Big Pharma and AI

Nothing new they would be interested in the topic.    But the scale on these interactions is advancing.

Big pharma turns to artificial intelligence to speed drug discovery, GSK signs deal  By Ben Hirschler

LONDON (Reuters) - The world's leading drug companies are turning to artificial intelligence to improve the hit-and-miss business of finding new medicines, with GlaxoSmithKline unveiling a new $43 million deal in the field on Sunday.

Other pharmaceutical giants including Merck & Co, Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi are also exploring the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to help streamline the drug discovery process.

The aim is to harness modern supercomputers and machine learning systems to predict how molecules will behave and how likely they are to make a useful drug, thereby saving time and money on unnecessary tests.

AI systems already play a central role in other high-tech areas such as the development of driverless cars and facial recognition software.

"Many large pharma companies are starting to realise the potential of this approach and how it can help improve efficiencies," said Andrew Hopkins, chief executive of privately owned Exscientia, which announced the new tie-up with GSK.  .... " 

Marketing with a Watson Bot - GSK: Cough and Cold Pharma

An example of a bot style interaction with a product.   Using IBM Watson as a means to provide natural language, cognitive knowledge.  Again recall our Mr Clean efforts in this area. We did not have the Tech to deliver this directly through an ad.   More details to follow.  Look forward to trying this.  In CWorld:

With IBM's Watson, GlaxoSmithKline tackles sniffle and cough questions
If you start feeling a cold or flu coming on this season, you will be able to reach out to IBM's artificial intelligence-fueled Watson to find some answers to your sniffly, coughy questions.

GlaxoSmithKline, (GSK) the world's sixth-largest pharmaceutical company, is teaming up with IBM to use Watson to better connect with customers.

The London-based company plans to start using Watson Ads in November, enabling people to ask questions by voice or text right through GSK's online ads. ... "

Watson Ads and the Retail Consumer

Some early comments in RetailWire  with discussion about Watson Ads by retail oriented tech practitioners.   See  my previous link on this, will be closely watching progress.

Will shoppers want to interact with AI ads?
The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in January, will begin rolling out digital ads that people can communicate with this fall. Powered by IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence, consumers will be able to ask questions via voice or text and receive relevant information about the product or offering.

The first companies to tap Watson ads will be Campbell Soup Company, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Unilever.

Unlike ads tied to keyword searches, Watson Ads are able to pick up the nuances of natural language. ... " 

CPG Using Uber Methods

Have covered the topic of retail compliance many times in this space.  Technology combined with crowdsourcing has already been used for some time.  Note the connection to data analytics applications.

Retail Solutions Partners With Gigwalk To Bring Real-Time Actionable Intelligence To In-Store Execution

CPG Companies To Benefit From Local, Real-Time Intelligence And On-The-Ground Resources Combined With Science-Based, Out-Of-Stock Alerting – Ensuring The Right Product Is On The Right Shelf At The Right Time

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., and SAN FRANCISCO – June 4, 2014 – Retail Solutions Inc. (RSi), a global provider of cloud-based, Big Data analytics and real-time intelligence for the consumer products industry, today announced it has selected Gigwalk, the local visibility software platform changing the way brands and retailers collaborate, to power its new RSi Intelligent Crowdsourcing solution. The new offering provides clients with end-to-end business intelligence that drives sales by delivering real-time, actionable intelligence to field operations for improved in-store retail execution and on-shelf availability. .... " 

Design Sketching and Coding

From IEEE: A favorite topic, how do we take the informal sketches of a non graphic artist and convert them into knowledge with precision?    See also post on CogSketch.

How Software Designers Interact with Sketches at the Whiteboard
Nicolas Mangano, Thomas D. LaToza, Marian Petre, and Andre van der Hoek, Member, IEEE

Abstract—Whiteboard sketches play a crucial role in software development, helping to support groups of designers in reasoning about a software design problem at hand. However, little is known about these sketches and how they support design ‘in the moment’ particularly in terms of the relationships among sketches, visual syntactic elements within sketches, and reasoning activities. To address this gap, we analyzed 14 hours of design activity by eight pairs of professional software designers, manually coding over 4000 events capturing the introduction of visual syntactic elements into sketches, focus transitions between sketches, and reasoning activities. 

Our findings indicate that sketches serve as a rich medium for supporting design conversations. Designers often use general-purpose notations. Designers introduce new syntactic elements to record aspects of the design, or re-purpose sketches as the design develops. Designers constantly shift focus between sketches, using groups of sketches together that contain complementary information. 

Finally, sketches play an important role in supporting several types of reasoning activities (mental simulation, review of progress, consideration of alternatives). But these activities often leave no trace and rarely lead to sketch creation. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the practice of software design at the whiteboard and for the creation of new electronic software design sketching tools. ... "

(Full technical paper at link above)

Electroceuticals

In IEEE Spectrum: And once drugs have been changed to implants, there is no reason we can't also gather data with sensors at the same time.   At first I thought this was about pharma dosing, but the idea is more radical than that: " ... vision involves more than simply taking medical devices like heart pacemakers—which use electric waveforms to activate or block bundles of nerve cells—to the next level, claims Kristoffer Famm, head of bioelectronics research at GSK. The company is aiming for something much more radical: connecting thousands of tightly packed individual nerve cells with electrodes and associated circuitry to read and interpret the “code” in the collection of nerve-cell fibers that constitute a nerve, and then modulating the code to restore a specific function to a healthy state. “No treatments like this even remotely exist today,” says Famm. “The medicine will speak the body’s language.” .... :

Innovation in Consumer Goods

Good short piece in ConsumerGoods:

Clorox, GSK and More Share Innovation Tactics
In the current economic climate, innovation is power. Top consumer goods executives recently gathered to gain insight into driving innovation and sparking creativity. Watch behind the scenes video coverage of the meeting here ... '

Global Innovation at GSK

Andrea Meyer reports on Donna Sturgess of GlaxoSmithKline talk at the world innovation forum. Their use of the idea of 'emotional talismans' in weight control OTC marketing. ' ... Products that perform a rational purpose can fail if they don’t address emotional needs ... '