AI-Created Lenses Let Camera Ignore Some Objects

 A kind of sensory focus, but is this another privacy issue?

AI-Created Lenses Let Camera Ignore Some Objects

New Scientist, By Matthew Sparkes, August 23, 2022

University of California, Los Angeles researchers developed a deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) model design three-dimensionally (3D) printed plastic camera lenses that capture images of certain objects, while ignoring others in the same frame. The researchers trained the model using thousands of images of numbers, designated either as target objects to appear in images or objects to ignore. The model was told when images that were supposed to reach the camera's sensor did and did not pass through a trio of lenses, and when images that were not supposed to reach the sensor did. The AI used the data to improve its lens design. The completed lenses use complex patterns printed into the plastic to diffract away light relating to objects that are not designated to appear in the final image. Unwanted objects are not captured digitally, so they do not need to be edited out of the image.

China Requires Face scans for Night Game Use

More direct control of children and minor's use of games at specific hours.   Different from what Apple is planning in upcoming OS, where a person can define their own 'focus' times.  Here the government will do it for you.  Enforced by face scans.  Problematical? 

Chinese Phone Games Now Require Facial Scans to Play at Night

Ars Technica via ACM , Sam Machkovech, July 7, 2021

Chinese video game publisher Tencent has added a facial recognition system to more than 60 of its China-specific smartphone games, in order to comply with government rules to limit access to video games by minors. Users will receive a prompt to scan their face once a gameplay session exceeds an unspecified amount of time during the nation's official gaming curfew hours of 10 p.m. to 8 a.m. If adult users decline or fail the facial check, the "Midnight Patrol" system will disable gameplay. Game publishers that do not comply with the rules, which also require real-name registration systems and in-game spending caps for minors, could have their business licenses revoked.     ... '

Focus Music

Amazon Alexa Music has been pushing what they call 'Focus Time Music'   With claims for 'perfect sound when you are studying, working, reading or writing '.   They just suggested the idea to me.  Something I have tried myself for years, with playlists, particular artists, etc.    For me its jazz.   Does it really work?  More than other methods.   Seems you could do some controlled  experiements,anyone know of any?  How about taking that to creativity?   Here is what they write about it. 

Mindfulness

In Knowledge @ Wharton:

How Companies Can Instill Mindfulness

Mindfulness and meditation have made deep inroads into the corporate world. The benefits are proving out, notes this opinion piece by Christian Greiser and Jan-Philipp Martini of the Boston Consulting Group. Greiser is a senior partner, managing director and the global leader of the firm’s operations practice who works with senior leaders around the globe. Martini is an associate who supports clients around the world on enterprise-wide agile transformations.

Volatile markets, challenging consumer demands, and the technological disruptions resulting from digitization and Industry 4.0 are producing unprecedented rates of change. In response, companies have worked to increase organizational agility, hoping to foster innovation and shorten go-to-market cycles. Yet organizational experiences and sociological conditioning often impede true agility. As a result, many of these efforts fall short of their objective to manage the uncertainty generated by change. But another movement — mindfulness — will help companies overcome these challenges.

Mindfulness is a centuries-old idea that has been reinvented to address the challenges of our digital age. In essence, mindfulness describes a state of being present in the moment and leaving behind one’s tendency to judge. It allows one to pause amid the constant inflow of stimuli and consciously decide how to act, rather than react reflexively with ingrained behavior patterns. Mindfulness, therefore, is perfectly suited to counterbalance the digital-age challenges of information overload and constant distraction. ... " 

Google Does a Slack Alternative

Been using Slack for some time on a project by project basis.  Does I think promote focus.   Email can be very fragmented among the noise.  Are the new Hangouts better?

Google's Slack alternative is available starting today

Despite the name, Hangouts Chat isn't just a retread of what it has already tried.   By Nathan Ingraham, @nateingraham in Engadget

It's been almost a year since Google first mentioned Hangouts Chat -- a totally redesigned messaging service that's more like Slack than the Hangouts most consumers know today. As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of its "early adopter" program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course.

To be clear, Hangouts Chat is a totally separate and distinct service from Hangouts proper, which still lives in your Google mail inbox. And while we'll forgive you for rolling your eyes at yet another chat service from Google (the number of different apps the company has built is legendary at the point), Hangouts Chat does offer something potentially valuable to companies using G Suite -- assuming they're not on Slack already. .... " 

Chasing Focus

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus     By Srini Pillay

The ability to focus is an important driver of excellence. Focused techniques such as to-do lists, timetables, and calendar reminders all help people to stay on task. Few would argue with that, and even if they did, there is evidence to support the idea that resisting distraction and staying present have benefits: practicing mindfulness for 10 minutes a day, for example, can enhance leadership effectiveness by helping you become more able to regulate your emotions and make sense of past experiences.  Yet as helpful as focus can be, there’s also a downside to focus as it is commonly viewed. .... " 

Rallying Around Common Goals

A most important topic,  even more so today in our heavily interacting world.   Focus.

Podcast:   In Knowledge@Wharton
Meaningful Work: What Leaders Can Learn from NASA and the Space Race  ... 

New Wharton research looks at how thousands of NASA employees with vastly different roles were able to rally around the common goal of a lunar landing in the 1960s.  ...  "

The Aha Moment and Working Memory

Fascinating.   Have had a handful of such aha moments.  Never tried to manage them.  How can that be done, or should it be?   How are our devices now a part of working memory?    Looking at the use of working memory.   In the HBR:

" ..... Having a high working memory capacity (WMC) generally helps with problem-solving by allowing us to avoid distractions, pull up relevant information, and complete multiple steps in a complex task. But not all problems benefit from that approach.

Previous research has shown that people with high WMC will choose problem-solving strategies that play to their strengths, adding more steps and complexity to the process than are strictly necessary — or efficient. Researchers have also found that high WMC individuals will direct the power of focused attention on activities that are actually performed better without it (such as dribbling a soccer ball or touch-typing).   ... " 

Smartwatches with Templates for Business

In CWorld:  Data and process focusing work?   A wearable advisory system.  How much different than an App on a smartphone?  To what degree does someone see a notification on a Smartphone, handsfree, as different from that on a Smartphone?  Am I wrong in seeing a watch as more directing than a phone with multiple Apps and uses?

" ... Salesforce has long been a proponent of wearable computing's enterprise potential, and on Tuesday it showed off five new Apple Watch apps created specifically for business users. All built by the company's partners on the Salesforce1 Platform using the Salesforce Wear toolkit, the new apps span a spectrum of purposes, including collaboration, scheduling and project management.  ... " 

PepsiCo R&D

PepsiCo overhauls R&D to innovate, boost sales
A major research and development overhaul helped PepsiCo innovate with new products, including Tostitos Cantina and Mountain Dew Kickstart, which have earned the company more than $100 billion each in annual sales over the past three years. "This resulted in a more focused innovation agenda, a greater emphasis on development platforms rather than product line extensions only and more efficient allocation of development resources as we have significantly reduced redundant efforts through better coordination," CEO Indra Nooyi said.PepsiCo overhauls R&D to innovate, boost sales

A major research and development overhaul helped PepsiCo innovate with new products, including Tostitos Cantina and Mountain Dew Kickstart, which have earned the company more than $100 billion each in annual sales over the past three years. "This resulted in a more focused innovation agenda, a greater emphasis on development platforms rather than product line extensions only and more efficient allocation of development resources as we have significantly reduced redundant efforts through better coordination," CEO Indra Nooyi said. .... "

Do Data Visualization Right to Promote Data Asset Value

This Forbes piece suggests further that you should visualize data only when you need to.  I disagree, it is so easy and cheap today, all data should be visualized.  At very least it can alert you to later unexpected changes that can be warnings or opportunities.  And especially if you later expect to perform analytics with the data.  Every expert and stakeholder of the data's value and process should be linked to the visuals.  The visuals are then an inspiration to leveraging the data for analytical value. Every enterprise should want that.

Its About the Data

By data I don't just mean the mega enterprise warehouses in place today.  It also includes sensors, human input, text comments, business rules, the output of other analytics systems and much more.  In the enterprise the most difficult issue is often finding and integrating that data with the systems that need to use them.  Have experienced many such challenges.  This will be no different with Cognitive systems. The first question I often get is 'Do we have the data'?  Or I am left to discover they don't.

Positions the challenge:   " How can you knock down barriers to data access so you can anticipate and respond to opportunity? ".   It states the need well.  There then needs to be a 'Watson Data Integration' advisor to help with this process.

As an example, see this recent post about what Kraft is doing with data integration.  Unrelated to Cognitive, but a symptom of the same issue:    

A need for Chief Data Officers:

Rich Fast Data, Focused Digital Enterprise Advisory Systems

A connection with a former colleague let me to take another look at Nestle's Digital Acceleration Center. Our Enterprise started similar efforts in Business Sphere.   I point to Nestle's work  here. 

This brings to mind that today any enterprise needs focus on data and focused expertise.  Linked to how this data can be leveraged with analytical methods.    And to multiple sources of expertise, human and cognitive.    Prescriptive and collaborative results delivered.  Example of job augmentation.

Visualization Tells the Focused Story of Data

In CIO Insight:  Perhaps obvious, but it is a very useful way to show the usefulness and value of your data.   Also to do this in some standardized way, so you can quickly understand how your data relates to your business, your values, contexts and immediate needs. We did some mock ups of data focusing experiments, where a user (or group, division ... ) could see a display of the key data for their responsibilities.  That could lead to not only a better understanding of their job, but an understanding of how other data might improve their work.

Innovation and Strategic Focus

In Forbes Future of CIO:

Will Innovation Enhance or Distract you from Strategic Focus?

Someone obviously needs to innovate otherwise the world will come to a standstill.  Innovation is the light every organization is pursuing, however, some might complain it has distracted them from their strategic focus, because a company cannot have a clear focus on everything, innovating, bringing products to market and cutting cost/removing complexity to stay profitable. Are companies able to focus on more than one thing, should their primary focus be prosperity via innovation or maintaining a sustained business via efficiency? ... " 

Hear Every Voice in the Room

An IBM exec's key to innovation is the free flow of information
IT leaders often must navigate a range of personalities as they guide teams and advance projects, writes Phil Gilbert, the general manager of IBM Design. "[W]e focus on two things: getting everyone to contribute and letting everyone’s contribution be heard," Gilbert writes ... " 

What Does the Term Cognitive Assistant Mean?

A Linkedin discussion on the topic, which includes some comments of my own on several systems we built that have been mentioned here.  Assistance can mean to augment someone's skills, using data or knowledge. It can also scale their capabilities broadly. It can be focused, or very broad in scope.  An assistant helps, at agreed upon levels of detail, focus and correctness.

How to Find Needed Market Research Data

The data you need to make your company work efficiently is often hard to find.  A former colleague has a startup that addresses this.   It is being used by P&G.  Note how this is also related to all kinds of data assets.

Can’t find your market research data? This startup can help
That Diet Coke in your hand didn’t invent itself. It’s the result of years of focus groups, surveys and data crunching—more commonly known as market research. Companies that produce consumer packaged goods (CPGs) spend millions each year on market research and it’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a boon to planning new products and tweaking existing ones but when it comes to finding individual pieces of information, that’s where the cursing comes in. A startup out of Chicago called KnowledgeHound thinks it has the answer. .... 

As KnowledgeHound CEO Kristi Zuhlke put it, companies spend all that cash on studies, then “stash the results on a hard drive, and promptly experience ‘corporate amnesia’.” .... 
Zuhlke experienced this firsthand in her time at Procter & Gamble working in consumer insights. “As soon as we’d get the info in, a month later we’d forget we had it. There wasn’t a central, easily navigated place to access.” Building on her experiences in the consumer packaged goods industry, Zuhlke founded KnowledgeHound in 2012 and went from paper to product in four months. Her first customer? Procter & Gamble.   ..... " 

See also a video visualization.

P&G Focuses, Simplifies

From the P&G Alumni Network.  Large companies need to simplify and focus on profit.

" .. The Procter & Gamble Company today announced the sale of its Camay and Zest brands along with the transfer of a manufacturing facility in Mexico to Unilever for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is expected to close during the first half of 2015 subject to necessary regulatory approvals.

The deal involves the global sale of the Camay brand, the sale of the Zest brand outside of North America and the Caribbean and the sale of the Talisman manufacturing facility in Mexico. The plant employs approximately 170 people who will transfer to Unilever at the completion of the deal.

P&G noted that the sale of both brands is consistent with its strategy to focus on its core brands that will create a faster growing, more profitable P&G that is far simpler to operate. ... " 

On the Future of the Pieces of Work

In McKinsey:  " ... A group of economists, tech entrepreneurs, and academics discuss whether technological advances will automate tasks more quickly than the United States can create jobs. ... 
The topic of job displacement has, throughout US history, ignited frustration over technological advances and their tendency to make traditional jobs obsolete; artisans protested textile mills in the early 19th century, for example. In recent years, start-ups and the high-tech industry have become the focus of this discussion. A recent Pew Research Center study found that technology experts are almost evenly split on whether robots and artificial intelligence will displace a significant number of jobs over the next decade, so there is plenty of room for debate. ... " 

Further, What are the jobs of today?  See One Net for precise task descriptions of many.  A  great place to start to think about how these might be replaced in whole or part.  Or how they can be augmented by advanced technologies.