Recommendations By Artificial Intelligence Vs. Humans: Who Will Win?
When pitted against recommendations by humans, AI need not necessarily always
have a win-win situation. It is true that data-driven recommendations are
always preferred; however, the preferences to accept humans and artificial
intelligence based recommendations differ with respect to situation and use
case. It all stems from the ‘word-of-machine effect.’ Recently, an article on
“When Do We Trust AI’s Recommendations More Than People’s?” by University of
Virginia’s Darden Business School Professor Luca Cian and Boston University’s
Questrom School of Business Professor Chiara Longoni, was published in the
Harvard Business Review. In the article, they explained this phenomena as a
widespread belief that AI systems are more competent than humans in dispensing
advice when utilitarian qualities are desired and are less competent when the
hedonic qualities are desired. The article authors clarify that, it doesn’t
imply that artificial intelligence is competent than humans at assessing and
evaluating hedonic attributes nor are humans in the case of utilitarian
attributes. As per their experiment results, suppose someone is focused on
utilitarian and functional qualities, from a marketer’s perspective, the word
of a machine is more effective than the word of human recommenders.
5 Unusual SEO Tactics That Will Boost Your Performance
Conversions occur when a visitor to your site completes a desired action/goal.
That could be anything from making a purchase to signing up for your
newsletter – you get to set the parameters for your conversion goals. When
building out your pages, it’s important to keep these goals in mind in
conjunction with your SEO strategy. Conversion goals and strategy should vary
from organic to ad landing pages. However, you can learn from both marketing
strategies. When building out a landing page, be sure to tailor it to a
specific purpose. If you intend to use it for ads, it’s important to clearly
display the information you advertised would be there. Likewise, if you’re
optimizing a landing page for organic traffic, be sure that your content
matches what you signal is there to search engines. Then, compare results! A
landing page can act for ads and SEO in tandem, but only if you do it right.
If you start noticing that your SEO traffic is converting much higher than
your ads, then maybe it’s not the ideal landing page for your ads budget. But,
if the landing page is meant to serve for both ads and SEO and SEO isn’t
converting well at all, rethink your strategy. Why? Aside from the fact that
you need to know where high-converting traffic comes from, Google is already
aware of your stats.
Where Are The Self Driving Robotaxis Of India
When it comes to self-driving in India, there are only a handful of startups.
Amongst these startups, those who are genuinely working on fundamental
research are even fewer. According to Sanjeev Sharma, founder of Swaayatt
Robots, solving self-driving problems requires fundamental research in the
fields of theoretical computer science and applied mathematics. Although
there are over 300 startups globally, most of the companies are working on DMS
and ADAS (advanced driver assistance system). This is only one tiny problem of
the autonomous driving problem. There are actually three bigger problems to
solve — perception, planning, and localisation. If one tries to solve the
problem very accurately, which is what most companies are doing, the challenge
would be to minimise the computation time. ... The ugly truth is that
self-driving technology is a tough nut to crack. We are at least five years
away from even witnessing level 3 autonomy on roads. India has one of the
toughest roads in the world. The models that work well in relatively empty
roads of the United States will falter in Bengaluru or Delhi crowded roads.
So, this is not just a problem exclusive to India. The world is yet to figure
out self-driving tech.
Why Banks’ Digital Sales Efforts Still Aren’t Working
While the industry earned many kudos for pushing through so many Paycheck
Protection Program loans as quickly as it did, D’Acierno says that experience
also underscores the lack of digital readiness most institutions had. PPP was
a relatively cookie-cutter program but getting applications completed and
processed remotely took tremendous handholding and manual labor in many
institutions, he explains. Few business owners interested in PPP assistance
could find an Amazon-style customer experience, D’Acierno says. “Ideally,
digital should be an easier channel,” says D’Acierno, “but the downside of
digital is that the customer is just one click away from giving up and saying,
‘You’ve just made this too hard for me’.” Finding another potential bank or
credit union is as close as doing a quick Google search, he points out.
Solving the digital sales challenge is a practical matter, not an academic
one. While they tend to have narrower product lines, direct banks and fintechs
routinely operate where many mainstream banks haven’t been able to go,
seamlessly. The problem: Consumers and business can obtain extensive online
services from these newcomers and from nonfinancial companies, so the bar is
higher for digital sales.
Data-driven 2021: Predictions for a new year in data, analytics and AI
George Fraser, CEO of Fivetran, says "I think 2021 will reveal the need for
data lakes in the modern data stack is shrinking." Adding that "...there are
no longer new technical reasons for adopting data lakes because data
warehouses that separate compute from storage have emerged." If that's not
categorical enough for you, Fraser sums things up thus: "In the world of the
modern data stack, data lakes are not the optimal solution. They are becoming
legacy technology." Data lake supporters are even more ardent. In a prediction
he titled "The Data Lake Can Do What Data Warehouses Do and Much More", Tomer
Shiran, co-founder of Dremio, says "data warehouses have historically
had...advantages over data lakes. But that's now changing with the latest open
source innovations in the data tier." He mentions Apache Parquet and Delta
Lake as two such innovations and lesser known projects Apache Iceberg and
Nessie as well. Together, these projects allow data to be stored in open,
columnar formats across file systems, versioned and processed with
transactional consistency. Martin Casado, General Partner of Andreessen
Horowitz, put it this way: If you look at the use cases for data lakes vs.
data analytics, it's very different.
Now AI is Knocking On The Doors of Luxurious Hotels
AI in hospitality and tourism is still a new development that has
prospects for new earning models. Though chatbots exist, they can be taken
to a new level. High-grade chatbots can effectively reduce the cost of
hiring personnel. Combining AI with the right data mining and acquisition
tools is essential for hotels to learn as much information about tourists
and vacationers as possible. This way, hoteliers can tailor their
experiences to meet specific individual needs. AI will be able to sort
through big data faster and automate actions based on deduced inference.
Hoteliers can incorporate mobile booking and hotel recommender engines
with several other event booking software. This idea provides a
“one-stop-shop” for event attendees to book for events and as well get
hotel recommendations and be able to book for spaces; all within the same
application. This solution will drive up booking numbers in no time and
will bring mobile bookings closer to those who need it the most.
Ultimately, the task of collecting and analyzing data will be streamlined
by technology that is smart enough to make well-planned choices about
guest behavior and characteristics. Incorporating artificial intelligence
to solve user demands in the hospitality industry is a quantum leap
forward in terms of implementable technologies.
How Will 5G Influence Healthcare Cybersecurity
While 5G is generally accepted to be more secure than the 4G we use now,
the technology still poses a few notable risks. In November of 2019, a
joint research initiative between security researchers at Purdue
University and the University of Iowa revealed an incredible 11
significant vulnerabilities in studied 5G networks. The study noted that
these security lapses could allow bad actors to surveil and disrupt device
operations — or even launch falsified emergency alerts. These findings are
troubling for the risks they highlight and because they prove that the
vulnerabilities that 5G was meant to resolve are still an ongoing problem.
Equally problematic is the ease with which these security holes can be
abused. As a writer for TechCrunch noted in an article on the study,
researchers “claimed that all the attacks could be exploited by an
adversary with a practical knowledge of 5G and 4G networks and a low-cost
software-defined radio.” All this said, cybersecurity in the 5G era does
warrant some optimism. Because next-gen wireless tech is designed with
network slicing in mind (i.e., organizing several isolated virtual
networks within an overarching physical infrastructure) it will be harder
for bad actors to access the broader system. Slicing also allows for
better privacy, because information isn’t shared across isolated “slices,”
and for better tailoring, because organizations can apply different
policies across varying inner networks.
Resilience As A Competitive Advantage
The growing focus on resilience will likely follow the same trajectory we
saw with security and privacy. In the 1980s and ’90s, computer security was
an occasional irritant. Attacks, however, became more frequent,
sophisticated and devastating, where commerce froze and real money was
stolen. Security became centralized, and automated and users became more
vigilant. Similarly, privacy was initially treated as a concept that would
blow over. “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” joked Sun
Microsystems co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy in 1999. In 2020, privacy has
become one of the top concerns of consumers, investors, employees and
regulators — and a difficult challenge for some of the top companies in
health and technology. The increasing damage being inflicted by extreme
weather and actions such as forced power outages in California has begun to
compel us to confront our relative lack of preparedness. Covid-19 has
further underscored this and made the idea of investing for unforeseen risks
less of a sunk cost and more of a necessity — it has given shape, substance
and urgency to worst-case-scenario planning. Three of the primary
technologies for improving resilience will likely be AI, IoT and 5G.
Farewell to Flash
As the standardisation of HTML5 and supported media formats grew, the
advantages of Flash for providing video declined, until it was primarily
used for interactive games and some interactive applications. However, Flash
suffered from the same issues that had meant the JVM didn't take off in
browsers a decade earlier; constant updates for security vulnerabilities
meant that Adobe Flash was the primary cause of CVEs in web browsers and
infections. To be fair to both Flash and the JVM; downloading programs from
the internet is always going to be a vector for vulnerabilities, and the
security of a remote system is always going to be as good or bad as the
implementation – and as the complexity of those runtimes grew, particularly
in unmanaged languages like C++ – the danger was real. Even today, bugs in
image rendering pipelines or font decoding are the primary cause of
vulnerabilities in browsers. Flash's demise started with Steve Jobs' post
"Thoughts on Flash" (web archive link), who had recently launched the iPhone
in 2007 with 'always on' internet connectivity.
Quote for the day:
"Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish." -- Anne Bradstreet
