AI: Our Only Weapon Against Climate Change?

Nicole Sky

Aug 26, 2018

Artificial Intelligence, more commonly referred to as simply AI, has been, since it’s early days, changing our lives in many ways. AI has become one of the greatest inventions of the human mind. When thinking of AI, we do not normally associate AI as being involved in helping farmers grow more crops to feed the exponentially growing population, or helping develop cancer treatment, or even keeping kids safe from trafficking and abuse by finding improper online activities. Instead we think of computers to phones, to self-driving cars and robots. However AI doesn’t just power the gadgets that we have grown so accustomed to in our daily lives, but it is increasingly being used to help solve impending social challenges.

One of these impending social issues is the quite literally hot topic – global warming. The challenges of global warming are growing by the day, as its impacts are becoming more severe and harder to manage. Melting ice caps, severe sever weather changes, extinction of species, are just a few of the consequences of the manmade climate change that is plaguing our world today. Despite widespread acceptance and awareness, the rate at which the world is embracing positive change is unfortunately not fast enough.

Fortunately there are many large companies that are setting an example by using AI to develop new ways in which to battle global warming. In fact, it seems as though AI is the only solution we have. It is helping us not only track and our present data, but also analyze our past data so that we can make informed decisions about the future. One such example is the use of AI to collect large amounts of data on land, animals, weather, ecosystems, etc… and organize it, so that scientists and governments can then determine what needs to be done, and the most cost effective ways to engage conservation methods.

We are quite surely seeing more and more AI initiatives being undertaken to help create a more eco-friendly world.

In order to reduce human influence on nature, increasing levels of human interference with natural processes are required” (Harvard University)

Whatever the downfalls of AI may be, its ability to help us against destroying our planet is perhaps its most important trait – because as hard as it may be to accept, our planet is dying and AI can help us prevent that.

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Easy Yet Untapped Revenue Channel for Hotels Worldwide

There are many travelers looking for hotels and places to stay on social web. Every day.

Take Twitter, for example:

Or this:

People are genuinely looking for help. Surprisingly though only few are getting it. According to nmodes data less than 12% of Twitter travel requests are being answered. The rest - lost opportunities for hotels and businesses in the hospitality industry.

And how big is this opportunity anyway?

nmodes Twitter data shows that every 15 min somebody expresses intent of going to, or visiting New York. Most of these travelers need a place to stay there.

Every 33 min - intent of traveling to London.

Every 54 min - intent of traveling to Paris.

We started Twitter recommendation service @nmodesHelps and were encouranged by the results. 72% of those that received our travel recommendations reacted by thanking us and expressing their gratitude. This reinforced our assumption that people seek travel advice on Twitter, accept it as an instant value, and are prepared to act upon it.

The hotels that are ready to move fast to monetize this opportunity will benefit the most.

When Big Data is not so big anymore

We are inundated with information. There is so much information around us they coined a special term - Big Data. To emphasize the sheer size of it.

It is, of course, a problem - to deal with a large amount of data. Various solutions have been created to address it efficiently.

At nmodes we developed a semantic technology that accurately filters relevant conversations. We applied it to social networks, particularly Twitter. Twitter is a poster child of Big Data. They have 500 million conversations every day. A staggering number. And yet, we found that for many topics, when they are narrowed down and accurately filtered, there are not that many relevant conversations after all.

No more than 5 people are looking for CRM solutions on an average day on Twitter. Even less - two per day on average - are asking for new web hosting providers explicitly, although many more are complaining about their existing providers (which might or might not suggest they are ready to switch or looking for a new option).

We often have businesses coming to us asking to find relevant conversations and expecting a large number of results. This is what Big Data is supposed to deliver, they assume. Such expectation is likely a product of our ‘keyword search dependency’. Indeed, when we run a keyword search on Twitter, or search engines, or anywhere we get a long list of results. The fact that most of them (up to 98% in many cases) are irrelevant is often lost in the visual illusion of having this long, seemingly endless, list in front of our eyes.

With the quality solutions that accurately deliver only relevant results we experience, for the first time, a situation when there are no longer big lists of random results. Only several relevant ones.

This is so much more efficient. It saves time, increases productivity, clarifies the picture, and makes Big Data manageable.

Time for businesses to embrace the new approach.