Posts in category: CTIC News

“Birds of a feather flock together.” 

The proverb plays out true for a lot of us. We attract – or hope to attract – people like us. This plausibility of our social inclination to surround ourselves with beings like us is referred to as the similarity-attraction hypothesis. I say beings… because it also seems include robots.  

We often describe people by – and identify ourselves with – personality. This is the basis for how we understand who we are, and how we understand who others are. Inherently, this is knowingness is done through the lens and expression brought about by being in relationship with others. 

Personalities are sets of distinctive characteristics among humans and exchanged between them. Goldberg indicates the personality is composed of openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism – you might have heard these referred to these factors as the “Big Five.” Levels of extroversion are particularly exposed in defining a human’s personality as it characterizes it is often associated with one’s social aptitude in various relationships. An extroverted person is generally energized by external stimulus, while an introverted person will be comparatively less socialable. It follows that it is often the case introverted people tend to have fewer relationships than extroverted counterparts as they present with less engagement in social interactions. 

Of our perceptive abilities in social interactions, verbal and non-verbal communication deliver information, emotion, and intention to us. Verbal communication delivers purposes and details; non-verbal communication supports delivery by conveying information subtly with gestures, facial movements, and eye movements. In application to levels of extroversion, it’s notable that extroverted people more actively form social relationships with facial communication, while introverted people are less likely to do so.  

Studies indicate that social rules and terminations of human-human interactions will equally apply to human-robot ones, and similar rules to engagement – aka, the prevalence of personality in building relationships – apply. “If computers and robots are able to communicate with humans, humans will respond to these computers and robots using the same elements of social interactions that they employ in human-human interactions.”

A purpose-blinded study, participants interacted with robots programmed to introverted or extroverted properties (eg passive facial movements, slow facial expressions, and small, infrequent eye contact movements for an introverted robot). The responses of participants were measured by indexes of anthropomorphism, friendliness, preference, and social presence. The results of participants’ perception of the robots were correlated directly with their personality type. Extroverted participants found a higher degree of anthropomorphism, friendliness, and social presence than intermediate or introverted participants when interacting with a robot holding extroverted properties. When introverted participants interacted with the robot similar to them, they felt higher degrees of friendliness, immersive tendency, and preference. Breaking the correlation, introverted participants did find a lower degree of presence with the introverted robot.  

In similar studies, subjects are found preferring a computer acting similar to themselves and reporting higher satisfaction with their interactions. “Birds of a feather flock together,” even if no one has feathers, one is covered in skin, and the other runs on batteries. 

 Check these out:

Park E, Jin D, del Pobil AP (2012) The Law of Attraction in Human-Robot Interaction. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems 9(2).  

Nass C, Steuer J, Tauber E, Reeder H (1993) Anthropomorphism, agency and ethopoeia: Computers as social actor. Proceedings of the INTERACT ’93 and CHI ’93 Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM. pp. 111–112. 

Nass C, Moon Y, Fogg BJ, Reeves B, Dryer C (1995) Can computer personalities be human personalities? International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 43: 223–239. 

We all have great ideas. But an idea can only become as great as its delivery.

You once in a while come across those speakers that grab your attention and hold it. They articulate their thoughts as though they have masterfully rehearsed a script, and deliver stories as though you are living through it with them. It’s magic.

You too have probably experienced those moments where each of your words feels perfectly placed – the world seems to open up before you as you find your flow and your ideas find receptive ears.

Whether you are readying to capture that feeling for an upcoming engagement, or would like to nourish that ability to tap into when you need it next, we’ve got some ideas for how to make your idea delivery great.

Listening like a Speaker.

There’s a practice prolific writers take part in – they read like writers. They look out for literary devices and tactics authors employ to deliver the content. They pick out punctuation, sink into sentences structures, and rake out rhyme schemes – and alliteration. From this investigation of words in newspapers and cereal boxes, readers that read like writers gain a better understanding of language and its functions and pick up tips, tricks, and templates along the way to try out in their own work. A speaker can do the same.

Listen to people talk online and in your day-to-day life to learn about speaking. Pay attention to what everyone is doing with their words – purposeful and not. Make mental notes of what engages you and what diminishes your focus, what language choices garner your trust or move you to be dismissive, what makes them see knowledgeable or inexperienced. Listen like a speaker. Listen for the good and the bad and seek to learn from it all. Recognize every interaction as an opportunity. Remember, even if you’ve learned what not to do, you’ve learned something!

Quick Tips to Kick Start Your Observations

Here are some observations of speaker tactics. Use this format and process as a model for how you listen. Pay attention to speaker choices and then name the outcomes on listeners. Then, transform this observed interaction into a tip you can act on.

• Get your audience speaking and responding to you. Have the person engage with you is a sure way to grab their attention. Seek responses and create opportunities for them to interact with you and your content.
• Provoke responsiveness and engagement with humor or a question at the beginning of you speaking. Get their buy-in during the first minute by inviting them to participate in the energetic exchange.
• Denote your thinking process. Share how you are traveling through the ideas entering your head or how stories are connecting themselves in your mind. This offers the listener sort of a roadmap for the discussion and makes them feel like they understand you – and ultimately your thinking and ideas – more.

Prime Practice Advice

Tips on process are powerful for creating sustainable outcomes. Seek process advice from aware or experienced speakers by talking to one or finding content on YouTube or in a podcast. Check out these tips you can have in your back pocket for preparing or course correcting a delivery.

• Demonstrate your understanding of the presentation content. Review key points or details you don’t want to miss during your drive, deliver your presentation to a friend, make bullet points and quiz yourself on remembering them. Get some good tests of knowledge under your belt so you can be assured you know what you’re talking about, even if you experience some nerves before the moment of action.
• Practice in front of a mirror and pay attention to how your facial expressions sync up with words.
• Record a voice memo of yourself speaking and listen back to where your inflections lie. Dipping into a lower register at the end of your sentence often instills more trustworthiness, but there may be occasions where you want to jump up in your voice to build intrigue or collaboration.
• Try slowing down your rate of speaking. Slowing down is often a tip we get moments before the presentation, but it can be hard to do when you haven’t practiced doing so. Vary your speed when speaking to give yourself an arsenal of options to pull from when you are presenting, particularly if you are working with time constraints in a conference or stage setting.

Have your own advice? Give us a tip! We learn by sharing, doing, and – of course – practicing.

The Ignite Carroll season is upon us for the eleventh time. The unique concept of the Ignite talk gives speakers 5 minutes to deliver a presentation of 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds. It’s an endeavor that challenges speakers new and experienced, pushing ideas into a format that distills them to their most pertinent and powerful parts.

This is the second year I’ll be helping to organize it; it’s the first I’ll be applying to present. I write this to “speak” it into action because, in truth, I still sit slightly dissuaded from taking the stage, wondering:

Is this opportunity right for me? Is this the right time? Do I have something worth saying? Will people want to hear it?

I can hurl myself into answering these questions for days, weeks, months… there are few limits to the creativity of thought, especially when it pertains to how I, and others, will define me and my choices. But the most important part to answering them comes at the very end, when the answer begs the next question: “…And?”

And, what will I decided to do next, in spite of or because of this information? And, what if I still have one good reason to do it? And, what if I will learn some unrealized lesson from this, one I haven’t imagined yet? And, does this reason really matter?

Some of the biggest “and…” extensions come right from Ignite. The Ignite concept is meant for people to share something they are passionate about. The beauty of this simplicity is, everyone has at least one passion – the idea that hums throughout your life or fires you up, the project you pursue every week, the concept that you persistently explore. The Ignite stage is the platform to share these perspectives and experiences. So, if you can follow up your excuse with:

• And, I care deeply about this
• And, I believe someone should hear this
• And, my community needs to know about this

then, Ignite is right for you – and maybe for me, too.

Diana Flores, founder of ConectandUs, felt the call to present and took the Ignite stage for the first time at 18 years old. “Honestly, for me it just felt like I needed to do it because I wanted people to know they aren’t alone in their struggles but also to start the conversation in a meaningful way.”

Although the call appears clear, Flores was not without her own internal battle, “Being vulnerable in that way was a such a difficult step to take but there was just something inside me telling me that someone out there needed to hear my story so that they could know that they weren’t alone.”

Like with most hard things, there’s a million reasons to not do it. But there is one solid reason to do it: because you can. If you have an idea and a desire, it might be your time to apply to Ignite.

After submitting your idea and being accepted into the cohort of Ignite Carroll 11 speakers, there will be many opportunities to receive coaching on your Ignite presentation and guidance from past Ignite speakers. Although you will be taking the stage solo, you will never be alone. There is an Ignite community behind the stage and in the audience to support you, as well as Ignite headquarters and your Ignite talk coaches in the wings.

Will you Ignite the night?

When you don’t know where to start, start with ChatGPT.

Many of us are beginning to realize ChatGPT as a reliable tool for starting. I regularly turn to it for the beginning stages of an email or article, an idea for journaling, or a quippy headline or title. The chatbot is fantastic at putting something on paper and helping us make immediate progress. It can concrete early ideas into something that appears polished. So, it begs the question, can it help also polish our silver and prepare our homes for relaxation? Maybe.

With the right prompts, ChatGPT can help us start cleaning. ChatGPT significantly breaks down the barrier to starting. That’s because, before being able to hit the ground and see progress made, a goal or large task can feel daunting. Having the goal to clean the downstairs is a noble one, but how long will it take? Where should you spend the most time if you have a limited amount of time to do it all in? What little details will make a place shine? Do you need to buy more cleaning products, or do you have what you need? Let’s find out, and make some progress on the cleaning plans. 

In this next edition of the “Ask your AI assistant” blog series, we are going to be talking about how you can inform and create prompts to generate cleaning tips and tactics.

Creating a cleaning plan.

Note the details: the size and type of space, time you have to clean, and any constraints

Example: 1 bedroom apartment with 1 bathroom, 1.5 hours starting now, already cleaned the toilet and there is a sink full of dishes

If you have a constraint like the note about dishes in the example, be aware that if you include it in the initial prompt, the generated response will direct significant attention to it. When prompting, begin more generally and then ask the chat bot to “edit” the response. If the details are given up front, the chat bot often loses track of the bigger picture.  

What to prompt:

I have [details], how should I start?

• This will produce an imprecise outline of what needs to be accomplished, such as gathering cleaning supplies, creating a playlist, and denoting where to spend the most attention.

I have [details], could you make me a minute-by-minute plan to tackle it all?

• The chatbot will respond with a schedule of tasks. It will give you a good idea of how much time to spend in each room and with certain tools. 

The generated responses are a place to start – both in your interaction with ChatGPT and in the tasks and ideas you are prompting. You can refine the responses with additional details, like what cleaning tasks you have already completed or might need significant attention (eg I haven’t dusted since Thanksgiving). You can also direct the chat bot to take a different approach. For example, the minute-by-minute plan included a water break. I followed up with a request for that to be removed, so I could clean continuously. 

Other detail and prompt examples you could adapt for your own use are:

• I have a 1 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment I want to keep clean. I’m willing to clean for a half hour at the end of every week day. What should I do each of these days?
• My 8 year-old asked for a chore to make an allowance. What’s a 30-minute task they could do well to help me out?
• Could you break down the list of areas to clean by we day? I want to start and finish cleaning a room all at once. 

When the produced prompt isn’t exactly what you had in mind, it can still be a great start, either for the chat bot conversation or for you to copy and paste elsewhere to start your customization of the information. For example, I got a result of some good suggestions for a daily cleaning plan, but I want to have clean sheets at the start of each week – not the end – so I moved onto another document and began shifting things around according to my preferences. It was easier to create what I ended up with having had initial copy to edit and work with from the ChatGPT conversation. 

It’s all in the details.

After mapping out your plan of attack with the chat bot, it’s time to get all the dirty details. Try asking for a list of products and tools you need to gather or, ask more details to refine how you proceed with cleaning tasks.

Prompt examples:

• This is a good plan! What cleaning tools do I need? OR Could you make me a list of cleaning products I can pick up at the grocery store?
• What’s the most efficient and clean way to clean the bathroom?
• What is a good mindset for approaching cleaning so I look forward to doing it?
• I hate vacuuming. What can I do to make it more bearable?

Chat bots are also useful for getting answers to general questions. They operate by gathering data from around the internet, so the answers it creates are products of what’s talked about and accessed on the internet. This makes it convenient for grabbing answers to common questions. As you’ve likely already seen for yourself, the ChatGPT responses are regularly caveated with the suggestion to take in other information – through your own research and experiences. So, grab a quick answer here and there, and integrate your own thinking to improve the responses’ applicability in your life. 

Some general questions you could ask to gather up information for your cleaning processes:

• How often should I clean my sheets?
• How much bacteria spreads by toilet seat?
• What’s more important in washing your hands, the soap or the water temperature?

Once you have some answers and see a path for perfecting the cleanliness of your space, put on some tunes or a podcast, and keep going! It starts here.

Everyone, everywhere seems to be talking about the amazing possibilities of artificial intelligence (AI). Many of them also suggest that the future of success in health and wealth is embedded in one’s ability to implement AI tools effectively. 

Like any tool, it’s only as useful as its users ability. We interact with AI chatbots like ChatGPT through conversational exchanges – making requests, asking questions, and following up for clarification. The results it yields are only as good as the conversations we create. With applications like this, what you put in is what you get out, and how you prompt is key to the success of the interaction. 

So, in this blog series, we are going to be talking about how you can inform and create prompts to generate information that can enhance and expand your everyday life. Let’s get started at a natural beginning: breakfast.

The Perfect Plan

Breakfast foods are my favorite, but it’s not always the meal I have the most time for. ChatGPT can help me plan ahead.

What you need: Gather the ingredients you would like to use in your breakfasts – or come in with an open mind for Open AI’s suggestions! Also consider how much time you want to spend each morning on preparing the breakfast food.

What you want: Do you want to prepare your food fresh? Are you okay with eating the same thing every day? Does it need to be transportable? Also think about what your food needs to do for you – like keep you full for a long-time or fuel you for an intense workout. This will deliver results that you will actually want to integrate into your mornings and screen out ChatGPT recommending a soufflé for your Monday morning commute. 

What to prompt: I’ll give us a few examples:

• Is there something I can make for breakfast [insert ingredient]?
• What’s a [descriptor] breakfast I could make at home?
• What’s something I can prepare for a work week of breakfasts on the go?
• I don’t want to eat [ingredients], what can I make for breakfast?

As you’ll learn through experimenting, there are many ways to start the conversation with ChatGPT – and there are many ways it might respond. You can get better answers with more specific prompts, but you can also get better answers with follow up comments and questions.

For example, when I asked: what’s something I can prepare for a work week of breakfasts, ChatGPT responded with a recipe for overnight oats. I responded: “I don’t really like eating sweet things in the morning. Is there a savory option?” ChatGPT followed up with a breakfast preparation of savory egg muffins. I wanted another option, so I asked: “Is there another savory breakfast option I can prepare ahead of time?” I received a different recipe for a vegetable frittata. 

After finding a recipe you might like, you can ask ChatGPT to create you an ingredient list for the grocery store. Specify things such as the number of servings and the days of the week the meal will be eaten to have a grocery list that keeps you full for the full week!

Working with What You’ve Got

The “we’ve got food at home” meme has pushed us to realize that we usually do indeed have food at home – just maybe not the ideas to make a meal out of it. Let ChatGPT be the casserole to your noodle and offer you some ideas of how to take what you have and turn it into something you can have for dinner. 

What you need: Select your ingredients you would like to use in the meal. Maybe these will be some produce items that you would like to use up before they go rotten. 

What you want: Think about what type of food you want, how long you’d be willing to spend on cooking the meal, and how many servings you would like to make. You can use this information to generate a result that more closely matches something you’d be willing to make and eat. 

What to prompt: 

• I have [insert ingredients]. Could you give me an idea for a [insert meal descriptors] meal using those ingredients?

OR

• I have [insert ingredients]. Could you give me [insert meal descriptors] meal ideas using those ingredients?

I prompted: “I have 1 yellow onion, a handful of spinach, and half a block of cheddar cheese. Could you give me an idea for a vegetarian and comforting meal that I can make in under a half hour?”

ChatGPT responded with a recipe for a cheesy onion and spinach frittata. When I asked using the other prompt format asking for “meal ideas,” I received five ideas, each with brief recipe descriptors.

ChatGPT does make some assumptions about household ingredients that I have – which is generally pretty useful, otherwise I’d have to write in every ingredient the could possibly be used in a recipe. The results can be narrowed by specifying ingredients that I don’t have. For example, I clarified an ingredient I didn’t have by responding with “I don’t have eggs, can I have some ideas that don’t need eggs?” ChatGPT would have screened for suggestions that included eggs and gave me results more relevant to my situation. The same could be done to alert ChatGPT to allergens, dietary restrictions, or nutrition goals. You will have to share this information each time you prompt for recipes, so consider keeping a Notes file of restrictions and needs that you can copy paste into ChatGPT for your convenience.

If you install the Instacart plug-in, you could then ask ChatGPT to add the ingredients you are missing to your Instacart.

Working with what you got can help inspire meals you haven’t tried with ingredients you already know, and it can help you cut down on food waste by helping you identify recipes that can use the ingredients you’ve got. 

What will ChatGPT help you make this week? And, might you share with the Tech Council?!

What’s the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) and why should you care?

The ACP was created through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law with the aim of lowering the cost of internet for students and families. Who wouldn’t grab that opportunity, right? Well, millions of eligible households are actually still unenrolled, but this can change by ensuring that every eligible household can get connected.

Online For All is rallying corporate, philanthropic, government, community-based, and national organizations to meet this moment. The ACP Week of Action, taking place June 14 to 22, 2023 to bring together organizations and leaders from all sectors – from ACP outreach to installment to adoption – to spread awareness of this program, help households enroll, and share the story of how ACP is helping close the digital divide.

When households lack internet connectivity, the lack access to numerous services, resources, and opportunities. Internet connection is healthcare; civic and economic engagement; entertainment, culture, and community. Online For All captures this in some impactful statistics:

Craptions are – get ready for this – captions that are crappy. They are inaccurate, fail to differentiate between speakers, are not grammatically correct, or don’t contain punctuation. In short, they are crap – which is a bummer.

Captions are essential for those who are Deaf or hard of hearing  – in the US, that’s about 15% of the population – and they are a critical tool for those learning a new language, making sense of some muddled speech, or trying to understand what’s being spoken over the sound of crunching on kettle chips.

Viewers are left to attempt to piece together meaning or stop watching all together. It’s not only annoying to us TV snackers, detrimental to those who rely on it, and harmful to the 50% of Americans watching with subtitles most of the time, it’s also supposed to be illegal.

The Federal Communications Commissions is responsible for making sure the airwaves are accessible for every body. Since 1996, they have required all TV shows have available “accurate, synchronous, complete, and properly placed” captions, meaning they match the spoken words and also display background noises accurately. Additionally, broadcasters in the Untied States also have to comply with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act. “The ADA says that all businesses who serve the public or ‘places of public accommodation,’ must be equally available to everyone,” concisely summarizes our friends at 99% Invisible, whose “Craptions” podcast episode inspired this blog post.

While online media streaming and communication services are not technically “places,” they do function as a social place. For example, when a family unit is gathered to watch a show, excluding someone from content by not offering them a vehicle for consumption, such as captions, excludes them also from that social interaction; similarly, when people cannot engage with virtual meetings, they are being removed from a place of gathering.

Softwares have been responding to this online meeting need with closed captioning services.

• Zoom Room meeting hosts can enable live transcription for a meeting or assign participants to manually type captions.
• Otter.ai takes transcription a step further, providing automated, real-time meeting notes of Zoom meetings and other audio or video files, while allowing action items, comments, and highlights to be directly applied to the produced notes.
• Similarly, MeetGeek uses AI-integrated technology to transcribe in real-time and summarize meeting notes with key insights.

You can check out more note-taking meeting tools here.

Many of these caption creating tools – in meeting rooms and in media – use speech recognition technology, leveraging Artificial Intelligence to scale the captioning process. In place a human note taker or captioner, A.I. programs can transcribe faster, cheaper, and sometimes in real-time. This outcome of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has a significant impact on the products of meetings and movies, for everyone.

ASR is also the technology at work when we ask Siri for the weather and has many other use cases. To make the magic happen, a computer receives audio input, processes it by breaking down various components of speech, and then transcribes the speech into text. An ASR system has a few key components:

• Lexical design. An ASR system is equipped with language-specific lexicon, containing phonemes and allophones of the language (these are the sounds we put to together to make words). The system includes these fundamental elements of the language – as they will be received – and written vocabulary, the text that will be produced. It makes use of the lexicon information through the acoustic modeling process.
• Acoustic model. Acoustic modeling allows the ASR system to separate audio into small time frames and provides the probability of the phonemes spoken. This makes it possible for the system to detect phrases produced by different people and accents. Deep-learning algorithms are trained on various audio recording and transcripts to better understand the relationship amongst audio frames, phonemes, and the intended words.
• Language model. To help computers understand the context of what’s being said, natural language processing (NLP) is used to help systems recognize the intent of what’s being said and use that insight to compose word sequences.

These components work together, intaking audio and making predictions, to recycle our meaning back to us.

ASR offers possibilities for computer communication that seemed unimaginable decades ago – even five years ago. Although it’s evolving rapidly to make sense of our speech, it’s far from perfect, which is why we have labels like “craptions” for some of ASR’s outputs. What will continue to aid captions and those who need them are human notetakers and transcribers – they can help to clarify meaning, emphasize importance, and cut down on the crap in captions.

The game of golf is gleaming with technology additions. From its equipments early beginnings made of wood, the golfing arsenal has come quite a long way to get today’s tee time.

Golf clubs are designed with aerodynamics in mind – and in simulated action. The art of crafting a golf club, once honed on hickory wood, has become more of a science. Creators use computer assisted design to construct, modify, and artificially test their designs. Before the 1990s, golf clubs were hand designed and crafted for external cosmetics, then casted and tested after their creation. The current approach to club design enables engineers to take a look at durability, aerodynamics, and performance, before the club even hits the casting.

The ultimate objective for using software is “to evaluate, eliminate, and improve designs prior to spending the time and money to make samples,” said Dustin Brekke, Engineering Manager, Research and Development for Celvelant to Golf RX. This era of technology in golf allows for greater understanding and experimentation with the equipment created.

Creo VP of Engineering Paul Wood considers several elements when testing a driver head or overall golf club, using the model to:

• Simulating impact on the ball
• Identify stress and strains
• Predict performance

Take a walk through a golf club designs, from market research to the 3D printing: How to Design a Golf Club from Start to Finish

The technology behind the head of driver is focused on more club head speed and less wind resistance. Inside the club, components are lighter and stronger, today’s average driver – sometimes weighing 50 grams lighter than previous generations. Golf club design has integrated materials such as graphite, fiberglass, and carbon fiber, enabling engineers and designers to more easily manipulate characteristics of golf clubs. The popularity of these materials has been spurred by constricting price and availability of materials like tungsten and titanium, but the benefits of a lighter club has likely encouraged its adoption among players – or at least caddies.

The aspects of a lighter club, combined with larger, more dynamic driver heads that allow for a more forgiving hit, result in golfers hitting at greater distances. While fantastic for the amateur, some golf industry leaders worry about how a longer hit will effect the integrity of the professional sport.

Concern for the potential negative impacts of technology in golf comes from industry experts who worry, not for the enjoyment and progression of the amateur – who is often directed to do as they like – but for the game of golf, professionally and sustainably. Gary Player, a retired professional golfer, widely considered to be one of the best golfers of all time, is outspoken on this topic.

Efforts and hundreds of millions of dollars spent on refining golf balls and redoing golf courses, in Players opinion, do not do much for the professional game of golf. As technology enables today’s golfers to hit the ball across distances once thought to be impossible, the sport has tried to respond by changing physical courses and the expectations for strategy in the game. Player advocates to cut investments and cut the ball back for the pros. He wants more for the sustainability of golf courses and preservation of the game’s traditional strategy, as well as the recruiting and retaining young players in golf programs.

The dialogue around the role of technology in the sport will continue to be an important conversation, as it is in most spaces.

Tee up your game with some recent golf game highlights:

PGA Tour Champions Highlights: 2023 Regions Tradition, Round 2 | Golf Channel

Cognizant Founders Cup | Round 4 Condensed Highlights