Espresso: AI system gets patent, AI for gender parity

Meet DABUS, the AI inventor

Remember the name: DABUS. An acronym for ‘device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience,’ DABUS is the first artificial intelligence (AI) system that has been awarded a patent by intellectual property (IP) officials in South Africa and Australia.

An ‘inventor’ of a patent has to be a human being, so the South African officials have set a precedent by classifying the AI as the inventor. According to the DABUS team, the food container that has been patented was designed and created by AI, which is why it is the ‘inventor’.

Similar cases to make DABUS the ‘inventor’ are ongoing in the United Kingdom, European Union, and the United States of America. The innovation in question involves interlocking food containers that have been designed for robots to grasp and stack.

AI to promote gender parity

Accenture Ventures recently invested in Pipeline Equity, a Denver-based startup that uses AI technology to increase financial performance by closing the gender equity gap in enterprises.

The four-year-old startup’s proprietary SaaS platform, Pipeline, is available to human capital management or CRM teams in enterprises. “By analysing hiring, pay, performance, potential and promotion data, Pipeline helps organisations quickly identify internal areas of unconscious bias to make gender equity actionable and attainable,” according to an Accenture press statement.

Pipeline’s AI system recommends measures to improve financial performance for the organisation, as well as growth for the individual. For every 10 percent increase in intersectional gender equity, organisations discover improvements in revenue between 1 percent and 2 percent, according to Pipeline’s research.

Diagnostic-imaging as a service

Medical technology company Siemens Healthineers recently introduced WeScan—or, MRI as a service—in select countries.

To make the remote collaboration possible, Siemens Healthineers has partnered with TeamViewer. WeScan seeks to enable remote magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) examinations for hospitals and healthcare professionals who don’t have a qualified radiology staff.

With the WeScan service, customers can access a pool of skilled remote imaging technologists who help operate the MRI scanner using syngo Virtual Cockpit, the remote scanning software of Siemens Healthineers.

Bank of Baroda’s Q1 results

Bank of Baroda reported a standalone net profit of Rs 1,208.6 crore in the first quarter of financial year 2022. The lender posted a net loss of Rs 1,046.5 crore in the previous quarter, and Rs 864.3 crore in the same quarter last year.

Retail loans, which have a 22 percent share in gross domestic credit, grew by 11.8 percent in the June quarter of FY2022, compared to the same quarter last year. The growth was led by a 25 percent increase in auto loans, and a 19.5 percent rise in personal loans on a year-on-year basis.

“Going forward, the bank plans to focus on loan growth, driven by a recovery in corporate demand and continued healthy traction in retail,” said analyst Anand Dama in a research report by Emkay published on August 8. “We believe that better growth, lower interest reversals and continued advantage in funding costs should drive up margins or core-profitability,” he added.

Centrum Capital’s digital strides

The wealth management market in India will grow at a compounded rate of up to 25 percent between 2021 and 2025, says financial services firm Centrum Capital.

India could be the fourth-largest private wealth market globally by 2028, the company said in its latest annual. Centrum’s wealth management business invested in infrastructure, and team education to increase connectivity through the customers’ preferred mode of communication—from virtual calls to social media tools—in 2020-21.

It developed a ‘phygital’ client-servicing model with initiatives such as iConnect, an internal collaborative platform allowing teams to exchange information, One Paper Lane (for paperless onboarding of clients), and 360-degree view, which provides the relationship manager and their clients full and secure access to the portfolios online.