The Impact Of Artificial Intelligence

Gone are the days when Artificial Intelligence belonged to the realm of hardcore scientific technology. Today, it happens to be an integral segment of daily operations and day-to-day life. From the retail space to crime investigations, AI has revolutionized various sectors across the globe. We all have come across spam filtering and voice recognition systems. Those using iPhones are well acquainted with Siri, the personal voice assistant.

In a nutshell, AI has been there for a long time, and it is revolutionizing various aspects of human life and how! Here’s a short account of how Artificial Intelligence systems and technologies are taking human lives to the next level!

Focusing on the future

We just can’t deny our advancements towards technology and innovation. The time isn’t far when computerized robots would replace human workforce. We already have chatbots serving us, and that gives us crystal clear ideas of automated technologies. The prime focus is on the future and how AI can create opportunities for further development!

1. Chatbots in retail space

Customers will always want to get personalized experiences. While associating with a brand, they will want the company to understand their requirements, needs, and preferences. Chatbots collect crucial data about consumers thus creating endless opportunities for data analytics. Brands get the chance to create personalized products for consumers thus maximizing their revenues to a great extent.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence, chat bots and smart assistants have transformed the retail space completely. Even if you shop online, you can be sure of getting unmatched experiences.

2. AI powered financial advisors

Some of the companies are leveraging AI systems in a never-seen-before way. By extracting and analyzing historical data sets, they are learning about their customers’ investment decisions. Based on these reports and data, they are making meaningful assumptions thus offering the best investment opportunities to clients.

Digital financers are getting the chance to understand a person’s financial credibility thus offering the best assistance to him.

3. Empowering the general workforce

If you are operating in the service arena, you will need to know whether you are getting the right price for your service. AI systems and strategies have empowered service professionals, thus helping them know their true worth. With the help of Artificial Intelligence, employees can find out whether they are underpaid or get the right remuneration. The consequences are beneficial for both the employer and employees, as a satisfied workforce delivers unmatched performances.

4. Weather predictions

AI software and systems can come up with precise weather predictions. Individuals will get clear ideas of weather conditions in a particular place, which will help farmers to a great extent. That’s not all; with prior notifications about bad weather conditions, aircrafts can identify dangers and fly safely.

5. Increased security

No matter where you are, you can always play the careful vigilante. Whether it’s your home or office, AI systems will help you keep them safe and secure. You simply don’t need to worry about home safety, as smart security systems powered by Artificial Intelligence will do the needful.

AI systems have become a prime requisite for homes, commercial units, and business enterprises. With such remarkable footprints as of now, it won’t be wrong if we say that Artificial Intelligence is here to make lives better!

How Does A Chat Bot Work?

Chatbots make it easier for people to communicate with businesses.

Think of it as a replacement for all of the apps you have downloaded. Instead of opening the Airlines app, chatbot could tell you your flight’s delayed, another chatbot from FedEx could tell you your package is on the way, and so on.

Chatbots allow you to search for the info in natural conversational language as compared to search engines where you will have to input not so natural ‘keywords’.

These bots will fill a role of being both useful and promotional for Brand’s Facebook pages where they already put lot of efforts on customer engagement. Bots will take it to the whole another level.

• Hey, what’s up?
• How’re you doing?
• How do you do?
• Hello!

Anything familiar in these sentences?

They all are some or the other variation of a greeting message.

How do you respond when someone asks you one of the above questions?

You respond, typically like – I am good, how about you?

Some other day you might respond as – I am fine, thanks for asking.

This is exactly how Chat Bots work. A typical Chat Bot maps a sentence into a so called intent which in this case is the greeting intent. With every intent are associated a set of responses. The bot picks up one of these responses and sends it back to the user. This is done so as to give a more natural feel to the bot by avoiding sending the exact same response again and again.

Platforms like Facebook has given developers access to Chat SDKs that allow them to build interactive experiences and bots for interaction, shopping, booking travel etc.

Following are few capabilities of these platforms :

1. Send/Receive API. This includes the ability to send and receive text, images, and other rich content with CTAs.

2. Generic Message Templates. People definitely prefer to tap buttons and see beautiful images, rather than learning new difficult ways to interact with your bot. That’s there are structured messages with call to actions, horizontal scroll, urls, etc.

3. Welcome screen + Null state CTAs. Developers can think of the message thread as their own app. There are tools available to customize the experience. This starts with the welcome screen. People discover featured bots and enter the conversation. Then, they see your brand, your Messenger greeting, and a call to action to “Get Started”.

4. Natural Language Assistance : The Wit – landing Bot Engine of Facebook enables ongoing training of bots using sample conversations. This enables you to create conversational bots that can automatically chat with users. This helps you to build bots much easily. You just have to tell what your user said, the engine will tell you what your bot should do next.

5. Bot continuously gets smarter as it learns from conversations it has with people.

What is the AI involved?

The element of Artificial Intelligence comes in during the intent recognition. The bot is supposed to take a look at the words and possibly their arrangement in order to figure out what the intent is. This can be done in multiple ways like:

• Simple word mapping: words like hi, hello, what’s, etc can be mapped to the greeting intent. However, this is quite inaccurate because ‘hello, who the hell are you?’ doesn’t quite sound like a greeting 😛
• Machine Learning: if you are familiar with Machine Learning, you would be able to easily identify that the above problem is a supervised learning based classification problem. In simpler words, the problem at our hand is as follows – you are given a bunch of sentences and the corresponding intent against them. Now, you are given a new sentence and you need to classify it as belonging to one of the intents. This problem can be solved using a number of ways. The simplest way would be to use a Naive Bayes based implementation. In this implementation, we convert the sentence into a vector of numbers. The corresponding intents are also given ‘codes’ to identify them numerically. This input is fed to a training algorithm which learns how to classify these sentences. Later on, the trained model can be used to classify new sentences (if it has been trained well). Over time, it can be retrained with fresh data so as to make it learn better.

A more complex Machine Learning approach will involve training a multi-layer artificial neural network which is almost sure to give far better accuracy.

Once the intent has been identified, the bot can pick up one of the answers corresponding to the intent.

In simpler terms

• Your knowledge base or CMS is the database of information that is used to seed your chatbot with the information needed to respond to your users’ questions
• The data store captures data on your users’ activities and whether or not your chatbot was able to match their questions or prompts with an adequate response
• Natural Language Processing translates users’ free form questions into information that can be mapped in real-time to find or formulate appropriate responses
• Finally, the chat apps shown in the schema above — e.g., Facebook Messenger, Slack, Whatsapp, etc. — are the interface through which users access and interact with your bot

Once up and running, a chatbot requires a training period, during which the system “learns” how to best match users’ questions to appropriate responses. The more interactions, the more data,  the faster the chat bot learns and the more quickly you’re able to provide a high-quality experience for your users.

What is the Design Thinking Approach?

Embracing designing thinking means understanding that the customer is a real person with real problems, rather than a sales target. Instead of traditional market-research data, design thinkers dig for data that are user driven and offer a deep understanding of a customer’s sophisticated needs. Design thinking helps reframe questions in a way that expands the boundaries of the search itself.

“Big businesses can be really offensive, demanding a level of efficiency that is good for today but bad for tomorrow. The pressure is relentless, but the battle is often uninspired.”

The need is to inculcate a way of thinking that can spur inspiration and innovation even in the most traditional of workplaces. It is called design thinking, and it’s simply a different approach to problem solving. Design thinking nurtures creativity, which is not as random as you think.

Let us take the example of Procter & Gamble who were hellbent on improving detergents used to clean floors. That particular focus was limiting. Design thinking pointed out them to a better answer, a better mop. And hence was born the unique Swiffler.

It is all about structured brainstorming, which uses the data collected during the discovery phase as input, then converts output into something valuable.

Design thinking works to make marketplace testing practical by engaging customers in the act of building a new product. You need to create as vivid an experience as possible. You are engaging the customer to get at their needs. It is not a dress rehearsal. Unlike traditional marketplace thinking, design thinking expects to get it wrong. You experiment and then you figure out why it works or not. The goal is to fail early to succeed sooner. Actively look for data that proves the product will not work. It is valuable information for saving money and zeroing in on how to make products that do work.

“Design Thinking” is a design methodology primarily branded by the product design firm IDEO. It consists of both a process and a set of values.

The process is generally defined to be:

1. Observe: This phase is dominated by “needfinding,” a process by which designers go out and observe users participating in activities that inform the area in which you are designing. This can include just observing, or interviews.

2. Understand: Analysis of the data collected through observation, attempting to understand the user’s deeper motivations, feelings and values.

3. Define: Define a point of view (POV) on the problem, that directs your understanding of what you are trying to design.

4. Ideate: This generally consists of a variety of brainstorming techniques to come up with new ideas.

5. Prototype: Build out ideas in a physical form.

6. Test: Bring your prototypes to users to get feedback to revise and adjust your prototypes.

Design thinking dispels the belief that only someone special can part the seas and create like the “Moses Myth.” It arms even the most traditional thinker with ways to blossom creatively. Those include tools that allow to see possible future conditions to journey mapping that is nothing but assessing things through the eyes of a customer.

Another well-recognized image of design thinking is the brainstorm, complete with post-it notes and whiteboards. The list of “brainstorming rules” often used by design thinkers is as follows:

1. Defer Judgement: This is the grand poo-bah of brainstorming rules in a design thinker’s mind.

2. Quantity over quality: Hand in hand, rather than try to come up with the BEST idea, just go for whatever comes to your mind.

3. Encourage wild ideas: Write down everything, even the wacky ideas that would never work (you never know what would spur someone else).

4. One conversation at a time: Don’t talk over each other, read out your ideas, and listen to what others are saying.

5. Build on the ideas of others: Intake ideas and keep the useful ones.

6. Warm-up: start with a small exercise to get people’s minds working.

7. Visualize it: Don’t write it, draw it. (see above in the “be visual” value)

8. Provide focus: this is where the POV (point of view) becomes useful – by focusing your brainstorm to come up with good ideas.

So, the question you should ask yourself is: ” What is design for you? The way it looks or the way it works.”

Google’s New Initiative

ARCore is a platform for building augmented reality apps on Android. It utilises three defining technologies to integrate virtual content with the real world as seen through your phone’s camera.

With ARCore, you can shape brand new experiences that overlap the digital and physical worlds. You can transform the future of work and play on the Android platform. 

In close collaboration with Android, Daydream has released a preview of ARCore, an Android software development kit that will allow AR across Android phones with no additional hardware requirements. With ARCore, developers can start experimenting with AR capabilities on the Google Pixel and the Samsung S8 phones, running 7.0 Nougat and higher.

Supported Devices

ARCore is designed to work on a wide variety of qualified Android phones running N and later. During the SDK preview, ARCore supports the following devices:

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL
• Samsung Galaxy S8 

How does ARCore work?

Fundamentally, ARCore is doing two things, tracking the position of the mobile device as it moves, and building its own understanding of the real world.

ARCore’s motion tracking technology uses the phone’s camera to identify interesting points, called features, and tracks how those points move over time. With a combination of the movement of these points and readings from the phone’s inertial sensors, ARCore determines both the position and orientation of the phone as it moves through space.

In addition to identifying key points, ARCore can detect flat surfaces, like a table or the floor, and can also estimate the average lighting in the area around it. These capabilities combine to enable ARCore to build its own understanding of the world around it.

ARCore’s understanding of the real world lets you place objects, annotations, or other information in a way that integrates seamlessly with the real world. You can place a napping kitten on the corner of your coffee table, or annotate a painting with biographical information about the artist. Motion tracking means that you can move around and view these objects from any angle, and even if you turn around and leave the room, when you come back, the kitten or annotation will be right where you left it.

Read more here 

UX Introspection

What exactly is expected out of UX is a question that will have many answers. Before understanding UX requirements, defining and understanding the concept of UX is mandatory as well.

User Experience (UX) is somewhat of an elusive notion with many different definitions, even among the UX community themselves. There is user experience involved in all product and service design the focus here is purely on digital user experience.

The Role Of UX

While the design team definitely has a crucial role when it comes to user experience, it’s not something only designers have to worry about. Everybody involved in the creation through sales of a product should be thinking about UX.

Collaborating with the UX department can yield benefits for everyone involved. For example, learning about UX can help marketers better understand their customers. Having an understanding of UX in different channels can also help marketers optimize their materials for each of the channels they use.

This, in turn, will make the lives of designers easier, because they won’t have to redesign products that weren’t made with consumers in mind. It will also lead to better, more popular products because the products will be geared towards the customers.

When marketers collect data on their campaigns, they can also share that information with UX designers, especially if they determine UX may have been a factor in the effectiveness of a campaign. This can help both marketers and UX designers improve their work.

Thinking about user experience is something that needs to be integrated into company culture and the whole process of how a company does business.

ISO 9241-210 defines user experience as “a person’s perceptions and responses that result from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”.

The problem with this definition is that it still leaves so much to interpretation. Designing the user experience is a combination of an art and science with many “rules” actually being guidelines based on user behaviors during testing.

So, instead of defining UX, we list out 10 questions that will help you understand UX better. The individual answers to these questions will lead to a better definition of UX in your mind.

So, before starting a UX project, ask yourself these questions because the definition of UX is ever evolving and changes from project to project.

The Questions To Be Asked

1. Who is the website intended for? If the website already exists, what kinds of users does it already have, if any?

2. What information exactly needs to be communicated to these users for the website’s function to be considered successful?

3. Are the intended users or the message likely to change in the future, and if so at what rate and degree?

4. What are your motivations for working on the UI?

5. In particular, how do your motivations differ from the those of the intended users? How do they differ from those of anyone else working on other aspects of the site?

6. What is your budget for the work at hand, in terms of both money and time?

7. Do you have the freedom to try unconventional solutions, or are standard ones more appropriate to the context?

8. Who owns the UI once you have “finished” working on it? Will others need to change it independently?

9. How closely coupled is working on the UI taking into account technical limitations the development process?

10. Are you in the right frame of mind to create world class UX?

Keep these questions in your mind every single mind and the final product will be more user engaging thanks to your honest answers and better understanding of the user requirements.

The Impact Of Machine Learning

Fewer technologies are hotter than artificial intelligence and machine learning, which mimic the behavior of the human mind. And for companies embarking on digital transformations, AI and ML are being viewed as pivotal technologies for engaging customers in a better manner.

What Can Machine Learning Achieve?

The U.S. Bank had collected a wealth of customer data. And like most banks, the U.S. Bank has struggled to derive actionable insights from this data. After adapting to Machine Learning, the bank has been using Machine Learning technology to increase personalization across the bank’s small business, wholesale, commercial wealth and commercial banking units.

Post adaptation, if a customer searched on the U.S. Bank’s website for information about mortgage loans, a customer service agent can follow up with that customer the next time they visit a branch. It also helps U.S. Bank find patterns humans might not see.

A simple change that was observed was that the software can recommend agents to call a prospective client in a particular industry on Thursday between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. because they are more likely to pick up the phone. It can also put a calendar invite into the agent’s calendar to remind them to call the candidate the following Thursday.

Such capabilities get to the core of what many financial services organizations are trying to do; cultivate a 360-degree view of customers to recommend relevant services in the moment.

The industry is transforming from a world that was describing what happened or what is happening to a world that is more about what will or should happen. It is all about staying a step ahead, anticipating customer needs and a suitable channel to communicate with them.

How Facebook Utilizes Machine Learning

Facebook uses Machine Learning in quite a few ways! The People You May Know feature is an implementation of ML. If you browse for a certain product in E-Commerce websites, Facebook will show an ad related to that product on your news feed. That is implemented using Machine Learning as well. The list of Suggested Friends that you see when you join Facebook is based on your current workplace or school or college. That uses Machine Learning as well.

A vivid example of Facebook using Machine Learning is mentioned below:

• Open an image in facebook and right click for Inspect Element or F12.
• Then check the Inspector tab. You can see the html code for that image. If not, search for .spotlight class.
• Check the alt element content. It will give a general description of the image: no of persons, whether they/he/she are sitting, standing, laughing etc.

Understanding Google Page Ranks

Consider all the web pages in the world as nodes of a graph. All the hyperlinks i.e mentions of a website on another website as the edges.

Now, Google Page Rank basically ranks the web pages . So, a generic score needs to be assigned to every web page upon which they’ll be ranked. This score is dependent on the web pages that point it with a factor of alpha and a constant term with a factor of beta. The computations are made and the scores are computed till no further change in scores can be obtained.

PageRank is a ranking system designed to find the best pages on the web. A webpage is good if it is endorsed by other good webpages. The more webpages link to it, and the more authoritative they are, the higher the page’s PageRank score.

If one webpage links to a lot of webpages, each of its endorsements count less than if it had only linked to one webpage. That is, when calculating PageRank, the strength of a website’s endorsement gets divided by the number of endorsements it makes.

Note that this ranking is recursive, to put it more simply, the PageRank score of one webpage depends only on the structure of the network and the PageRank scores of other webpages.

Page Rank algorithm gives weight to every incoming link a web page gets, every incoming link increases Page rank, while links from pages with high page rank have high weight and matter more, links from pages with just a few outgoing links matter more.

Page Rank does not include relevance information, so incoming links from pages that have nothing to do with the page will increase page rank. However, Page Rank is only a very small portion of what determines search results. Trust rank algorithm influences search results more, since it takes into consideration how likely the site is to be trustworthy and not give irrelevant outgoing links.

In layman’s terms, all this enabled through Machine Learning, where in Google utilises its capabilities and build up a database and ranks it accordingly which enables users to access the better websites rather than the mediocre ones.

Machine Learning Is A Huge Asset 

Thinking about the future, machine learning will make its biggest mark in helping workers and businesses to more efficiently use time and gain a deeper understanding of their data. There is so much industry knowledge locked away in PDFs, medical files ,and even cookbooks. Tapping into this data, being able to organize, process and assimilate years of unstructured data points will accelerate the acquisition of knowledge, reducing the time to innovation and unearthing of new ideas. 

Adapt Machine Learning In Your Business Or Fall Behind.

Youtube – The Internet Leader

Youtube has been Internet’s favorite since a long time. It rakes in a lot of money and a lot of us underestimate the power of Youtube when it comes to advertisement and making money. A good understanding will make you realize the power of Youtube.

To begin off, we bring some amazing Youtube Facts that you might be unaware of.

1. PayPal’s Role in YouTube’s Creation

YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005. The three founders knew each other from working together at another Internet start up, PayPal. In fact, Hurley designed the PayPal logo after reading a Wired article about the online payment company and e-mailing the startup in search of a job. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal. You could argue that if there was no PayPal, there would be no YouTube.

2. YouTube’s Origins as a Dating Site

The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.

3. The First Ever YouTube Video

The first video to ever be uploaded to YouTube isn’t a classic by any means. Shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo it shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephant enclosure going on about long trunks. It has, nonetheless, racked up a very healthy 4,282,497 views since its online debut on April 23, 2005.

4. Statistics

We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website , they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.

5. Mobility

YouTube has over a billion users and a majority of them are watching videos on their mobile device, a testament to the rising popularity of smartphones as internet connectivity on cellular networks is improving.

6. The Code For Gangnam Style

Psy’s Gangnam Style is the definition of viral in practical terms and currently sits north of 2.8 billion views on YouTube, making it the highest watched YouTube video ever.

YouTube had a 2, 147, 483, 647 view counter limit in its code and Gangnam Style was going viral and looked like it’ll cross that threshold. The coder’s at the company quickly changed the code before Psy broke YouTube’s counter.

The Power Of GitHub

If you are a software engineer and have a notion that your degree is enough to get a job now, it is time that you change your mindset before it is too late! Trends are showing that in the forthcoming years, hiring software developers would not be the same as they were in past. The entire world is becoming “open” to all and nothing is private anymore. This is where online version control systems like GitHub is essential and would shape your career in near future.

Getting to know GitHub

Git is a command line tool and hub is the central repository hosting service where the developers can store their source codes and programs written in varied languages. They can make continuous changes in the code, keep a track of the same made by others, thus come up with modified versions at a regular interval. Several developers like you can simply collaborate with others, download newer modified versions, make changes and upload the new one which can be seen and accessed by your collaborators. Here are few ways you can make use of it:

·       Enhance product quality

The entire world is making a paradigm shift, including staunch closed source patrons like Microsoft. Hence, you can have your code being seen and reviewed by an entire community of programmers all across the world, if you post your code in GitHub. This would help you to understand the flaws in your project and hence can solve them alone with their assistance to create a better version of the software.

·       Knowledge base

GitHub is a valuable knowledge repository. This means that you can also get to know about the projects of the other software developers, which would surely be an exchange of knowledge for both of you. You can also discuss about your project with the other person and take help from him/her to modify your code in case you are stuck with some dependency issues or conflicts.

·       Better version control

GitHub keeps every version that you have modified which means every iteration you do, the previous one can be a supporting document for you! There are change-logs which keep a track of what exact changes have been made and thus you can lookback at your faults if needed.

·       Incredible integration

There are lots of integration options with GitHub and you can integrate your code with platforms like Google cloud or Amazon, for your own benefits. You can use services like Code climate which can simply track your own feedback as well as can deliver your code in over 200 programming languages. Hence you as a software engineer can establish your command over coding in a much better way in comparison with others.

Even if you are a non programmer and have a team that is involved in projects that need constant modifications, you can use GitHub for your own version control management. However, GitHub only offers such system and repos upon an additional cost that you have to bear on a monthly basis. Any ways, which good things come free today? So embrace GitHub and enhance your programming career.