Overview: Innovation Strategy

idea is that the human agents only handle requests too complex for a bot. But the enterprise software companies building automated responses and those that manage live chat services for workers are jostling over how to do the so-called “handoff,” or the step in which a customer gets routed from a bot to a human

how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself... What is at stake is not just one more piecemeal innovation but control over what very well could represent an entirely new computational platform: pervasive, ambient artificial intelligence... Artificial general intelligence will not involve dutiful adherence to explicit instructions, …

leading researchers are finding that they can make software that can learn to... design machine-learning software.

Over the past week in our Understanding AI series, we heard from a group of professionals exploring the impacts of AI... Sales coaches are valued, highly experienced, and well-paid. It’s hard to believe that a machine could potentially put them out of work, and yet…look at the data. And Sales’ counterparts over in Marketing are hardly any safer...…

With a few paragraphs buried in... bureaucrat-speak, the GDPR also restricts what the EU calls “automated individual decision-making.” ... what neural networks do... prohibit any automated decision that “significantly affects” EU citizens... provides ... a “right to explanation.” ... the option of reviewing how a particular service made a partic…

artificial neural network... takes in a given type of data... and finds patterns in them... Nobody knows quite how they work. And that means no one can predict when they might fail... If there hadn’t been an interpretable model, Malioutov cautions, “you could accidentally kill people.”.. European Union recently proposed to establish a “right to ex…

the world’s top artificial intelligence researchers ... discussed their rapidly accelerating field and the role it will play in the fate of humanity... Machines aren’t just taking the place of humans on the assembly line. They’re doing a better job. And all this before the coming wave of AI ... most new jobs are either at the very low end of the p…

The Feynman Machine is both an accurate description of how the brain really works, and a blueprint for Machine Intelligence... I won’t dwell too much on why I believe the Deep Learning boom of today is not the panacea it has been hyped up to appear... The central idea of the Feynman Machine is that regions of the brain form a network of NDSs whic…

finely-grained user segmentation could do wonders for bots. The experience becomes tailored to each user, therefore much more personal — and much more effective... how can IBM’s AI service help?

voice based AI assistants ... are naturally extremely open ended... not really that good at anything... the best services ... focus on solving one problem with a compelling solution and then expand

still ... publishing "dutiful, incremental pieces," ... designed to fill a daily print edition... dominated by long strings of text... a series of goals for areas including visual journalism, reader engagement, newsroom training and diversity... new content management system... build stories with visual elements and examine what the final produ…

Use the brightest ideas from your people to grow your business faster. ... Idea Drop is smart and intuitive idea management software.

Fuller knew... new ideas might emerge from the chance meeting of disparate information in a curious mind

today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive... well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets... You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented d…

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

deep learning... is the reason we’re on the brink of a more general intelligence... essentially one algorithm (with many minor variants) that can adjust its own structure to solve a problem, directly from whatever massively large data set you feed it... we’re seeing extremely narrow systems right now is because they’re extremely useful... we are …

The privations of the past decade and a half have unleashed nothing if not a stream of flimsy would-be innovations... as a public service, we offer this starter list of Media-Innovation-Don’ts.

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” ... filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network... improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying... much easier to identify than false news s…

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Business coaching to a media startupOne of the smallest, yet sweetest, projects of 2016 was helping specialist online media Borderlexrethink its business and relaunch its website. Coaching ranged from overall business model right down to the nuts and bolts of social media promotion, engagement and monitoring.

Where are companies at in their digital transformation efforts?... I define iteration as doing the same things better. Innovation is doing new things that unlocks new value for your customers. Only one of those can lead to disruption, which is doing new things over time that make the old things obsolete.

Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the tu…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

a lot of people don’t know fake news when they see it, sensationalized reports are more likely to go viral on social media than sane ones, and distrust of traditional (and genuinely more reliable) media sources is rising. Professor Nicole A. Cooke ... focusing on human information behavior, information literacy, and diversity in librarianship.... …

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

trillions of dollars are spent on making the world technologically ‘smarter’ ... but very little is spent on getting humans ready for that future... We will need to decide, very soon, where humans end and machines start, and vice-versa- and this is an ethical question NOT a technological challenge.