Those of a certain age need not apply

We have laws that are meant to prevent discrimination in hiring. But in practice, employers can find ways to avoid hiring people above a set age threshold with the help of social media and demographic data.

A story that ProPublica copublished with the New York Times declared the dark side of social media targeting for job applicants -- age discrimination. Facebook is designed to give direct access to a precisely targeted population, including those within a specified age bracket. That means ads for employment may be directed only to potential candidates below a "certain age," and that could be both ethically and legally problematic.

(Image: Pixabay)

Facebook has been used as a successful recruiting tool for companies who seek to reach recent grads. The same type of "microtargeting," as ProPublica refers to it, can be used to reach whatever parameter the advertiser specifies, and that often translates into job ads, particularly those in tech, being directed to eyeballs under 40.

Declaring that the age targeting has had a discriminatory effect on workers over age 40, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and three workers filed a class action lawsuit against T-Mobile, Amazon, and other companies that they say used the social media platform in that way.

That's not to say that Facebook has a monopoly on such practices. ProPublica tested out Google and LinkedIn and found that job ads designed to not be extended to people above 40 were allowed. It then contacted the companies and was told by Google that it had no problem with complying with the specified age range. LinkedIn told ProPublica that would make the necessary modification, as did a number of companies whose advertising strategy looked like an attempt to exclude older applicants.

Facebook defends itself against ProPublica's critique. Facebook's VP of Ads, Rob Goldman declared, "We have carefully reviewed their concerns -- and this time we disagree." Though he does not deny that job ads were intended for specified age groups, he argues that does not necessarily constitute age discrimination any more than advertising "in magazines and on TV shows targeted at younger or older people."

ProPublica doesn't buy that argument, though. It points out that the analogy fails because other forms of media may be aimed at particular age groups, but they do not restrict access to them. If a teen wants to look at AARP or if a middle-aged person picks up Seventeen, they will see the ads, too. "Online, however, people outside the targeted age groups can be excluded in ways they will never learn about," it points out.

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Targeted Advertising Triggers Age Discrimination Law Suit

2018: the year RCS overtakes SMS for marketing

As carriers shift to the new Rich Communications Services (RCS) standard, new functionalities and ways to engage consumers will emerge, opening up a whole world of marketing opportunities.  

Even last year, RCS began to emerge as a significant advance for mobile marketing.  At that point, there were about 137 million RCS users, according to David O'Byrne, RCS lead at the GSMA. He was quoted in an MSN reportreferring to that baseline, saying he anticipates users to reach 350 million this year, topping a billion next year.

On the basis of those predictions, combined with the number of people already using SMS, RCS is poised to become a key component of communication in the very near future.  That's the view of Andy Shirey, Senior Product Marketing Manager at OpenMarket. 

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RCS Set to Take Over SMS as Primary Marketing Tool in 2018

Marketing on wheels

Mobility Marketing: Toyota's e-Palette

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Advertising on cars is nothing new, but what we may be seeing in future is not limited to static car wraps but specially purposed vehicles that can change their function and their messages as needed.

At this year's CES, Toyota unveiled the e-Palette concept. The company anticipates first introducing it for use at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo in 2020. But it is already working with partners like Amazon, DiDi, Mazda, Pizza Hut and Uber to develop the concept and its commercial applications. 

In a press release, Toyota describe e-Palette as exemplifying “Toyota's visions for Automated Mobility as a Service (Autono-MaaS) applications.” The vehicle itself is a “fully-automated, next generation battery electric vehicle (BEV) designed to be scalable and customizable for a range of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) businesses.”

Read more in Mobility Marketing: Toyota's e-Palette

Amazon May be Giving a Voice to Marketing

We've seen a rapid evolution in shopping interfaces, ranging from letting our fingers do the walking on our keyboards, to letting them swipe their way to what we seek on touchscreens. The next big thng, it seems, is a touchless interface made by possible by voice-activation.

As people are coming to expect the convenience of talking to their devices, companies like Google and Amazon are accommodating that form of navigation, and exploring new ways to monetize it. 

Read more in Alexa May Give Voice to Targeted Marketing

Facial Recognition Features on Facebook Find Your Face

Facebook doesn't need tags to know that the person in the picture is you. Is that a good thing? It depends on your point of view.

Given the proliferation of faces that gets uploaded in the form of photos and videos on Facebook, a person may not even know that his/her face appears in a particular context.

photo from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Face_detection.jpg

To address that problem and to increase access for recognition among the visually impaired, at the end of 2017 Facebook rolled out three new facial recognition features:

• For the visually impaired, the feature provides a verbal description of people the AI recognizes in the photos.
• You can be notified whenever the AI recognizes your face in an uploaded image, even when it is not tagged with your name.
• Working off this link of your name and face, the system can alert you if others put your face in for their profile.

As the company explained in its announcement about it, Facebook's new features are based on the same technology the social media platform uses to bring people's attention to faces in images before they are tagged with a name.

While no one would likely object to applying AI to assisting the visually impaired, there are some questions about the effect of the alert feature, which delivers a "Photo Review" message to the user whose face it identifies. The company puts a very positive spin on it, saying, "You're in control of your image on Facebook and can make choices such as whether to tag yourself, leave yourself untagged, or reach out to the person who posted the photo if you have concerns about it."

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Facebook AI Finds Your Face, Enabling New Features

AI and shopping: the perfect match

As visual AI advances, it's becoming a useful tool for marketing fashion both online and on premises. Alibaba recently demonstrated the difference it could make with record sales for this year's Single's Day in China. This marriage of fashion and AI signals possibilities for shoppers.

The volume of sales for this year's Single's Day through Alibaba's sites amounted to $9.3 billion this year, compared to $5.9 billion last year. Technology use played a major role in that surge of sales, as nearly half the orders this year came through smartphones; over double the 2016 number.

However, another form of technology was also involved: AI. Using deep learning, Alibaba researchers developed FashionAI to offer in-store shoppers a familiar kind of screen interface that can make recommendations to customers based on its huge volumes of data.

Read more in AI and Fashion Marketing: A Perfect Match 

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2017/12/visual-ai-what-you-see-is-what-you-shop.html

From Smart Cities to the Jetsons

photo from https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5324/6917138408_144eeec7b8_b.jpg

A connected utopia in the ideal vision of a smart city and it is achievable, but given the challenges to overcome it will take some time and effort to get there, according to AT&T's Michael Zeto.

In part one of this Q&A with Telco Transformation, Michael Zeto, general manager and executive director of AT&T Smart Cities, IoT, explained what forces, aside from the technology itself, have to work together to make smart cities viable and how his company was taking a leadership position. (See AT&T's Zeto on Achieving the Smart City Vision.)

In part two, he talks about AT&T's smart cities pilot, the type of problems smart cities deployments solve and how smart cities will evolve. He also explained why, despite the significant advances of the past couple of years, the achievement of full smart city status is still farther down the road.

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AT&T's Zeto: How Smart Cities Meet The Jetsons

The shifting role of healthcare marketers

Technology is changing the game for all businesses, and marketers are also finding new ways in which to do their jobs more effectively. Now healthcare marketers are discovering the ways in which they can use technology to identify and engage their target market.

In order to identify the priorities for healthcare marketers in the upcoming year, Affect, a public relations and social media agency specializing in technology, healthcare and professional services, spoke with a panel of senior healthcare executives from organizations like, Illumina, MDxHealth, Pfizer and Phoenix Children's Hospital. Based on those discussions, it published a guide to navigating major trends in healthcare marketing in 2018 with a look at five key areas:

1. Advanced social media use to increase awareness  and loyalty
2. Highly customized content plus promotion
3. Creative media relations
4. Emerging tech campaigns
5. Business-oriented metrics

I spoke with Melissa Baratta, SVP and healthcare practice lead at Affect, about the state of healthcare marketing in today's environment. She said that because of the increasingly important role technology is playing marketing, “the role of marketers for healthcare is shifting.”

Read more in Prescriptions for Healthcare Marketing in 2018

Can Facebook Prevent Suicide? Ethical Questions Arising from AI

In today’s hyperconnected world, we are generating and collecting so much data that it is beyond human capability to sift through it all. Indeed, one application of artificial intelligence is identifying patterns and deviations that signal intent on posts. Facebook is using AI in this way to extract value from its own Big Data trove. While that may be applied to a good purpose, it also raises ethical concerns.

Where might one get insight into this issue? In my own search, I found an organization called PERVADE (Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research). With the cooperation of six universities and the funding it received this September, it is working to frame the questions and move toward the answers.

I reached out to the organization for some expert views on the ethical questions related to Facebook’s announcement that it was incorporating AI in its expanded suicide-signal detection effort. That led to a call with one of the group’s members, Matthew Bietz.

Bietz told me the people involved in PERVADE are researching the ramifications of pervasive data, which encompasses continuous data collection — not just from what we post to social media, but also from the “digital traces that we leave behind anytime we’re online,” such as when we Google or email. New connections from the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables further contribute to the growing body of “data about spaces we’re in,” he said. As this phenomenon is “relatively new,” it opens up new questions to explore with respect to “data ethics.”

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The Ethics of AI for Suicide Prevention

AI Raises Awareness of Fake News

The proliferation of fake news couldn't happen without technology. The internet allows anyone, anywhere to spread information -- whether or not it is true. But technology could also help serve as a tool that makes people more aware of which stories are not trustworthy.

(Image: Mega Pixel/Shutterstock)

True story: one of my social media connections asked for recommendations for reliable new sources and got a few outlets named, though some of us -- myself included -- said that you simply cannot rely wholly on any single source and have to check through multiple sources to be sure you get the full picture of the facts in context to find where the truth lies.

But not everyone is sophisticated enough to be aware that reports they see -- even from outlets with solid reputations -- need to be taken with a grain of salt. That's why Valentinos Tzekas founded FightHoax. Its AI-powered algorithm that empowers anyone to ascertain if an article is fake or not in just seconds without Googling the story.

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How AI Can Help You Decide What to Trust in Online News

Visual AI: What you see is what you shop with

With the responsiveness to indications of taste set by Amazon, many sites now offer browsers suggestions for additional items that resemble the style of the ite initially selected. Now with the advance of AI and object recognition, it is possible to get that kind of recommendation from an image anywhere, whether it's on a retailer site, a style article, or even something captured on your phone from real life.

Partnering with technology companies like SAP, Naver, Microsoft, Line, and Oracle, Syte.ai pulls together object recognition, AI, and machine learning to render anything visual “clickable and shoppable.” If you can get a picture of it, you can shop for it.

Syte.ai is designed to grasp all elements in a still or video image and render them shoppable without having to work thought text and tags. The advantage for those shopping is that they just have to locate or snap a picture of the item they want and let Syte find the item or something very close to it for sale online.

Read more in With Syte, AI Lets You Shop Almost Anything You See

Going Green In the UK

According to Britain’s environmental mandate traditionally powered cars and trucks will be eliminated from the roads altogether in the next couple of decades. That’s why now telematics are being applied to several models to find the most sustainable choices—both for consumer and industrial purposes.

This past July the UK took another step in its ambitious CO2 reduction targets that would keep pace with the plans set in France. UK environment secretary Michael Gove  announced that Britain would ban the sale of any cars powered by gas (petrol, as they call it,) or diesel fuel by 2040. That means that car manufacturers have to find economical designs (and the supply chains to bring those designs to reality) for cars and trucks powered by electricity in the near future.

To that end, the government has directed toward research and testing with funding of £20 million to be distributed via the Office for Low Emission Vehicles (OLEV) and Innovate UK among 20 firms that were selected to participate in the trial of low and zero emissions vehicles. The objective is not just to reduce C02 from auto emissions for the sake of improved air quality but to contribute to England’s aspirations “to be a global leader in electric vehicle technology.”

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Auto OEMs Supply Chains Pave the Road to Green

IFTF's Forecast for 2030

Key changes to result from the rise of machines in the workplace that we can anticipate over the next 13 years include:

• Cloud computing would become the norm.
• While some jobs will be handled by machines, new jobs that don't exist yet will make up the majority of positions in 2030.
• The machine and human interaction will yield greater efficiency in finding talent, managing teams, delivering products and services.
• Workers will learn what they need to do 'in-the-moment,' while on the job to keep up with the skills in demand for the rise of machines in the workplace.

The whole nature of individual careers is expected to change. "By 2030, expectations of work will reset and the landscape for organizations will be redrawn, as the process of finding work gets flipped on its head." The trend currently observed of people working in a "gig economy" is expected to grow to the extent that people would find that they are hired for tasks rather than permanent positions.

The report also envisions a future in which people would not be seeking jobs as much as the jobs will be looking for them: "Reputation engines, data visualization, and smart analytics will make individuals' skills and competencies searchable, and organizations will pursue the best talent for discrete work tasks." As organizations hire people exactly where and when they are needed, they will gain the advantage of becoming "leaner and more competitive," as well as "more agile and profitable," thanks to the reduction in "costs and overheads."

Workers would gain a kind of agility, as well as get trained "in-the-moment" for the tasks required by the organization. Maguire explained that thanks to immersive technologies like AR and VR, workers would not "have to leave the job to complete a curriculum" for retraining. Instead, they'd be able to apply "a digital layer over work stations" that could guide them in new skills and applications right in the workplace.

from 

Preparing for Our Future: The Human Partnership with Machines

Timing is Key to Effective Social Marketing

As everyone now acknowledges, social media is an essential marketing channel. With the ability to reach billions, and to identify what's important to them, social combines the benefits of targeting and scale.

Connecting the dots that makes the targeting effective is the business of data science and media technology platform 4C. I spoke with 4C's CMO, Aaron Goldman, about his company's latest State of Social report. 

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Focus on Key Moments for Social Advertising Success

Beyond Games: The Future of AI and AlphGo Zero

Intel's Bob Rogers explains the possibilities that emerge as AI progresses beyond standard machine learning. DeepMind's self-taught Go champion is just the beginning.

The next iteration of AI is the step of generating its own examples with which it builds the models to extract rules. That’s what AlphaGo Zero did in generating a million examples of different rounds of Go to improve its own play. That was achieved through reinforcement learning, which relies on “feedback — positive reinforcement for what’s right and penalties for what’s gone wrong,” Rogers said.
While that ability opens up great possibilities for systems to learn to answer the questions we want answered, the thing to remember is that the systems “are very much unitaskers,” Rogers said. AlphaGo Zero may be an unparalleled Go player, but playing Go is the only thing “the program is designed to do.” Through transfer learning, AI systems can shift to apply the same kind of deep learning to another domain. Still, they would not do so on their own; someone would have to set them up for that.

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What AlphaGo Zero Means for the Future of AI