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Peter J. Denning, Editor in ChiefThe digitally connected world has become a large, swirling sea of information stripped of context.

We help our readers make sense of it, find meaning in it, learn what to trust, and prepare for the future that may show up. "Ubiquity and Your Future

Peter J. Denning,
Editor-in-Chief

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LATEST ARTICLES

opinion

How to Write and Speak Clearly and Concisely without Insulting Your Audience's Intelligence

by Philip Yaffe

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.

People who are serious about effective writing and speaking are eager to learn and emulate the principles and practices of professionals in the field. In particular, they often worry about their text or presentation being too long, i.e., "over-explaining" for fear of insulting their audience's intelligence. This is a legitimate concern. However, "too long" doesn't actually mean what many people think it means. Let's correct this damaging misapprehension.

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Interview

A Conversation with Ken Holstein: Fostering human-AI complementarity

Interviewed by Bushra Anjum

Ubiquity's senior editor Dr. Bushra Anjum chats with Ken Holstein, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he leads the Co-Augmentation, Learning, & AI (CoALA) Lab. We discuss how, amidst all of the current AI hype, human ability and expertise remain underappreciated. Designing for complementarity in AI-augmented tooling ensures that domain-specific worker-facing AI systems are designed to bring out the best of human ability rather than simply attempting to, many a time incorrectly, automate them away.

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opinion

Digital Economy: Dark Innovations in the Digital Economy

by Peter Denning

Innovations are adoptions of new practices in communities. They are adopted because people perceive value from them. However, around the edges of the standard community practice, new practices can emerge that are of negative value. They are called dark innovations. Four examples are examined here: privacy, subscriptions, automation, and class abstraction. There is no easy way to eliminate dark innovations. ...


Interview

Interview with Demis Hassabis, CEO and Co-Founder of DeepMind by Ruth Fulterer of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung

Interviewed by Martin Antony Walker

The large-language-model-based chatbot ChatGPT was released on November 30, 2022. Presented here is a translation of an interview held in February 2023 between Ruth Fulterer, of the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), and Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind. ...