{"id":343572,"date":"2017-06-14T05:00:54","date_gmt":"2017-06-13T21:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techcrunch.com\/?p=1499019"},"modified":"2017-06-14T05:00:54","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T21:00:54","slug":"ai-on-your-lock-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/asmawisham\/ai-on-your-lock-screen\/","title":{"rendered":"AI on your lock screen"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For the last 10 years, news feeds have been the main way \u2014 the mainstream user interface \u2014 to discover interesting and relevant digital content.\u00a0Today, news feeds, from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, are surfacing the interesting news and moments from\u00a0your social network and favorite sources.<\/p>\n

This is about to change. The push notifications on the lock screen of your personal mobile device are turning your lock screen into the new news\u00a0feed. The lock screen is thus becoming the pivotal interface to access and experience any of the updates and content that you consider to be\u00a0worth noticing.<\/p>\n

Therefore, your lock screen and your mobile device, not the apps, become the nexus for all the personal data flows, feeding machine learning\u00a0algorithms soon running also on your personal hardware.<\/p>\n

This is a fundamental change. It will change the way your digital experience is personalized. It will change the way AI systems can learn from\u00a0you. And it will change the power balance between the big industry behemoths such as Facebook, Google and Apple.<\/p>\n

Battle for the lock screen<\/h2>\n

We\u2019ve had push notifications bubbling under for some time now. Back in 2014, Christopher Mims of The Wall Street Journal predicted<\/a> a big\u00a0success to the Yo app because of the way it used the simple power of push notifications.<\/p>\n

Yo didn\u2019t rise to the occasion, but the applications and influence of push notifications has been growing ever since. Today, the landscape for push notifications\u00a0is changing rapidly. Both Android and iOS have introduced updates on push features in a considerably fast pace.<\/p>\n

Notifications are transforming from simple text-based boxes into adaptive elements that allow a richer and more nuanced experience, thus-called\u00a0\u201crich notifications.\u201d Designers and developers are embracing these new possibilities, enabling a more engaging user experience. Today\u2019s\u00a0notifications can contain text formatting, bigger images, video and updating infographics, as well as interactive features such as sharing. As a result,\u00a0users are consuming more and more content directly on their lock screen.<\/p>\n

The lock screen has become the place where your attention needs to be caught. And thus, every app is racing to invent more meaningful and\u00a0engaging notifications. Nic Newman from Oxford\u2019s Reuters Institute calls this \u201cthe battle for the lockscreen.\u201d<\/a> In the process, applications are turning into micro-platforms that can provide notifications as branded and optimized mini-products.<\/p>\n

From rich notifications to smart notifications<\/h2>\n

The new richer interactions on your lock screen presents a new user interface paradigm and will have a major affect on personalization.<\/p>\n

By appearing automatically on your lock screen, push notifications enable interesting things to find you<\/a>, rather than the other way around. At the same time, the lock screen isn\u2019t tied\u00a0into presenting things in a chronological order. Push notifications allow you to experience things ambiently: notifications materialize on your lock\u00a0screen automatically without your explicit action.<\/p>\n

Importantly, you do not need to open the app to access content. Today, notifications from a news app allow you to follow the\u00a0developing news event directly on your lock screen. You can participate in a conversation, check photos, watch a live video and share content\u00a0without opening the app.<\/p>\n

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With a personalized lock screen feed your device has the potential to get truly smart and personal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

As we\u2019ve seen in the news feeds of Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, personalization algorithms are needed to curate the continuously growing\u00a0flow of updates. Soon your lock screen is filtered by personalization algorithms, too.<\/p>\n

Already, as people\u2019s interactions are moving from the apps to the lock screen, both iOS and Android have started to automatize the way\u00a0things are presented and accessed on the lock screen. Android provides automatically triggered smart notification bundles that collect together\u00a0useful notifications. iPhone highlights apps based on your personal context, such as time and location. On both platforms, widgets are part of\u00a0this development, serving richer interactions and more content without opening the app.<\/p>\n

As an extension of you, your personal mobile device contains all your apps, thus making it a treasure trove of personal data. As an interface, the lock screen\u00a0makes it possible to combine the data of your app-specific interactions with the rich contextual data provided by your device.<\/p>\n

Concretely, the lock screen will introduce a new algorithmic layer for personalization. The lock screen captures your social interactions and\u00a0content consumption patterns, your favorite apps, movies, videos, music and much more. This rich data will be used to feed machine learning\u00a0systems to make personal suggestions and recommendations more relevant and contextual.<\/p>\n

Soon your lock screen will filter push notifications actively and automatically, deciding which updates, suggestions, messages, apps, movies,\u00a0recipes \u2014 and ads \u2014 are visible to you. With a personalized lock screen feed your device has the potential to get truly smart and personal.<\/p>\n

From smart notifications to personal AI<\/h2>\n

When the interactions on your lock screen become richer, the data they generate becomes richer, too. Your mobile device will learn from\u00a0everything you do more accurately than ever before.<\/p>\n

This introduces a new opportunity to start really understanding you as a unique individual and thus go beyond the existing personalization gaps<\/a>. Any individual app, even Facebook, couldn\u2019t and can\u2019t achieve\u00a0this today (note: Facebook tried unsuccessfully to create their own mobile device).<\/p>\n

Personal hardware is becoming an essential part of personalization and machine learning.<\/p>\n

As Gary Marcus, the founder of Geometric Intelligence and NYU professor has pointed out, AI systems should be able to learn from a\u00a0lesser amount of data<\/a>. They should be able to learn\u00a0like a child, continuously, iteratively and from everything, being able to generalize, apply and extrapolate these learnings in a useful way.<\/p>\n

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The personalized lock screen creates a unique interface connecting you and your personal AI running on your most personal device.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

What if the missing piece for creating such a machine learning system has been a personal AI \u2014 an algorithmic angel<\/a>, if you will\u00a0\u2014 living and running on your most personal hardware, thus being able to learn\u00a0with you like a child would.<\/p>\n

Such a personal AI running and evolving with you on your personal device is taught and fed continuously by your rich interactions and\u00a0contextual data. It evolves by iterating itself based on your feedback and personal patterns.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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While learning directly from you, personal AI can\u00a0utilize specialized internal and external agents that inhabit various digital environments, simultaneously utilizing the computing power in the\u00a0cloud. In addition, these individual agents can process and provide domain-specific data, information and recommendations, from stock market\u00a0tips to optimized travel options. The best versions of your personal AI collaborate and compete to evolve into better versions of themselves.<\/p>\n

Who controls your personal AI?<\/h2>\n

Everything that happens on the lock screen is captured and can be used to enhance your experience \u2014 not directly by Facebook and other apps,\u00a0but mainly by Google and Apple. Google Assistant and Siri will get smarter faster.<\/p>\n

Google is already bringing machine learning into their devices using their own algorithms and hardware. Simultaneously, they are offering\u00a0developer tools to optimize notifications. Apple is following suit. Samsung is trying to keep up with its recent acquisition of Viv, \u201cthe next-gen AI\u00a0assistant.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

Will personal AI become your algorithmic angel, making sure you maintain your personal agency in tomorrow\u2019s algorithmic reality? Or will it just\u00a0turn your personal device into an ultimate marketing experience, thus trying to affect every decision you make?<\/p>\n

The new age of personalized lock screen and personal AI makes the idea of algorithmic angels, your personally controlled algorithms, more\u00a0timely than ever. Ethical committees and clauses are starting, but they don\u2019t suffice. As our decision-making is augmented by intelligent machine learning\u00a0systems, we need explainable algorithms, interfaces and methods to guide and control these smart entities in an explicit and comprehensible\u00a0way.<\/p>\n

The lock screen as a user interface provides a new interface to do so.<\/p>\n

What if you swipe far enough left on your iPhone to see the settings and preferences of your personal AI? What if you can access various\u00a0versions of these AIs and decide which one is active for a particular moment just by swiping your lock screen? Maybe you can have a\u00a0mundane chat about the reasoning behind your AIs suggestions, or then you use intuitive gestures, haptics and sounds to communicate with\u00a0each other in a mutually comprehensible manner.<\/p>\n

The ultimate \u201cconversational UI\u201d won\u2019t be an app or a bot that you need to open or call for. It\u2019s something that\u2019s present and available all the\u00a0time, engaging in a continuous \u201cdialog\u201d with you and your digital and physical environments.<\/p>\n

The personalized lock screen creates a unique interface connecting you and your personal AI running on your most personal device. This opens\u00a0up completely new opportunities for designing next-generation human-machine communication methods and interfaces that can be applied from\u00a0mobile devices to AR and VR environments. Simultaneously it is the next step to augment human and machine thinking in an inseparable way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\" For the last 10 years, news feeds have been the main way — the mainstream user interface — to discover interesting and relevant digital content.\u00a0Today, news feeds, from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest, are surfacing the interesting news and moments from\u00a0your social network and favorite sources. This is about to change. Read More<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

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