Women in AI Awards 2022: The transformative nature of AI

The Women in AI awards Australia and New Zealand honours the top women across varied industries that are committed to excellence using artificial intelligence.

The finalists for the 2022 Women in AI Awards, were announced yesterday on International Women’s Day.

Women working in industry, government, universities, research institutes, start-ups and NGOs are all eligible and are judged based on criteria including innovation, leadership, impact potential, and the ability for the AI solution to provide a social good for the community.

The award categories include AI in health, mining, law, finance, agribusiness, cyber security, education, defence and intelligence, infrastructure, manufacturing, creative industries, sport, climate, and innovation.

Digital Nation Australia is a media partner of the Women in AI Awards 2022, and recently spoke to Professor Kerryn Butler-Henderson director of digital health at RMIT University, lead partner of the awards about how AI is transforming the health sector.

According to Butler-Henderson, while AI is not new in health, she has seen a shift in how it is being used in the sector.

“AI has been used to be able to look at imaging, to be able to pick up things that the human eye may not have been able to detect, but we're also now seeing AI being used with for example, telehealth, to be able to automate some of that process at the beginning of telehealth consultations, to be able to ensure that our patients have a seamless experience with telehealth and be able to have a more rapid engagement with clinicians, whereas previously they may have needed quite a long time,” she said.

“AI is also being used in health to be able to capture greater data to provide more meaningful insights about our health and our wellness. And this is going to lead to greater innovations for the treatment of diseases, for being able to support people on both their health and their wellness journeys, and being able to assist our workforce to be able to provide quite high quality, meaningful care to our citizens.”

Digital Nation Australia also spoke to Elisha Grace Harrington, senior director in the chief innovation office at ServiceNow, another leading partner of the awards. She described how financial services has been disrupted by AI.

“The use of these sophisticated techniques is really well-placed in the areas of due-diligence, processes and fraud, because you're able to run, and train machine learning datasets to pick up on these key indicators and also alert where there may be false positives as well. So certainly in fraud and identity management, this is an area of application that's certainly been very transformational.”

The categories where achievements will be recognised in the Women in AI awards span speech, image and video recognition, autonomous objects, natural language processing, conversational agents, prescriptive modelling, virtual and augmented creativity, smart automation, advanced simulation among others.

The awards will be held at an invitation-only Gala Dinner at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne on the 31st of March. The biggest awards of the night include the Australia-New Zealand WAI Innovator of the Year Award and the new WAI Trailblazer Award.