Category: Reading

Categories
Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: The Upside of Disruption

The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown by Terence Mauri.

The Upside of Disruption: The Path to Leading and Thriving in the Unknown by Terence Mauri

Terence is the founder of Hack Future Lab. He is a former Director at Saatchi & Saatchi and McKinsey, and columnist for Inc. Magazine’s Future Proof column. He is Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a visiting professor at both IE Business School in Spain and an Entrepreneur Mentor in Residence at London Business School.

Terence is introducing the “fail principle” and seeking to move organizations to relook at failure as a source of data and resilience. He sees failure as a source of innovation.

Organizational leaders who embrace this will not only survive disruption but leverage this for long?term value creation. Terence is sharing his key message of “unlearning” by stating “good leaders learn, but great leaders unlearn.”

So Unlearning must be a deliberate act by leadership. This including challenging assumptions, removing obsolete processes and introducing new behavioral models. The major obstacle to agility is the organization’s culture.

Continue reading “Latest Read: The Upside of Disruption”
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Generative AI in Action

Generative AI in Action by Amit Bahree.

Generative AI in Action by Amit Bahree

Amit holds an MSc in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Pune. He previously served as Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Avanade. He is also a co-author of Pro WCF: Practical Microsoft SOA Implementation. Today he serves as a Principal Group Product Manager for the Azure AI engineering team at Microsoft.

Generative AI in Action certainly provides a high-level roadmap for integrating Large Language Models into organizational enterprise environments. He is linking the “magic” of AI’s hype cycle with the demands of production architectures across diverse organizations.

This is not a “how to use ChatGPT” guide for non-technical users. This is however a good book for experienced software developers, architects, and data scientists who are new to AI. It explains the core concepts from scratch and provides a learning path sans PhD in mathematics. So, generating quick prompts from poetry to dinner recipes, the demands of building enterprise, scalable AI services is rather challenging.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Generative AI in Action”
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Digital Wellbeing

Digital Wellbeing: Empowering Connection with Wonder and Imagination in the Age of AI by Caitlin Krause.

Digital Wellbeing: Empowering Connection with Wonder and Imagination in the Age of AI by Caitlin Krause

Caitlin holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She is the Founder of Mindwise and teaches courses on digital wellbeing, technology, and storytelling at Stanford University. She has also advised Google, LinkedIn, the US State Department on leadership and experience design.

Instead of viewing technology as the typical “necessary evil” to avoid where possible, Caitlin conveys a position that digital tools can be amazing resources for human growth when implemented with positive intention.

Digital Wellbeing presents readers with the innovative notion that technology needs alignment and enrichment. Caitlin shares the idea of a “Digital Wonder” suggesting that in the age of Artificial Intelligence that we all have an opportunity to use technology to expand both inner and outer connections. There is a unique view that we leverage the new advancements in technology to bolsert our humanity.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Digital Wellbeing”
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Agents in the Long Game of AI

Agents in the Long Game of AI: Computational Cognitive Modeling for Trustworthy, Hybrid AI by Marjorie McShane, Sergei Nirenburg, and Jesse English.

Agents in the Long Game of AI: Computational Cognitive Modeling for Trustworthy, Hybrid AI by Marjorie Mcshane, Sergei Nirenburg, and Jesse English

Marjorie McShane is a cognitive scientist and computational linguist known for her work on cognitively inspired, trustworthy AI systems that can collaborate with humans in natural language. She is a professor in the Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and co-directs the Language-Endowed Intelligent Agents (LEIA) Lab.

Sergei holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics from Kharkov State University. Jesse holds a PhD in computer science, with a focus on language understanding from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is a senior researcher in the LEIA Lab, leading the development of content-centric intelligent agent architecture.

Together they work in related areas: knowledge-rich natural language processing, cognitive architectures, and language-endowed intelligent agents,

AI has relied traditionally on machine learning. The position by the authors is that for over thirty years machine learning development, it is not an all-purpose solution to building human-like intelligent systems. One hope for overcoming this limitation is hybrid AI: that is, AI that combines ML with knowledge-based processing.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Agents in the Long Game of AI”
Categories
Education Reading

Latest Read: Grokking Data Structures

Grokking Data Structures by Marcello La Rocca.

Grokking Data Structures by Marcello La Rocca

Marcello holds a MS in Computer Science from Università di Catania in Catania Italy. He is a former Full Stack Engineer at Twitter and then Microsoft, a former Senior Applied Research Engineer at Apple and today he is Principal Software Engineer at Luware.

Grokking Data Structures is a very engaging introduction to one of computing’s most foundational topics. This book as designed for readers with a basic understanding of Python. Marcello is easily establishing a base understanding of data structures via the Grokking theme of cartoons, real-world examples, and also hands on coding. The benefit for readers is a refreshingly approach to a complex topic.

So, rather than overwhelming readers with a very deep theory, Marcello is in fact guiding readers into the core, simple data concepts including arrays and linked lists. Then he is moving to advanced structures such as graphs and binary search trees. Each chapter is carefully written building upon the previous to ensure readers can fully understand data structures.

Continue reading “Latest Read: Grokking Data Structures”