Tag: Innovation

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Artificial Intelligence Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: How Smart Machines Think

How Smart Machines Think by Sean Gerrish. Sean is a Senior Engineering Manager at Google leading machine learning and data science teams. He holds a PhD in machine learning from Princeton.

How Smart Machines Think by Sean Gerrish

This book is providing readers with a wonderful overview to advances in artificial intelligence, and specifically how machine leaning is now the most popular subset of AI.

How Smart Machines Think is addressing three key areas that reveal the leaps in advancements of machine learning development: The DAPRA Grand Challenge, the Netflix recommendation engine, and Neural Networks.

Each section is well written, providing above all, deep insights tied to objectives driving new business models.

While Sean is certainly providing a solid grounding in algorithms and their methodologies, I was certainly surprised at the depth of autonomous vehicles, recommendation engines, and game-playing. The larger lessons from his book include amazing progress in neural networks.

Machine Learning for autonomous vehicles

Clearly Sean understands the full picture of how this emerging technology began. The 2004 initial contest found team only to achieve a small distance, perhaps less than twenty five percent of the course before their AI systems failed.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: How Innovation Works

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley. Matt is a British journalist best known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics in The Times. He holds a seat in the British House of Lords.

How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley

Matt is certainly writing against government regulation and big business across many established and emerging fields: energy, transportation, food, and computing. Regulation and big businesses are hampering innovation due to oversight. He also addresses early innovations including farming and taming animals including dogs.

Every chapter is certainly intriguing. Vast amounts of stories and historical facts drove each innovation. Matt obviously makes it certainly clear that innovation is within democratic countries where freedom allows for ideas to flourish, leading to inventions.

Chapter 2, focusing upon Public Health innovation certainly reminds the reader how vaccines developed to curb the loss of lives across many continents in our global history. A very refreshing chapter for our COVID era. On the other hand, this would be publishing in May 2020, at the beginning of our pandemic.

The first airplane

Chapter 3, Transport has a particularly great recollection of The Wright Brothers innovation. Unquestionably, this storyline is parallel to Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and reveals more details to the road both brothers took in finding success at Kitty Hawk.

Many readers will be captivated by the research Matt delivers in round after round of amazing stories of innovation not by the inventor, but rather by those who saw a vision of how inventions lay the foundation of innovations.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Scaling Up Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. This book is a wonderful, insightful read for today’s world. Robert Sutton continues to provide deep analysis for successful leaders. Those leaders in turn generate (and sustain) ideal performers. Coronavirus is challenging business to fundamentally re-think their core business model.

scaling up excellence

Scaling Up Excellence will help organizations understand how to embrace change faster and effectively in the short term. And short term as of mid April may be forecasting this into December 2020.

Let me begin with a new twist for business projects. Conduct a pre-mortem. Organizations conduct post mortems to discover where tasks failed. Sutton’s pre-mortem can drive project goals or reveal scope creep.

The key is dividing your team into two. One team will imagine project delivery as a success specifically down to the details. The second team takes the opposite road, also in great detail. Bring your teams back together and place all points on a whiteboard. Find your hits and misses in a new way and determine if your scope is accurate enough to deliver.

Scaling Up Excellence provides great case studies and academic research. From start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, education, non-profits, and healthcare. All benefit from pre-mortems.

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Blockchain Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Design Education Globalization Innovation IoT Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: Blockchain – Blueprint for a New Economy

When Melanie Swan’s book Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy written under the O’Reilly series was available I was eager to start reading. This is a thoughtful overview to the Blockchain. There is much to learn about the role of cryptocurrency and the blockchain but this is not the sole focus of her work.

Blockchain - Blueprint for a New EconomyMelanie, like Tapscott paints a wide brush across the Blockchain. Too similar to Tapscott perhaps? No. If the blockchain’s focus was just security then it would command a smaller, narrow focus on IT infrastructure. Yet Melanie provides a wider arena to learn how Blockchains especially in healthcare hold enormous possibilities.

My first book Don Tapscott’s The Blockchain Revolution was interesting. William Mougayar’s The Business Blockchain was better. My thirst for knowledge continues.This is possibly the best of the three at providing a deeper dive to the possibilities of a truly changing technology.

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Blockchain Cloud Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network OpenSource Reading Technology

Latest Read: The Business Blockchain

William Mougayar’s new book The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology provides a blueprint overview that compliments Tapscott’s Blockchain Revolution previously reviewed. Mougayar is able to specifically touch on the Blockchain’s architecture. Tapscott painted with a wide brush addressing everything possible with the Blockchain’s decentralized trust solution.
The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet TechnologyMougayar moves slightly forward addressing v 3.0 aimed at audiences wider than banking. A key view is that Blockchain will not just be for the enterprise. This will create a new crypto economy. It will be interesting to watch this grow. Care to take a live look? Here is the blockchain.info site.

He views the blockchain will revolutionize the roles of existing financial intermediaries including PayPal. Blockchains will force change upon them. They can adapt or die like the dinosaurs. Blockchains will disrupt oldschool, imperial organizations as the trust boundary shifts value away from them after hundreds of years.

Banks are clearly the key target of the blockchain infrastructure. To no surprise even the Federal Reserve has been given a blockchain briefing in June. The focus byMougayar beyond another blockchain overview is a breakdown of trust, obstacles and challenges to the Blockchain technology. The issue is much stronger in the financial services marketplace as Wall Street and international banks are now testing blockchains. He touches briefly implementing Blockchain technologies and closes by pushing the message of decentralization as a key in moving forward.

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