Augmenting Human Intelligence

Quite an interesting piece.   Obvious at one level.  Its always about augmenting human intelligence,  at least in any near term view.   So then its about how well you can create the most useful tools.  Yes, it is about reasoning, but also about doing valuable things.  About inserting AI into valuable human process.   That's a challenge in every piece of work I do.

Using Artificial Intelligence to Augment Human Intelligence   (In Distill,Via O'Reilly) 

By creating user interfaces which let us work with the representations inside machine learning models, we can give people new tools for reasoning.

" .... Our essay begins with a survey of recent technical work hinting at artificial intelligence augmentation, including work on generative interfaces – that is, interfaces which can be used to explore and visualize generative machine learning models. Such interfaces develop a kind of cartography of generative models, ways for humans to explore and make meaning from those models, and to incorporate what those models “know” into their creative work.

Our essay is not just a survey of technical work. We believe now is a good time to identify some of the broad, fundamental questions at the foundation of this emerging field. To what extent are these new tools enabling creativity? Can they be used to generate ideas which are truly surprising and new, or are the ideas cliches, based on trivial recombinations of existing ideas? Can such systems be used to develop fundamental new interface primitives? How will those new primitives change and expand the way humans think?  ..... " 

Explanation Leading to Trust of Computers

Learning to explain.   Ultimately a very important topic.  Leading to trust.

AI Research Seeks to Grow Trust between Humans and Computers  By BU Today 

Researchers at Boston University and the University of California, Berkeley received a four-year, $7.55-million grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to find new ways of getting inside the "mind" of artificial intelligence (AI), creating a translation tool that explains its decision-making process to human users.

Getting feedback on why an AI device makes a particular decision could help improve its accuracy by giving opportunities for humans to offer small corrections.

In addition, it could increase the trust that humans put into a machine, making it a better collaborator on complex jobs.

All of the primary neural network's processing is devoted to solving its task. "That's why we want to use a second neural network that has access to that machinery and input data, and can learn to translate all that into a textual version that humans can understand," says BU professor Kate Saenko. .... " 

Role of Dialog Talk

From Today's talk:

Murray Campbell on  “The Role of Dialog in Augmented Intelligence”   IBM Research

Slides.    Talk recording. 

Role of Dialog in Augmented Intelligence

Looking forward to this talk,  precisely what we attempted in a number of expertise augmentation and Bot delivery applications.  Its still a big challenge,

Dear Professors, Students, IBMers and others, 

This a reminder about our Cognitive Systems Institute Speaker Series on Thursday, February 23, 2016 at 10:30 am ET US (7:30 am PT).  Our speaker is Murray Campbell, IBM Distinguished Research Staff Member, who will be presenting “The Role of Dialog in Augmented Intelligence.”

Please point your web browser to https://apps.na.collabserv.com/meetings/join?id=2894-8491 password=cognitive.   Use audio on computer or dial 855-233-7153   PIN Code: 43179788    Non-IBMers please use the "guest" option instead of entering your email.   

Please find the schedule of presenters herefor the next several calls.   A link to slides and a recording of each call should be available on the CSIG website (http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/).   We encourage those who join the calls to add questions and comments to the LinkedIn Discussion Group https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Cognitive-Systems-Institute-6729452 and please ask questions at the end of the call.

Thank you!

Dianne Fodell
IBM Global University Programs
fodell@us.ibm.com

AI / Cognitive Systems Institute

Wanted to re-introduce people to the Cognitive Systems Institute, an IBM Almaden research sponsored group to which I belong and contribute.    Includes connections to many students and practitioners and research groups.   I often attend and comment on their weekly speakers.  Worth joining in.

Introduction to the Cognitive Systems Institute
The Cognitive Systems Institute Group is a collaborative effort between universities, research institutes, and IBM clients to advance the state-of-the-art in cognitive computing.  The institute features resources on this website , a LinkedIn Discussion Group and a weekly Speaker Series .  As research collaborators and faculty, we focus on building and evaluating cognitive assistants for every profession.  The Cognitive Systems Institute centers on professional cognitive assistants that exhibit the three L’s – language, learning, and levels to augment and scale human expertise.  ... " 

Robotics and Disability

Correspondent Madelaine E. Sayko sends this piece she placed on Linkedin:

"Robotics & Disability; Friend or Foe?"  by @CognitiveCompas on @LinkedIn

Her company is a great link about augmenting every employee.

Madelaine E. Sayko, CEO
cognitivecompass.com

Cognitive Systems Institute Group

Wanted to remind people of the Cognitive Systems Institute Group,   that I have been part of for several years.  Spoken at and contributed to.  I particularly like their goal:  To Augment and Scale Expertise  ... ".    Their speaker series contains lots of interesting research and practitioner speaker recordings.

" ... The Cognitive Systems Institute Group is a collaborative effort between universities, research institutes, and IBM clients to advance the state-of-the-art in cognitive computing.  The institute features resources on this website , a LinkedIn Discussion Group and a weekly Speaker Series .  As research collaborators and faculty, we focus on building and evaluating cognitive assistants for every profession.  The Cognitive Systems Institute centers on professional cognitive assistants that exhibit the three L’s – language, learning, and levels to augment and scale human expertise. ... " 

On Useful Intelligence Augmentation

A talk with Pattie Maes about Intelligence augmentation, a favorite topic,  We had been members of the Media lab years ago, and had been intrigued by her practical consumer applications of AI.   She continues to address useful AI, in Echo: 

" ... Maes: I started out doing artificial intelligence, basically trying to study intelligence and intelligent behavior by synthesizing intelligent machines. I realized that what I've been doing in the last seven years could better be referred to as intelligence augmentation, so it's IA as opposed to AI. I'm not trying to understand intelligence and build this stand-alone intelligent machine that is as intelligent as a human and that hopefully teaches us something about how intelligence in humans may work; instead what I'm doing is building integrated forms of man and machine, and even multiple men and multiple machines, that have as a result that one individual can be super-intelligent. So it's more about making people more intelligent and allowing people to be able to deal with more stuff, more problems, more tasks, more information. Rather than copying ourselves, I'm building machines that can do that. ... " 

Curriculum for Cognitive Science

Fascinating new discussion I am participating in is underway.  Follow along.   Will pass along excerpts here.

A New “Science of Cognitive Computing” Curriculum
Posted by Jim Spohrer ...

Currently, I am working on a new “science of cognitive computing” curriculum for IBM with our partner universities and others to allow people of all ages to design, build, understand, and work with cognitive mediators.  The curriculum is inspired in part by the work of Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer, who urged us to work quickly to augment human intellect to address complex, urgent problems.

Initially,  we plan to use the curriculum to show people how to design and build cognitive mediators that augment their personal and professional memories and suggest profitable connections and conversations between people – a type of relationship-oriented computing.   Later, we plan to use the curriculum to help people understand how intelligence (capabilities to perform useful tasks) develops in people and machines using specific data sets and learning algorithms, both unsupervised (evolution) and supervised (culture) algorithms.  Finally, we plan to use the curriculum to help people explore how best to work with their cognitive mediators, individually and collectively. ... " 

Doug Engelbart on Human Augmentation

Was pointed via this piece in CSI.      

Fascinating piece I was reminded of.  Doug Engelbart on a framework for human augmentation.  We looked at this, but could not translate it into reality.  Can it be done now?   More on Engelbart interactions at the tag below.

' .... "By 'augmenting human intellect' we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems."  ... ' 

Only Humans Need Apply. Davenport and Kirby on Smart Machines

Attended an MIT Webinar covering the topic of the forthcoming book:

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines   – Available May 24, 2016  by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby    (Will post talk here)    Will follow with a review.

They write:
" ... An invigorating, thought-provoking, and positive look at the rise of automation that explores how professionals across industries can find sustainable careers in the near future.

Nearly half of all working Americans could risk losing their jobs because of technology. It’s not only blue-collar jobs at stake. Millions of educated knowledge workers—writers, paralegals, assistants, medical technicians—are threatened by accelerating advances in artificial intelligence.

The industrial revolution shifted workers from farms to factories. In the first era of automation, machines relieved humans of manually exhausting work. Today, Era Two of automation continues to wash across the entire services-based economy that has replaced jobs in agriculture and manufacturing. Era Three, and the rise of AI, is dawning. Smart computers are demonstrating they are capable of making better decisions than humans. Brilliant technologies can now decide, learn, predict, and even comprehend much faster and more accurately than the human brain, and their progress is accelerating. Where will this leave lawyers, nurses, teachers, and editors?  ... ' 

Automation Driving Retail Growth

Statistics on retail growth.  Advanced automation replacing in store and back end knowledge workers too.   Relates to think tank examination we did this week.  Voice commands.

" .... E-commerce platform provider Demandware has released its annual list of retail predictions for 2016, and many of them center on how machines will continue taking over tasks once done by people.

Out of the nine trends Demandware identifies, four are related to growing IT automation: machine learning driving voice-based intelligence assistants, in-store payment evolving dramatically, data-driven decision marketing replacing gut instinct, and last-mile fulfillment providers driving instant gratification.

Specifically, Demandware predicts that machine learning will expand beyond shopper personalization to provide retailers with a Siri-like intelligence assistant that pops up occasionally with insights and recommendations. Swiping, typing and tapping be largely replaced by voice commands. This will help make personalization such a fundamental part of the shopping experience that consumers will no longer notice it. ... " 

How Hard is it to Build A Cognitive Assistant?

Jim Spohrer, Director, Global University Programs at IBM, co traveler on the issue of how to build and benefit from AI with cognitive methods, poses these questions. See the tags below.  Answer and join in at the link.   I will create a thread on this.

How long does it take to build a cognitive assistant?

Looking for feedback on these statements:

Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG) members generally agree that....

1. Building cognitive assistants is still very hard, but will get easier in the future (see predictions)

2. Building cognitive assistants for all occupations can benefit from O*NET information (see "algorithm")

3. Building cognitive assistants for many emerging areas today requires pooling expertise and resources by building relationships between academia-industry-government (see model)

Thoughts? Please comment and let me know what you think...   "

My starting thoughts:  It is harder than we think even now.  It depends on what kind of assistant you are thinking about.  Simplicity, focus and clear value .....

Looking at Workplace Automation

A topic covered here for some time.  We mean to augment and scale expertise in the form of tasks and jobs.   How and why does that occur, and can we predict when jobs will be replaced by capabilities like AI and Cognitive services?  We can base some of this on how jobs have already been replaced, or redefined.  Excellent,  detailed piece in McKinsey, with some useful statistics:

Four fundamentals of workplace automation
As the automation of physical and knowledge work advances, many jobs will be redefined rather than eliminated—at least in the short term. ... " 

Domain Scoping for Subject Matter Experts

The capture, sharing and augmentation of expertise is a key topic for Cognitive.   How do we do it well?  By first understanding and then leveraging the language of the domain.

 Elham Khabiri, from IBM Watson Research, presented “Domain Scoping for Subject Matter Experts.”  

Slides here.   Access to recording.
Further Discussion in Linkedin.

Expertise and Implementation Bias

Good topics for expertise delivery, how does expertise bend to implementation news?

Blinded by Experience: Prior Experience, Negative News and Belief Updating
by Bradley R. Staats, KC Diwas & Francesca Gino

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY — Theoretical models in operations management assume that decision makers update their beliefs as new information emerges. This paper investigates this process in the field and the lab. Findings show that although individuals do respond to negative news, the rate at which they do so is influenced by their own experience, peers’ experience, and their interaction. Addressing these biases is important for everyday decision makers and operating managers involved in system design as well as for scholars in the development of analytical models. ...  " 

A CKO Pushing Change

Always an interest, how do we promote valuable change and expertise, adapted to local context?

How NASA’s Chief Knowledge Officer Drives Change
By Carla O'Dell on Aug 20, 2015  .. Posted in Knowledge Management Process and Performance Management

 As part of my quest to understand how people become experts more quickly in complex scientific and technical disciplines, I interviewed Edward J. Hoffman, chief knowledge officer (CKO) at NASA. Ed ought to know: he founded the NASA Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership and was its director for 20 years before his current CKO gig. ... " 

Figure Eight Cognitive Systems with CrowdFlower

Learning and adapting knowledge to train a cognitive system is key.  While we experimented with corwdsourcing methods, they were difficult to manage for AI systems.

Now renamed:  Figure Eight   https://www.figure-eight.com/ 

Figure Eight:
" .... This is especially true in the interpretation of health data from a seemingly infinite array of sources -- and a big reason why we’re so excited to see CrowdTruth.org leveraging CrowdFlower to train IBM Watson.

 Watson represents the state of the art in computational linguistics and computer vision put into action. It uses its never-before-seen understanding of language and imagery to comb through volumous datasets to unearth helpful information and make predictions (such as tips for disease diagnosis). According to Lora Aroyo, Principal Investigator of CrowdTruth, Watson acts as "a cognitive prosthetic to extend the decision making capabilities of an expert," such as a doctor, who will utilize it as a tool for recommendations on how best to analyze a patient's condition. 

In parallel, data enrichment platforms have become a valuable resource for data scientists looking to automate and scale the cleaning, labeling, and enrichment of data using human intelligence for machine learning -- ie., training data creation. While Watson continuously engages in active learning, its intelligence is strengthened by the quality of the training data it takes in from crowd contributors on data enrichment platforms such as CrowdFlower.   ... " 

Phone an Expert Friend. Past and Future

Has been very interesting to be part of this evolution over the years.

Jim Spohrer of CSIG writes.

The Future of Phone-a-Friend  (Discussion) 

The evolution of "Phone-a-Friend/Expert" is explored in twenty year time steps from 1955 to 2055.  The Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG) has the mission to encourage the development of cognitive mediators for all roles/occupations in smart service systems. By 2035 people may be symbiotic with their personal cognitive systems or cognitive mediators, which boost their creativity and productivity in service interactions. By 2055 people have have to pass a test before they can use cognitive mediators - this will allow the cognitive mediator to get to know them, their strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations. From tool to assistant to collaborator to coach - cognitive systems will continue to evolve along with the service systems entities they support. 

Slides.    (Non technical, but provocative view of the future of Virtual Assistants )

Beyond this, I see my cognitive mediators becoming more autonomous, and calling me.

Human Machine Symbiosis

A favorite topic.  Not only how will robotic machines do our work, but how will they effectively collaborate with humans to do that work.   Issues of autonomy and augmentation. A look at how Amazon is addressing this, in MIT Tech Review