Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing medicine, city management and art. It is a technology that will transform the post-industrial era and the relationship between people and machines. The development, application and ethical aspects of this technology are also challenges for the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), which maintains various lines of research in the field of artificial intelligence.
Finding a cure for diseases such as Alzheimer’s may seem like a utopia today. But what if it were possible to detect them when the first symptoms have not even appeared? Thus, early intervention strategies could be designed and the impact of the disease minimized. This is what the Image and Video Processing Group (GPI) of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech (UPC) is trying to achieve, in collaboration with the Barcelona Beta Brain Research Center (BBRC), which is developing a tool that, with techniques artificial intelligence (AI), combines data from magnetic resonance imaging with demographic and genetic data. With this data and the appropriate algorithms, people at risk of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease can be found. It is a technology that is designed within the framework of the AIMING project and that is also intended to be applied to the diagnosis of melanoma and breast cancer, and to help in choosing the best chemotherapy. This is an example of how the application of artificial intelligence can improve the diagnosis and treatment of diseases.
Through artificial vision technologies, networking is also enhanced and patient care is improved. This is evident in the DigiPatICS project, with IDEAI at the forefront, focused on optimizing the pathology diagnostic process in the network of the hospitals of the Catalan Institute of Health. From more accurate medical images and diagnoses to faster and more efficient data analysis and management, artificial intelligence is becoming a key tool to support medical practice and, ultimately, to help improve health.
But the applications of artificial intelligence in the field of medicine go much further. At the UPC several research groups design robotic arms to provide support during surgical interventions. This is the case of the SARAS project in which the Biomedical Engineering Research Center (CREB) has taken part. Artificial intelligence also helps make hospitalized children’s stay easier. With the pet robots created as roommates, the suffering of children hospitalized in centers such as the Sant Joan de Déu Hospital in Barcelona is reduced. The project promoted by the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) of the UPC has received the name of a child, the ghost CASPER.
Through algorithms that analyze video images and detect patterns, it will be possible to prevent suicides on trains. This has been demonstrated in the Anomaly Phase O project, in which researchers from the Knowledge Engineering and Machine Learning Group (KEMLG), IDEAI and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Computación (BSC) participate.
According to the director of IDEAI, Karina Gibert, “artificial intelligence represents one of the most important engines of the paradigm shift towards digital transformation and allows the shift towards a digital society, which from the European vision we want to be centered on the person , oriented to the common good, aligned with the 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. Advances in the knowledge, detection and treatment of diseases, and the promotion of healthy lifestyles, the personalization of consumption proposals and even the mechanisms of direct participation open the doors of a society that we would like to be fairer and egalitarian”.
Artificial intelligence is not the future, but the present, with technologies that have been progressively introduced into our daily lives and others that are yet to be explored. Since the British mathematician Alan Turing opened the debate on the ability of machines to reason in 1950, until today, we have witnessed a revolution in the development of these technologies, which are found in applications as diverse and everyday as automatic correction of smartphones, virtual assistants or driving assistance systems. To all this will be added more and more intelligent homes, with home automation systems that regulate thermal comfort or that make purchases automatically. The final result is that of fully connected cities, where services such as messaging, mobility or electrical networks are managed with artificial intelligence.
The digitalization of industry, through connected factories where processes will be automated, and people and robots will work in a coordinated manner, is the immediate future for which the Center for Research in Motion Control and Industrial Applications (MCIA) is working. The group coordinates the Looming Factory strategic project.
The Looming Factory strategic project, in which the MCIA is working, focuses on the digitization of the industry. (Photo: UPC)
In the industrial field, one of the great needs is also to make the energy demand of production processes more flexible in order to accelerate the energy transition towards a more sustainable model and lower the cost of energy prices by integrating it into production planning. In this sense, the Center for Technological Innovation in Static Converters and Drives (CITCEA), which is a benchmark in research in this field, investigates the technology necessary to respond to these challenges, within the European project FLEX4FACT, of which it is the coordinator scientific.
This same center participates in the digital transformation of the European energy system, through artificial intelligence and blockchain, in another great European project called BEYOND. An initiative focused on implementing local electricity markets to maximize the deployment of renewable energy, making use of flexibility mechanisms such as demand response or batteries.
Artificial intelligence is also increasingly present in artistic creation. Artists, scientists and other professionals explore the interrelationship between both worlds on platforms such as the AI and Music S+T+ARTS Festival, which has been jointly organized by the advanced music festival Sónar, the UPC and the Betevé television channel. This is also the goal of the Thinking Lab, an applied research laboratory led by IDEAI and the Center for Image and Multimedia Technology (CITM) of the UPC and coordinated together with Sónar, within the framework of the same project.
Artificial intelligence technologies also help meet the challenges of sustainability. In line with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of marine biodiversity conservation, several UPC groups develop high-performance algorithms and use satellite images, remote sensing techniques and machine learning to detect humpbacks and gray whales in the waters of California, within the project ‘Detectability of humpback and gray whales in satellite imagery off California’.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating the transformation of industry and society in a process that is not without risks, such as those that may affect data security. How can access to network services be guaranteed without putting personal data at risk? Projects such as COMPROMISE have much to say in this field, in which the Smart Services for Information Systems and Communication Networks (SISCOM) research group participates, using artificial learning techniques (machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence) to improve protocols communication and protect privacy. In this context, an application is developed to analyze data from smartphone sensors and thus predict the type of transport that citizens will use. The objective is to improve the management of urban mobility.
The democratization of access to data is another of the challenges in artificial intelligence. Along these lines, the Integrated Software, Service, Information and Data Engineering (inSSIDE) research group is designing a shared platform to improve access to Barcelona’s data ecosystem and the management of the city from the point of view of public services. A task that is carried out within the framework of the ‘An Automatic Data Discovery Approach to Enhance Barcelona’s Data Ecosystem’ project.
Another issue that worries the scientific community is how to prevent artificial intelligence from reproducing the biases present in society. How to make it possible, for example, for machine translators to be inclusive and take minority languages into account? The Center for Technologies and Applications of Language and Speech (TALP) is immersed in this challenge, which creates more efficient automatic translation systems that meet these requirements. (Source: UPC)