Off Course-On Target

Time to "Tearn"?

For a number of years, I’ve been pondering how the Snowflake Effect¹ could influence learning. For those who are new to this concept of the Snowflake Effect, in essence it’s about the transformation of society from a model of mass production to one of mass personalization. Think of it as providing just the right things for just the right people at just the right time in just the right context.

Many times everyday, we all have the need to learn about things that are just right for us, and ideally the perfect learning resources are available at just the right time. We hope for the Buddhist saying “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

Since a very young age, I’ve been fascinated by the “teachable moment”, when someone is perfectly ready, willing, and able to learn something new. How can we develop more ways to foster teachable moments every day, and how can we provide just the right resources (people, content, and environment) exactly when we need them?

A Growing Demand for Teachers

When you start to think about this on a worldwide scale, the demand for teachers and teaching forums is increasing exponentially. More than 6.6 billion people have the need to learn everyday, yet the learning assimilation gap (the gap between what we know and what we need to know) is widening.

What’s driving this need? There has always been much more to know than we ever could learn, and we always discover that the more we learn the more we understand how much we don’t know. This situation, however, is being exacerbated by the exponential growth of new “stuff”: technologies, techniques, content (text, audio, visual, etc.) and new concepts, as well as additional means of communication (anything from email to podcasts to Twitter). Add to this the need to solve problems (and challenges!) that are also growing at matching rates and you can see why the demand for learning is increasing exponentially.

Traditionally, the model for formal teaching and learning has been one where a single teacher instructs multiple students. Now this model is inverted. Today, most learners (we still have much to do in many regions where this is not true) are essentially surrounded by multiple resources, instructors, coaches, and trainers.

Initially then, we reach the point where, oddly, we need more teachers than there are learners. If we multiply this by the number of learning experiences everyday, then we find ourselves needing “n” times more the number of teachers than there are learners! And those numbers start in the billions and rapidly increase from there.

Rethinking the Relationship Between Teachers and Learners

Are we really to the point where we need many times more teachers than learners? If so, then we have to start rethinking the relationship between teachers and learners. And where would all these teachers come from? The answer is quite seriously “in the mirror". In this new world, we would start thinking and acting as both teachers and learners simultaneously. We would all become “tearners”.

Let me give you a reference point for this term “tearners”. I’ve borrowed the idea of blending existing terms to create a new one that represents a new concept from Alvin Toffler, who you might remember as the author of several books from the 1960’s and early 1970’s, including Future Shock and The Third Wave. His term “prosumer” blended producer and consumer into a single word that represented the concept of a society where the functions of producer and consumer would be combined.²

Now, I’m not suggesting that we’re all going to quit our jobs and become teachers in a formal sense. Rather, we’re going to augment our ability to learn by making all of us adopt this role of being a teacher whenever it is needed. In this context I am using the word “teacher” to describe the situation where one person is helping others learn something new. This could be anything from answering questions, suggesting a new technique, recommending a new tool, referencing some useful resource, etc. In this context, teaching is not necessarily an in-person real-time event. Today we can capture and publish our individual and collective “intelligence” through the use of blogs, podcasts, wikis, email, Twitter streams, and all of the more traditional means such as books, movies, songs, etc. We can continuously create teaching/learning resources for others to benefit from when their “teachable moments” arise.

The vast majority of our learning today is already done informally, that is, outside the bounds of a formal classroom setting. According to most estimates about 75% of the time, our sources of learning come to us this way. So this would suggest that we need to have about the same percentage of “informal teachers” as well. And as all of us become “tearners”, how can we dramatically increase the effectiveness and rate of learning?

In the past 20 years, we’ve certainly seen an increase in our focus on learning. Yet if we really look at our learning effectiveness (the speed with which we can acquire new skills, knowledge, and abilities), we don’t seem to have achieved an appreciable increase, despite the addition of new tools and new technologies throughout the entire e-learning and technology-enhanced learning era. I’m not suggesting that this era has been a complete failure. Certainly technology has augmented the number of learners who can be reached and it has increased the number of resources available, but I’m not convinced that it has increased the effectiveness of learning in any significant way. Thus, I am interested in not only the quantitative side, the idea that all of us can become teachers, but also the qualitative side, that all of us can become better teachers (and learners).

Part of the reason why I think this tearner model is possible is because we’re already redefining what “expert” and “expertise” means. Historically, experts have been recognized by their credentials. We’ve had degree programs, certification awards, and other formal means for acknowledging someone’s expertise in a tangible way. We still need this kind of verification of expertise, but since new technologies are being introduced at a more rapid rate all the time, we’re also seeing a transformation of what an expert is. In many cases, an expert is simply someone who knows more about a product or a technology than you or I do, and can therefore be an effective teacher.

We no longer have sufficient time to create the formal learning tools and environments, such as masters and doctoral programs, textbooks, and credentialing systems, to address these significant changes in technology or methodology. We need experts to teach us about new programming languages, new equipment, new approaches, and new ways of communicating no matter how quickly they appear on the scene.

I also think there is a relationship between this new definition of “expert” and this new way of teaching and training. Can we get better at attaching the responsibility for teaching to the idea of “expertise.” Many countries I have visited or lived in—Germany comes to mind—have an ingrained understanding that as you become an expert or master in a craft or profession, you inherit the responsibility, formally and informally, of becoming a teacher as well. What if everyone who mastered a competency, skill, or knowledge area also accepted the responsibility of helping others learn in these areas?

The historical model of formal education as the sole means of producing experts and providing teachers is not scalable. But maybe we can take the essence of it; that is, someone with expertise in a craft or profession not only has the potential to become an effective teacher of others who want to acquire those same skills, but also expects that teaching is simply part of what their “expertise” is all about.

So, What If We Were All “Teachers”?

What would it mean for each of us to think of ourselves as teachers? How could we become more effective in this role? First, we’d need a change of mindset. Every one of us would assume the responsibility of helping others to learn. We would also need to develop new skill sets. Some of the skills that would make us better are:

· Capturing and sharing what we know.³

· Being able to articulate our thoughts and ideas to others well through storytelling, metaphors, visual illustration, and problem-solving.

· Being more empathetic—improving our ability to see what the other person really needs to learn effectively.

These would be good skills for us to have anytime! It is intriguing to me to note that all of these skills are predominantly “right-brained” and that this scenario adds to the arguments I’ve made previously in my OCOT entry “Getting It Right” about the increasing need for right-brained skills in business.

This idea of all of us becoming teachers to help others learn is not just a one-way street. All of us as teachers gain the added benefit derived from the old adage, “The best way to learn something really well is to try teaching it to someone else.” When you have to explain it to someone else or help someone else become competent at doing something, you almost always learn more and become more competent yourself. Therefore, we can also look at being tearners from the standpoint of enlightened self-interest. If taking on the role of teacher causes us to learn something even better, then our collective learning will go up. We all stand to benefit in this role as “tearners”, since in the process of teaching others, we are addressing some of our own learning needs.

New Tools, Technologies, and Techniques for “Tearners”

As we move toward this model of tearners, let’s also look at ways to enhance teaching. What new tools, technologies, and techniques for teaching would we need? For example, search engines and recommender systems have mostly been focused on content thus far. Just as the exponential increase of content on the Web drove the need to develop these tools, so too might the exponential increase in teachers drive the need for better “expert-finding” tools. For example, we could develop tools that would help us find the experts we need in any given situation. I think a lot of the same technology that we apply to content could be applied to people. Metadata, such as characteristics, words found within, the audience it was written for, who else looked for this content, etc., could be applied to people and skills. Could we have more metadata about us individually? Could we get better at itemizing what each of us knows: our skills, knowledge, abilities, experience, expertise, to enable us to find people who are just right for us at just the right time and in just the right context?

Unlike the current mass production model of learning, which often assumes we are all somehow the same and need the same things at the same time in the same way, this new model of tearners, which supports mass personalization, draws upon our uniqueness as “snowflakes”. This model is sustainable because each of us can take on these roles of learner and teacher mutually. This model is also one that can grow exponentially because as each of us learns more, we can teach and share more, so the supply of “teachers” will naturally grow to meet the demand for learning.

And as teachers of others, we learn more ourselves so we have a built-in form of self-motivation and another multiplier to the overall effect. It all starts with you. Could it be time for you to tearn?

___________________

NOTES:

¹If you’re interested in learning more about the Snowflake Effect, check out the The Long Slow Chat, my joint effort with friend and colleague Erik Duval, and this collection of articles from Off Course – On Target.

² I’ve written about this prosumer concept often on Off Course - On Target including:

• Redesigning Rather Than Crying Over Spilled Milk?
• New Perspectives: The Third Wave?
• Jumbled Joomla: there is no "B" in Joomla!

³ I see the increased amount of capturing and publishing that we are witnessing via email, blogs, wikis, social media such as Facebook and MySpace, video on YouTube, and comments and opinions on Amazon, as signs that more people are sharing what they know, though in relative terms it is still only a small percentage of people who do so and only a small percentage of the expertise and knowledge that people have is actually captured and shared.

Great Thoughts

Here's another posting derived from my ever growing list of items to blog about.  This one springs from an article I read in the IEEE Spectrum back in Jan 2007.   

Did I mention I’m behind in my postings and the list is growing? However on the plus side I like this delay because it acts as a check on just how relevant and useful things are.  If it stands the test of time, it gets posted, and this one passed the test with flying colors.

The title of this posting “Great Thoughts” is the same as the article by Robert W. Lucky (IEEE Fellow), now retired. In it, he wrote: 

“There is a theory of creativity that holds that creativity is most often the product of the unexpected intersection of two previously unconnected thoughts. If you are thinking very hard about one such thought, perhaps you are suppressing the other thoughts that could connect with it. On the other hand, if your mind is a perfect blank…”

This is an interesting conundrum: not focusing too much on one thing yet not shutting out all thought, something that my ADD riddled brain can't even comprehend!

But for me, the takeaway here has more to do with the question of what constitutes “new” these days?  What makes something original?  What constitutes plagiarism or copying?  What is at the heart of innovation and creativity in the world today?

In this era where more and more things are mashups, a new assembly of previously existing things, is there any such thing as an original idea, song, drawing, text, etc.?  The answer is more "yes" than "no", I think, but it is worth noting that most of the time what is new and what makes something unique is not the bits and pieces that it is made from, but the selection of certain items and the way they are assembled into a new whole. And most often, the value of this new assembly is much greater than the sum of the parts.

This concept is nothing new really. Think of some fundamental examples such as text, where we have almost all existing words available in the dictionary (although the list is growing and evolving all the time), yet from this finite set of letters and words we can create an infinite number of written documents (e.g. articles, books, poems, and scripts). Or music where we have another finite set of notes and chords that enable us to create an infinite number of new songs, melodies, and even ring tones!

This combining of existing things to create new things, the heart of the Snowflake Effect is what makes it a scalable model. Not that we won’t also be creating new bits and pieces along the way, such as the new words which are added to dictionaries every year, but for the most part I think most of what is new and valuable, most of the innovation and creativity we are and will be seeing, comes from the serendipitous intersection of two or more previously existing things, be they thoughts, ideas, notes of music, letters and words, lines, arcs or circles.

So here’s to celebrating and fostering the creativity in all of us by focusing on being the unique snowflakes we all are and designing more and more new original ideas and “stuff” from what we already have around us.

World Languages: Going Colorblind?

"Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission"

In case you find it as interesting as I did, here is the list (according to www.geographic.org) of the top ten most popular languages in the world. See the map above and this full list of the top 50 languages.

1. Mandarin	(1120 Million)
2. English	(480M)
3. Spanish	(332M)
4. Arabic	(235M)
5. Bengali	(189M)
6. Hindi	(182M)
7. Russian	(180M)
8. Portuguese	(170M)
9. Japanese         10. German	(125M) (98M)

** note this list was updated Oct.1 to correct errors in list tabulation that omitted Spanish!  Apologies for confusion and thanks Kean for correcting!

As is often the case with these kinds of lists and large scale estimations, we need to keep in mind that there are many different ways of counting and measuring things, such as the amount of people who speak a given language. Do you only count the first or native language?  Do you group dialects together?  What constitutes fluency? To prove my point, I've picked two other equally interesting lists of language by population that you can find here and here. No doubt there are many more to be found by simply searching online.

What these lists and maps don't show us is how these languages are spreading throughout the world based on both the movement of people from their country of birth to other countries for work or through marriage for example, as well as the spread of languages via people learning new ones, organizations setting up offices, factories, and other operations around the world, etc. 

In the next 25 years or so, especially with the augmentation and acceleration of language-based technology and translation, I wonder if we are headed for a world that is "colorblind" when it comes to languages, and the need for these maps becomes somewhat obsolete?

Designing Your Own Future!

Carrying the rather magnanimous title of “Strategic Futurist”,  I try to always clarify that I have no crystal ball, no special powers for prediction of the future (nor any other special powers for that matter!), but I do believe that “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” as Alan Kay said.  However, I have become somewhat skilled at discovering and observing trends and patterns that I believe will help us to shape and design our futures to be bright and positive ones.  Today I’d like to highlight some recent examples that add credibility to this model of designing your own future, and I for one could not be happier with the progress and trend. 

It seems that the topic of the future is particularly popular of late.  In my recent posting “Inventing the Future?” I wrote about the fascinating new joint venture between Jane Congeal and the Institute for the Future called Superstructure, "the world’s first massively multiplier forecasting game" which is about to start September 2008 . With a tag line of “Superstructure! Play the game, invent the future”, you can see why I was immediately attracted.

Rather than fatalistically accepting that the future as something that happens to us, I believe that we can both individually and collectively invent and design our own!  I also see this as part of using serendipity as a serious strategy for success.  More on that later.

Web of Fate; NOT!

Mark Alert recently (July 16, 2008) did a good job of highlighting several of these new examples of what I would see as “designing your own future” in his e-Clippings: Learning As Art blog post called Forecasting the Future:  Prediction Markets & MMOG's.  In particular, check out the Web of Fate(Wof).  Despite the title, I see WoF as serendipitous and by design rather than fatalistic. It is, in their own words:

“.. a social experiment that harnesses the collective intelligence of the web to visualize and uncover hidden relationships among future and historical events."

They do this by providing everyone (yes you too!) the opportunity to add their own thoughts in a variety of ways. You can make your own predictions, quote a prediction from someone else you agree with, set a future goal, or create a time capsule.  Web of Fate also offers another way of looking at this with their “Semantic Future: explore the meaning of everything”,  accomplished by their semantic analysis engine that extracts meaning from historical, present and future events and draw connections among them.

Since I'm a very visual thinker, I particularly liked the way that WoF is synthesizing all of “our” input to create the Web of Fate visualizations.  Given enough input, I think these will go a long way towards helping us spot trends and patterns that I find so enlightening to the process of designing your own future. 

World Mural Project:  Youth is Not Always Wasted on the Young!

But I’ve saved the best for last.  Chris Dawkins, another blogger I recommend, wrote a terrific summary of the “Intel World Mural project - just what will the next 40 years bring?”.  Chris is behind the Ziff Davis blog on Education and I’ve written more about him and his blog in my previous post “Scan, scan, scan as fast as you can”. I recommend that you subscribe to his feed, if you don’t already.

But the treat today is to direct your attention to the World Mural Project, which is part of Intel’s celebration of their 40th anniversary as a company (July 18, 2008) when they will unveil what they describe as:

“...one of the world’s largest web based digital murals designed by youth.  More than 530 young people from 21 countries around the globe share their vision on what computers will allow us to accomplish in the next 40 years.”

To see for yourself, just click the “View Mural” link on the World Mural site. I hope you will have as much fun as I did exploring the various visions from the young contributors.  The interface is fun and whimsical, and it allows you to move around to different countries and regions and then click on the individual contributions.

Chris pulled out this quote from Intel spokesperson Agnes Kwan, which gives a great glimpse into the future that some of these “kids” see:

"Some of the themes that the kids have expressed are: having multi-function, wearable computers, achieving a greener environment on Earth, greatly improved healthcare, vastly improving our brain power, experiencing virtual education, communicating through holograms, teletransport, living more relaxed, peaceful lives, and living on Mars.”

Also worth checking out is the Intel Computer Clubhouse through which the mural project was developed.  This network is an after-school community-based technology learning program that enables youth in underserved communities to acquire tools necessary for personal and professional success.  The Clubhouses were an ideal way for youth to collaborate on the mural and create a dynamic and unified piece of art that represented a global world view.

I think this is also a great example of another trend that I highlighted in my post “Future Sources of Innovation, Discovery and Design” where I see more and more innovation and ideas coming from the underdeveloped and underserved groups and regions of the world (many of them located inside otherwise very “developed” regions and countries, I might add!).  In any case, a very good use of your time would be to check out both the World Mural project itself and the Computer Clubhouse project.  Consider getting involved yourself as a volunteer, mentor or trainer in these projects.

Who better to involve directly in designing our future than those who are going to spend the most time in it and who likely have entirely new and fresh ideas and perspectives than those of us who may be more often shaped by the past?

I particularly liked the line and the link found in the Web of Fate site:  “The Solution:  You have the solution”    OK, OK, so it’s a form and you know I subscribe to the “all forms must die” attitude, but in this case the potential for the benefits of your input outweigh the format and I’d strongly encourage you to add yours to the collection and check back regularly to see how our future is shaping up!

Make This Personal!

I hope you too find some of these new examples inspiring and insightful and that you will check them out.  However, all of these are acting at a very high level. Most change occurs much closer to the ground and with more specific applications.   Therefore perhaps most important and valuable is the potential for YOU to adopt some of these examples to your own work and areas of interest.  What is to stop you from creating your own game along the lines of Superstruct to drill down on designing the future on a much more focused level of your own industry, profession, hobby or other areas that you are passionate about?  It “only” takes a good initial premise or scenario to cause some of that incendiary “Spontaneous Creative Combustion” in your own organization. How could you involve younger minds in helping to see and shape the future of these worlds you are a part of?  How could you instigate an outbreak of input and feedback within your groups and utilize the semantic analysis from something like the Web of Fate to spot trends and directions that will help you direct and design the future?

At the risk of beating this theme to death, let me restate that I am NOT interested nor optimistic about these examples I’ve highlighted for their predictive capabilities, but rather for their assistance in helping each and every one of us to play a part in designing a future that is both bright for all and is one we can be proud of and part of.

But most importantly I’d like to know how do YOU see the future shaping up?    You know where I stand but how do you see it?  Bright or dark?  Is the future fatalistic of serendipitous?  Done to you or something you have a hand in?

Inventing the Future?

I've been a big fan of Jane McGonigal ever since I had the chance to talk with her at the Learning 2007 conference where we were both speakers. One of the many reasons I so like her work is her focus on what is called “alternate reality gaming” or ARG (gotta have an acronym or it ain’t real right?).  While Jane is a very fun person (who else would carry the title of  "Head PuppetMaster"?), trust me when I say that her work on games and their consequent results has been very “serious” indeed. Harvard Business Review called her theory of "alternate reality business" one of the "Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas of 2008".  Check out Jane's company AvantGame and her blog for more information and I think you too will soon be a big fan.

I’ve been promoting augmented reality over virtual reality for a long time, and Jane’s unique approach of adding gaming to the equation is brilliant. I believe that Jane and her games are the best examples that I know of for showing off some of the true power of applying game theory. I especially appreciate the truly unique approach and out-of-the-box thinking she has brought to gaming. Jane’s games are also great examples of a common theme here on OCOT—the power and beauty of simplicity. Unlike most game examples, which typically involve a lot of hardware and software technology and are highly dependent upon the game developers and platforms, Jane's games are an extremely “low tech” model that puts the game players in charge. It all starts with and is based upon a simple opening statement or premise and is then left up to the players to provide all the excitement and direction online, usually with simple tools such as e-mails, blogs, and IM. You can see this for yourself by checking out some of her past successes such as World Without Oil, Cruel 2 B Kind, and I Love Bees.

Superstruct is Super!

All this is just an introduction though to a new joint venture that I'm intrigued by and which Jane is leading with the Institute for the Future called “Superstruct”. They describe it as “the world’s first massively multiplayer forecasting game. It’s not just about envisioning the future—it’s about inventing the future.”  As with all her alternate reality games, this one starts with a scenario. In the case of Superstruct, it begins with the following:

"Humans have 23 years to go:  Global Extinction Awareness System starts the countdown for Homo sapiens. PALO ALTO, CA — Based on the results of a year-long supercomputer simulation, the Global Extinction Awareness System (GEAS) has reset the "survival horizon" for Homo sapiens—the human race—from "indefinite" to 23 years."

You can read the rest of the details in the link above and this Superstruct FAQ.  Highly recommend that you take a few minutes to check out the link to Superstruct to learn more. Although the game doesn’t officially start until September 2008, they have already started a precursor in the form of comments to the announcement and an initial premise of:

"It’s the summer of 2019. Imagine you’re already there, and tell us a little bit about your future self. Where are you having dinner tonight?"

For more on Superstruct and other AR games check out the ARGNet for more alternative reality games.  While it is obviously still early in the process, I was struck by the degree to which the initial comments seem to see and predict a very negative future, and it's all the more reason for us to all take a role in changing this by envisioning and designing one that is positive. If you believe as I do that WE are ultimately in control of the future, then why would we design and aim for anything less? PLEASE be sure to check out the comments and add some of your own!

Forget Predicting the Future. Let's Get Busy Designing It!

What I'm most passionate about, and my reason for alerting you to this new glimpse into the future, is the whole idea of not predicting the future, but "inventing it" as Jane has also been known to say. This of course parallels one of my favorite Alan Kay' quotes:

“The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

This hands on, get involved, take responsibility and action approach has always spoken to me loudly, and so I’m struck by the increasing number and diversity of ways that this is actually happening and how we collectively can and are creating the future. It sure beats the more typically fatalistic attitudes I seem to run into so often that "they" are causing everything or that technology is somehow in control of our future. I'm desperately hoping and sincerely believe that as these recent examples show, we are seeing the turnaround of the "victim mentality" that seems to have become so prevalent and we are going to seize both the opportunity and the responsibility to make the future one that we want to live in and be a part of. 

Game on!

Serious Play: Are We Humans the Biggest Computer of All?

Would you be interested in a future where the pursuit of fun and enjoyment was one our our major roles in life because it leads to solving extraordinarily large and complex world problems? For example, what if all of us helped to digitize all the content contained in all the books in the world? Almost none of this content is currently available on the Web or in any digital form and as such, is largely inaccessible to most. And would you be interested in a world where the relationship between computers and humans is a very positive and symbiotic one? I know I would. 

I'd like to bring your attention to some of the ways in which this is already happening. Let's see if this excites you so much that you'd like to not only participate in some of these processes, but also start to use some of these models to help solve some of the problems you and your profession or areas of interest face.

In my previous posting "Moving aLOM", I mentioned some of the exciting, yet daunting, challenges of the future of metadata, such as how to create, in staggering volume, some of the more "subjective" metadata—things like the infinite characteristics that describe people, places, and things—where we humans are still the only source. This effort would include things like creating metadata for all the images and videos out there—still a largely unsolved problem—the absence of which not only makes them very hard to find, but also makes the Web and computers very inaccessible to the visually impaired, which, with age, might include a lot of us!

The Exciting Work of Luis von Ahn

Perhaps most notable in this area is a relatively young new professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Luis von Ahn, standing at right in this photo with his PhD advisor Manuel Blum. Luis has already completed some amazing work on what he refers to as "human computation" and how to put "wasted" human cycles to use in solving problems a computer cannot solve at this point in time, but humans can solve easily. Luis also picks up on a theme we have discussed here on Off Course - On Target in many other contexts—the power of the "network effect" achieved by connecting everything and every one together. Human computation is obviously focused on the latter, and Luis wants us to consider having all of our brains connected together as an extremely advanced large-scale distributive processing unit. Not to worry, no wires or direct connections to your head are required!

Before I go any further, and especially if you are more of a visual and auditory learner, let me recommend that you immediately watch this talk called "Human Computation" that Luis gave on July 26, 2006, about the power of human cycles. This 51-minute talk is part of the Google Video Text Talk series (also highly recommended), and while it is long by some current standards, I feel very comfortable recommending this to you, since I'm convinced you'll agree it was a VERY good use of your time (actually Luis' talk only runs 40 minutes, and is followed by about 10 minutes of a good Q&A session).

Another excellent reference for you, which contains more fascinating details and examples of von Ahn's work, can be found in Clive Thompson's article "For Certain Tasks, the Cortex Still Beats the CPU"  in the June 2007 edition of Wired magazine.

Games with a Purpose

But for those who don't have the time right now to look at these things more, here is a quick synthesis of what I find so exciting and interesting about the innovative use of our human "compute cycles", and the use of "fun and games" for very significant and "serious" results. What von Ahn likes to call "games with a purpose".

One of the most common and effective examples of this type of human computation is one of Luis' first applications, which is known as "Captcha". The name may be new to you, but I'm sure you're already a veteran Captcha expert! Captchas are those slightly difficult to make out words that you are asked to identify and type into a box when you are signing up for web sites. Captchas are used for responses online and in other situations where we want to prevent automated "bots" from generating unending amounts of "spam" or other undesirable exploitations of such online experiences. The problem is how to differentiate between a human response and a computer response, and Captchas are a simple solution to this problem, as well as a simple example of a problem that computers can't solve by themselves.

In itself, this doesn't sound like that interesting of a problem, although certainly it is an annoying one! However, part of what I would see as Luis' brilliance is in the more primary problems he is solving with this process.

In the case of Captcha, the real problem being solved pertains to my initial reference about the challenge of digitizing all the content of the world's printed matter, such as books. For more background on this digitizing and scanning challenge, you may want to refer to my previous posting from Jan 2007 "Books—the NEW old medium". Specifically, the problem is with all the words found in printed matter that scanning and conversion technology cannot make out, because the medium has a crease running through it, or it is partly missing, or other factors which make it impossible for the technology to recognize the words correctly.  Yet, show these words to almost any one of us and we can easily recognize the word.

So all those "fuzzy" words in Captchas are NOT just some random words that are blurred to fool a computer. Instead, these are the images of words which scanning technology has failed to recognize correctly! Luis refers to this specific application as ReCaptcha and you'll find much more information there, as well as instructions and free plugins for you to embed within your own sites, blogs, etc.

And that's just one side of why Luis von Ahn was awarded one of the MacArthur "Genius" awards and a Microsoft Research grant, for he has also managed to put these types of solutions into a game format that starts to look at solving these kinds of problems at a scale that is truly breathtaking! 

Solving World Problems or Playing Solitaire?

In his talks, Luis likes to use a very compelling metric of human-hours, and he often compares statistics on the the amount of human-hours that are "wasted", in his opinion, doing something like playing Solitaire on a computer. I too have always been amazed at the number of people I observe when walking down the aisles of an airplane, for example, who are hard at "work" playing Solitaire, but I had no idea just how much time is spent on this. According to the statistics that Luis uses, over 9 billion human-hours were expended playing Solitaire in 2003 alone! Better yet, he puts this into perspective by comparing this activity to such things as:

• The building of the New York City Empire State building, which consumed about 7 million human-hours, and thus equates to just 6.8 hours of collective Solitaire playing.
• Building the entire Panama Canal, which took 20 million human-hours and amounts to less than a day of collective solitaire playing!

Metadata for All Images?

Now imagine if we were able to put this kind of "human computation" to more effective use AND still do so within the format of games that people can enjoy doing themselves! One example is another one of Luis' creations, and one that has been running with staggering results for over three years called the ESP Game. As we've discussed many times, experiential "learning by doing" is often one of the best ways to learn about something new, so I'd encourage you to not only read about the ESP Game on that site, but to play it for awhile. (Caution: can be very addictive and time consuming!) When you do, you'll see how it puts two or more players (there is also a single player version) into a friendly competition by typing in descriptive words for a given photo (that metadata thing again), and they get points whenever they both type in the same word.

So what? While progress is being made in image recognition technology, this is still largely a problem that computers cannot do. And ask yourself, do YOU take the time to "tag" or create all the metadata for the photos and videos that YOU post, such as who and what is in the photo? Didn't think so. Yet by using this type of game format, the ESP Game has been running for over three years with no drop off in popularity and as of mid-2006, it was very fast, very cheap, and very accurate. If this were done as a popular online game site, it would be possible to label all the images on Google Image Search in just a few weeks! No surprise then that the ESP Game has already been licensed by Google in the form of the Google Image Labeler, and is used to improve the accuracy of the Google Image Search. We humans are relatively competitive animals and we like to do what we enjoy, so this approach appears to have a lot of promise.

Yes, but WHERE is that object in the photo?

Another problem that is even more challenging than identifying WHAT objects are in the image is identifying WHERE they are in the image. To do this, Luis has created another game called "PeekaBoom". The first player sees an image along with a word that describes an object within the image, and then clicks on the image where the named object is located. The second player sees only the object that the first player clicked on and types the word associated to that object. Once the second player guesses the correct word, the two players move on to the next image and switch roles. More details are explained in the video (you really should take the time to watch it!).

Human Computer Relations: Parasitic or Symbiotic?

Luis also notes how this transforms the current relationship between humans and computers from what he calls a parasitic relationship to a symbiotic one where:

"...humans solve some problems, computers solve others, and together we work to create a better world."

Sound far fetched? Well, in the less than two years that his limited experiment of the ESP Game has run, over 75,000 players have come up with over 15 million "agreements" (matched words). This rate would indicate that 5,000 players playing simultaneously could label all images on Google Images in about two months. Think about that...5,000 is NOT a very big number when you consider the numbers on many gaming sites. Therefore, it should be possible to label all the images on the Web in a few months. Again, I strongly recommend that you check out the video to get not only more details, but to see just how accurate, pragmatic, and promising this approach is. 

For example, it turns out that the results of a game such as PeekaBoom can in turn be used to help train computers to recognize objects and their location. Turns out that one of the reasons that computers are not yet very good at this type of object recognition and automated metadata generation is that there is very little data and examples to use to "train" the computers on how to do it. By capturing the results of all the human play in location identification of objects within images, this data can then be used to train computers to do the same thing"—allowing us move on to new challenges... and more fun.

Super Side Effects

I think you'll agree that this approach not only shows great promise in terms of solving some very large scale problems, but has some surprising and equally amazing "side effects", like how some people have used this to help them learn a language. This approach has spawned its own game called Babble, where two English-speaking players are shown a sentence in a foreign language that neither of them speak, and are presented with a list of possible meanings (in English) below each word. Players try to agree upon a set of English words that forms the most coherent sentence. The result is that this activity is surprisingly effective in translating foreign text into English without requiring anyone fluent in both languages. Think of the possibilities of this running at a larger scale!

Another "side effect" of this approach is how many players have noted that they end up finding other people who think very much like them, and thus they have a great sense of "intimacy" and closeness with their counterparts who play these games. Therefore, many  ask if they can find out who their anonymous competitors are to continue the conversation. At this point in time, all the game players are anonymous and no identities are revealed, but one could imagine this being used as a way to help discover other people "like you"—ones you'd want to meet and get to know better.

Common Sense Isn't that Common; yet!

And lastly from von Ahn's work, check out his new game Verbosity, which helps to generate what he calls "common sense facts" (again just more metadata really). One player is given a word and the other tries to guess what it is by completing fill-in-the-blank-type templates, such as "It is a type of ____" or "It contains ___".  The player who entered the original word can answer "true" or "false", but can't use the word itself. All this is very much like some party games that many of you have probably played, but the important difference here goes back to the original point of the summative network effect and how this can all be put to greater use. In the example that Luis shows in his presentation, the word "milk" would have some common sense facts such as;

• It is white
• It is a liquid
• It is often used to eat cereal
• It has lactose

Again, computers can not currently solve this kind of problem, and it is another an example of the need for massive amounts of metadata. Imagine if we started generating massive volumes of these "common sense facts" and they were readily available to all. 

More Competition = Less Carbon?

Lest you should think this is just a "one man show" from Luis von Ahn, I want to point out that there are many others who have been developing, adopting, and adapting similar models. For example, "Carbonrally: Carbon Challenge", which you can learn more about from the Nov. 20th, 2007 Webware post "Carbonrally: My carbon footprint's smaller than yours" by Martin LaMonica, is an application that is showing some great promise for improving the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or the "carbon footprint" of individuals and organizations alike. Carbonrally adds the dimension of some fun and healthy competition to do better than others. As Martin describes it, Carbonrally is "tapping into people's tribal competitive spirit".

Whew!  That's quite an introduction to what I believe is both a powerful and profound pattern emerging—where the natural pursuit of fun, healthy competition, and challenges are combined into a game-based model that has already shown some of the ways we can solve large-scale present and future problems. It also creates a whole new relationship between us and technology. This model is not only interesting and fun, but it is a fascinating example of "user generated metadata", which I mentioned in my previous "Moving aLOM" posting.

Your Turn to Play!

Besides raising your awareness about "human computation" and the power of this approach, I also want to encourage all of us to put more time and energy into figuring out how we can inject more fun into work and other problem-solving situations. As you do so, I think you'll see an important job or task or problem  can be more fun if it's solved with some kind of game play, and where the solution remains very much a human one.

We can not, for now at least, expect computers to come up with such fun and game-based solutions by themselves! 

For starters, if you have websites or other applications where you have problems preventing spam or other misuses, consider taking advantage of some of the freely available plugins and nullities, such as those from the ReCaptcha site. Longer term though, please put some thought into which problems you could address with this model, and the ways you could do so by injecting the fun and challenge of a game-based approach into the more serious problems you need to solve...then share them with us here at Off Course - On Target.

I'm reminded of the great quote from Brian Suton-Smith who said:

"The opposite of play is not work; its depression!"

And I look forward to hearing all the innovative and creative ways you will come up with to solve problems—large and small—and replace depression with play. Have fun!

Musical Snowflakes Continue to Fall All Around Us

The world of music continues to be one of the richest sources of examples for the Snowflake Effect, where mass personalization, mass customization, mass contribution are all available to try.

The list of examples continues to grow exponentially.  A "Do It Yourself/ Build Your Own" model calls for a radical redesign, and this is what most products and services will need to adopt if they expect to survive in the future.

If you haven't tried using this aspect of mass personalization in the music services area, I'd recommend you check out the "Social Music Overview" page from TechCrunch for a list of options and a brief overview of each. Then, to best understand and evaluate the experience and the potential, you really need to try it yourself. 

See if you think that there is no turning back now. The genie is out of the bottle and there is no putting it back!  The vector of mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect is inevitable and will become the expectation that we have for most products and services, because we now know it is possible—a great thing from my perspective. But let me know your reactions and experiences as well.

Right now though, I'd like to bring a few of the newer developments and advancements from the world of music to your attention. 

Slacker isn't!

My first example is Slacker, and contrary to its name (in many cultures the word "slacker" refers to someone who does not try or work very hard), this site is a real winner. It's currently my top pick for the Snowflake Effect as its applied to music. 

You'll find a good overview of Slacker in this PC Mag review. On TechCrunch, you'll see that the founders of Slacker (each of whom is an online music veteran) have very big ambitions indeed.  In addition to their Web-based music service, which will compete with others such as Pandora, MOG, and Last.FM, Slacker is about to release (Dec 2007) a new portable player, which is reviewed here and is pictured on the left. This new portable player is WiFi-enabled, so you can have music streamed right to it, and synch it with your desktop and music collection. They have also announced a satellite car kit so you can have this music wherever you are. 

One notable addition over most other music personalization services is that the desktop version of Slacker (Windows only for now unfortunately) enables you to incorporate your own music library in the mix. What most impressed me, however, was the well designed interface that enables new degrees of personalization.  I'm referring to the overall human computer interface, not just the way it looks. 

Slacker is impressive and a significant improvement over other services. You can do as much or as little customization as you like quickly and easily. And no matter where you leave off in this customization, Slacker works to the maximum degree possible.

For example, my former favorite, Pandora, requires that you provide constant feedback by indicating that you like or don't like each song. If you stop providing this feedback, then it stops playing after an hour or two. This is all very understandable since it can't continue to improve without some additional input, so it knows if the music is continuing to be just right for you at just that time or not. However, most of us are unwilling or unable to constantly provide this feedback for every song while it is playing—at least not by the current norm of manually clicking a thumbs up or thumbs down button or a 1-5 star rating.  This method is too interruptive on a continuous basis. 

Slacker, in contrast to all the others I know, is set up to do the best it can with however much feedback you give it. Obviously the more you give, the more you get. However, that Slacker will continue to work very hard at playing music that is as personalized as possible to the information you've given it is a huge improvement.

I'm very big on the "discovery factor" of this kind of personalization, and this is another big plus of Slacker, which is why I'm using this as my current best example. As you use the Slacker interface to personalize the music, you are constantly exposed to more and more alternatives. Yet this does not overwhelm you with too much choice, because you can take it or leave it. Again, Slacker maximizes as much feedback as you've given it and keeps on playing great personalized music.  One particularly valuable new function is the ability for you to set the "discoverability" factor to any degree you like.  This is nicely summarized in the PC Mag review:

"To tweak your listening experience further, Slacker provides four ingenious fine-tuning options. Artist Discovery lets you control how much variety you'll get beyond the chosen artists (a lot, a little, or none at all), and Popularity determines whether you get "fringe" song selections, "hits," or something in between. The Favorites tool determines how often the selected station plays those songs you've tagged as favorites. Finally, there's Year, which narrows the selection to Classic, Older, Recent, or Current. (You can leave all these options set to Auto if you'd rather not get so specific.) Neither Last.fm nor Pandora offer anywhere near this kind of fine-tuning; the most you can do is vote yea or nay on the current song selection (which you can do in Slacker as well)."

Social.FM

Want more examples of the richness of the music world?  Check out the just released Social.fm, which is (as you might guess) a widget designed for  music sharing within social networks, such as FaceBook. Read the Nov. 12th Webware review "Social.fm rolls out fancy looking Facebook app, DIY widgets for everyone else" for a good overview of this new service. In addition to a nicely integrated FaceBook version, Social.fm has also announced that they are working on integrating better with with Google's OpenSocial initiative.  This is worth keeping an eye on IF and as OpenSocial creates a standard that enables interoperability for widgets across all applications and OS.  This is still a long way off and somewhat of a long shot, but it's very much worth rooting for and following up on.

Social.fm's announcement of Social.fm Mobile is also great example of convergence. This technology turns your smartphone into a music player for everything from your own music collection to digital radio and podcasts,

So, are you Off Course from your usual thinking, and where you are looking?  Most likely. But On Target? Even more likely!  Enjoy your experiential learning and I'll be back soon with more.

The Lego of Gadgets

How could I not like Rafe Neeleman's recent posting on Webware called "Bug Labs: The Lego of Gadgets"?!  Here's so many of my favorite themes all wrapped into one: Lego block modularity, mashups, gadgets and the whole DIY ethic (Do It Yourself). 

OK, I confess to having a severe gadget addiction that dates back to my early youth in an earlier era where it manifested as hot rods, restoring antique cars, woodworking, metalworking, sewing, and other pursuits. The DIY gene is very dominant in me (along with just being plain cheap). A friend and I were just discussing this idea this past weekend, when it worked out "cheaper" to go buy a new MIG welder and some other tools to build some custom stainless steel brackets that were going to cost too much to have made by a local shop:

DIY labor = less $$ + new toys tools

What's not to love about that formula?

If you have any similar tendencies, do take the time to check out the Bug Labs site. It appears to be the work of a very passionate group—my favorite kind of people! On their new web site, their stated inspiration is:

There are so many great gadget ideas that haven't been thought of yet. With BUG, we want to unlock and inspire the discovery and creation of as many of these devices as possible.

Right now, they have a "BUGbase" unit (image left) which is the size of an old tape cassette (remember those? If not ask your parents) and is (their site described it); "a small hackable Linux computer" that has the basic components you need for most devices such as a CPU, USB, LCD interface, battery, WiFi, etc.

 

Some of their initial add on hardware modules (image at right) include a GPS, digital camera/videocam, touch sensitive color LCD screen and an accelerometer/motion sensor—all of which snap together with the BUGbase, of course, and can be programmed with the open source software SDK.

They apparently have a full development environment called Eclipse which is also open source and according to Rafe's posting, "looks to be philosophically similar to the Bug hardware—that is, highly modular."

While Bug Labs is still pretty high up the geek/DIY echelon, I do hope that this is evidence of an evolution towards a more modular and interoperable level, enabling mashups for hardware, much as we are seeing on the software side with widgets and the like. 

 

Once again however widespread adoption will depend upon the emergence of standards, be they de facto or de jure that will make everyone's modules interoperate and "snap together". What would Lego blocks be without standard "pin" size?! 

On the good news side we are seeing how something like the relatively ubiquitous USB connector has sparked an explosion of devices that all work off this same standard (even with the slight hiccup of there now being two USB connectors—A and B). This ability to use the same cords to plug any USB compatible device into any USB port has been a huge improvement in the interoperability of hardware and the exchange of power and data between such devices as cell phones, cameras, GPS, scanners, printers, etc. Heck, some of them even span the great Windows/Mac divide! 

On the other hand, no one seems to have been able to come up with a standard DC power plug in!  Even within the same manufacturer, it seems like every new laptop I get, for example, has a slightly different size connector, which renders all my other "brick" converters useless and means almost none of us can share them when we are together. 

So here's hoping that efforts like Bug Labs can start to make some significant progress towards standards that matter! In the meantime, all you DIYers like me, have fun creating more mashups, and be sure to share some of your creations with all of us.

EOL and the power of MC2: Mass Contribution x Mass Customization

Some of my previous postings have focused on the need to dramatically increase the scale of our discovery of the unknown. I'm finding more examples all of the time that show a trend towards more mass participation and mass contribution by connecting everything and everyone together. The project we recently covered called the "Encyclopedia of Life" (EOL) is one such example.

But let's take a step back and try synthesizing this into something that give us direct and broader benefits.

As I noted my previous postings "New Perspectives: Looking Down and Under" and Third Wave, about the Open Ocean Initiative (OOI), EOL is not just another amazingly large scientific study with the resultant report and data. Instead, EOL is yet another great example of the pattern towards mass customization and mass contribution.

EOL will be using a mashup model by assembling lots of technology and data from many different sources into a single experience. This effort is not as flexible as I would like in terms of providing multiple experiences, and is much less "open" from a contribution standpoint than I would ultimately like, but it is still a huge step towards mass contribution compared to the historically typical static and closed research.

For the project, agents will collect all the information about a particular species from the Web and assemble it into a draft species page.Scientists will then review, edit, and authenticate the information. A species expert will sign each page.

This is a proven model, but is also one that will be challenged to meet their objective of exponentially increasing the volume and speed of cataloguing the worlds known species of life and even more so in discovering the unknown 90%.

But let's keep in mind that the context here is scientific data, and thus it lends itself much more to such scrutiny, accuracy, and expertise. Yet I can see that by truly opening this up to mass contribution by the global scientific community and providing a way to converge, connect and vet it all, then it is quite possible (I'd estimate probable) that this will create a tipping point and set off the chain reaction or network effect that can achieve the audacious goal of EOL, and do so in a fraction of the time.

However, the most exciting characteristic to me is the degree to which EOL is shining example of the trend towards mass personalization and the Snowflake Effect.  For example, when you're using EOL you can set up your level of expertise in a given context, you can post questions, photos and your own discoveries. After all, many of the currently known species have been discovered accidentally and by amateurs—a.k.a you and me!  Imagine the impact of adding millions or billions more "amateur explorers" to this process?!

Fail Forward Faster!!

There is, of course, the big question of how to do all this with a strong degree of accuracy and authenticity. Similar to the challenge that something like Wikipedia faces, when anyone can post or edit anything, how do we know if we can trust the information? This is a very important and major issue for all of us to pay attention to and to participate in evolving some effective solutions. While Wikipedia continues to have its share of growing pains, why would we expect anything less of disruptive innovations? Some of Wikipedia's recent decisions are of concern to me regarding some of the restrictions they are placing on postings and editing;however I empathize with the difficult decisions they wrestle with and applaud the fact that they are making decisions, good and bad,and thus learning from their experiences, so the can put ever forward. 

Let's be sure to keep in mind that this is all a grand experiment and a learning process, and we should expect "failures" and relish the learning that they provide. From my perspective there is no question that we are much better off with this trend towards a much more transparent process, mass contribution etc. as exemplified by the likes of Wikipedia, and I welcome the rapid growth of this pattern with such additional efforts as the Open Ocean Initiative and the Encyclopedia of Life. Check them out and see what you think.

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Frontiers in Service

Recently I was honored with an invitation from Jim Spohrer to attend and present at the Frontiers in Service Conference on Friday, Oct. 5th, 2007 in San Francisco. Jim is the Director of Services Research at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA, and he has been a longtime colleague and inspiration. Our connection dates back to his days at Apple Computer in the late 80's when he was a DEST (Distinguished Engineer, Scientist, and Technologist) and program manager of learning technology projects in Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Many thanks to Jim for this opportunity.

I met Jim back in the late 80's when he was leading the effort to create Apple's first online learning community and vision for anytime, anywhere e-learning and the Educational Object Exchange. Jim is also responsible for coming up with the whole idea behind WorldBoard.

The WorldBoard idea came to Jim one day in 1996 when he was out hiking and saw an interesting plant that he wanted to know more about. He started to imagine the benefits of combining a new viewing system built into his eye glasses with digital photography, GPS, and location information, and a way to leave information at that location for the next hiker who asked the same question he had asked (remember this was 1996!).  Eventually, he came to call this notion WorldBoard and there is now a whole group called the WorldBoard Forum working on this and related challenges. The site is very "click worthy"!

Back in 2000 when I was creating  "Into the Future: A vision paper" for the American Society of Technical Development ASTD and the US National Governor's Association (NGA), I used Jim's idea of the WorldBoard as an example of "augmented reality", whereas all that talk at the time was about virtual reality. Check out my paper for more details if you're interested. I can't believe it was "only" seven years ago!  

The Frontiers in Service Conference, which I mentioned at the start of this post, was founded in 1992 and is considered by many to be:

"'...the world's leading annual conference on service research. The conference has a very global nature, and generally draws attendees from 25 countries or more from around the world. It is sponsored annually by the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland.'

The Center for Excellence in Service (CES) is a nonprofit organization composed of individuals dedicated to service strategy and research. CES combines its unique perspective of customer point-of-view and an exploration of a variety of services (with a focus on information technology) in order to provide business leaders and academics with the latest knowledge in service research.  CES also implements practical business objectives into its academic research, and this dynamic creates a partnership between the business world and academia."

I was particularly attracted to the dual attributes of this event and organization: they represent an international R&D community and one focused on the future of services. Services is a big focus area of interest for me. I see a future where our current distinction between services and products will be blurred to the point of requiring a whole new vocabulary to describe the emerging new world where products are becoming more service-like and services are becoming more product-like. 

This same view is also discussed in some of my prior postings, such as New Perspectives: Third Wave, where I point out author Alvin Toffler's predictions from 40 years ago where he envisioned that we would see a  blurring of the distinction between a consumer or a producer and his coining of the word "pro-sumer" to describe this.

Similarly, I believe we are seeing more evidence of a parallel pattern of convergence between products and services. Furthermore, I expect we will see this materialize on a mass scale in MUCH less than the almost 40 years it took for the "pro-sumer" society to emerge. 

At the Frontiers in Service conference, I had the honor of being on stage with Dr. Michel Wedel (University of Maryland) and Dr. Sajeev Varki (University of South Florida, USA), two eminent experts in the areas of recommender systems.

In our session “Rating Recommendations: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly”, examples from the world of music predominated much of the discussion, since they provide so many tangible examples of what is already possible for mass personalization through feedback loops, metadata, and recommender systems, which address the tricky challenge of personalizing our listening experiences. Consider for a moment just how difficult and "fuzzy" this problem is to get some assistance with choosing "just the right" song at just the right time for just you and just your context at any given moment.

Given my affinity for mass personalization and what my co-conspirator Erik Duval and I refer to as the Snowflake Effect, you can imagine why I was delighted to be there.

The name Snowflake Effect refers to the fact that you are like a snowflake; there is no one else quite like you, and of course that also makes you just like every other snowflake!  But moreover so too is every situation, every project unique, so we're aiming for enabling each of us to have "just the right" people, content and "stuff" at just the right time in just the right context on just the right medium, etc,

In my presentation to this group (see slides below), I posed the question that if this observation of uniqueness has arguably always been the case and is SO obvious, then why do we live in a world that assumes the opposite?  If we look around us, almost very product and service has been designed for some relatively large number of people, a "target audience, customer or demographic" and a whole set of assumptions about how everyone in this group is the same! But the times they are a changing!

| View | Upload your own

I went on to suggest that it is now possible to have such mass personalization, that there are more and more examples showing up every day, and therefore there are more and more people who know this is possible and are demanding it. Such "market demand" is usually met. 

My additional point about what's new was the degree to which we are seeing what I call "MC3", the combined multiplier effect of:

Mass Customization x Mass Contribution x Mass Conversation = Mass Personalization

The R&D work , which Dr. Wedel and so many of the international researchers in the room are doing in this area, promises to accelerate this trend much further, much faster. 

I always relish any chance to get in front of people doing the really hard work of research and development, because it gives me the opportunity to suggest some new areas of research that some of them might pick up on. Such opportunities have just been too good to turn down and have proven extremely effective in the past. Perhaps being a bit overzealous, I couldn't resist providing this latest opportunity to be in front of such a prestigious and international group of R&D experts, so I put up the following list of key challenges I see facing both the service industry (the focus of this group) and mass personalization:

• Scalability:
  • Global personalization at a planetary scale
    • e.g. 6.6 billion people on the planet growing exponentially
  • Uniqueness is unique and infinitely so
    • n degrees of personalization per every person, place and thing
    • n radio “stations” per person
    • n-number play lists
• Sustainability:
  • Mass contribution models
• Transferability:
  • Portable Feedback and Attention data
  • Re-purposing from strange sources
  • Not “just” for content
    • Think about competencies; for example, “just the right” people
• Transparency:
  • Dynamic pattern recognition and speculative computing
  • Minimizing the direct explicit input required from individuals
• Metadata Matters:
  • Automated metadata generation
  • Attention metadata
  • Context acquisition
  • Inferred metadata and implicit metadata acquisition
    • e.g. the “missingness” that Dr. Wedel noted)
  • Mood metadata
  • Subjective vs. objective metadata
    • Genome projects (e.g. Pandora Music Genome Project

There's too much to cover in more detail in this posting (lucky you!), but I will use some of these items as fodder for future postings.

My thanks to Jim Spohrer, Ronald Rust, and the Center for Excellence in Service organization for this opportunity to learn about the many exciting R&D efforts underway and the chance to suggest some of the future work they might take on. Based on what I saw and heard at the conference, I'm more optimistic than ever that the dream of having the Snowflake Effect lead to mass personalization on a planetary scale is well on its way to becoming a reality!

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