Big Data and Ethics

BIG Data and Ethics was held a few weeks ago in the new premises of the DigitYser, downtown Brussels. It was a great Meetup, with interesting speakers and an interested public 😉 It’s always a pleasure when the public can contribute and presentations raise great discussions, and it is more important here on this gathering Read More …

Elections warn about ethical issues in algorithms

I tweeted recently on this article about how Big Data has been used on the last American Presidential campaign. “At Cambridge,” he said, “we were able to form a model to predict the personality of every single adult in the United States of America.” The hall is captivated. According to Nix, the success of Cambridge Read More …

AI and Machine Learning in business: use it everywhere!

Last week Bev from PWI’s group in Linkedin pointed me to a great HBR article: “How One Clothing Company Blends AI and Human Expertise”, by H. James Wilson, Paul Daugherty and Prashant Shukla. It describes how the company Stitch Fix works, using machine learning insights to assist their designers, and as you will see, they Read More …

Sexism spotted with Maths!

I did a talk in May this year called ‘Restore the balance of data’ at the Data Innovation Summit.  It was about sexism and other biases that are implicit in our existing electronic traces (actual and historical data) and my concern because we are using that data as baseline information to create the new prediction Read More …

DIS2016 Restore the balance of data

Two weeks ago was the Data Innovation Summit 2016.  I was due to speak using the presentation format of ‘ignite’.  For the ones who don’t know this format, it’s a nightmare! Out of joke, it means that slides go automatically at regular intervals (15″ in my case).  You cannot stop it, you don’t control the flow… Read More …

Big Data workshop at the First European Celebration of Women in Computing

This last Tuesday, I lead the ‘Discover Big Data’ workshop at the First European Celebration of Women in Computing.  There were many parallel sessions that morning and I received some questions about my presentation from the participants that couldn’t divide themselves to attend this workshop 😉 Welcome to the Big Data workshop, we need women Read More …

Pre-Crime unit for tracking Terrorists?

Due to last events in Belgium, the terrorist bomb attacks in Zaventem and Brussels, I couldn’t but remember the article from Bloomberg Businessweek talking about pre-crime: ‘China Tries Its Hand at Pre-Crime’.  They refer us to the film Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, that takes place in a future society where three mutants foresee all Read More …

Great visualisation tips

I would like to share with you this article on the Harvard Business Review.  They give excellent advice to ‘make extreme numbers resonate’.  They give 3 examples to illustrate their tips: Challenge: Green Mountain sold 18 billion coffee pods in two years. How can you give people a concrete sense of just how many objects Read More …

The Value of Emotional Connection

Scott Magids, Alan Zorfas and Daniel Leemon tell us that research on motivational values is paying off: Our research across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that it’s possible to rigorously measure and strategically target the feelings that drive customers’ behavior. We call them “emotional motivators.” They provide a better gauge of customers’ future Read More …