Monthly Archives: May 2019

Faking It – Data, media and manipulation

12 Sun May 2019

Posted by in Big Data, Big Data 7s, Big Data Analytics, Cambridge Analytica, Inform, educate and entertain., media, Social Media, The Big Data Contrarians

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Martyn Richard Jones

Brussels, 12th May 2019

It has recently been revealed that political campaigns are taking the unprecedented step of hiring the services of consulting companies that will assist them in reaching, convincing and influencing voters.

This is a scandalous abuse of power, privilege and technology.

Big Data and data science are being used on a massive scale to manipulate political elections, control voter behaviour and to undermine constitutional democracy and the rule of law.  There is no doubt about this; I read it on the internet. Continue reading →

Learning to hate Agile-at-scale

11 Sat May 2019

Posted by in agile, All Data, Architecture, business, business strategy, Inform, educate and entertain., Methodology, Process, project management, scrum

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StupidToScaleAfilonius Rex

Cordoba, 12th May 2019

Ladies and gentlemen, the performance is about to start!

In 1998, as Programme, Product and Competence Centre manager at Hewlett-Packard, I signed the Agile Manifesto.

At that time, I had been using elements of the Agile-method mindset for the best part of sixteen years.

Previously, in 1995 I was trained and certified in Iterations, an iterative and agile-like methodology for building, maintaining and expanding data warehouses and data marts. Continue reading →

Deep learning and shallow understanding

11 Sat May 2019

Posted by in AI, All Data, Big Data, deep learning, Inform, educate and entertain.

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Martyn Richard Jones

Bruxelles, 29th April 2019

To begin at the beginning

In spite of or perhaps because of the many years I worked in artificial intelligence I believe that the current long-distance love affair with AI and what is also euphemistically termed ‘deep learning’ to be somewhat irrational in its exuberance.

In the eighties I was experimenting with automatic feature extraction, pattern recognition and parallel distributed processing (see Rumelhart and McClelland), which led me to adaptive neural networks.

As a result, my research and development in this field showed me that automatically mining nuggets of gold or automatically gaining real insight from data is not easy, far from stable and frequently not achievable.  Interesting experiments, but frequently impractical in a business setting. Continue reading →