Data Science: Re-Imagining Our Institutions at the Systems Level — from campustechnology.com by Mary Grush
A Q&A with George Siemens

Excerpt:

We know that higher education institutions have been exploring data science for decades. Many began by leveraging institutional data to serve administrative computing needs and efficiencies, later taking on an additional learning science focus, at least to some, often limited degree.

What can institutions do now, to use data science better and perhaps reinvent themselves in the process? Are they taking advantage of all the access they have to so many disciplines and researchers, to help move data science ahead in the real world? Here, George Siemens, who is a professor of practice at the University of Texas-Arlington and co-leads the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning at the University of South Australia, talks with CT about data science in higher education.

 

What might the ramifications be for text-to-everything? [Christian]

From DSC:

  • We can now type in text to get graphics and artwork.
  • We can now type in text to get videos.
  • There are several tools to give us transcripts of what was said during a presentation.
  • We can search videos for spoken words and/or for words listed within slides within a presentation.

Allie Miller’s posting on LinkedIn (see below) pointed these things out as well — along with several other things.



This raises some ideas/questions for me:

  • What might the ramifications be in our learning ecosystems for these types of functionalities? What affordances are forthcoming? For example, a teacher, professor, or trainer could quickly produce several types of media from the same presentation.
  • What’s said in a videoconference or a webinar can already be captured, translated, and transcribed.
  • Or what’s said in a virtual courtroom, or in a telehealth-based appointment. Or perhaps, what we currently think of as a smart/connected TV will give us these functionalities as well.
  • How might this type of thing impact storytelling?
  • Will this help someone who prefers to soak in information via the spoken word, or via a podcast, or via a video?
  • What does this mean for Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and/or Virtual Reality (VR) types of devices?
  • Will this kind of thing be standard in the next version of the Internet (Web3)?
  • Will this help people with special needs — and way beyond accessibility-related needs?
  • Will data be next (instead of typing in text)?

Hmmm….interesting times ahead.

 

Artificial Intelligence in Video Production — from provideocoalition.com by Iain Anderson

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence has promised so much for so long, and in many ways, it’s been less than perfect. Siri doesn’t quite understand what you’re asking; Google Translate can’t yet seamlessly bridge the gap between languages, and navigation software still doesn’t always offer an accurate route. But it’s getting pretty good. While a variety of AI-based technologies have been improving steadily over the past several years, it’s the recent giant strides made in image generation that’s potentially groundbreaking for post production professionals. Here, I’ll take you through the ideas behind the tech, along with specific examples of how modern, smart technology will change your post workflow tomorrow, or could today.

Also relevant/see:

 

Tearing the ‘paper ceiling’: McKinsey supports effort driving upward mobility for millions of workers — from mckinsey.com

Excerpt:

September 23, 2022There’s a hidden talent pool that most employers overlook—the more than 70 million workers in the US who are STARs, or workers ‘skilled through alternative routes.’ Whether through community college, workforce training, bootcamp or certificate programs, military service, or on-the-job learning, STARs have the skills for higher-wage jobs but often find themselves blocked from consideration.

This week, nonprofit Opportunity@Work and the Ad Council have launched a nationwide campaign to ‘Tear the Paper Ceiling’ and encourage employers to change hiring practices. McKinsey is providing pro bono support to the effort through data and analytics tools that enable recruiters to recognize STARs and their skills.

“While companies scramble to find talent amid a perceived skills gap, many of their job postings have needlessly excluded half of the workers in the country who have the skills for higher-wage work,” says Byron Auguste, founder of Opportunity@Work and a former senior partner at McKinsey. “Companies like the ones we’re proud to call partners in this effort—and those we hope will join—can lead the way by tapping into skilled talent from a far wider range of backgrounds.”

There are lots of reasons why someone might not begin or complete a degree that have nothing to do with their intrinsic abilities or potential. We know there are better ways to screen for talent and now we have the research and tools to back that up.

Carolyn Pierce, McKinsey partner

Also from McKinsey, see:

Latest McKinsey tech outlook identifies 14 key trends for business leaders

Excerpt:

October 4, 2022 The McKinsey Technology Council—a global group of over 100 scientists, entrepreneurs, researchers, and business leaders—has published its second annual Technology Trends Outlook. By assessing metrics of innovation, interest, investment, and adoption, the council has prioritized and synthesized 40 technologies into 14 leading trends.

Following on from last year, applied AI once again earned the highest score for innovation in the report. Sustainability, meanwhile, emerged as a major catalyst for tech around the world, with clean energy and sustainable consumption drawing the highest investment from private-equity and venture-capital firms. And five new trends were added to this year’s edition: industrializing machine learning, Web3, immersive-reality technologies, the future of mobility, and the future of space.

In this post, McKinsey senior partner Lareina Yee, expert partner Roger Roberts, and McKinsey Global Institute partner Michael Chui share their thoughts about what the findings may mean for leaders over the next few years.

 

Radar Trends to Watch: October 2022 — from oreilly.com by Mike Loukides
Developments in Machine Learning, Metaverse, Web3, and More

Excerpt:

September was a busy month. In addition to continued fascination over art generation with DALL-E and friends, and the questions they pose for intellectual property, we see interesting things happening with machine learning for low-powered processors: using attention, mechanisms, along with a new microcontroller that can run for a week on a single AA battery. In other parts of the technical universe, “platform engineering” has been proposed as an alternative to both DevOps and SRE. We’ve seen demonstrations of SQL injection-like attacks against GPT-3; and companies including Starbucks, Chipotle, and Universal Studios are offering NFT-based loyalty programs. (In addition to a Chipotle’s steak grilling demo in the Metaverse.)

Also relevant/see:

General AI News — from essentials.news

 

OpenAI Says DALL-E Is Generating Over 2 Million Images a Day—and That’s Just Table Stakes — from singularityhub.com by Jason Dorrier

Excerpt:

The venerable stock image site, Getty, boasts a catalog of 80 million images. Shutterstock, a rival of Getty, offers 415 million images. It took a few decades to build up these prodigious libraries.

Now, it seems we’ll have to redefine prodigious. In a blog post last week, OpenAI said its machine learning algorithm, DALL-E 2, is generating over two million images a day. At that pace, its output would equal Getty and Shutterstock combined in eight months. The algorithm is producing almost as many images daily as the entire collection of free image site Unsplash.

And that was before OpenAI opened DALL-E 2 to everyone.

 


From DSC:
Further on down that Tweet is this example image — wow!
.

A photo of a quaint flower shop storefront with a pastel green and clean white facade and open door and big window

.


On the video side of things, also relevant/see:

Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video — from theverge.com by James Vincent
Just type a description and the AI generates matching footage

A sample video generated by Meta’s new AI text-to-video model, Make-A-Video. The text prompt used to create the video was “a teddy bear painting a portrait.” Image: Meta


From DSC:
Hmmm…I wonder…how might these emerging technologies impact copyrights, intellectual property, and/or other types of legal matters and areas?


 

HSF embraces the metaverse with new digital law course for students — from legalcheek.com by Thomas Connelly

Excerpt:

The global law firm has launched a series of free workshops exploring how lawyers help clients navigate novel legal and regulatory issues relating to techy-topics including the metaverse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), robotics and artificial intelligence (AI).

From DSC:
This kind of thing needs to happen in law schools across many countries.

 

AI/ML in EdTech: The Miracle, The Grind, and the Wall — from eliterate.us by Michael Feldstein

Excerpt:

Essentially, I see three stages in working with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). I call them the miracle, the grind, and the wall. These stages can have implications for both how we can get seduced by these technologies and how we can get bitten by them. The ethical implications are important.

 

5 Ways AI is Reshaping the Human Resources Industry — from intelligenthq.com

Excerpt:

Here are a few of the ways that HR professionals and departments are leveraging artificial intelligence to improve the hiring and employee management process.

From DSC:
I must admit that I was originally kind of excited to post this. And while I appreciate the ideas involving onboarding, completing forms, offering appropriate learning modules, and benefits administration…in looking more closely at this article, I have some serious concerns with:

  • Using AI to screen candidates — the Applicant Tracking Systems can miss a lot of things; algorithms and parameters can discriminate all too easily
  • Using AI to track employee behavior — seems controlling, not trusting one’s employees, and manipulative. 

Employee tracking is also essential for managing remote employees.

From DSC:
B.S.  If you hire talented individuals, don’t do this. This can easily backfire on you, making employees feel like second graders. Don’t do it. You don’t want that kind of employee anyway. This is a slippery slope to micromanaging and not honoring/trusting your employees to get their jobs done.


From DSC:
On a more positive note, this application of AI seems pretty sharp to me!

Do you know the name of the flowers you like? How about the name of the flowers or trees you walk by everyday on your commute to work, do you know their names? Well, now you can with the help of the plant identification apps below. I curated for you a collection of some of the best apps you and your students can use to identify plants, flowers, and trees by simply photographing them.


 

Getty Images bans AI-generated content over fears of legal challenges — from theverge.com by James Vincent
Getty Images is worried about future copyright claims

Excerpt:

Getty Images has banned the upload and sale of illustrations generated using AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. It’s the latest and largest user-generated content platform to introduce such a ban, following similar decisions by sites including Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity.

Getty Images CEO Craig Peters told The Verge that the ban was prompted by concerns about the legality of AI-generated content and a desire to protect the site’s customers.

 

Megatrends | September 25, 2022 — by Michael Moe, Tim Juang, Owen Ritz, & Kit Royce

“The trend is your friend.” – Martin Zweig

“Follow the trend lines, not the headlines.” – Bill Clinton

“In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different.” – Coco Chanel

“I don’t set the trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them.” – Dick Clark

Megatrends are powerful technological, economic, and social forces that develop from a groundswell (early adoption), move into the mainstream (mass market), and disrupt the status quo (mature market), driving change, productivity, and ultimately growth opportunities for companies, industries, and entire economies.


.

The metaverse is not a vertical trend; it’s a horizontal trend that will impact sectors ranging from healthcare, education, socialization, entertainment, commerce, and more.

 

This Uncensored AI Art Tool Can Generate Fantasies—and Nightmares — from wired.com by Will Knight
Open source project Stable Diffusion allows anyone to conjure images with algorithms, but some fear it will be used to create unethical horrors.

Excerpt:

Image generators like Stable Diffusion can create what look like real photographs or hand-crafted illustrations depicting just about anything a person can imagine. This is possible thanks to algorithms that learn to associate the properties of a vast collection of images taken from the web and image databases with their associated text labels. Algorithms learn to render new images to match a text prompt in a process that involves adding and removing random noise to an image.

Also relevant/see:

There’s a text-to-image AI art app for Mac now—and it will change everything — from fastcompany.com by Jesus Diaz
Diffusion Bee harnesses the power of the open source text-to-image AI Stable Diffusion, turning it into a one-click Mac App. Brace yourself for a new creativity Big Bang.


Speaking of AI, also see:

 

Keynote Wrap-Up: NVIDIA CEO Unveils Next-Gen RTX GPUs, AI Workflows in the Cloud — from blogs.nvidia.com by Brian Caulfield
Kicking off GTC, Jensen Huang unveils advances in natural language understanding, the metaverse, gaming and AI technologies impacting industries from transportation and healthcare to finance and entertainment.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

New cloud services to support AI workflows and the launch of a new generation of GeForce RTX GPUs featured [on 9/20/22] in NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote, which was packed with new systems, silicon, and software.

“Computing is advancing at incredible speeds, the engine propelling this rocket is accelerated computing, and its fuel is AI,” Huang said during a virtual presentation as he kicked off NVIDIA GTC.

Again and again, Huang connected new technologies to new products to new opportunities – from harnessing AI to delight gamers with never-before-seen graphics to building virtual proving grounds where the world’s biggest companies can refine their products.

Driving the deluge of new ideas, new products and new applications: a singular vision of accelerated computing unlocking advances in AI, which, in turn will touch industries around the world.

Also relevant/see:

 

From DSC:
The first item below is from Harsh Makadia — with thanks to educatorstechnology.com for mentioning Harsh on this posting.


Also see:

Great Tips for Using Chrome — from lawpracticetipsblog.com by Jim Calloway

…as well as the Tweet below


 

What if smart TVs’ new killer app was a next-generation learning-related platform? [Christian]

TV makers are looking beyond streaming to stay relevant — from protocol.com by Janko Roettgers and Nick Statt

A smart TV's main menu listing what's available -- application wise

Excerpts:

The search for TV’s next killer app
TV makers have some reason to celebrate these days: Streaming has officially surpassed cable and broadcast as the most popular form of TV consumption; smart TVs are increasingly replacing external streaming devices; and the makers of these TVs have largely figured out how to turn those one-time purchases into recurring revenue streams, thanks to ad-supported services.

What TV makers need is a new killer app. Consumer electronics companies have for some time toyed with the idea of using TV for all kinds of additional purposes, including gaming, smart home functionality and fitness. Ad-supported video took priority over those use cases over the past few years, but now, TV brands need new ways to differentiate their devices.

Turning the TV into the most useful screen in the house holds a lot of promise for the industry. To truly embrace this trend, TV makers might have to take some bold bets and be willing to push the envelope on what’s possible in the living room.

 


From DSC:
What if smart TVs’ new killer app was a next-generation learning-related platform? Could smart TVs deliver more blended/hybrid learning? Hyflex-based learning?
.

The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV

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Or what if smart TVs had to do with delivering telehealth-based apps? Or telelegal/virtual courts-based apps?


 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian