Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren’t connected to Amtrak or an angry ex.
In fact, we are increasingly interacting with our computers by just talking to them, whether it’s Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or the many voice-responsive features of Google. Chinese search giant Baidu says customers have tripled their use of its speech interfaces in the past 18 months.
Machine translation and other forms of language processing have also become far more convincing, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Baidu unveiling new tricks every month. Google Translate now renders spoken sentences in one language into spoken sentences in another for 32 pairs of languages, while offering text translations for 103 tongues, including Cebuano, Igbo, and Zulu. Google’s Inbox app offers three ready-made replies for many incoming emails.
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But what most people don’t realize is that all these breakthroughs are, in essence, the same breakthrough. They’ve all been made possible by a family of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques popularly known as deep learning, though most scientists still prefer to call them by their original academic designation: deep neural networks.
Even the Internet metaphor doesn’t do justice to what AI with deep learning will mean, in Ng’s view. “AI is the new electricity,” he says. “Just as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same.”
Graphically speaking:
“Our sales teams are using neural nets to recommend which prospects to contact next or what kinds of product offerings to recommend.”
One way to think of what deep learning does is as “A to B mappings,” says Baidu’s Ng. “You can input an audio clip and output the transcript. That’s speech recognition.” As long as you have data to train the software, the possibilities are endless, he maintains. “You can input email, and the output could be: Is this spam or not?” Input loan applications, he says, and the output might be the likelihood a customer will repay it. Input usage patterns on a fleet of cars, and the output could advise where to send a car next.
The New Media Consortium (NMC) has released Digital Literacy: An NMC Horizon Project Strategic Brief in conjunction with the 2016 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference.
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In analyzing the progress and gaps in this area, the NMC’s report has identified a need for higher education leaders and technology companies to prioritize students as makers, learning through the act of content creation rather than mere consumption. Additionally, the publication recommends that colleges and universities establish productive collaborations with industry, government, and libraries to provide students with access to the latest technologies and tools.
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Based on the variety and complexity of these results, NMC cannot identify just one model of digital literacy. Instead three different digital literacies are now evident, each with distinct standards, potential curriculum, and implications for creative educators.
The aim of this publication is to establish a shared vision of digital literacy for higher education leaders by illuminating key definitions and models along with best practices and recommendations for implementing successful digital literacy initiatives.
To be digitally literate, you need to be:
fluent at critical thinking, collaborating,
being creative, and problem-solving in
digital environments.
Computer science and digital media classes can instruct on everything from office productivity applications to programming and video editing, for example. Sociology courses can teach interpersonal actions online, such as the ethics and politics of social network interaction, while psychology and business classes can focus on computer-mediated human interaction. Government and political science classes are clearly well equipped to explore the intersection of digital technology and citizenship mentioned above. Communication, writing, and literature classes have the capacity to instruct students on producing digital content in the form of stories, arguments, personal expression, posters, and more.
From DSC: If faculty members aren’t asking students to create multimedia in their assignments and/or take part in online/digitally-based means of communications and learning, the vast majority of the students won’t (and don’t) care about digital literacy…it’s simply not relevant to them: “Whatever gets me the grade, that’s what I’ll do. But no more.”
This type of situation/perspective is quite costly. Because once students graduate from college, had they built up some solid digital literacy — especially the “creative literacy” mentioned above — they would be in much better shape to get solid jobs, and prosper at those jobs. They would be much better able to craft powerful communications — and reach a global audience in doing so. They would have honed their creativity, something increasingly important as the onward march of AI, robotics, algorithms, automation, and such continues to eat away at many types of jobs (that don’t really need creative people working in them).
This is an important topic, especially as digitally-based means of communication continue to grow in their usage and impact.
Part of digital literacy is not just understanding how a tool works but also why it is useful in the real world and when to use it.
Eric Florenzano is a VR consultant and game designer who lives in the San Francisco Bay area. He is currently working on new game ideas with a small team spread out across the US.
So far, so normal, right?. But what you don’t know is that Florenzano is one of a handful of advocates pioneering something they claim could transform work, end commuting, and even lead to a mass exodus from large cities: the virtual office.
“There’s no physical office [for us.] It’s all virtual. That’s the crazy thing,” explains Florenzano. Rather than meeting in person or arranging a conference call, his team jumps into Bigscreen, which allows users, who are represented by floating heads and controllers, to share their monitors in virtual rooms.
Recently, I wrote about how the future of surgery is going to be robotic, data-driven and artificially intelligent.
Although it’s approaching fast, that future is still in the works. In the meantime, there is a real need to train surgeons in a more scalable way, according to Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon at the Royal London and St. Bartholomew’s hospitals and cofounder of Medical Realities, a company developing a new virtual reality platform for surgical training.
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In April of 2016, he live-streamed a cancer surgery in virtual reality. The procedure, a low-risk removal of a colon tumor in a man in his 70s, was filmed in 360 video and streamed live across the world. The high-def 4K camera captured the doctors’ every movement, and those watching could see everything that was happening in immersive detail.
“Since we can manipulate a hologram without actually touching anything, we have access to everything we need without breaking a sterile field. In the end, this is actually an improvement over the current OR system because the image is directly overlaid on the patient, without having to look to computer screens for aid,” said Cutler in a Duke news release.
Oculus and OTOY may have achieved a breakthrough in social VR functionality.
VR headset owners should soon be able to share a variety of environments and Web-based content with one another in virtual reality. For example, friends can feel like they are together on the bridge of the Enterprise, and on the viewscreen of the ship they see a list of Star Trek episodes to watch with one another.
We have yet to test all of this functionality first-hand, but we’ve seen some of it live in the Gear VR — accessing, for example, a Star Trek environment inside OTOY’s ORBX Media Player app from within the Oculus Social Beta.
“Whether it be HoloLens, mixed reality, or Surface, our goal is to invent new computers and new computing,” he added. This also includes investing in artificial intelligence, which is now its own group within the company.
Nadella admitted that for a long time, Microsoft was complacent. “Early success is probably the worst thing that can happen in life,” he said. But now, he wants Microsoft to be more of a “learn-it-all” culture rather than a “know-it-all” culture.
These networks keep growing. One of the hosts of the conference, ARinChina, brought me over along with a group of about a half-dozen Westerners. This media company connects a community of 60,000 developers, all of whom are invested in staying ahead of breakthrough technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the hybrid known as mixed reality (MR). The AR track where I presented was hosted by RAVV, a new technology think tank that is pulling together subject matter experts across robotics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, VR and AR. RAVV is building an international ecosystem that includes its own approaches for startup incubation, knowledge sharing and other collaborative endeavors.
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To get a sense of how global the emerging mixed reality field is, consider that, in February, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba led the $800 million Series C round for Florida-based Magic Leap, an MR startup. As our daily reality becomes more virtual and augmented, it doesn’t matter where someone is on the map. This field is connecting far-flung practitioners, hinting at a time, soon, when AR, VR and MR will connect people in ways never before possible.
On August 26th, President Obama publicly responded to a Facebook message sent to him by a citizen—a first for any president in history. Since then, he has received over one and a half million Facebook messages, sent from people based all around the world.
While receiving messages from the public isn’t a recent phenomenon—every day, the White House receives thousands of phone calls, physical letters, and submissions through our online contact form—being able to contact the President through Facebook has never been possible before. Today [10/14/16], it’s able to happen because of the first-ever government bot on Facebook messenger.
Also see:
Anyone can chat with the White House… through a bot — from yahoo.com With the new presidential “bot” on Facebook Messenger, users can send messages, 10 of which will be read each day by President Barack Obama
Fuel For Growth
Compelling data reveal a discouraging truth about growth today. There has been a marked decline in the ability of traditional levers of production—capital investment and labor—to propel economic growth.
Yet, the numbers tell only part of the story. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a new factor of production and has the potential to introduce new sources of growth, changing how work is done and reinforcing the role of people to drive growth in business.
Accenture research on the impact of AI in 12 developed economies reveals that AI could double annual economic growth rates in 2035 by changing the nature of work and creating a new relationship between man and machine. The impact of AI technologies on business is projected to increase labor productivity by up to 40 percent and enable people to make more efficient use of their time.
Free app Duolingo is a great way to learn the basics of a new language, with small daily lessons that gradually increase your skills, with rewards for progressing. Now the service has added a new feature that’s a little different from the back-and-forth translation — text-based chatbots.
These are aimed at helping you improve your conversational skills and skills you might use in real life, such as ordering food, visiting a tourist attraction, shopping for clothing or catching a cab. A variety of scenarios will see you learning how to follow a set of directions, or talk with a doctor. According to the Duolingo chatbot Web page, these bots are programmed to react to thousands of different responses.
From DSC: I have attended theNext Generation Learning Spaces Conferencefor the past two years. Both conferences were very solid and they made a significant impact on our campus, as they provided the knowledge, research, data, ideas, contacts, and the catalyst for us to move forward with building a Sandbox Classroom on campus. This new, collaborative space allows us to experiment with different pedagogies as well as technologies. As such, we’ve been able to experiment much more with active learning-based methods of teaching and learning. We’re still in Phase I of this new space, and we’re learning new things all of the time.
For the upcoming conference in February, I will be moderating a New Directions in Learning panel on the use of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). Time permitting, I hope that we can also address other promising, emerging technologies that are heading our way such as chatbots, personal assistants, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, tvOS, blockchain and more.
The goal of this quickly-moving, engaging session will be to provide a smorgasbord of ideas to generate creative, innovative, and big thinking. We need to think about how these topics, trends, and technologies relate to what our next generation learning environments might look like in the near future — and put these things on our radars if they aren’t already there.
Key takeaways for the panel discussion:
Reflections regarding the affordances that new developments in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) — such as AR, VR, and MR — might offer for our learning and our learning spaces (or is our concept of what constitutes a learning space about to significantly expand?)
An update on the state of the approaching ed tech landscape
Creative, new thinking: What might our next generation learning environments look like in 5-10 years?
I’m looking forward to catching up with friends, meeting new people, and to the solid learning that I know will happen at this conference. I encourage you to check outthe conferenceandregister soon to take advantage of the early bird discounts.
AI chatbot apps to infiltrate businesses sooner than you think — from searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com by Bridget Botelho Artificial intelligence chatbots aren’t the norm yet, but within the next five years, there’s a good chance the sales person emailing you won’t be a person at all.
Excerpt:
In fact, artificial intelligence has come so far so fast in recent years, Gartner predicts it will be pervasive in all new products by 2020, with technologies including natural language capabilities, deep neural networks and conversational capabilities.
Other analysts share that expectation. Technologies that encompass the umbrella term artificial intelligence — including image recognition, machine learning, AI chatbots and speech recognition — will soon be ubiquitous in business applications as developers gain access to it through platforms such as the IBM Watson Conversation API and the Google Cloud Natural Language API.
Facebook introduced chatbots on Messenger three months ago, and the search giant has shared today that over 11,000 bots are active on the messaging service. The Messenger Platform has picked up an update that adds a slew of new features to bots, such as a persistent menu that lists a bot’s commands, quick replies, ability to respond with GIFs, audio, video, and other files, and a rating system to provide feedback to bot developers.
In another example, many businesses use interactive voice response (IVR) telephony systems, which have limited functionalities and often provide a poor user experience. Chatbots can replace these applications in future where the user will interact naturally to get relevant information without following certain steps or waiting for a logical sequence to occur.
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Chatbots are a good starting point, but the future lies in more advanced versions of audio and video bots. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google with its voice assistance, are working in the same direction to achieve it. Bot ecosystems will become even more relevant in the phase of IoT mass adoption and improvement of input/output (I/O) technology.
With big players investing heavily in AI, Chatbots are likely to be an increasing feature of social media and other communications platforms.
Chatbots are software programs that use messaging platforms as the interface to perform a wide variety of tasks—everything from scheduling a meeting to reporting the weather, to helping a customer buy a sweater.
Because texting is the heart of the mobile experience for smartphone users, chatbots are a natural way to turn something users are very familiar with into a rewarding service or marketing opportunity.
And when you consider that the top 4 messaging apps reach over 3 billion global users (MORE than the top 4 social networks), you can see that the opportunity is huge.
The Xiaoice chat bot — pronounced “Shao-ice” and translated as “little Bing” — born as an experiment by Microsoft Research in 2014, reaches 40 million followers in China, who often literally talk with her for hours.
At her most active, Xiaoice is holding down as many 23 conversations a session, says Microsoft Research NExT leader Dr. Peter Lee. It’s even evolved to become a nice little sideline business for Microsoft, thanks to a partnership with Chinese e-retailer JD.com that lets users buy products by talking to Xiaoice.
The reason Xiaoice is so successful is she was born of a different kind of philosophical experiment: Instead of building a chat bot that was useful, Microsoft simply tried to make it fun to talk to.
The ‘soft skills’ employers are looking for — from blogs.wsj.com by Kate Davidson Communication, teamwork, punctuality and critical thinking are in high demand, an analysis of 2.3 million LinkedIn profiles shows
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Want to craft a standout resume? Try adding skills like communication, organization and punctuality.
Nearly 58% of employees who touted stellar communication skills were hired over the course of a year, according to an analysis of 2.3 million LinkedIn profiles for The Wall Street Journal.
Employers are increasingly looking for workers with strong soft skills—those traits that don’t show up in a job posting but are essential for succeeding in the workplace, like working well with others and taking initiative. But many employers say it has gotten harder to find those applicants as the labor market tightens.
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Communication, at the top of the list, was followed by organization, teamwork, punctuality, critical thinking, social skills, creativity, interpersonal communication, adaptability and having a friendly personality.
From DSC: Looking at the list of top skills desired by employers, there seems to be a major breakdown in the entire spectrum/continuum.
Hmmm….standardized testing doesn’t really bring out the collaborative side of us, does it? In fact, you would likely get shown the door if you tried to collaborate (or show social skills) on a test, right? Teamwork. Hmmm….again, not on the exam. Punctuality? Nope…not that either. Organization…perhaps…maybe a little bit on the exam, but not much.
Which set of goals are we pursuing? Standardized testing and all of what that means…or are we trying to produce students who have the soft skills mentioned aboveand who can reinvent themselves over and over again (to which I’d add entrepreneurship/innovation/ability to freelance, the ability to look up and out into the future, and the ability to keep the relevant landscapes on their radars).
The answer seems to be that we’re trying to do both. That said, the corporate world seems to be saying that the standardized testing is winning out in this clash of goals.
This is why I try to pulse check the worlds of K-12, higher ed, and the corporate space all at the same time. We are not islands. What happens in earlier phases of people’s lives matters. What’s currently happening in the earlier portions of the continuum matters.
There remains a fundamental mismatch between market demand and supply of skills. The longstanding concerns around a drought of STEM and digital talent have been well publicised, but the issue extends beyond that. Students are graduating with degrees offering neither technical nor vocational knowledge, yet these are what employers are often looking for first.
Recent research in the US found that while 87% of recent graduates feel well prepared to hit the ground running in their new job, only half of hiring managers agreed. The shortfall across hard and soft skills is plain to see – one in four roles go unfilled due to the technical skills gap and hiring managers report worrying gaps in graduates’ critical thinking, communication and leadership skills. Around the world, many graduates simply aren’t employable in the roles being created today, yet will have spent at least 3 years racking up debt to study a course that will not help them find a relevant role.
If steps are not taken to address this, then I genuinely fear for our graduates, employers and the global economy. We are already seeing the skills gap widening into a skills chasm.
The freelance economy is on the rise. In fact, the number of freelancers on LinkedIn has grown by nearly 50% in just the past five years. As the workforce evolves, we, too, are evolving to ensure we’re creating opportunity for the expanding sector of professionals looking for independent, project-based work in place of the typical 9 to 5 profession.
Last October, we began piloting a brand new platform in support of this very endeavor and today, we’re excited to announce its nationwide availability. Introducing LinkedIn ProFinder, a LinkedIn marketplace that connects consumers and small businesses looking for professional services – think Design, Writing and Editing, Accounting, Real Estate, Career Coaching – with top quality freelance professionals best suited for the job.
Dropping a child off at college is a stressful experience. I should know — I dropped off one last week and another today. It’s confusing because everything is so new, your child (who is actually a young adult, how did that happen?) is anxious, and you usually have to settle up on your finances.
This situation happens to be ideal for a chatbot, because the administrative staff is way too busy to handle questions in person or by phone. There might be someone directing you in the parking lot, but not everyone standing around in the student center knows how to submit FAFSA data.
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One of the main reasons for thinking of this is that I would have used one myself today. It’s a situation where you want immediate, quick information without having to explain all of the background information. You just need the campus map or the schedule for the day — that’s it. You don’t want any extra frills.
From DSC: My question is:
Will Instructional Designers, Technical Communicators, e-Learning Designers, Trainers, (and other positions as as well) going to have to know how to build chatbots in the future? Our job descriptions could be changing soon. Or will this kind of thing require more programming-related skills? Perhaps more firms like the one below could impact that situation…
From DSC: How much longer before the functionalities that are found in tools like Bluescape & Mural are available via tvOS-based devices? Entrepreneurs and VCs out there, take note. Given:
the growth of freelancing and people working from home and/or out on the road
the need for people to collaborate over a distance
the growth of online learning
the growth of active/collaborative learning spaces in K-12 and higher ed
the need for lifelong learning
…this could be a lucrative market. Also, it would be meaningful work…knowing that you are helping people learn and earn.
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg)