Blog

Artificial intelligence is one of those terms that has experienced a degree of semantic slippage over the years. Originally, it referred to a machine that had an intelligence that the average person on the street would recognize as intelligent. In time, the various parts that would go to make up such a system: expert systems,Read more

In previous articles, we’ve often discussed decision making in business, and our emphasis has been on how data and analytics help human beings to make decisions. In many areas of decision making, having a human in the loop is detrimental. Humans are expensive and slow, especially when it comes to inputting, sharing, and processing largeRead more

Apple has, in recent days, feasted on humble pie; even going so far as to issue an apology for the poor quality of their recently released mapping app when compared to its competitors. There are various factors that have contributed to the less than stellar launch, but prominent among them is the problem of dataRead more

We’ve often talked about how analytics can benefit business decision making, but we’ve not said a lot about how having access to data and analytics might affect decision making in our personal lives. Our on-board data collection and processing systems — body and brain — are notoriously unreliable and replete with kludgy heuristics that mightRead more

For those of us within the industry, it’s difficult to get a handle on the level of understanding that the ‘person in the street’ has for what we do. Even moderately technically adept people know the frustration of watching a casual computer user completely failing to take advantage of the efficiencies designed into technology. Who hasn’t beenRead more

Back in the day, when the Internet was a novelty and a 28K modem was the height of technical sophistication, movies tended to visualize the net as a 3-dimensional CGI landscape of shimmering buildings and lambent roads — the literal representation of the clichéd information superhighway. All a stark contrast to the dour network mapsRead more