Study on Aging Workforce and Robotics

Makes sense. How do we make such uses most efficient?   Teach both to collaborate well. Have my own ideas on that, lets collaborate. 

Robots Readily Adopted In the Aging Workplace, Study Finds   By MIT News  in CACM

Robots are more widely adopted in places with notably older workers, filling gaps created by a shortage of middle-aged workers in manual production tasks, according a study on robot adoption.

"Demographic change — aging — is one of the most important factors leading to the adoption of robotics and other automation technologies," says Daron Acemoglu, an MIT economist and co-author, along with Pascual Restrepo at Boston University, of "Demographics and Automation,"   published in The Review of Economic Studies.

The researchers' model predicts that the effects of demographic change should be more pronounced in industries that rely more on middle-aged workers and in those that present greater technological opportunities for automation.

Acemoglu and Restrepo found a strong relationship between an aging work force — defined by the ratio of workers 56 and older to those ages 21 to 55 — and robot deployment in 60 countries. "Our findings suggest that quite a bit of investment in robotics is not driven by the fact that this is the next 'amazing frontier,' but because some countries have shortages of labor, especially middle-aged labor that would be necessary for blue-collar work," Acemoglu says.

From MIT News   View Full Article 

P&G Looks for Smarter Audiences

Good overview of the direction of my former employer.  With mention of  '1 billion consumer IDs to build audience segments' for more effective marketing.    Some interesting detail in the article.

P&G shifts from targeting ‘generic demographics’ to ‘smart audiences’

The FMCG giant claims a focus on more precise targeting of audiences such as first-time mums is helping its advertising reach “the right people at the right time, in the right place”.   By Sarah Vizard in MarketingWeek

Procter & Gamble (P&G) has credited a shift from “generic demographics” to “smart audiences” with helping improve the effectiveness of its marketing and its innovation pipeline.

Speaking on a call today (30 July) following its full-year results, CEO David Taylor said he is excited about its “smart audience work”, which is helping the company move from “wasteful” mass marketing to mass one-to-one brand building. To do that, it is using the more than 1 billion consumer IDs it has to build audience segments and then do “propensity marketing with people who have similar characteristics”.

“We are going from generic demographic targeting, like women aged 18 to 35, to more than 350 precise smart audiences, like first-time mums, millennial professionals or first-time washing machine owners, to help us reach the right people at the right time, in the right place,” he explained.

“That is only going to get more powerful…and we will get more accomplished at performance marketing to serve people messages that meet their needs.”  .... " 

Walmart Follows Demographics

Was may own impression from some time ago that they did much better in leveraging demographics both in inventory and physical design of their retail spaces.

How Walmart stays ahead by following demographics

The rise of big data may have eclipsed demographics for many retailers, but Walmart has kept demographic trends in its sights, says Peter Francese, founder of "American Demographics" magazine. Falling birth rates, key differences between the baby boomers and the millennials, and the financial stresses faced by low-income immigrant groups and people of color all factor into Walmart's merchandising strategies, according to Francese.  .... " 

Dilemma of Scraping Facial Data

Solving deep learning problems requires considerable and varied data.   I was recently involved in such a problem which aimed to do facial demographics, learning and then do real-time classification.  It was quickly determined that this data was hard to get in sufficient volume.  Though it was also determined that services like Facebook had lots of it. Technically, scraping it online is easy.  But  this, if used, would be without direct consent.    The company involved rejected that  approach, and looked for other places to get data. 

IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in

On Tuesday, NBC published a story with a gripping headline: “Facial recognition’s ‘dirty little secret’: Millions of online photos scraped without consent.” I linked to it in our last Algorithm issue, but it’s worth a revisit today.

The story highlights a recent data set released by IBM with 1 million pictures of faces, intended to help develop fairer face recognition algorithms. (I wrote about the news at the time too.) It turns out, NBC found, that those faces were scraped directly from the online photo-hosting site Flickr, without the permission of the subjects or photographers. .... "

Collision of Demographics, Automation Inequality

I previously referenced this Bain report when I spoke about automation and AI, thinking that might be the biggest influence.  Worth reposting it here.

Labor 2030: The Collision of Demographics, Automation and Inequality
The business environment of the 2020s will be more volatile and economic swings more extreme.

By Karen Harris, Austin Kimson and Andrew Schwedel

Executive summary
Demographics, automation and inequality have the potential to dramatically reshape our world in the 2020s and beyond. Our analysis shows that the collision of these forces could trigger economic disruption far greater than we have experienced over the past 60 years (see Figure 1). The aim of this report by Bain's Macro Trends Group is to detail how the impact of aging populations, the adoption of new automation technologies and rising inequality will likely combine to give rise to new business risks and opportunities. These gathering forces already pose challenges for businesses and investors. In the next decade, they will combine to create an economic climate of increasing extremes but may also trigger a decade-plus investment boom. ....  "

Social Media Demographics

A view of most major social media their demographics and buying habits in 2017.  Interesting, but overly infographic.  Could be done in a single visual page.   Useful information.

Predicting Demographics with Twitter

Always an interesting challenge.  Note the mention of Mechanical Turk, a method we examined.

In Techrepublic:
"  ... Big data can reveal inaccurate stereotypes on Twitter, according to UPenn study ... What can you guess about a person, based on their tweets? A new study examined how 140 characters can shape assumptions about a person's gender, age, education, and politics. Here's what it found.  ...  " 

By Hope Reese  | November 16, 2016

Shoe Recognition by Disney

How much better is this than face recognition?    Positioned as less personal I assume.  Link to demographics and style.

Disney may track park visitors using shoe recognition technology
Walt Disney was recently awarded a patent that describes identifying and tracking its visitors based on their footwear in order to provide customers with customized experiences.

As a guest enters a theme park, cameras would capture their shoe’s color scheme as well as brand and model. Further, sensors placed in the ground would recognize and store shoe size and tread pattern. Individuals could then be recognized by other cameras and sensors as they move about the park.

According to the patent, amusements parks, theme parks other sporting and entertainment venues would benefit from a better understanding of guests’ footpaths. For theme parks this would include understanding the “common guest paths from ride to ride.”   .... ' 

Media Services Getting Smarter

A continuing trend.  Intelligence can consist of including higher level services.  But these have to be correct and consistent under varying data contexts.  That last part is probably the hardest thing to achieve.  Contexts can be many things:  Industry, customer demographics, history of interaction ... and more.   Consider too the implications of of error varying under each context as well.  Note the mention of 'workflows' below, that also has the potential of specifying context.

Microsoft is bringing automatic video summarization, Hyperlapse, OCR and more to Azure Media Services
Azure Media Services, Microsoft’s collection of cloud-based tools for video workflows, is about to get a lot smarter. As the company announced at the annual NAB show in Las Vegas today, Media Services will now make use of some of the tools Microsoft developed for its machine learning services for video, as well. ... "

Store Formatting by Kroger and other Retailers

In Retailwire:  Something we examined in the innovation centers.  At both the shelf and broader store design level.  Here some interesting views of how this is linked to demographics.  How has the emergence of online changed these designs?   Comments by other observers is also interesting.

Kroger Expands Online Shopping

In Cincinnati, A good example of how bricks retailers are testing shop online and pickup grocery shopping.  For Kroger pickup is only at one store so far.  The demographics would be interesting, and link to loyalty propositions.

Knowledge Management at Boeing links to Behavior

Its about behaviors, not tools.  How often that is so true.  You need to know the behavior (decisions) before you choose your tools.  In the APQC blog by Lauren Trees.    " ... APQC recently spoke to Jyoti Patel, knowledge management strategist at Boeing, about how Boeing merged two organizations and developed common processes, knowledge management capabilities, and data system architectures while also designing a knowledge management strategy that emphasizes behaviors over tools. ... "     Worth a read.

One segment talks about their own internal wiki, something we also attempted.  I would make similar comments about hurdles to address:

" ... Our wiki, e-Book, has over 550 pages of content and 955 users; it has been built over 6 years as an entirely grassroots effort. I’ll speak to the cons first. It’s difficult to maintain a navigational structure that works for a diverse range of users, which happens when new groups join. We want to grow the user base to drive more participation, which leads to a higher standard of content. I think striking the balance between the right number of users while maintaining relevance to your core users is key. We have a lot of content consumers, but only a subset of those are content creators/editors, which means that there is a critical mass of users for a wiki to maintain efficacy. Another con is that our engineering population values content approved by experts, so it has been a hurdle for those folks to accept an open source model. Also, it’s slow to build content momentum within an organization where the demographics are so polarized and the level of comfort using a wiki is very inconsistent among employees. This is a long-term resource with long-term gains and had to be approached accordingly.   .... " 

Balancing Shopper Desire for Personalization

In Supermarket News: 

FMI CEO: Balancing shopper demand for personalization
Food retailers can fulfill consumer demand for more personalized service without becoming overwhelmed if they focus on the demographics of their customer base, identify the groups to which the majority of their shoppers belong and then customize the shopping experience based on the preferences and tastes of those groups, FMI President and CEO Leslie Sarasin writes. "If a food retailer can become sufficiently knowledgeable of the communities that comprise their shoppers and create a shopping experience contoured to each group's tastes, they will have made tremendous strides toward offering customized service," she writes. ... " 

Social TV, A Study

In Knowledge@Wharton.   Video podcast and transcript.

As social media grows more popular, it’s increasingly becoming a way for industries, companies and brands to figure out what the cultural zeitgeist is thinking — and from there, to recommend other things consumers might like.

Wharton operations and information management professor Shawndra Hill has extensively studied how social TV — i.e., people contributing or consuming commentary about their favorite programs — can be used by Hollywood and advertisers to better reach their target demographics. In this interview, she discusses her method and findings, and also responds to a recent announcement by Nielsen that it will now include demographic information as part of its Twitter TV ratings service. That service offers data that gauge which shows are generating the most chatter on the social network. ... " 

CPG Mobile Marketing Scores

In Mobile Marketer:  Some very interesting details are included in the article:

" ... CPG brands score on mobile's hypertargeted marketing promise ...  CPG brands have historically relied on mass marketing tactics with big budgets akin to TV and print advertising that hit the majority of consumers. However, the appeal with mobile is significantly different for CPG marketers around influencing purchases at the point-of-sale, which is causing some to scout out specific demographics of consumers who are increasingly spending more time within mobile applications and sites. .... “Mobile is still the most personal advertising vehicle in the world, and sophisticated brands are really starting to understand that,” said Tim Jenkins, CEO of 4Info, San Mateo, CA.... "

Real time Cloud Retail Data Analysis

This site was recently brought to my attention.  I am currently in the process of helping a retail marketing operation better understand how well it is doing when doing promotions under varying conditions.  IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark Hub: Your source for real-time cloud-based online retail data and analysis.  As they describe it further:

IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark
View performance benchmarks for your peers and competitors to help you uncover opportunities to grow your digital marketing and web properties. ... 

In general, the small to medium size business has a more difficult time in getting the data to understand how their business is operating.   In the enterprise we had  many sources of data and expertise. In the small to medium sized firms you track your own sales, but suppose you are trying to understand how well your promotional activities are working.  What promotions should you use in the future, what are your competitors doing, what are the demographics of your buyers? All key questions to ask.  New analytics exist to measure each of this questions, and the site includes tools and articles about them.   They point me to a study:

Read the study: How Marketing is Taking Charge: Leading the Customer Experience
Learn what leading marketers are doing to differentiate themselves in a perpetually shifting omnichannel world. .... 

Which highlights the fact that we are heading toward a very multi channel world.  Also a world where it is not about which channel we use, but how many channels we use to support a purchase and even what order we use them in.

This is all about leveraging data and analytics.   In rapidly changing conditions.   Benchmarking the results against your business sector, and helping you plan for the future.

An interesting place to start.  I plan to give it a try.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.  #MidsizeIBM

Shelf Retail Surveillance

In the news today.  Word that a major  CPG manufacturing conglomerate, Mondelez International, is expressing an interest in using cameras on store shelves to gather data about shoppers. Apparently through image analysis, to determine preferences and behavior based on demographics.   First, this is nothing new, it has been done for a decade in laboratory and real shopping environments.  It just has been done primarily in test modes and not in full scale rollouts.   Having large scale databases of video and derived data could lead to useful patterns of shopper behavior.  Those databases,  what is classically called Big Data, have real value.  Privacy is a big consideration.

Note too, that this article and others just show how this company has just expressed an interest in this approach.   All large CPG companies would love this kind of insight.  It does NOT mean they are actively doing it, or are even close to a real experiment.   I have no further information about that.

This blog often covers related topics of retail behavior data and its use.

Open Innovation: Heart of Small Business

In Free Enterprise: John Mason GM of IBM's Midmarket Business writes:

" ... The drive to innovate is alive and well within the hearts of small businesses. But as most successful small business leaders know, it's not enough to have a great idea.   In fact, half of all new small businesses fail because they can't turn their promising concepts into a profitable business reality, according to the Small Business Administration. For the most part, the survival of these smaller firms relies on factors that remain unrecognized until it is too late. Markets shift, pushing customers to find new places to spend their money. Technologies shift, enabling the latest products to be offered through other channels. Even demographics shift, with one group’s position of “favorite brand” losing its appeal and seemingly overnight becoming “has-been”. ... " \

As part of my role in our innovation centers I often had to work with small businesses that had new ideas in retail.    These varied in size from very small businesses to very large. We worked with them to define, develop and deliver their new innovations in our simulated retail environments ad demonstrate them to retailers.    These innovations were delivered under the umbrella of open innovation.   One thing I saw more than and other was the need to adapt to agile environments.

In addition companies were often closer to the retail environment than we were, and had to be able to changes as their market changed.    Most of what we did was before social technologies were widely available to consumers, but the new realm of the social, mobile and local connections make this form of innovation more agile even more important.

" ... The small business often has the advantage of proximity to their customers, but this proximity also means that it may be difficult to "see the wood for the trees". Yet thanks to new social, mobile and connected technologies, there is much a small business can do to identify new areas of value in their products and services. Open innovation is fast becoming the heart and soul of a new, more dynamic small and midsized enterprise. The opportunity is greater now than ever for smaller competitors quickly to develop actionable insights, collaborate with others to turn innovative ideas into real business opportunities and be a truly disruptive force in their market ..." \

John Mason is the GM of IBM's Midmarket Business.
This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

Video Mining

Analyzing raw video from cameras. Videomining, a company we talked to as a potential solution for analyzing retail video lab stores that examined shopping contexts.   " ... VideoMining Corporation is the leading provider of in-store intelligence for consumer product manufacturers and retailers. VideoMining’s breakthrough measurement and analytics platform is based on patented, proprietary software for converting in-store video into rich statistical data on shopper behavior and demographics. We provide consumer product manufacturers and retailers actionable insights into factors that impact shopper behavior—insights that allow clients to continuously optimize shopper marketing and merchandizing strategies.... " 

Tailoring Billboards

Onstar patents a system to tailor billboards to individual drivers:

" ... Like the billboards Tom Cruise encountered in Minority Report, the OnStar-linked ads would be tailored to passing motorists based on personal information they’d shared with their telematics service. Perusing the patent’s text, nightmare scenarios flooded our thoughts. Kids in the backseat? Be prepared to see ads for Happy Meals and nearby amusement parks. Headed to the doctor’s office? A friendly reminder to schedule a colonoscopy, in flashing 40-foot letters.

The most alarming aspect of the patent is how it proposes gathering personal data. Expectedly, the patent covers the use of location-based information from OnStar’s turn-by-turn navigation system. But more intrusively, it also includes the use of in-vehicle cameras to determine unspecified demographics of vehicle occupants. Even power seat positions could be used to estimate the age of a driver.... "