Posts

Showing posts from November, 2018

Highly Intelligent Is Not Highly Creative – How to Be Truly Innovative

Image
In research as well as in entrepreneurship, there are many characteristics distinguishing an exceptional researcher or entrepreneur from just a good one. In particular there is a key difference between highly intelligent and highly creative people, as these characteristics are not necessarily correlated. Intelligence is commonly defined as the ability to acquire and apply existing knowledge and skills, while creativity is the ability for something novel and valuable. New research and new enterprises can therefore be grouped into four categories: Highly intelligent, incrementally creative researchers or entrepreneurs add an incremental twist to existing methods and knowledge. For instance, a researcher might add mathematical bells and whistles to widely accepted ideas and concepts - in Renaissance Europe they might have added an additional proof that Earth was indeed flat and that the Sun was circling around it. Most of the papers in Nature and Science fall into this category, ce...

Principles of Profiling Users with AI

Two days ago I read a Washington Post article about 3 Californian AI startups that profile users based on opaque AI algorithms. Their products calculate a quality score for people in different domains without explaining how it is calculated Predictim.com calculates a “risk rating” of babysitters based on their social media activities. HireVue analyzes tone, word choice, and facial movement of job candidates to predict their skill on the job. Fama does employee screening on social media and internal HR data to prevent what they call “brand risk” such as sexual harassment, bullying, or insider threats of employees.  The main problem with these and similar systems is that they use machine learning, in particular deep learning as a black box. Their algorithm gives back a score claiming high numerical accuracy without explaining how it has been calculated. Our own Condor software is doing similar things, showing a bird’s eye view of the communication patterns of organizations...

Why Donald Trump is No Leader

There are many ways to identify exemplary leaders. One of my preferred categorizations comes from here . It lists humility, curiosity, and empathy as the main criteria of successful leadership. I am afraid that on all three criteria Donald Trump scores zero: Humility  means that exemplary leaders treat everybody with respect, are not afraid of criticism and are willing to admit their own mistakes. They are willing to put their own ego into the background for the sake of others. Donald Trump stands for the opposite, as an egomaniac person who is obsessed with his own power and glory. Curiosity  means that a leader is constantly looking to further his own understanding, is willing to defer to the knowledge of others, and thirsty for new information. One of the first actions of Donald Trump was to cut funding in research, denying scientific facts about vaccination  and climate change , showing zero scientific curiosity. Empathy means that we treat others with compa...