NVIDIA Goes Virtual Assistants

To me an unexpected direction.   Apparently a prototype early access effort for partners.   

Develop Intelligent Virtual Assistants with NVIDIA Omniverse ACE Early Access

By Stephanie Rubenstein and Alex Qi    NVIDIA

NVIDIA just announced at CES 2023 that early access is now available for NVIDIA Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE). Developers and teams building avatars and virtual assistants can register to join the program, which includes access to the Omniverse ACE suite of cloud-native AI microservices for faster, easier development of interactive avatars.

Early partners include Ready Player Me, whose avatar was showcased in the CES demo. With this early access program, NVIDIA is looking for developers and partners to provide feedback on the microservices, collaborate on product improvement, and help push the limits of what’s possible with lifelike, interactive, digital humans. Applicants are reviewed and approved on a rolling basis as the program continues to expand.   .... ' 

What is the Omniverse ACE early access program?

Methods for developing avatars often require expertise, specialized equipment, and manually intensive workflows.

To ease avatar creation, Omniverse ACE enables the seamless integration of NVIDIA AI technologies—including pre-built models, tool sets, and domain-specific reference applications. The available avatar applications are built on most engines and deployed on public or private clouds.

Measuring Microfailures (Again)

Not really a new thing, but thinking about effectively measuring them is.    Which we attempted to deal with directly. ... 

Elsevier:  Business Horizons   Volume 63, Issue 4, July–August 2020, Pages 573-584

Full article 

How small service failures drive customer defection: Introducing the concept of microfailures

 By Sean Sands, Colin Campbell,  Lois Shedd,  Carla Ferraro,  Alexis Mavrommatisa

Abstract

Service that falls below customer expectations is framed as a service failure. While many researchers have investigated service failures, they have tended to focus on large service failures. This is likely because large failures are more noticeable by firms and more likely to prompt customer complaints than small failures. However, we argue that smaller service failures can cause as much damage as larger failures, and in some cases even more. We introduce the concept of service microfailures, which we define as instances when a customer’s expectations go unmet in some small way. While minor in isolation, repeated service microfailures that go unnoticed and unrecovered can compound in effect and drive customer defection. For this reason, we propose that service microfailures are a potentially much larger managerial problem than they may appear on the surface. In this article, we conceptualize microfailures as a distinct form of service failure and outline the mechanism through which they cause damage. We then develop a multifaceted approach through which managers can detect, repair, and prevent service microfailures.... '

Talking Microservices

 Had cause to talk the concept recently,  in InfoQ, here is a somewhat technical look at the concept and its uses and details. Most of the details and useful links at the clickthrough.

Reviewing the Microservices Architecture: Impacts, Operational Complexity, and Alternatives  by Wesley Reisz, Yan Cui in InfoQ

Key Takeaways

Although we can find case studies about microservices migrations, there are still a lot of companies in the industry that haven’t touched the microservices strategy yet.

The current microservices approaches are more complex than they used to be. We build more complex systems, with a more complex architecture, so we have a more complex landscape and a deeper learning curve as consequence.

Monitoring and tracing microservices are some of the biggest challenges, besides its complexity.

The event-driven architecture is a great way to build microservices, especially in terms of communication between different services.

Wes Reisz moderated an InfoQ Live roundtable on the impact of microservices, dealing with operational complexity, and alternatives to the microservices model. The participants were Leif Beaton (NGINX senior solutions architect), Yan Cui (independent AWS and serverless consultant), and Nicky Wrightson (Skyscanner principal engineer).

Peter Rodgers first introduced the term "micro-web-services" during a presentation at the 2005 Web Services Edge Conference, going against the conventional thinking at the time. The SOAP service-oriented architecture peaked in 2005 and Rodgers was arguing for RESTful services. He described in his presentation how a well-designed micro-web-services platform combines the underlying architectural principles of the web and REST services in Unix-like scheduling and pipelines to provide flexibility and simplicity in service-oriented architectures.

After six years of innovation and thought about this problem, a May 2011 workshop for software architects coined the term "microservice" to describe what participants were seeing and employing. By the next spring, the community embraced "microservices" to describe this architectural style.   ... '

Valuing Spatio-Temporal Information

The valuation of data is a long time interest, have consulted with large companies on the topic.  Lately about automotive connections.  Technical detail on the topic at the link.

Computing Value of Spatio-temporal Information
By Heba Aly, John Krumm, Gireeja Ranade, Eric Horvitz
Communications of the ACM, September 2020, Vol. 63 No. 9, Pages 85-92
10.1145/3410387

Location data from mobile devices is a sensitive yet valuable commodity for location-based services and advertising. We investigate the intrinsic value of location data in the context of strong privacy, where location information is only available from end users via purchase. We present an algorithm to compute the expected value of location data from a user, without access to the specific coordinates of the location data point. We use decision-theoretic techniques to provide a principled way for a potential buyer to make purchasing decisions about private user location data. We illustrate our approach in three scenarios: the delivery of targeted ads specific to a user's home location, the estimation of traffic speed, and the prediction of location. In all three cases, the methodology leads to quantifiably better purchasing decisions than competing approaches.

1. Introduction
As people carry and interact with their connected devices, they create spatiotemporal data that can be harnessed by them and others to generate a variety of insights. Proposals have been made for creating markets for personal data1 rather than for people either to provide their behavioral data freely or to refuse sharing. Some of these proposals are specific to location data.6 Several studies have explored the price that people would seek for sharing their GPS data.5, 13, 9 However, little has been published on determining the value of location data from a buyer's point of view. For instance, a Wall Street Journal blog says10:

"What groceries you buy, what Facebook posts you 'like' and how you use GPS in your car:
Companies are building their entire businesses around the collection and sale of such data. The problem is that no one really knows what all that information is worth. Data isn't a physical asset like a factory or cash, and there aren't any official guidelines for assessing its value."
We present a principled method for computing the value of spatiotemporal data from the perspective of a buyer. Knowledge of this value could guide pursuit of the most informative data and would provide insights about potential markets for location data.

We consider situations where a buyer is presented with a set of location data points for sale, and we provide estimates of the value of information (VOI) for these points. Because the coordinates of the location data points are unknown, we compute the VOI based on the prior knowledge that is available to the buyer and on side information that a user may provide (e.g., the time of day or location granularity). The VOI computation is customized to the specific goals of the buyer, such as targeting ad delivery for home services, offering efficient driving routes, or predicting a person's location in advance. We account for the fact that location data and user state are both uncertain. Additional data purchases can help reduce this uncertainty, and we quantify this reduction as well.

In the next section, we introduce a decision-making framework with a detailed analysis of geo-targeted advertising. We focus on the buyer's goal of delivering ads to people living within a certain region. We show that our method performs better than alternate approaches in terms of inferential accuracy, data efficiency, and cost. In Section 3, we apply the methodology to a traffic estimation scenario using real and simulated spatiotemporal data. We present our last scenario in Section 4, where we show how to make good data-buying decisions for predicting a person's future location. ... 
" 

What is Watson? A Significant Part of the Future of AI

Thoughtful piece.   Despite recent criticism as not having attained enough, Watson is a genuine accomplishment.    We saw it early on and remarked about how it was the direction for enterprise AI, solving difficult, data rich problems.   I continue to watch how IBM is advancing this.   See our ISSIP and CSI speaker series, which includes many IBMers who are making real development progress, much of it available to all.    Have worked with a number of IBM Watson practitioners.  As mentioned here, its a series of microservices that will become a key part of the future of AI.   Easy to explore today.

This Is Watson
IBM Watson: Reflections and Projections
Written by: Rob Thomas
Categorized: AI | Analytics | Data Science | IBM Watson | This Is Watson

AI has gone through many cycles since we first coined the term “machine learning” in 1959. Our latest resurgence began in 2011 when we put Watson on national television to play Jeopardy! against humans. This became a cornerstone event, demonstrating that we had something unique. And we saw early success, putting Watson to work on projects with clients. This created even more excitement. That excitement led to more opportunity. At this stage, we have a large product organization, separate dedicated research organization, and an entire health organization all leveraging and building on this technology.

So, what is Watson? This is the question I’ve been asked the most since IBM combined its Data and AI software units earlier this year.

Let’s start with what it’s not. Watson is not a personal assistant like Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant – its capabilities far exceed those of a consumer AI device. However, consumers likely interact with some form of Watson every day, they just are not aware of it. That’s because Watson was built to enable business-to-business interactions. Watson technology spans everything from powering virtual assistants to embedding AI in business processes across many industries.

Watson does not have a voice, gender or personality. Many people associate Watson with the measured male voice used to bring it to life on Jeopardy! and in older TV commercials. We gave it a voice for those instances, but it is not a box that talks back to you. It is a set of composable microservices (software) that live in the cloud. Any cloud, public or private.

Put simply, Watson is software capable of making sense of data sets and understanding natural language to provide recommendations, make predictions, and automate work. As we have fine-tuned our approach, the “Watson” name is only used on IBM products and solutions that significantly utilize IBM Watson technology. For products and solutions in which AI is an embedded enhancement, we use the designation “with Watson.”  .... " 

On the use of Microservices

Fascinating case study that I have passed the link on to several clients.  Below the intro:

How we moved from a giant monolithic system to microservices in Medium
By Arjun Dixit  @ Rebel Foods (Part 1/2)

Defeat them in detail: The Divide and Conquer Strategy. Look at the parts and determine how to control the individual parts, create dissension and leverage it. — Robert Greene

With this being said, we at Rebel Foods tech, strongly believe in the idea of breaking down a large monolith system into the small sets of microservices. Here I would be describing the purpose and the journey behind it.

Overview of the monolith giant system of Rebel Foods:

When we started in 2011 with one brand FAASOS the requirements were quite clear to us — “Build a system that can handle 15k transactions per day” and 15k was just the number of orders expected daily, behind this Rebel Foods manages the complete lifecycle of on-demand food right from the inventory to our supply chain to content management to user channels like our mobile apps, websites and our third-party partners to our cloud kitchens to finally making the last-mile fulfilment. Looking at the fast-paced market we had to deliver a system that can produce a flawless experience while being 99% fault tolerant. We came up with a central core system design that would interact with our main database and would expose the APIs to perform various operations required to satisfy the above needs. We called this system the V1 architecture of Rebel Foods.  ... "

Alexa Releases Skills Blueprint

OK, easy, and may kick up the Skill count.   But will it increase quality?   No code involved.   It might be better to make it easier to create plug-in capable micro skill-services that can be readily shared.  Not as easy,  as it depends on architecture to make that do-able.    Also note the implication that you might want to create your own private set of skills.  .Say for your home, family, company.   I like that idea.  Perhaps starting from a provided template.  Reaches closer to IFTTT involvement?

Amazon’s new ‘Alexa Blueprints’ let anyone create custom Alexa skills and responses   By Sarah Perez   @sarahintampa in TechCrunch.   

Amazon this morning is introducing “Alexa Blueprints,” a new way for any Alexa owner to create their own customized Alexa skills or responses, without needing to know how to code. The idea is to allow Alexa owners to create their own voice apps, like a trivia game or bedtime stories, or teach Alexa to respond to questions with answers they design – like “Who’s the best mom in the world?,” for example.

You could also create a skill that includes helpful information for the babysitter, which could be triggered by the command, “Alexa, open My Sitter,” Amazon suggests.

“Alexa Skill Blueprints is an entirely new way for you to teach Alexa personalized skills just for you and your family,” explained Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa, in a statement about the launch. “You don’t need experience building skills or coding to get started—my family created our own jokes skill in a matter of minutes, and it’s been a blast to interact with Alexa in a totally new and personal way.”  .... " 

Designing and Testing AI Microservices

Thought ultimately this would be a key aspect of delivering intelligence applications.   The architectural design and selection of what each service looked like, and how they can be implemented to interact.  A reminder of our look at Object Oriented programming,   This is only the start to make things workable, and most important: maintainable.

Architecturally Aligned Testing
By Stefan Friese in  InfoQ
, reviewed by Shane Hastie

Key Takeaways

Microservices are typically owned by cross-functional and autonomous teams, responsible for implementing, testing, and releasing.

When implementing a microservices architecture there should be no separate testing phase.

Everybody is responsible for the quality of the product.The complexity of integrating microservices requires carefully deciding the  appropriate integration test approach.

Continuous Testing means a shift left in testing to ensure that teams stay autonomous and a shift right in testing towards exploration and experimentation. ... 

Architecture impacts heavily testing. The way you test a monolith is different than how you should test a loosely coupled system. Let’s look at microservices as a prominent exponent of loosely coupled systems. As we will see, they challenge our previous definition of testing.... "

Algorithmia

Algorithmia  (Invested in by Google)

Build Intelligent APPS

We're a Common API for Algorithms, Functions, and Models that run as scalable Microservices. 

Developer Superpowers on Demand 

Expand your toolbelt with access to a growing library of more than 3,500+ algorithms, functions, and models that enable you to create, share, and remix algorithmic intelligence at scale – All powered by a community of world class developers, researchers, and organizations. Optionally choose to monetize your contributions through an open marketplace where royalties earned reflect the the value of your algorithm, function, or model.

Explore the marketplace .... 

Identifying Micro Moments

I like breaking down moments in a customer journey.  Gives us hope for 'solving' the required interaction and knowledge and resources involved.   A way to solve a related business process model?  Or using a Cog to provide insight?   Here Google and  McKinsey talk the identification process.   In ThinkWithGoogle: 

" ... Mobile is changing how brands communicate with customers—from the way they identify key moments of opportunity to how they create a great user experience. Google's VP of Marketing, Lisa Gevelber, spoke with McKinsey's David Edelman about micro-moments and how they fit into the customer journey. ... " 

Chunking and MicroLearning tied to Services

Interesting piece by Steve Cushing.   Can this also be translated into services as they are delivered in assistants?   And how are they then combined into things that need to get done?

Next Genertion Learning, Chunking and micro learning ...

For some years now I have been involved in designing microlearning tools, although I never realised it. I did realise the importance of the concept as it has always been clear to me that we learn in small steps, after all, it’s how our brains are wired. As a dyslexic, my brain has always switched off fairly quickly after a short time span and I was usually sleeping (at least virtually) ten minutes into most lessons. For me, it was technology not the DJ who saved my life (sorry for those not young enough to appreciate the pun.) My first job was a DJ so a little indulgent reminiscing is to be expected.  ... "  

How to Moments on YouTube

This came to mind this past week as I searched for several very different how-to needs online.  I some cases I really needed a visual explanation of the technique, rather than a textual description.  An example of tacit knowledge.  Its not all on YouTube, but much is there.  As in all online resources you look for credibility, objectivity, and clear and complete visual explanation. Often too, how the task description is encapsulated in larger needs.   How then are such microtasks combined to form Jobs?    In Think With Google this week, satistics about YouTube use for the How-to moment.   And how that can link to marketing.

" ..... Do you know how build a treehouse? Cook the perfect pancake? Do a french braid? Neither do I. But life (and 3-year-old daughters) sometimes require us to do all of this and more in a given day. Learning how to do these sorts of things used to be time-consuming. We might've combed through an instruction manual, tracked down an expert, or called up good ole mom and dad—or worse, customer service. Today, we can find out instantly. We simply grab the nearest device and search—and not just on Google. Searches related to "how to" on YouTube are growing 70% year over year,1 and more than 100M hours of how-to content have been watched in North America so far this year   ... " 

Digital Kitchen

Google Think on the Digital Kitchen.   Another clear place for the virtual/personal assistant.  Have tested many in that room.  But its much more than just about Millennials.   Food Hacking, Aligning Micro moments, Using Micro services and more.  The value of hands-free modes.  Inserting creativity.    Lots you can do even before your start leveraging AI.   All on  my mind recently.

Linking Multiple Services to Advice

via Jim Spohrer
" ... Probably the most interesting related business idea is Adam Cheyer's (co-creator of SIRI)  (http://viv.ai) which is trying to what you are describing below - sort of, first for "apps" in a way they get combined; Adam has innovative ideas on the business model.  If you think of apps as microservices, then you may have 50 apps that do the same thing (e.g., recommend a restaurant) - and just like Watson pipeline can combine and score, so would viv.ai, and then pay out a little to each in accordance with how helpful they were to the end user. ... "

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.

Hyperspecialization

The recently mentioned concept of microservices led to a conversation with Jim Spohrer of the Cognitive Systems Institute.  He pointed me to a related idea of hyperspecialization.

" ... Prof Thomas Malone's idea of Hyperspecialization is of interest.  Video on the topic. ... And see this HBR news item.  ...  

Tom Malone is one of the faculty recognized for his research relevant to the future of cognitive assistants and collective intelligence ....  

Hope you enjoy the reading and videos - all lining up on one thing - cognitive assistants for all occupations in smart service systems are on the way, and they will boost creativity and productivity of professionals, raising revenue per employee of companies and GDP of nations  ... " 

Microservices for an Enterprise

Had not thought about the concept, but InfoQ takes a critical look.  Admit I needed a definition, which is embedded.    A technical consideration of design, which in the past might have been called Widgets, and now might be called Apps.  But clearly Apps that can work together in a way that most cannot today.   " .... The term "Microservice Architecture" has sprung up over the last few years to describe a particular way of designing software applications as suites of independently deployable services. While there is no precise definition of this architectural style, there are certain common characteristics around organization around business capability, automated deployment, intelligence in the endpoints, and decentralized control of languages and data. .... "   

OK, considering.  Can advisory service intelligence be defined as a collection of interacting microservices?