Bias – Another look at it…

‘Where there is a decision – there is perceivable bias (no matter how small it is)’

This bias – is going to shape our foundations of future, the question really is not whether it’s avoidable or not but what constitutes a good vs bad or incoherent bias. 

 

Professor Patrick Henry Winston (at MIT) mentioned the fact about machines being able to tell their stories one day. 

 

That, in itself, if done accurately is a big accomplishment.

 

Let’s understand why – in the age of artificial intelligence or so they call it, there is a black box which has the result, the input and a bunch of neural nodes, every time making sure that the result matches the criteria which makes the result fitting. The real question is, no one knows how the nodes worked among themselves to process the input so that the result matches the criteria. Every time that happens – we have just got the nodes, the expected criteria and the input – what we hope every time which comes as a result – is always aligned and befitting to returns. Well, yes true – but not always and not forever. Over a period of time, this result would change and gradually, it will go off the criteria of success to failure, the only effort is to make sure that inflexion point doesn’t exceed the expected offset of returns vs expenditures. In order to make sure that happens, someone should be able to write the critical decision points leading to the result and make sure that those decision points are not bypassed by any means in near future while running neural processing on the data involved. That’s exactly where the story telling comes into picture. 

 

Now, where does bias come into play here. Let’s go back for a second to the drawing board here. Every decision is an individual’s interpretation of what is right and wrong with some mathematics to it & his confidence on a broad set of experiences in sub-conscious. Whenever a decision is taken in a situation where a group is involved, human tendencies make it easy for the group to interconnect and start influencing the decision within the group one way or another. Imagine a classroom where a group of students, maybe some chosen few regard someone’s abilities to be superior as compared to others. Another example is a party of few people where almost always some are backing each other up. Group influence and bias created because of a few people supporting each other is very common and sometime with improper governance leads to decisions which, seem to be, for general benefit but are actually influenced to serve a few and can lead to crackled decisioning in turn inducing bad bias over the long run. 

 

How to solve this? 

Ever heard of anti-patterns, well, let’s take an example. In the above situation – wherein in a classroom with 10 presentations, 2 got applauds by 30% of the students and other 8 were just liked. A survey done later found that one presentation out of 2 was good, but then out of the other 8, 2 were good as well but were lacking the applauds. If there was an antipattern which was introduced to judge the presentations on merely the structure and content, rate them and then show them to audience without the presenter details, that would have caused a clean decision to come but in the absence of this technique, another way is to start taking that bias into consideration and ask questions, not so much on why the 2 were good but why the other 8 were not so good. That’s an anti-pattern, starting to reverse question and change ownership so that there is an anonymity and a set of decisioning parameters which keep the overall decision clean. 

 

Another example let’s take a behavioral approach, in a group, there is always situations where conformance plays an important role, if there is a question and a number of people presenting points, which points are taken or supported plays a critical role in group dynamics of agreement. What happens to this, when a few answer a question and support response of few and negate others. Let’s say, there are 3 people who always support each other out of 10 in group and only 4 or 5 speak in that group when a point is debated. It’s very easy to figure out that any agreement would in turn be agreement of the first 3 involved, other 2 being negated every time hence basically 7 others are quietly ignored. This is a bias which develops unknowingly or knowingly, humans deal with these biases by observing the pattern and changing the group to separate or remove those 3 participants to be in the same group or getting feedback from the rest (the quiet ones) on the decisions. This can be more dangerous if machines start to form groups which support each other, the issue becomes more complex when they can go in and out of groups and can change the overall dynamics in a way so that results are always confirming to their whims. In order to make sure that doesn’t happen, again antipatterns have to be introduced, a support which can look like a plausible supportive candidate which later withdraws to make sure that the pattern doesn’t influence any decisions is key to making this whole process streamlined in doing the right thing apart from making sure that the story is well written.

(PS: The thoughts in this article are completely my own and do not represent the thoughts of any organization or group).

 

Refle(ct)xions 2021…

Time has come where-in we try and visualize what this year has unfolded to us. As we leap our way forward into 2022, with the common aspiration of making it there, the difference lies only in the ways each of us would be navigating there. Some will have happiness & joy, celebrations raining & ringing into the countdown, others – memories which they had shared with their loved ones lost in the year that passed by & with a hope that this one goes by normally. No matter what the event(s) or memories, there’ll always be a common goal to – to get to 2022.

New year is the time for new resolutions – or is it? 

For me, the year started off with a continuous learning cycle – focusing on a new way of thinking – this was a great start to visualize & perceive an already existing phenomenon but less noticeable although having a larger impact when imbibed in the day-to-day culture of approach. Time has come to reflect a bit on it. Algorithmic thinking or thinking with the right level of detail is powerful in itself because it can carry the picture to move forward irrespective of what if any event might occur which might try to distort the objectives – short term or long term. This program ended post a 6-week session but for me, it kind of never ended as there were opportunities always to re-think and apply the methodologies to an existing process to make it more refined, it was, as some might call something which was continuous learning where the Lego blocks are purposely given to build the picture and see if there is a better one which is possible.  

This did bring to the realization – that we are living in a dynamic world, change is the only constant and learning to focus on that change from an individualistic purpose is not just learning for the sake of learning but learning to apply. You’ve got to ask that question again and again to yourself – 

   

• what is this learning going to do for me? 
• & have I got a way to measure the return on it? (which, also means how much you have applied it in the right way possible)

Which does bring back to the question – have we learnt anything from what happened in the year that unveiled a completely different picture to us? Well, to be frank, there will be those that are still passerby-s & say it was unusual and wait for it to get back to normal & there will be others who will acknowledge that life can change with an event which was never planned for correctly and try to find ways to plan it better but the fact remains – we are living in a dynamic world, events will happen and unfortunately technology has adapt to focus on those events and make them normalized for any type of anomaly which can occur. 

 

What does this mean to us? – For sure, one thing, we have to change our way of thinking, the way to move forward is probably not based on the methods & techniques of last two decades but is evolving to shape up for advancements many times more. In some ways it’s like a fission reaction – which needs the right amount of balance to continue forward and if not approach with intended phased governance processes might lead to levels of mammoth sink holes creating an overall imbalance. This might be a very high level perception but what does that mean for us – a) we have to acknowledge the fact that we are already past that time when only humans could be a part of working and decisioning process, which means we need to continuously start thinking on human-machine interaction, working hand in hand  & b) we need re-position our methodology to achieve a long term un-biased work expectation from a human-machine interaction, which also means going down to the extent at which machine comprehends and starts to decision in the right way.

 

Question is – how can we achieve this? 

Well, first step is to be aware – which might sound a bit confusing, but if we look at our everyday life, most of our day-to-day activities are based out of approach from the sub-conscious, but probably not laid out in the way that you could always clearly say or point to them in a stepwise fashion. 

 

Say for example – if we are going to a super-market to purchase food, we might be making a list of things needed but those are core-necessities and probably not linked to the complete picture of the diet, the probabilities of eating out or maybe having a scheduled overtime running out causing us to keep a stock of some more or less items than what we think might be needed. We try to adjust around the way what we bought more and never plan to bring the right stuff in first place. Well, if you had the steps and associations marked, this would have been easy & so would have been the permutation and combination for it. So, the basic question is to start thinking on the breakdown first, and to do that – it is essential to understand what constitutes a breakdown and what doesn’t (more on this later). This also involves – the heating and cooling cycles for an individual or group focusing on the activity at hand and imbibes into the bigger picture of activities which shape humanity – like the carbon footprint.

 

The second step is to understand what is essential and what is not & prioritize -  basics but often not followed as much. 

In this regard - I often like to use the terminology of grading experiments on ISS -  anything out of the plan and sweeping in - you've got to ask that question - is this a need, a want or a desire?

 - if it's a need - it's gotta be having a justification which may be return or essentiality focussed, for e.g. - drinking water.

- if it's a want - it's gotta be having some lower level prioritization, for e.g. - condiments.

- if it's a desire - then you might or might not wanna factor that into the plan, for e.g. - added bag of chips. 

 

At any point - it is critical & essential to factor in the what kind of a prioritization is coming in place for both a planned or un-planned item.

 

This past year – gave me an opportunity to dwell on some of these steps – to be aware – to understand what is key and what is changeable in terms of the day to day activities, to see if there was an opportunity to control or contribute to the overall picture (like the carbon footprint contribution) but most of all – the realization that considering the impact of what each one of us is consistently working on can never be completed until and unless we all have a common goal or goals and right governance in place.

 

(PS: All thoughts are my own and don't represent any organizational policies and procedures. References only to nasa ISS experiments grading system)

'Bias' - the unseen influencer in the digital world

Last post - we talked about the science behind social connection in the digital world, this post we are aiming to cover - 'bias' & to find out a vaccine for getting rid of it. 

Before we start discussing further - let's be clear - a vaccine is not a cure but an arrangement which prevents the load of the probability of a pathogen (like bias) from exceeding the capability to trigger a compensating immune response from the system in process of being infected & it will never be a constant configuration, vaccines undergo changes as the pathogen changes while striking a healthy asset - here - the mind of an individual.

Okay so now - that we've got the basics clear - let's dwelve into it deeper - before we start discussing about how to to remove bias let's try to understand how a bias can be triggered in action. 

What trigger's bias? (origin) - We in our conscious & sub-sub-consious world are subject to inherent bias developing from the content fed into us from our known senses - currently a major portion of this input comes in via digital means as our lifestyles have changed to undergo an acceptance positioning via the ability to allow digital inputs an easy pathway to the brain and add  a confidence factor associated with it. 

So first pattern to understand and break the bias off directly focusses on widening our sensory receptacle input points. 

How to do this? - well, start with :

1. Minimizing the digital input point to a factor which allows you time to develop & open other entry points.

    Safe reduction factor can be set at 30 - 40% of present digital input timeframe. This means putting a time limit to your access to digital devices - handhelds, mobile phones, laptops(web) or notifications. Some companies have started to give you a break-down of the scale of your digital input involvement by providing you a digital footprint summary - which helps. Limiting might be categorised into:

•  Social - includes any basic social communicating engine like the many available today including any shopping or dating engines too.
•  Web - includes content search which may be a component of blind surfing.
•  Video - includes aimless video watching which can contribute to reinforcement of useless patterns.

The entry and exit from from these content sources should be optimised often on.

2. Expanding your sensory input points - try getting information from sources which provide a more active    real and enhanced point of input of content - like for example going to the place where an event happened, talking to the person face to face, meeting with the individual - whenever possible than going for a chat via a web interface. The small talk communication engines have been developed with a view to keep it small & start feeding in wrong input to the brain once the time frame is extended. This doesn't apply to work as - work oriented communications are very focussed so control points are inherently activated. Although when using chat which is asynchronous communication point for an activated discussion can lead to human brain putting in an assumption based on bias, hence more communication drop & greater chance of confidence drop out & before you know - bias is doing it's magic already.

3. Expanding your input from sources - whenever there is a bias, a good way to approach to resolve it is to look forward at both points of view. If it is content related bias - an easy resolution is to look at both parties for the content and against it and understand the logical positioning involved. The worst kind of situation is where a pathogen utilises sub-consciously infected brain already injected with a bias for a prolonged period of time. This can lead to quick decisioning overlooking the details and hence lead to either a negative injunction of an action which can cause serious harm - well - psychoanalysts can go on & on this for a long time but essence of it is - it needs to be stopped before it can start doing what it likes to do.

Lastly but definitely not the least be aware of the pattern - mostly called for lack of a better name as analytical sleeper pattern - wherein a person or algorithm can blindly be a part of injecting the content which contains pathogen to create an impending bias, most of the times the algorithm or person is unaware and small unnoticed  actions can lead to a group being on the receiving end of this journey. Again - human developed content can still be questioned, analysed & thought over but if the content created was a work of an algorithm driven by a human - it can be difficult to perceive or question back with exact tenacity.

Last - but not the least - we are living in a world - where there is a human mind & a digital mind at play - so the idea here is to make sure - the digital minds works to get the humans serviced in the right direction and not other way round. Any content which doesn't define a positive purpose in long term fails and leads to a virtual value proposition in future. More on this in the next post ... keep those analytical thinking cells alive until then!

New learnings from the ongoing fight against

Over the last couple of days, a lot has happened, which has caused many to be worried, sad, anxious, adaptive & cautious as the new strain of virus spreads. But the most important thing which has happened is:

•  It has caused people to come out of their comfort zones and 'think', think on a lot of aspects like - dependencies, supply chains, contingency plans, essentials & most important - how to keep the economy going.

Mankind's enemy is but their own thoughts & the thing that this situation created was 'focus' - to solve one problem - get out of this situation quick and fast - everybody was focussed on that and working together to resolve this issue. The non-essential noise factor went down and people thought & talked sense & came together as one nation, one humanity to solve the problem at hand. 

Innovation sprung out of the minds to get out stuff quickly which works, but coming back to the act of thinking which has been very much absent from a long time. 

A house we built will 

Countries' dependency on other countries, ability to ramp up production during a crises.

Consumer value - ability to make sure you are getting the value of the product you are buying. 

Ability to track 

The science behind social connection...

Had chance to catch a breath between the run & long since I posted so giving it a write.. 

Whenever we talk of social media and social connection, we are presented with this lucid picture of:

• a bunch of posts 
• a bunch of likes
• comments
• followers  

Although when looked at, these are just tools to collect  information in order to create an 'engine' which can help drive a bigger vehicle.

So what's this vehicle we are talking about - let's explore a bit... & I dare forbid myself to use the word - intelligence or anything but what it means once we claim it is still artificial.

Humans for long have loved the idea of being a point of focus .. and the whole picture which is shown to you is the interaction which tries to gauge - 'what people say or think about you or how you present yourself to others or how they present to you' and this is what forms the basis of human to human behaviour. 

Behaviour - is something which gives a prediction of a person or a group of persons approach based on a situation. Analysing behaviour via interaction between different groups of connected people via social media is the basis of understanding how that behaviour functions within a group. 

It's simple math sometimes whereas at other times it's complex. A behaviour pattern can form gradually within a group and might take some time to be consistent but one thing is certain, after subjecting a group or person to a similar situation multiple number of times the behaviour becomes somewhat predictable.

So how does this work? 

Well, for one in the start - a situation is created by the person themselves by expressing a view and later there would be a reaction to the view, the more reaction, the better prediction. In an active group, with a high reaction quotient, it might be fairly easy to predict an outcome of a situation by predicting a series of behaviour driven reactions of people in the group. On another hand, in a relatively inactive group, it might again be fairly easy to predict the behaviour of the group by predicting the outcome of a situation affected by the few active participants. These are basically the easily predictive realms of a group.

Well, what does that mean? It means that in a group which can be easily predicted is good to be eligible for 2nd stage in group dynamics & that's called as situational control - wherein you create a situation to control the group behaviour - this is the reverse of the first phenomena where the probability of accuracy  factor and confidence is high.

Any engine which can do the above math correctly can be used to inject situations to create highly probabilistic outcomes, and thereby in due course of time can go into the 3rd stage which is injecting behaviours.

How does injecting behaviour work?  This in turn starts to give in a situation and feed data with respect to a situation to drive the behaviour not of an individual but of the group as a whole and in turn start creating a ripple affect, it works silently on the subconscious level and before the group is aware - its already reacting in accordance with the injected behaviour.

This kind of behaviour injection coupled with an intelligent engine can be used in a reverse feedback loop to guide the engine to decision based on best statistical and actual data available considering the probability of behavioural outcome confidence for a group.

Well, now it's starts getting interesting - doesn't it? Probably when you realise a machine can start controlling the way a heard or a group reacts and you start to understand the dynamics involved as to why you need to think quickly and try to interject that pattern - voila - here's comes the need of something called as - 'neurallink' & breaking patterns.

What are breaking patterns? Well, talked about patterns of group behaviour which are easily predictable but some groups are dynamic with the individual subjects establishing a random pattern of activity which can cause the probabilistic confidence levels to skew often, that's one breaking pattern. I really find breaking patterns as very interesting because in any intelligent pattern formation breaking patterns can be used both to control as well as to reform the thought pattern of a group. We will explore this probably in my next post. Also, since we didn't go through any examples, we can discuss some examples & how we can throw in security enabling patterns within a group dynamic of social interaction.

Memorial day post ...a new beginning, looking into the future!

Hope everyone's had a great memorial day weekend.

It's been a complete month & bit quiet out here so thought would pen down some points floating on my mind around new research, will try not to talk about the virus as everyone's already talked a lot..

Okay - so research & innovation go hand in hand, we as humans' have been a very focussed race towards innovating & solving complex challenges around flexibility to develop faster & market to consume effectively. Our focus though has shifted time to time on prioritizing for cost to market rather than on innovating for which we all have and would be paying the price in future but for now - let's talk about pure reduction in time to market...

A couple of fascinating projects that are those involving microgravity.

Well, we have a launch which is very much near for a manned mission to ISS using Dragon capsule but more interesting is the series of experiments which are basically involved with it.

So one thing - which we all have experienced during this virus pandemic is that ability for humans to comprehend a pathogen quickly relies on a large number of factors, one being the fact that any attempt to comprehend would be accomplished only within the limitations of the gravity scenario in play for earth.

Now what does that mean? - inspite of having supercomputers and intelligence which can pair up and sequence the RNA strands and create models to mimic the virus behaviour quickly, there is a sequence process towards development of any drug  which can be released into the market with confidence - which undergoes a set of steps - discover & development, pre-clinical research, clinical trials, government review & then on approval - manufacturing. This whole process in itself takes from a couple of months to a couple of years depending on the kind of drug for a disease or for that matter even a vaccine.

But how does space solve this problem?  - well, the answer is not space, it's micro-gravity.

How does microgravity change the flexibility around releasing a drug? - it's believed that micro-gravity - induces the ageing affect on humans, the reason being since our bodies are very much adapted to gravity, the body functions start to deteriorate at a faster rate with micro-gravity environments.

How does that help? - well, scientists have been able to synthesise protein compounds which can mimic our organ functions on nano scale level - like for e.g. - a small kidney or liver which doesn't look like one - but functions like one, it has all the characteristics and deteriorates, reacts and works in close fashion to our actual kidney or liver.

But how will this speed up development of drug? - well, to speed up development of drug - we need to understand fully the effects of the drug over different age groups over a long periods of time, micro-gravity helps to reduce the time factor here only if those people with different age-groups are in space and for that we have something called as  micro-physiological systems or organs on chips or tissue chips which are sent into space in the capsule as experiments which can then be studied for effects of drug and then examined for results. This shortens the time of approval of the drug and also reduces the cost & spending to that research which might not be needed and focusses attention to research which would be critical for usability of the drug.

Space Health Technologies are all about working on micro-gravity environments to get the intended results quicker.

Another useful experiment is the study of how the the deep space missions will impact human health by studying the human tissues and behaviour when subjected to long periods in space.. we will talk about this later.. but for now I just want to highlight how much of innovation is still in progress and there are endless possibilities here.

What we learn from this crises & the way it is being handled...

Time has been moving very slowly for most of us with the current situation of virus impacting more than 203 countries at the time this post was written, but if you look from the other side time has been moving quite fast for any measures adopted to either stop the virus in entirety or containing the spread because of the nature of this invisible enemy.

Before I talk about the learnings.. I would want to take a moment and say 'Thank You!!' to all the heroes who are at the front-line fighting this pandemic which includes - all the healthcare workers (doctors, paramedics, all medical staff), pharmacists, police officers, food suppliers, shops owners, production workers, government officials, firefighters, naval guard, army & the many more who are putting their lives in the line to keep the everyone safe & the country running.

It is war & these people are no less than war heroes.

Tough times bring in tough people to test & they teach us a lot.

What did I learn from these times (well, a lot) but I wanted to share 2 key points..

No matter how difficult the situation is, it cannot be resolved until everyone works together.. the doctors & paramedics don't choose who they want to work with or what kind of ailment they want to attend to.. they just get there and start working, they are working for everyone & working together towards one cause, which is going to make a difference.

Everyday people like us, go into their jobs and then some of us have the luxury to say - 'I don't like to work this person' or 'their work is useless' and start complaining, well sorry, it's good no one like that is there on the front lines today, because if that was happening - we were never going to win it. We should learn to work together.. and we don't do it most of the times, being learned & intelligent we forget common sense. I strongly believe each person has something to contribute, we just need to be good at understanding what they can do & push them, that's the difference between leaders who 'matter' and others who are just leaders.

Again, all these efforts of the people at the front line are complimented by the people who are following the guidelines of social/physical distancing... again 'working together'.

The other learning which was significant was that when a person is fighting the war with the invisible enemy ... there comes a point when they need assistance which can be in terms of equipment or drugs which help them to fight the virus but in the end, it's their immune system which works to get the body rid of the disease. The equipment, drugs or the staff could help in getting them fight it but if their immune system doesn't respond at the end, it doesn't matter, so having an immune system which responds is very crucial.

Many firms start with an idea or a concept & forget to develop a strong immune system .. when a company faces critical times, it's their own immune system which is the core capability and interface framework (around it)  which leads it to make it excel among competitors... you are fighting the war of competition & tools either outsourced or third party may be good enablers but if the company doesn't have core interface points which enable the firm to interact with those tools efficiently, they would soon loose that battle of opportunity, it might just be a matter of time. Core framework with components for each area built with security in mind keep the firm ahead of the opportunity providing it the means to position response in the right direction.

The other great thing to notice is that when it's war, the enemy doesn't care who you are, its sole purpose is just to exploit your weakest point and use that as opportunity to win, Now the question is when that happens, is the firm going to allow it to do so or not. Completely depends on everyone working towards a common goal & having a strong backbone behind.

Nature always tries to teach, it's upon the human to understand or just ignore it, the choice is always there, learning from it is upon us.