The Future of Analytics – What Will We See Next?

The best way to predict the future is to make it.

—Peter Drucker

I have enjoyed meeting people who make a regular practice of mentally living in, and predicting, the future. Two of my favorite people in the world who do this on a regular basis are Larry Smarr and Mark Anderson. Both Larry and Mark are incredibly accurate at seeing what the future state will be; they are, in effect, prescient.

Larry is the founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UCSD's Jacobs School.

Larry has made a living out of looking forward, seeing the future, and guiding pure scientific innovations, developments in software, hardware, and networking, and has helped guide the forward path for the US government, multiple global academic organizations,...

Data

The earliest form of recorded data that exists and is readable and still usable are accounting records from the Sumerians, dating from approximately 3400 B.C. [2] Data has been with us for many thousands of years and will be with us forever.

Single sources of data are useful ensembles of multi-source integrated data that is much more valuable and useful. Data is being generated at a staggering pace. Bernard Marr commented in Forbes:

The amount of data we produce every day is truly mind-boggling. There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created each day at our current pace, but that pace is only accelerating with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT). Over the last 2 years alone, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated. [3]

If 90% of the world's data was generated in the last 2 years, that means that we have an issue with immediate data overwhelming historical data. Do we need every reading from a light bulb indicating that it is...

AI today

As we have discussed in this book, mankind has been attempting to build humanoid forms and robots that either mimic or extend human intelligence for thousands of years. The first known recorded instance of the creation and demonstration of a humanoid invention is 976 BC, in the court of King Mu of the Zhou dynasty, in what is now known as China. [5]

The term artificial intelligence was coined in 1956 at Dartmouth College. [7] Since the founding of the field, we have seen the inventions progress along a development path of playing checkers, to chess, to Jeopardy!, to Go and AlphaGo, and to selected massive online multiplayer games where AI teams compete with human teams and win.

The field of AI has made impressive leaps and bounds in the last 10 years. I am certain that part of the reason that you are reading this book is due to the unmitigated success and widespread interest within the field.

The field of AI owes much and most of its success to the advancements...

Quantum computing and AI

Quantum computers are fascinating for a number of reasons. These are the three that I think about the most:

• The ability of a machine to calculate and manage an infinite number of states for each elemental unit of measurement, beyond the standard options of 1 and 0, is mind-boggling.
• It is equally mind expanding to think that individual quantum operations or calculations can be deferred in the computing or calculating sequence until later in the process, with intermediate calculations being resolved at the end, or near the end, of the process.
• Also, something that's amazing is that the entire calculation process can, and does, dissolve into the complete loss of the calculation process due to the loss of coherence in the system in the middle of a process.

Quantum computing began in the early 1980s, when physicist Paul Benioff proposed a quantum mechanical model of the Turing machine. Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin...

Artificial General Intelligence

Humans are simultaneously fascinated and abhorred by the prospect of building human-level intelligence into a non-human creation or innovation. Books, movies, research papers, inventions, and countless hours have been dedicated to creating human-like intelligence. There truly seems to be equal measures of wonder and terror in the idea.

In almost every high school class I have spoken with and to over the past 10 years, this topic is raised. Typically, a student raises the subject and a lively and wide-ranging discussion ensues. The conversation has evolved over that time period, but where we have landed over the past couple years is that the students want to know when AGI can be used to improve live battlefield operations (that is, killer drones), as well as first person shooter games, and another group of students want to know when AGI will be able to lessen the harmful effects of global warming and the problems related to food distribution, leading...

Today, we are failing

In the US, we need to change the way we teach Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM). We are failing our children. I know, because the system failed me or I failed to perform in the system – either way, the result is the same.

When I was 12, my father died. He died in front of me. It was him and me, alone. I ran and got help, but it was too late. That was a tough day.

I was stressed, and my schoolwork suffered. I lost my way in math and never recovered. I struggled with math in academic settings from then on. Eventually, I made it through high school, undergraduate school, and through trigonometry in graduate school. I passed all my exams and classes, but it was always an anxiety-producing experience.

From high school, I could never catch up. I couldn't understand what the teachers were talking about, but I could see how to arrive at the answers. I developed my own intuitive approach to every math class. I arrived at the right...

Teaching children to love numbers, patterns, and math

I met Dean Kamen in Chicago when he came to speak at an event. I remember him talking about one of his organizations, For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST). [1] Dean spoke about how he wanted to see the United States inspiring children to aspire to be scientists and researchers the way we inspire children to throw, bounce, or shoot a ball.

His position and remarks made, and make, so much sense to me. I never did, and do not, understand the obsession with sports figures and other celebrities. The time and interest on the part of the general public for celebrities and sporting events always seemed misguided and a waste of time and effort. We spend significantly more time watching reality television programs and sporting events than we do helping our children succeed in school. In what world does that make sense?

In the US, we have such a pervasive view that the majority of the population does not...

Blending rote memorization with critical thinking as a teaching paradigm

In fifth grade, I recall the teacher barking multiplication problems at the class and expecting us to write down answers at a rate of about one answer every 5 to 7 seconds. I did not enjoy this, and I am quite sure this is where I started to fall away from math as a subject of interest. I remember looking at Mr. Pabst and really disliking him, his crew cut, and his drug store aftershave.

Teaching children to memorize things is not the same as learning. I understand that there are base elements of all subjects that are useful to memorize, and the multiplication tables may be one of those useful bits of data, but memorization cannot be the end goal of teaching a subject. Well, it can be, but our children are not well served by this approach and method.

Even as I was failing to learn symbolic math and traditional mathematics, I was working diligently to hone my logic, reasoning, and critical thinking skills...

Summary

First of all, let me say thank you. Thank you for investing your time, energy, and interest in reading this book.

Before I started writing this book, I had multiple people tell me that this book might not be a book that someone would sit down and read cover to cover in a short period of time.

The first time I was told this, my heart sank because I translated the feedback into a subtle way of saying that there would be little to no interest in the book, but as I asked further questions and the dialog developed, people were saying that they felt that the book would be read in parts as people had areas of interest in creating an analytics function in a corporate environment, and that the readers would use the book more as a reference guide over time to gain knowledge of how to approach a task or challenge. The readers would then keep the book on their bookshelf to refer to over time. That feedback raised my level of excitement and engagement in writing this book. I do...

Chapter 10 footnotes

1. FIRSTL, https://www.firstinspires.org/
2. 9 Things You May Not Know About the Ancient Sumerians, Evan Andrews, Updated: Feb 5, 2019, Original: Dec 16, 2015: https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-ancient-sumerians
3. How Much Data Do We Create Every Day? The Mind-Blowing Stats Everyone Should Read, Bernard Marr, May 21, 2018: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/05/21/how-much-data-do-we-create-every-day-the-mind-blowing-stats-everyone-should-read/#598b0a1e60ba
4. Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage, and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage, 1st Edition: https://www.amazon.com/Infonomics-Monetize-Information-Competitive-Advantage/dp/1138090387
5. King Mu of Zhou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Mu_of_Zhou
6. Solid, https://solid.mit.edu/
7. Dartmouth workshop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop

   (Solomonoff, R.J., The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence;...