AI Model Transferability in Healthcare

Very good look at this issue,  considering potential application. 

AI Model Transferability in Healthcare: A Sociotechnical Perspective

By Nature Machine Intelligence, October 24, 2022  (Was Introduced to Nature Machine Intelligence) 

Predictive model transferability is gaining more attention as healthcare organizations attempt to implement artificial intelligence (AI)-based prediction tools. Although some machine learning (ML)-based models fail when subjected to retrospective validation across institutions and patient populations, technical improvements show promise for addressing this model efficacy problem. To address the engineering challenges, a technical subfield labelled MLOps has emerged.

However, the focus of MLOps on technical transferability may be obscuring a larger set of obstacles to sociotechnical transferability: organizational, social, and individual challenges of deploying models at scale across contexts, whether institutions, teams or individual roles....

To deliver value in healthcare AI and ML models must be integrated not only into technology platforms but also into local human and organizational ecosystems and workflows.

From Nature Machine Intelligence

View Full Article  

Why Computing Belongs within the Social Sciences

Thoughtful piece in the ACM.  Full text at the link. While computers started from technology, it has evolved unpredictably into something also very deeply and even alarmingly sociological.    Read the key insights below.

Why Computing Belongs Within the Social Sciences
By Randy Connolly
Communications of the ACM, August 2020, Vol. 63 No. 8, Pages 54-59  10.1145/3383444

On October 23, 2008, Alan Greenspan, the Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, was testifying before Congress in the immediate aftermath of the September 2008 financial crash. Undoubtedly the high point of the proceedings occurred when Representative Henry Waxman pressed the Chair to admit "that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right," to which Greenspan admitted "Absolutely, precisely."17 Fast forward 10 years to another famous mea culpa moment in front of Congress, that of Mark Zuckerberg on April 11, 2018. In light of both the Cambridge Analytica scandal and revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election, Zuckerberg also admitted to wrong: "It's clear now that we didn't do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm. That goes for fake news, foreign interference in elections, and hate speech, as well as developers and data privacy." ... '

Key Insights:

Better Public Speaking via Speaker Assistants

Clever idea for assistant speaker devices

Anxious About Public Speaking? Your Smart Speaker Could Help
Penn State News
By Jessica Hallman

Researchers at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) have developed a public-speaking tutor that runs on Amazon Alexa to enable users to engage in cognitive restructuring exercise. The team found that the tutor relieved users’ pre-speech anxiety. As part of the study, participants were guided to interact with an Amazon Echo smart speaker and were randomly assigned to interact with either a highly social Alexa or one that was less social. The researchers found the highly-sociable Alexa provided a better user experience by establishing a sense of interpersonal closeness with the user. Said Penn State's S. Shyam Sundar, "People are not simply anthropomorphizing the machine, but are responding to increased sociability by feeling a sense of closeness with the machine, which is associated with lowered speech anxiety."  ... '

Social Robotics from Samsung

Got some praises at CES.  Another attempt at social as well as helpful.  'A Ball-like moving device than can explore space'.  A silly gadget?   Have now seen maybe a dozen attempts at this.   This one also suggests that it can be a proactive security device.   This articles cuts at Alexa for 'killing the promise' of social robots, but if anything, Alexa and its competition have started the movement to social.   Its not as easy as it seems.  And expect that attempts like Balle, if they emerge, will be thrashed for doing real security, like communicating with real police.

(Later  I saw that Procter/Gillette  had acquired the firm 'Billie' which makes body care and razor products, this is NOT the same company that makes 'Ballie' covered here, but the naming might create some confusion. )

Samsung Ballie is a Social Robot That Might Actually Be Useful and Scalable  By Bret Kinsella in Voicebot.ai

It’s easy to look at Ballie, a cute little pastel-colored social robot demonstrated by Samsung last night at a CES keynote, and wonder if it is just another gadget with no better future than other social robots that have come and gone. However, this may just be different.

Smart speakers and smart displays have filled the role that was expected by many to be played by stationary robots such as Jibo. Radical simplification enabled smart speakers to provide most of the features anticipated for a social robot solution and then went beyond that template at as little as one-twentieth of the price. If you want to know what killed the promise of social robots, look no further than Amazon Alexa which created the smart speaker category.

A Robot that Follows You around and Patrols Your Home When you are Away.

Ballie will follow you around as demonstrated during the keynote by HS Kim, Samsung Consumer Electronics president, and CEO. “I love this guy. He even knows to give me a little space,” Kim said as Ballie followed him around the stage, speeding up and slowing down to keep an appropriate distance. Kim went on to say, “Samsung’s vision is more than a cute robot.” Instead, the company wants to introduce, “robots that you know, support you and take care of you, so you can take care of what really matters.” This turned out to be a broader theme for Samsung about making products that help people in their daily lives.   .... "

Models of Social Contagion

During our earliest looks at word-of-mouth interactions, aimed at things like advertising, we examined the structure of customer interaction. Also that context drives this kind of interaction.   This overall is a very technical paper,  but it has some embedded gems.   Explanatory diagrams at the link.

Simplicial models of social contagion
Iacopo Iacopini, Giovanni Petri, Alain Barrat & Vito Latora 
Nature Communications 10, Article number: 2485 (2019) | Download Citation

Abstract
Complex networks have been successfully used to describe the spread of diseases in populations of interacting individuals. Conversely, pairwise interactions are often not enough to characterize social contagion processes such as opinion formation or the adoption of novelties, where complex mechanisms of influence and reinforcement are at work. Here we introduce a higher-order model of social contagion in which a social system is represented by a simplicial complex and contagion can occur through interactions in groups of different sizes. Numerical simulations of the model on both empirical and synthetic simplicial complexes highlight the emergence of novel phenomena such as a discontinuous transition induced by higher-order interactions. We show analytically that the transition is discontinuous and that a bistable region appears where healthy and endemic states co-exist. Our results help explain why critical masses are required to initiate social changes and contribute to the understanding of higher-order interactions in complex systems.

Introduction
Complex networks describe well the connectivity of systems of various nature1,2 and are widely used as the underlying—and possibly multilayered3—social structure on which dynamical processes4,5, such as disease spreading6, diffusion and adoption of innovation7,8,9, and opinion formation10 occur. For example, when modeling an epidemic spreading in a population6, the transmission between infectious and healthy individuals is typically assumed: (i) to occur through pairwise interactions between infectious and healthy individuals, and (ii) to be caused even by a single exposure of a healthy individual to an infectious one. Such processes of simple contagion can be conveniently represented by transmission mechanisms along the links of the network of contacts between individuals.

When dealing instead with social contagion phenomena, such as the adoption of norms, behaviors or new products, or the diffusion of rumors or fads, the situation is more complex. Simple epidemic-like contagion can suffice to describe some cases, such as easily convincing rumors or domino effects11. In other situations, however, they do not provide a satisfactory description, especially in those cases where more complex dynamics of peer influence and reinforcement mechanisms are at work12. Complex contagion mechanisms have been proposed to account for these effects. As defined by Centola and Macy11: “a contagion is complex if its transmission requires an individual to have contact with two or more sources of activation”, i.e. if a “contact with a single active neighbor is not enough to trigger adoption”. Complex contagion can hence be broadly defined as a process in which exposure to multiple sources presenting the same stimulus is needed for the contagion to occur. Empirical evidence that contagion processes including multiple exposure can be needed to describe social contagion has been provided in various contexts and experiments13,14,15,16,17.  ... ' 

Alexa Socialbot Reports on Grand Challenge

Following this effort.   Have experimented with the bots to date.   We still need more substantial results to make these approaches more powerful.  True, meaningful, contextual conversation is the goal.   Not just fooling someone that they talking to a knowledgeable human, but really helping.  Like to see more results from the challenge emerge on the platform.

AI Tools Let Alexa Prize Participants Focus on Science  By Anu Venkatesh

March 4 marks the kickoff of the third Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, in which university teams build socialbots capable of conversing on a wide range of topics and make them available to millions of Alexa customers through the invitation “Alexa, let’s chat”. Student teams can begin applying to the competition on March 4, and in the subsequent six weeks, the Alexa Prize team will make a series of roadshow appearances at tech hubs in the U.S. and Europe to meet with students and answer questions about the program.

As we gear up for the third Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, the Alexa science blog is reviewing some of the technical accomplishments from the second, which were reported in a paper released in late 2018. This post examines contributions by Amazon’s Alexa Prize team; a second post will examine innovations from the participating university teams.

To ensure that Alexa Prize contestants can concentrate on dialogue systems — the core technology of socialbots — Amazon scientists and engineers built a set of machine learning modules that handle fundamental conversational tasks and a development environment that lets contestants easily mix and match existing modules with those of their own design. ... " 

Alexa Science Blog 
Paper on Socialbot work to date.  

Assistants as Homecare Help

Our devices are already something we much rely on.    So why not.   What does it mean to be a companion though?  Conversations probably, that include strong context.   But one could argue that there has to be an element of humanity as well.   Talk to the Japanese who have been working eldercare for years, we did.  Strong Social element, but beyond the post and forget it world of Facebook.  Healthcare advice too is mentioned.   Will take a look. 

Alexa app for elderly aid bridges digital divide, acts as companion   By  R. Danes

Isn’t it great when mind-bending technology and product development come down the chute to solve a real human problem? Diverse industries are applying the latest advancements in artificial intelligence to everyday consumer issues.

For example,  the AI technology in Amazon Alexa’s virtual assistant could prove a handy in-home healthcare assistant, according to Dr. Justin Marley (pictured, right), consultant psychiatrist at Essex Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust (EPUT). Together with Accenture LLP consultants, Marley developed an Alexa skill and web portal to aid the elderly.

“Our mission is to help people feel socially connected in this … always changing digital world and stay independent in their own home for a bit longer,” Marley said.

The aid works just like a smartphone application. It applies sophisticated AI and voice-recognition technology to a number of everyday tasks, processes, etc. “It’s constantly learning the behaviors that they’re doing on a daily basis,” said Gayle Sirard (pictured, left), applied intelligence lead, North America, at Accenture LLP.

It can monitor users’ mental health, remind them to take medication, and encourage them to participate in local activities, to name a few features. .... "

AI Design Trend Inspiration

Several of my students looked at startups in the fashion industry, that had design, marketing  and customer engagement angles, so this is interesting.  Have not seen to much for AI in design/creativity over the years, so that too is intriguing.   Note also the use of image recognition.

Yoox looks seeks AI’s help for design inspiration   by Matthew Stern  in Retailware  With retail expert comments.

Designers of Yoox’s latest apparel line are getting a little inspirational help; the line is based on information collected, aggregated and “powered by artificial intelligence.”

Yoox’s AI tools review content across social media and online magazines to furnish the retailer’s designers with data on what styles are being discussed and shared. Inspiration also comes from predictive indicators into emerging lifestyle and style trends, analysis of internal data from products sold on its site, customer feedback, industry purchasing trends, as well as text search and image recognition.

“We are always exploring the frontier between Human and Machine; it’s been part of our DNA since I invented Yoox in 1999,” said Federico Marchetti, CEO of Yoox Net-A-Porter Group, in a statement. .... "

Furhat: a Social Robot from Sweden

Been following the social aspects of robotics for some time.  Furhat looks at it differently.  But since its is not meant to have any particular purpose in mind, does this mean it is goal-less?  Or as a needed front end for a chat-bot like system?  Its been shown that a human like face can change our behavioral interaction to a robot, even if we know it is a robot.   We recently saw a socially oriented robot, Kurbi, fail.    Yet we find people reacting to Alexa socially.   What do we want from social robots?   I am intrigued by the statement that  "... Furhat is an answer to the absence of robots ..."

Good piece, quite a bit of detail, with images and video:

Furhat is a social robot for every situation
But could we ever really accept it?
 By Jamie Rigg, @jmerigg in Engadget

Earlier this month, Furhat Robotics launched its face-swapping social robot after many years of development and prototyping, which began at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Unlike the majority of robots, Furhat isn't built with any particular purpose in mind. In fact, that's the whole point. The disembodied bust can look and sound like all kinds of different, virtual people; it can take on any number of personalities. It's pitched as a new type of computer interface -- more engaging and understanding than any screen or smart speaker or AI chatbot. And as CEO Samer Al Moubayed puts it, Furhat isn't a replacement for people, but an answer to the absence of robots.   ... "

Rethinking Social Networks

How can we use this idea to think about the evolution of social networks over time, and how they are influenced.?   We talked the implications of networks with SFI very early on, and did substantial experiments as a result.

Rethinking Social Networks 
Carnegie Mellon University   By Daniel Carroll

Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed a way to show how social networks change and develop over time. The core of the Weighted Betweenness Preferential Attachment (WBPA) model focuses on the notion of "node betweenness," a quality of being between communities, while previous models have centered on the amount of connections that an individual has. The researchers found node betweenness is actually a greater attractor and driver for the formation of social ties than node degree or other measures of centrality. Instead of examining only the amount of connections a single node has, WBPA places more emphasis on community formation and the quality of node connections. CMU's Radu Marculescu says, "The new model builds on the idea that humans are better at observing qualitative aspects than quantitative ones, which is why people typically favor investing in fewer qualitative social ties rather than numerous lower quality ties."  ... " 

Social Failing Brand Engagement

Reporting low engagement levels for social.    A trend or more local behavior?

When it comes to Brand Engagement, Social Media is Failing Brands and Influencers.
Manuel Solis -  in CustomerThink

Recently, Forrester Research (one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world) studied more than 3 million user interactions with more than 2,500 brands posts on seven social networks. They confirmed what marketers have suspected for quite some time, which is people aren’t engaging with branded social content anymore.

Forrester revealed that six of the seven top social networks achieved an engagement rate of less than 0.1 percent for brands.

If you’re already spending thousands or millions on ad managers, Ad Words, and other promotional tools, this realization has HUGE implications. But even if you already knew this statistic, where do you look now to achieve the results you desire? .... "

Balancing Social Media?

Intriguing, but seems this could also be directly misused.

Conflicting Views on Social Media Balanced By an Algorithm
Aalto University

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland and the University of Rome Tor Vergata in Italy have developed an algorithm that balances information exposure so social media users can be exposed to information from both sides of a discussion. The program uses a greedy algorithm paradigm to find optimal choices at each stage, which works by efficiently selecting a set of influential users who can be convinced to spread information about their viewpoint to the other side. "We use word clouds as a qualitative case study to complement our quantitative results, whereby words in the cloud represent the words found in the users' profiles," says Aalto's Kiran Garimella. He notes the algorithm examines the content of a few influential users to find terms from both sides of a discussion. "Thus, these users can play a significant role in initiating a social debate and help to spread the arguments of one side to the other," Garimella says.  .... "

Identifying Viral Bots

In O'Reilly,  a considerable look at the problem of bots in social.  Like the use of network diagrams for analytics.   Bringing up the concept of 'information entropy'.   There is so much noise in social this needs to be carefully measured. Note this uses the Polinode graphical network tool, mentioned here previously.

Identifying viral bots and cyborgs in social media
Analyzing tweets and posts around Trump, Russia, and the NFL using information entropy, network analysis, and community detection algorithms.        By Steve Kramer  PhD

" ... In this article, I have demonstrated how it is readily possible to identify social bots and cyborgs on both Twitter and Facebook using information entropy and then to find groups of successful bots using network analysis and community detection. Given the extreme risks of disinformation and propaganda being spread through social media, it is our hope that this approach, along with the work of other researchers, will enable greater transparency and help protect democracy and the authenticity of online discourse. I invite researchers who wish to collaborate on studies of these data sets to request access to become collaborators on our data project hosted on data.world. ... " 

Twitter Posts

My Twitter stream https://twitter.com/franzd  contains links to many of the posts here.   I also add related posts from twitter and other social sources a similar range of topics.   Follow along there and add your own references.

Evolving Technologies for Social: Hootsuite

Certainly the case in the typical information ecology most of exist within.   Thus a challenge for many organizations.  Though I rarely hear it expressed.    A lengthy and technical conversation.
    
In ACM Queue   Volume 15, issue 3
Hootsuite: In Pursuit of Reactive Systems

A discussion with Edward Steel, Yanik Berube, Jonas Bonér, Ken Britton, and Terry Coatta

Based in Vancouver, Canada, Hootsuite is the most widely used SaaS (software as a service) platform for managing social media. Since its humble beginnings in 2008, Hootsuite has grown into a billion-dollar company with more than 15 million users around the globe.

As Hootsuite evolved over the years, so did the technology stack. A key change was moving from LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) to microservices. A shift to microservices didn't come without its challenges, however. In this roundtable chat, we discuss how Scala and Lightbend (which offers a reactive application development platform) were an essential part of a successful transition. The exchange includes Jonas Bonér, CTO of Lightbend; Terry Coatta, CTO of Marine Learning Systems; Edward Steel, senior Scala developer at Hootsuite; Yanik Berube, lead software developer at Hootsuite; and Ken Britton, senior director of software development at Hootsuite.


TERRY COATTA I'm curious about the original set of problems Hootsuite was looking to address in the switch to microservices. Can you provide some detail?

EDWARD STEEL Mostly, it had to do with our ability to send out notifications to user mobile devices whenever something relevant happened on Twitter. By the time we started having some concerns about how we were handling that, we were already servicing several hundreds of thousands of users, each with individual subscriptions tailored to their own specific interests. What was needed was something that could stay connected to Twitter's streaming endpoints.

TC I gather that at about the same time you were making this move, you also took steps to move from PHP to Scala. What drove that?

ES Initially, it had a lot to do with learning about all the success some other organizations had experienced with Scala. This was after Twitter had decided to go with Scala, for example, and that obviously lent a lot of legitimacy to it. Also, the first team here to work with Scala came from quite a varied background. We had some people who were lobbying for a more strongly typed functional language—something on the order of Haskell—and then there were some others with Clojure and Java experience. In taking all that into account, I guess Scala just seemed to check most of the boxes.
   ... "

Watson Analyzing Social Tone

Instructive Watson Example, via O'Reilly

How can I use IBM Watson to analyze the tone of social media posts?
Learn how to use IBM Watson's APIs and natural language understanding to analyze the tone of social media posts like tweets.  Video.

By Matt Coatney  ... " 

Brands engineering Social Media Content

Brands Engineering Social Media Content

Wharton's Kartik Hosanagar discusses his research on brand content and consumer engagement on social media.

In the world of social media advertising, the biggest win for firms is when consumers are delighted by the content they see, want to engage with it and eventually buy something. Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, has co-authored research that takes a closer look at brand posts on Facebook to determine the type and mix of content advertisers should aim for to get results. The paper, “Advertising Content and Consumer Engagement on Social Media: Evidence from Facebook,” which was co-authored with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford University’s Harikesh Nair, is forthcoming in the journal Management Science. Hosanagar recently joined Knowledge@Wharton to discuss his findings. ... 

An edited transcript of the conversation follows .... " 

More Social Robotics

Been intrigued by social robots, attempts at making  interactive and friendly devices for the home and elsewhere.  Is this problem solvable before we figure out how to do intelligent conversations between humans and machines?  How much does soft and doll-like buy you in social?   Expecting too much from the Eliza Effect in AI?   I am following several interesting examples.

Blossom: A Handmade Approach to Social Robotics from Cornell and Google  By Evan Ackerman

As excited as we are about the forthcoming generation of social home robots (including Jibo, Kuri, and many others), it's hard to ignore the fact that most of them look somewhat similar. They tend to feature lots of shiny white and black plasticky roundness. That’s for admittedly very good reasons, but it comes at the cost of both uniqueness and visual and tactile personality.

Guy Hoffman, who is well known for the fascinating creativity of his robot designs, has been working on a completely new kind of social robot in a collaboration between his lab at Cornell and Google ZOO's creative technology team in APAC. The robot is called Blossom, and we'd describe it for you, except that it's designed to be handmade out of warm natural materials like wool and wood so that every single one is a little bit different.  ... " 

Using Social Media to Find Top Customers

In Knowedge@Wharton.  

Influencing the Influencers: Using Social Media to Find Top Customers


Wharton's Gad Allon discusses his research on using social media data to identify a company's top customers.

Podcast/Text

Social media offers an almost endless stream of data for businesses to collect on their customers. But what good is data without a smart way to apply it? The latest research from Gad Allon, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, offers a lifeline for firms drowning in the deep waters of social networks. Allon and his team devised an analytics model that can help businesses identify high-value customers. The paper, “Managing Service Systems in the Presence of Social Networks,” was co-authored with Washington University professor Dennis J. Zhang. He talked with Knowledge@Wharton about the process. .... " 

Social Media Endorsements

In Knowledge@Wharton:

Social Media Endorsements: Where Will Marketers Draw the Line?
What if advertisers found a stealthy new way to get their pitch across — a form of messaging perceived more as a friendly recommendation than hard sell? In an over-crowded media environment, marketers would surely flock to such an innovation.

And they have. In the nascent realm of social media influencing, paid endorsements are burgeoning. Celebrities and other influencers present their taste and choices in the marketplace as nothing more than the act of sharing tips with fans and the public — even while failing to make clear that, often, they are being paid to do so. .... "