John Squire is IBM’s director of Digital Marketing and Analytics.

Updated Post
AN UPSET IN THE MAKING
3 February 2012, 11:30 AM Eastern

Just like on the field, Eli Manning is riding a late surge to overtake Tom Brady in the IBM and USC analysis of Super Bowl XLVI social media sentiment.  Overnight results of Super Bowl Twitter buzz drove Giants quarterback Eli Manning’s ‘T score’ for positive sentiment ahead of Tom Brady. Manning now leads with 66% vs. Brady’s 61%, which represents an 8-point shift compared to the previous day. In another interesting development positive sentiment for Giants head coach jumped dramatically with his score rating increasing to 76% positive. That places Coach Coughlin above all of the players and coaches on both teams.

This day-to-day shift in Super Bowl fan sentiment illustrates the speed at which consumer sentiments can shift online — a factor that businesses are watching closely due to the potential impact on their brand equity and sales.

By applying analytics in social media settings we can identify nuances – positive, negative, irony, snarky vs. sincerity, in real-time.  That’s enough time to help an organization, or in this case professional athletes, adjust their comments and actions to dramatically (and positively) impact their brands.

Original Post
SUPER BOWL ANALYSIS TAKES US BEYOND THE TWEETS
2 February 2012

One of the most dramatic NFL games ever played was Super Bowl XLII pitting the undefeated (18–0) New England Patriots led by record-setting quarterback Tom Brady against the surprising NY Giants with young, unproven Eli Manning at the helm.   A thrilling, some say shocking victory for the Giants ended the Patriots bid to be the only 19–0 undefeated champion in league history.  And now Super Bowl XLVI –  The Rematch —   anticipated to be the most watched American television show in history, promises to take social media to a whole new level.

As my colleague, and former NFL player Kevin Nosbusch posted on Wednesday, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab are conducting the first sentiment analysis of the two Super Bowl quarterbacks to illustrate how new analytics technologies make it possible to quickly assess the positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared by fans.

Why is this sentiment analysis important to IBM? In addition to being a longtime partner of the NFL, IBM recognizes that its clients, just like football players, are closely connected to their brand presence.

Using advances in analytics companies, academics, journalists can gain new insights into consumer perceptions via social media on endless topics from football and baseball to movies and retailing. Technologies can even distinguish irony and figure out which tweets are just background noise and those that are truly important.

Branding Upset on the Digital Playing Field

The Super Bowl analysis shows us that today the two quarterbacks, Tom Brady and Eli Manning are in statistical dead heat:  Brady earning 65% positive sentiment and Eli Manning earning 62% positive sentiment.  That actually represents a big branding upset on the digital playing field. Most sports and marketing followers would assume that Brady should be far ahead given his lofty status as an elite QB for many years and three championship rings.

Other noteworthy findings show that wide receivers have upstaged the quarterbacks, who are being positioned in the news media as the chief protagonists — Wes Welker is #1 in positive sentiment and Victor Cruz is a close 2nd.  Interestingly Brady leads by 3% points, exactly the point spread Las Vegas oddsmakers have favored the Patriots.

So while it looks like Tom Brady is going into the game as the Social MVP, now is not the time to get cocky.  Eli Manning is holding his own against the more experienced Brady in terms of positive sentiment.

The IBM USC analysis illustrates the potential insight and benefits that social media analytics can deliver to a brand — whether you’re an professional football player or a global enterprise.  Businesses that ignore the impact of social media will be stuck on the sidelines.

Learn more about IBM and USC AIL social media analysis projects.

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, entrepreneur, IBM, IBM Research, Jeopardy, nfl, picture stories, predictive analytics, retail, smarter commerce, Smarter Planet, social business, storytelling, twitter, Watson

See Also:

IBM and San Jose State University Collaborate to Advance Social Business Skills

Schulich School of Business Students Graduate to the IBM SmartCloud

Picture Story: Social Business at Work

Picture Story: How IBMers Work

Technorati Tags: curriculum, social business, social media, the great mind challenge

It may be time to follow Bhutan’s lead and broaden the ways we define economic success.

In fact, Sergio Borger and other scientists at IBM Research – Brazil are thinking along these lines. They’re trying to come up with a way of accurately measuring the quality of life in a city.

Outside Bhutan, the gross national happiness (GNH) index hasn’t had much impact. Until now, that is. In addition to the small team of scientists at IBM, others are reconsidering our traditional methods for measuring economic success. Last year, for instance, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution calling for government leaders to consider happiness as part of a “holistic approach to development.” On a smaller scale, the city of Seattle has turned the pursuit of a broader definition of prosperity into a grassroots community campaign. Through a Happiness Initiative, Seattle’s leaders conducted a citywide online survey of citizen satisfaction with their lives. The results of the survey have been discussed in town meetings. The Seattle City Council has promised to consult the survey data and proposals that come out of the meetings when it makes budgetary and policy decisions.

We need to rethink our definitions of economic success because the 20th century approaches alone are no longer sustainable. It’s becoming clear that prosperity should no longer be measured solely or even primarily based on how much people produce or consume. As the global human population swells beyond 7 billion, there simply won’t be enough natural resources to go around. Meanwhile, the burning of fossil fuels threatens to cause devastating global warming.

So countries and communities need to transition toward socio-economic systems that do not rely on ever-increasing numbers of people and consumption to maintain economic vitality. Instead, we should seek new definitions of economic success focused more on the quality of life–including happiness, health, peace, freedom, cooperation and opportunities for self-determination and self-expression.

This shift would represent a huge transition for society–huge challenges for political systems and human psychology. In addition, we’d face the complex operational tasks of developing standards and metrics for measuring these values, tracking the metrics and designing mechanisms for continually improving them.

But it would be well worth the effort if we can avoid environmental armageddon and endless wars over resources.

Technorati Tags: Bhutan, Gross National Happiness

 Read the related announcement:

IBM Advances Analytics Skills Program To Universities Globally

————————————————————————————–

The IBM Curiosity Shop on Flickr

The IBM Curiosity Shop on YouTube

Technorati Tags: Analytics, animations, curriculum, Education, picture stories, storytelling, Yale

I’d add that if you create a large pool of people with analytics skills, you’re going to create a lot of high-value jobs. That’s one of the reasons that IBM is helping more than 200 universities worldwide develop programs and curricula aimed at preparing business, computer science and engineering students for careers in analytics. In the forefront of the movement is Northwestern University, which has introduced two new masters degree programs in analytics—one for traditional graduate students and another for adult professionals who are acquiring new skills.

How do skills create jobs? Think of it this way: People who have advanced scientific and technical skills will see the world through the prism of those possibilities and will create companies based on their visions. This is one of the bases for the success of Silicon Valley, where Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley helped build the intellectual foundation for one of the world’s premier economic development success stories. Also, smart business people will establish businesses where the proper conditions exist for their success–and having the right talent pool is essential. So skilling up people will be a catalyst for innovation, new business ideas and, therefore, job creation.

Now consider analytics. It will clearly be one of most important skill sets in the coming decades. A global technology industry is being built around these new capabilities. But these skills will be vital for more than IT and business consulting firms. Every person at nearly every level in a knowledge-based company will do their work better with the help of analytics. So, it’s clear that if a community creates and attracts a large talent pool of people with analytics skills, it will receive a strong return on its investments.

In this time of fiscal austerity, it’s difficult for governments to find the money to adequately invest in public education. But those with ambition and foresight will find ways to do so. And they’ll be rewarded for it with job growth, a dynamic economy and rewarding careers for their young people.

Weigh in on analytics and the future of competitiveness in comments here and at #us competes.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Northwestern

Update:

Here’s Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for Sales, Marketing and Strategy (and IBM’s next CEO) talking about how to build a smarter city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————————-

9:00 a.m. Special Address: Economic Recovery, Urbanization and The City, by Alfonso Vegara Gómez, President, Fundación Metrópoli.

Cities have transformed themselves with such intensity. The challenge of the 21^st Century is to build a better urban environment.

“We can’t build cities in the conventional way. We would destroy the planet.” We have to use smart technologies and ideas to build cities in a sustainable way, and a way that provides jobs and economic growth.

In the future there will be super cities and mega metropolitan areas. Between Washington DC and Boston, for instance. We’ll need new transportation systems. The cities in the corridor will share talents.The same in Europe: From Lisbon to Madrid; ultimately you’ll get a huge cluster of connected cities in Europe. “This is the new scale in which you can compete.”

Some exampled of smart cities: Singapore, the new city state. They bet on a port economy. They have smart transportation. They attract talent focusing on IT, media and bio-med. In compact urban spaces they have combined expertise and creativity.

Bilbao, Spain. It integrated all of the systems. It integrated art with urban architecture. Bilbao hasn’t been successful in attracting talent. This will be a big challenge. It has to compete with other cities in a knowledge economy.

The challenge is to build a new urban development park, which will include all of the modern elements: architecture, art, communications, and improved infrastructure.

————————–

9:30 a.m. A Conversation with: Pablo Allard, Decano de Arquitectura y Arte de la UDD y Asesor Senior de Reconstrucción Urbana; Dr. Néstor Bercovich, Coordinador ECLAC, Plan Regional para la Sociedad de la Información de América Latina y el Caribe ECLAC; and Wilson Ferreira Junior., President, CPFL Energia.

Bercovich: We need to rethink the state so we can rise to the challenges of urbanization. A wide variety of stakeholders need to cooperate and innovate.

The free market has created distortions in the social fabric of cities. There’s a huge disparity in wealth and services. This needs to be addressed.

Smarter platforms are the base from which we make the systems of cities and regions work better. For instance, broadband needs to be made available widely and affordably.

Allard: Urban centers, if they’re smarter, can begin to address some of the inequities. They can be a source of economic opportunity for the people of the favelas.

In the future the rate of population growth will go down, and that will make it possible for personal income to come up. Latin American cities will get wealthier and offer new opportunities. “We will have a population that demands a better quality of life.”

“Favelas are full of small entrepreneurs who will make the most of the opportunities that are offered to them.” Little by little, they’ll reach the middle class.

But we need smarter systems in the cities to make this possible.

The context:

Pablo Allard, dean of architecture and art, Desarrollo University, Chile, talks about why he’s “addicted to smarter cities.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

———————-

10:30 a.m. Special Address: Smart Investments in Cities: Managing for the Long-Term, by Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank.

The quality of life in cities and the city ecosystem constitute key factor in innovation going forward. Traditionally we saw that innovation was is driven by three pillars: big private companies, government subsidies and universities. But that’s the old paradigm. Now there are additional factors: cities, NGOs and society.

If we can make cities more efficient we can increase their creative output. A smart city doesn’t just need to be efficient. It needs to have quality of life and creativity. “A city is an ecosystem that encourages innovation and creativity.”

Technological progress will increase in the coming years. Mobile computing is going to be an important factor. Broadband access is increasing greatly. We need to deploy sensors, and large scale databases.

All of this makes information about what’s going on in the city and how it’s working widely available to everybody.

“The city is becoming a new thing.”

In Latin America and Brazil, cities are a bigger factor than they are in other areas of the world. We have 34 cities in Brazil with 45% of the population, and Rio and Sao Paulo have 25% of the GDP of the country. “We need to reinforce the mid-tier cities and prevent them from falling into the same traps as the mega cities, with their traffic and pollution problems.”

We’re at a critical moment in Brazil. We must have a high level of performance and competitiveness. Our public services must be more efficient and more creative.

————————

11:00 a.m. A Conversation with: James W. Breyer, partner, Accel Partners, Luciano Coutinho, president, The Brazilian Development Bank, and Marcelo Haddad, executive director, Rio Negócios. Discussion leader: Marcus Regueira, founding partner, FIR Capital.

Breyer: I’m interested in investing in Brazil. We think through the cultural attributes of great entrepreneurs. Is there a common characteristic?

“The people we like to back have passion, think about long term impact and think about building high impact team from the beginning.”

We’ve seen many of these characteristics in Brazil. We see entrepreneurs building strong teams of co-founders. Every location is a little different. In Silicon Valley today we’re finding very young breakthrough technologists. When I first met Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook I took him out to dinner and I offered him a glass of wine, but he said he was not yet 21. He’d have a Sprite.

Brazil will be one of our three most important countries for investments in the coming years.

Coutinho: In Brazil, we need to create an ecosystem for entrepreneurship. The Brazilian capital markets are still a step behind. “We need to create an atmosphere for entrepreneurship by young people. That’s vital to creating smarter cities.”

Regueira; What we need for venture capital to take off in Brazil is a quarter of a billion dollar exit.

Breyer: The city and country have to minimize the difficulties for young people to get going. One thing we have lost in the US is the idea of allowing small businesses to thrive without uncertainty and significant regulatory overhang.

You need a partnership between great entrepreneurs, people who come in early to help them scale the company—without losing the entrepreneurial spirit, and also partnerships with large and important companies.

“The first trillion dollar valuation company could come from Brazil.”

Here’s the video of the panel:

Click here to view the embedded video.

————————–

11:30 a.m. Special Address: How to Build a Smarter City, by Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president of sales, marketing and strategy—and next CEO.

“Brazil is a country full of natural resources. We think of information as the world’s next important national resource.”

We’re heard a lot about why people should build smarter cities. My focus today is on how.

So how does a city actually get started? Over the last year or so, we’ve reviewed thousands of Smart City initiatives. We’ve identified three common steps that are taken in successful projects.

–By instrumenting different city systems, the city can leverage data as a strategic tool to understand the performance of those systems, and be in a position to managing them better–responding to changes in those systems more rapidly and effectively.

–Once a city has developed that solid foundation, they can start to think about integrating key processes within and across systems.  You can take the data and use it across departments and functions.

–Cities can start to optimize their systems and transform service delivery. Analytics become key here. “You can start to re-imagine the art of the possible.” It’s not just about using analytics to examine the past, but to predict the future.

Value goes up with each of these three steps.

We have also identified key leadership skills for Smarter cities.

–The complexity of cities requires us to understand the city as a system-of-systems and manage it accordingly.

–“We need to build a culture of analytics versus gut-check decision making.”

–Managing and coordinating across city systems will require all city leaders to collaborate with one another, with local business leaders, and other influencers in new ways.

I hope that we’ve been able to provide some guiding principles here that we’ve learned from hundreds of Smarter City engagements, and that have opened our eyes as to what it takes for cities to be successful.

——————-

Noon: A Conversation with: Jorge Gerdau Johannpeter, chairman of Gerdau, Gerdau Steel, and a private sector leader in Brazil’s economic development; and Kenneth Schwartz, dean, School of Architecture, Tulane University. Discussion Leader: Ginni Rometty, IBM’s senior vice president for sales, marketing and strategy, and the next CEO.

Schwartz: Tulane was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. We had to shut it down for months.  Now we’re back and the city of New Orleans is back. We’re both building more sustainably and smarter.

We’re using the school of architecture and technology from IBM to see if we can achieve significant carbon use. We’ll take what we learn to other buildings on the campus.

Instrumentation was relatively easy. Integration was harder. We had to get our school, IT and facilities to work together.

“We think of buildings as the building blocks of cities.” You can experiment in buildings and a university campus and then model solutions that you can use city wide.

Gerdau: We started a movement to build the economy of Brazil based on using management technologies.

The public sector is inefficient.

“What decides a country’s wealth today is its management competency.”

Cities have to be build and rebuilt by seeing them as an integrated unit. Technology is important for gathering information, but it’s not enough.

You need to do management with efficient technology. But it only works when your have good governance aligned with strategy.

Political will is perhaps the biggest challenge. I like to talk to government leaders. I feel there’s lack of policy. We have to transform cities. It requires the kind of strategic thinking I don’t see now.

We have to get our communities involved so they see this is the way forward. Maybe it’s in our education. Time is being wasted. How can we harness all of this?

“We have to change culture.”

————————–

12:15 p.m. Key Observations from Sam Palmisano, IBM’s CEO.

We operate in 170 countries and every political system. All societies are going through a transition. The same goes with companies. You can be optimistic or see it as concerning. How do some do it better than others?

Your have to re-prioritize. You have to take things that were done one way in the past and come up with new approaches.

Mayor Paes of Rio surrounded himself with professional managers. “Good management is the key to getting things done.”

——————

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Banavar: There’s an impression that more disasters are happening. Part of it is that because of modern communications, we know more about what’s happening. But it’s true for floods, perhaps caused by global warming. There are also man-made disasters, such as nuclear disasters. These kinds of massive events require a long term planning, preparedness and response system.

Factoid: $265 billion total global economic losses due to natural disasters in the first half of 2011.

We can do a lot to prevent these kinds of losses.

We’ll look at four types of events: natural disasters, terrorism, industrial accidents and large-scale events like protests and riots, but also the World Cup and the Olympics.

The density of communities in coastal communities has  been increasing, and those populations are the most vulnerable

Four stages for managing disasters: Mitigation, such as building codes; short-term preparedness, responding to warnings; response with full situational awareness of what’s happening; recovery and long term rehabilitation.

——————-

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Second installment

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Osorio: We have two major challenges in Rio. We have a history of natural disasters mainly caused by heavy rains and flooding and mudslides, and we have a history of dealing with large scale events.

We were very poorly prepared to face natural disasters.

Every five or six years on average we have a major natural event, but we have flooding every year. We have had two big events in the past two years. It seems to be a pattern. It could be global warming.

In the past we’d say it’s god’s will. We just reacted.

The city decided to approach the situation head on. We felt it was our obligation to meet the challenge in a different way.

They mayor who is 42 started his political life as deputy mayor in part of the city. He was in charge of the region when it had a disaster about 14 years ago.

When he became mayor, he was the emergency response plans and felt it wasn’t enough. Early 2009. He ordered a study.

We had a major disaster–incredible rain. More than 70 people died here. We used the plan to some extent, but not enough

We decided to have an emergency response center but later decided to make a city operations center to handle a wide variety of situations.

We had an organization with many fiefdoms, but, in order to respond to disasters, you have to cooperate. They mayor made people work together.

So we have become much more agile.

We’re facing big events coming to Rio, including the World Cup and Olympics. They’re a big challenge for us. They’re big and complex events. The operation center is a major tool to enable our preparations and response.

This year, we had the Rock in Rio festival with 700,000 people. The last edition was 2001 and was a total disaster. Nobody could move in the area. But this year the operational part worked well. We reacted very quickly, and the operations center was instrumental. We think we’ll be ready for what’s coming.

———————–

Breakout session

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 3

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, Dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department

Allard: In Chile we had the large earthquake and tsunami, and it was also widely dispersed. We had more than 700 kilometers of land affected. The disaster affected the three main metro areas in Chile and many smaller cities. Five major highways were broken. Many buildings fell—even some built in the past few years. More than 500 people died. 370,000 houses were destroyed or damaged.

The neighboring communities had to come and help the ones that were affected.

First response, lasted 33 days. It was coordinated by the emergency ministry.

Reconstruction is expected to take four years.

I worked on the reconstruction.

We opened a voluntary record for families that had suffered damage. This helped us relocate them. They received vouchers.

We arranged for houses to be rebuilt by private companies. These projects were subsidized.

Six months after the catastrophe we had 60,000 emergency houses built, where people could stay while their permanent houses were built.

It was a huge management challenge. We had to track people’s identity and map it to their location and what was being done for them.

We invited companies to present different kind of building systems. We had a fair where the families could go and chose the type of house.

We had voting by the people to chose the best designs. The winners started quickly.

But we also wanted to use the rebuilding to create smart options. We studied the risks in locations by the coast.

For places that were especially vulnerable, we designed the houses to be resilient to quakes and tsunamis.

By this September we had more than 60,000 houses built and more than 200,000 under construction. We expect to have all the houses built in February 2014.

Lessons:

–Be prepared for the worst case scenario.

–Manage the expectations of the people after the disaster.

–Communicate complexity and time frame.

–Reinforce local capacity and leadership.

Here’s Allard talking about why he’s a “smarter cities addict.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

—————-

Emergency Management: Learning from the Leaders
Installment 4

Moderator: Guru Banavar, CTO, Global Public Sector, IBM; Pedro Almeida, Director, Smarter Cities Strategy, IBM Brazil; Pablo Allard, dean of Architecture and Art, Desarrollo University, Chile; Carlos Roberto Osorio, secretary for Conservation & Public Service, City of Rio de Janeiro; and Pablo Escudero, general director, Madrid Police Department.

Escudero: We created an emergency response system in 2006 that turned into a crime fighting system as well.

Here’s a look at Madrid’s emergency management system:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Brazil, IBM, Rio de Janeiro

Update:

Teams of three students from MIT/Sloan and HBS take on IBM’s Watson. (This is only the second contest matching Watson against collegians. In the previous contest, Watson beat teams from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt came in second, much to the chagrin of rival CMU!)

Harvard wins the first question, with “What is Belize?” Answering: countries in central America, ending with “e”

But then Watson takes over, running the category.

The machine picks “Who’s Your Daddy Company?” as the next category, eliciting a huge hook of laughter from the audience.

They finished the Jeopardy! round, with Watson, $8600; Harvard, $5200  ; and MIT,  $-200 .

(I got disconnected from HBS’s Wi-Fi at a crucial moment, destroying the coverage of the second round. Grrrrr)

Final Jeopardy!

Clue: Finding the spot for this memorial caused its creator to say “Americans will march across that skyline.”

The question: Mt. Rushmore.

Harvard and Watson answer correctly. MIT does not.

Final score: Watson, $53,601; Harvard, $42,399; MIT, $100.

!!!!!

—————-

The Start:

9:45 a.m.

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, kicks off by talking about a concern these days about technology and its role in society. Some people are saying that innovation has been stagnating, and that’s contributing to the slowness of the economic recovery.

“The issue isn’t that technology is stagnating, but that we haven’t been keeping up with technology. Societies, institutions and structures haven’t advanced rapidly enough to keep up with the advances. We’re creating a lot of wealth through technology, but the benefits aren’t going to regular people in the middle of the income distribution.”

This has been a great decade for productivity growth, even better the 1990s. It has contributed to income growth per capita. Yet median income growth has not improved much. “A lot of wealth has been created that goes to the people at the very top of the income brackets.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

———-

The context: Here’s the new book by Erik and Andrew McAfee, Race Against the Machine.

—————-

10 a.m.

IBM Fellow David Ferrucci talks about the making of Watson, IBM’s question-and-answer machine, which in February beat the top past champions on the TV game show Jeopardy! (He’s speaking again this afternoon, so I’m going to go into detail on that.) For now, here’s another IBM Fellow, Bernard Meyerson, talking about the importance of Watson.

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————

10:40 a.m.

Question to IBM’s David Ferrucci about Watson: How long until Watson can program itself?

Ferrucci:

It already does that, but will do so more in the future.

“I can imagine a situation where you’re searching for different models, different weights to answers, and it automatically programs itself to do that.”

He wouldn’t predict when.

——————–

10:45 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why are we seeing these astonishing advances now?

Afred Spector of Google: The Web makes it possible to combine a lot of information and access it via the Web. We also have a huge amount of feedback from users. And we have a large amount of software components. We can combine things and piece things together. “We’re solving a collection of problems which are acceptably probabilistic.”

Rod Brooks, an AI and robotics expert at MIT and entrepreneur: We have enough computer power to solve bigger and more complex problems. “Using machine learning and statistics we’ve managed to come up with algorithms which learn things acceptably well.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “What’s exciting is the ability to generation hypothesis using induction and then track them back and evaluate evidence during an inductive process.”

———————

11 a.m. Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question: Why can’t computers do things that a two year old child can do?

Rod Brooks, AI and robotics entrepreneur “There is progress but it’s in narrow subfields. But it can do great things. Google cars are an example: They don’t do a lot of things but they do a few things very well.”

Afred Spector of Google:  Google Translate is another example. We’re up to 69 languages. We’re working on quality. “We want to get to the languages that are less spoken so all those populations will have access to the Web. We want to make the knowledge available to everybody.”

Another project: Making it possible so the machine automatically understands things so well that we can translate an image into a text description, or visa versa.

Brooks: He talks about the problem with manufacturing in the US. We keep going to high tech manufacturing, but that makes us too narrow. Not enough jobs created. He says we need to develop manufacturing that can employ a lot of people, by automating the low value pieces more but produce a wide variety of products.  “The answer is in the masses–creating robots that people can interact with and use.”

David Ferrucci of IBM: “I see a future where computers can act as intelligent mediators that enable informed collaboration, for instance, between you and your healthcare team, so you can make better decisions about your treatment.”

—–

Here’s McAfee talking about the coming capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs and job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——————-

11:20  a.m.

Panel: What Can Technology Do Today and in 2020?

Andrew McAfee of MIT asks the question:  What would accelerate your work the most: data, computing power, or smart researchers?

Rod Brooks, MIT professor, and AI and robotics entrepreneur : We have enough computing power and data. “I have a bunch of smart PhDs, but you have to direct them in the right direction. You need the right reward structure for research.”

“We’d be better off if universities were smaller, had fewer people working form them, and focused on deep fundamental research. Let organizations like IBM do the applied research.”

Afred Spector of Google: “When we go to universities we’re surprised and disappointed that the faculties aren’t doing more high-risk research.”

Google sees a need for vastly more computing power. We need to do “deep learning.” It’s a new level of machine learning. Google has 5,000 PhD’s in computer science. “We need even more talent.”

“We need all three to get better.”

David Ferrucci of IBM:  “Researchers, data and machines, in that order.”

————

12:20 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: What does technology mean for technology and jobs?

David Autor, economics professor at MIT:  There’s a long running debate. Does technology eliminate jobs? The stock answer is to call people who ask it Luddites.

We’ve seen incredibly rapid technology change over the past century and it eliminated a lot of farm jobs, but it created jobs elsewhere. “We’ve seen rising employment rates; and it raises productivity and incomes.”

However, there’s another side to this. Technology increases our efficiency but it can compete with workers and their skills. “Technology changes much faster than people can adapt.”

Middle-education and middle-skilled jobs are the vulnerable ones. That’s manufacturing jobs and administrative jobs.

“This creates real challenges. We should be worried. The set of opportunities are far more bifurcated than then used to be.”

“It’s leading to even more unequal distribution of wealth.”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer:  He says he has been focusing on technology based innovation in the service economy. So many of the new jobs are in services. About 80% of the service jobs are information-based jobs. Technology will be used more and more in this area. So these jobs will increasingly come under pressure, too.

This is another period of creative destruction.

New industries will be created that will create the mid-skilled and mid-education jobs. “I don’t know the answer”

“The top-down approaches to job creation aren’t working. We have to rely more on bottoms-up approaches—entrepreneurialism.”

Frank Levy, a labor economist at MIT: Keeps things in perspective. Everything we see today is colored by the recession. It doesn’t have a lot to do with technology—but with the collapse of the housing bubble.

At the same time, the middle-skill job problem is very real.

“Because of the recession, it’s going to be hard to get kids to get advanced education at the same time that the jobs that will come will require advanced educations.”

———

12:45 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Erik Brynjolfson, MIT Sloan School of Management, asks: How do we create new jobs for mid-skilled people?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: Cloud computing and other technologies can help entrepreneurs get started and build companies and hire people. So a lot of small companies will spring up—not the high tech companies but companies that take advantage of technology.

David Autor, economics professor at MIT: That’s good, but it won’t produce a lot of jobs. “Most people want to be employed. They want to work for somebody. If they have a choice, that’s what they do.”

Frank Levy, MIT: He calls for apprenticeships and case-based education to bring up the skills.

Wladawky-Berger: Germany has done a better job at creating the mid-skilled jobs.

Autor: The Germans have adapted more quickly than other developed economies. They brought up the skills and reduced wages for mid-skilled people, which made the people and the country more competitive.

There are decent middle-skilled job in health care, repairs, the trades. But all require post-high schools investments in skills. “But you can’t go to the Harvard of plumbing.”

Wladawsky-Berger: Can’t community colleges help fill the void.

Autor: “They’d like to, but their funding is being cut by states and communities.”

—————————-

1 p.m. Panel: How Will Technology Affect Productivity and Employment?

Question from the audience: “I’m worried about how we communicate about the new capabilities of machines and their impact on jobs. Will people react against it?”

Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former IBM executive and MIT lecturer: There’s a consensus that just as we transitioned from the agricultural age to the industrial age, and literacy and education went up, in today’s world you need the next level of education. You need information-based literacy, and teamwork literacy. People who learn to use these tools can make a good living. If we can communicate that we’ll be okay.

Frank Levy, MIT: We should be clear about what machines can do and what they can’t do, and not talk a lot about the “singularity”—the point in the future when machines will be able to truly think.

“Just tell it straight in terms of what we know now. Don’t try to scare people.”

Here’s Wladawsky-Berger talking about the future of job creation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

——-

1:25 p.m. Remarks from Martin Fleming, chief economist at IBM:

There have been five waves of technological change over the past three centuries. With each wave, the new technologies fundamentally altered the way business—and work—was done. “The business changes because the technology makes it possible to do so.”

With IBM’s Watson, for example, you enable the democratization of clinical decision making. The practice of healthcare can be fundamentally changed. Evidence-based medicine is made possible.

Each wave was also accompanied by an economic crash, typically at the time when the new technology is impacting the old ways of doing things but has not yet produced all of the productivity gains that are coming on a mass scale.

We’re now entering into a period where the economy is beginning to open up opportunities for the deployment of significant new innovations. “Radical new technologies will be deployed. New industries will be created.”

“This is about the transformation of the economy.”

——

At Harvard Business School now…

3:30 p.m. David Ferrucci, head of IBM’s Watson project, talks about how Watson came to  be and where the technology is going.

Watson was a grand challenge aimed at driving important scientific advances. It gets people to think about the implications of technology–where is it today and where might it go.

Watson beat former grand champions at TV’s Jeopardy! quiz show.

He points out how much more difficult it is for a computer to have a conversation with a person than it is to play chess–a previous grand challenge that IBM took on in the 1990s when one of its machines beat the best chess player in the world. That’s because, in conversation, “context defines meaning.”

It’s a very difficult problem. Computers can’t relate words to experience.

“Jeopardy! helped us push the kind of technology that interprets natural language to determine meaning.”

————————-

4:00 p.m. David Ferrucci, the father of Watson, talks about how the technology came about and where it’s going.

We did 8000 experiments to develop Watson’s capability. There were lots of growing pains. Example: New York Times Headlines: An exclamation point was warranted for the “end of” this” in 1918. Watson’s answer: “a sentence.”

The project took 4 years.

Originally, running on a single PC, it took two hours for Watson to answer a single question. “The producers insisted that that would make for a boring game.” So they scaled the machine up to a 2880-core computing system.

The important thing about Watson is that it collects evidence and builds confidence in an ansers. when we think about applying it to medicine or law, we don’t think it’s providing the answer but providing useful suggestions–based on an evidence profile.

We’ll give a human decision maker the top answers to a question and the evidence and analysis that led Watson to those answers. This is about empowering the decision maker.

——————

Here’s Ferrucci talking about how the software program can help transform the healthcare industry.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Technorati Tags: Harvard Business School, HBS, IBM, MIT

Guest post by Jonathan Taplin, Professor at the University of Southern California and the Director of the school’s Annenberg Innov

What a thriller! After 11 innings last night, the St. Louis Cardinals forced a winner-takes-all Game 7 with tonight sure to be a great finale to close out this October classic.

The historic Game 6 also forced the Twitterverse to crown two new tweet and sentiment leaders in IBM and USC Annenberg’s latest analysis from the USC Social Sentiment Index. Due to their late inning heroics, the Texas Rangers’ Josh Hamilton netted the highest volume of tweets and an 88% positive sentiment while the biggest hero of the night, St. Louis Cardinals’ David Freese led his team in tweets and an 86% positive sentiment. Extra innings afforded diehard fans the opportunity to share their sentiment and push these two players over the top.

So what does Game 6’s analysis tell us? Social media fans are highly vocal, generating the largest volume of tweets during the final moments of the game. These real-time fan insights could have tremendous impact on how and when marketers engage these fans.

Get ready for an awesome Game 7 and a final World Series analysis where we’ll not only crown the Social Media MVP of the series but take a closer look all the cool trends we found with fans’ sentiment toward both teams’ managers, highest spike in a player’s tweets and much more. Stay tuned!

• Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
• Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
• Read more about social media analysis from Games 3 & 4.
• Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.

• Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, IBM, predictive analytics, Smarter Planet, social business

Two more World Series games played and millions of tweets later, IBM and USC Annenberg Innovation Lab students uncovered new findings in fans’ social sentiment in our ongoing World Series analysis.

Despite lower TV ratings for Game 3, we saw the volume of tweets increase from Game 2 as baseball’s diehard fans continue to turn to the Twitterverse and other social media platforms to pontificate about the game play and players and coaches on the field.

Using the same metrics from our initial World Series analysis, the number of “sentiment” tweets – that is, tweets both positive and negative, in our most recent sampling showed:

– In Game 3: St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols and the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz were the most tweeted among players and coaches.

– In Game 4, the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols kept his crown and the Rangers’ Derek Holland led his team for total number of tweets.

—————————————————————————————————————–

Great game play not only can result in a W for the team, but also a W for individual social media accolades.  In this most recent analysis, St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, amassed unbelievable numbers following his historic baseball performance, receiving the most tweets on his team for both Game 3 and Game 4 and the most positive sentiment at 81% and 87% respectively.  The same could be said for the Rangers’ Derek Holland in Game 4, who received the most tweets and an 83% positive sentiment. Rangers’ Michael Young netted most positive sentiment on his team for Game 3 with 83%.  For those keeping score at home, the positive sentiment is the result of ‘T’ scores – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment indicated in tweets.

Our second analysis accurately correlates players’ large volumes of tweets to fans’ positive feedback, reiterating how important social media platforms are to capturing consumer sentiment and uncovering actionable insights. More importantly, it affords us an opportunity to view consistencies and inconsistencies with sentiment—what players continue to stay hot amongst fans, who is falling off the bandwagon, via real-time data to make or change decisions, be it promotions or other marketing efforts. It also goes to show those relying solely on mediums such as TV to uncover new fan insights will be at a disadvantage to their peers who are turning to social media to analyze sentiment to get a real-time temperature check on public attitudes as well as customer segments like diehard baseball fans that can result in making more insightful decisions.

Stay tuned for our final analysis at the conclusion of the World Series.  Enjoy the rest of the Series!

• Read about social media analysis from Games 1 and 2.
• Read more about “Behind the Diamond: Understanding MLB Fan Sentiment.”
• Learn about how IBM and USC AIL are conducting the social media analysis project.
• Check out images from the World Series Social Sentiment Index

Technorati Tags: Analytics, Big Data, business analytics, Education, IBM, mobile, predictive analytics, Smarter Planet

Analytics is going mainstream at universities around the globe. It’s being fueled by a growing demand from businesses and governments for employees skilled in the art of making sense out of a deluge of data that’s available from myriad sources–everything from remote sensors to Tweets and blog posts. “It’s imperative that leaders take advantage of all the data that’s in front of them,” says W. “RP” Raghupathi, a professor of information and communications systems at Fordham University’s Schools of Business. “Data analytics has become a very integral part of business decision making.”

Today, Fordham  is announcing two new masters degree programs, Master of Science in Business Analytics and Master of Science in Marketing Intelligence–establishing itself as a pioneer in bringing analytics skills training to business students.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Analytics isn’t brand new. When Raghupathi studied for his PhD at the University of Texas (Arlington) in the 1980s, he took a course in what was then called “decision support systems.” In those early days, people who wanted to analyze data had to write a lot of customized code. Today, software programmers and business analysts have huge data bases, sophisticated software tools, and, often, real-time data feeds at their fingertips. And, at a time when unemployment is high and high-paying jobs are scarce, analytics offers a career path for many an enterprising technology or business student.

IBM is helping Fordham and more than 200 universities worldwide develop courses and programs in analytics–contributing software and curriculum materials. And no wonder: IBM needs to hire a boatload of people with analytics skills and it wants companies to buy its software. In the past five years, IBM has invested more than $14 billion in 25 analytics acquisitions. It projects $16 billion in business analytics and optimization revenues by 2015.

For Raghupathi and his students, IBM’s aggressive moves signal that analytics won’t fade in importance any time soon. “Analytics has become a new specialization and has opened up new career paths that didn’t exist before,” Raghupathi says.

His courses are popular with students partly because they get hands-on training in solving problems using sophisticated software tools. For instance, a group of students downloaded massive amounts of public health data from the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and other national and global health bodies. They learned how to create huge data warehouses, to cleanse the data so it could be relied on and to analyze the data–looking for significant patterns.

One of the most important lessons for the students was finding out that their original hypotheses were sometimes way off base. In one case, they expected to find larger incidences of certain cancers in urban areas of the United States but instead found higher concentrations in some rural areas. “This is the power of analytics to solve big problems in medicine,” says Raghupathi.

Analytics is positioned to solve problems in one industry after another. Thanks to forward-thinking universities like Fordham, an army of specialists is being trained to help transform the way people understand the world and make crucial decisions.

Technorati Tags: Fordham University, IBM, W. RP Raghupathi