2021 - one more year of pandemic (in images)

While 2021 was marked by challenges, business and society are setting their sights on sustainable, inclusive growth amid the ongoing economic recovery.

But what does that look like? Art can reinforce or enhance coverage of a world in flux, so at the closer of 2021, McKinsey’s designers set for a view on the images that helped bring insights to life. How to capture, in a single photograph, the effects of the ongoing pandemic? What art best expresses the power of digital or the interplay of sustainability, inclusion, and growth?

Here’s McKinsey Global Publishing’s visual take on 2021. Read on for a new lens on the standout moments that made it unique.

How a committed minority can change society

Over the last year, handshakes have been replaced by fist or elbow bumps as a greeting. Its the pandemic effect and it shows that age-old social conventions can not only change, but do so suddenly. 

But how does this happen? How do social conventions change? 

Robotic engineers and marketing scientists joined forces to study this phenomenon, combining online experiments and statistical analysis into a mathematical model that shows how a committed minority can influence the majority to overturn long-standing practices.

This is studied in many ways mostly is relying on lots of data from observations and experiments. Ming Cao, Professor of Networks and Robotics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering at the University of Groningen, has studied complex group behaviour in robots by using agent-based simulations, among other methods. These agents follow a limited number of simple rules, often inspired by nature, which can lead to realistic complex behaviour. 'Swarming birds or schools of fish are a good example', Cao explains, 'their movements can be reproduced by agents that follow a few simple rules on keeping a certain distance and heading in the same direction as their neighbours.'

A PhD at 50? (or why do I keep going back to school)

"Why would anyone in their right mind go back to school, once again, instead of relaxing and taking advantage of the golden years?" or "haven't you had enough of school?" - I have received some of these reactions when sharing that I have finally taken the step of facing a PhD. Yep ... 1st year of my PhD is starting at ISEG! 

Why now? Well, the fact is that this is an idea (desire) that I have had for many years, but kept it in the draw. I love studying and this passion has taken me back to school for several different courses and post graduation studies. 

I like to think that I am part of a an entire population dedicated to life-long learning. Being part of that bulk of people that often goes back to school to complete degrees as payed-off. Learning and researching has helped me live and work with open-mindedness and intellectual honesty.

  

At this stage in life, I feel (even more) pragmatic and resilient, willing to ask questions and take this risk in my life. 

#lifeinterrupted #dorabailao

#lifeinterrupted #dorabailao

Rocking life and smiling was her motto.

Another heart breaking loss; we all love(d) greatly you and your spirit.

Today has fallen the brave. Fair well.

Trust me, I'm a chatbot

More and more companies are using chatbots in customer services. Due to advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, chatbots are often indistinguishable from humans when it comes to communication. But should companies tell customers they are communicating with machines and not with humans? Researchers investigated. Their research found that consumers tend to react negatively when they learn that the person they are talking to is, in fact, a chatbot.


Göttingen University researchers investigate effect of non-human conversation partners in customer services

AI learns to predict human behavior from videos

In a new study, Columbia Engineering researchers unveil a computer vision technique for giving machines a more intuitive sense for what will happen next by leveraging higher-level associations between people, animals, and objects.

Predicting what someone is about to do next based on their body language comes naturally to humans but not so for computers. When we meet another person, they might greet us with a hello, handshake, or even a fist bump. We may not know which gesture will be used, but we can read the situation and respond appropriately.


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Explaining habits: new concepts for the cognitive science of bad habits and addictions

Habits are the topic of a venerable history of research that extends back to antiquity, yet they were originally disregarded by the cognitive sciences. They started to become the focus of interdisciplinary research in the 1990s, but since then there has been a stalemate between those who approach habits as a kind of bodily automatism or as a kind of mindful action. This implicit mind-body dualism is ready to be overcome with the rise of interest in embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive (4E) cognition.


This article by Susana Ramírez-Vizcaya and Tom Froese reviews the enactive approach and highlights how it moves beyond by integrating both autonomy and sense-making into its theory of agency. It defines a habit as an adaptive, precarious, and self-sustaining network of neural, bodily, and interactive processes that generate dynamical sensorimotor patterns.


Habits constitute a central source of normativity for the agent. The enactive approach views habits as constituting an interdependent whole on whose overall viability the individual habits depend. The consistent theoretical framework of enactivism sees cognition as “an embodied engagement in which the world is brought forth by the coherent activity of a cogniser in its environment” (Di Paolo, 2009a, p. 12).