“What I’m most excited about is not necessarily the sexiest AI technologies … things that are showing up in science magazines,” said Greg Singleton, chief artificial intelligence officer at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “What I’m really excited about for the department is seeing where we can apply these technologies to the general business that we do.”

That might mean holding off on the self-driving cars and robot secretaries for now and using AI instead to pick the low-hanging fruit of automating burdensome tasks that have grown for agencies while their workforces have not…

“Our workforce is dedicated, they want to do a good job, but you have challenges when people are overloaded by processes, overloaded by volume, overloaded by batch transactional communications,” Singleton said at the ATARC conference.

The department has identified dozens of scenarios that could benefit from AI, including an automatic tool for finding chemical names in biomedical literature, a virtual assistant for finding grants, and a bot to ensure disability accommodations follow an employee who is being reassigned or promoted… Read the full article here.