Happy New Year! This is Harnham’s weekly news digest, the place to come for a quick breakdown of the week’s top news stories from the world of data and analytics.
TechRepublic: How IT can prepare for the coming hybrid work environment
As the world continues to feel the pressures of COVID-19 , remote working is no longer the temporary and novel approach to work that we had envisaged.
Vaccines are being approved and healthcare professionals are supporting its rollout across the globe. And, as each dose is administered, we move one step closer to what is likely to become a hybrid working situation. It is therefore pressing for tech leaders to prepare for a shift to this style of work.
TechRepublic have explored how these leaders need to ensure that their technology is agile enough to support the needs of the workforce. Yet they also need to look beyond the tech, to redefine how teams work together.
Read the full article
here.
Forbes: 350 CMOs: 3 Marketing Supertrends For 2021 ... And The No-Hype Future Of Marketing Tech
We’re a big fan of this piece from John Koetsier, writing for Forbes. He describes how the marketing trends of the year ahead will take a focus on the holistic transformation in a digital-first world. Drawing on the thoughts of a range of Chief Marketing Officers, Koetsier explores that a mixture of new, emerging technologies will see the evolution of marketing to put digital right at the core.
Openpath CMO Kieran Hannon, “Now meaningful customer-centric digital transformation can accelerate.”
Suzanne Kounkel, Chief Marketing Officer for Deloitte, “Fusion is the new ecosystem. Fusion is the art of bringing together new business partnerships, customer insights, and digital platforms to create ecosystems.”
Tristan Dion Chen, CMO of University Credit Union, “It is without a doubt crucial to recognize how COVID-19 has ushered in a strong sense of empathy as a driving force within the marketing industry.”
The marketing industry is set to experience continued innovation and growth.
Read more on this
here.
ZDNet: Facial recognition: Now algorithms can see through face masks
Last year was a year unlike any other. The complete shift in the way we have had to go about our day-to-day lives, brought about by the ongoing implications of the COVID-19, is still being felt now. One of these changes to our lives is the compulsory requirement to wear a face mask when leaving home.
Now, of course, this requirement has brought up some challenges for using our technology, such as banking and payment applications, which need facial recognition to activate it! However, ZDNet have reported that algorithms can now see-through face masks (pretty sweet, right?)
The US Department of Homeland Security has carried out trials to test whether facial recognition algorithms could correctly identify masked individuals. This could be a real support for travel, banking and mobile technology in the future.
Read more on the trial
here.
Towards Data Science: Predicting the outcome of NBA games with Machine Learning
The NBA season is back and well underway. Will the Los Angeles Lakers take the top spot again this year? Lots of fans will be making their own predictions as the season begins, but new research has been used to help predict the outcome of NBA games – with the help of the insightful tech that is machine learning.
Focusing on five core steps, the team at ‘Towards Data Science’ used Big Data Analytics to help them predict the outcome of games:
- Scraping Relevant Data
- Cleaning and Processing the Data
- Feature Engineering
- Data Analysis
- Predictions
Through the research, they found that the best published model had a prediction accuracy of 74.1 per cent (for playoff outcomes), with most others achieving an upper bound between 66–72 per cent accuracy. That’s scarily good!
Click
here to read more on the study and see the statistics in action.
We've loved seeing all the news from Data and Analytics in the past week, it’s a market full of exciting and dynamic opportunities. To learn more about our work in this space, get in touch with us at
info@harnham.com.