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- 🧠 AI model that detects Alzheimer's?
🧠 AI model that detects Alzheimer's?
PLUS: Robinhood adds AI to its quiver; Dior, Armani accused of exploiting workers
Steven Van & Jacob Goldschein
July 03, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
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TOP STORY
🥼 AI model that detects Alzheimer's?
📸 Boston University
A research team at Boston University has created an AI model that can help detect Alzheimer’s.
In June, the team revealed a promising new AI model that could analyze a patient's speech to help predict Alzheimer's-related dementia.
Their model can predict with 78.5% accuracy whether someone with mild cognitive impairment will stay stable or develop Alzheimer's dementia within six years.
This astonishing work can lead to earlier, life-saving diagnoses and make cognitive impairment screening more accessible by automating parts of the process.
By automating the process, AI can eventually eliminate the need for expensive lab tests, imaging exams, and even routine office visits.
📸 The International Student Blog
How does it work?
The model is powered by machine learning, a subset of AI in which computer scientists teach a program to analyze data independently.
What kind of data?
The researchers used data from one of the nation’s oldest and longest-running studies—the BU-led Framingham Heart Study.
Even though the Framingham study is focused on cardiovascular health, participants who show cognitive decline regularly take tests and interviews, which gives researchers detailed data on their overall cognitive health.
The BU team was given audio recordings of 166 interviews with people between ages 63 and 97 diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment—76 who would remain stable for the next six years and 90 whose cognitive function would progressively decline.
They then used speech recognition and machine learning to train their model to identify connections between speech, demographics, diagnosis, and disease progression.
After training it on some participants, they tested its predictive power on the rest.
In the future, researchers say that models like this can help bring care to patients who aren’t near medical centers and drastically increase the number of people who can get screened.
💬 “We combine the information we extract from the audio recordings with some very basic demographics—age, gender, and so on—and we get the final score. You can think of the score as the likelihood, the probability, that someone will remain stable or transition to dementia. It had significant predictive ability.”
FINANCE
🏹 Robinhood adds AI to its quiver
📸 Robinhood
Robinhood is wisely adding some new AI features to its platform.
Earlier this week, the trading app announced it had acquired the AI-powered research platform Pluto Capital.
Pluto will allow Robinhood to add tools for quicker identification of trends and investment opportunities, help guide users with their investment strategies, and offer real-time portfolio optimization.
💬 Pluto’s founder, Jacob Sansbury, will join Robinhood to help the company adopt the new AI features.
📸 Bloomberg
What else will Pluto help with? Pluto’s data analysis will be able to process and interpret market data using LLMs (large language models) with real-time access to financial data and users’ investment portfolios.
So, if you’re looking to stay ahead of the poor investors without AI on their side, Robinhood may be your best bet.
Pluto will also help Robinhood customize investment strategies by analyzing users' risk tolerance, investment goals, and past behavior to provide more personalized recommendations.
Plus, real-time updates and insights on the market.
Sounds like Robinhood may finally be living up to its name, taking powerful tools used by the rich and giving them to the masses.
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📈 Robinhood ($HOOD) stock is up 85.04% this year.
FASHION
👜 Dior, Armani accused of exploiting workers
📸 Getty Images
During a series of raids across Italy, prosecutors found that Dior and Armani exploited foreign labor to produce high-end products at a fraction of their retail price.
Dior paid a supplier $57 to assemble a handbag that sells for about $2,780.
Armani bags sold to a supplier for $101, then resold to Armani for $272, and ultimately priced at around $1,962 in stores.
It's important to note that these prices don’t include leather or other raw materials, nor the costs of design, distribution, and marketing.
Still a crazy markup, though, but hey, that’s just good capitalism, right?
Apparently, not everyone thinks so.
📸 AP
💬 Italy produces 50% to 55% of the world’s luxury clothing and leather goods.
💬 “Why does it cost so little to manufacture the product?”
“The brands need to ask themselves this question.”
💬 In June, Italian judges placed Dior's unit, Manufactures Dior SRL, under court administration after finding its supply chain included Chinese-owned firms in Italy that mistreated migrant workers.
However, the luxury brands will not face charges related to these findings.
Instead, some of the independently owned suppliers, which essentially all of the major fashion houses use, might face charges for exploiting their workers and employing illegal immigrants.
I guess, unfortunately, beauty still does equal pain.
📉 Dior’s parent company, LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton ($LVMH) is down -1.13% this year.
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