Entry 2 – Must Have: Marketing Executives with Computer Science Knowledge

Topic: 

            As the world continues to become more and more digitalized, companies are faced with the challenge of transitioning from old business processes to new ones in attempt to keep up with evolving technologies. One particular department that companies are seeing a major shift towards the need for employees with computer science backgrounds is in their marketing departments. Many of their current marketing executives and other employees don’t have the skills needed to work on the company websites, so companies have devoted entire sections of their computer engineering staffs to focusing on improving marketing strategies. While this is a temporary fix to the current problem, business directors feel that moving forward they need employees with both business and computer science backgrounds. One article on this topic states, “Graham Cooke, founder and CEO at Qubit, argued that as consumers are faced with increasing choice and as brand loyalty continues to decline, digital customer experience will be the core “battleground” for marketers in the years ahead.”₁

Important Terminology: 

CMO – Chief Marketing Officer; “Responsible for overseeing the planning, development and execution of an organization's marketing and advertising initiatives,”₂

CEO – Chief Executive Officer

Relation to Computer Science: 

This problem in marketing departments today is connected to computer science because it shows how versatile the field of computer science is. Many companies that were having issues with customer loyalty found that there is a lot of miscommunication between their IT and marketing departments. The website designers were often unaware of how important certain design details were to the website, and marketing executives didn’t always understand the level of work that goes into each little change on the website. 

Works Cited: 

1. Bacon, Jonathan. "All CMOs 'will Have Computer Science Background in 10 Years'." Marketing Week. Marketing Week, 14 Apr. 2015. Web. 26 Jan. 2017.

2. Court, David. "The Evolving Role of the CMO." Marketing & Sales. McKinsey & Company, Aug. 2007. Web. 25 Jan. 2017.

Entry 1 - Artificial Intelligence in the Courtroom

Topic: 

In late October 2016, computer scientists at University College London successfully developed artificial intelligence (AI) software that is able to accurately (79%)3 predict the same outcome of court cases that had been decided on by the European Court of Human Rights. One interesting theory that this program’s success supported is that many court decisions are more heavily influenced by non-legal factors than the actual laws themselves. While this program (or any others like it) still has a long way to go before it could effectively replace humans in the courtroom, many are hopeful that this technology will be able to help solve inefficiency problems that are slowing down court systems all over the world.

Important Terminology: 

·        European Court of Human Rights – “The ECtHR is an international court set up in 1959 by the ECHR. The court has jurisdiction to rule on the applications of individuals or sovereign states alleging violations of the civil and political rights set out in the Convention. The ECHR is an international treaty for the protection of civil and political liberties in European democracies committed to the rule of law”₁

Relation to Computer Science: 

The possibility of AI playing a role in courtrooms wouldn’t be possible without computer science. The program used to make these predictions utilized algorithms to determine patterns in the court documents of several cases that led to certain verdicts. Due to the complexity and variation of the English language, an algorithm like the ones used in this program rely heavily on, “recent advances in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning provide us with the tools to build predictive models that can be used to unveil patterns driving judicial decisions.”₁ Previously, all predictive outcomes had been calculated based on some human factors like the severity of the crime or certain judges’ political views. This new software, however, is able to take out the “human” aspect of decision-making and output decisions based on keywords found within documents. Not only does this topic relate to computer science on a broad scale, but it also highlights some key topics that we have been discussing in class over the last two weeks such as the complexity of communicating the English language in a way that the CPU is able to understand. 

Works Cited: 

1. Aletras N, Tsarapatsanis D, Preoţiuc-Pietro D, Lampos V. (2016) Predicting judicial decisions of the European Court of Human Rights: a Natural Language Processing perspective. PeerJ Computer Science 2:e93

2. 6 NEW TECHNOLOGIES RAISING QUESTIONS FOR COURTROOMS. Digital image. EDepoze. N.p., n.d. Web.

3. Johnston, Chris. "Artificial Intelligence 'judge' Developed by UCL Computer Scientists." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 23 Oct. 2016. Web. 18 Jan. 2017.