S05E05 of Connection Problem: Translation Layers

Seasonal Greetings (i.e. hi there!)

I was going to write about facial recognition, and about artists and tech, and about the OpenDoTT PhD program selection process; and I will! But I just walked out of a super interesting 3 hour long conversation about the role of artists in informing technological deployment that the lovely Retune team had kindly invited me to, and now all I'm thinking about is translation layers and how important they are. Everything else will just have to move a few lines, a few dozen pixels, further down.

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Translation layers

In this conversation it was about how we can get artists to be more involved in commercial (read: corporate) innovation processes. And while the participants, who all but myself were all involved in one way or another, shared their experiences, all I could think of was: Both the opportunities and the frictions are so, so similar to how 5, 10 years ago corporations tried to work more closely with startups and it was mostly a bit of a fail. All the right intentions (well, some of the right intentions), but not enough expectation management internally nor externally, not enough thinking about how to really align all parties, how to make sure all sides could work at their best. It's almost always too one-sided: Something that can happen easily when one party brings an entourage of 15 people to the meeting and the other brings one or two folks. I suspect it's a critical mass thing.

Expectation management, and being honest to both the others & to your own (and I don't know which is harder!) is key. But there's also a big source of friction (and hence huge opportunities) at the translation layer. We use similar terminology in many domains but mean different things. Quick turnaround is likely to mean something very different for a corporate R&D department than for a small artists' or design studio. So is cutting edge or even new technology. Prototyping and co-creation can refer to vastly different things. This isn't new insight, these are basic ontological considerations. And yet! The amount and quality of insight and new ideas we could likely unlock if we had better translation mechanisms involved, and processes for this type of exploration to happen not just by chance but in a structured (or maybe a deliberately unstructured) way. It's staggering how much energy this friction turns into the equivalent of heat now, but could turn into electricity instead. This is what could power generations of projects to come. I don't have any proposals yet, but this seems worth thinking about some more.

Because only then can we really hope to involve more artists and other independents and small studios and the like in large scale projects. (👋 European Commission and your funding!)

And I think we really want this to happen. This may be Surveillance Capitalism (the book) speaking, but I increasingly believe that artists and researchers and other independents might be the best (only?) candidates to explore new technologies and how to deploy them, what impact they might have, etc. The other, more commercial players, just too often have mis-aligned incentives and economic imperatives at this particular point in time, and in the maturity of connected technology in the age of big data.

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OpenDoTT

As you may know, both ThingsCon (the non-profit I co-founded way back when) and I personally are involved in OpenDoTT, a paid PhD program by University of Dundee and Mozilla that's funded by the EU. ThingsCon is a training partner and I'm a PhD supervisor. We just had a workshop last week to plan some of what will happen over the next 3 years, and also started fine-tuning the selection criteria for the candidates. It's the first time for me to see how this works, so I figured it might be interesting for others as well. (Please understand that I can't go into great detail while the selection process is ongoing.)

Given there were waaaaay many times more applications than spots available, the program turns out to be quite competitive. This is quite an honor for a first time program, even though I assume it's not just because of an amazing research topic and structure but also has to do with the fact that it's paid well at some 40K Euros or so. That said, the amount and quality of applications is amazing as far as I can tell. I won't be reading all, it's a decentralized process where supervisors get to rate some applications, but the university has a full comprehensive multi-step selection process in place. Long lists and short lists and interviews were mentioned.

One thing I found noteworthy is the express goal of diversity, and I was glad to see the applications represented it, too. I personally saw applications from Iran, Hong Kong, Germany, US, Turkey, and many other places — which is to say, not just the usual Western tech hubs. Backgrounds were from design to medical to user research to engineering to policy - less of a surprise given that it's framed under the umbrella of IoT.

I struggled a little with applications that would be great in terms of diversity, not just regional or ethnic but also language and background and culture. How do you compare a super slick native speaker application of an experienced professional shifting into academia with that of an early stage career non-native speaker from a different cultural background? It's not easy. The way I decided to rate was to look for those applications that were concise and demonstrated the ability to clearly articulate motivations and ideas: While for a bachelors level it's ok to focus on potential, for a PhD you need to independently grasp and communicate (and develop new, challenging!) complex ideas. There's no training to catch you up on that — you'll have to hit the ground running, and nobody wants to set up a candidate for failure. Still, it can be tricky to look beyond a slick CV and find someone with the potential for greatness. I'm confident that this process will surface a few true gems, and I can't wait starting to work with them.

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Ease of use vs Ease of mis-use

Experienced a pretty neat artist installation by Berlin-based artist So Kanno that involved some facial recognition as part of the experience (the installation isn't documented online yet). Like so often, the facial recognition software — on device? in the cloud? — got all our ages really wrong, getting the three of us in the range of 58 to 67 years while none of us are above 40; some may be hardly above 30. It's a good reminder how far the tooling has come: It's now fairly easy to just build stuff with facial recognition and analysis. HOWEVER. While it's easy to build with it, it's incredibly hard to build WELL with facial analysis. The tooling is getting really available and easy to use, but the data sets this off the shelf stuff has been trained on is bad on all kinds of levels. But the temptation to roll this out at quite some scale is real. If it's easy and cheap, it will happen.

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Miscellania

• Robin Sloan's Republic of Newsletters: All The Newsletters (subscribed, to all)
• "We are dedicated to the study and mitigation of risks that could lead to human extinction or civilisational collapse": The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. I'm glad someone's on it. Also, what a time to be alive.
• As a kid, I genuinely didn't believe I'd live to see the day that quantum computing got to market. Now startups are opening up their quantum computing services left and right, like this one (picked kind of randomly) that's now in beta. Also, what's a quantum computer again? (Technology Review)

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If you'd like to work with me in the upcoming months, I have very limited availability, so let's have a chat! I'm currently doing the planning for Q2 and Q3 2019.

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I wish you an excellent rest of the week, and a beautiful weekend.

Yours truly,
Peter

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Who writes here? Peter Bihr explores the impact of emerging technologies — like Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence. He is the founder of The Waving Cat, a boutique research, strategy & foresight company. He co-founded ThingsCon, a non-profit that fosters the creation of a responsible Internet of Things. In 2018, Peter is a Mozilla Fellow. He tweets at @peterbihr. Interested in working together? Let’s have a chat.

Know someone who might enjoy this newsletter or benefit from it? A shout out to tinyletter.com/pbihr or a forward is appreciated!

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Pictures: Unsplash (pahala basuki), Public Domain Review (Crispin van de Passe's grid for his perfect elephant)