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BusinessWeek 50 (04/03) No. 3826, P. 154; Port, Otis; Arndt, Michael; Carey, John

Financial institutions have reduced incidents of credit-card fraud through the application of neural networks, which feature circuits arranged in a brain-like configuration that can infer patterns from data. Several AI technologies--neural nets, expert systems, and statistical analysis--are implemented in data-mining software that retailers such as Wal-Mart use to sift through raw data in order to forecast sales and plan appropriate inventory and promotional strategies. The medical sector is also taking advantage of data-mining: One application involves a collaboration between IBM and the Mayo Clinic to detect patterns in medical records, while another project uses natural-language processing to map out the "grammar" of amino acid sequences and match them to specific protein shapes and functions. Government organizations such as the Defense Department and the National Security Agency are using AI technology for several efforts related to national security, such as the Echelon telecom monitoring system. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a leading AI research investor, and the breakthroughs that come out of DARPA-funded projects are more often than not put to civilian rather than military use. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Unisys are also intensely focused on AI, especially in their pursuit of self-healing, autonomous computer systems that can automatically adjust their operations in response to fluctuating demands.

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