Overview: Digital Transformation

By the end of this tutorial, you will have built a fully functional food ordering bot using our new feature: the Bot Builder. Bot Builder helps you design complex flows for your bots quickly and easily

today’s news outlets are all in a no-win situation where they are forced to contribute to the causes of their own demise to survive... well-meaning people try to “fix” the news. But instead, those methods erode trust in all news outlets... You can draw a straight line from the bad incentive structure forced upon news outlets to the unprecedented d…

... fears about how changing technology is affecting the quality of information and the state of our democracy. ... heated debate about the role and size of tech platforms and the extent to which their activities should be regulated. Artificial Intelligence (AI) takes over from mobile as the hottest topic in technology...Expect widespread innovati…

For content curators, adding a CuratorBot on Facebook Messenger is a no-brainer. The alpha testing launched in late December was useful, resulting in a whole bunch of tweaks, as described in this post for Chatbot Magazine.

The European Training Foundation asked a partner and I to help them map out a digital transformation strategy. Through running workshops and interviewing staff in a highly structured process, we are currently developing actionable change management recommendations to steer them towards a more efficient and innovative use of digital tools. The proj…

Most of us aren't futurists, and futurists aren't oracles. They simply try and make some sense of what's coming—not hard and fast predictions, just possibilities.... there are a few ways companies can get better at predicting not just what changes may be around the corner, but how they'll affect them once those disruptions arrive. Making everyone…

deep learning... is the reason we’re on the brink of a more general intelligence... essentially one algorithm (with many minor variants) that can adjust its own structure to solve a problem, directly from whatever massively large data set you feed it... we’re seeing extremely narrow systems right now is because they’re extremely useful... we are …

It’s not about bots. It’s not about artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing ... It’s about solving a problem for your customer... Stop building bots, start building experiences... Nobody uses and returns to your product or service because it’s a bot, an app, or a website. They return because you’re s…

As IoT grows, the need for distributed computing becomes an absolute necessity... fog computing, distributed AI and parallel stream processing... both data and compute-intensive, and they don’t cope well with centralized infrastructure... A distributed network of computers managed by blockchain and smart contracts can create a shared economy wher…

cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg explores how work schedules, behavioral rituals, and writing environments affect the amount of time invested in trying to write and the degree to which that time is spent in a state of boredom, anxiety, or creative flow... High-intensity noise that exceeds 95 decibels disrupts performance on complex tasks b…

One of the primary reasons to get teams together has to do with the hardwiring of the human brain... Building trust is a multisensory experience... Only when people are physically present together can they use all of their senses to establish that needed trust. Without a bond, conflict or disengagement can more easily arise and is more difficult t…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

Facebook’s application for Patent 0350675: “systems and methods to identify objectionable content.” ... filed in June 2015, describes a sophisticated system for identifying inappropriate text and images and removing them from the network... improve the detection of pornography, hate speech, and bullying... much easier to identify than false news s…

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

a new contract where the focus of consulting support doesn’t fall so much on prompt responses (“I have the answers and come to tell you what to do”) as on the facilitated co-creation and dissemination of new operational models (“I’ll use my experience to accelerate your ability to learn and change) ... Only under this condition digital transformat…

founders of the Hub Institute in Paris, have just released a manual (in French) The guide to Digital Transformation... a useful and simple way for every company to measure its progression, with prioritized steps to follow in order of degree of maturity, as well as defining the next stages to undertake.

most deployments fall into the ‘deploy and pray’ category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. He argued that some kind of paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Business coaching to a media startupOne of the smallest, yet sweetest, projects of 2016 was helping specialist online media Borderlexrethink its business and relaunch its website. Coaching ranged from overall business model right down to the nuts and bolts of social media promotion, engagement and monitoring.

Where are companies at in their digital transformation efforts?... I define iteration as doing the same things better. Innovation is doing new things that unlocks new value for your customers. Only one of those can lead to disruption, which is doing new things over time that make the old things obsolete.

my research team’s analysis of data from Columbia University’s Emergent rumor tracker suggests that this misinformation is just as likely to go viral as reliable information... limiting news fakers’ ability to sell ads... a step in the right direction. But it will not curb abuses driven by political motives... Using BotOrNot, our colleagues found…

Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the tu…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. ... very like being in the Matrix but with less kung fu and more Polly Toynbee and Nigel Farage... here are a few of the things I’ve learned…

a lot of people don’t know fake news when they see it, sensationalized reports are more likely to go viral on social media than sane ones, and distrust of traditional (and genuinely more reliable) media sources is rising. Professor Nicole A. Cooke ... focusing on human information behavior, information literacy, and diversity in librarianship.... …

mainstream AI tools: machine learning and deep learning...lack an element that will be key to building the sentient machines ...

the most-coveted project planning tools include file sharing, time tracking, email integration and Gantt charts... using social media facilitates “small talk ... help build rapport and create a more nurturing, supportive, collaborative and trusting environment... dedicated Yammer newsfeeds in SharePoint, for example, can be useful for communicatin…

Let’s take a break from the Donald, Facebook and the end of democracy, and try to focus on what’s important.

If you think this election is insane, wait until 2020... technologies like AI, machine learning, sensors and networks will accelerate. Political campaigns get ... so personalized that they are scary in their accuracy and timeliness. The single most important factor influencing your voting decision is your social network… so you can bet that politi…

If we think closely about anger, we can begin to see why it is a stupid way to run one’s life... how a leader has to operate: forget about the strike-back mentality, and forge a future of warmth and partnership... He asks only, how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?