LATEST ARTICLES

Banishing the fear of public speaking

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.

In this installment, Philip Yaffe explores how speak to a crowd.

Big data: big data or big brother? that is the question now.

by Jeffrey Johnson, Peter Denning, Kemal A. Delic, David Sousa-Rodrigues

This ACM Ubiquity Symposium presented some of the current thinking about big data developments across four topical dimensions: social, technological, application, and educational. While 10 articles can hardly touch the expanse of the field, we have sought to cover the most important issues and provide useful insights for the curious reader. More than two dozen authors from academia and industry provided shared their points of view, their current focus of interest and their outlines of future research. Big digital data has changed and will change the world in many ways. It will bring some big benefits in the future, but combined with big AI and big IoT devices creates several big challenges. These must be carefully addressed and properly resolved for the future benefit of humanity.

Artificial intelligence in politics: an interview with Sven Körner and Mathias Landhäußer of thingsTHINKING

August 2018
Interviewed by Walter Tichy

Natural language processing, an area of artificial intelligence (AI), has attained remarkable successes. Digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa respond to spoken commands, and understand several languages. Google has demonstrated a machine can call up a restaurant and make a reservation in a manner that is indistinguishable from a human. Automated translation services are used around the world in over a hundred languages. This interview discusses a new and surprising application of language processing in politics. Though the AI software analyzes texts in German, it could be adapted to any language. The underlying technology has wider applications in text analysis, including legal tech, contracting, and others. Here is a summary.

Big Data: Business, Technology, Education, and Science: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

July 2018
by Jeffrey Johnson, Luca Tesei, Marco Piangerelli, Emanuela Merelli, Riccardo Paci, Nenad Stojanovic, Paulo Leitão, José Barbosa, Marco Amador

Transforming the latent value of big data into real value requires the great human intelligence and application of human-data scientists. Data scientists are expected to have a wide range of technical skills alongside being passionate self-directed people who are able to work easily with others and deliver high quality outputs under pressure. There are hundreds of university, commercial, and online courses in data science and related topics. Apart from people with breadth and depth of knowledge and experience in data science, we identify a new educational path to train "bridge persons" who combine knowledge of an organization's business with sufficient knowledge and understanding of data science to "bridge" between non-technical people in the business with highly skilled data scientists who add value to the business. The increasing proliferation of big data and the great advances made in data science do not herald in an era where all problems can be solved by deep learning and artificial intelligence. Although data science opens up many commercial and social opportunities, data science must complement other science in the search for new theory and methods to understand and manage our complex world.