Tag: Robots

Books for the modern, data-driven HR professional (incl. People Analytics)

Books for the modern, data-driven HR professional (incl. People Analytics)

With great pleasure I’ve studied and worked in the field of people analytics, where we seek to leverage employee, management-, and business information to better organize and manage our personnel. Here, data has proven valuable itself indispensible for the organization of the future.

Data and analytics have not traditionally been high on the list of HR professionals. Fortunately, there is an increased awareness that the 21st century (HR) manager has to be data-savvy. But where to start learning? The plentiful available resources can be daunting…

Have a look at these 100+ amazing books
for (starting) people analytics specialists.
My personal recommendations are included as pictures,
but feel free to ask for more detailed suggestions!

Categories (clickable)

  • Behavioural Psychology: focus on behavioural psychology and economics, including decision-making and the biases therein.
  • Technology: focus on the implications of new technology….
    • Ethics: … on society and humanity, and what can go wrong.
    • Digital & Data-driven HR: … for the future of work, workforce, and organization. Includes people analytics case studies.
  • Management: focus on industrial and organizational psychology, HR, leadership, and business strategy.
  • Statistics: focus on the technical books explaining statistical concepts and applied data analysis.
    • People analytics: …. more technical books on how to conduct people analytics studies step-by-step in (statistical) software.
    • Programming: … technical books specifically aimed at (statistical) programming and data analysis.
  • Communication: focus on information exchange, presentation, and data visualization.

Disclaimer: This page contains links to Amazon’s book shop.
Any purchases through those links provide us with a small commission that helps to host this blog.

Behavioural Psychology books

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Technology books

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Ethics in Data & Machine Learning

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Digital & Data-driven HR

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Management books

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Statistics books

Applied People Analytics

Programming

You can find an overview of 20+ free programming books here.

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Data Visualization books

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A note of thanks

I want to thank the active people analytics community, publishing in management journals, but also on social media. I knew Littral Shemer Haim already hosted a people analytics reading list, and so did Analytics in HR (Erik van Vulpen) and Workplaceif (Manoj Kumar). After Jared Valdron called for book recommendation on people analytics on LinkedIn, and nearly 60 people replied, I thought let’s merge these overviews.

Hence, a big thank you and acknowledgement to all those who’ve contributed directly or indirectly. I hope this comprehensive merged overview is helpful.

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Screeps: An AI colony simulation game for programmers

Screeps: An AI colony simulation game for programmers

A while back I discovered this free game called Screeps: an RTS colony-simulation game specifically directed AI programmers. I was immediately intrigued by the concept, but it took me a while to find the time and courage to play. When I finally got to playing though, I lost myself in the game for several days on end.

Screeps means “scripting creeps.”

It’s an open-source sandbox MMO RTS game for programmers, wherein the core mechanic is programming your units’ AI. You control your colony by writing JavaScript which operate 24/7 in the single persistent real-time world filled by other players on par with you.

https://screeps.com/

Basically, screeps is very little game. You start with in a randomly generated canyon of some 400 by 400 pixels, with nothing more than some basic resources and your base. Nothing fun will happen. Even better, nothing at all will happen. Unless you program it yourself.

As a player, it is your job to “script” your own creeps’ AI. And your buildings AI for that matter. You will need to write a program that makes your base spawn workers. And next those workers will need to be programmed to actually work. You need to direct them to go to the resources, explain them how to mine the resources, when to stop mining, and how to return the mined resources to your base. You will probably also want some soldiers and some other defenses, so those need to be spawned with their own special instructions as well.

Everything needs to be scripted well, as the game (and thus your screeps) runs on special servers, 24/7, so also when you are not playing yourself. Truly your personal, virtual, mini-AI colony.

The programming mostly occurs in JavaScript. This can be difficult for those like myself who do not know JavaScript, but even I managed to have some basic workers running up and down my screen in a matter of hours. Step by step, you will learn (be forced) to create different worker types (harvesters, builders, repairmen, and even some stupid soldiers) and even some basic colony management scripts (spawning workers, spending resources, upgrading stuff). In the mean time, you will silently learn some JavaScript while playing. As I put in more and more hours, I could even see how to improve on my earlier scripts. This makes screeps a fun and rewarding gaming and learning experience.

Do expect to run into frustrations though! If you’re no JavaScript expert you will personally create a lot of bugs. Of which the game by default send you messages, as your colony will get stuck overnight. Moreover, you will likely need to Google every single thing you want to do at the start. I found great help in this YouTube tutorial to get me started. Finally, you are only under nooby-protection for the first so-many hours, after which you will quickly get slaughtered by all the advanced multi-CPU players on the servers.

Heck, it was fun while it lasted : )

PS. I read here that, using WebAssembly, one could also compile code written in different languages and run it in Screeps: C/C++ or Rust code, as well as other supported languages.

Computers decode what humans see: Generating images from brain activity

Computers decode what humans see: Generating images from brain activity

I recently got pointed towards a 2017 paper on bioRxiv that blew my mind: three researchers at the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories at Kyoto, Japan, demonstrate how they trained a deep neural network to decode human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) patterns and then generate the stimulus images.

In simple words, the scholars used sophisticated machine learning to reconstruct the photo’s their research particpants saw based on their brain activity… INSANE! The below shows the analysis workflow, and an actual reconstructed image. More reconstructions follow further on.

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Figure 1 | Deep image reconstruction. Overview of deep image reconstruction is shown. The pixels’ values of the input image are optimized so that the DNN features of the image are similar to those decoded from fMRI activity. A deep generator network (DGN) is optionally combined with the DNN to produce natural-looking images, in which optimization is performed at the input space of the DGN. [original]
Three healthy young adults participated in two types of experiments: an image presentation experiment and an imagery experiment.

In the image presentation experiments, participants were presented with several natural images from the ImageNet database, with 40 images geometrical shapes, and with 10 images of black alphabetic characters. These visual stimuli were rear-projected onto a screen in an fMRI scanner bore. Data from each subject were collected over multiple scanning sessions spanning approximately 10 months. Images were flashed at 2 Hz for several seconds. In the imagery experiment, subjects were asked to visually imagine / remember one of 25 images of the presentation experiments. Subjects were
required to start imagining a target image after seeing some cue words.

In both experimental setups, fMRI data were collected using 3.0-Tesla Siemens MAGNETOM Verio scanner located at the Kokoro Research Center, Kyoto University.

The results, some of which I copied below, are plainly amazing.

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Figure 2 | Seen natural image reconstructions. Images with black and gray frames show presented and reconstructed images, respectively (reconstructed from VC activity). a) Reconstructions utilizing the DGN (using DNN1–8). Three reconstructed images
correspond to reconstructions from three subjects. b) Reconstructions with and without the DGN (DNN1–8). The first, second, and third rows show presented images, reconstructions with and without the DGN, respectively. c) Reconstruction quality of seen natural images (error bars, 95% confidence interval (C.I.) across samples; three subjects pooled; chance level, 50%). d)  Reconstructions using different combinations of DNN layers (without the DGN). e) Subjective assessment of reconstructions from different combinations of DNN layers (error bars, 95% C.I. across samples) [original]
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Figure 3 | Seen artificial shape reconstructions. Images with black and gray frames show presented and reconstructed images (DNN 1–8, without the DGN). a) Reconstructions for seen colored artificial shapes (VC activity). b, Reconstruction quality of colored artificial shapes. c) Reconstructions of colored artificial shapes obtained from multiple visual areas. d) Reconstruction quality of shape and colors for different visual areas. e) Reconstructions of alphabetical letters. f) Reconstruction quality for alphabetical letters. For b, d, f, error bars  indicate 95% C.I. across samples (three subjects pooled; chance level, 50%)  [original]
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Supplementary Figure 2 | Other examples of natural image reconstructions obtained with the DGN. Images with black and gray frames show presented and reconstructed images, respectively (reconstructed from VC activity using all DNN layers). Three reconstructed images correspond to reconstructions from three subjects. [original]
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Supplementary Figure 3 | Reconstructions through optimization processes. Reconstructed images obtained through the optimization processes are shown (reconstructed from VC activity of Subject 1 using all DNN layers and the DGN). Images with black and gray frames show presented and reconstructed images, respectively. [original]
There were many more examples of reconstructed images, as well as much more detailed information regarding the machine learning approach and experimental setup, so I strongly advise you check out the orginal paper.

I can’t even imagine what such technology would imply for society… Proper minority report stuff here.

Here’s the abstract as an additional teaser:

Abstract

Machine learning-based analysis of human functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) patterns has enabled the visualization of perceptual content. However, it has been limited to the reconstruction with low-level image bases (Miyawaki et al., 2008; Wen et al., 2016) or to the matching to exemplars (Naselaris et al., 2009; Nishimoto et al., 2011). Recent work showed that visual cortical activity can be decoded (translated) into hierarchical features of a deep neural network (DNN) for the same input image, providing a way to make use of the information from hierarchical visual features (Horikawa & Kamitani, 2017). Here, we present a novel image reconstruction method, in which the pixel values of an image are optimized to make its DNN features similar to those decoded from human brain activity at multiple layers. We found that the generated images resembled the stimulus images (both natural images and artificial shapes) and the subjective visual content during imagery. While our model was solely trained with natural images, our method successfully generalized the reconstruction to artificial shapes, indicating that our model indeed ‘reconstructs’ or ‘generates’ images from brain activity, not simply matches to exemplars. A natural image prior introduced by another deep neural network effectively rendered semantically meaningful details to reconstructions by constraining reconstructed images to be similar to natural images. Furthermore, human judgment of reconstructions suggests the effectiveness of combining multiple DNN layers to enhance visual quality of generated images. The results suggest that hierarchical visual information in the brain can be effectively combined to reconstruct perceptual and subjective images.

Identifying “Dirty” Twitter Bots with R and Python

Past week, I came across two programming initiatives to uncover Twitter bots and one attempt to identify fake Instagram accounts.

Mike Kearney developed the R package botornot which applies machine learning to estimate the probability that a Twitter user is a bot. His default model is a gradient boosted model trained using both users-level (bio, location, number of followers and friends, etc.) and tweets-level information (number of hashtags, mentions, capital letters, etc.). This model is 93.53% accurate when classifying bots and 95.32% accurate when classifying non-bots. His faster model uses only the user-level data and is 91.78% accurate when classifying bots and 92.61% accurate when classifying non-bots. Unfortunately, the models did not classify my account correctly (see below), but you should definitely test yourself and your friends via this Shiny application.

Fun fact: botornot can be integrated with Mike’s rtweet package

Scraping Dirty Bots

At around the same time, I read this very interesting blog by Andy Patel. Annoyed by the fake Twitter accounts that kept liking and sharing his tweets, Andy wrote a Python script called pronbot_search. It’s an iterative search algorithm which Andy seeded with the dozen fake Twitter accounts that he identified originally. Subsequently, the program iterated over the friends and followers of each of these fake users, looking for other accounts displaying similar traits (e.g., similar description, including an URL to a sex-website called “Dirty Tinder”).

Whenever a new account was discovered, it was added to the query list, and the process continued. Because of the Twitter API restrictions, the whole crawling process took literal days before Andy manually terminated it. The results are just amazing:

After a day, the results looked like so. Notice the weird clusters of relationships in this network. [original]
The full bot network uncovered by Andy included 22.000 fake Twitter accounts:

At the end of the weekend of March 10th, Andy had to stop the scraper after running for several days even though he had only processed 18% of the networks of the 22.000 included Twitter bots [original]
The bot network on Twitter is probably enormous! Zooming in on the network, Andy notes that:

Pretty much the same pattern I’d seen after one day of crawling still existed after one week. Just a few of the clusters weren’t “flower” shaped.

Andy Patel, March 2018, link

Zoomed in to a specific part of the network you can see the separate clusters of bots doing little more than liking each others messages. [original]
In his blog, Andy continues to look at all kind of data on these fake accounts. I found most striking that many of these account are years and years old already. Potentially, Twitter can use Mike Kearney’s botornot application to spot and remove them!

Most of the bots in the Dirty Tinder network found by Andy Patel were 3 to 8 years old already. [original]
Andy was nice enough to share the data on these bot accounts here, for you to play with. His Python code is stored in the same github repo and more details around this project you can read in his original blog.

Fake Instagram Accounts

Finally, SRFdata (Timo Grossenbacher) attempted to uncover fake Instagram followers among the 7 million followers in the network of 115 important Swiss Instagram influencers in R. Magi Metrics was used to retrieve information for public Instagram accounts and rvest for private accounts. Next, clear fake accounts (e.g., little followers, following many, no posts, no profile picture, numbers in name) were labelled manually, and approximately 10% of the inspected 1000 accounts appeared fake. Finally, they trained a random forest model to classify fake accounts with a sensitivity (true negative) rate of 77.4% and an overall accuracy of around 94%.

pix2code: teaching AI to build apps

Last May, Tony Beltramelli of Ulzard Technologies presented his latest algorithm pix2code at the NIPS conference. Put simply, the algorithm looks at a picture of a graphical user interface (i.e., the layout of an app), and determines via an iterative process what the underlying code likely looks like.

Afbeeldingsresultaat voor user interface
Graphical user interface examples (Google Images)

Please watchUlzard’s pix2code demo video or the third-party summary at the bottom of this blog. My undertanding is that pix2code is based on convolutional and recurrent neural networks (long explanation video) in combination with long short-term memory (short explanation video). Based on a single input image, pix2code can generate code that is 77% accurate and it works for three of the larger platforms (i.e. iOS, Android and web-based technologies).

The input and output of pix2code

Obviously, this is groundbreaking technology. When further developed, pix2code not only increases the speed with which society is automated/robotized but it also further expands the automation to more complex and highly needed tasks, such as programming and web/app development.

Here you can read the full academic paper on pix2code.

Below is the official demo reviewed by another data enthusiast with commentary and some additional food for thought.

Read here some of my other blogs on neural networks and robotization: