Personality Key for Open Source Contribution?

Depends if we can really detect useful personality measures of this type, and if they will be stable under differing contexts and goals.

Personality Key in Whether Developers Can Contribute to Open Source Projects
Waterloo News

The results of a study by researchers at the University of Waterloo in Canada suggest a software developer's personality could affect their ability to contribute to open source projects. Although social factors are the primary determinant of acceptance or rejection of online contributors' work, Waterloo's Meiyappan Nagappan said personality also is important to consider because it governs how contributors' behaviors manifest in their interactions with others. The researchers assessed data from the GitHub open source platform to analyze the personality traits of 16,935 active developers from 1,860 projects, and extracted the five leading developer personalities—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism—with the IBM Watson Personality Insights service. Waterloo's Alex Yun said the analysis suggested that biases may be involved in the acceptance or rejection of contributions to work on open source platforms. Said Yun, "Managers are more likely to accept a contribution from someone they know, or someone more agreeable than others, even though the technical contribution might be similar."

Personality Detection by Autonomous Vehicles

More on personality determination to be used for autonomous vehicles.  Or any IOT device?  While it would appear this would be very useful, it leads to some kinds of private data, like behavioral personality, which could further be used to predict things that could be proxies for criminal behavior.

If I can quickly determine that a person drives erratically, say by observation, I would avoid them.  But I imagine this would likely be objected to as too deeply personal to be determined by an AI.   As we continue to do this kind of tagging with AI, expect more of this.

Predicting People's Driving Personalities
MIT News   By Adam Conner-Simons

A team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) developed a system that classifies drivers' behavior, in order to determine whether autonomous vehicles (AVs) can be programmed to gauge other drivers' personalities in order to predict other vehicles' behaviors. The researchers employed social value orientation to quantify a person's selfishness or cooperativeness, and mapped out real-time driving trajectories for driverless vehicles based on that measurement. The researchers designed and tested an algorithm in scenarios of merging lanes and making unprotected left turns, and demonstrated that they could better predict other cars' behaviors. CSAIL's Wilko Schwarting said, "Creating more human-like behavior in autonomous vehicles (AVs) is fundamental for the safety of passengers and surrounding vehicles, since behaving in a predictable manner enables humans to understand and appropriately respond to the AV's actions."

Watson Personality Insights

Just today I happened to be reintroduced to Personality Insights on the Watson Developer Cloud.  Had taken an earlier look.   Basic version is free to work with.   Can any provide me concrete examples of its use in the wild?   A personality classifier / transducer for the millions?   Marketing tool?  Python code connects .   " ...  Personality Insights extracts and analyzes a spectrum of personality attributes to help discover actionable insights about people and entities, and in turn guides end users to highly personalized interactions. The service outputs personality characteristics that are divided into three dimensions: the Big 5, Values, and Needs. While some services are contextually specific depending on the domain model and content, Personality Insights only requires a minimum of 3500+ words of any text. ... " 

More posts on Watson Personality Insights

Watson Personality Insights for Shoppers

A demonstration of Watson's personality services capability for shopping.  " ... The Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to extract a spectrum of cognitive and social characteristics from the text data that a person generates through text messages, tweets, posts, and more. ... ".   You can test it with own text and see how you the author is classified.    Aimed at segmenting shoppers based on streams like those from Twitter. See my previous post on this.  It also has a link to the science and cautions about the methods.  Have yet to see the personality classification tested  in retail.   Note that this basic service can already be tested and integrated free in the Bluemix services cloud.   This demo appears to show how this can be used with a data and analysis wrapper.   CGT registration required.

Juji: Behavior-based Individuality Analysis

Michelle Zhou brought to my attention their new personality analysis startup that creates people profiles from Twitter and Facebook streams.  I  gave it a try and was impressed by its ease of use.     The idea of this kind of user modeling has been around for a long time, we tested related ideas with text analyses of 800 line calls.  This example is one of the first that uses new sources of social data effectively.  Consider if you combined results of this system with streams of IOT data, you could provide an analysis of people in context.

Juji has similarities to and in part derives from work done at IBM, that I have reported on previously, but it is now a unconnected startup.  It provides both profiles and alternative use case scenarios.  Give it a try, they need a critical mass of testers, and are providing incentives for students to participate.

Sign up and test the system.

They write about their goals:

Our Vision
Juji's mission is to discover the world’s people by their individuality, and to enable individualization at scale. Our notion of individualization includes two aspects. One is self individuation, a concept proposed by the renowned Psychologist Carl Jung: one should be aware of and realize one's true self. The other is for individuals to obtain hyper-personalized experiences that suit their true nature, including their personality, physical and emotional needs, values and beliefs, and taste and style.

As the first step toward fulfilling our mission, we empower our users, individuals and businesses alike, to automatically derive deep insights about people of interest from opt-in or public data (e.g., public blogs and web pages). Such insights characterize a person's or a group's individuality from multiple aspects, encompassing their professional and personal lives. Our users can then use the derived insights to develop and improve their own brand personality, and create individualized engagements at scale (e.g., interacting with hundreds or thousands of customers in an personalized way).  ....    "

Watson Determining Personality and Resonance of Message

Today at the Insight meetings we saw a Watson cognitive App being built from a number of Bluemix services and prefabricated Java.  Of particular interest was a user personality modeling mechanism.   They showed it being used to determine how well a message resonated with a recipient. A near definition of advertising.

The simple model was built and embodied in an App in a few minutes.  What they showed could be done by anyone with just a little computer dev experience.  Potentially a very big idea, especially when being used online.  Genesys was an example of a company using the idea today, for call center style applications.

It was unclear what theory of personality was being used.  Someone know?  I am sure there will be some push back on relevance of the model.  Also matches well with service and advisory applications.   I have asked for a complete demo video of the personality feature and will post it here, hopefully sometime soon.

#IbmInsight

Devices Can Have Personalities

The personality of devices.    An interesting experiment that creates some new approaches to design consideration between product and consumer.

" ... Injecting some personality into products might be one way to help people notice that they’re not really using everything filling their home. As Rebaudengo tested his network of toasters, people were suddenly hyper-aware of an object they'd never noticed before. They started changing their everyday lives; one family even had a party just so they had a reason to make more toast.

"Suddenly an object that has no real value gets a lot of value because you are judged as an owner," he says. "It was kind of fun because even though it was a speculative vision, by making it real enough you get these full reactions. What if this was true?" ... " 

Myers-Briggs as Assessment

We never used the well known Myers-Briggs personality test for specific decisions.  But it was promoted as a means for self-understanding.  I was convinced it was useful for broad brush analyses, but the results were  frequently over analyzed.   We like to know about ourselves.   A piece in the WP.