Part of the Process

As part of my continuing professional development I have taken two courses. They are similar in terms of backer and effort required. Hopefuly they will help me to prepare for 2018! The first is an intro to Ethics and Law related to analytics and AI applications. This provided by Microsoft on the edX platform. This followed a common format of: a short video,  linked content to read,  labs to explore the subject, and finally  quizzes to check progress.  The content was still fresh with the course first run in April 2017. This meant it was topical with GDPR law as well as FCC rulings in the USA. If you are in IT and interested in Ethics, then I can recommend learning from an ethicist. There is no real need to come up with your own moral framework, since there is over 2000 years of open research. Having the two experts from different domains present their viewpoints and way of working was a nice escape from the technologist bubble. The second was actually a ...

When pondering what to write about looking forward to 2018 I had a shortlist of three hot topics: AR Blockchain Artificial Intelligence (AI) I didn't choose AR as I think it will remain a specialist tool, although cool apps like  Star Chart  that my family love exist and Pokemon Go showed how addictive usage in games can be, it's still early days for tool kits like ARKit  to make a break through app. Blockchain is still probably at least a year off. Given the co-ordination needed in business process innovation it takes a bit longer to get into the mainstream. It appears that the processing speed is also a bit of a impediment at the moment. I am watching this field with interest though as it has potential to change the way companies process transactions. (Edit:  although this is now the subject of a 15below tech take ) Which leaves AI. I chose this not just because it's been my key interest my whole adult life, but also because it is making another bi...

How to explain revenue mange ment to normal people... This year's TTI summer conference was around the idea of "money for nothing" - that is doing effective revenue management to get more profit without any extra product or inventory. Like most of the professions in and around travel, it should come as no surprise that data analytics and supporting business decisions effectively seemed to be the main theme of the morning.  There were three speakers covering various aspects. Deniz Dorbek from Wyndham Hotel Group started by talking about "Total revenue management" from a hotel point of view. This included exploiting spa, sports, food and beverage, meetings as well as room rates. A key point in her summary was around people in revenue management communicating and working closely with the marketing and online analytics teams to ensure success.  Dimitrios Hiotis from Simon-Kucher and Partners is from a tour operator background and introduced tools at TUI...

Machine Learning Miller by Bastian Greshake When I wrote about AI and the Future last year I was reasonably excited, as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) graduate, of the possibilities and jealous of those beginning their careers in AI. Since now they have the luxury of extreme computer power and storage, 3D printing and the other abundant pieces of technology needed to create the future bounded only by our imaginations! The past couple of months though and I am noticing a bit of a trend in conference presentations (and tweets coming out of conferences) that seem to have moved a lot of the hope and hype around big data onto AI. Or more specifically machine learning. I am not going to single out any specific examples, but I feel this covers two basic areas: I don't need to know about my data or structure it to get useful information and  I won't need to configure things. because machine learning. (Lack of ) Data structure I am not sure what i...

Some notes from this quarter's technology briefing from Thoughtworks. This session's topic was "Big Data". I was pleased that the topic was chosen as I am interest in Big Data and travel , especially how it can be used by my clients and to enhance the product that I work on. Caitlin McDonald from twitter has also created a Storify story from tweets during the event (with the added bonus is that I am in the background to someone's photo) Session The main speaker was David Elliman with Ashok Subramanian - David has also written a blog post called The Big in Big Data Misses the Point that presents some of the content covered or see the full presentation in English or German . The session started y looking at the origin of "information explosion" and how in the 1940s people were starting to get worried about the miles of shelf space would be needed by 2000 to store all the books produced. This was contrasted with the explosion of multimedia informat...

I've been meaning to write about "Big Data" for a while, especially when as an Artificial Intelligence graduate I saw the Venn diagram at the start of a recent Amadeus sponsored report included both machine learning and natural language processing. Also in Bain & Company's report their research showed that analytical capability had a strong correlation with top performing companies. So I thought I'd sum up some of the articles out there on the subject at the moment. Is it just hype? Gartner's analysis is that Big Data is currently at the peak of inflated expectations and heading towards the trough of disillusionment -  and Wired's article asking Is Big Data in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’? showed areas that is already more advanced. Is the case that as the Japan Times OpEd Deflating the hype on big data claims "big data isn’t much more than a sexier version of statistics, with a few new tools that allow us to think more broadly ab...