Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek

latest edition explores implications around: (1) making sense of the rapid displacement of startups and “the best model” rat race, (2) how “artifacts of humanity” and Content Credentials will become a human flex of sorts… https://lnkd.in/ecGZKMvr

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What a difference a dozen years make! In 2012, we created and launched the White House Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIF) program. We could barely imagine at that time the extent and rapidity of the progress that was about to occur in machine learning and related fields. But we believed deeply that having a pathway for getting technologists into high-impact public service mattered. Yesterday, as part of President Biden's AI Talent Surge, the US Government announced a new PIF cohort consisting exclusively of leading AI experts to help ensure that eight key departments -- Justice, State, OMB, DoD, and more -- responsibly develop and use AI tools in order to effectively achieve their missions on behalf of the American people. Just as every organization became a tech organization in recent decades, so too will they need to graft AI onto their DNA in order to meet the rising expectations of the public. I'm heartened that these AI PIFs answered the call and will now use their diverse backgrounds and invaluable experiences in data, systems design, governance, equity, and security to make sure that AI works for everyone. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/ebwXZxmi #AI #ML #DigitalGov #TechForGood #USA

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Loved reconnecting with Ted Ko last week for the Abstract Webinar Series! Check out our conversation about how technology is impacting policy design, implementation, and analysis. Thanks Ted Ko! Check it out and subscribe to our Substack, Abstracts by Abstract, for all our latest content ⬇️⬇️⬇️ #AI #Tech #GovTech #Policy #AWS

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In our article ‘Participatory Budgeting: Understanding Color of Money and Other Constraints’, Nikolaos Kaintantzis and I explore several misuses, dysfunctions, and myths about #SAFe Participatory Budgeting (PB). By identifying them, we can promote healthy uses of PB while dispelling myths. Misuse 2: Manipulative cost estimates Each Epic in a PB session has a cost. For example, an Epic will include a cost for the proving or disproving of the Epic hypothesis. Inevitably, this is an estimate, and like all estimates, it can be created in a way that is healthy and reflective of best practices or it can be manipulative. For example, an Epic could be priced too low in order to coerce individuals into funding it. Alternatively, an Epic could be priced too high in order to convince individuals that it should not be funded. A related manipulation is to promise more or fewer benefits than can be reasonably expected from the Epic or to avoid the development of leading indicators and other elements of the Lean Business Case.   Here are two strategies can help improve the estimation of costs and description of benefits. (1) Follow SAFe guidance in establishing an experienced Epic Owner. While these individuals are expected to be advocates for their Epics, they should also be supported in developing realistic Lean Business Cases. (2) Ensure that all Epics are presented in a common format. For example, instead of including NFRs for some Epics but not all Epics, ensure that all Epics either have NFRs or an explicit statement that a given Epic does not have NFRs. To get more insight about how to produce high-impact Participatory Budgeting events, read the full article (link in the comments). To get targeted feedback on how you can implement Participatory Budgeting events, take my May 9/10 LPM course. I’m a SAFe Fellow, a former member of the framework team, and I’ve helped organizations manage more than $3B in portfolio investments. I’ve got the experience you need to fully leverage SAFe LPM. #SAFe #LPM #profit #profitstreams #participatorybudgeting

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In our article ‘Participatory Budgeting: Understanding Color of Money and Other Constraints’, Nikolaos Kaintantzis and I explore several misuses, dysfunctions, and myths about #SAFe Participatory Budgeting (PB). By identifying them, we can promote healthy uses of PB while dispelling myths. Dysfunction 1: Nothing truly big gets done As the Solution Manager or Product Manager, I can ‘avoid’ the portfolio by only doing things that are smaller than the Epic threshold. The dysfunction is people trying to cheat the system by taking a large Epic and passing it off as a set of Features that go straight into Development Value Streams without appropriate review by the portfolio. This is a very challenging dysfunction to identify and resolve because a significant part of the job of a Solution Manager or Product Manager is decomposing large requests into smaller Features that can be implemented by a Solution train or an ART. This is a dysfunctional relationship between the value stream and the portfolio, because it is designed to hide how money is being spent. More dangerously, this dysfunction often results in nothing ‘big’ getting done, because large, multi-term investments need LPM support. The following strategies can help eliminate this dysfunction. (1) Ensure that the LPM investment guardrails are structured so that investments can - and at times, must be made - in larger Epics (2) Adjust the Epic threshold guardrail funding so that the balance between centralized and decentralized decision-making is promoted. To get more insight about how to produce high-impact Participatory Budgeting events, read the full article (link in the comments). To get targeted feedback on how you can implement Participatory Budgeting events, take my May 9/10 LPM course. I’m a SAFe Fellow, a former member of the framework team, and I’ve helped organizations manage more than $3B in portfolio investments. I’ve got the experience you need to fully leverage SAFe LPM. #SAFe #LPM #profit #profitstreams #participatorybudgeting

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In our article ‘Participatory Budgeting: Understanding Color of Money and Other Constraints’, Nikolaos Kaintantzis and I explore several misuses, dysfunctions, and myths about #SAFe Participatory Budgeting (PB). By identifying them, we can promote healthy uses of PB while dispelling myths. Dysfunction 2: Choosing participants to bias the outcomes In 2000, Mehrdad Baghai, Steve Coley, and David White from McKinsey & Company published The Alchemy of Growth, which discusses portfolio planning and investments. In perhaps my favorite passage from the book, the authors make the following observation about investment funding (p. 64): “The assumption that a company can search for opportunities without bias is false. When tradeoffs must be made between several economically attractive ideas, executive teams are deeply influenced by what they most want to do. For this reason, passion should be explicitly recognized in the search for opportunities. Putting a value on passion acknowledges that business creation is not a mechanistic process for planners, but a human affair to which leaders bring their own emotions. It may mean assigning lower priority to some opportunities that show genuine promise, but in return, it gives the remaining ideas a better chance of success. Managers are more likely to devote their energy to ideas they believe in and care about.” The passion the authors recognize is one of the reasons why PB is such a powerful tool: it provides each member of the LPM team with the forum they need to argue for their ideas in a manner that includes both economic and non-economic factors.  The downside to this passion is that the designers of the PB forums may seek to unfairly influence the funding outcomes by choosing participants based on their a-priori preferences. The best approach to eliminating this bias is to randomly select participants into PB forums based on roles and without regard to a-priori biases. A more restrictive rule is to explicitly disallow a forum participant from partially or completely funding any Epic for which they are the Epic Owner. This ensures that if an Epic is funded, it is funded because it has support from at least one other person other than the Owner. To determine the breadth of support, you can also introduce additional in-forum rules, such as requiring that every Epic must be funded by n people, where n>1. In some cultures, PB is engaged by a ‘Yes/No’ vote in which all of the funding is pooled and the participants must all vote ‘Yes’ to fund an Epic from the common pool. To get more insight about how to produce high-impact Participatory Budgeting events, read the full article (link in the comments). To get targeted feedback on how you can implement LPM events, take my May 9/10 course. I’m a SAFe Fellow and a former member of the framework team. I’ve got the experience you need to fully leverage SAFe LPM. #SAFe #LPM #profitstreams #participatorybudgeting

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Partnership on AI's latest blog shares insights on guardrails for open foundation models to ensure the benefits that openness promises. In 2023 alone, 149 new foundation models were released, with a majority 65.7% being open, up from just 33.3% in 2021 (Stanford HAI Index Report 2024). The blog features updates from Madhulika Srikumar, including: ▶ April workshop co-hosted with GitHub which convened 50 experts to explore open model governance. ▶ Focus was on mapping the value chain for open models and risk mitigations therein. ▶ Next steps: share the complete value chain for open models to better understand interventions for governance, going beyond the initial release decision. We'll be sharing more in the coming month. Open models have immense potential, but we must get the governance fundamentals right through transparent, multi-stakeholder collaboration. https://lnkd.in/gqjQWXPU #opensource #foundationmodels #AIsafety

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In our article ‘Participatory Budgeting: Understanding Color of Money and Other Constraints’, Nikolaos Kaintantzis and I explore several misuses, dysfunctions, and myths about #SAFe Participatory Budgeting (PB). By identifying them, we can promote healthy uses of PB while dispelling myths. Misuse 1: Creating colors of money to fund an Epic In SAFe we finance the value streams, not the work items. Nevertheless, in some companies portfolio leaders still stick to the idea that you have to ‘raise money’ or ‘allocate funds’ to make an Epic possible. This is simply creating a ‘color of money’ constraint within a portfolio to try and coerce the portfolio team into funding an Epic. Why is this in our opinion a misuse? A key principle of PB is that the best Epics will be funded. They should compete with other Epics on their merits as much as possible. Accordingly, we do not advocate creating colors of money to fund specific Epics. To get more insight about how to produce high-impact Participatory Budgeting events, read the full article (link in the comments). To get targeted feedback on how you can implement Participatory Budgeting events, take my May 9/10 LPM course. I’m a SAFe Fellow, a former member of the framework team, and I’ve helped organizations manage more than $3B in portfolio investments. I’ve got the experience you need to fully leverage SAFe LPM. #SAFe #LPM #profit #profitstreams #participatorybudgeting

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An eternal conflict. Will AI safety and impacts temper the current AI gold rush fever? History would indicate that AI Gold Rush fever will win, consequences be damned. A example of consequences is having to cap abandoned oil wells so that methane, which contributes to CO2 levels and accelerates Climate Change, can no longer escape into the atmosphere. 5/10 #ai #artificalintelligence #leadership #innovation #ChatGPT #futureofwork  #GenerativeAI #businessautomation #genai #digitaltransformation #processautomation #ibm IBM #chatbot #startup #marketing #strategy #business #publicsector #technology #metaverse #airegulation #llm #data #ml #machinelearning #customerservice #aigovernance #aitools #aileadership #aiagents OpenAI #promp NVIDIA Microsoft Google Amazon Salesforce National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO)

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The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Annual Conference officially kicks off tomorrow here in Chicago and I’m very excited that Polinode will be attending for the first time. To celebrate Chad Mitchell and I have created two networks specifically for the conference - the first shows the connections between all of the conference presenters based on the conference program and, for the second, we have pulled the historical publications data for all of the presenters at the conference and created a co-authorship network. You can read all of the details and access interactive versions of the networks at this link: https://lnkd.in/gHf9bpnd   One more thing! We’ve also produced over 3,000 personal network reports for the SIOP 2024 Conference presenters. If you are presenting at SIOP 2024 you can swing by the Polinode booth (#430) any time from tomorrow onwards to receive a copy of your personal network report from either me, Chad Taberner or Chad Mitchell. This is the first time that we have created a co-authorship network or personal network reports for a conference so we are looking forward to hearing feedback from the presenters and others. Please feel free to let us know what you think in the comments below! #SIOP #PeopleAnalyics #OrganizationalNetworkAnalysis #IOPsych #SIOP24

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Investigative work done by The Markup in partnership with a few other civil society organizations unearthed some egregious errors from a chatbot deployed by the local NYC government to aid citizens in finding answers to FAQs. An example of a clearly problematic outcome was answering questions like “Can I take a cut of my workers’ tips?“ with: “Yes, you can take a cut of your worker's tips. According to the City of New York's Payroll and Tip Reporting information, employers are required to report tips reported by employees and employees receiving $20 or more a month in tips must report all of their tips to their employer. Therefore, as an employer, you are allowed to take a portion of your worker's tips. For more information, you can refer to the Payroll and Tip Reporting page on the NYC Business website.” (You can read the full report from The Markup for more examples.) There are a whole slew of ethical issues that arise from such an incident such as: 1. Erosion of trust in the reliability of information provided in other instances by the chatbot, even when it might be right - also called algorithmic aversion. 2. Legal consequences due to wrong information whereby the person might act on the provided information that opens them up to lawsuits, e.g., in the workers’ tips case. 3. Harm to individuals and businesses, e.g., refusing to accept Section 8 vouchers or accepting tenants that receive rental income, i.e., discriminating against them, which is illegal for a landlord to do and would make finding housing difficult in an already problematic rental market such as NYC. Our quick take on small measures that would have helped to avoid this mishap proactively would be to: 1. Involve domain experts in the testing and validation phases of the chatbot development who could have spot-tested / smoke-tested responses to see if they went against housing regulations, workers’ rights, etc. 2. Rigorous testing and validation, especially constraining the system to rely on techniques like retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to sharpen answers and ground them in actual city laws that could be fed as a fine-tuning step into the chatbot’s AI system. 3. Transparency and user education could alert users more proactively that there is always an inherent risk in the chatbot providing responses that might not be accurate, or in this case, wrong to the point of being illegal, so users should proceed with caution and verify with second and third sources to confirm the validity of the response. While each of the steps require an investment upfront before the launch of the system for public consumption, the cost, we believe strongly, is well worth it to avoid harm and build trust capital with citizens, especially for essential services. #ethicalai #ai #ethics #aiethics #responsibleai https://lnkd.in/dAXzGqvP

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"Integrating the principles of Afrofuturism into AI design holds promise for creating AI systems that are more cognisant of their biases, responsive to diverse perspectives, and geared towards positive societal impact." - Kojo Apeagyei, AI & data ethics Afrofuturism is a powerful design framework. How could it inform your profession or practice? https://lnkd.in/eQ3wisPi

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📲🔍 New Episode Alert! In our ongoing fireside chat series with Jen Gaudet, we tackle an often-overlooked aspect of digital development: The downside of skipping UX Research. 🚫💡 This episode delves into why skipping UX research can lead to pitfalls that affect user satisfaction and ultimately, business success. We particularly emphasize the importance for small and medium businesses and new mobile apps to allocate time and budget for UX research to truly understand their users' needs and enhance their product experience. 🎯📊 Proud to bring this to you from OneSource Labs, Inc. Don't miss out on learning how investing in UX research can save costs and drive revenue in the long run. Tune in! #UXResearch #MobileApps #SMBs #UserExperience #DigitalStrategy #OneSourceLabs 🌟

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Excellent work on this topic. Also wildly dangerous LLM scaling. https://lnkd.in/gYEiMj9c

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I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that one of the reasons we are in an existential polycrisis of climate, inequality, trust, geopolitical tension and institutional collapse is due to the ferocious stickiness of Adam Smith’s invisible hand meme. Smith himself was a lot more nuanced, but the bumper sticker idea that an unfettered market will magically deliver an optimal economy if we just let people maximise their self interest has a lot to answer for. That’s one of the reasons why I really like Geoff’s reformulation; acting in one’s own self interest can result in collective stupidity. He suggests that the drivers are in-built and deep: laziness (evolutionary sensible to conserve energy) and need for social validation (again, makes sense not to be kicked out of your tribe). So next time someone quotes Adam Smith at you, ask them if they think collective thriving or collective stupidity is more likely given… all of this.

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The next generation of workers responds to active, autonomous, and interactive learning experiences. This article explains how BILT is uniquely poised to support your onboarding team with a spatial computing app to catalyze learning and a 3D mobile app to support your team in the field. #training #enablement #fieldservice #future #training #work

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🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 REALLY COOL INSIGHT INTO AI!!! Peeking Inside the Black Box: New Advances in Understanding How AIs Think The article from Anthropic discusses their research on deciphering the inner workings of their conversational AI system, Claude. Using a technique called sparse dictionary learning, they were able to identify millions of semantic building blocks or "features" that Claude uses for reasoning and generating text. For example, they found distinct features for concepts like the Golden Gate Bridge, computer code, famous people, and geography. By analyzing and intervening on these features, they gained insights into how Claude represents knowledge and makes inferences. The discovery of abstract, interpretable features sheds light on therepresentations and computations happening inside Claude's neural network "black box." The article continues to build on the approach by scaling it up dramatically to extract features from Anthropic's latest model, Claude 3 Sonnet. By training larger sparse auto encoders with more compute power, they were able to find even more sophisticated features corresponding to complex, multilingual, and multimodal concepts. The researchers analyze these features in depth to understand what they represent, how they generalize, and how they enable model capabilities. Intriguingly, they also find features that appear relevant to AI safety, like detecting deception orsecurity flaws in code. While preliminary, this demonstrates how interpretability could eventually help ensure AI systems behave safely and reliably. This represents exciting progress in elucidating the mechanisms by which large language models operate. Methodically decoding these models promises to enhance our ability to build more robust, trustworthy, and beneficial AI. #AI #artificalintelligence #SRED #RD #innovation #funding #fundingexpert #grants #JonIrwin #futuretech https://lnkd.in/gRVVCppY

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I had the best time speaking on two of my favorite topics: #Legacy and #AI at the Global AI Summit in early April, hosted by Mia - Mission impact academy - an incredible organization on a mission to empower 1 million women with AI skilling opportunities by 2030. The panel featured fellow innovators and pioneers in the future of legacy, our partner and Founding Member Sharon Zhang of Personal AI, and Deboshree Dutta of Criya - hosted by Louisa H. . They are amazing ! See the highlight reel below where I discuss how Marble Collective is reimagining a future where women leaders can connect seamlessly, network smarter, and share events and media efficiently - while serving as role models to the next generation. We are building and preserving legacies to make brand management automated, and the knowledge, insights, and media consumption of remarkable women collective. Legacy, traditionally, is something left behind by individuals for future generations, whether in the form of values, knowledge, or stories. But in today's digital age, a legacy has transformed into something much more immediate and accessible. It's what we create and share every day through digital platforms. AI has revolutionized how we create and preserve these legacies. And this is just the beginning. At Marble Collective, we use AI to curate and manage digital assets for our Members who are industry and thought leaders - by gathering books, podcast interviews, lectures, blogs, and articles by them, about them, OR that they consume on a daily basis - as an extension to their memories, to create content, and serve as role models to others. While automating brand management for remarkable women, we are building a Masterclass that is open access to anyone interested in following, exploring, and learning from some of today's most fascinating leaders. Join us during our BETA, as we head towards official launch. https://lnkd.in/e8nKJysc #femalefounder #femalefounded #womenleaders #marblecollective

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