Swarm Creativity Blog

Recently HR analyst Josh Bersin interviewe d Praful Tickoo , head of HR analytics, and Piyush Mehta, CHRO at Genpact, about the work we have been doing together for the last 5 years to identify both rock stars and flight risk of employees. His excellent blog post is here .

Have the Russians and Cambridge Analytica been abusing Facebook to influence the US and British elections by spreading fake news to receptive users? Absolutely Yes! Has this abuse had an impact on the US elections and Brexit? Most likely not! It becomes increasingly clear that people like Donald Trump (through his former confidant Steve Bannon) and Vladimir Putin have been (illegally) harvesting user profiles on Facebook and setting up Twitter bots to spread fakenews on Facebook and Twitter . Facebook by its own account admitted that fake news produced by the Russians and US Alt-right proponents might have been seen by millions of users. What has not been shown, however, is what effect this has had on the actual voting behavior. I argue that this effect has been minimal, most likely smaller than the voting margin for Trump in the US elections, and for Brexit in the UK. While a group of researchers has done an t horough analysis of the dynamics of the spread of ...

In the earlier days of computer science (1990ties), when I was a post-doc at MIT, there was huge discussion among AI researchers, with people like Marvin Minsky on one side, who said that computers eventually would become smarter than humans, and the majority agreeing that this would never be possible. Fast-forward 25 years, and there is no question that Marvin Minsky was right. Researchers today envision one of three possible scenarios: the first, least fearsome one, that the human is telling the machine what to do, secondly, we have true human-machine symbiosis with computer and human being equal partners on a task, or third, the machine telling the human what to do. Looking at the current stock market fluctuations, it unfortunately seems we already firmly reached the third scenario, with computers taking over. When after multiyear growth and a record high of the Dow on January 26 2018, a few days later on February 4, the Dow lost 1175 points in a single day, this was its bigges...

Here is a collection of "HowTo" documents, helping over some hurdles when installing Condor on Mac and Windows, courtesy of Ken Riopelle (thanks a lot, Ken!) Condor and Java 9 and Java 8 Tips Condor 3 How to obtain a Google CSE Key_Updated_07162017 Condor 3 How to obtain the four Twitter API Keys Updated July 16 2017 How to install Java JRE 8 update 121 on a Windows 10 PC How to install MySQL 5.7.17  on a Windows 10 PC How to install MySQL Workbench 6.3.7 on a Widnows 10 PC How to start Condor on a Windows 10 PC updated July 15 2017 How to install Java JDK 8 update 131 on a Mac as of July 13 2017 How to install MySQL and Workbench on a Mac updated July 13 2017 How to start Condor on a Mac Sierra updated July 13 2017

What is the real-world impact of Twitter? It seems that one well-placed tweet can #makeAmericaGreatAgain – at least it got Donald Trump elected as US President, or did it?  One year after his election, even the Russian press says Trump did not “Make America Great Again” . In this post I would like to explore if Twitter really can help an aspiring leader to change the world, promote a cause, or further his or her own career. I will start by looking at the Twitter behavior of the World’s most famous people, and then identify some characteristics of the most active or prominent twitterers. In a project with GDI Switzerland we have used prominence in Wikipedia to identify the most influential people in the (English speaking) world. Wikipedia’s notability criteria are a robust mechanism to filter out the most notable 800,000 people. We have then constructed the network among these 800,000 people by linking two people, if their Wikipedia pages are mutually linked. (We call this a bi...