'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.

Dealing with an exponentially growing crises with technology...

Usually when a war like scenario arises there are 3 key parameters which decide the fate of victory:

• Strategy
• Tools
• Timing

There have many books written and many studies conducted from history & experiences which define how to fight a war with the right orientation in mind, but what happens when the enemy is invisible & comes in without any warning, maybe you are getting where I am going with this.

How do we fight a pandemic?

Earth currently has humans as the most intelligent species but from a complexity standpoint - we are level 1 species on the range scale of 1 & 5, where level 5 species can control their sun, atmosphere & to some extent drive their solar functions autonomously.

Focus is currently on how do we move to a higher level, let's start with identification & adaptation & this situation above is a great example to begin with.

Pandemics usually have one feature which is very basic to their definition, they are widespread, the speed and pace with which they advance is usually quite fast. The cost of their spread varies depending on the kind of damage they can cause, which changes the models of how to prevent them completely or adapt to the the ripple they create which stays in motion for some time before everything can restore back to normal. What makes a life form complex is the speed by which they can identify, track, emulate, strategise & take actions to prevent the event to shape into a pandemic & if it happens, take actions to adapt & minimise the effect of the same. Level 2 - life forms might be able to completely replicate environments which can be used to contain & continue life without any obstructions but there is some time before this can happen.

So the question is - how can we leverage technology to fight a pandemic, how can we counter a positive-sense single-stranded RNA genome, which has a capability of 2.5x of contagion & an exponential spread capacity with  40% more case scenario with a day of delay, so time is of crucial essence here.

The good thing about technology is that it is connected & present everywhere, which makes it to be utilised as a very powerful tool if used in the right context to combat the contagion accurately.

1) Minimising the impact - Giving tools to the mob to make sure they are working to a collective goal of minimising the spread. Apart from the human practising the social distancing approach, if their commonly used technical equipments are positioned to provide them with options of scheduling to limit the number of people in a place, this would work towards minimising the contagion. More apps built to work collectively & OS properties to notify a person to wait before they can approach an area would highly minimise the spread (thinking out of the box here is very crucial).

2) Traceability - The best place to track course of the enemy is to track the source of enemy carrier and what other means then the electronic equipment like a handheld or mobile used by the person. Voila - Internet of things - wasn't that supposed to be one of the useful tools we can apply here?
How many people get infected is directly proportional to the location where the person was and how many other device were close to that location (probable targets).

3) Enhanced reporting - The other aspect to this is reporting, not just on the number of the people infected or recovered but the kind of mechanisms which are being the cause of the spread, how do we delay or stop those mechanisms to cause further damage. At the end of this - there is always a cost, and sometimes - the hidden economic cost at a later point of time is bigger than the cost of preventing  the spread from speeding right now. Again, time is of essence, applying learning and modelling to evaluate the position of an area and taking proactive measures for containment & gathering data which confirms those measures are working is important.

Although, the situation might be appearing difficult as of now but the most important thing to remember is - we are all in this together and with the right tools & approach we will not only overcome this but also will be able to learn from this to position ourselves as a more evolved life form for any future global catastrophe or crises.

Notifications.... are they what they should be?

Just realised, it's been a month and there has been no posts so thanks the leap day... gives me some time to push the thought.. 

'Push Notifications' has always been a debated subject and a technology which although was invented with a perspective in  mind but has long been abused. 

If we look at the screen time readings on the average - it wouldn't be difficult to understand that we are expected to loose an year of time in 10 years wasted in just looking at those notifications(if replying to each notification, this time multiplies)  that come in every time - weather they are for news, updates on utility or social apps, which means that is the amount of time lost from the average life time which could have been spent in carrying out a more useful & productive activity maybe spending some time for recuperation or with the family or kids. The worst part is sometime the same news or activity is being notified to the consumer a number of times based on how many individual apps or subscriptions you are holding. 

I would call this the easiest way to barge in into somebodies' private space without even asking permission (some will argue but the point is not about arguing again, it's about coming out of the monolithic thinking and being creative).

Let's talk a bit more ... at the end of the day .. I need a push notification but at the same time I don't need it all the time, so who knows best when I need it... 'there you go' ... I probably need an assistant which does the following .. 

1) Understands my patterns of behaviour for particular notifications.

2) Confirms my patterns of behaviour for some notifications.

3) Give's me a single notification for  items which are on the same topic and also preserves' the choice for me to view it.

4) Give's me an upper limit on the time that I might want to spend on a notification.

5) Mark's notifications on messages which are more or less spam or just good to knows as non-essential and gives me an option to look at them after wards.

6) Not only groups notifications by type but by content and time. 

Most of the points above can be tackled via a good intelligent interface which is able to comprehend the needs well, a framework which guides on common principles but this is not done as a framework till now but is mostly given to developers to develop apps to realise the business opportunities which is a bit unfortunate. 

Not sure if any OS is working on this but ... this is something which was long needed, probably not from the business standpoint but more from effectiveness of use... quality standpoint... but seems like business' don't care they just want clicks at the end even if product usability drops down the line.

Does your product have ears, eyes, mouth & nose?

Are we talking about human's here? Before building any product - the few questions that come to my mind are:

1. What is the unique or  distinguishing feature of this product?
2. Does it have the flexibility to adapt?
3. Is it able to measure itself over a period of time?
4. Is is reaching out to the right people in the right way?
5. Is it able to perceive when things might go wrong?

Let's understand what is meant above here by some examples first.

Consider the development of touch enabled phones - if you look at any phone today, it is touch-enabled, it wasn't so maybe a decade back but one concept, one idea & thought forward changed the perception.

Now consider another example here - the early operating system days - someone in earlier point in time said - let's not re-invent the wheel, this is when new operating systems were coming up, so gradually we kept to few good ones, which are still being used today. Each company developing those operating systems had an opportunity going forward - to make the OS refined and better.
A lot of work has been done to make the OS more refined & optimised & so has the effort to put the hardware at par with the software but some of basic usability features still loom in each OS like for example -

Download - still in a browser allows you to save to 'downloads' - no matter what browser is being used, there is no program in the OS to pick the file and push it to a location which matches the place where you intend to use it (well, now we are talking about a neatly stacked file system).

Any ideas here? well, consider the laundry routines - you just got a bunch of clothes, wouldn't it be nice if the clothes were sorted for you & you wouldn't have to sort them out yourself. Vala -- that's where the intelligent operating system comes in place.
  -- It knows over a period of time what goes where, gives you a one time interface and does your file moving for you.
  -- Next piece is the desktop,  I know always cluttered with everything that is needed - the software will look at the files there as well & push them to the location where they need to go.

A software which enables this feature will be able to monitor & enhance itself over a period of time, as long as it has the right variables monitored.

Now let's take it to the next level - a conversation with your OS: "Can you download top 5 articles on nature photography and update them to my photography project?"

This should be possible with the system learning how I use it, what photography project means to me & how I would be able to pick it up later in order to continue my work on it.

So the system knew - I was talking about 5 articles from x, y & z sites, I was talking about forests & animals when I said nature, I was talking about my photography - 2020 folder & my blog suitcase app when I said project & I was talking about the system giving a rank for each feature for the articles for the processing it needs to do before I can pick the articles up.

Now that's what I would call a breathing system - has a small mind of it's own & somewhat knows what it's doing - that might be called 'intelligent'.

Hope it gives an idea in terms of what a product should be in the near future..

Why blending AI enabled droids in workforce is critical at this juncture..

Happy New Year to all.. 2020  - seems to be an adequate place to start a conversation where AI enabled tools can be included in the workplace to work alongside as peers to help ensure fairness & accuracy in evaluation at each step of a companies major portfolio's.

Before going into the 'how', let's talk about the 'why' & how these why's are emerging now.

Let me start with an example of a scenario similar to what I saw in a couple of cases while working & discussing events at different organisational workplaces.

Consider a scenario wherein a there is a person who works with dedication never gets acknowledged - let's say in current tech world, one techie develops and application but the moment development completes the people who had no to little input in that development jump in and take the credit. 

Or another scenario - wherein a techie person who solves a problem by jumping into the code and fixing it gets no credit instead they get pulled into more places where problems exist & expectation is they will solve it but the credit in the end goes to a person who is the front face of the talk.

With all the policies of fairness in place & rules against workplace ethics, still educated humans use the tools when & where to their little advantage. Many techie Jesus's die each year to let a person who doesn't do the actual work take the credit & this is not uncommon in workplace tactics. Plus there are other places where community favouritism & personal talk are given more importance than the judging someone based on the amount of work done right. One can argue either ways but business alway's suffer's in the long run & the company or product takes the hit eventually or the customers which are using the product.

This results in loss of creative productivity & eventually building a product which needs to be rebuilt but is always behind the timeline in terms of its build quality with modern trends. All this is money & experience gone down the drain in time. 

That explains the 'why', now let's talk about the 'how'.

If an AI tool or assistant is put in place to measure the quantity & quality of work being done which proves to be beneficial in the long run - then a correct judgement can be made for the credit which then would probably go to the techie Jesus who was crucified - but don't worry - the knaves will eventually find out a mechanism to bug this too. 

Anyways' let's target on the savings right now. So how we do this - 

1. Providing code review by an AI assistant & alternating the review with human reviewers.

2. Providing a performance review using an AI assistant, let the assistant set goals and perform the review, then that review will be alternated or cross checked with human inputs.

3. Providing mechanism to monitor login-logout times and work done using the tracking mechanisms in place.

4. Let humans work alongside AI assistants to do pair programming and then decide if the person is correctly using the logic or has a long term thought.

5. Use AI analytics alongside human analytics to understand if the quality of feature makes sense in long run.

6. Use business focussed AI assistants to give insights on the long term functionality from a business perspective from time to time and change the goals or stories to accommodate the same.

In these scenarios' a technical lead would be an inspiration and would develop leaders than being just a sampler of picking up all the good things and blaming the negatives on another member of the team. Eventually we want to get to a point where the team as a whole functions in a way to be productive, some variation would always be there but algorithms which would focus on key variations suggesting bias like for example - 

1. if more people are going out of the team.

2. newly inducted members in the team don't stay too long.

3. a low level of morale within the team.

would immediately trigger an alert to examine the processes of that team more deeply.

This is just one of the scenarios where going into a world with intelligent data analysis being used actively in processes would get the business to turn-around faster & excel in their areas.

But the important bit here is not to over do it...