5/11/10
Two Speakers with Compelling Topics
Deb Roy
Customer Experience Redesign
At MIT, Deb Roy heads the prestigious Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines Group, is founding director of the Center for Future Banking, and chairs the academic program in Media Arts and Sciences. He’s a pioneer in cognitive modeling, communication theory, and human-machine interaction, whose research is frequently featured in publications that include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, National Geographic, and Science.
Among the things you will learn from this session are:
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How emerging technologies can and will transform the consumer experience;
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How physical retail spaces can be fluidly transformed in real time based on consumer usage patterns;
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The sophisticated new analytical methods that are dramatically expanding the capacity to understand, predict, and affect human behavior.
More about Deb …
Deb is also the founding director of the Center for Future Banking at MIT, which, in collaboration with Bank of America, explores how emerging technologies can be used to gain new insights into human behavior which, in turn, can lead to the transformation of customers' experience. In this effort, he is joined by a multidisciplinary team of researchers and students with a passion for invention who are developing new ideas for the banking industry, and building and testing new working prototypes.
He is a native of Canada, and received his Bachelor of Computer Engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in 1992. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science from MIT in 1999, and joined the MIT faculty immediately after in 2000. He has authored numerous scientific papers in the areas of artificial intelligence, cognitive modeling, human-machine interaction, data mining and information visualization.
According to Deb, we have witnessed the birth of novel forms of human data in the past decade–data about people and created by people–enabled by new imaging and networking technologies. When combined with advances in Artificial Intelligence and data mining, we are in a position to reveal sweeping new views into the human condition that will leave few areas of business and government untouched. From genome sequences and brain images, to longitudinal video and cell phone traces, new data about people are revealing insights into how we develop, think, behave, and interact. At the same time, billions of people have come online and are expressing themselves in forms that simply did not exist just ten years ago–from blogposts and podcasts to YouTube videos and twitter feeds. By analyzing and cross-pollinating these rich streams of human data, our ability to understand, predict, and effect human behavior will be expanded dramatically with deep implications for health, finance, retail, government, and beyond.
In this session, Deb will focus on a project he calls Longitudinal Data-Driven Retail Behavioral Analysis. The long term vision guiding this project is to fluidly reconfigure physical retail spaces based on consumer usage patterns akin to dynamically reconfigurable online web sites that evolve content based on dwell times and click-through rates. Working with industrial partners, Deb’s team is gathering longitudinal video from real-world retail settings. Video analysis algorithms are being developed to mine recurrent patterns of activity that provide detailed insight into behavioral patterns and interaction effects with elements of the environment. The team is also developing predictive models grounded in observational video that will help marketing and sales managers more clearly understand customer service experiences, one-on-one interactions, and the needs and desires of customers down to the level of the individual.
Deb Roy is a pioneer in cognitive modeling, communication theory, and human-machine interaction, and is the AT&T Associate Professor at MIT and chair of the academic program in Media Arts and Sciences. In addition, he directs the Cognitive Machines group, a research team of 15 PhD students and staff working on several projects, including: the Human Speechome Project, a pioneering effort to understand how children develop language grounded in extensive longitudinal video; collaborative work with Autism researchers and clinicians to better understand the developmental course of the disorder in young children; and The Restaurant Game, a research project that will harness the power of the Internet and capture rich behavior and language by algorithmically combining the game playing experiences of thousands of people playing an identical scenario.
MEET A GENIUS ♦ GET A LOOK AT THE FUTURE ♦ STRETCH YOUR MIND ♦ RE-SEE THE CUSTOMER INTERFACE
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Josh Klein
Opportunities of the Networked World
Josh Klein finds his greatest joy in the skill called “hacking”—combining unexpected elements to create a result that works in new and better ways. His rare ability to do that has made him an important advisor to organizations that include Nokia, Oracle, Johns Hopkins University, Microsoft, Frog Design, and The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
His book, Hacking Work: Saving Business from Itself, One Bad Act at a Time, has been called “the right book at the right time…exactly how we need to save business and ourselves.”
Among the things you will learn from this session are:
How to use techniques like crowdsourcing, social currencies, and virtual worlds to create new, more profitable, more collaborative business models with lower costs, greater reach, and deeper customer involvement;
How to disintermediate, reorganize, and rearrange the components of any business;
How to create a workplace that breaks free from old-fashioned models to genuinely engage the “Millennials” who can supply much-needed new perspectives.
More about Josh …
Josh has practiced and was trained, both formally and informally, in hacking — social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware, animal behavior, and, most recently, the publishing industry. When he's not taking things apart or putting them back together again, he speaks, writes, and consults on new and emerging technologies that improve people's lives. He speaks at conferences such as Gadgetoff, TED, SICS, LA-IP, BIF, and Serious Play, and he has appeared on the Sundance Channel and Nova.
His session with us will be divided into two parts:
Opportunities of the Networked World – Crowdsourcing, Creative Commons, social currencies, virtual worlds — all of these and more are means to achieving new, more profitable, more collaborative business models with lower costs, greater reach, and deeper customer involvement than ever before. Drawing from his own experiences in publishing, fashion, research, information security, government, and more, Josh will show how astonishing results can be achieved through dramatic hacking — reorganizing, rearranging and disintermediating the components of any business. This is all well and good, of course, but there’s one little problem …
Hacking Work – The Millenials (people born after 1980) who can actually “walk and chew gum at the same time” when it comes to doing this kind of work, won’t work hard, long – or at all – for companies who insist they work the same way their parents did. Josh has looked into this by arranging several hundred conversations between randomly paired Boomers and Millenials and analyzing the results. He’ll share his very rich and cogent analysis with us during the session, though we can tell you in advance that it centers on that fact that while workplaces are mostly corporate-centered – corporate needs are first and absolute, and workers’ needs are a distant second and up for debate – the Millenials are pushing hard for a user-centered workplace or one that meets each individual's needs.
Josh will make time for us to ask questions of him; he loves to interact with his audiences and just about anyone who crosses his path. He also would love to ask some questions of us. For example:
♦ In what ways are you successfully breaking the rules to achieve superior results?
♦ What surprised you about your own use of technology today?
♦ What was the oddest interaction you've had this week?
♦ Which companies are doing things differently and seeing success follow?
♦ More importantly, what are you or your company doing the same way they always have, and not getting the results you DO want?
ALPHA GEEK ♦ UNABASHED HACKER ♦ TECH WIZARD ♦ JUST SHOW UP ♦ HAVE YOUR BRAIN REBOOTED
Register for this session today.