Group Profiles & Pitches: In weeks 2-5, students groups of approximately five students post to this blog to profile and critically evaluate a form of augmented intelligence recently pioneered within a company, collective or community; or pitch their own augmented intelligence opportunity with a designed demonstration.

Solution Profiles will (a) outline the problem or opportunity to which the company, collective or community’s ensemble of machines and people was directed; (b) summarize the nature of their solution; (c) evaluate its effectiveness and commercial promise from available performance information, by analogy to comparable efforts, and analysis of anticipated competition; and (d) propose alterations—additions or subtractions—that might increase its potential and appropriable value. Each student group will perform one of these analyses over the course of the half-quarter, posted to the UChicago Voices blog as a clearly sign-posted 500-700 word discussion. Pictures and related media can be embedded as they assist your examination and argument. Information for profiles must be drawn from three or more sources, which could include attention in the business press (e.g., Wired, Fast Company, Wall Street Journal, Crain’s Chicago Business), the technical press , analyst reports, patents, research articles, site visits, or interviews with company members, suppliers or customers. Select your cases based on the novelty and promise of the problem or opportunity, not the success or ultimate promise of the company’s solution. As such, these should not all be glowing reports, but provide appropriate criticism and the opportunity to pose constructive changes that might increase their value.

Solution Pitches will (a) identify a new problem or opportunity, (b) propose a novel augmented intelligence solution, (c) detail the design of an empirical demonstration that persuades others of their solution’s commercial value and promise, oriented toward potential investors, bosses, colleagues, and critics of the proposal, and (d) pilot that demonstration to reveal its plausibility, promise, and appropriable value. Students should assume an intelligent, critical audience moved not only by narrow modeling and parameter estimation, but also scope and possibility. Consider IBM’s 2011 staging of the Jeopardy game show competition between Watson and the two highest scoring champions in the game’s history. Students will produce two of these over the course of the half-quarter, posted to the UChicago Voices blog as a clearly sign-posted 500-700 word discussion. Diagrams, images of prototype mock-ups, and group-produced video can be embedded as they amplify your proposal and detailed demonstration. Pilots could illustrate an actual deployment of a crowd-sourced or machine learning solution on an exemplary task or simulated data (e.g., drawing on algorithms and models from the Python Jupyter notebooks described below or others learned through prior experience or classes at Booth), or interviews with potential suppliers or customers that demonstrate the efficacy of a solution if achieved.

Final Project: This project will involve expansion on the most promising of your solution pitches or radical alteration to an existing company solution from a solution profile into a final pitch, of the same form described immediately above, but in longer format (1000-1400 words), with a more substantial pilot.