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Research shows natural language benchmarks don’t measure AI models’ general knowledge well

August 12, 2020 Big Data

Open-domain question-answering models — models theoretically capable of responding to novel questions with novel answers — often simply memorize answers found in the data on which they’re trained, depending on the data set. That’s the assertion of a team of researchers affiliated with Facebook and the University College London, who in a preprint paper present evidence that 60%-70% of answers given by models tested on open-domain benchmarks are embedded somewhere in the training sets.

Open-domain question-answering has received attention in the AI community for its practical applications, and more recently as a method to analyze language models’ grasp of factual knowledge. But a deep understanding of what kinds of questions models can answer remains elusive; unknowns about how questions and answers are distributed in benchmark corpora make it hard to contextualize the results.

In their study, the researchers sought to evaluate the test sets of popular open-domain question-answering data sets including WebQuestions, TriviaQA, and Open Natural Questions. They identified classes of question a model should be able to answer and annotated 1,000 question-answer pairs from each test set for repeated questions in their respective training sets. Then they computed the performance of several models on the benchmarks using open-book (which leverage retrieval from a large corpus of documents) and closed-book approaches (which focus on training large models with no external knowledge).

The three data sets in question aren’t much alike, which was the point — testing across all three guaranteed robustness. WebQuestions contains 3,778 training and 2,032 test question-answer pairs from a search engine, while TriviaQA has 78,785 training and 11,313 test question-answer pairs from free trivia websites. Meanwhile, Open Natural Questions comprises 79,168 training and 3,610 question-answer pairs from a combination of search engines and Wikipedia articles.

The team theorizes open-domain question-answering models should be able to (1) recall the answer to a question seen at training time, (2) answer novel questions at test time and choose an answer from the set of answers seen during training, and (3) answer novel questions that have answers not contained within the training data set. To determine whether the aforementioned benchmarks measure any of these behaviors, the coauthors split the test data in each corpus by whether the answers appeared somewhere in the training sets. Around 58%-71% of test answers were also somewhere in the training data, according to the researchers, demonstrating that the majority of the test data didn’t probe for answer generalization.

The team also probed the benchmarks for paraphrased questions in training data, using the set of 1,000 annotated questions. They say that 28%-34% of the questions were paraphrased, the majority being near-duplicates differing only by one or two words. “This result implies that 30% of the test set of these datasets only probe for how well models can simply memorize question-answer pairs seen at training,” the coauthors wrote.

The researchers selected several “open book” models — dense passage retrieval, retrieval-augmented generation, and fusion-in-decoder — and “closed book” models (Facebook’s BART and Google’s T5) to test, as well as nearest-neighbor models that store all available answers and classify new answers based on a similarity measure. Results on the benchmark corpora imply that all models memorized questions well, with an untrained nearest-neighbor model answering 20% of the test questions correctly. But they performed poorly on questions that couldn’t be memorized from training sets, with a mean absolute performance difference of 63% between repeated and non-repeated data. And when it came to generalization, one model that reliably memorized questions — T5 — struggled, achieving only a 22% match score.

“It is clear that performance on these data sets cannot be properly understood by overall question-answer accuracy,” the researchers wrote. “We suggest that in future, a greater emphasis be placed on more behavior-driven evaluation rather than pursuing single-number overall accuracy figures.”

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Big Data – VentureBeat

AI Weekly: CDPA bill shows progress on coronavirus-tracking data privacy, but there’s still a ways to go

May 9, 2020 Big Data

Contact tracing has quickly emerged as the go-to method of tracking the spread of the coronavirus among the general population, but there have been crucial questions around the most effective, ethical, and legal ways of doing so. New legislation introduced this week, the COVID-19 Consumer Data Protection Act (CDPA), seeks to enact legal guardrails around the collection and use of people’s data.

It’s a sign of progress that legislation is emerging around this issue, but it also highlights that there’s a way to go yet. The CDPA has some issues that privacy experts are concerned about, and the lack of any Democrat co-sponsors indicates a lack of bipartisan support. The Dems actually have their own version of this type of legislation, called the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act (COPRA), which was introduced in December. Both bills emerged from the same committee — the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation — and so the lack of bipartisanship is especially notable.

The CDPA was introduced by Senators Roger Wicker (R-MS), John Thune (R-SD), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Jerry Moran (R-S), and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN). COPRA is sponsored by Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA), along with Brian Schatz (D-HI), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Ed Markey (D-MA).

Despite the partisanship, the CDPA includes much that all sides can agree on. And in an announcement about the bill, the Republican Senators said all the right things. For example, Senator Wicker’s statement reads, “As the coronavirus continues to take a heavy toll on our economy and American life, government officials and health-care professionals have rightly turned to data to help fight this global pandemic. This data has great potential to help us contain the virus and limit future outbreaks, but we need to ensure that individuals’ personal information is safe from misuse.”

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Per the announcement, the CDPA includes the following:

Require companies under the jurisdiction of the Federal Trade Commission to obtain affirmative express consent from individuals to collect, process, or transfer their personal health, device, geolocation, or proximity information for the purposes of tracking the spread of COVID-19.
Direct companies to disclose to consumers at the point of collection how their data will be handled, to whom it will be transferred, and how long it will be retained.
Establish clear definitions about what constitutes aggregate and de-identified data to ensure companies adopt certain technical and legal safeguards to protect consumer data from being re-identified.
Require companies to allow individuals to opt out of the collection, processing, or transfer of their personal health, geolocation, or proximity information.
Direct companies to provide transparency reports to the public describing their data collection activities related to COVID-19.
Establish data minimization and data security requirements for any personally identifiable information collected by a covered entity.
Require companies to delete or de-identify all personally identifiable information when it is no longer being used for the COVID-19 public health emergency.
Authorize state attorneys general to enforce the Act.

In a statement to VentureBeat, Liz O’Sullivan, cofounder of ArthurAI and technology director of STOP (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project), said that the CDPA is a step in the right direction, but she’s concerned that it doesn’t go far enough. “There’s nothing stopping companies from using this data to profit after the crisis, and it won’t protect people in the event that ICE or other law enforcement agencies subpoena identifiable information while the crisis is ongoing,” she said.

In a way, the issues here are business as usual for data privacy. “All the usual concerns apply: This data is a great source of power in any hands, to be politicized or used for personal gain. If companies are left with a choice to ‘delete or de-identify,’ it’s pretty clear which one they will choose,” she said, adding that “It’s telling, in fact, that Palantir, a company typically associated with national security, has already won contracts to handle this data.”

She emphasized that the danger with any bill that fails to keep a divide between public and private data is the creation of the illusion of privacy while handing governments, and “state-adjacent corporate entities,” expanded surveillance capabilities.

Andrew Burt, chief legal officer at Immuta and managing partner at bnh.ai, said in a statement to VentureBeat that the CDPA does serve to reinforce how important data and data analytics are to combatting the pandemic. “There’s a reason, for example, that the most thorough plans to get Americans back to work pre-vaccine start with contact tracing and monitoring — knowing who might be a carrier of the virus, and where they’ve gone and who they’ve been in close proximity to, is the first step to getting us to a state of reasonable safety,” he said. “Data collection and data analytics will form the backbone of those efforts. So I see the CDPA as a very clear acknowledgement of that fact.”

But Burt also noted that there is much more that needs to be discussed around data protection laws, such as what a bill like this says about the broader state of data protection laws, the current and future role of the FTC around privacy, what counts as “health data” in a world of ubiquitous data generation and collection, applying time limits to “new surveillance mechanisms” for COVID-19, and more.

The fact that legislators are moving forward with data privacy laws is a welcome sign of progress. But Republicans and Democrats will need to do more to come to consensus lest the U.S. ends up with data laws that fail to strike the best balance between protecting people from the coronavirus and protecting people from future abuses.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Calico Cat Shows Off Her Kittens

February 11, 2020 Humor

Come with me.

“Come see my babies :”).”
Image courtesy of https://imgur.com/gallery/dzZCnzn.

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Quipster

Some Dark Moments from your Favorite Disney Shows that you Might’ve Missed

January 30, 2020 Humor

We all have spent the maximum part of our childhood in front of the Disney channel. Our days began and ended with all of the characters we saw every day for months and years at a stretch. We laughed at Raven’s strange, funny faces when she suddenly got a glimpse of her future; envied Miley who lived a double-life as a rock star and a normal teenage girl; wished so desperately of having powers that the Russos’ had; had so much fun watching Zack and Cody live a life of luxury in a five-star suite; literally felt what Lizzie had to go through every single day at school; or enjoyed the whole summer vacations with Phineas and Ferb.

At that time, we were either too small to get it or were too busy following the storyline of that episode that some dark moments were overlooked by us. We’d like to bring some of them to the light now to remind you of what you have seen but never noticed:

1. Girl meets World:

The one episode in the very popular American teen drama Girl meets world, where everyone comes to know that Farkle has Asperger’s syndrome. For every symptom that he has, Maya says “he’ll stop doing that” wishing he’d stop acting like a weirdo at a time and just get back to normal behavior while this was his normal behavior. It just looked so harsh on television like she didn’t want to be friends with a person like Farkle who has Asperger’s syndrome. A pretty dark moment of Disney.

2. Suite Life of Zack and Cody:

The luxurious life spent by the troublesome teens at Tipton hotel was surely a delight for viewers of the era. But it has some dark moments of its own that only people that paid close attention and were mature enough to understand could catch. In an episode, we see the characters of London and Maddie faced with eating disorders. Both of them want to change their body’s shape. London feels pressure to gain weight while Maddie is pressured to lose weight. The scene depicts the dark reality of teen peer-pressure.

3. The Proud family:

Who doesn’t remember watching this awesome American animated sitcom on Disney Channel without missing any episode? We all enjoyed growing up with Penny Proud, a fourteen-year-old teenager who tried to gain independence and faced so many typical teenage experiences that we could relate to so much. Apart from the comical situations that she always landed into, there was one particular episode in the series where Penny switched families with a Muslim girl. Someone wrote “Slut” or “Go home” on the Muslim families’ house, and that was a pretty dark moment for Disney to broadcast. True to the events, yes, but dark for children watching at that time unaware of the reasons and logic behind this act.

So engrossed we’d been in watching our favorite shows by Disney that we failed to realize some of the darkest forms of humor presented by Disney in a very surprising way.

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Mefunnysideup

MIT and IBM’s ObjectNet shows that AI struggles at object detection in the real world

December 10, 2019 Big Data

Object recognition models have improved by leaps and bounds over the past decade, but they’ve got a long way to go where accuracy is concerned. That’s the conclusion of a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and IBM, which recently released a data set — ObjectNet — designed to illustrate the performance gap between machine learning algorithms and humans.

Unlike many existing data sets, which feature photos taken from Flickr and other social media sites, ObjectNet’s data samples were captured by paid freelancers. Depicted objects like oranges, banana, and clothing are tipped on their side, shot at odd angles, and displayed in clutter-strewn rooms — scenarios with which even state-of-the-art algorithms have trouble contending. In point of fact, when “leading” object-detection models were tested on ObjectNet, their accuracy rates fell from a high of 97% on the publicly available ImageNet corpus to just 50% to 55%

It builds on a study published by Facebook AI researchers earlier this year, which found that computer vision for recognizing household objects generally works better for people in high-income households. The results showed that six popular systems worked between 10% and 20% better for the wealthiest households than they do for the poorest households, and that they were more likely to identify items in homes in North America and Europe than in Asia and Africa.

“We created this dataset to tell people the object-recognition problem continues to be a hard problem,” said Boris Katz, a research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM), in a statement. “We need better, smarter algorithms.”

It took three years to conceive of ObjectNet and design an app that would standardize the data-gathering process, according to Katz and team. The researchers hired photographers through Amazon Mechanical Turk, who received photo assignments on the aforementioned app with animated instructions telling them how to orient the assigned object, what angle to shoot from, and whether to pose the object in the kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, or living room.

After a year of data-gathering, during which half of all the photos freelancers submitted had to be discarded for failing to meet basic requirements, the scientists tested a range of computer vision models against the completed ObjectNet. They allowed said models to train on half of the data before testing them on the remaining half, a practice that tends to improve performance. But the detectors often struggled to understand that the object samples were three-dimensional and could be rotated and moved into new contexts, suggesting that the models have yet to fully comprehend how objects exist in the real world.

“People feed these detectors huge amounts of data, but there are diminishing returns,” added Katz. “You can’t view an object from every angle and in every context. Our hope is that this new data set will result in robust computer vision without surprising failures in the real world.”

The team intends to present their work at NeurIPS 2019 in Vancouver this week.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

AND SHE SHOWS HER TRUE RAGHEAD ASS-SUCKING SIDE

July 24, 2019 Humor

The Cunt from Somalia was disgusted when someone asked her to condemn FGM.

She basically said no raghead can ask another raghead this sort of question.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) lambasted a female Muslim audience member Tuesday for asking her to renounce female genital mutilation (FGM), a practice common in Omar’s native Somalia.

Omar was reportedly taking questions an event for the Muslim Collective for Equitable Democracy event when Muslim audience member Ani Osman-Zonneveld of Muslims for Progressive Values asked Omar to condemn FGM.

Omar responds by saying the question is “appalling” and she is “disgusted” to be asked if she condemns “al-Qaeda,” “FGM,” and “Hamas,” saying it’s a “waste” of time

Omar said she was “disgusted” by people who ask Muslim politicians specific questions on issues and groups embraced by extreme members of their religion – such as FGM, al-Qaeda, and Hamas – and called it a “waste” of time.

“I am, I think, quite disgusted I think to be honest that as Muslim legislators, we are constantly being asked to waste our time speaking to issues that other people are not asked to speak to because of the assumption exist that we somehow support and are for [the issue],” Omar said, according to BuzzFeed News.

She urged audience members to think twice before asking Muslim lawmakers questions, pressing them to ensure that it is a “proper question that they would probably ask any member of Congress, any legislator, [or] any politician.”

While Omar condemned FGM as “abhorrent,” she continued to focus on the sentiment of the question, claiming that she and fellow “Squad” member and Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) are held to different standards than non-Muslim members of Congress.

Omar said:

The question is posed: Could you and Rashida do this? And it’s like how often — should I make a schedule? Does this need to be on repeat every five minutes? Should I be like, so today I forgot to condemn al-Qaeda, so here’s the al-Qaeda one. Today I forgot to condemn FGM, so here we go. Today I forgot to condemn Hamas.

“You know, I mean, like, it is a very frustrating question that comes up,” Omar continued.

“So I would like, not just for you, but for everyone to know that if you want us to speak as politicians, American politicians, then you treat us as such,” she added.

FGM is a procedure in which a woman or, often, girl’s outer genitalia are partially or completely removed, typically by older women. It is common in eastern Africa and not an exclusively Muslim practice, nor do many Muslims outside of the region engage in FGM. In Somalia, however, where Omar and a growing number of her constituents in Minnesota were born, some estimate that as many as 95 percent of girls undergo FGM.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated this year that “more than 500,000 women and girls in the United States are at risk of or have been subjected to FGM/C (Female Genital Mutilation or Cutting).”

Omar has recently been accused of having sympathy for terrorist groups, following a resurfaced video from 2013 featuring Omar drawing “a moral equivalence between radical Islamic terror and ‘the violence that is done [by] the West,’” Breitbart News reported. However, Omar did not endorse terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda.

Last week, Omar and Tlaib introduced a controversial resolution aimed to support the antisemitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Omar compared the BDS movement to the Boston Tea Party and likened Israel to the terrorist organization, Hamas.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

How Effective is Virtual Reality at Trade Shows?

June 18, 2019 CRM News and Info

VirtualReality Axonom How Effective is Virtual Reality at Trade Shows?

Many manufacturers view virtual reality (VR) as an effective business tool to present and educate their (configurable) products to conference attendees on the trade show floor.

Visual Product Configurators with Virtual Reality is a solution suite quickly being adopted by businesses to deliver an immersive experience that showcases product attributes, demonstrates benefits, and leaves a memorable impression with attendees.

VR has ROI benefits as well. In many cases, it’s not cost-effective or realistic for manufacturers to display large or many products in the booth. Reducing the amount of physical items on display will shrink drayage (shipping, installation, dismantle) expenses.

Time is a factor. Attendees only spend a few minutes in a booth. It is imperative to quickly show options that fit the attendees requirements. With a push of a button, you can present a variety of preconfigured product layouts in various environments.

Here are even more reasons why VR is being used by manufacturers at trade shows…

Buzz Factor

Have you ever left a trade show with a bag full sales literature with scribbled notes and a hazy memory of what vendor provided what? The trade show floor is crowded with exhibitors selling similar products and/or services. Many vendors often get blended together.

How does one stand out above the competition? It starts with providing a compelling experience. Not only does VR drive attendees to your booth but it creates buzz about your offering and others will share their experience with colleagues.

*Watch UFC fighter Daniel Cormier react to his personal training facility in virtual reality.

“Virtual Reality is very cool and worked extremely well as a WOW factory in our trade show booth. It’s a great tool to make booth visits memorable, and we hope to use it to alleviate confusion when ordering complex configurations of mobile carts.” – Spencer Costello at BFW Inc.

A Teaching Tool

virtualreality medical 300x176 How Effective is Virtual Reality at Trade Shows?

Explore and Interact with Products in Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality includes animation and interactive product movement. This enables attendees to quickly grasp product attributes and benefits.

For example, when it comes to designing an operating room, the healthcare staff and designers need to be in sync on how each medical equipment moves, operates, and fits in the space. Poorly placed equipment can lead to unsafe or ineffective working conditions – which will result in an expensive shutdown and remodel.

VR is a tool to help decision makers make better, more informed decisions prior to construction and installation.

“Virtual Reality gives us the flexibility to demonstrate correct product placement as well as the ability to demonstrate and spatial limitations based on the room design. It’s flexible and allows us to show our product in a way we were never able to do before.” – Craig Wassenaar, President at Skytron

A Memorable Impression

vr phone 300x226 How Effective is Virtual Reality at Trade Shows?

Extend Virtual Reality Experiences on Smartphones

The trade show floor is full of distractions. It’s often difficult to have a good conversation when loud sounds, potent smells, and crowds of people draw the attention away from what the vendor is explaining.

Virtual Reality helps attendees focus on the product. It transports them into a virtual world where they have a first-hand view to visualize, explore and interact with the product in the environment.

When the show is over, mobile VR on smartphones is a great tool for attendees to share product designs with colleagues back at the office.

“Virtual Reality is a first-class teaching tool. It’s an effective way to demonstrate each stage of the apparel design process – from concept in software to fabric to completed garment.” – Bill Grindle, CMO at Gerber Technology

3D Product Configurator + Virtual Reality

Virtual Reality combined with a 3D product configurator delivers the ultimate trade show experience. A visual configurator enables attendees to custom build a product to their specific needs. Add immersive VR to help the attendee visualize and explore their newly customized product in minutes. This one-two punch is the most effective way to showcase configurable products and configurable environments at conferences or trade shows.

“The edge of the network is more critical and more complex than ever before. This virtual reality experience allows visitors to our booth to work through design complexities in a way that brings these environments to life.” – Jennifer Renaud, vice president of marketing for Vertiv in the Americas

Learn More About Manufacturers Using VR

Discover how manufacturers are successfully using Axonom’s Visual and Virtual CPQ suite at trade shows to reduce drayage costs, showcase one or many products, stand out from the competition, and deliver a memorable experience with conference attendees – www.axonom.com/axonom-customers-use-virtual-reality-at-trade-shows.

Written by Michael Bauer, Axonom.

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CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365

NBC Cancels Morris Chestnut’s ‘The Enemy Within’ Plus 7 Other Shows

May 31, 2019 Humor

No network will come to the upfront table this May with a bigger mixed bag of good news and bad news than NBC.

The broadcaster is on track for an almost-defiant sixth season as TV’s No. 1 among adults 18-49 — but by a slimmer margin than ever, down more than 25 percent in the key demo from the same point on the 2018 TV calendar. Admittedly, NBC lost some year-over-year steam thanks to the absence of a Super Bowl. But one night does not 25 percent make.

Still, it’s a steady erosion across the board — not one or two big failures — that will be responsible for any overshadowing of the Peacock’s latest Madison Avenue victory lap. Looking at its week, there’s still a lot to brag about. Sunday Night Football saw its audience bleed-out finally reverse, the Wednesday bundle of Dick Wolf’s trio of Chicago-set series proved to be one of the shrewder scheduling choices in years and, as NBC so often does, the network launched the season’s top new drama out of The Voice in already-renewed Manifest.

But the year’s losses show where NBC needs to do the most work to maintain its hold on increasingly distracted linear viewers. This Is Us is already showing signs of age. Heading into its likely fourth season, it’s no longer the hands-down No. 1 series on broadcast. It shares that title this season with The Big Bang Theory and Fox breakout The Masked Singer. As for the bigger drama discussion, for every Manifest or New Amsterdam, there are several other launches (Enemy Within, Village) that don’t stack up. In unscripted, The Voice’s decline is hard to ignore, and it can no longer be counted on to prop up the schedule as it has for so many seasons. And comedy is in desperate need of a new hit to aid dependable (if modest) players like The Good Place and Superstore.

The coming season that the network pitches at the May 13 NBCUniversal-wide presentation at New York’s Radio City Music Hall will be the first made by co-chairmen George Cheeks and Paul Telegdy. So perhaps more than anything else, it will be an opportunity to gauge the new regime’s tastes.

RENEWED

Blindspot | The end is in sight for the Martin Gero-created puzzle drama starring Jaimie Alexander and Sullivan Stapleton, which has been picked up for a final season. The drama is owned by an outside studio — Warner Bros. TV — and has, like most other broadcast series, continued to shed viewers. It’s down 25 percent among adults in its fourth season, which recently saw its final three episodes bumped out of May sweeps. Still, NBC likes being in the Greg Berlanti business and the fifth-season renewal will take the drama into syndication territory.

The Blacklist | The James Spader serial is returning for a seventh season as part of a two-season pickup NBC and producers Sony TV quietly worked out last May. With Spader’s deal expiring at the end of the 2019-2020 broadcast season, a final season announcement could be the next thing Red Reddington uncovers.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine | Fox’s loss is truly NBC’s gain. The ensemble cop comedy starring Andy Samberg, Andre Braugher and Melissa Fumero from Universal Television and exec producers Dan Goor and Mike Schur will return for a seventh season (and second on NBC) after drawing stable ratings for its new network. The series remains a revenue stream for Universal TV and allows NBC to keep Schur-produced comedies on well after The Good Place wraps its run. Nine-Nine!

Chicago Fire | The oldest member of Dick Wolf’s Windy City franchise has grown by nearly 2 million viewers over last season, the biggest jump for any veteran series this season. It will return for an eighth season.

Chicago Med | The youngest member of the Chicago franchise has also improved in viewers since NBC stacked all three of the Wolf-produced procedurals Wednesdays, averaging about a million more in its fourth season than its third. It’ll be back for a fifth season.

Chicago PD | The middle child of Wolf’s Chicago franchise has also grown in viewers, albeit not by as much as its brethren. Still, it has added close to 800,000 viewers and will be back for a seventh season. All three series are produced in-house at Universal Television.

Good Girls | A good example of a network showing patience and allowing a critical darling from showrunner Jenna Bans (Scandal) time to grow and find an audience, NBC handed out an early third-season renewal for the midseason drama starring Retta, Mae Whitman and Christina Hendricks. Helping its case was the fact that the ratings-challenged drama (down 27 percent among adults 18-49) is owned in-house at Universal TV.

The Good Place | Mike Schur’s serialized fantasy comedy ended its third season as NBC’s top half-hour in adults 18-49 and earned an early season four renewal. The Ted Danson and Kristen Bell afterlife comedy, from Universal Television, takes up little shelf space (it runs a short 13 episodes every season) and gives the broadcast network a rare awards season player.

Law & Order: SVU | The Dick Wolf-created drama starring (and exec produced by) Mariska Hargitay will officially become TV’s longest-running primetime drama when it returns for its historic 21st season, breaking the record previously held by parent Law & Order and CBS’ Gunsmoke. At this point, can anyone imagine an NBC schedule without SVU? (Meanwhile, another spinoff — L&O: Hate Crimes— remains in the works.)

Manifest | The Lost-like serialized mystery drama about a crop of presumed-dead passengers on a plane who mysteriously return home faded badly in the second half of its maiden voyage. Still, the Josh Dallas and Melissa Roxburgh drama from Universal TV and Warner Bros. TV was the No. 1 new scripted series of the (dismal) season among adults 18-49 and finished second among rookies in viewers.

New Amsterdam | The medical procedural starring Blacklist grad Ryan Eggold proved a solid fit with This Is Uson Tuesdays, coming in as the season’s No. 2 new drama among adults 18-49 (behind Manifest) and averaging better than 11 million viewers after a week of delayed viewing. In a show of faith, the Universal TV-produced drama was NBC’s first rookie to earn a second season.

Superstore | The workplace rom-com starring (and exec produced by) America Ferrera will return for a fifth season as the Universal TV comedy is quickly approaching the 100-episode threshold needed for syndication. The series, which will change showrunners, also boasts a Hulu streaming deal.

This Is Us | Broadcast television’s highest-rated drama is plotting its endgame as the Dan Fogelman-created drama scored a three-season renewal, taking it through its sixth and, what sources say, final season. The stars of the awards season favorite from Disney’s 20th TV — Milo Ventimiglia, Mandy Moore, Sterling K. Brown, Chrissy Metz and Justin Hartley — all negotiated new deals at the start of season three. Meanwhile, Fogelman has been vocal that This Is Us is at the midpoint of its run.

Will & Grace | The glow has worn off in the revival’s second season. In its 10th overall season, the Debra Messing, Eric McCormack, Sean Hayes and Megan Mullally starrer has lost almost half its adults 18-49 viewers. Still, NBC handed out an early third-season (and 11th overall) pickup for the multicamera comedy from Universal TV, which has a lucrative streaming deal on Hulu.

NBC Cancels Morris Chestnut’s ‘The Enemy Within’ Plus 7 Other Shows

CANCELED

Abby’s | NBC took a risk on this freshman comedy. The Natalie Morales-led series is TV’s first multicamera comedy to be filmed in front of a live studio audience and taped completely outside. The Cheers-like backyard bar comedy took its fair share of shots from critics and, despite hailing from current NBC comedy king Mike Schur, didn’t get a second round after posting some of the network’s weakest ratings in 2018-19.

The Enemy Within | The Blacklist-like rookie spy thriller starring Jennifer Carpenter and Morris Chestnut showed decent signs of life following its midseason debut, growing by about 60 percent in both adults 18-49 and viewers with a week of delayed viewing after taking over the prime post-Voice slot Mondays after Manifest wrapped its run. Yet the drama, produced in-house at Universal Television, never really broke out and ended up well below Manifest‘s numbers.

The Village | Last year’s buzziest pilot hasn’t lived up to the hype that it’s the next This Is Us. The drama about the residents of an apartment building and produced by Universal Television struggled to pull in ratings that hold a candle to This Is Us, even after taking over the latter’s time slot. Its cancellaton, along with those of Abby’sand The Enemy Within, meant NBC went 0-for-midseason with first-year scripted shows.

A.P. Bio | The single-camera comedy starring Glenn Howerton as a philosophy scholar who winds up a high school teacher has tumbled 27 percent in its second season. Despite being owned in-house by Universal Television and hailing from studio and network MVPs Lorne Michaels and Seth Meyers, the show co-starring Patton Oswalt won’t return for a third season — according to series creator Mike O’Brien, who opened up about the cancellation on Twitter.

I Feel Bad | The single-camera comedy’s fate was pretty much sealed when NBC opted not to extend the initial order after the Amy Poehler-produced series underperformed its fellow Thursday comedies by sizable margins. Not helping the rookie comedy from Universal TV was the fact that leading lady Sarayu Blue booked a role in CBS drama pilot Under the Bridge. (The latter is still in contention at CBS.)

Marlon | The multicamera comedy, loosely inspired by Marlon Wayans’ life as a loving father committed to co-parenting with his polar-opposite ex-wife, was canceled in December after two seasons.

Midnight, Texas | Based on Charlaine Harris’ book series, the supernatural drama starring Francois Arnaud aired at the end of summer 2017 and helped bridge the network’s schedule to the fall. NBC, impressed by its rookie run, moved the Universal Television drama to an in-season run for season two where the series, with new showrunners, could not cut through.

Trial and Error | Bring back the murder board, NBC! OK, that’s a long shot since the network axed the second-year anthological comedy from Warner Bros. TV in January despite its status as a cult favorite.

NEW SERIES

Lincoln | Based on the bestselling Bone Collector book series, the drama — a co-production of Sony and Universal TV — stars Russell Hornsby (just off Fox’s canceled Proven Innocent) as Lincoln Rhyme, a criminologist seriously injured in his hunt for a serial killer. Arielle Kebbel plays the young beat cop who helps him hunt the killer while also taking on other high-profile cases. Justified veteran VJ Boyd and Mark Bianculli co-wrote the pilot, based on Jeffrey Deaver’s Bone Collector novels that also spawned a 1999 movie with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie.

Perfect Harmony | Bradley Whitford stars in a single-camera comedy from Disney’s 20th TV as a former Princeton music professor who unexpectedly stumbles into choir practice at a small-town church. Speechlessveteran Lesley Lake Webster created the series, with Whitford and pilot director Jason Winer among the EPs.

Indebted | The lone multi-cam comedy among NBC’s four new half-hours, the Sony-produced series (formerly known as Uninsured) stars Adam Pally and Abby Elliott as parents ready to reclaim now that their kids are growing up. Until his parents (Fran Drescher and Steven Weber) show up at their door, broke, and he feels obligated to take them in. Dan Levy (The Goldbergs) created the show and exec produces with Sony-based Doug Robinson.

The Kenan Show | Saturday Night Live Emmy winner Kenan Thompson stars as a father to two adorable girls while balancing his job and a father-in-law (Andy Garcia) who helps in the most inappropriate ways. Thompson is expected to continue on at SNL as his new show may be held for a midseason debut. Lorne Michaels and his Universal TV-based Broadway Video exec produces the single-camera comedy from writer Jackie Clarke (Superstore).

Bluff City Law | The character-driven legal drama follows an elite Memphis law firm that specializes in controversial landmark civil rights cases. Jimmy Smits (L.A. Law) returns to NBC to star as a legendary lawyer. Caitlin McGee plays his daughter. The Universal TV drama is from writer Dean Georgaris (The Brave) and David Janollari Entertainment. The project had been among the network’s buzziest dramas and is NBC’s first new hourlong order of the upfront season.

Sunnyside | The single-camera comedy from supervising producer Mike Schur (The Good Place) revolves around Garrett Shah (Kal Penn), a former New York city councilman, who finds his calling when faced with immigrants in need of his help and in search of the American Dream. Matt Murray (Parks and Recreation) co-wrote the script alongside Penn. The series hails from Universal TV, Schur’s studio-based Fremulon and 3 Arts Entertainment. The comedy is NBC’s first new half-hour order of the season.

Law & Order: Hate Crimes | Picked up straight to series with a 13-episode order, the SVU spinoff from Dick Wolf is, like The Gilded Age, trapped in time. Sources say the network still plans on moving forward with the drama, whose pilot was eyed as a planted episode of SVU — but it’s unclear if the drama is still on track to air in the 2019-2020 broadcast season.

Council of Dads | In the vein of the network’s hit This Is Us, this drama from former Grey’s Anatomyshowrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater centers on Scott (Tom Everett Scott), a father of four who’s diagnosed with cancer. He assembles some of his closest allies — best friend Anthony (Clive Standen), AA sponsor Larry (Michael O’Neil) and surgeon Oliver (J. August Richards), who’s also his wife’s (Sarah Wayne Callies) best friend — to be “back-up dads” for every stage of his family’s life. The show is based on a memoir by Bruce Feller. Universal TV produces in association with Jerry Bruckheimer Television and Midwest Livestock Productions.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist | A musical drama from executive producer Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, A Simple Favor) and writer Austin Winsberg (Gossip Girl), the Lionsgate TV series is the first 2019-20 pickup from an outside studio for NBC. Jane Levy (Castle Rock) stars as a whip-smart coder in San Francisco who, after an unusual event, starts to hear people’s innermost wants and desires expressed through songs. After first questioning her sanity, she comes to realize this unwanted curse may actually be a great gift. Skylar Astin, Peter Gallagher, Alex Newell, John Clarence Stewart, Carmen Cusack and Mary Steenburgen also star.

R. Kelly Charged With 11 New Sex-Related Crimes In Chicago!

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The Humor Mill

New CRM Research Shows Awareness Gap

May 2, 2019 CRM News and Info

CRM guru Esteban Kolsky and I did some primary research earlier this year, paid for by Zoho. We wanted to improve our understanding of what buyers of CRM systems were most interested in, and to discover their highest priorities.

Our survey population was comprised of more than 200 highly qualified executives and managers (47 percent C-level) in companies with workforces that ranged from at least 500 to several thousand. All respondents indicated a need to make a CRM purchase decision in the months (not years) ahead. So, we felt our data represented a good measure of current need.

Our main findings were what you might expect from such a group, but some data points puzzled us. For example, few executives seemed to understand the need for platform technology to support their ambitions. Those aims included taking on the digital disruption and leading their organizations to be more agile — things that platform-based CRM is ideally positioned to address. So that seemed like a big disconnect.

CRM All In

After most of two decades, during which CRM was seen in some circles as a technology suite to keep an eye on but not necessarily purchase, our data clearly showed that most people surveyed saw a CRM solution as a necessary additive to business strategy.

Most said they wanted greater technology flexibility (80 percent), increased ability to take on new opportunities (63 percent), and better information sharing among the groups in the front office (60 percent).

Since all of the participants in our study had purchased CRM before, the great yearning for technology flexibility speaks to some of the limitations of earlier CRM systems. It also suggests to us pent-up demand that could result in a new adoption wave.

These findings are in line with other research that points to a majority of CRM purchasers seeking opportunities for greater differentiation in their markets. You can’t blame them. With CRM well distributed in many markets, the dividend from installing first- or even second-generation CRM systems has evaporated.

Today, users with systems that only capture and store customer data (systems of record) are being out-competed by businesses that can perform some amount of data analysis and make relevant recommendations about what to do next, integrate other systems easily, and offer support for social media.

The latter systems often are referred to as “systems of engagement.” In other research I’ve documented an important chain of cause and effect this way: Engagement drives loyalty, which drives profits. No wonder there’s so much interest in modernizing CRM. A note of caution though — your notion of engagement might not be the thing that motivates customers to engage.

Best of Breed?

Over time I’ve seen the number of disparate best-of-breed applications in organizations steadily climb from a low of several dozen when I started tracking to many hundreds now. This finding in part simply reflects the success of cloud computing. As the number of cloud vendors steadily has increased, so has the number of apps available. The cloud technology and business models make it easy to add a new app.

However, at some point — which I am confident we’ve passed — the sheer number of different apps capturing and trying to share data produces its own limitations. With hundreds of apps needing to integrate to a CRM suite, it becomes more than a full-time job to keep all of the apps synched and the integrations in good repair, even with modern cloud technology.

There are two keys to success in this scenario: 1) Limit the number of apps the organization will take in; or 2) Invent better ways to integrate systems. Good luck with the first idea. Departments are now fully capable of bringing cloud-based IT solutions into their workflows without seeking permission. Too often IT only discovers a new app when it is asked to fix something.

The second approach calls for platform technology from a CRM vendor. With platforms, a third party builds to the specifications of the platform, and the user has a much easier time bringing apps on board. So it was a great surprise to us that fewer than 10 percent of the executives surveyed had an inkling of the centrality of platform technology to their search.

Another Surprise

When I started in this business, implementing a CRM system in an enterprise easily could take a year, given the complexity of deploying CRM for the very first time. The rule of thumb for a full CRM deployment was that the cost of the effort easily would be two or three times the cost of the software, thanks to the need for an army of software integration specialists.

Software costs have been reduced considerably thanks to competition and cloud computing, but the time involved has barely budged, though it has been refactored.

In our study 63 percent expected to complete the selection process in four to six months, though a smaller cohort expected it to take upwards of a year. With selection complete, 43 percent thought purchase to rollout should take two to four months, while an additional 33 percent expected the process to take four to six months. With everything laid out and accounted for, the executives still thought the process would take a year from purchase to first proof of return on investment.

Perhaps this can be explained partly by the additional need for setting up artificial intelligence rules and algorithms, and training machine learning systems. Also, some explanation may rest in the need to customize by adding vertical market expertise.

My Two Bits

We might be in the early stage of a new CRM deployment wave. The situation in the industry and among vendors has changed a lot since cloud computing came to dominate, and AI and machine learning made appearances.

To a degree, platform orientation within a CRM product set could alleviate significantly the need for substantial rip-and-replace efforts. With a good platform, it’s far more likely that a vendor could update customers with new technology in-line with the maintenance process. Yet another reason to pay attention to platforms.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.

Denis%20Pombriant New CRM Research Shows Awareness Gap
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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CRM Buyer

“This Is Scary, But It Shows That People Want Something New”

December 3, 2017 Humor

December 2, 2017 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

There is no deleting a tweet like this @ashleyfeinberg – I hope no one ever treats your family this way during a time of great pain and i hope @HuffPost is aware of what their journalists are tweeting pic.twitter.com/8C9BnJsUG5

— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) December 1, 2017

Meghan McCain, the dimwitted daughter of American plutocracy, is outraged by a mean tweet from Ashley Feinberg, which will not shorten her father’s life by one second. Meanwhile, the unspeakably cruel tax bill the Senator just supported will literally abbreviate the lives of many citizens. The Republican National Committee is pressuring the Huffington Post to fire the journalist, even though the large majority of its members voted for Donald Trump even though he mocked McCain for being a POW and subsequently refused to apologize. A sign of a civilization suffering from moral rot is when actual marauders feel emboldened to scold critics for their manners.

· · ·

Of course, Trump and the band of robber barons that comprise today’s GOP didn’t get here alone. There’s been no more pernicious influence in modern America than the Murdoch family, which has poisoned the well with Fake News long before such a term even existed.

“There is a special place in hell for Roger Ailes and Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly,” Thomas E. Ricks recently said, “I think they introduced a feeling of thuggishness into American discourse. And ultimately, I blame that on Rupert Murdoch, who I think has done more to poison American political life than any single person since Jefferson Davis.” In the United States, that probably means we’ll soon erect statues to honor Rupert, James and Lachlan.

· · ·

There are likely only two paths forward, a cleansing or a collapse. Perhaps Robert Mueller and a woke #Resist movement will be able to dismantle the evil system built by traitors, grifters, bigots and crackpots, or maybe we’re ineluctably headed for decline, dotage and death. Those who attempt the former will be attacked vociferously by those leading us toward the latter.

· · ·

In a New Yorkerpiece about new developments in Swedish politics, Masha Gessen takes time to meditate on a more hopeful future for us all. Let’s hope. The opening:

Michael Wernstedt lives in the future, in the center of Stockholm. It is a “co-living space,” a former hotel now inhabited by fifty people who share five kitchens and a variety of common spaces on four floors; each tenant also has a bedroom with a private bathroom. All of it is breathtakingly well-designed and meticulously clean. While Wernstedt and I talked, sitting on one of several giant gray couches in one of the common spaces, about a dozen people of different genders and skin colors (though all roughly in their mid-thirties) shared a casual meal in another. During a recent house meeting, Wernstedt told me, someone asked those present to recall the happiest time of their lives—and they all said that they were happiest right now. Wernstedt’s vision for the future of Sweden, and democratic politics in general, resembles this house: it is happy, healthy, sustainable, and co-created.

Last week, the co-living space hosted a press conference, during which Wernstedt and two co-organizers announced the formation of a new political party, the Initiative. Few people in Sweden have heard of the new party yet, though its older sister, Denmark’s the Alternative, has assembled an impressive constituency in just four years. To register as a party in Stockholm, the Initiative had to collect fifty physical, pen-and-ink signatures; it will take another fifteen hundred to get on the national ballot. The Initiative plans to meet the national threshold by August, the deadline for next September’s parliamentary election. Getting into parliament would require winning at least four per cent of the vote. There are about three dozen nationwide political parties in Sweden, but only eight are represented in parliament. The youngest party to break the four-per-cent barrier is the Sweden Democrats, an ultranationalist, anti-immigrant party that was founded in 1988 and has been seated in parliament since 2010.

Wernstedt interprets the rise of the Sweden Democrats, like the election of Donald Trump in the United States, as an opportunity of sorts: “This is scary, but it shows that people want something new. And we have to take responsibility for democracy.” Better yet, Wernstedt wants to reinvent politics. The Initiative’s most important innovation is launching a party without a program but with two lists. One is a list of six values that the Party espouses: courage, openness, compassion, optimism, co-creation, and actionability. The other is a list of three crises that the Party must address: the crisis of faith in democracy, the environmental crisis, and the crisis of mental health. Last year, according to Wernstedt, Swedes missed more workdays for being mentally unwell than they did for being physically unwell; the leading cause of death among people under thirty-five is suicide. Starting next week, the Initiative plans to begin holding workshops around Sweden to develop a political program to address the three crises in ways consistent with the six values.•

Tags:Ashley Feinberg, Masha Gessen, Meghan McCain, Michael Wernstedt

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