Nice documentary video now available on Amazon Prime.

Today is Sunday December 9, 2018.  Fifty years ago at an early computer conference in San Francisco, a researcher from SRI (Stanford Research Institute) unveiled what he and his team had created – a view of the future of augmented human performance with advanced technologies in computing and communications.  Douglas C. Engelbart and team created what is famously known today as “the mother of all demos.”  The text I just typed, the hyperlinks I just used, the mouse I used for positioning and clicking, and the zoom on-line meeting that I participated in last week all owe an intellectual debt to Doug and his team.

Celebrating the event is the Computer History Museum, read more here.

Reflections

 In 1962, Engelbart offered a conceptual framework for augmenting human intelligence, which was the center piece of his life’s professional work (Engelbart 1962, Scanned Original).  In 1968, he showed the first implementation of a rapidly evolving augmentation system that he and his team at SRI had developed (Engelbart and English 1968). In 2003, he argued that investing in “an improvement infrastructure” was still much needed while speaking to a large audience at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA (Engelbart 2003).   In 2004, Doug and I collaborated on a paper, which was requested by colleagues from NSF (National Science Foundation), and our topic was enhancing human performance (Spohrer and Engelbart 2004).   In 2017, his conceptual framework was celebrated in a book by Daniel Araya, in which I was invited to contribute a chapter (Spohrer and Siddike 2017).Last week, Nick Ragouzis emailed me, suggesting some broader connections between Engelbart’s work and several exhibits at the Computer History Museum.  For example, (A) Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart and Hypertext exhibit, (B) Moore’s Law exhibit, and (C) Demo@50 exhibit.   Without going into all the details of purple numbers, I will just say that Nick has worked hard to clarify the nature of compounding rates of improvement possible in Engelbart’s more fully implemented improvement infrastructure vision.  Nick and others call this Engelbart’s Law.  Improvement rates in individual silos (e.g., technology – tool systems) is limited compared to improvement rates possible with integration (e.g., tool system and human system) that overcome organizational inertia.  The type of multidisciplinary thinking required for this would likely require an overhaul of the education system into a more integrated whole that considers the socio-technical system design loop (Kline 1995). So perhaps one broader area to highlight in the exhibits at the Computer History Museum Demo@50 event is  emphasis on the type of education and investment frameworks required to continue to evolve Engelbart’s conceptual framework.  Nick suggests some additional reading that I am eager to look at as well: (Engelbart and Engelbart 1995) and (Lienhard 1979, 1985).

Annotated Bibliography

(Engelbart 1962, Scanned Original) Engelbart DC (1962) Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report, Stanford Research Institute, on Contract AF 49(638)-1024, October 1962, 134 pages. Scanned Original, Unclassified AD 289 565, Reproduced by Armed Services Technical Information Agency, 1963 Jan 04. For annotations see below.

(Engelbart 1962, Doug Engelbart Institute Online Version) Engelbart DC (1962) Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. Summary Report, Stanford Research Institute, on Contract AF 49(638)-1024, October 1962, 134 pages. Scanned Original, Unclassified AD 289 565, Reproduced by Armed Services Technical Information Agency, 1963 Jan 04. “By “augmenting human intellect” we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by “complex situations” we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers—whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human “feel for a situation” usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids. Man’s population and gross product are increasing at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his problems grows still faster, and the urgency with which solutions must be found becomes steadily greater in response to the increased rate of activity and the increasingly global nature of that activity. Augmenting man’s intellect, in the sense defined above, would warrant full pursuit by an enlightened society if there could be shown a reasonable approach and some plausible benefits.” P. 1.

(Engelbart and English 1968) Engelbart DC, English WK (1968) A research center for augmenting human intellect. In Proceedings of AFIPS (American Federation of Information Processing Societies) Fall Joint Computer Conference, San Francisco,  December 9-11, 1968. Pp. 395-410). “1a This paper describes a multisponsor research center at Stanford Research Institute in man-computer interaction. 1a1a For its laboratory facility, the Center has a time-sharing computer (65K, 24-bit core) with a 4.5 megabyte swapping drum and a 96 megabyte file-storage disk. This serves twelve CRT work stations simultaneously. … 1a1b1 The “mouse” is a hand-held X-Y transducer usable on any flat surface ; it is described in greater detail further on. … 1b User files are organized as hierarchical structures of data entities, each composed of arbitrary combinations of text and figures. A repertoire of coordinated service features enables a skilled user to compose, study, and modify these files with great speed and flexibility, and to have searches, analyses data manipulation, etc. executed. In particular, special sets of conventions, functions, and working methods have been developed to air [sic aid] programming, logical design, documentation, retrieval, project management, team interaction, and hard-copy production.” P.395. “2b The research objective is to develop principles and techniques for designing an “augmentation system.” … 2c The research approach is strongly empirical. At the workplace of each member of the subject group we aim to provide nearly full-time availability of a CRT work station, and then to work continuously to improve both the service available at the stations and the aggregate value derived therefrom by the group over the entire range of its roles and activities. 2d Thus the research group is also the subject group in the experiment. 2d1 Among the special activities of the group are the evolutionary development of a complex hardware-software system, the design of new task procedures for the system’s users, and careful documentation of the evolving system designs and user procedures. 2d2 The group also has the usual activities of managing its activities, keeping up with outside developments, publishing reports, etc. 2d3 Hence, the particulars of the augmentation system evolving here will reflect the nature of these tasks – i.e., the system is aimed at augmenting a system-development project team. Though the primary research goal is to develop principles of analysis and design so as to understand how to augment human capability, choosing the researchers themselves as subjects yields as valuable secondary benefit a system tailored to help develop complex computer-based systems. 2e This “bootstrap” group has the interesting (recursive) assignment of developing tools and techniques to make it more effective at carrying out its assignment. 2e1 Its tangible product is a developing augmentation system to provide increased capability for developing and studying augmentation systems. 2e2 This system can hopefully be transferred, as a whole or by pieces of concept, principle and technique, to help others develop augmentation systems for aiding many other disciplines and activities. 2f In other words we are concentrating fully upon reaching the point where we can do all of our work on line-placing in computer store all of our specifications, plans, designs, programs, documentation, reports, memos, bibliography and reference notes, etc., and doing all of our scratch work, planning, designing, debugging, etc., and a good deal of our intercommunication, via the consoles. 2f1 We are trying to maximize the coverage of our documentation, using it as a dynamic and plastic structure that we continually develop and alter to represent the current state of our evolving goals, plans, progress, knowledge, designs, procedures, and data.” P. 395-396. “4 SERVICE-SYSTEM SOFTWARE 4a The User’s Control Language 4a1 Consider the service a user gets from the computer to be in the form of discrete operations – i.e., the execution of individual “service functions” from a repertoire comprising a “service system.” 4a1a Examples of service functions are deleting a word, replacing a character, hopping to a name, etc.” P. 402.

(Engelbart 2003). Engelbart DC (2003) Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future. Transcription of talk and presentation at IBM Almaden Research Center’s Co-Evolution Symposium September 24 2003, organized by Jim Spohrer and Doug McDavid.  “In this talk, Dr. Douglas Engelbart, who pioneered much of what we now take for granted as interactive computing, examines the forces that have shaped this growth. He argues that our criteria for investment in innovation are, in fact, short-sighted and focused on the wrong things. He proposes, instead, investment in an improvement infrastructure that can result in sustained, radical innovation capable of changing computing and expanding the kinds of problems that we can address through computing.” P. 1.

(Kline 1995) Kline SJ (1995) Conceptual foundations for multidisciplinary thinking. Stanford University Press. See summary (Campbell 2011) here.

(Spohrer and Engelbart 2004) Spohrer JC, Engelbart DC (2004) Converging technologies for enhancing human performance: Science and business perspectives. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2004 May 1;1013(1):50-82. 

(Spohrer and Siddike 2017) Spohrer J, Siddike MAK (2017) Chapter 2: The Future of Digital Cognitive Systems: Tool, Assistant, Collaborator, Coach, Mediator. In Augmented Intelligence: Smart Systems and the Future of Work and Learning, Ed. Araya D. (2017 Sep 28). Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers. Pp. 40-61.  “Technology and organizations are two instruments that have been developed to augment the human intellect in order to make people smarter (Norman, 1993). In fact, Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer, and an early computer and Internet pioneer who invented the computer mouse, urged people to work quickly to “augment human intellect and address complex, urgent problems” (Engelbart, 1962, 1995). Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize laureate and an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist, took a mul- tidisciplinary approach to decision making and identified “bounded rationality” as a condition that technology and organizations could mitigate (Simon, 1997). Following these thinkers, we argue in this chapter that digital cognitive systems, known as cognitive mediators, may someday address a range of problems associated with “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1997), “knowledge burden” ( Jones, 2005), and “half-life-of-facts” (Arbesman, 2013).” P. 40-61.

Additional Readings:

Engelbart DC,  Engelbart C (1995) “Boosting Collective
IQ: For Quantum-Leap Improvement in Productivity, Effectiveness,
Competitiveness. A New Grand Challenge”. (July 28, 1995).

Lienhard JH (1979). “The Rate of Technological Improvement
before and after the 1830s”. Technology and Culture. John’s Hopkins
Press. 20 (3): 515–530. doi:10.2307/3103814. JSTOR 3103814

Lienhard JH (1985). “Some Ideas About Growth and Quality in Technology“.
Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Elsevier: 27, 265-281
(1985)

URLs:

Celebrating… read more here: https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/net-50-did-engelbart-s-mother-of-all-demos-launch-the-connected-world/

Douglas C. Engelbart: https://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/hall/douglas-c-engelbart/

(Engelbart 1962, Scanned Original) … Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/289565.pdf

(Engelbart 1962, Doug Engelbart Institute On-Line Version) … Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework: http://dougengelbart.org/content/view/138/000/

(Engelbart and English 1968) … A research center for augmenting human intellect: https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/ps/access/BBAIKM.pdf

(Engelbart 2003) … Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future: http://worrydream.com/refs/Engelbart%20-%20Improving%20Our%20Ability%20to%20Improve.pdf

Engelbart’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbart%27s_law

(Kim 2001) An Introduction to Purple: http://eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html

(Kline 1995) … (Campbell 2011) summary here: https://prod.sandia.gov/techlib-noauth/access-control.cgi/2011/114500.pdf

(Lienhard 1985) … Some ideas about growth and quality in technology : http://www.uh.edu/engines/qualitytechnology.pdf

the mother of all demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

Above dedication is from book chapter by (Spohrer and Siddike 2017).

Thanks to Rohith Jyothish and Anil Srivastava for pointers.

The first paper (Freeman 2018) present three laws of “robo-economics” – and is important to read carefully.  The pros and cons of profit sharing with employees is well explored in the second and third papers (Weitzman & Krause 1990; Krause 1986), especially from an incentives for full employment perspective. The fourth paper (actually book) (Pendleton 2002), is also very important to understand trends and challenges in employee ownership, governance, and participation.  Finally, the fifth paper (Errasti, Bretos, Nunez 2017) gives an analysis relevant to co-ops.  In addition, need some other perspectives…  co-ops include a component of profit sharing with customers – so some integration of this may also be worth exploring from a fuller co-creation of value perspective. As we get employees, managers, customers, and capitalists (owners) with large numbers of digital workers (say 100 digital workers per employee based on the number of apps on my smart phone today) and include the households these individuals are part of as well, the nested networked structure of the service system ecology might cause us to expect far more from individuals than we do today – just as we expect far more responsibility-taking from adults than children in society today (and age range of children at home status seems to be increasing today). Worth thinking about at least…

Annotated Bibliography

(Freeman 2018) Freeman RB (2018) Ownership when AI robots do more of the work and earn more of the income. Journal of Participation and Employee Ownership. (2018 Jun 11). 1(1):74-95. “To the extent that who owns the robots rules the world, it argues for a concerted social effort to widen the “who” in ownership from the few to the many. It reviews policies to expand employee ownership of their own firm and of the stream of revenue via profit-sharing and gain-sharing bonuses.” P. 74. “The natural solution to a distribution problem based on the unequal ownership of income earning AI robots and other capital assets is to expand ownership to a larger proportion of the population through increasing employees’ ownership of their firms and workers and citizens’ ownership of capital writ large. By ownership, I mean any of a diverse set of property rights over income-producing assets ranging from ownership of the capital, which gives employees or citizens’ rights to vote on economic and management decisions, to ownership of streams of income from capital, which give persons rights to the stream but not to the capital itself.” P. 83. “The USA has arguably the most extensive system of employee ownership and profit-sharing in the world, which gives the country a good base from which to adopt policies for increasing workers’ ownership as AI robots produce more of GDP.” P. 84. “Workers benefit from ownership by gaining higher incomes via shares or profit-related bonuses and by participating more in workplace decisions. Developing greater trust/loyalty to their firm, workers are more likely to stay with their employer than otherwise comparable workers without such plans and are more likely to monitor co-workers to keep productivity high (see chapters in Kruse et al., 2010). ” P. 85. “Capital income is more unequally distributed than labor income. The top 1 percent wealth holders have 35 percent of total wealth, which is about three times the share of the top 1 percent labor income earners in total labor income. Inequality in capital income has also increased more rapidly than inequality in labor income[42]. To the extent that AI robot automation raises capital’s share of income, it will add to inequality and accelerate the rising trend in inequality.” P. 87. “Sovereign funds – state owned investment vehicles that invest public moneys based largely on taxes and royalties from publicly owned natural resources such as oil and gas in real and financial assets – offer a different mechanism to spread capital wealth.” P. 88.

(Weitzman & Kruse 1990) Weitzman M, Kruse D (1990). Profit sharing and productivity. 95-142. “From many different sources there emerges a moderately consistent pattern of weak support for the proposition that profit sharing improves productivity.” P. 96. “The gains are probably modest, and perhaps it is a difficult change to engineer. A society‘s labor payment system seems to be one of the more likely candidates for historical inertia. institutional rigidities, and imitation effects.” P. 140.

(Weitzman 1986) Weitzman ML. Macroeconomic implications of profit sharing. NBER Macroeconomics Annual. 1986 Jan 1;1:291-335. “What we do not know – and this is the central economic dilemma of our time – is how simultaneously to reconcile full employment with reasonable price stability.” P. 291. “Senior workers who are not unduly at risk of being laid off might resist the plan.” P. 297. ” Here I would like to deal with some of the major objections that have been raised. The most effective way to do this, I believe, is to answer questions the way they are typically posed by astute critics.” P. 304. “In this article I have argued that substantial progress in the struggle for full employment without inflation will have to come largely from basic changes in pay-setting arrangements rather than from better manipulation of financial aggregates.” P. 332.

(Pendleton 2002) Pendleton A. Employee ownership, participation and governance: a study of ESOPs in the UK. (2002 Jan 4). Routledge. “This book has been a long time in the making. I first developed an interest in employee ownership at the beginning of the 1990s. Nick Wilson, then a colleague at Bradford University, was mainly responsible for introducing me to this field. We spent an enjoyable few months travelling the length and breadth of Britain collecting information on the early ESOPs. He was mainly responsible for assembling the questionnaire used to collect data on employee attitudes (see Chapter 8).” P. xi. “Our concern then is with a sub-set of share ownership schemes where employee share ownership is at high levels and where share ownership is intertwined with considerations of governance and participation.” P. 3. “In the main the employee ownership firms we focus on came about in two ways. One was where management and employees mounted buy-outs of public sector firms undergoing privatisation. The second arena for employee ownership conversions was the private company sector where the owner(s) wished to divest or exit.” P. 4. “The contemporary significance of this interpretation resides in the shift that is thought to be occurring in advanced economies towards a ‘knowledge economy’. Increasingly, wealth creation involves the application of human knowledge to the provision of services rather than the production of goods using physical capital. The critical investments therefore are those made in human capital. In these circumstances, the appropriate mode of governance is one involving employees in ownership and control. This line of argument is now filtering through into reformulations of the theory of the firm, and it has been proposed recently that the modern firm should be conceptualised as a ‘nexus of specific investments’ (Rajan and Zingales 1998). The other side of the coin is that firms need to find ways of binding employees with highly developed firm-specific knowledge to the firm so as to protect investments the firm has made in training and development. Employee ownership, both as remuneration and as a governance device, provides a way of doing this.” P. 8. “To these insights were added those of Jensen and Meckling a few years later. They also applied principal–agent theory to the theory of the firm, and analysed the problems of incentives and control based on asymmetrical distribution of information between principals and agents. They emphasised the monitoring costs for principals given that employees have superior information about many aspects of the production process, and the bonding costs to employees arising from the possibility that employers will in the future take most of the gains arising from long-term employment and the development of human capital.” P. 10. “Overall our conclusion is that studies of employee ownership need to pay close attention to the varying circumstances of ownership conversion, and to the objectives and philosophies of those involved in mounting the conversion. Variations in these are likely to be associated with differences in ownership, participation and governance.” P. 18. “Several observations can be made about the pattern of ESOP creation. One, there are virtually no cases where ESOPs have been used by start-up firms. There was just one such firm in our study, and this firm went out of business during the course of the research. ESOPs structures are not well suited to start-ups because they can be administratively onerous (in the view of our respondents) and because the demands of acquiring external finance for physical and working capital are likely to preclude the provision of financial resources to an ESOP.” P. 184. “An influential set of arguments suggests that decisions to become employee-owned may be relatively more likely in contexts where monitoring of worker activities is costly and where employees have transferable skills, knowledge, and reputation (Russell 1985b).” P. 191. [Note JCS: When employees have 100 digital workers working for them, this is very likely to be the case. Consider employees using and contributing to key resources in open source communities and open soure leader boards. Or does monitoring get easier, if privacy is less of a concern?]

(Errasti, Bretos, Nunez 2017) Errasti A, Bretos I, Nunez A (2017) The viability of cooperatives: The fall of the Mondragon cooperative Fagor. (2017 Feb 02). Review of Radical Political Economics. 49(2):181-97. “The viability of workers’ cooperatives as alternative work organizations in capitalist economy has long been a point of debate. Globalization brings new challenges to their survival as businesses and as democratic organizations. This article presents a case study of the rise and fall of the Basque cooperative Fagor Electrodomésticos, one of the largest industrial cooperatives in the world. Fagor, founded more than fifty years ago, played a key role in launching the several cooperatives that led to the creation of the Mondragon Corporation.After years of intense international growth, the local cooperative Fagor had been transformed into a multinational corporation competing in the highly concentrated and increasingly global home appliance market. In 2007 it employed around 11,000 workers inits eighteen production plants distributed across six countries. Then, as a result of a combination of external and internal factors,Fagor facedits most severe crisis, one
that eventually brought about its closure in 2013. Given Fagor’s role as a leading cooperative, the general question of the viability of workers’ cooperatives is also at stake in its failure. Recounting the story of Fagor’s rise and fall and examining its causes is therefore of broad significance.” P.2. “It finally failed in the midst of a very severe economic downturn that also brought down many other Spanish and European companies. Furthermore, most of Fagor’s members have already been relocated to other Mondragon cooperatives, which would be practically in conceivable in capital – owned companies. Fagor’s failure, then, says less about the viability of cooperatives than about the risks inherent in actual market economies: any business may fail, whatever the size, the juridical nature or the corporate and institutional support. There remain over one hundred cooperatives of Mondragon group , continuing to exhibit a strong capacity for growth and long – term survival, contradicting the verdict of the Webbs.” P. 18.

URLS:
(Freeman 2018)
https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/JPEO-04-2018-0015

(Weitzman & Kruse 1990)
http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/weitzman/files/profitsharingproductivity.pdf

(Weitzman 1986)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/3585175.pdf?casa_token=9pK-bgWzk0YAAAAA:7ThJCgHrGYC8UcuRaW3FeEWLMBCY4wjKny54IFhAO9lijmyLtXOIDgdB5TcITOB-GSdo1eA_ZCrB50uFr-uPS9CoSIzGNwLWkUseB8L17-mHJ8VpE-0

(Pendleton 2002)
http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/Cooperatives/Employee_Ownership_Participation_and_Governance-A_Study_of_ESOPs_in_the_UK.pdf

(Errasti, Bretos, Nunez 2017)
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ignacio_Bretos/publication/313292439_The_Viability_of_Cooperatives_The_Fall_of_the_Mondragon_Cooperative_Fagor/links/5a2027470f7e9bfc48fdfa4e/The-Viability-of-Cooperatives-The-Fall-of-the-Mondragon-Cooperative-Fagor.pdf

The Naples Forum on Service

Tips:
(1) Go to website – http://www.naplesforumonservice.it
(2) Click on “User Area” – Scroll to the bottom and click “Account Registration”
– fill out the form and wait for a confirmation email
– then activate your account, login-in
– once logged in you can submit a 400 word abstract – deadline January 19th (extended from original January 8th)

Regarding Account Registration
(1) The country names are not all in alphabetical order – for example “United States” comes after “Sri Lanka” and before “South Africa”
(2) “Affiliation” is used rather than “home organization” and it will also ask you for your website – so maybe have your LinkedIn URL handy fot that….
(3) password is number, letters (upper and lower), and just a few special symbols: period (.), underscore (_), at (@), and hashtag (#)
(4) username has to be at least 8 characters long
(5) If you have trouble registering, email – naplesforumonservice@gmail.com or madi.forum@unicas.it
(6) Confirmation comes from this email address – so check your spam filter – NaplesForumOnService – Account Activation <noreply@naplesforumonservice.it>
(7) When you click on the activation link in the confirmation email – it takes you to a blank page – but then you can go to the home page, click on “User Area” and login
(8) Website for login – http://www.naplesforumonservice.it/public/index.php

Abstract submission:
One you have a registered account at the website you can submit an abstract.
URL: http://www.naplesforumonservice.it/public/index.php?node=134&nm=Abstract+submission
From Home Page, Click on “10th Years Naples Forum” – and then on “Istructions” and then “Abstract Submissions” – I have alerted them to typos…

Additional Documents:
Helpful documents that can be downloaded from the Naples Forum website, included here for convenience:

(a) All the conference information in one document:
CFP2019

(b) Abstract template (word document) – no names on abstract, 400 word max
Abstract fac – simile

(c) Information about decisions on abstracts:
2019 Naples Forum on Service

(d) ISSIP Best Abstract Award

I propose: ISSIP.org will be sponsoring a best abstract award (max 400 words, with about one page of text with references) around the theme of “solving (a) advanced technologies and (b) their business and societal integration challenges” (e.g., artificial intelligence, economics, political science, public policy, service science, service-dominant logic, viable systems approach, smarter/wiser service systems, service networks, service ecosystems, service ecology, mechanism design, socio-technical systems design, socio-ecological systems, service marketing, service operations, service computing, service systems engineering, operations management, service design, service economics, quality-of-life, harmonious society, governance, trust, resilience, sustainable innovation, equality, value proposition design, scaling service systems, ISPAR model, grit, T-shaped skills, education that prepares citizens to understand multiple disciplines, cultures, industries, circular economy, emphasizing sequencing advanced technology development and adoption to rapidly rebuild industries (in miniature) from scratch in diverse local environmental contexts, open data, open source, open innovation, open organizations, monetizing personal data, privacy, security, ethical AI, ISSIP.org global collaboration projects, etc.)

Jeff Saperstein and Hunter Hastings co-authored the book “The Interconnected Individual” – read my summary here.

Jeff just sent Hunter and I the following Bertrand Russell quote about living in a more and more closely interconnected world…

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”

Surely tolerance can be taught and learned.  Many social nuances associated with tolerance.

For some reason this Bertrand Russell quote reminded me of a puzzle I am working on related to computer science and physical symbol systems…  Newell and Simon suggest that physical symbol systems are at the heart of computer science the same way the cell is at the heart of biology – and I would argue the same way service systems as entities are are the heart of service science…

“Lived lives” are series of thoughts (signals to the internal world), utterances (information signals to the external world), and actions (larger physical changes to the external world) – our thoughts, utterances, and actions all have social consequences, some direct and some indirect.

From a computer science/physical symbol perspective – this is not easy to represent in a general way.   Paul Maglio and I claim that all service system entities are physical-symbol-system entities, so it is worthwhile for service scientists to ponder this a bit.

So when another entity says something we do not like – we register there utterance in our memory through an internal thought “I do not like that entity X uttered statement Y in social context Z”).   We can follow this with a response – (a) Anger Response, (b) Sympathy Response, (c) Stoic Response, (d) Cowardly Response, (e) Courage Response, (f) Tolerance Response, etc.  – furthermore we can also follow it with an (g) Analysis Response by asking both (i) Why was I offended?  and (ii) Why did the other entity feel compelled to utter what they did in that context, what happened in their lived life that made that the logical or emotional response most appropriate in their mind for that situation?

I think the Tolerance Response that Bertrand Russell suggests in his quote can best be achieved when we appreciate different “lived lives” more fully.

Also from a service science perspective value co-creation happens best when there is deep levels of trust.

What is trust?  And how do we measure it?   In one service science paper – I do not recall which one – I think Paul and I write about trust in terms of having accurate models of others – when we simulate another and accurately predict what they will do next, we trust them more.   When we fail to predict their behavior, if the result helps us more than what we predicted, our trust of that individual grows – I think this is what happens with parents and very children.  When we fail to predict their behavior, if the result hurts us more than what we predicted, our trust of the individual diminishes.

References

Book Summary: The Interconnected Individual (Hastings and Saperstein
https://service-science.info/archives/4954

The four innovations that I would most like to see…

(1) Education: Rapid rebuilding from scratch as basis of entrepreneurial education

(2) Healthcare: Self-cleaning exoskeleton with AR/VR hoody display clothing linked to tele-robots as basis of healthy aging

(3) Retail: 3D printed steaks that remove carbon from the atmosphere and recycling as basis of retail

(4) Legal: Opt-in ethical ISPAR leaderboards for all entities with cognitive mediators as basis of social viscosity/legal

There is a lot of potential to realize these with “Interconnected Individuals: Seizing Opportunities” and “T-Shaped Professionals: Adaptive Innovators” …

=== References

(1) to get full access and benefits of knowledge accumulation in society requires taking responsibility for truly knowing
http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
https://service-science.info/archives/2189

(2) “modern” clothing production is a 200 year-old technology that needs disruption, something better than iron-man’s suit is becoming possible – and will help with isometric exercise
https://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/robotic-exoskeleton-investing/3419 https://www.pcmag.com/news/364342/watch-boston-dynamics-atlas-robot-do-parkour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isometric_exercise

(3) things are matter and energy in time and space – make the basics cycles sustainable  – my favorite article from “Meat Packing Journal” –
https://meatpacking.info/2018/06/13/protein-from-air/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

(4) philosophy of life display for lives lived – see the writing of Ruskins and Galambos –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unto_This_Last
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Joseph_Galambos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_aspera_ad_astra
https://image.slidesharecdn.com/ahfehsse20140722v3-140722032019-phpapp02/95/ahfe-hsse-20140722-v3-42-638.jpg?cb=1405999263

And Carl Sagan had it right when he said we are all “star stuff” – https://www.cnet.com/news/we-are-made-of-star-stuff-a-quick-lesson-on-how/

Interconnected Individuals: Seizing Opportunities
https://www.amazon.com/Interconnected-Individual-Opportunity-Platforms-Exchanges-ebook/dp/B07DM77NQ1/

T-Shaped Professionals: Adaptive Innovators
https://www.amazon.com/T-Shaped-Professionals-Innovators-Yassi-Moghaddam-ebook/dp/B07GTBD5K6/

Yes, some of the top ISSIP roles are demanding – especially being ISSIP VP is about one hour a week and one full day workshop, and ISSIP President is two hours a week and at least two full days of workshops – so a pretty serious commitment for sure, and not for the faint of heart.  And a volunteer role, so takes times away from more gainful activities.   The “honor” of being in the role is about the only reward, and knowing that you are helping a network of amazing people connect and grow as service innovations professionals.  About 1000 in the network now, and 10 super-active, 100 semi-active, and 900 on-call to largely inactive.  Many are amazing innovative systems thinkers and technologist such as yourself, often with a big social sciences component as well.  Frankly, most have big optimistic hearts too.   Every August we have 3-4 ISSIP members who get nominated for VP role that leads to President role.  The ISSIP Board of Directors, likes the VP/President to move from semi-active to super-active role ISSIP member, in those two years.  The top candidate pool is our ISSIP Ambassadors and/or ISSIP BEP book authors.  More about the duties of ISSIP VP/President is here: https://service-science.info/archives/4901

And yes, ISSIP is a fun group, to me at least.  I am happy to be a part of ISSIP, and on the Board of the non-profit professional association. Individual members (students, academics, executives, professionals, policy makers, etc.) join ISSIP for free.  The monthly newsletter is the main communication vehicle, and we love it when members, send a 3-5 page draft POV on their interests and recent publications/blog posts, etc. when they can – and turn it into interviews in the newsletter or chapters in an ISSIP BEP book with their help of course.  For ISSIP BEP book chapter publication, authors keep the copyright, and can point to other material. In recent ISSIP Discovery Summits, we got POV from experts at  IBM, Cisco, Japan Science and Technology, etc. – who  are the institutional members, and they pay to get institutional member benefits.  Regarding skills for the future – this is the most recent ISSIP BEP book: https://www.amazon.com/T-Shaped-Professionals-Innovators-Yassi-Moghaddam-ebook/dp/B07GTBD5K6 – the first ISSIP network report came out before ISSIP was an established organization, and it is called the IBM-Cambridge SSME report: http://www.ssmenetuk.org/docs/Cambridge_SSME_Symposium_Discussion_Paper_Final.pdf  While it is not academic rigor, it does seem to create a nice interface between industry, academy, government  point of views- and helped student contributors to advance their bona fides and executives to get a bigger picture than the quarterly view of the business, and academics to get our of their silos for a bit – which is fun sometimes.  ISSIP.org is a non-profit professional association, so it is primarily about individual members working and learning together on topics of interest, and sharing and improving points of view.  And we know people get very busy with their day jobs, so no worries -if this is not of interest to our colleagues and friends.  The next book will have chapters that report on an ISSIP Discovery Summit attended by speakers from IBM, Google, Accenture, Facebook, and we hope to gather additional POV chapters and content from the iSSIP.org network.  Would be great to have chapter that summarizes you and your centers reports that are relevant.  A chapter in an ISSIP book is a lot easier than writing a whole book of course.  We try to draw our ISSIP Ambassadors first from Service Research centers from around the world, and then from organizations (businesses, universities, government agencies, other professional associations) that see the benefit of service innovation, and professional development of talent in those organizations.

The importance of open source software (OSS) in university-industry collaborations is on the rise – generating an ever growing two way flow of advanced code and high tech talent, spinning up a wide range of startups as well. The best practice open source communities has three parts: (1) open access to code, (2) a commercially friendly license, and (3) open governance in a neutral third-party foundation that specializes in catalyzing and nurturing OSS community growth.

Recruiting & Readiness:
Established firms and startups study the GitHub profiles of candidates to hire the best.  For example, the hottest technologies are open source in areas such as Artificial Intelligence/Deep Learning (TensorFlow, PyTorch, ONNX), Containers (Kubernetes), Data Science (R, Python, Spark), Graph DB (JanusGraph), and Blockchain (HyperLedger).

Research & Regional Entrepreneurship:
In addition, candidates who are Kaggle Masters and/or who have experience in submitting open source solutions to top algorithm challenge leaderboards may have multiple offers even before graduating – is that good or bad?   Both corporate and university teams compete on leaderboards, such as SQuAD for question answerinq (i.e., https://rajpurkar.github.io/SQuAD-explorer/).  A growing number of challenges include a student section on a subset of the data, such a CVPR Moments challenge (e.g., https://winstonhsu.info/winning-third-place-in-cvpr-2018-video-recognition-challenge-moments-in-time/).   For example,  IBM recently ran the Call For Code, and developers from around the world submitting solutions of how AI systems can help in case of natural disaster – see https://callforcode.org/global-prize/

Who has Open Source Software (OSS) programs today?
A small sample of noteworthy university OSS centers include: 1. RPI RCOS (https://science.rpi.edu/computer-science/programs/undergrad/bs-computerscience/rensselaer-center-open-source-rcos) contact: Wes Turner (RPI) <turnew2@rpi.edu>, 2. Berkeley RISE: (https://rise.cs.berkeley.edu/), 3. UC Santa Cruz CROSS (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5730466942943232/), 4. Stanford (https://opensource.stanford.edu/) – and DAWN: https://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/, 5. MIT (http://mitopensource.sourceforge.net/) – and MIT-IBM Watson Lab see: https://mitibmwatsonailab.mit.edu/, 6. OSU Open Source Lab (https://osuosl.org/) – and IBM PowerAI see: https://developer.ibm.com/linuxonpower/cloud-resources/

Role of UIDP
UIDP (https://www.uidp.org/) role might be to provide an improved overview and help answer these basic questions: 1. Which university programs exist and what are the best practices for curriculum, interns programs, etc.?, 2. What are the best practice in setting up and runnings challenges, across university, industry, and government challenges?, 3. What government programs exist in the USA and around the world to enhance open source collaborations?

IBM and Open Source AI
CODAIT (Center for Opensource Data and AI Technologies) – see http://codait.org – is an example of an industry-based open source center seeking university and industry collaborators on projects that improve the ethical use of AI in enterprise AI solutions.  For an overview, of CODAIT please watch this 15 minutes video, by CODAIT Chief Architect, Dr. Frederick Reiss, during his engaging recent ApacheCon keynote – see https://feathercast.apache.org/2018/09/26/from-adam-to-zara-enabling-the-ai-lifecycle-for-your-enterprise-using-open-source-fred-reiss/

http://connect.informs.org/service-science/home

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2753/MIS0742-1222260402

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850113000758

https://service-science.info/archives/4316

https://service-science.info/archives/4871

https://service-science.info/archives/2210

https://service-science.info/archives/1982

https://service-science.info/archives/3648

http://www.businessexpertpress.com/product-category/service-systems-and-innovations-in-business-and-society/

https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/27201.wss
SSME has spread to 250 universities in 50 countries on six continents offering degree programs and specific courses. Some examples include:

Some service science conferences:
https://10times.com/icess-karlsruhe

http://www.wikicfp.com/cfp/call?conference=service%20science

Frontiers in Service 2019

July 18 – 21, 2019

National University of Singapore

Deadline for submission is Nov 30 – https://www.frontiers2019.com/cfa/submit_abstract/

Welcome to Singapore! – https://www.frontiers2019.com/

Just in from Jochen Wirtz (2019 Frontiers Chair) who wrote:

In 2019, the Frontiers Conference will move to Asia and convene in the sunny island state of Singapore. This will be the first time that one of the world’s leading annual conference on service research is held in Singapore.

Themed “Sharing Economy, Platforms and New Technologies”, Frontiers in Service Conference 2019 will explore a wide variety of service topics, including service marketing, service management, service operations, service strategy, service design, service engineering, service science, service IT, and AI and robotics as related to service.

So mark your calendar, come join us at the conference and get the chance to explore this constantly evolving country, with people who are passionate about creating new possibilities!

Abstracts Due

30 Nov 2018

Submit Abstract

ISSIP Innovators Groups (IIG) could be a good way for local ISSIP volunteers to get together to learn about and put into practice new service innovation methods and resources.

IIG’s are:
– run by local volunteers
– regular-ish events aimed at learning together
– oriented toward service innovation professionals growth
– open and free to all who adopt the ISSIP code of conduct

IIG’s are not:
– about buying/selling things
– raising funds for projects
– closed meetings

For examples, ISSIP members who listen to weekly speaker series, or the recordings of those talks, might do so as a group and then have local discussions – see ISSIP CSIG weekly speaker series, there are also weekly series on Service Innovation Frameworks and recordings related to Service Innovation Education and Research available.

Five main objectives of ISSIP are service innovation-related:  (1) professional development, (2) education, (2) research, (2) practice, and (5) policy understanding.

Some ISSIP resources that an ISSIP Innovators Group (IIG) might use:
The ISSIP weekly calls – SIF and CSIG and Ed&Res (when it was active) – have created a large set of educational resources – but packaging them in a way that a volunteer could run a meaningful ISSIP Service-Innovators Group meeting would take some work.  ISSIP BEP book collection is also a significant and growing set of educational resources:

T-Shaped Professionals: Adaptive Innovators (Moghaddam, Demirkan, Spohrer) is just released:

The Interconnected Individual: Seizing Opportunity in the Era of AI, Platforms, Apps, and Global Exchanges (Hasting, Saperstein) – is another good one for local ISSIP Service-Innovators Group discussion – and relates to ISSIP Mission of service innovation for our interconnected world:

Modeling Service Systems (Badinelli) – is one of my all time favorites – it really stands up to the test of time.

Note that most books published in the ISSIP BEP series have associated open access presentations by the authors and/or blog post summaries.  For example, here is the blog post summary for “The Interconnected Individual.”

URLS:
ISSIP (International Society of Service Innovation Professionals): http://issip.org
CSIG (Cognitive Systems Institute Group): http://cognitive-science.info/community/weekly-update/
Modeling Service Systems: https://www.amazon.com/Modeling-Service-Systems-Ralph-Badinelli-ebook/dp/B0184MQ61W/
Interconnected Individual: https://www.amazon.com/Interconnected-Individual-Opportunity-Platforms-Exchanges-ebook/dp/B07DM77NQ1/
Blog post summary of Interconnected Individual: https://service-science.info/archives/4954
T-Shaped Professionals: https://www.amazon.com/T-Shaped-Professionals-Innovators-Yassi-Moghaddam-ebook/dp/B07GTBD5K6

Inspiration was these two groups that Susan Malaika pointed me to:
GDG – Google Developer Groups run by local passionate volunteers – https://developers.google.com/programs/community/gdg/
Women Techmakers – series of global initiatives – https://www.womentechmakers.com/

ISSIP Code of Conduct
1. Respect others
2. Treat people fairly
3. Avoid injuring others, their property, reputation or employment
4. Refrain from retaliation
5. Comply with applicable laws, policies and procedures
(modeled on IEEE Code of Conduct 2014) – https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/about/ieee_code_of_conduct.pdf

Send email to info@issip.org to learn more and get involved.