Machine Learning and AI for You to Learn

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I am going a webinar/presentation titled "5 Steps to Play With and Learn AI" On March 23, 2021.  The live webinar is free (you can register here) and will be available soon afterward on-demand with other of my webinars.

This is reference information for that presentation.

 The 5 steps to learning:

1. Awareness / Decision / Goal
   
2. Play / Experience / Experiment
   
3. Learn
4. Apply
5. Share
   

1. Awareness: 

The fact that you are here shows that you are aware. Now, you need to decide if you want to pursue it. Then, set a goal.

Forbes "Top 10 Tech Job Skills Predicted To Grow The Fastest In 2021" names AI as a top paying job.

Coursera story: "How Stijn landed his new job after completing the IBM Applied AI Professional Certificate"

Data Science compared to Machine Learning "When Data Science Met Machine Learning" (this includes the Five Vs of data: volume, variety, veracity, value and velocity

Towards Data Science: "Data Science vs. Artificial Intelligence vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning" by Sunny Srinidhi.

UpGrad: "Data Science vs AI: Difference Between Data Science and Artificial Intelligence" by Rohit Sharma Dec 17, 2019

SimpliLearn "AI vs Data Science: Mapping Your Career Path" By Ronald Van Loon Last updated on Feb 5, 2021

Thinkful: "Data Science vs Artificial Intelligence" includes salary information and career track information

New Jersey Institute of Technology: One of the only B.S. degrees in Data Science in the Nation

2. Play and Experiment

Google

https://experiments.withgoogle.com/

https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/ai 

Includes: AI and Writing, AI and Learning, AI and Drawing, AI and Music

Google Vision AI

Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/deep-learning-group/

https://lionbridge.ai/articles/10-craziest-ai-experiments-to-try-online-today/

IBM:

https://www.ibm.org/activities/

TJ BOT: https://www.ibm.org/activities/tjbot

Virtual TJ BOT: https://www.ibm.org/activities/virtual-tjbot

Machine Learning for Kids: https://www.ibm.org/activities/machine-learning-for-kids  

Watson Conversation: https://www.ibm.org/activities/watson-conversation

https://www.research.ibm.com/artificial-intelligence/experiments/learn-and-play/

GAN

This x does not exist

https://thisxdoesnotexist.com/

https://machinelearningmastery.com/impressive-applications-of-generative-adversarial-networks/

https://poloclub.github.io/ganlab/

https://www.producthunt.com/alternatives/this-x-does-not-exist

Generative Engine: https://experiments.runwayml.com/generative_engine/ Write and AI will draw a picture.

Image to Image Demo: upload an image and AI will make a corresponding image: https://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/

3. Learn

A great introductory article as an overview: From IBM "A beginner’s guide to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cognitive computing"

AI and ML for Kids

https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/

https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/links

 https://medium.com/stempedia/ai-for-kids-teach-kids-ai-with-the-best-online-ai-course-26575ab57337

https://thestempedia.com/blog/teaching-ai-kids/

https://thestempedia.com/shop/online-courses/artificial-intelligence-for-kids/

8 AI-driven Creative Apps for You and Your Kids

https://towardsdatascience.com/8-ai-driven-creative-apps-for-you-and-your-kids-5fdd71407dc4

Google Youtube video "AI Adventures: What is Machine Learning"

This tutorial and list of ML algorithms might be helpful to learn from:

 https://data-flair.training/blogs/machine-learning-tutorial/

https://www.newtechdojo.com/list-machine-learning-algorithms/

Google Dialogflow tutorials -Try it free https://cloud.google.com/dialogflow

 Medium "The most impressive Youtube Channels for you to Learn AI, Machine Learning, and Data Science"

Python Profits:  Learn ML, Regression, Classification, DL, Big Data https://www.pythonprofits.com/

IBM Watson

FREE cognitiveclass.ai courses include docker, chatbots, cloud, ML, Python, Node-RED, blockchain, TJBot, Big Data, Hadoop, Data Science, R, Serverless computing, Iot, Data Visualization, DL, Istio, Swift, statistics, Spark, GPU, Tensorflow, SQL, Bitcoin, Scala, NoSQL, MapReduce, YARN, Graphx, Kubernetes K8s, OpenShift, Microservices, Predictive modeling, Kafka, zookeeper, Solr, and more. see https://cognitiveclass.ai/courses

Data Science courses https://community.ibm.com/community/user/datascience/coursera

Design Thinking course https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/page/courses/Practitioner

AI: Deep Learning Course at NYU CDS (Center for Data Science) accessible to all: https://nyudatascience.medium.com/yann-lecuns-deep-learning-course-at-cds-is-now-fully-online-accessible-to-all-787ddc8bf0af

Microsoft

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/deep-learning-group/

 Kaggle

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/intro-to-deep-learning

https://www.kaggle.com/learn/overview

https://jonathan-hui.medium.com/gan-some-cool-applications-of-gans-4c9ecca35900

Learn Python 

Python is considered by many to be the most popular language for AI.

For beginners (and children too), you can learn a bit about Python by using Turtle graphics. This was introduced to me by our local library which sponsored an Hour of Code and provided some of the following links:

https://hourofpython.com/  - Click on the "start learning" button for the free lesson of "Python with Turtles" - This might be fun to do with your friends or family too.

Python Turtle sandbox and documentation on how to use turtle and the beginner's guide to python turtle

If you want to learn python, here are some courses and tutorials

Beginners guide: https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers

https://www.learnpython.org/ 

Python tutorial https://docs.python.org/3.7/tutorial/

"Automate the Boring Stuff" - Python books

 

Learn DL 

https://towardsdatascience.com/probably-the-best-resource-to-learn-deep-learning-in-2020-66d13a8ab1f1

Or you can monitor a class on Coursera or edx.

AI Newsletter: https://thesequence.substack.com/ or https://thesequence.substack.com/p

Ivy League University Online Classes

https://qz.com/1821327/450-free-ivy-league-university-courses-you-can-take-online/

Georgia Tech Course on Machine Learning (need to create a free account):

https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud262AI Machine Learning Data Sets:

Data for AI:

Datacatalogs.org

Data.un.org

www.data.gov

europeandataportal.eu/en

Kaggle.com/datasets

Datasetsearch.research.google.com

Community Data License Agreement:

Cdla.io

AWS Data Exchange marketplace

Data Access Exchange: DAX: https://developer.ibm.com/exchanges/data/
Has data notebooks

Model Exchanges
Model zoos:  Pytorch, TensorFlow, Keras, ONYX

MAX – Model Asset Exchange 

https://developer.ibm.com/exchanges/models

When I presented the webinar, there were questions about Project Management and AI. I referred people to my previous webinar on "Project Management and Artificial Intelligence" and my blog post on "Project Management and Artificial Intelligence"

4. Use / Apply

Alexa Skills:  

Alexa has "Skill Blueprints" that can be set up fairly easily. For example, here is the Q&A skill blueprint you can use to have Alexa answer your questions with answers you want. More information in this article by CNBC "How to get Alexa to answer certain questions exactly how you want it to" Updated Thu, Apr 19 2018 by Todd Haselton @robotodd

Learn to program a skill (like an app) for Alexa: "What is the Alexa Skills Kit?"

Compete for good with AI: Kaggle Competitions include some benevolent uses of AI

"How to build a chatbot for your school in less than an hour" by Brooke Gleason on 08 APR 2020

AI Gaming - Competitions at programming bots to win games with bitcoin as the prize https://www.aigaming.com/

 5. Share / Use it for Good / For Benefit

AI for Good organization

Microsoft AI for Good

Google AI for Social Good

DataRobot - AI for Good - For Non-profits - Cohort program open until April 30, 2021 

 https://www.citizenai.nz/

 

DIY Wood Pickup Truck Bank

 

Photo by Henry Will

Someone's birthday was coming up and they wanted a bank. I asked what types of things they like. The answer was dinosaurs, trucks and helicopters. I had an idea! I could make a wood bank that is in the shape of his dad's pickup truck!

So, I asked for a photo and received this:

I had some wood wheels that I wanted to use. I found from my experience with past projects (see other posts here in my blog) that wood wheels are a bit difficult to make, so I just buy them at the craft store.  

Looking at the picture of the pickup, I measured out the proportions of the real truck with respect to the wheels in the photo. I made a stencil out of paper using the same proportions to the wheels that matched the size of the wood wheels I had. I then traced from the paper stencil onto cardboard and cut it out. 

I saw a wood pickup truck online that was made with layers of wood and decided to follow that method so the middle section could hold coins.

I had a nice piece of oak to use to cut out the left and right sides of the truck. I decided to use some scrap 2 X 4 for the middle section.

I had to create a shape for the 2 X 4 to go in the middle of the truck that would allow coins to be put in the top and be stored toward the back. This piece also had to have a spot to drill holes for the axels for the wheels. Here (below) you can see the two shapes.

Part of the way through cutting out the two sides, I ran into an issue with my jig saw. It gave out. As you can see in the picture below, I wasn't quite done. Isn't amazing that even without planning, the two sides fit together like a puzzle so I wasted very little wood? Thank God!

Our nice neighbor, who makes wonderful wooden furniture, let me borrow his amazing scroll saw to finish the cutting of the 2 sides. 

The scroll saw didn't seem to be willing to cut through a 2 X 4 so I used a jig saw. My good neighbor also loaned me his jig saw (Thank you, you know who you are). I cut the 2 X 4 to the shape. The space between the two wheels was very difficult. There was nothing to sit the jig saw on. So, I cut grooves and then broke them out with a screwdriver. You can see that a file was also helpful and I used my protective eye wear even though I also wear glasses (my grandfather was a carpenter and had a mishap with his eye, so I'm careful).

I used some brown finishing nails to nail it together. Because this is hard wood, I had to drill holes first for the nails so I didn't split the wood. Not shown in this picture was the challenge I had on the other side. A finishing nail broke and split the wood. I had to glue it back together and put in a nail nearby.

I carefully cut a piece of oak to fit exactly where the tailgate was and carefully measured holes for a "hinge". I made a little handle and had to bevel the edges of the tailgate so it fit tight when closed, but allowed space to tilt open. I guess there has to be a way to get the coins out, right?  The file and Dremel tool were very helpful tools for this work.

I was looking into acrylic to cover the windshield, back window, and bed. But, after looking into the tools I would need to drill holes and the issues I've had in the past drilling holes in acrylic, I decided to use my wife's good idea. She suggested using the plastic that held some apple cider donuts we bought at a local farm stand!  It worked very well and doesn't scratch as easy as acrylic!  I just bent it to shape, drilled some holes through it and into the wood so the oak didn't split, and used a screw with a washer. 

All in all, I think it came out well.  Solo Deo Gloria! 

I prayed and God helped me with this. I kept reminding God that Jesus was a carpenter and I needed his help.

 

Please like and comment with your thoughts and stories about DIY projects!

7 Proven Ways to Manage Your Time and Tasks

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I'm giving a free webinar on 2021-02-10 titled "7 Proven Ways to Manage  Your Time and Tasks."

In this post I will provide some information related to the subject. Anyone attending the webinar can find more detail here in this post. If you want to attend, register at this link.

The 7 Proven Techniques are:

1. The Pomodoro technique ® – focus and eliminate distractions

2. GTD: getting things done – take big tasks (projects) and break down into pieces. Just start on one piece.
3. Inbox 0 – Manage your email inbox - look at each incoming task once
4. Personal kanban – visualize work, limit work in progress
5. Saying "No"
6. Eisenhower's prioritization technique
7. Margin – Don’t over-commit
8. Bonus: bullet journaling

 You'll find links to more information below:

Here is a very recent article about Time Management:

Fast Company:  02-08-21 SECRETS OF THE MOST PRODUCTIVE PEOPLE
3 time management myths messing with your productivity

 1. Pomodoro Technique ® (Registered Trademark)

• The original Website (gives a good overview and has info about books on the topic) : https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique
• The Free web app:  https://pomodoro.francescocirillo.com/
• Trello blog: https://blog.trello.com/how-to-pomodoro-your-way-to-productivity
• Forbes "The Pomodoro Technique Explained"
  

2. GTD: getting things done – take big tasks (projects) and break down into pieces. Just start on one piece.

• The book is written by David Allen and available in many places
  
•  Explained at the GTD website: https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/
• Wikipedia GTD : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done
•  New Yorker article "The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done" (this gives a great history of GTD) https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-rise-and-fall-of-getting-things-done
  

3. Inbox 0 – Manage your email inbox - look at each incoming task once

• 43 Folders: Inbox Zero
  
• The Muse "Your Step-by-Step Guide to Reaching Inbox Zero (Even if You Currently Have 1,000+ Unread Emails)"
  
• Whatis Overview and link to Google Talk: https://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/inbox-zero
• Lifehack: "What Everyone Is Wrong About Achieving Inbox Zero" 
• FastCompany "The 7-Step Guide To Achieving Inbox Zero—And Staying There—In 2018" and  "The Smart Way to Tame your email in 2021: Embrace a little chaos"
• Medium: "Why Inbox Zero is Ruining Our Lives (Better Email Habits That Will Help You Save Time And Money)"
  
• Read your email only certain times of the day, don't let email determine your priorities
• Think about where your tasks come from. Read "Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?" in Harvard Business Review (one of their top read articles over the years)
  

 4. Personal kanban – principles: visualize work, limit work in progress

• Kanban entry in Wikipedia
• A good tool for keeping your own kanban is trello.com 
  
• Personal Kanban website
• YouTube Video "Introduction to Personal Kanban" By Jim Benson (6 minutes, 36 seconds)
• Modus Institute : Blog
  
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Team Kanban

5. Eisenhower's prioritization technique

•  Monday Project "5 old-school strategies for prioritizing urgent tasks you can try right now" (includes other productivity ideas too)
• Medium "The Eisenhower Method For Taking Action (How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks)"  (includes some history of the origin)
• You can also see this used in the book "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®" by Stephen R. Covey - it is in Habit 3. See also the Wikipedia entry for this book

6. Saying "No"

• Henry Cloud Book "Boundaries: When to Say Yes; How to Say No to Take Control of Your Life"
  
• Michael Hyatt "5 Reasons You Need to Get Better at Saying No"
  
• Inc. "7 Tips for Saying No Effectively"
• Forbes "Three Reasons You Need To Say 'No' More Often"
• From the Agile Manifesto Principles "Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential."
  
• CIO "The art of maximizing work not done"
  

 

7. Margin – Don’t over-commit

• Book "Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial, and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives" by Richard Swenson, M.D.
• Sequel book "The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live Within Your Limits"

8. Bonus: Bullet Journaling (aka BuJo)

• BulletJournal website
• Watch the free tutorial (4 minutes and 11 seconds)
• TED talk "How to declutter your mind -- keep a journal | Ryder Carroll | TEDxYale"
  
• Wikipedia entry
  
• New Yorker article "Can Bullet Journaling Save You?"  
• Good Housekeeping:https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/a25940356/what-is-a-bullet-journal/

My past two blog posts on this subject are also helpful:

https://henrywill4.blogspot.com/2020/02/productivity-time-and-task-management-5.html

https://henrywill4.blogspot.com/2018/10/is-it-time-management-or-task-management.html

I am available to do webinars and presentations on a wide range of topics.
Subscribe to emails of future presentations by sending an email to:
speaker-henrywill+subscribe @ groups.io
Or visit my speaking list page to see the other subjects I've spoke on and will be speaking on soon!

  Please comment here with your ideas about being more productive!

Online Courses, MOOCs, and many for FREE

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I mentioned to someone recently how I was taking several online courses and many are free.
She asked if I would share a list, so here they are:

1. Udemy offers courses on all types of subjects and many are free. I've enrolled in courses here by Amazon about the Amazon Web Services (AWS cloud). You can find discounts on courses here every now and then since they tend to have sales now and then.  I recently saw a PMI-ACP class on sale for $9.99 that offered 21 hours of PMI approved education. That was an offer too good for me to refuse!
 

2. Coursera - has courses and some are credited. I've recently taken 9 courses on Coursera that were created by IBM. I learned about AI, Machine Learning, Python, Visualization, and Data Science and received a Professional Certificate in Data Science.
 

3. Edx - has many courses. Some are offered by Harvard and other schools (MIT, BU, Berkley, etc.). You can audit some courses or pay extra for a certificate when you complete the course (if you have a passing grade). I took courses from HarvardX in Data Science and the R language.  They did have a 20% off sale around April 2019. I am also auditing a course from MIT in Machine Learning.

These online courses are sometimes referred to as MOOCs : Massive Open Online Course

Are there any online courses you can recommend?

Glass Fusing Project

 

Photo by Henry Will using Google Photo Scan app

The picture above is before being fused.

This picture is after being fused...

Photo by Henry Will

 This was a gift from one of our lovely daughters. She got it locally in Morristown NJ. It's a take home kit (and you can also work on projects at their shop).

They have a setup to drop things off and pick them up contact-less (even after hours), but I wanted to see the place. So, I went during business hours. They are very careful and cautious with the pandemic. It is a big place with lots of room for people to spread out. When I went, there were 3 family groups there that were spaced far apart, with masks, socially distanced, and working on various projects. 

There is loads of glass in all sizes, shapes, and colors. You can make all types of things: suncatchers, dishes, spoon rests, jewelry,etc. It looks like a very nice place to spend some time together and make something. Here's the website: https://umakeglass.com/

This was a kit to take home and work on. I waited until after Christmas day to do it. You can work on the kit at home and drop it off for fusing and then they contact you when you can pick it up (contact-less). It's a good system. Or, you can go to their studio and work on a project there if you want.

A "tip of the hat" to the Google PhotoScan app for allowing me to get a clear, no glare picture of the glass. I've used this app for many other pictures of pictures and find it performs very well. Highly recommended!

(note: my next project is a wooden pickup truck bank - I start on that today!)

I saw a very nice glass spoon rest at the shop that had a very nice flower design. Maybe that will be a future gift for someone!

What do you think about this fused glass project? What would you make out of glass?

DIY Toy Wood Camera

I was looking for a gift to make for a 1 year birthday and suggested a few things to the parents. They liked the idea of a Wood Toy Camera. I found a few posts on the internet and liked one the best. So, I somewhat fasioned it after that one.

and

and then

and then

You'll see the finished project at the top. A fun toy for a child.

DIY Wood Push Toy Duck

This is a push toy duck that was fashioned after a similar item that was purchased many years ago.
The pre-schoolers and the toddlers liked it, so I decided to make a similar one for another toddler. I used a 2" X 6" board for the body and filed the edges to smooth it. The wheels are wood too. Cut them out, drill a hole in the center (or for more fun, a little off center to help with the "waddle"). Cut a slot in each wheel and glue a "foot" in there.  I couldn't find any rubber (I didn't have any old inner tubes laying around from a bicycle), so I used a cut out piece from a black plastic binder from the local dollar store (you can see the binder in the phone below, I had to cut out a piece to fix the old duck from years ago in the picture below).

This is the one we purchased many years ago.When it's pushed, the wheels turn and there were pieces of rubber that would flap around and slap on the ground: alternating with the right, then the left. The duck waddles as it's pushed.  The rubber "feet" were lost years ago, I just cut a piece out of that plastic binder to replace them. Good as new! 

Online Games for Families and Friends

StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay

We recently had fun playing a virtual escape room with family and friends. We thought it would be fun to play some games online too!

I looked for some websites and found lots of games that can be played online.

1. I like this playingcards.io site that lets you play games with a group of people. It was mentioned by a few of the following sites. It has "built in games" (like checkers, go fish, hearts, crazy-eights, backgammon, cribbage, and it also allows you to play with decks of cards, spinners and such to make your own card game (like golf (which we play by these rules, but the joker is -2 points), Kings in the corner, war,  or any card game)

2. We've played the boardgame called Code Names. It's a "spy" theme, but basically a game of trying to get your team to picks from a bunch of words which are the ones that are similar to a one-word hint you give. It's available online as CodeNames.game.

3. Our family also introduced us to "house party" - it's an app. It has built in games (like finding words, something like pictionary, and the Uno card game too).

4. Adding this one in March 2021: https://kahoot.com/ - has some trivia games you can play. Share the main screen with players over meetup or zoom or some screen sharing capable video meeting, then each person connects with the code and inputs their answers.

5. Adding this one in January 2024

Scattergories:

This game can be shared using an online video conference (like google meet or zoom or Skype) and letting people take turns trying to find words for each category that start with a specific letter. Or, for collaborative play, everyone together can try to come up with words for the given categories beginning with the given letter.

https://swellgarfo.com/scattergories/

6. Online Atari games

https://www.aarp.org/lp/games-atari/

7. Bible puzzles: word search maker, word searches, mazes, coloring sheets worksheets, crafts, and more

https://biblepuzzles.com/

8. Colorasmile :find a coloring sheet, print it, mail it and it will go to cheer someone

https://colorasmile.org/

Here's some lists of other games I found:

• Oprah Magazine: 21 Best Online Games to Play With Friends While Social Distancing
• Mentions Golf Battle (IOS and Android) and playingcards.io
  
• Good Housekeeping: 11 Fun Games to Play on Zoom That Will Amp up Your Next Virtual Party
  
• 10 Best Virtual Family Game Night Apps
• Mentions Mario Kart

 Have you played any games online with family and friends?  If so, please comment! We'd all like to hear of more games!

  

 

 

Christmas Specials For the Third Day of Christmas

 

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

 It's the Third day of the 12 days of Christmas. 

Here are some Christmas Specials that I found to be very good.

This message was very encouraging
Beautifully Broken
https://youtu.be/3TXSlzgmn5E

Hillsong Spectacular https://youtu.be/GpBNejEHKp8

St. Olaf's from Norway (singing is in English) https://youtu.be/5Io_7-jVfYU

New York staff Band (Salvation Army) https://youtu.be/EdqS-Db76e0

International staff band Salvation army from London https://youtu.be/wNLpgWdK4is

Moody church Chicago https://youtu.be/IGvKXr3hIjA

Christ Church Christmas (Rockaway township New Jersey) https://youtu.be/Dth-NEKvesI

For King and country Christmas from living room https://youtu.be/U4ovLkw5Z9Q

West point Band Christmas https://youtu.be/swAB7eCs9EE

Messiah from Sydney opera house https://youtu.be/bR0cEOTpYSk

Which specials do you suggest?

2020 Christmas Specials

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay

 

 

 I put this list of 2020 Christmas Specials together for family, so I thought I would share it with everyone.

I'll add items as I find them. If you have any to add, let me know or add a comment here.

Before I give dates, here are a few links: 

NBC,

ABC;

Freeform:

Friday November 27

Grinch cartoon 8pm ET NBC

Minions 8:30pm ET NBC

Charlie Brown Thanksgiving PBS

Monday November 30

Disney Sing along 8pm ABC

Wednesday dec 2

New York tree lighting NBC 

December 9

Live grinch ABC

December 13

The Chosen Christmas Special 8PM ET

December 16,17, 23,24,25

Christchurchusa.org 

December 20 (Sunday)

2pm eastern: West Point "Home for the Holidays" show on Facebook and YouTube.

December 25

Disney Christmas Celebration

January 1

Rose Bowl Parade

Do you know of others?

The Power of Soft Skills

Illustration Copyright 2020 Glenn Witmore

I'm doing a FREE webinar on "The Power Of Soft Skills" on Nov. 17, 2020. 

You can register here.

This blogpost provides some reference information for the presentation.

I'll add more items here as they become available. 

Please do comment with your thoughts!

There are lots of movies about superheroes, so I want you to know that…
You can be a superpower through the use of the power of soft skills!

My friend, Glenn Witmore, created this graphic for my presentation. He’s a professional comic book artist who has worked on major superhero licenses and owns captainclockwork.com where you can find more about him and his work.
As you can tell, Glenn didn’t use my likeness to create the character here in the foreground LOL 

Wikipedia provides a top10 list of softskills.
Maybe it will help to talk about hard skills. Hard Skills are those we learn from classes or get certified in, like Project Management, AI, Python, Scrum Master, SAFe Agilist or even using a tool such as spreadsheets.

What is a common thread in soft skills? People! Dealing with people! Sometimes they are called “People Skills”.
How do they vary from “Hard Skills”?

Active listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_listening

Four Stages of Competence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

By asking questions we produce some stress which can motivate people to make improvements.

Yerkes-Dodson Law – becoming stressed to the point of distress

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law

Stress can turn into distress when it becomes overwhelming and productivity will decrease. 

Have you ever had this happen?

Freedom Ladder: https://gohighbrow.com/the-freedom-ladder/

Maslow's Hierarchy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs  

Altruism – caring for the needs of another while sacrificing your own needs.

John Kotter’s books “Leading Change” “The Heart of Change” and his website

“7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Franklin Covey 

Design Thinking – IBM information and course (digital badge option)
https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/

Why soft Skills are so difficult to teach
https://www.nationalsoftskills.org/why-soft-skills-are-so-difficult-to-teach/

“Emotional Intelligence: no soft skill”
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/professional-development/blog/emotional-intelligence-no-soft-skill

Books:
Never Eat Alone – Keith Ferrazzi
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie

 Please add your comments!

 

 

How We Helped Each Other Today

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Emmaus Work Connectors had our monthly meeting this evening.

The group is about helping each other in our work journey.

We started out with the following encouraging words and a brief prayer:

Isaiah 41:10. “Do not fear, for I am with you; do not anxiously look about you, for I am your God. ...
Psalm 37:23-25. “The steps of a man are established by the Lord, and He delights in his way.

We then started with the question:

• In one minute, explain what would be the best outcome of this time together tonight?

Everyone took a turn. Some people were there to help others. Some had things they were working on that they needed help with. Here are a few highlights of the meeting.

1. We talked about how to get motivation to get to our goals. This article was shared: "How To Master Your Goals With The Ulysses Pact" on the trello blog.

Someone mentioned that this was along the lines of a book they just picked up titled "indistractable" by Nir Eyal

2. One person was working on an introduction of themselves to a class they are taking.
We worked together on ideas of how to write a good introduction. 

It was mentioned that telling a story makes it more memorable. One person remembered that tomorrow the Vyond team is offering a "tour" online (for free) that goes for several weeks on Wednesdays called the "Virtual Story Telling Tour".

We also discussed how we can use mind-mapping for brainstorming in writing ( which a few people in our group are doing ) or presenting (which I do a lot of)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_concept-_and_mind-mapping_software

We talked about creating an effective headline - for LinkedIn and for our introduction:

https://cultivatedculture.com/linkedin-headline/

3. It was mentioned that in a future monthly meeting (or in one of the weekly small group meetings) we could work together on our LinkedIn headlines as a task to help each other with.

 Conclusion:

These meetings are glitzy, they're not all that structured, but they are helpful to the people who participate by either sharing their needs or helping others. And, just like one of our main goals states, by helping each other, we create strong net-working bonds.  We use the team "Net-working" because we network by working together on each other's work-journey goals.

Maybe you'll consider joining us at some point. 

Please comment here about what you have found to be effective in your work-journey or in helping others.

Sign up and find details here.

Choir Festival Great Moments from Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Assosication ...

Here's one of the things I've been working on during this pandemic: Volunteer work for Premier / Watch Parties for the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association. Please tune in and invite others.

Website is oceangrove.org

Project Management and Artificial Intelligence

I am posting this as a supplement to several talks I'm giving on "Project Management and Artificial Intelligence"

I suggest you look at this previous blog post where I provided lots of information on AI and Project Management.


About AI:

• Free from IBM
• Free "The AI Ladder" book (Compliments of IBM - no email needed)  
• IBM Think Digital Conference (May 2020)- register for free on-demand content (including AI and other topics)
• AI Information and learning (by role)
• Badges
• AI for Kids
• IBM Learning community
• Gartner Hype Curve for Artificial Intelligence 2019 - this provides a summary of types of AI too (Forbes Article about it)
• Gartner: Artificial Sentience vs Artificial Intelligence
•  A glossary of basic artificial intelligence terms and concepts

Examples of AI:

• Chatbots
• Virtual Assistants: Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, Cortana
• RPA
• Robots (e.g. Boston Dynamics and DARPA Robotics Challenge) and Cobots
• Forbes Article: "The 4 Ds Of Robotization: Dull, Dirty, Dangerous And Dear" by Bernard Marr
• Recommendation Engines: Amazon, Netflix, etc.
• Gaming (Go, Chess, Jeopardy, video games)
• Speech recognition and speech synthesis
• NLP – analyzing documents/ Knowledge Base
• Autonomous vehicles and semi-autonomous
• Expert systems / Decision support systems
• Medical diagnosis (oncology, radiology)
• Visual recognition (including Facial recognition)
• Spam filtering
• Fraud detection
• Digital Workers - e.g. ipsoft
• Emerj.com : Everyday Examples of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Fields of AI:

•  Medium: Three Major Fields of Artificial Intelligence and Their Industrial Applications

Subfields of AI:

• Medium Artificial Intelligence and It’s Sub-Fields
• Artificial Intelligence subfields and their topics

Types of AI

•  Forbes (June 2019) : 7 Types Of Artificial Intelligence
•  AI Classification
• Classification based on likeness to Human Mind
• Reactive machines – no memory. e,g, big blue that mastered chess
• Limited memory - chatbots, self-driving cars, VAs
• Theory of Mind -  understands needs, emotions, beliefs
• Self-Aware - human-like intelligence and self-awareness
• Technical Classification
• Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) aka Weak AI or Narrow AI: this is AI specialized in it's application area (e.g. what is available now)
• Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) aka Stong AI: self-learning in general areas like a human - "Technical Singularity"
• Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) – more than human
• Medium:  Types of Machine Learning Algorithms You Should Know
• Supervised Learning - Human does the teaching (labeled training)
• Unsupervised learning - learns on it's own to mine data for rules, patterns and groupings
• semi-supervised learning - lies between the two above: Human provides some training and the system extrapolates from there.
• reinforcement learning - Human provides a "reinforcement signal" (a "goal") and the AI "agent" interacts with the environment to see which experiences optimize the reinforcement. This is used for Gaming (Go, Chess), and autonomous vehicles.
• KDnuggets: AI Knowledge Map: How To Classify AI Technologies

About CAPTCHA

• Google: What is reCAPTCHA?
• Google: Are you a robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” 
• Verge: Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult
• Techradar: Captcha if you can: how you’ve been training AI for years without realising it
• Medium:  You Are Helping Google AI Image Recognition

Testing AI:

• Hold-Out (aka "Blind data") test set Vs. Cross-Validation - Medium
• K-Fold Cross Validation - Wikipedia

Project Management and AI

• projectmanagement.com Webinar 2020-08-11 titled "The Role of Project Practitioners in the World of Artificial Intelligence (AI)" (Projectmanagement.com webinars are included in a PMI.org membership) 
• "Artificial Intelligence, Disruptive Technology and the Future of Project Management" Dec 2019 Villanova University
• This refers to the report that The Project Management Institute (PMI) has made available. It is a 4-page report on Project Management and AI. They provide results of a survey of 551 Project Managers. The paper is titled "AI Innovators: Cracking the Code on Project Performance" (2019).  (June)
• "How can project managers leverage AI?" 2019-October, Strongbytes - This article also refers to the PMI report above and and the Gartner report below. It also gives a few examples of AI being used for Project Management
  
• Gartner Says 80 Percent of Today’s Project Management Tasks Will Be Eliminated by 2030 as Artificial Intelligence Takes Over  (March 2019)
• This article mentions another Jan 2019 article by Gartner titled: "Gartner Predicts 70 Percent of Organizations Will Integrate AI to Assist Employees’ Productivity by 2021"
• Related to this topic is this article: "How AI Is Creating Jobs Not Killing Them For Low-Skilled Workers?" on Medium claims that 133 Million new roles will be created by AI as it replaces 75 Million by 2020 (a net gain of 58 Million jobs)
• Captera:  I, Project Manager: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace
• 5 Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Project Management
• PM Times:  Artificial intelligence in project management: silly or sensible? 
• How Can Project Managers Leverage AI?
• Infoworks: Project Managers Can Leverage the Power of Artificial Intelligence 
•  Artificial Intelligence: How It Will Impact Project Managers - video and outline
• TechRepublic : 6 AI technologies changing project management

Will AI take away my PM job?

• "What If Project Managers Get Replaced By Bots And AI? " 2018-November, eLearning Industry
  
• "Should Creatives Fear Losing Their Jobs to Artificial Intelligence?" 2018-Feb, Villanova University
  

I suggest you look at this previous blog post where I provided lots of information on AI and Project Management. 

What comments or additions do you have on this information?

What you Can Learn from the Panel on Artificial Intelligence and Project Management

What you Can Learn from the Panel on Artificial Intelligence and Project Management

In February 2020, I was honored to be on the AI Panel discussion at the New Jersey Chapter of Project Management International. George Pace was the moderator and serving on the panel with me was Sandipan Gagopadhyay, David Dalessandro, and Mike Moran. I was selected due to my work managing AI projects in three different companies.

The discussion started out about AI in general and then focused on how Project Management relates to AI. Here are a few of the main points made by the discussion. Thanks to the panelists who have provided additional input below.


Discussion of Four Example Articles on AI The following articles were provided to the chapter members in advance of the meeting. While the panel didn't delve into any particular one in a lot of detail, they were discussed in general. We will explore some of the general intents of these articles in more detail below.

• Artificial intelligence could potentially have negative impact on Tennessee job sector
• How artificial intelligence provided early warnings of the Wuhan virus
• Why Apple And Microsoft Are Moving AI To The Edge
• World's First 'Living Machine' Created Using Frog Cells and Artificial Intelligence
• How PMs Can Be Ready for Robotic Process Automation

Will It Take Away Jobs?
(Mike Moran provided the following section of this article)
In a sense, AI is a personality test. Some predict that we will have much more leisure time. Others claim that we will all be unemployed. Those two statements are actually the same prediction. It just depends on whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.

What's historically true is that we humans have a difficult time predicting the effects of technology. We are worried about how all the things we are doing now might go away, but we fail to imagine all the new things that will need to be done. In 1790, 90% of the US workforce were farmers. In 1990, it was under 3%. Unemployment wasn't 87%. And today we produce oodles more food than we did in 1790. And the 1990 workforce included droves of women not in the 1790 workforce. What really happened is that technology has made it possible for fewer people to do the things that many people were once needed for, while the rest found other ways to be useful. Technology tends to do that, even if we think every new technology could be the apocalypse. Maybe someday that will be true, but it's probably not that way to bet.

Some people will certainly lose their jobs someday because AI automates away their jobs. But for most people, AI will automate tasks that they currently perform, not their entire job. The people who will lose their jobs to AI are the people who refuse to use AI. They will lose their jobs to those that do.

Take self-driving cars as an example. Despite the hype, there are many thorny issues that need to be resolved for self-driving cars to be more than just a novelty--insurance coverage, changes to roadways, and how parking is configured are just a few. But that's not the real story of AI when it comes to driving. The real story is that AI makes humans better drivers. Many new cars can parallel park themselves. They can tell you when another car is in your blind spot. Or when you are weaving out of your lane. They can apply the brakes in an emergency faster than you can.

Most AI is like that. It doesn't take away your job. It makes you better at your job.

(Thanks Mike for that insight! I agree with that perspective. AI is a work augmentation tool. If AI ever develops to the point of taking away Project Management jobs, I think we have a lot more to be concerned about than our jobs! For more information on this subject, I am providing this article titled "How AI Is Creating Jobs Not Killing Them For Low-Skilled Workers?" on Medium.  Mike's writing reminds me of the phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy.” Some people believe AI will help them in their work and so they embrace it, while others believe it will take their job away, so they ignore it. It's like the quote attributed to Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t – you’re right!”)

AI needs data and AI is not Magic Pixie dust

• Some people have the misconception that you can "sprinkle a bit of AI" on something and it automatically becomes magical -it's not that easy and not that magical
• The AI used in Chatbots, Facial Recognition and image recognition is called "Supervised learning".  For example, if we were training AI to recognize photos of dogs Vs. Cats, it would need a human to manually "label" lots of pictures as dogs and cats. Then the AI uses that information to identify new pictures as either dogs or cats. 
• I mentioned something during the panel discussion that astonished many in the audience. I told the audience that they are helping train AI! Here's how: you've probably seen reCaptcha (CAPTCHA stands for  Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). It asks you to prove you are not a robot by reading and typing some obfuscated letters or to identify things (like street signs) in photos. When you reply, you are actually training AI! Apparently not many are aware that they are helping AI to identify words in old books and helping to train Google's AI visual recognition.
• Yes, supervised learning AI needs lots of data
• Note: there is another type of AI called "Reinforcement Learning" where AI does not need lots of data in the same way as Supervised Learning. In layman's terms, it is given a reward/goal that has a value and then it keeps attempting to improve itself to attain that reward. This video shows an example of Google Deepmind teaching how to run and jump. You can find more to "play" with AI on Google's page of experiments.
• Here is a good article explaining some of the main terms of AI and another one explaining AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. 

AI Bias and Interpretability

• There is a whole research area of AI to determine how it arrives at its decisions. It's called Interpretability or Explainable AI (XAI). Because bias has been discovered in AI, there is a lot of research going into XAI with many methods being used. This article gives a good overview of AI and Interpretability with good examples.
• Henry mentioned during the panel discussion that he worked on a large scale enterprise AI project where two data centers were trained with the same data but arrived at different answers. The audience audibly expressed their surprise at this.
• Mike Moran asked why should this surprise us; people sometimes express different opinions from each other, so why not AI?

Do I need to Learn about AI?
The panel had various views on this. In my opinion, it will depend on the types of projects you want to manage.

• If you are working on a project that is going to implement AI, then, of course, you would need to understand the tasks involved. As a PM, you can work with your project team to take the objective and decompose it as a WBS.
• If you want to make yourself marketable, probably many software projects will use AI in the near future, so that's another reason to learn more about AI.
• For all PMs, your knowledge of AI will need to be about how it can be applied to the work that you do. AI has a high ROI where lots of repetitive work is being done. For project managers, you can easily list the tasks you do that are repetitive. My experience has been that I have had repetitive tasks in communications (reports and notifications), scheduling, risk, and issue management.

A few sentences on AI and Project Management

(This section was contributed by Sandipan Gagopadhyay)

1. AI such as machine learning is good at synthesizing patterns from vast amounts of data. If an organization is using a project management solution (such as MS Project Server) over a few years consistently, then information can be harvested to derive a number of insights:

• Supervised Learning examples - Prediction of accuracy in time and cost estimation in projects
• Prediction of issues and their impact based on challenges and risks based on NLP and ML-based review of unstructured RAID logs
• Unsupervised Learning examples - Classification of high variability when projects involve specific clusters of technology, teams, locations that in turn can shed light on underlying policy or process issues
• Here's a Forbes article titled "AI in Project Management" https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/07/30/ai-in-project-management/#74c18a31b4a0

2. AI/ML projects have unique requirements for Project Managers in that the techniques used require modifications to the SDLC, whether in waterfall or Agile

• AI/ML projects involve precursors including the collection and determination of quality of data that will drive machine learning
• Key steps to identifying the feasibility of a machine learning solution such as feature identification and selection require an iterative with a fundamentally undetermined outcome and timeframe - This requires prototyping early on before any commitments are made to business or in the delivery of value, financial or otherwise
• The quality assurance and validation functions require an engaged and a deeper supervisory role in the overall approach to AI rather than testing results at the end
• Please see FDA's proposed regulatory framework for AI/ML in Medical Devices - https://www.fda.gov/media/122535/download
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Software as a Medical Device - https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/software-medical-device-samd/artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-software-medical-device
  

(Sandipan, thanks for that helpful input!)

The Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) 

There was some discussion among the panelists about how the SDLC is different for AI projects. My experience has been mostly with supervised learning AI. In supervised learning, humans have to tag (or label) lots of data in order to provide training for the AI.
So, I've found that for chatbots (and lots of AI projects), there needs to be a lot of work both in the beginning and after go-live. In the beginning, people need to be involved to identify and analyze data to train the AI. I've also found that many business people believe that AI learns on its own or will teach itself. So, they think that once the AI is live, there will be little effort required. With Supervised Learning, humans have to be involved in analyzing what is happening in user interactions and training/re-training the AI. This needs to happen continually to increase the effectiveness of the AI. So, there is a large amount of effort required even after go-live.


AI and Project Management

The Project Management Institute (PMI) has made available a 4-page report on Project Management and AI. They provide results of a survey of 551 Project Managers. The paper is titled "AI Innovators: Cracking the Code on Project Performance" (2019). A review of the report was done by TechRepublic titled "6 AI technologies changing project management" mentioning 6 AI technologies that are impacting organizations. My takeaways from the article are:

• Some companies are actively involved in AI and seeing benefits already while others are lagging behind. 
• The article looks at the principles being used by "AI Innovators" Vs. "AI Laggards".  
• It mentions that Accenture research found that visionary organizations apply five key principles identified by the acronym MELDS: Mindset, Experimentation, Leadership, Data, and Skills.

Conclusion 

With my experience in Natural Language Processing and chatbots (and my knowledge of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, RPA, and predictive analytics), I can see how these AI technologies and others can be used to help Project Managers. I've reviewed several articles (see the reference section below) and agree with many of them mentioning ways that AI can help PM. However, I've not yet found a whole lot of specific information showing how these AI technologies are being applied to help Project Managers.
I do believe that AI will grow in its use, so PMs do need to learn about how to lead projects using it, how it works, what it's benefits are, and how it can be applied to help them.

I would like to hear your comments and questions about this article and your thoughts on AI and project management. Please comment below. Thanks for your time to read this.

All the Best! Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Henry Will



Reference: Additional Information on Artificial Intelligence

• George Pace, the moderator of the AI Panel, has an extensive website about AI and how to prepare your career for it: keeppace.com
• "5 Benefits of Artificial Intelligence in Project Management" (2020 article by Software Advice) mentions the PMI report done in 2019 (see above). The authors says that AI will not take PM positions and mentions some ways that AI can help PMs.
• CIO "How AI could revolutionize project management" (2018) - This article mentions ways that AI might help Project Managers and gives a few examples of AI being used for project management.
• This TechTarget article (2019) gives examples of chatbots, AI-assisted data visualization and predictive analytics being used to help project managers https://searchenterpriseai.techtarget.com/feature/AI-for-project-management-makes-projects-more-strategic
• TechRepublic "Managing AI and ML in the enterprise 2019: Tech leaders expect more difficulty than previous IT projects" mentions a survey done by Tech Pro Research that found that more than half of the respondents believed that AI and ML projects would be more difficult.
• This 2017 Atlassian Article titled "3 ways AI will change project management for the better" mentions a few AI technology tools that are assisting PMs and speculates on more to come.
• This 2017 Capterra article, "I, Project Manager: The Rise of Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace", predicts that by now some things would be made available by AI helping project managers that I've not yet seen the evidence of, but it does also give some examples of AI in project management. And, the comments point to other uses of AI in project management tools.
• This 2017 Clarizen article titled "Four Ways AI & Bots Will Change Project Management"  - This article mostly is speculation about upcoming uses of AI for PM.
• This 2019 infographic titled "AI for Project Management" lists 8 ways that AI is being used for Project Management and some information about how much it helps projects, but I don't see where the data came from or examples of how they arrived at the information (registration is required) 
• This 2019 Forbes article titled "AI in Project Management" is written by a person at Cognilytica and has a link to their Infographic above as well as their podcast 92 about AI and Project Management. It lists ways that project management can help Project Management.
• This 2019 TechTarget article titled "AI for project management makes projects more strategic" is also written by a person at Cognilytica and mentions ways that AI can help PM.
• This is a 16 minutes Cognilytica podcast titled "AI Today Podcast #92: AI Use Case Series — AI in Project Management". It mentions bots for simple tasks like scheduling tasks, reminding team members, get completion data, get status, and other tasks. The podcast mentions an Accenture survey that says that PMs mentioned that they have many tasks that could be automated. It mentions that AI can aid to remove human bias and error. It can also be used for predictive analytics, finding patterns, and identifying problems. But, this podcast doesn't name any particular systems that are actually doing these things.