I was recently asked by a major corporation to give a talk on “fake agile.” They wanted me to explain what it is, how to identify it and how to deal with it. The request led me to give some thought to the many varieties of the beast, the reasons for its emergence and the prospects of taming, containing it, or turning it into the real thing.
The request is understandable. Some instances of supposedly agile management have as much relation to real Agile as someone wearing flamenco costumes and talking about flamenco, without having mastered flamenco dance steps or displaying a feel or flair for flamenco music.
With the growing recognition that “Agile is eating the world,” surveys by Deloitte and McKinsey show that more than 90% of senior executives give high priority to becoming agile, while less than 10% see their firm as currently highly agile. The gap between aspiration and reality has led to a vast number of managers, consultants, and coaches claiming to be agile and offering to help firms become agile. Quite a few firms also have CEOs who are asking, “Why aren’t we agile?”
As a result, the term “agile” is often thrown around without any agreement as to its meaning. Read More
Daily Archives: May 24, 2019
When AI Becomes a Part of Our Daily Lives
As we live longer and technology continues its rapid arc of development, we can imagine a future where machines will augment our human abilities and help us make better life choices, from health to wealth. Instead of conducting a question and answer with a device on the countertop, we will be able to converse naturally with our virtual assistant that is fully embedded in our physical environment. Through our dialogue and digital breadcrumbs, it will understand our life goals and aspirations, our obligations and limitations. It will seamlessly and automatically help us budget and save for different life events, so we can spend more time enjoying life’s moments.
While we can imagine this future, the technology itself is not without challenges — at least for now. The ability for artificial intelligence to understand the complexities and nuances of human conversation is one hurdle. There are more than 7,111 known living languages in the world today, according to Ethnologue. Adding to the intricacies are the varied ways words are shared and used across different cultures, including grammar and the level of education and style of the speakers. Google Duplex, the technology supporting Google Assistant, which places phone calls using a natural-sounding human voice instead of a robotic one, is an early attempt to address such challenges in human communications. But these are just initial whispers in voice AI’s long journey. Read More
Are we looking at the evolution or extinction of editing and post-production?
When we teased out Eric Escobar’s recent piece on social media, a number of people jumped on us for publishing click-bait. That was obviously not the intention, as anyone who read the article can attest, but it’s an understandable reaction to seeing “Video Editor: A job on the edge of extinction”. After all, how often do you see a headline along the lines of “The Machines are Coming for Your Job!” only to find out the headline is just as misleading as the info the article possesses.
No, video editors aren’t going to all find themselves extinct or unemployed anytime soon, but things have changed for them and for other post-production professionals. One of the biggest factors in that change is automation, as it has and will continue to have a major impact on the livelihoods of everyone working in post. Instant sub clips, project organization and fast editing while ingesting are just a few of the ways post-production has been impacted by automation.
Change can be a good thing though. Read More
Video Editor: A job on the edge of extinction
I know this post has a clickbait sounding title, and for that I apologize, but I’m not writing this for click throughs or ad impressions. This is about the things that software can do now and guessing at what it will do in the very, very near future.
Right now, software “reads” articles and emails, and this is how Google analyzes and ranks what we write and figures out what to sell us. Software even “writes” articles, more and more everyday. Software doesn’t write the opinion pieces, or the long, interesting New Yorker think-piece, it goes for the easy stuff: financials, sports scores, crime beats. The kind of stuff that feels all boiler-plate and perfunctory.
This is old news, a change that has already transformed publishing and will change it more as the tech gets better. Read More
Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions
We present a model that generates natural language descriptions of images and their regions. Our approach lever-ages datasets of images and their sentence descriptions to learn about the inter-modal correspondences between language and visual data. Our alignment model is based on a novel combination of Convolutional Neural Networks over image regions, bidirectional Recurrent Neural Networks over sentences, and a structured objective that aligns the two modalities through a multimodal embedding. We then describe a Multimodal Recurrent Neural Network architecture that uses the inferred alignments to learn to generate novel descriptions of image regions. We demonstrate that tour alignment model produces state of the art results in retrieval experiments on Flickr8K, Flickr30K and MSCOCO datasets. We then show that the generated descriptions significantly outperform retrieval baselines on both full images and on a new dataset of region-level annotations. Read More
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