The Future of Work

Science Fiction (Sci-Fi) As A Stimulus For Innovation

January 12, 2018 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

As part of my role as a Facilitator for Warwick Business School’s “Knowledge & Innovation Network” (KIN), I was privileged to be invited to a Sci-Fi Symposium organised by the Defence, Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl). The event took place just before Christmas 2017, and was led by Dr John Carney, Principal Scientist and Mrs Caz Pitt (Innovation Process & Culture Lead) at Dstl. The aim of the Symposium was to explore whether the stimulus of Science Fiction might enable…

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Automation and AI – What does the future of work look like?

November 20, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

Our news and activity streams are buzzing with articles, blogs, analyst reports and social media hype around the topic of “AI”. It’s a fairly loosely defined topic that covers an enormous spectrum of disciplines, from big data and predictive analytics, to machine learning, natural language processing, automation and robotics. Depending on who you listen to, it’s either the most important technological breakthrough since the invention of electricity, or it heralds the end of civilisation as we know it! Extreme scenarios…

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KIN Winter workshop 2017: Data-driven decision making

November 14, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

It’s now just over three weeks to Warwick Business School’s Knowledge & Innovation Network Winter Workshop on the 6th December. An event I’ve been busily planning over the past few months. It’s been a bit of a rocky road finding the right speakers for this event, but I think we’re finally there, and we’ve got a good blend of relevant experts who can talk about the social, ethical, political and economic impact of human-machine (augmented) decision making, and the real…

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Workplace Week Fringe Event: Automation & AI

October 3, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

Warwick Business School’s Knowledge & Innovation Network (KIN) and Norton Rose Fulbright (NRF) will be facilitating a breakfast briefing during Workplace Week (13-17th November) on the topic of ‘Automation & AI in the workplace‘. Workplace automation is becoming more widespread, and today’s AI-enabled, information-rich tools are increasingly able to handle jobs that in the past have been exclusively done by people (including tax returns, language translations, accounting, even some types of surgery) – automation is destined to have profound implications…

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Alexa – I think I love you!

May 4, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

Unless you are a technology ‘geek’, most people wouldn’t have paid much attention to ‘bots’ or ‘virtual assistants’ until relatively recently. We’ve seen and maybe occasionally used Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana, but their utility was perceived to be limited to doing hands-free searches. How little we knew! The investment in AI, and especially Natural Language Processing (NLP) by the big players, has revealed their true value. It’s slowly dawning on more and more users that these assistants…

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The depreciating value of human knowledge

April 26, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 0 Comment

Automation is just one facet on the broader spectrum of AI and machine intelligence. Yes, it’s going to affect us all (it already is with the increasing emergence of intelligent agents and bots), but I think there is a far deeper issue here that – at least for the majority of people who haven’t become immersed in the “AI” meme – is going largely unnoticed. That is, the very nature of human knowledge and how we understand the world. Machines…

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How a knowledge map can help to identify knowledge gaps and needs, against all odds

March 23, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 3 Comments

Without understanding their knowledge needs, organizations can hardly decide on relevant KM activities to strengthen the necessary knowledge domains and advance in their business. Knowledge mapping can be an optimal way to address the challenge. Knowledge is undoubtedly the trickiest organizational asset: possessing it alone is never enough for organizations to use it in a proper and advantageous way. That’s why, when put into the knowledge management context, organizations often look like antique shops: there are zillions of articles, but…

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Data & Information Design

March 1, 2017 Stephen Dale Comments 2 Comments

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to find Giorgi Lupi. Fortunately, serendipity came to my aid and I stumbled across her almost by accident. And what a find! Anyone who does anything with data and information should read her postings, starting with this one: https://medium.com/@giorgialupi/data-humanism-the-revolution-will-be-visual… I’ve picked out a few nuggets: Embrace complexity. What made cheap marketing infographics so popular is probably their biggest contradiction: the false claim that a couple of pictograms and a few big…

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Organisational Knowledge in a Machine Intelligence era

November 17, 2016 Stephen Dale Comments 1 Comment

A preamble to the KIN Winter Workshop 2016, 7th December 2016. According to Narrative Science, 62 per cent of organisations will be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) by 2018. If you asked most people when they last encountered something that used artificial intelligence, they’d probably conjure up a mental image of robots, and might be hard pressed to think of something in everyday use. Machine intelligence and machine learning – the new synonyms for “artificial intelligence” – are on the rise…

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