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"The Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity meeting held at the Getty Center on Feb 8-10, 01998 produced some remarkable insights into the future uses of digital technologies and their impact on the documentation of cultural heritage (see press clippings for summary detail). We will be posting transcripts, images, and video clips from the meeting here in coming days. If you are interested in registering to take part in on-line discussions please do so at the Time & Bits Discussion section of this site."

Stephen Hawking summed up the thinking of many of the researchers and funders behind artificial intelligence this week when he launched the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge by claiming that AI is "either the best or worst thing to happen to humanity."

On Tuesday, Google is expected to finally unveil its answer to the Echo, alongside new smartphones and tablets. The Google Home device, which looks a little like an air freshener, is expected to go on sale later this month.

The world's biggest artificial intelligence companies, including Facebook and Google, have joined forces to mould the ethical rules that will govern how robots and computer programs behave in the future.

About time and welcome. I hope that those with experience of medical ethics are also involved. For two reasons; medicine is likely to be a major player and beneficiary of AI (eg personalised drugs) and medical ethics is a mature field that is used to responding to rapid innovation.

While automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail.

The government needs to get the ethical framework and regulation of artificial intelligence right and invest in skills training if it wants to make the most of the technology, the Government Office for Science has said.

The coming-of-age of artificial intelligence, 'social robots' and big data is having a massive impact on the way decisions are made in organisations. It follows that if we are to maximise know-how and expertise, the outputs from this technology-enabled channel must be integrated into how we work. Augmenting judgment and experience in this way also supports the move towards evidence-based decision making.

Can machines (e.g. robots) act and behave like humans? More to the point, do we want them to? Making them more and more like us humans could be a blueprint for another flawed species!

Teaching computers to understand casual, contextual conversation in every language and accent is key to this quest to normalise our interactions with computers and to place Google even more squarely at the centre of our lives.

Microsoft's research arm and Bing search engine business unit released on Wednesday a chat bot named Tay, which is powered by artificial intelligence technologies.

Amazon is pursuing an open-systems approach that allows quick development of many features, while Apple is taking a slower route, asserting more control over the technology in order to assure security and ease-of-use.

APQC's Knowledge Management (KM) Capability Assessment Tool is a diagnostic that lets KM practitioners measure every aspect of their KM programs, from strategy and business case development to specific processes and technologies, and find out how they stack up against the competition. This white paper describes the assessment tool, the 12 categories in which participating organizations are measured, and how knowledge managers can leverage the assessment results to improve their strategic decision making.

"The Top 100 Tools for Learning was compiled from the votes of over 500 learning professionals in workplace learning and education from 48 countries worldwide in the 7th Annual Survey, by Jane Hart, Centre for Learning & Peformance Technologies"

"Gamification can turn otherwise unpleasant tasks like data analysis, setting through data, paying attention to specific code and other intense activities that can be quite tedious and boring and turn them into something fun. This is why Gamification is such a hot trend in technology because it can truly reinvent work."

"The company of the future - and indeed the company of the present - needs new instruments to adapt to a changing reality. The new generation of digital natives is progressively being incorporated to the world of work. We are talking about a generation that has lived most of its life within the technological revolution that has occurred in the last two decades. It has connected people, who spend more time on the Internet than in front of the television and who have lived with the emergence of video games. It is not to judge whether that is good or bad, it's simply real and nothing will change it."

Looking at the HiSocial offering, I can't help but wonder about unintended consequences. The digital natives are savvy and will naturally find ways of 'gaming' the system. If you simple reward actions such as visiting intranet pages or 'downloading corporate material', you are in no way increasing the sum total knowledge, helping efficiency or decision making. What's needed is reward that stimulates participation and qualitative contribution, not just transactions.

"The focus of 'Mirror' is the creation of an easily used set of applications ('Mirror' apps), that enable employees to learn lessons from their own and others experiences to perform better in the future. The project facilitates learning 'on the job', at the workplace, through collaboration and reflection technologies."

Collaboration is a mindset and set of skills. It is also a messy and occasionally frustrating activity, and in the short term can even take longer than not collaborating. But long term, effective collaboration provides far stronger results. But to get there, we must first take a look at ourselves.

As Yammer integrates more with Office 365 there seems little point, and little desire from Microsoft, to keep it as a separate product. This isn't to put Yammer down - it's a good tool, has many thankful customers and fulfills a real need for many. But it's clear that Microsoft sees Yammer features (or features inspired and powered by Yammer technology) as parts of Office 365.

Ensuring that big data creates big value calls for a reskilling effort that is at least as much about fostering a data-driven mindset and analytical culture as it is about adopting new technology. Companies leading the revolution already have an experiment-focused, numerate, data-literate workforce. Are you ready to join them?

Systems of insight are the business discipline and technology to harness insights and turn data into action.