Adi Gaskell

Let's take a quick look at how you can use Artificial Intelligence to improve your predictive capabilities.

The message seems increasingly clear: If you want innovation, then openness is a prerequisite.

Research from the University of Michigan highlights how making room for uncertainty can result in more successful outcomes on projects at work.

A number of projects have attempted to use AI to improve matters by using algorithms to monitor live footage for behaviors that look suspicious

As we explore another use case for virtual reality, let's see how VR is being used for city planning, particularly for adding greenery to ubran spaces.

If escaping the office milieu has done your productivity some good, you are far from alone according to two recent flexible working studies.

While AI technology has considerable potential for automating certain tasks, it is likely to be very rare for an entire job to be automated.

The last few years has seen a tremendous boom in the number of sources online relaying information about restaurant quality. Whether it’s review sites or more general social media, there is no shortage of feedback on how people have found a particular restaurant. I wrote a few years ago about a project from the University of Rochester that aimed to mine Twitter for mentions of eating out, with the hope of producing a detailed and comprehensive map of food hygiene standards throughout restaurants in New York. The system, called nEmesis, analyzed millions of tweets, and was on the hunt for people sharing an attack of food poisoning after visiting a restaurant. You might think, or hope at least, that this would be a relatively small number, but over a four month period they found 480 such mentions in New York City alone from a total of 23,000 restaurant visitors. What’s more, the data collected correlated well with public health data on those diners. Crowdsourcing food hygiene A recent Harvard led project is hoping to provide similar assistance to the Boston food hygiene authorities by providing more intelligent information for the authorities to base their inspection checks on. Rather than using Twitter for data however, the Harvard project is turning to the review website Yelp. They have launched a NetFlix style competition to create an algorithm that can search through the ratings of restaurants in Boston and produce recommendations for which restaurants warrant a visit from the hygiene police. The competition, organized by the data company DrivenData, will see the raw data posted online and then an army of data scientists charged with solving the puzzle. The founders observed that whilst the collection of machine readable data was now mandated by the government, there was a literacy problem that rendered much of that data left dormant and unused. Bringing data science to the masses And so the competition was born to try and make data science affordable for organizations with a clear social need but no budget to afford what are still very expensive skill sets. Of course, the food hygiene challenge is but one of the challenges on the DrivenData website, with the venture coming along way from their first challenge to make a better algorithm for improving spending in schools. The organization try and ensure that whatever winning entries emerge from the competitions receive support and help to grow and improve. The winner of that initial competition, for instance, eventually turned their algorithm into a software tool for schools to use. The eventual aim is to establish a community of data scientists that are happy to deploy their talents for socially worthwhile endeavors. “Our mindset has grown; we want to solve the big-picture data literacy and data capacity problems in the social and public sectors,” the creators say. “We think competitions are a great mechanism to do that right now, but our goal is to do more, to serve that community in other ways.” Suffice to say, challenges have come a long way from their beginnings in the 18th century when the UK government launched such a competition to help find longitude more easily. The likes of the X Prize has taken them to newfound heights, and it’s great to see organizations like DrivenData apply the concept to more manageable challenges. Of course, they aren’t the only organization seeking to make algorithms more accessible. I wrote last year about the Algorithmia social network, which aims to connect up organizations with lots of data with algorithms that are being under-utilized. The aim is that this match up will create not just new insights but extra profits. Data science is undoubtedly a burgeoning field, and it’s one with a great many exciting developments in it. Original post

Wharton’s Ethan Mollick is undoubtedly one of my favorite thinkers, and I’ve written about a number of his papers previously, whether it’s on the role of middle managers in innovation, or how successful crowdfunding has been at picking winners (compared to traditional venture capital). This apparent wisdom of crowds is something he has returned to for his latest paper, which looks at how successful crowds are versus experts in the funding of art. The study measures the artistic judgment of the crowd versus a team of experts to see how closely they’re matched. The art in question was a collection of 120 theatrical ventures listed on Kickstarter. There have been a number of studies down the years that highlight how effective the ‘uneducated masses’ tend to be when compared to an educated elite, and this one was no exception. “On average, we find a remarkable degree of convergence between the realized funding decisions by crowds and the evaluation of those same projects by experts,” Mollick says. “Projects that were funded by the crowds received consistently higher scores from experts … and were much more likely to have received funding from the experts.” How important crowdfunding is for arts funding The study was inspired by the finding that more money is raised for artistic ventures via Kickstarter than via the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the primary way the US government gives money to the arts. That obviously represents a sizable shift in how money is raised, so the authors were keen to explore what that meant. Were these new patrons ensuring the same quality of art? Does a greater range of art get funded? The authors recruited a team of well established experts from the art world and asked them to judge the projects funded on Kickstarter. The aim was to see if they would have funded those projects via more official channels. Interestingly there was indeed a broad level of consensus between the experts and the crowd. The experts agreed with many of the projects that got funded, and where disagreement existed, it was usually that the experts would not have funded a particular project. So, in reality, the crowd were ensuring a wider and more diverse range of projects received funding. What’s more, the crowd also seemed a good judge of potential success, with a strong track record of picking ‘winners’ in terms of commercial or artistic success. The study provides further insight into the potential for crowds to perform as well, if not better than, supposed experts. Certainly food for thought. Original post

The commute to work is something many of us still do, despite the various technical and social changes that render such daily endeavors largely redundant, the office is still the hub of working life. A recent study suggests that many employees, particularly younger ones, would forgo several hundred dollars from their salary in return for a shorter commute. Such thinking was no doubt behind the strategy of Californian company Imo to pay staff to live nearer to their office a few years ago. A recent Australian study, called Commuting Life, found however that the commute isn’t all bad, with a mixture of positive and negative aspects revealed to the authors. The pros and cons of commuting The study, which was chronicled in a dedicated website for the project, found that commuting can provide people with a degree of personal time, whether it’s to relax or dream, away from the responsibilities of working life. Of course, that isn’t to say that it’s all positive. “For a lot of people, commuting is really constraining their freedoms to do things,” the authors say. The study, which interviewed and observed Sydney based commuters, found that our daily travels to and from work change how we behave towards one another, and indeed things such as our level of tolerance, what we want from work and even our longer-term plans. “A stressful commute can change how we treat work colleagues. But it can also have negative impacts on family life, with commuters finding it difficult to relax when they return home,” the authors say. Rather depressingly, the average worker commuted for more than an hour each way, even if they lived with 10km of their office, with the record being a four hour commute from one woman in the study. Despite the apparent drudgery however, some respondents revealed that they enjoyed their commute because it afforded them some time and space to themselves, free from the stresses of both home and work. Key points Our commutes change who we are – specifically in how we behave towards others Our commutes change our relationship with cities – specifically how we access services and undertake regular activities such as shopping Our commutes are ingrained in the rest of our lives – commuting is not a freestanding activity, but is something that reflects and reverberates onto nearly every other aspect of our life in some way Commuting stress is caused by various factors – it isn’t just the time/distance that stresses us about. For instance it might be when the commute is delayed or we don’t get a seat. It is also something that both new and old commuters experience. There are various strategies to alleviate stress – these include policy based strategies such as building new roads or better trains, but also individual strategies, more flexible working options and so on. The authors hope that their study will prod employers and policy makers into looking at the commute and taking it more seriously than is currently the case. “Yes some of these commuting problems fall on state governments. But at the same time there are many other sites of responsibility – our employers and companies for example – who could offer their staff the chance to work from home,” they conclude. Original post

Manufacturing has been undergoing a significant number of changes in recent years, and I’ve touched on a number of them on this blog. Whether it’s the rise of TechShop style co-working spaces, or the opening up of intellectual property via communities such as Quirky. Industrial giant GE have been at the heart of these things, so it is perhaps no surprise that they are leading an effort by the Digital Manufacturing Design and Innovation Institute (DMDII) to create a Digital Manufacturing Commons. Opening up manufacturing This will provide a digital marketplace to more effectively connect up supply chains. It will consist of an open source platform along the lines of the platform developed by GE in partnership with DARPA and MIT a few years ago. “The Digital Manufacturing Commons will open up innovation and collaboration in ways that create a whole new renaissance in manufacturing,” GE say. “The open source platform we are building with our DMDII partners truly will democratize access to the tools of manufacturing innovation for companies, universities, institutes and entrepreneurs big and small.” The aim is for innovation within manufacturing to be supported, and tremendous potential unlocked for manufacturers within the US. The project hopes to connect manufacturers, supply chains and entrepreneurs to accelerate new products to market. With agility increasingly important, GE hope that the platform will bring the various facets of the supply chain together in a productive way, but especially between the physical and digital worlds that are so heavily influencing manufacturing today. Creating the 21st Century assembly line This is especially evident in the amount of data that’s generated throughout the lifecycle of a product, whether it’s in the design stage, the sourcing, production, distribution, point of sale or even when it’s being used by customers. Maintaining a seamless flow of data across each of these stages is likely to be hugely valuable. Whilst this is very far from the case at the moment, it’s hoped that the Digital Manufacturing Commons will provide a platform to support such sharing. “Manufacturing operations will achieve the agility and speed that we have seen in other digital industries,” GE say. With the plan being to recruit over 100,000 users within the next few years, this is certainly a project to watch with interest. Original post

It’s fairly well established that nature can play a big part in our wellbeing and productivity. Indeed, I wrote about a study last year that revealed how a short walk through a park type environment can give our productivity and happiness a considerable boost. Could just hearing natural sounds trigger the same boost? That was the question posed by a recent study from academics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Their study suggests that simply hearing sounds, such as a flowing river, can improve both our mood and also our cognitive ability. Now, suffice to say, the modern open plan office is often a long way from anything remotely natural sounding, and indeed, many offices employ a masking system to try and limit the spread of noise throughout the office. Such systems enable you to listen effectively to those nearby you, but limits the spread of that chatter throughout the room. “If you’re close to someone, you can understand them. But once you move farther away, their speech is obscured by the masking signal,” the authors reveal. Noise in the workplace Now the presence of these things is news to me, but apparently they exist in most office ceilings and mask office chatter by outputting a form of electronic noise (or white noise if you like). The researchers wanted to test if they could use a form of masking signal that not only helps to block out the noise of open plan offices, but also helps to make us more productive. So rather than piping white noise into the office, they began to pipe in natural sounds instead. The hyptothesis they were testing was that people would focus more intently in such an environment, thus improving their productivity. The study saw participants exposed to a range of different sounds whilst they were undertaking a task that required an intense focus, which is just the kind of task that open offices are usually terrible at supporting. The noises included your usual office hubub, the white noise usually used to screen this noise, and a natural sounding masker, which in this case was a mountain stream. Nature for the win The results revealed that those exposed to the sound of the mountain stream were both more productive and generally happier than their peers who were exposed to more traditional office noises, both of the unmasked office din and the white noise based masking signal. Despite the relatively small sample used in the research, the authors are confident that they’re onto something, and that using such natural sounding maskers could have a big impact on the normal office environment, but also in environments such as a hospital where it could be used to improve the mental wellbeing of patients. It’s certainly an interesting finding and would potentially be a cheap, yet effective, way of making a substantial difference to our performance and wellbeing at work. Can you think of any other sounds that might have a similar effect as the mountain stream?

In the online community world there’s a well used heuristic that says how for every 100 members of a community, 1 will post unique content, 9 will comment on existing content, and 90 will be passive consumers. As heuristics go, it has proved relatively durable, and there is a clear motivation for community owners to attract as many of the content creators as possible. A recent study explores some of the motivations behind unique content creation, and may therefore help community managers in their quest. They have identified five core motivators behind the creation of fresh content, whether that’s a blog post, a video, song or the numerous other types of online content. Those five factors are: entertainment self-expression social-belonging communication social-cognition The five motivators were derived via the theory of uses and gratifications, together with the theory of reasoned action. These were used to better understand content creation and how we perceive such acts of creativity. The authors suggest that the five motivators behind online content creation are similar to those found in those who passively consume content online. The difference primarily lies in the area of social-cognition. This underlines our desire to share information or insights, voice our opinions online or participate in discussions. “The findings of this study would help future studies to build a more comprehensive theoretical model, which will allow scholars to understand the factors influencing consumers’ creating behavior of social media content,” the team concludes. To further muddy the waters, a study from earlier this year found that the easier we make it to create content online, the less likely people are to do so. They use an analogy of a market, with creators of content making the investment in the hope that they will attract customers (or readers). Unlike a business however, individual content creators often aren’t seeking financial reward but rather the status that comes from being heard. The larger the social network, the greater the effort required to reach people, and the authors believe it doesn’t take a huge drop-off in the ‘reward’ they receive to see the effort taken to produce content as not worthwhile. This increase in size tends to result in content that is less tailored, and therefore often less relevant to the receiver. This then often sees creators deciding that the pay-off is no longer worthwhile, whilst potential creators can be put off by the size of the market. This, the researchers believe, explains why so much content is created by so few users. Original post

Last year some data from the Citizens Advise Bureau revealed that 7 out of 10 potentially successful employment cases are not being pursued, with a good 50 percent of those being down to financial issues. Whilst it’s tempting to think that we are all equal in front of the law, there remains a distinct sense that we are anything but. It’s a major reason why companies such as Logikcull are trying to make the whole process easier and more efficient. It’s believed that the e-discovery process can contribute to around 70 percent of the costs of any legal proceeding, so reducing the time involved in that can be a huge cost saver. Using the crowd Other organizations are attempting to make the legal process more affordable by recruiting the crowd to help meet the legal costs involved. For instance, I wrote about LexShares towards the end of last year, who are a kind of crowd based investment site. You can ‘invest’ in a particular case, thus giving the plaintiff funds to pursue their case. If the case is successful, the backer gets their money back plus a bit of the damages. If the case fails, then they lose their money. Another crowd based venture launched in the UK recently. The site, called CrowdJustice, aims to provide funding to cases that would normally struggle to do so. Supporting public interest cases The site was founded by Julia Salasky, who previously worked for the UN, and aims to specialize in so called public interest cases. “CrowdJustice allows communities to band together to access the courts to protect their communal assets – like their local hospital – or shared values – like human rights. Successive governments have made access to justice harder and more expensive but we are using the power of the crowd to try and stem the tide,” she says. She suggests that cuts to legal aid has made it harder for poorer people to access adequate legal protection, especially when it comes to challenging large institutions. This is especially so when the end game doesn’t necessarily result in a large payout. This could include, for instance, the destruction of a local bird sanctuary or even much larger issues such as torture. Despite effecting huge numbers of people, it is often very difficult for communities to channel their energies towards fighting the case collectively. As such, these kind of cases typically require a determined individual to pursue the cause on their own. The hope is that the CrowdJustice platform will make this considerably easier. Whether it’s CrowdJustice or LexStorm or Logikcull, there are certainly a wide range of projects aiming to change the legal industry for the better. It will be fascinating to watch them as they unfold and witness the impact they have. Original post

As the MOOC revolution gathered pace, there was a widespread hope that it would prompt a major change in how tertiary education was provided. After all, they emerged in an environment where course fees were mushrooming, and many young people were graduating with enormous debts. Could online courses therefore provide a more efficient means of getting a degree? Whilst there is still a largely optimistic air around MOOCs, a recent study provides a cautionary tale. The paper compares the performance of community college students who undertook their courses online versus more traditional classroom based studies. About the study The focus of the research was the Californian Community College system, which ‘processes’ 2.3 million students each year. The study found that students on online courses achieved both lower grades and completion rates than their peers on more traditionally delivered courses. “We found the same pattern of results across all course types,” the authors say. This drop off in performance was particularly pronounced when students were undertaking courses outside of the normal academic year. They also appeared to suffer when the online segment of the student body for a class was in a relative minority. “The consistency of our results is important from a policy perspective,” the authors say. “Policymakers in California and other states are interested in exploring whether online courses can be used to expand instruction and improve outcomes, but there may be costs to this strategy.” Of course, this isn’t the first study into the success, or otherwise, of online courses. Last year, for instance, saw a study of student success at MIT. When the researchers tested both MOOC students on a MIT physics class and their offline peers, they found that the knowledge learned via the MOOC was greater than that in the traditional, lecture based course. What’s more, they found that even those MOOC students that were not at all well prepared for their course (ie those with low scores before the course started), ended up learning just as well as their fellow students. The rate of improvement was almost equal regardless of the skill level at the outset of the course. Another study highlighted the large spread of people that typically enroll for online courses, and the challenges this creates on how to motivate and engage such a diverse body. They identified five distinct type of student: Bystandars are students who are probably at the lowest end of the engagement ladder. They’ll sign up for a course, but then not really engage with it. Some might not even log-in to the course once it begins. Collectors on the other hand are slightly further up the ladder. They’ll consume the video content provided by the course, but they won’t do a great deal of interaction with fellow students. Viewers are similar to the collectors in that their primary means of engagement with the course is via the lectures. Despite watching the content however, the viewer is unlikely to complete many of the assignments. Solvers tend to be polar opposite to the viewers. They’ll do a lot of the assignments, without necessarily having watched the lectures beforehand. All rounders are undoubtedly the holy grail however, as these are the people that do it all. They’ll watch the lectures and do the assignments. Whether students at community colleges fit into one or other of these groups is difficult to determine, but I suspect a much wider exploration is required in order to draw particularly firm conclusions. Original post

Telemedicine is a topic that I’ve touched on numerous times on this blog over the past year or so, with a number of platforms emerging to offer patients the opportunity to consult with a medical professional from anywhere in the world. Most of these platforms are clinical based, such as the Babylon service, and therefore provide you with access to doctors when you have something wrong with you. There are however, also a number that are taking a more preventative approach and seek to keep you healthier in the first place. For instance, last autumn I wrote about the Vida platform that is providing coaching and support to ensure you stay out of the emergency room altogether. Of course, all of these services require a human healthcare professional at the other end of your video call to answer your queries for you. Sense.ly are taking another approach by offering an AI based nurse, called Molly, who aims to provide help and support in those periods between appointments with real life professionals. The service is aimed specifically at patients with common medical conditions such as diabetes or heart failure. The patient signs up to the site either direct or via their GP, and the platform then draws up a personalized care plan for them based upon both their medical records and the individual needs of the patient. The patient then follows this prescribed plan (hopefully), with regular check-ins with the virtual nurse via their smartphone or computer to help their progress. Doctors can also access information via the site to see how their patient is getting on, whilst the system will alert them automatically if worrying symptoms begin to emerge. I’ve written previously about the important role the appearance of avatars has on how we engage with them, so Molly has been designed with a friendly face and a softly spoken voice. She interacts with patients using voice recognition technology and can ask relatively simple questions of the patient whilst guiding them through exercise plans and collecting medical data from them. This data can then be analyzed by a doctor (although AI analysis seems inevitable), whilst the patient can also use Molly as a sort of health PA and book appointments with their doctor through her. With voice recognition technology growing at an incredible pace and the AI grunt of services such as Watson increasingly capable of making complex decisions, this seems the beginning of an inevitable trend towards more automated healthcare. Check out the video below that explains more about Molly and the service she offers. Original post

The business world is an increasingly complex one. In the past few IBM CEO surveys, they have highlighted the growing importance of both being able to manage this complexity, and to do so in a collaborative way. This shifting zeitgeist was reflected in a series of seminars hosted by Xincus, and prompted the launch of a two phase study into how Chambers of Commerce can evolve within this new landscape. The study, consisting of in depth one on one interviews and a nationwide online survey, aimed to better understand both how Chambers can adapt, and what changes would be required to do so. The findings from this research are now available in a new paper called Chamber 2.0: Digital – Connected – Global. The paper outlines both the main challenges currently facing Chambers, and the steps they can take to thrive in such an environment. Amongst the main challenges identified by the research was a fundamental desire to change and modernize, with a strategic positioning and business model that would allow Chambers to flourish. There was also a strong desire to work more effectively with partners, both inside and outside of the Chamber network, sharing both resources and insights. The report then concluded with a road map derived by molding these findings from within the network with best practice from the wider business world. The road-map consists of five broad stages, with each one containing more detailed steps Chambers can take to prepare for the modern world. Become a one stop shop for members, including positioning the Chamber brand for the modern world as centers for Business, Innovation, and Economic Development with a new and modernized approach to business that sees an adaptive and responsive leadership style essential to a revitalize business model. Offer new value, with a new emphasis on virtual services to reflect modern ways of working. Chambers will become a solution hub that connects and match makes members, with co-working spaces connecting the physical and virtual worlds. Collaborate beyond borders, by building an extensive Chamber alliance network, allowing Chambers to become specialized regional hubs, whilst tapping into the collective wisdom of the entire network as well as offering “health-club” type e-memberships to professionals, academics, entrepreneurs and “free agent” millennials alike. Nurture new economic development, by facilitating entrepreneurial collaboration between members and stakeholders, connecting the right people with the right resources, helping to forge an innovation economy and a thriving business community and jobs. Foster global innovation ecosystems, by tying all of these communities together to form a hyperconnected ecosystem, with Chambers at its heart, thus empowering the next wave of new economic development around the world. The report makes clear that whilst change is desired, the network remains positive that the right developments will occur. With Chambers striving to maintain their position at the heart of the business community, this report will go some way towards helping them achieve that goal. You can get your copy of the report here. Original post

There have been numerous websites and platforms emerging over the past few years that have set out to rock the educational establishment. Whether it’s Khan Academy or MOOCs, there are changes in how education is produced and consumed. Several of these approaches have pooled together to create the potential for flipping the classroom, whereby lectures are consumed by students at home, with class time then devoted to understanding and digesting that content with a highly trained teacher. Suffice to say, this approach still places a strong premium on the need for a good teacher. A new service aims to provide some of the things teachers add to the learning experience, for those without access to one. The platform, called Oppia, is an open source creation courtesy of Google (kind of) that lets anyone create an interactive learning experience online. The motivation behind Oppia was that much of the online educational content at the moment is asynchronous. In other words, you consume the content that is posted online, but there isn’t much in the way of interaction going on. There’s no dialogue or feedback between you and the teacher. The site provides a framework for anyone to create interactive learning experiences and bolt them onto their own website. The site does this whilst at the same time adding interactivity to the learning process by taking on the role of the mentor/teacher who is constantly asking questions of the learner. The AI backend will then absorb the responses to these questions and adapt future engagements accordingly. This (hopefully) rich seam of data is then fed back to the course creator to help them improve the content itself, thus hopefully building into the process a productive feedback loop. Suffice to say, this isn’t the first time open courseware products have hit the market, but it is one of the first that has built into the system a mechanism for giving feedback to students and feeding that data back into ‘teachers’. Now, it’s fair to say that Google have a whole lot of balls in the air at the moment, and whilst that diversity can be seen as a strength, it also leaves them stretched quite thinly. It’s unclear therefore just how much attention they’ll devote to Oppia. You have to search quite hard on the Oppia site to actually find any reference to Google at all (it was a 20% time project), so it is far from assured that they will support it extensively. With it being made open source, the hope is probably that the crowd will eventually take ownership of the platform. It will be a platform that’s very much worth following. Find out more via their YouTube video below. Original post

Air BnB is a seriously cool site. Not only have they given the travel industry a much needed revamp, they have also proven a source of good. It was reported last year that during the hurricane in New York, people were using the site to house the poor people that had lost their homes during the storm. Which is pretty cool. ShareDesk has a similar business model, but as yet without the social good attached to it. The idea is a simple one. You take your average office, and any spare desks you have can be rented out to freelancers, entrepreneurs and the like that would like an affordable and flexible office space for a while. Kia Rahmani, the founder of the site explained the concept to Fast Company recently. "The problem is this: There’s tons of idle capacity [read: underused office space] out there. There’s been numerous studies that show that an actual workspace is only utilized less than 45% of the time. That doesn’t only apply for small businesses; it also applies for large organizations and corporates. For us, the goal is to try to help workspaces better utilize their real estate assets, better utilize their idle desks, their meeting rooms." He would like to see the site used by companies to rent out un-used desk space, conference rooms, the works, all on a temporary basis. Prices vary, with some offering rent per day, some per month. For instance you can rent a desk in TechSpace, in the heart of London's Silicon Roundabout for £360 per month. At the moment, many of the listings seem to be offices like TechSpace that are essentially designed for co-working, but with the site barely 6 months old it's inevitable that they would be the first movers. Rahmani is seeing signs that more traditional offices are coming on board however, and he even envisages people renting out spare rooms in their homes before too long. ShareDesk take a 15% commission on any transactions made via the site but apart from that it's free to use. A really interesting concept and certainly one to keep an eye on.