Understanding the Digitization of the Workforce

Came to this piece by seeing the mention of O*NET, which we also used to look at the assemblage of work based on looking at component tasks.    Irving does a great job looking at workplace digitization, here a short excerpt:

By Irving Wladawsky-Berger:

The Digitalization of the American Workforce

“Over the past half century, wave after wave of digital innovation has ensured that digitalization - the diffusion of digital technologies into nearly every business and workplace and pocket - has been remaking the U.S. economy and the world of work,” said the Brookings Institution in Digitalization and the American Workforce.  The digitalization of everything has both increased the potential of individuals and societies while contributing to widespread anxiety about its impact on jobs and economic inequalities.  “And yet, for all of the evidence that big changes are underway, surprisingly little data exists to track the spread of digital adoption.” .... 

The Brookings report quantified the spread of digitalization by analyzing the changes in the digital content of 545 occupations between 2002 and 2016 based on O*NET, the most comprehensive data on US occupations sponsored by the US Department of Labor.  O*NET includes highly detailed, task-level information on hundreds of occupations, and includes quantitative measures of knowledge requirements, skills, tools, education, training and work activities. In addition, the report collected information on the occupations’ particular industries, pay, growth rates, geographical locations and distribution across educational and demographic groups. .... '

Extracting Knowledge from Job Descriptions

Below was brought to my attention, no so much as to aid HR, but to better understand the nature of jobs and their component tasks.  And how that links to augmentation and replacement.  An ongoing study. In KDNuggets:

" ... We present a deep learning approach to extract knowledge from a large amount of data from the recruitment space. A learning to rank approach is followed to train a convolutional neural network to generate job title and job description embeddings. .... " 

AI Replacing, Restructuring Professionals

Very likely that the basic research and analysis work will be done by systems within a few decades.   How this restructures professional jobs is still unclear.  See some of our work on O*Net regarding this structure.

Gartner Says Artificial Intelligence Could Turn Some Skilled Practices Into Utilities
By 2022, Smart Machines and Robots May Replace Highly Trained Professionals in Tasks Within Medicine, Law and IT

CIOs have a major role to play in preparing businesses for the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on business strategy and human employment, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner predicts that by 2022, smart machines and robots may replace highly trained professionals in tasks within medicine, law and IT.  ... " 

Proposed, An AI Index to Track Automation

See some of our previous look at Job and task analysis.  See the O*Net tag below, and the associated  online resource here.  A place to start for this kind of analysis.  But it is still hard to get precise breakouts of jobs to tasks, and how they are likely to change in the presence of emerging technology. Try it first with past data on automation with standard computing.

New Tools Needed to Track Technology's Impact on Jobs, Panel Says
By The New York Times  via the CACM.

New tools must be developed to track and measure the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation on the U.S. job market, according to a report from an expert panel at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

The panel recommends creating an AI index, analogous to the Consumer Price Index, which would be integrated with data on skills and tasks involved in various occupations to guide education and job-training programs. It also says a public-private alliance is necessary for developing such tools because information from numerous sources, ranging from traditional government statistics to databases from online services, can be harnessed for insights on skills, job openings, and how effective training programs are. The idea is that employees in declining occupations could find useful information about more promising careers requiring both similar and new skills. The tool also could pull information on job placement rates for courses that cultivate those new skills. ....  "

Marketing Automation Animation

Marketing automation defined in a 60 second animation.  Well done, but simplistic and fairly obvious.  Still a good starting point for thinking about automation.   Made me thing of how to represent other 'tasks' as straightforward animations.    A way to link to simlations of business process?   Or simply basically describe them.  A library of these?

Smart Spaces and Cognitive Mediators

Smart Spaces - People with Cognitive Mediators

Organizational Change and the Digital Economy:
A Computational Organization Science Perspective

Yes, spaces are one way to think about this. But also Jobs/roles. Or even Responsibilities/Expectations. Data/Risks/Insurance ... moving on to more abstraction. The place or need creates a fundamental organization of cognitive value. Great example is the O*Net database example of jobs and tasks, talked here previously. ...  More.  

A Look at Some New Dimensions of Fintech

Just sent to me by a Fintech contact, made me think:

Lots of places for innovation to play out in financial/insurance space.  Consider insurance defined as a means of dealing with a portfolio of risk.

Also looked at smart contract space ....  a place between compliance and finance and risk.... Is this where the Hyperledger dwells?   ....

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 .....

Internet Tells you How with Services

Since the beginning of the Internet, I have been interested in how it can provide teachable moments, and how people have used it as a primary place to find information to get things done. Google writes about their YouTube service as a means for visual, tactile instruction.   " .... For big projects and small fixes, people look for how-to videos on YouTube, increasingly on mobile. Of smartphone users, 91% turn to their devices for ideas while completing a task. See how brands like Home Depot and M·A·C are using mobile video to reach people in these 'I-want-to-do' micro-moments. .... " .   

Take this further, based on the O*Net job database (See tag below) which decomposes jobs into component services.     Could the same be done to provide links between requirements for a job and available micro moment services?    Selectively accessing and combining data, cognitive systems and human resources.

Luddite Revival

Note the use of O*Net data.  What will this mean to workers and jobs?

Anticipating a Luddite Revival by Stuart W. Elliott

Advances in information technology and robotics are already transforming the workplace, and even greater changes lie ahead. Here’s a look at what the next two decades might bring.

Even as computer-based consumer products have transformed our leisure and social lives over the past decade, information technology (IT) and robotics suggest a transformation of work that might be even more far-reaching. Some observers, including many workers, see this vision as inherently threatening.

Economists, however, have repeatedly argued that technological advance is central to economic growth and that workers displaced by technology in one sector will be absorbed in another. Of course, this process of adjustment takes time, and the economic arguments about long-term adjustment can seem particularly hollow during prolonged recessions. During these periods of lower economic activity, such as the slowdown the United States has recently been experiencing, displaced workers might find it difficult to move into new positions. Still, economics has provided a compelling model of the adjustments of the labor market to technological change, and the historical record has repeatedly demonstrated that the fears about substantial portions of the workforce being permanently displaced from work are unjustified.-----  " 

Tracking Human vs Cognitive Computing Performance

In the Linkedin CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute) Group, request for more information in tracking people vs machine job performance levels, via Jim Spohrer.  There is considerable additional information at the link about related work to date and goals,  Ultimately this creates a kind of 'Rosetta Stone' of links between system and people performance components of real jobs.  Want to join in?  add yourself to the group.

CSIG "Algorithm" and tracking cognitive system performance levels
The CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute Group) is interested in tracking cognitive computing components and their performance relative to novice and expert human performance levels. 

CSIG mission is to develop cognitive assistants for all occupations to boost creativity and productivity of people in smart service systems.  This requires creating an inventory of cognitive components - the capability of cognitive systems compared to human performance measures.  .... "  

Can Human Resources Retain Edge?

Have human resources lost their edge in a technology driven world?  In K@W   Better measurement of both the jobs and tasks at hand, and how they are addressed, will be needed.

AI Can Delegate Work

AI Can now Delegate Work

Brought to my attention in an HBR Article

AI Is Getting Good Enough to Delegate the Work It Can’t Do, by Katherine Barr
My thoughts: As we think about how we decide which tasks can be augmented and/or replaced by AI/Cognitive, it will be important to understand the tasks well. Some of the O*Net work and database, mentioned here previously, will be a great place to start. The article title implies further that even the delegation of the work needs to be appropriately 'intelligent'. Another challenge for practitioners like us.  ..... 

Virtual Career Counselor

Jim Spohrer writes that  John Horan (ASU) is working on a virtual career counselor (VCC) powered by O*NET occupation data.  Much more on him and that work.   Recall that the O*Net database is an excellent resource for structured data about careers, jobs, tasks and job characteristics, such as expertise.

Goal: Cognitive Assistants for all Jobs

Via Jim Spohrer, how can you join into the task?  I have joined in.

Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG)'s mission is cognitive assistants for all occupations:
What is CSIG?   

Getting started developing cognitive assistants on IBM Bluemix:
http://service-science.info/archives/3721

Watson Services on Bluemix - including AlchemyAPI acquisition
http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/developercloud/services-catalog.html

Read a lot and take the survey if you are planning a grant proposal:
http://cognitive-science.info/

Read more and see what the community is talking about:

Some award winners working on cognitive:
http://cognitive-science.info/award-recipients/

Weekly calls and speaker series:

IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG) service-science.info
As background on IBM's broader interests and to summarize IBM's Cognitive Systems Institute Group (CSIG): (1) over the next decade cognitive assistants will begin appearing for all occupations, job...  " 

Jobs Susceptible to Computerization

Working on a related problem.  What jobs or part of jobs are likely to be replaced vs augmented?  What is the influence of Cognitive methods?

The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization.
Carl Benedikt Frey†and Michael A. Osborne‡ September 17, 2013
Abstract
We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier. Based on these estimates, we examine expected impacts of future computerisation on US labour market outcomes, with the primary objective of analysing the number of jobs at risk and the relationship between an occupation’s probability of computerisation, wages and educational attainment. .... " 

Business Process Models meet Watson

Have for a long time thought about the natural connections between Business Process Modeling (BPM) and the augmentation of jobs and sub tasks using Cognitive systems. We experimented with this idea in the expert system era. Saw a short presentation on the topic last year.  Now IBM has software services in both spaces.  Came upon this pointer to work done underway in the area.  Worth a much closer look.

" ... IBM® Business Process Manager (BPM) is widely used to automate business processes, and the end users are often knowledge workers who make decisions based on their domain knowledge. IBM Watson™ has the capability to respond to user queries using natural language based on a corpus about any business domain. If you integrate an IBM BPM V8.5 application with the Question and Answer service on IBM Bluemix™, your team can use IBM Watson to support decision making based on a particular business corpus. ... " 

Cognitive Systems Learning Tasks

Excellent talk in today's CSIG presentation.  How tasks will be learned by cognitive systems.  See the demo link below for an early example.

Via Jim Spohrer:
               Prof. John Laird (U Michigan) decribes how next generation cognitive systems will be able to learn new tasks - learning to play new games, as well as other tasks - perhaps tasks from O*NET online occupation network someday?  General cognitive architecture - and learn new tasks and domain knowledge.   Slides and demonstration. ... " 

Crowdsourcing with the Gamification of Tasks

Notes on Choosing Tasks in a Job to Improve or Replace with Gamification (Published elsewhere)

 When doing business process modeling (BPM) you connect a group of tasks that comprise a job,  to fit together in sequence or in parallel.   Tasks also require time and other resources, like people or data to complete.   Resource availability can be estimated or simulated to model a job process.  The cost of resources can also be estimated in the job process.

If a task is boring and thus error prone for people,  it could be a candidate for replacement using a cognitive method.   But that is not yet always possible.  You can simulate how humans work by constructing a game that simulates the task.   Then crowdsource its operation to see how people perform,  while gathering information on the time they take and mistakes they make.   Such simulation can also lead to better understanding of resource use.   Which can further determine which tasks should be candidates for smart replacement.   We did this in an order placement and management application.

This was done with the game Airport Scanner,  which you can play online, which led to a study by Duke University about airport security applications.   Much more detail on that below.

http://eponymouspickle.blogspot.com/2015/01/turning-boring-task-into-game.html

MIT Research on Randomizing Tasks

I worked on a project that looked at how job tasks could be randomized in industrial processes.  This research effort at MIT, fairly technical, looks at a more arcane area of massive multicore processors, but still touches on how you can use context knowledge to randomly direct attention.   Could this be used for human task attention?