Congratulations Team Emora! Amazon announced today that Emory University and their Emora socialbot are the winners of the 2020 Alexa Prize. Second Place was awarded to Stanford’s Chirpy Cardinal bot and Third Place was Alquist developed by the team from Czech Technical University.
Emory won with a 3.81 average rating (out of a possible 5.0), earning them the $500,000 top prize. Each of the past two years’ winners have exceeded the average rating of the previous year’s winner. The eventual goal of the competition is to achieve a 4.0 rating while conversing with a human interactor for a minimum of twenty minutes.
It’s been an honor to be a part of this innovative competition – my third year as an Amazon #AlexaPrize finalist judge. I look forward to seeing what next year’s competition brings and what all of the competitors do with their amazing talent in the future!
Not surprisingly, the book launch of Future Minds at Town Hall Seattle had to be postponed, a decision I wholeheartedly support in the interest of public safety. But in lieu of that presentation (at least for now), the good folks at THS did an interview with me to offer a taste of what my book and presentation are about. You can read my interview in their blog, the Town Crier. Find out why our world is rapidly becoming more and differently intelligent and what this could mean for the future!
What is the Future of the Global Marketplace? How will demographic shifts, climate change and continued increases in urbanization affect trade between different parts of our world? I had the amazing opportunity to speak about these topics at the U.S Embassy in Hanoi a few weeks ago. The audience of about 200 was very engaged and had many thought-provoking questions. It felt like a great learning experience all around!
Few topics are as personal as our health and based on the current trends in healthcare, things are going to be getting a whole lot more personal very soon.
I had the pleasure of presenting the closing plenary last week for the NW Regional Primary Care Association’s 2019 Fall Primary Care conference and it’s become very evident that tremendous changes are coming to the field. Given current trends, within two decades we can expect a transition to a consumer-centered model that relies on near-continuous data flows of personal health information. This information and a range of other emerging technologies will allow healthcare professionals to proactively focus much more on ongoing wellness. When illness does occur, it will be detected far sooner and treated using micro-interventions and personalized precision medicine. While there will be many challenges along the way, we will hopefully find ourselves living healthier and longer lives in the years to come.
I just returned from an exciting and memorable week in Helsinki and Turku, Finland. As one of the keynote speakers for the annual two-day SHIFT Business Festival, I spoke about the future of human-machine interfaces. Now in its fourth year, SHIFT’s mission is “to help radical innovators shape a better future through intelligent business and deep technology.” In my conversations with Festival attendees and locals, I was intrigued to discover the level of commitment many in this northern European Union country have made to futures thinking.
This year’s theme of “Shapeshifting Intelligence” saw a heavy focus on AI and its implementation, with keynotes from major players in the field. This included Yoshua Bengio of the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute (MILA), one of the fathers of machine learning. (Bengio recently shared the ACM Turing Award – computing’s equivalent of the Nobel prize – with Facebook’s Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton of Google and University of Toronto.) Other speakers included Joanna Bryson (University of Bath), Catalina Butnaru (City AI), Catherine Havasi (MIT, Snowcap AI), Christian Gutmann (Tieto and Nordic Artificial Intelligence Institute) and Anupam Kundu (RealValue.ai). Each focused on different aspects of AI development, implementation, and ethics.
The day following my SHIFT talk, I had the pleasure of giving a lecture about the future of artificial emotional intelligence (based on my book, “Heart of the Machine”) at the University of Turku’s (UTU) Department of Future Technologies. My host, Seppo Helle, a senior researcher there, has a focus on user interfaces, including augmented reality. Besides the Future Technologies department, UTU also has a Finland Futures Research Centre (FFRC) within their School of Economics. I spoke with some of the FFRC faculty and students about their transdisciplinary approach to futures.
All of this is befitting a country that was recently ranked #1 in preparing its youth with future oriented skills by The Economist’s 2018 Worldwide Educating for the Future Index (WEFFI). The reasons for this emphasis on foresight are complex, however much of it seems to stem from Finland’s limited tradable natural resources, as well as its unique geopolitical history. The enormous success of Nokia in the early communications and mobility space provided a model which the country seems to have embraced wholeheartedly.
For me, the entire trip was a real eye-opener, from experiencing Finland’s natural beauty and very welcoming citizens to the perspectives on technology, sustainability, the European Union and strategic foresight. I believe we can all take a lesson from Finland, a forward-thinking nation with its eye firmly on future.
Photos: Julius Töyrylä, SHIFT Business Festival and University of Turku.
Over the past few years, virtual assistants have become increasingly prevalent in our homes and offices. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Apple Siri are a few of the predominant virtual assistant programs that are being run on an ever-growing number of platforms. For example, as of 2019, Alexa runs on over 20,000 compatible hardware devices, beginning with Amazon’s own Echo devices. Initially these voice-activated systems were little more than electronic novelties that allowed users to perform simple tasks, play games, or request information such as the weather without reaching for their phone or computer. Now however, they are becoming increasingly capable of far more complex tasks, such as scheduling a flight or booking tickets to a sporting event. But the day is quickly approaching when these virtual assistants will truly live up to their name. No longer a novelty, we will soon find them to be an essential part of our business and daily lives.
All of this is being driven by recent advances in artificial intelligence, of course. Beginning with voice recognition and activation, these systems rely heavily on a branch of AI known as natural language processing, or NLP. This allows them to turn your spoken words into text that can be parsed and processed for meaning. This is far more difficult than it seems to us since we have been dealing with spoken language all of our lives, making such tasks second nature to us. But obviously, we all have different voices and pronounce words differently, which makes this so much more challenging for software to understand. Fortunately, advances in recent years have improved this recognition considerably.
Then there is the matter of comprehending what our words actually mean. Language can quickly become extremely complex and challenging to grasp depending on its construction, which is why early virtual assistants required that we speak in very simple and direct commands. But as AI becomes more capable of inference and abstract reasoning (currently being worked on by numerous researchers and labs around the world), it should become possible to carry on a conversation with these devices, much as we would with another person.
But the real game changer in all of this will be the ability for these systems to assemble a complete picture of our personal preferences and propensities. Being able to factor all of this along with considering our emotional state and well-being will provide everyone with the kind of support once only possible from a human assistant or friend. Will it replace these? No, but it will definitely make for a very empowering new tool.
Of course, in the process of all of this, many different concerns will arise, not least of these being matters of personal and data security. All of this personalized capability will be driven by a picture of us built up from literally thousands upon thousands of pieces of personal data. This will not only need to be secured from the prying eyes of hackers, but somehow also siloed from the very companies that provide these services. While many users may find this a compelling reason to avoid these assistants, adopters from among the Millennials and other younger demographics are likely to take a very different view about what they’re trading in exchange for the many conveniences and competitive advantages this will provide.
Businesses will especially benefit from these innovations, reducing costs and increasing customer engagement. According to recent market research, the virtual assistant market is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of more than 26% to $12 billion over the next five years. Already involved in customer relationship management, virtual assistants will soon be performing more value-added functions like marketing, sales agents and much more.
As a result of all of this, in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to rely on these devices much as we would a human assistant. We’ll bring them to business meetings where they’ll take notes for us, instantly creating links to relevant articles, research and related discussions from prior meetings. They’ll schedule trips for us based on a simple request such as “Google, I need to be in New Orleans for three days starting the 24th.” Already familiar with what airlines, flight times, seats, hotels, restaurants and budgets we prefer, our assistant won’t need any additional details to make all of the needed arrangements.
In time, these programs will be able to recall what we wore to a particular event and who saw us there. They’ll engage in negotiations for us. Perhaps they’ll even offer counsel when we find ourselves faced with a difficult decision. It will be as if everyone had their own highly efficient, personal assistant, which in effect will be exactly what they’ll have. The future uses and applications of this technology will be virtually endless as we come to be increasingly reliant on our AI-powered virtual assistants.
Emory won with a 3.81 average rating (out of a possible 5.0), earning them the $500,000 top prize. Each of the past two years’ winners have exceeded the average rating of the previous year’s winner. The eventual goal of the competition is to achieve a 4.0 rating while conversing with a human interactor for a minimum of twenty minutes.
