Is now a good time for businesses to be bold and is the banking sector in particular ready for a radical overhaul?

Welcome to the latest episode of DockPod, which is produced by The Dock, Accenture’s flagship R&D and global innovation center.

We are living through tough times: Along with the ongoing threat to public health, the global economy is under severe pressure and many countries are experiencing their worst unemployment rates in decades.

Given these circumstances, it could seem counter-intuitive for industries such as banking to pick this moment to initiate significance change. Yet, this is exactly what some experts think should happen. And some are making the case that banks should seize this moment to re-define their entire purpose and focus on serving society more.

In this episode, we are joined by Accenture Interactive’s head of innovation and Fjord founder Mark Curtis, financial services lead at The Dock Conor McAndrew, and innovation delivery lead Sara Harrison.

DockPod is produced by The Dock, Accenture’s flagship R&D and global innovation center. It is presented by Laurence Mackin and Sinead O’Shea.

Tags: Banking//Traditional Banks//Challenger Banks//Unemployment//Innovation//Diversity//Purpose//Stakeholder Society

The Financial Art of Experimental Banking was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ryan Shanks is managing director of The Dock, Accenture’s global R&D and innovation center. He describes a recent project to help Jacinta Dixon cope with the symptoms of a rare form of Alzheimer’s.

Here at The Dock, our multidisciplinary teams work to pioneer new ways to fulfil human needs using emerging technology. We’re typically trying to solve problems that impact some of the biggest companies in the world and are challenging entire industries.

Recently, though, we got the chance to focus on solving a problem for one person: Jacinta Dixon.

From idea to impact

Jacinta was diagnosed with a rare form of Alzheimer’s disease in 2017, and as a result of her condition, she has problems with visual processing. She developed dyslexia and is now unable to read.

A concept was developed by Accenture’s The Dock. It was designed in collaboration with Design Partners and Amazon Alexa.

Jacinta’s story was featured as part of the TV show Big Life Fix, which aired on Ireland’s most watched TV station, RTÉ One.

National Dementia Office on Twitter

Don't Miss"Big Life Fix"Ireland's leading inventors create ingenious solutions to everyday problems for extraordinary people. This wednesdays show, experts think up ingenious ways to help Jacinta, a person with Alzheimers,RTE 1,9.35 Wednesday #dementia #understandtogether @Entirl https://t.co/FvK4mbycsp

A Dock team, led by Lorna Ross, initially met with Jacinta and several medical practitioners to understand the trajectory of Jacinta’s disease. Ross was then director of Fjord studio in The Dock and is now chief innovation officer at VHI — one of Ireland’s leading health insurers.

A solution for reading

When meeting Jacinta, what struck the team was her personality, her charisma, how intelligent she is. What wasn’t evident at all was her disease.

She explained how the thing that was most important to her, was reading.

While looking forward to her retirement, she had built up a large collection of classic books which she planned to work through. Now, she was coming to terms with the fact that she wasn’t going to be able to read again.

A few concepts were developed in a design sprint that brought together The Dock team, Gregor Timlin (author of Design for Dementia), Gavin O’Duffy and Max Amordeluso from Amazon Alexa, and two clinicians, including Jacinta’s neuropsychologist Dr Garret McDermott.

The design challenges

From workshops at The Dock, the team focused in on the idea of a chair that could change environments, as she moves closer to friends and family and if she then has to move into a care home. A lot of assisted technology can fail after a matter of months for the time it is intended, but the chair is designed to last her for her life.

One of the main challenges was designing something for a person who might not be able to use a typical interface or the technology itself.

With this in mind, the chair is a piece of furniture with embedded Amazon Alexa voice technology, speakers and tactile controls that enables Jacinta to easily access and enjoy music, audiobooks and radio. Amazon Alexa supplied a range of products for the team to work with, and custom built ‘tasks’ within Amazon Alexa so that they would work without an activation word. This was one of the first times Alexa was integrated with a piece of furniture.

The experience was prototyped and iterated at The Dock before Design Partners came on board to design and build the final artefact.

Although full of smart technology, Jacinta’s chair integrates it in such a way that it never compromises on everything a favorite chair in her home needs to be. A ‘bespoke solution’ is perhaps an over-used phrase but, in this case, it is particularly apt. This is a great example of the power of design and technology working in tandem to find the right solution — in this case, for Jacinta.

Final testing

The chair was tested onsite at The Dock before being brought to Jacinta’s house for a big reveal on July 8th, 2019. Jacinta’s story and the chair’s development was featured as part of the TV show ‘Big Life Fix’, which aired on Ireland’s most watched TV station, RTÉ One.

Of the team, Jacinta said: “They’ve been so supportive. They’ve been so patient. It’s really amazing and I also see it as a real privilege to have had this opportunity and hopefully that will move on to other people. But I was the first,” she says with a laugh.

A lot of what we do at The Dock is around fulfilling human needs using emerging technology. This was an exceptional project that really showed the difference we can make when we combine our diverse resources and get experts from a wide scope of areas — from designers and doctors to engineers and ergonomists — all working together towards one goal: in this case, helping Jacinta with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

So where does this go from here? We’ve been studying the Future Home more broadly, because utilities, telcos, insurers and others see opportunities to build offerings and business around the home — for the benefit of society and the bottom line. We are taking the learnings from our experience with Jacinta and Big Life Fix into our work with our global clients and partners. Our ambition is to move from idea to scaled impact.

I couldn’t be prouder of the team and the huge effort they put into this project, and of course it couldn’t have happened without our collaborators Design Partners and Amazon Alexa.

The full episode of Big Life Fix is now available to watch on RTE Player

Using emerging tech to help people with Alzheimer’s was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Unreasonable Group says it wants to have the greatest impact possible on the world’s toughest challenges. It runs programs for growth stage entrepreneurs, it has a global network of partners, which includes Accenture, and it also operates an investment firm. Among its collaborators are a sustainable car company, a fusion energy group, and a London organisation growing crops underground.

In this episode of our regular DockPod podcast, Unreasonable Founder and CEO Daniel Epstein and Human Insights Lab director Claire Carroll discuss a range of topics, including why managing energy is more important than managing time, why his company offers unlimited vacation to employees, and why ideas are welcome, but execution is worshipped.

During their discussion, Epstein acknowledges that there is “a lot of cynicism” surrounding the ability of capitalism to solve the world’s problems, but he argues the case for sticking with it: “I believe capitalism is the most powerful tool in our toolbelt, but a hammer can be used to make or destroy a house so how do you choose to wield it? And so, our belief is that you can use the most powerful tool in our toolbelt to build a regenerative economy, one that’s inclusive for everybody, but you can use the same toolkit.”

Rebuilding the House of Capitalism - DockPod

His hopefulness, he says, is based on the innate abilities of entrepreneurs.

“Entrepreneurs have a curiously warped perspective. Where most of the world sees market failures, we would look at it and see a market opportunity.”

According to Epstein, his motivations for setting up Unreasonable were “totally selfish.”

“It was feeling like a misfit, and wanting to seek refuge among other misfits, other entrepreneurs and business leaders who are foolhardy enough to believe they could change the world but they’re so hellbent and so determined they won’t stop until they do.”

With this in mind, he says: ‘There are market-based solutions that are not just 10% better but 1,000% better’.

If you want to learn more about some of the most vital topics in emerging tech and innovation — from how failure works, to the future of the smart home to the feasibility of sustainability– you can check out our other DockPod episodes on Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud and Google Podcasts.

Rebuilding the house of capitalism with Daniel Epstein was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This summer, The Alan Turing Institute, the University of Warwick and The Dock collaborated on the Data Science for Social Good Programme.

Teams worked together over a 12-week period to attempt to solve a wide variety of social problems, using “data to improve the lives of people” in the words of Sebastian Vollmer, programme director of The Alan Turing Institute.

The Dock was able to bring its own special skill set to bear. We provided training for the project teams in methods of “conscious decision making”, looking at the consequences of decisions — beyond their intended outcomes. Additional technical expertise was also provided, tailored to the individual projects.

April Durrett, Design Director with Fjord in The Dock, served as a mentor to the teams and described it as an extremely positive engagement: “I think what surprised me the most about this experience was that people are really thinking about real problems. They’re not just thinking about interesting tech.”

The variety of these problems was diverse. One participant, James Trimachio, worked on a project that examined public transport access across different demographics. In particular, his team wanted to see if less affluent social groups had sufficient access to public transport.

Both Turing and The Dock have many aligned goals to help improve society for all. As Rory Timlin, Director of AI and Analytics in The Dock says: “You can’t solve the world’s problems in 12 weeks but you can make a significant dent.”

View open roles in The Dock here.

Data Science for Social Good was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the past 30 years, 50% of the world’s corals have died and 90% of reefs may not survive past 2050 in one of the most visible effects of the climate crisis.

The Dock — Accenture’s global R&D center — has been working with The Australian Institute of Marine Science and The Ocean Agency to use AI, computer vision and machine learning to transform how they monitor coral reefs. This will help scientists as they work to strengthen coral reef resilience in the Pacific.

The project began life during an AI for the Environment Hackathon, in which Accenture employees from a variety of disciplines such as software engineering, design, AI and analytics were challenged to come up with technological solutions to help save the coral reefs. A team at The Dock suggested using computer vision techniques to help scientists identify resilient coral species among the millions of pictures they had already taken in reef surveys.

The team won the global Hackathon competition and subsequently got in touch with Richard Vevers. He is the founder of the Ocean Agency and he may be familiar to many people from the Emmy-award winning documentary Chasing Coral.

“The solution we came up with uses computer vision techniques to unlock as much information as possible from the images of the coral, be that the coral species that are in the image, whether it’s dead or alive, and whether we can see any signs of stress,” says Aoife Whelan, analytics lead on the Coral-ation project. This helps researchers to more quickly identify resilient species, so they can focus their efforts on understanding why they are stronger and how their development can be accelerated.

“Conservationists tends to work in a bubble,” says Richard Vevers. “They don’t have the funding or the resources and that becomes the norm. [Most conservationists] jump underwater with a pencil and a clipboard and make notes. That doesn’t give the data at the scale we need to make decisions … we need a complete shift where we use the best technology to look at what are massive issues and tackle them quickly.”

Vevers recently came to The Dock to meet the team and explore where the project might go in the future. “Seeing the approach here with The Dock and the people here, and seeing it on a completely different level, you realize the potential of this technology,” he said during his visit. “Suddenly, we can really transform what’s possible in terms of the investment into these critical ecosystems.”

View open roles in The Dock here.

Project Coral-ation: Can AI help save the coral reefs? was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Dock/Karmarama collaboration threw an AI into the cut and thrust of debate at SxSW

Antonio Penta

In a world of alternative facts, “fake news”, and psyops, the truth can be an elusive concept.

So could technology and data be used appropriately to help people form accurate and realistic judgments and better understand the world around them?

The Dock, Accenture’s flagship R&D and global innovation center, decided to tackle this question with a high-wire demonstration at one of the world’s most famous festivals. In February and March, a team of AI and Analytics experts helped build an AI to co-moderate a debate between two speakers with opposing visions of the world, at South by Southwest Interactive (SxSW) in Austin, Texas.

This project was a collaboration between the Analytics and AI team at The Dock and creative agencyKarmarama, which is part of Accenture Interactive. The challenge was to use smart data and algorithms to evaluate a live discussion between speakers and to help a human moderator steer the debate towards fair and accurate information.

The team’s goal was to accurately inform the audience about the points being made by the speakers, without them being biased by the ability of the speakers to select, describe and potentially over-index on certain topics. This was also an opportunity to demonstrate and experiment with human-machine collaboration in the Artificial Intelligence domain.

Human + machine debates

This project is indicative of wider industrial trends, where collaboration between humans and technology is helping machines to become smarter and is re-shaping companies and challenging their business and operating models.

The Dock team who took part in this collaboration with Karmarama was comprised of myself, Bogdan Sacaleanu, Christophe Onambele Manga and Andrew Poole, supported by Rory Timlin.

To be disruptive you need to act fast, collaborate in an agile manner and take risks. So in a relatively short time, we developed algorithms and technologies for the prototype for use at SXSW. The core technology showcased at SXSW is based on state-of-the-art natural language processing, plus a set of “ad-hoc” algorithms developed by The Dock.

The full system, orchestrated by the Karmarama team, also includes middleware that manages the output of the speech-to-text components and consumes our API, and a visualization that helps the user to experience the technology.

Rory Timlin, Antonio Penta, Andrew Poole, Bogdan Sacaleanu and Christophe Onambele Manga from The Dock who helped build the AI for Karmarama

The system behind the machine

We designed a process and developed a system for analyzing debates that includes two main stages: the Debate Curation stage, where algorithms, data and human knowledge are used to define what a good debate should be; and the Debate Analysis stage, where algorithms are used in real time to help the human moderator and the audience to evaluate if a debate is aligned with the goals defined in the first stage.

At the Debate Curation stage, machines are used to extract relevant information from a large quantity of data and, in tandem, humans decide what should be considered relevant for the debate.

This process uses two sets of unstructured texts or corpora. The first one, named the reference corpus, is a large collection of articles and news collected by a media agency and/or the debate editors, which has been judged trustworthy. The second is a small annotated corpus, named the editorial corpus. In it, editorial staff select the topics they think should be covered in the debate and used to evaluate its value.

The debate analysis stage is a set of real-time text analytics algorithms and technologies that processes the text from each live speech with the aim of analysing the following information: the breadth of the debate; the accuracy of a debate; the convergence/consensus of a debate; and the themes and sub-themes of a debate.

All this information can be used to evaluate the flow of the debate, and to help shape and improve the discussion towards more relevant topics and possible shared solutions.

The live result

On the day, the event was a huge success. Jon Wilkins, the chairman of Karmarama, moderated the debate and said that the AI added significantly to the event. “When it was time to perform, we learned a lot from our bot. As it followed the debate, it did an interesting job of listening to those themes. And what the debaters discovered was that when you’re in the heart of a discussion, you don’t always realize that you’re plugging into multiple meta-themes. We used the speech-to-text capability to transcribe the debate in real time, from which the AI analysed the themes and highlighted the topic areas. We also trained the AI to recognize phrases and words that indicated the speaker’s mood — whether they were happy, shocked or angry, for example. It also pointed out any dubious or incorrect facts: the effect was as embarrassing as it was educational for our debaters.”

The prototype was an opportunity to prove what kind of role smart data and algorithms can play in the future of the media industry. Running a pilot in a real scenario helped the team to understand the impact of these technologies in a wider context, and to collect feedback from domain experts on what can be done to improve the user experience enabled by our algorithms.

During the project, the team faced a tight deadline and the obvious fear factor of a live on-stage debate. The process threw up a host of fascinating questions, not only on what can be improved in the current solution but also what new ideas should be considered in the next steps. Our backlog is now full of interesting ideas to test, including: incorporating the latest deep learning language models into the system by fine-tuning them with our debates’ corpora; exploring weak supervision techniques to label the data; and exploring advanced computer vision models to measure the flow of the debates by also using the posture and expressions of people.

Using AI to improve live debates at SXSW was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our ever-rising expectations have created a world of products and services that would have unimaginable even a few years ago.

Consumers are increasingly accustomed to instant gratification. They are demanding a range of delivery options and prices to suit their needs, and greater control over their delivery experience.

Is now the best ever time to be a consumer? Do our rising expectations reflect our innate desires as humans or are we spiraling out of control?

Great Expectations

This podcast features three guests. April Durrett is a senior designer in The Dock and has been working with the recent Fjord Trends 2019, which have a lot to say about how we are evolving as consumers. Dr Mairead Brady from Trinity College Dublin focuses on marketing and technology adoption and utilization. And John Moriarty is a design director in The Dock who has been doing a lot of work in the area of last mile delivery, which is right at the coalface of spiraling consumer expectations and demands.

DockPod is presented by Laurence Mackin and Sinead O’Shea. It is produced by Sinead O’Shea and Ger Hutchinson is the sound engineer.

Great expectations: Evolving consumer expectations and us was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI is a tool for helping humans, not replacing them, so The Dock’s new design approach takes AI out of the black box and into the real world

It’s easy to misinterpret the role of AI in work and in society. The subject is complex and the general public view of AI can veer anywhere from acceptance to confusion to fear.

One of the achievements of The Dock in recent times has been to integrate human-centric design with the technical process of AI development. This means repositioning AI from being an automation technology that will eliminate jobs to being a creative tool that can help anyone do their job better.

This work has been spearheaded by Connor Upton, the data design director at Fjord at The Dock. He has led a multidisciplinary team of designers and data scientists to investigate how humans and AI can collaborate better.

Avoiding unexpected consequences

“Having designers working in partnership with data scientists at The Dock brings huge benefits,” says Upton. “Bringing a human-centric lens to AI applications makes us consider how to make algorithms more visible and interpretable to the people they affect, as well as the developers who build them. This is the best way to build trust in AI as well as avoiding unexpected consequences.”

This has meant taking a truly multidisciplinary approach, which includes using people with expertise in psychology and user experience alongside computer science and analytics.

Upton says that the team is drawing upon the concept of centaurs, i.e. systems where human and artificial intelligence collaborate to achieve greater goals. The term developed in the wake of two chess matches that took place between IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer and the chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1996 and 1997.

Kasparov was defeated in the second match but he went on to help establish freestyle chess, a new form of the game where teams consist of humans and machines working together in a centaur-like model. Kasparov notes that these teams are considerably more powerful than humans or machines working in isolation.

Augmenting humans

To this end, Upton and his team have been researching and developing AI that can best work as a tool that augments human capabilities.

As design lead Gemma Gallagher puts it: “As designers we should be asking questions during the process of designing AI so that it can be as human-centric as possible. It’s all about different experts collaborating with each other to achieve desirable as well as efficient products and services.”

Gallagher also emphasises the need for us to think about AI as an enabler rather than a complete solution.

AI is an umbrella term that covers a range of functions, such as computer vision, natural language processing and graph analytics. Upton points out that these terms are often inaccessible for non-experts so his team translates them into more human, relatable terms, such as “seeing, listening and reading. Using these terms, we’re able to have really engaging ideation workshops with clients to see how applications of AI can solve specific business problems. We use examples from Dock projects to bring these terms to life.

“For example, when we talk about ‘seeing’, we demo a pharmaceutical labelling experiment where your camera phone can be used to ‘look at’ a drug packet and automatically check its ingredients against any allergies that you might have. Consider the advantages that this might bring particularly for people taking multiple drugs or with poor eyesight.”

Help in emergencies

“Listening” using speech-to-text and natural-language processing is another AI application with which Dock teams have been experimenting. Working with a police emergency-response expert, a team demonstrated how AI can be used to support emergency calls. The solution augments an officer by extracting critical data from the emergency conversation, enriching it with context, and prompting the officer when it has acquired enough information to effectively dispatch a unit to a potential crime scene. This assistance means the officer on the phone can focus on ensuring the distressed caller is safe and calming them down.

It’s also possible to combine functions. The Dock has developed ways to “see” and “read” at scale, which can, for example, identify the risk of radicalisation from social media or open source data. A recent experiment uncovered new terms and memes which are being used within extremist groups to communicate online. This information can assist efforts to monitor and support public safety.

Out of their research, the team have created a set of principles for designing symbiotic human and AI systems.

• Observability is the ability for a person to see how the AI is working.
• Directability is the power for a human to guide an AI based on their own expert knowledge.
• Feedback is when the human or AI can learn from outcomes.
• Resilience is the ability for the system to handle change or failures.
• Responsiveness means that the AI or human can respond in a mutually acceptable timeframe.
• And creativity is the ability of the system to generate novel, useful outcomes.

In the coming year, Upton and his team will be applying this work to new projects at The Dock. “I’d like us to continue moving the perception of AI beyond cost-saving automation,” he says. “We want to encourage businesses to start thinking of AI as a tool that augments their workforce, allowing them to scale their productivity and supporting totally new products and services.”

Man with machine: designing a new future for humans and AI was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The smart home should make our lives easier, safer and better. But instead it is stuck in project mode. This new research uncovers some surprising reasons why

The smart home was intended to make consumers’ lives easier, safer, and more enriching but despite substantial hype and industry investment, it remains stubbornly under construction. Smart home technology is yet to be fully adopted by consumers and remains largely the preserve of early adopters.

The problem is that most companies are taking a product-focused rather than a human-centric approach and they are not getting a comprehensive view of people’s needs in the home.

New research by The Dock — Accenture’s global R&D and flagship innovation center — is a new way of looking at how people live in their homes today so that companies can build a strategy for success in the future home

A new look inside the future home

Bringing together a multi-disciplinary team at The Dock , we designed a program of research and experimentation to challenge the conventional approach to product design and marketing for the smart home.

We wanted to ask fundamental questions such as who are the customers for the future home? What do they really want? And how do companies overcome people’s key contemporary concerns about how their data is collected and used?

Our approach

We combined detailed qualitative research with substantial quantitative research to dig deep into the complexities of how people live at home. We also built a set of eight mindsets that covers a diverse spectrum of personality and attitudes towards technology in the home, and gives executives a new foundation on which to build success in the future home.

40

people directly observed in their homes through contextual enquiry

6,050

individuals surveyed across 13 geographies

Making the future home a reality

Our findings give companies a new perspective from which to design and build products and services that transform the future home from a remote futuristic concept to a relevant human reality. Based on this work, we’ve reached three main conclusions.

1. The future home is an attitude, not a technology.
   With people spending more time at home than ever before, now is the time to act to better understand their behavior and the opportunities it presents. Our respondents universally describe home as a place of comfort, safety and being in control. However, a deeper exploration of these topics show that the individual needs and feelings around these words have vastly different meanings to people.
2. With emerging tech comes emerging tensions.
   The market has long been aware that people feel both more connected and more isolated thanks to smart home technologies. But our research reveals how firmly rooted these and other tensions are, and draws fresh, surprising conclusions about what they mean for the smart-home market.
3. Typical customer archetypes are wrong.
   At the core of the problem with the future home is that most companies design products for a simplified customer archetype. The reality is that, in a world of hyperpersonalization, there is no such archetypal future home customer. Everyone has a different concept of what home should be and should communicate to the outside world. For example, the group most positive and trusting of technology are aged 65 years or more — which is precisely the part of the market that many tech companies have been neglecting.

85%

of respondents now spend the same amount or more time at home as they did five years ago

43%

of respondents aged 18 to 34 are fearful that smart devices know too much about them, indicating that their deepest concerns are around trust and intrusiveness despite being perceived as a more tech-savvy generation

25%

respondents aged 65+ are worried about the addictive nature of technology, the lowest figure across all age groups

Trust, control and relevance

The issues uncovered by this research are fundamental to any product design and marketing strategy for the smart home. Our research on tensions shows that people are resigned to the fact that they need to share their personal data in order to use certain smart-home products and services, but they struggle with this reality. The companies that go beyond data protection and earn their trust by combining true relevance with a rationalization of these tensions will be the pioneers of success in this space.

A smarter look inside the home

Decision points for executives

There is a significant opportunity to develop a future home offering that’s built to last, reinforced by the presence of several untapped markets in the space. As companies begin this journey, here are decision points for executives to consider.

• How does your smart home customer fit in with our research on the future home?
• Does your marketing talent understand the complexities of the home customer?
• Are you aware of the smart home tensions and are you mitigating them?

Putting the human first in the future home was originally published in Accenture The Dock on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.