January 2016 – Looking Forward

January 25, 2016

Getting Us Closer?

When we look at the adoption of new technologies, there often seem to
be two simultaneous divergent trends. The innovators and early adopters
push the technology forward, making significant progress every year.
The laggards still find many reasons not to use the technology.

The current state of videoconferencing provides a very strong example of this divergence.

While
videoconferencing has been steadily increasing in the corporate world,
it hasn’t really taken off. Each year, we see new predictions that this
next year videoconferencing will be unavoidable.

The obstacles to widespread adoption of videoconferencing in the past included:

Cost – which has decreased dramatically over the last few years
Quality
— the need for high broadband, low latency on both sides of the
conversation, which gets better as bandwidth has generally increased
Sunk
costs that make people wary of investing more money — one estimate is
that more than half of businesses have outdated hardware
And, as always, human resistance or impediments to change of any kind.

In
recent years, consumers have tended to adopt new technologies faster
than big corporations do. But reliable data about usage of consumer
video, like Skype Video or Apple FaceTime, is not readily available.

Nevertheless, the technology is moving forward with some interesting results.

Two weeks ago, Skype celebrated ten years of video calls by offering group mobile video conferencing.

Using through-the-screen-camera and a holographic illusion, DVETelepresence
has worked to make videoconferences appear more natural to
participants. This picture is one of my favorites. You’ll notice that to
enhance the illusion they even embed the office plant on both sides of
the screen, as if it really is to the side of the people who are remote.

Last week, 4Dpresence, a spinoff of DVETelepresence, announced
the availability of their “holographic town hall” for political
candidates and issues. Taking a page from India’s Prime Minister, who
used videoconferences to appear all over that country during their last
election, this company is offering to host candidates who can appear as
if they are live holograms and interact with audiences. The company
claims:

“In live venues, the patented holographic augmented
reality podium is so bright the candidates appear more compelling than
actually being there in person. The candidates and citizens engage each
other naturally as if they are together in person.”

You can see a video on their website.

Personify
offers what they call “Video Conversation, With a Hint of
Teleportation”. The idea is to eliminate the background that an Intel
RealSense 3D camera or a Primesense Carmine 3D cameravideo camera is
picking up so that you and the people you’re talking to all seem to
share the same virtual space.

Another version of teleportation for videoconferencing was featured a few months ago in a Wall St. Journal article titled “The Future of Remote Work Feels Like Teleportation: Virtual-reality headsets, 3-D cameras help make videoconferencing immersive”. As its author wrote:

“I
have experienced the future of remote work, and it feels a lot like
teleportation. Whether I was in a conference room studded with monitors,
on a video-chat system that leverages 3-D cameras, or strapped into a
virtual-reality headset inhabiting the body of a robot, I kept having
the same feeling over and over again: I was there — where collaboration
needed to happen.”

The article focused especially on the use of virtual reality gear to achieve this effect. There is DORA from the University of Pennsylvania, in which a person uses the VR headset to see through the eyes of a mobile robot.

This month’s MIT Technology Review also highlighted the use of Microsoft’s Room Alive in an article
titled “Can Augmented Reality Make Remote Communication Feel More
Intimate? A Microsoft Research study uses augmented reality to project a
life-size person into a room with you, perching them in an empty seat.”

Eventually, as the technology gets ever more interesting and
intimate, some fraction of the laggards may finally adopt the new
technology. Although as Max Planck noted about scientific progress, the
adoption pattern may just be generational: “A new scientific truth does
not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light,
but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation
grows up that is familiar with it.”

So it’s interesting that “47% of US teens use video chat including Skype, Oovoo, Facetime and Omegle.”

In
the meantime, the early adopters are getting all the economic and
intellectual benefits that can only occur with the full communication
that videoconferencing provides and texting/emails don’t. These people
are literally seeing the real potential of global Internet
communications and will likely reap the economic gains from realizing
that potential.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/138040698302/getting-us-closer]

January 12, 2016

Talk To Anyone In Any Language?

It’s been clear for some time that the Internet can connect everyone
around the globe – in theory. This opens up tremendous potential for
collaboration, mutual economic growth, education and a variety of other
benefits. We’ve seen many of those benefits, but we still haven’t
touched the surface.

Among other reasons the true potential of a
globally connected world hasn’t yet been realized is that many people
still can’t communicate when they communicate – they don’t speak the
same language.

So it has been interesting to me to see the recent
improvements in real time translation on the Internet. I’m not talking
about the translation of text that has been around for a couple of years
through, for example, Google Translate of websites or even the very
useful app, WordLens, which I have used in my travels when I had to read
foreign signs.

No, the new improvements are in speech – taking
speech from one language and ultimately, quickly converting it correctly
into another language. Although text translation is not easy, speech
introduces much greater challenges.

These new real-time voice
translation services and devices aren’t perfect, but they’ve improved
enough that they are usable. And that usability will begin to make all
the difference.

Last year, Google took its Translate app into speech. You can see a quick video example here. Google claims it can handle 90 of the world’s languages.

Then,
more recently, Skype made its Translator generally available, although
it’s clearly still in a sort of test mode. For English, Spanish, French,
German, Italian and Mandarin, Skype describes its capabilities quite simply:

“You
can call almost anyone who has Skype. It will translate your
conversation into another language in near real-time. What someone else
says is translated back in your language. An on-screen transcript of
your call is displayed.”

They have a charming video of school children in the US and Mexico talking to each other somewhat awkwardly.

There’s another video, titled “Speak Chinese Like A Local” with an American photojournalist in China arranging a tour for himself.

This translation work hasn’t only be done in the US. The Japanese have also been busy at this task, in their own way.

While not using the Internet, a Panasonic translator – in the form of a smart megaphone – will be tested at Narita Airport to translate between Japanese, Chinese, Korean and English.

Then there’s the “ili”,
a portable device (also not connected to the Internet) which translates
between Japanese, Chinese and English. The company describes it as “the
world’s first wearable translator for travelers”. They’ve posted a
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6ngM0LHxuU. The video is a strange combination of cute and creepy, but it gets the point across.

These developments have led some stories
to proclaim the arrival of the universal translator of Star Trek. But
as Trekkie experts say, unlike the one in Star Trek, this doesn’t read brains, which may have been a necessity to communicate with non-human species.

On
the other hand, if you only want to talk with other people, the new
language translators are pretty good substitutes 😉 With more use, they
can only get better, faster, all the while helping to improve
understanding between people around the world.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/137156470627/talk-to-anyone-in-any-language]

January 5, 2016

Analytics And Organizational Change

The accumulation of data is increasing fast – from wearables, the widespread deployment of sensors in physical locations and the ever increasing use of the Internet by people.

And someone somehow has to figure it all out. As a result, data scientists are in demand and analytics is a hot new field of study. On top of long standing statistical methods, there has been impressive progress recently in machine learning, artificial intelligence and new computer system architectures.

Yet, the use of analytics itself has not had as great an impact on many organizations as the data scientists have hoped. Some of the failures of analytics were really failures of implementation.

Perhaps the most public of these was the great Netflix million-dollar prize for a new recommendation engine. From a purely technical viewpoint, the winning team did exactly what was asked for – create a significantly better engine than the one Netflix had been using. Nevertheless, Netflix ended up not using their work. That’s an issue of implementation and integrating the product of analytics into an organization.

Being able to predict behavior or even generate new insights from all this data is one thing. As with Netflix, having people and organizations actually use that knowledge is another. Like many other new technologies, adoption is as much a question of managing change as it is developing the technology itself.

This surely bothers some data scientists. After all, they have a better mousetrap – why aren’t people using it? Being able to think quantitatively, they can prepare quite convincing business cases with impressive ROI statistics and yet even that isn’t enough to get executives to budge. But changing an organization isn’t simple no matter how good your arguments.

Despite this background, there has been very little overlap between the courses that prepare data scientists and the courses that prepare change agents in organizations.

Later this year, I’ll be doing something to help align these two fields to improve the success of both. I’ll be teaching an online course on analytics and leading change. It will be part of Columbia University’s new executive graduate program in Applied Analytics.

We’ll be reviewing what is known about successfully introducing changes into an organization from the classics on the subject that were written as much as twenty years ago to more recent research. The course will, of course, help its students understand how to get an analytics initiative started. More important, it will focus on how to sustain, over the long run, both analytics and the changes it informs.

Thinking about the long run, there are three facets of the relationship between analytics and organizational change.

The use of analytics as a part of everyday decision making and the rules of operation in a business – this is the obvious first thing everyone thinks of.
The use of analytics to help better implement the changes that its insights imply – a kind of a meta-analysis.
The continuing interaction between analytics and change to finally achieve the long desired goal of an organization that learns how to continually optimize itself – this is something of great strategic value to any business.

As the course develops, I’ll be posting more about each topic.