Understanding human factors are especially important as we develop new models for remote work. Managers could use human factors research to shape a remote work environment with fewer sustained work hours and fewer concurrent projects that in turn fosters more secure development practices.

Human Factors when Developing new methods for Remote Work

Software sustainment groups often churn out fixes that are narrowly scoped, without consideration for the global view. Effective software solutions require collaboration, leverage experience, and provide analysis of the architecture and design applied to meet the requirements.Some ‘just works’ patterns arise from time pressures, narrow mindsets, and lack of experience.

Overcoming the 'Just Works' Mindset

<ol><li>Learn and apply relevant patterns and idioms.</li><li>Create a defined context for your coding effort.</li><li>Learn and apply modern quality assurance practices and tools.</li></ol>

Overcoming the ‘Just works’ mindset

Engineering large, complex systems and systems-of-systems cannot be done in isolation. Engineers must create interfaces among software components and subsystems and set expectations for how the systems may behave when interacting. Groups of strong individual contributors accustomed to working problems alone may not easily transition to this collaborative setting.

Moving from Individual Contributors to a Collaborative Mindset

Team-building exercises can be viewed as soft by some organizations. However, their value has been proved through research showing that people are more likely to share an idea and accept feedback from someone with whom they regularly engage on topics not directly related to work.

Team Building Exercises

COVID-19 has created social distancing protocols that mandate remote work for many employees. The extra effort needed to stay connected to team members is more widely understood. Savvy managers will have remote members at the top of their checklists when making decisions that affect their teams, demonstrating that priority to the entire team in everyday actions. Virtual brown bag lunch situations and happy hours have enabled connections and team building, and have generally positive effects on well-being.

Covid and Remote Work

<ul><li dir = "auto">The array of contributors that feed into a large software effort create a number of potential concerns.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">Software delivered from contributors will be of varying quality, style, and structure.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">The integration into a larger system creates the potential for complex issues.&nbsp;</li><li dir = "auto">Engineering organizations that feed into the DoD do not always deliver systems that include comprehensive architecture and design considerations.</li></ul>Solution: Accept that large systems may require extra people power to integrate, test, and maintain. Over time, some engineers develop a deep, organic understanding of a system.

DoD Code at Large Vs. General Issues

In organizations where professional-development opportunities are limited, team members’ working problems alone will not develop and enhance their skills and may not advance their careers. One solution is to Incentivize teams through alignment with industry pay practices. Organizations can create rewards for teams and individuals who improve product iteration latency through the use of reuse, COTS, open-source, and open standards.

Government Employment Complexities

It is important to know more about these issues because an increasing amount of empirical evidence points us in this direction. Also, we believe that there is a need to change what is made available to the practitioners today in terms of software engineering knowledge, and make them realize the importance of these issues and incorporate them into everyday project development and management practices.

The Importance of People Issues

Stashed ideas

Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

Organizations today are often faced with a challenge: How do we move forward even if we don’t have all of the answers yet? A data engineer can have an impact across the application, from application performance to the semantics and meaning of the data flowing across the system.
AI team members must be curious and humble enough to acknowledge that they don’t have all the answers and identify who can reach across different boundaries within a system to track down an answer.

Accept that no one has all the answers

A common refrain for many organizations, and government organizations, in particular, is that building an AI-ready workforce is particularly challenging because it is impossible to match <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/19/technology/artificial-intelligence-salaries-openai.html" target="_self">the salaries offered by large, private-sector</a> companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Salary discrepancies between industry and government are unlikely to change any time soon, however.&nbsp; Many individuals <a href="https://hbr.org/2018/11/9-out-of-10-people-are-willing-to-earn-less-money-to-do-more-meaningful-work" target="_self">choose meaningful work over a larger salary</a>.

Draw talent into your problems

For many organizations, the workforce needs to depend on where they are in adopting, deploying, and maintaining AI. Organizations just starting out on their AI journey may have a large set of data that they have been collecting over the years, and they are now trying to identify what predictions they can make from it. Leaders need to move away from checklist-driven hiring practices and focus more on skills that showcase a candidate’s ability to work on a team, feel comfortable with ambiguity, and move forward in a rapidly changing environment.&nbsp;

Match your workforce needs to your development needs

Too often when organizations seek to hire talent in the AI space, they assume they should focus on a couple of schools. In our experience, robust, secure, scalable, and human-centred AI systems are ones that incorporate varied perspectives and data. AI systems learn from examples, so it helps to have a diverse team that can bring different lenses to a problem and identify appropriate datasets to train the AI system on.&nbsp; It is therefore critical to consider who can help translate across these different roles or how teams invest time in developing shared language over time.

Focus on hiring and supporting diverse talent.

AI technologies are evolving so quickly that any specific requirements might soon be overcome by advancement. For that reason, organizations looking to adopt AI need to grow a culture of learning. On the hiring side, that also means looking for people with a sense of curiosity.&nbsp;In the early days of adopting any new technology, and AI, in particular, it is often more helpful to have individuals with the curiosity and willingness to try things that are outside their traditional bounds to figure out solutions to problems.&nbsp;

Help your talent learn how to learn

Organizations also need to focus on helping existing employees learn how to learn. The expectation cannot be that everyone will be able to easily add learning on top of days filled with back-to-back meetings and never-ending lists for deliverables. Organization leaders have to think about ways they can create the structure to enable learning behaviours for individuals and teams.

New Ways To Think

To help individuals learn how to learn, managers can ask themselves the following questions:<ul><li>What is our shared vision for leveraging AI? What outcomes are we hoping to achieve?</li><li>How am I creating opportunities for people to learn and grow? How am I establishing psychological safety to encourage risk-taking?</li><li>Am I there and present when my team members have questions about where to go next? Who else can provide guidance?</li><li>How do I help my team see things they haven’t previously seen, ask new questions, or curate a set of resources?</li></ul>

Enabling Learning

Organizations today are working to assemble teams that can make bespoke pieces of AI, leverage them towards specific outcomes, and endlessly tune system components to arrive at assured AI systems, able to be deployed in a variety of different environments.&nbsp;To develop such systems, organizations and leaders will have to take action to develop a workforce that has the necessary skillsets, mindsets, and an array of experiences.&nbsp;Unfortunately, there is no perfected recipe and we at the SEI are trying to navigate the growth of our workforce to support our AI engineering portfolio.&nbsp;&nbsp;

The Starting Point for an AI-Ready Workforce

5 Ways to Start Growing an AI-Ready Workforce

"This sounds difficult, because it will be. The world has never done anything quite this big."

Every year, about 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases are added to our atmosphere, with the number still increasing.Zero is the amount we need to aim for in order to stop climate change.

51 Billion to Zero

Contrary to popular belief, emissions caused by car traffic and aviation only make up around 16% of all greenhouse gases emitted.The remaining 84% are caused by the production of food, electricity and building materials, as well as air conditioning.

Causes of Global Warming

Generating electricity causes 27% of greenhouse gas emissions.Today, fossil fuels account for two-thirds of all electricity generated worldwide. Getting all this energy from clean sources requires breakthroughs in science, for example in nuclear fusion and carbon capture.Because the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, we also need more efficient batteries to store solar and wind generated electricity.

1 - How we plug in

Production of plastics, concrete and steel causes 31% of greenhouse gas emissions.By 2060, urbanization will have approximately doubled. That's the equivalent of putting up another New York City every month.Currently, the only way to make concrete and steel involves tremendous carbon emissions. We need to electrify these processes and use materials more efficiently.

2 - How we make things

Food production causes 19% of greenhouse gas emissions.In agriculture, the main culprit isn't carbon dioxide, but methane. It causes 28 times more warming per molecule than carbon emissions.As funny as it sounds, 4% of global warming is due to cows farting and burping methane - that's the same amount of what ship and airplane traffic causes combined!So, to lower these numbers, we need to eat more plant-based and waste less food.

3 - How we grow things

Vehicle traffic causes 16% of greenhouse gas emissions.For short-distance vehicles, like cars and buses, going all-electric is an efficient alternative to gasoline.Long-distance vehicles, like trucks and planes, might have to switch to advanced bio- or electrofuels. Ships could rely more on atomic energy, like plenty submarines and aircraft carriers do.

4 - How we get around

Air conditioning causes 7% of greenhouse gas emissions.With climate change warming the earth more and more, A/C demand is on the rise.The biggest problem here are the coolants used to transfer the heat. Especially in cheap A/C units, so-called F-gases leak out into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.Government policies and incentives are needed for more climate-friendly devices to be used.

5 - How we keep cool and warm

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • In this urgent, authoritative book, Bill Gates sets out a wide-ranging, practical—and accessible—plan for how the world can get to zero greenhouse gas emissions in time to avoid a climate catastrophe. Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet's slide to certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions—suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise. As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.

Environment

How to Avoid a Climate Disaster

Where Am I? What time is it? Where am I? How are you? These are just a few examples of questions people ask Google. We often do a quick search to double-check something we are unsure of and in the meantime, Google is busy collecting all that information.

Some Common Questions 

Worldwide searches on Google often feature questions about today, such as: <ul><li>What day is today? </li><li>Is today a holiday? </li><li>What is the weather like today? </li> </ul>While it’s quite intuitive to know why people want to know what kind of weather to expect during the day, it’s interesting to see how easy it can be to lose track of time and having to check what day of the week it is or if a holiday we had forgotten about is magically happening today and we don’t have to go to work.

Questions about Today

The most commonly asked questions about social media are not about how to use them but how to delete profiles:<ul><li>How to delete an Instagram account</li><li>How to delete Snapchat account</li><li>How to delete a Facebook account</li><li>How to deactivate Facebook.</li></ul>It must be said that social media profiles don’t place a “delete profile” button in a prominent place. Understandably, the ultimate goal of social media companies is to keep users on their platforms for the longest possible time and drive engagement.These searches often direct to specific help pages with instructions on how to leave a social media platform.

Questions about Social Media

The frequency of questions about weight is probably a sign that, as a society, we are overly focused on our physical appearance. There may be different explanations behind searching for weight loss tips and advice, for example when we are exposed to images of successful, wealthy, and slim people that may make us feel insecure about the way we look.There may also be genuine reasons to search for ways to lose weight.However, in such cases, the best course of action is to speak to a medical professional first. Search results for weight loss will likely not be suitable for many people.

Questions about Weight

Quite a few questions related to languages as well as grammar. For example: <ul><li>What is the meaning of </li><li>What is an adjective? </li><li>What is a noun? </li><li>How to pronounce </li><li>What is a verb? </li> </ul>There are also prompts to use Google Translate to look up a word or sentence in a different language. In the United States, a popular search question is “how to pronounce”.

Language and Grammar

Questions about converting units of measurement are particularly popular in the United States, where imperial measurements are used instead of metric units. Questions include: <ul><li>How many ounces in a cup? </li><li>How many ounces in a gallon? </li><li>How many liters in a gallon? </li><li>How many ounces in a pound? </li><li>How many grams in an ounce? </li><li>How many cups in a quart? </li><li>How many quarts in a gallon? </li><li>How many centimeters in an inch? </li> </ul>These types of queries often relate to cooking recipes. On a similar note, a popular question is also how long to boil eggs for.

Units of Measurement

People are not just searching for ways to get slimmer or richer (or who is the wealthiest person in the world): they are also doing a bit of soul searching.It might be surprising to find these questions in the list of most Googled:<ul><li>Where can I find happiness?</li><li>What is love?</li></ul>This is just a selection of questions, but it can give us some ideas of the way we think. Questions tend to change over time and it will be fascinating to see what will be trending in the next few years. Let’s hope that meaningful questions will still be there while others about quick lifestyle fixes and diets .

Meaning of Life

World Wide Web

Weird Questions People Ask Google

... so they can leverage the considerable benefits to be gained through greater knowledge of their customers, explore new markets, and counteract new, AI-driven companies that might seek their market share.
To extract the benefits from AI while mitigating the risks, companies must ensure that they are sufficiently agile so they can adopt best practices to create responsible transformation with AI.

All companies will need to become “AI companies”

<ol><li>The whole organization must be engaged with the AI strategy, which involves a total organizational review and potential changes.</li><li>All employees need education and training to understand how AI is used in the company so that diverse teams can be created to manage AI design, development, and use. Additionally, employees should understand how the use of AI will impact their work and potentially help them do their jobs.</li><li>Responsibility for AI products does not end at the point of sale: Companies must engage in proactive responsible AI audits for all ideas and products before development and deployment.</li></ol>

The three principles of responsible AI

Organizations must recognize the drawbacks that some algorithms bring into the screening and hiring process as a result of the way they are trained, which can have a direct impact on outcomes such as diversity and inclusion.&nbsp;<ul><li>When it comes to reskilling and retaining employees, AI can be helpful to companies when deployed for screening and training employees for new positions.&nbsp;</li><li>Many employees have skills that can be built upon to cross into a new position, but companies often don’t realize the full extent of their employees’ capabilities.</li><li>For companies seeking to attract and retain employees with AI skills, it helps to develop responsible AI policies, because many of the most talented AI designers and developers value their company’s positions on ethics and transparency in their work.&nbsp;</li></ul>

Responsible AI and the employee experience

<ul><li>It’s more important than ever that companies develop a strategy around responsible AI and communicate it well to internal and external stakeholders in order to maintain accountability.&nbsp;</li><li>Companies should also keep in mind that a one-size-fits-all approach does not always work with emerging technology; instead, they need to match the right AI solution to the right customers and create business offerings that align with customer needs.</li><li>Startups with responsible AI strategies will be more valuable. The purchase of a responsible AI startup may depend on the startup’s approval of the acquirer’s apprcoach. Investors may refuse to buy stock in companies that don’t have responsible AI. Indeed, there may be an increase in activist investors in this space.</li></ul>

Responsible AI for customers and stakeholders

To gain traction throughout an organization, support for responsible AI needs to come from its leadership. Unfortunately, many board members and executive teams lack an understanding of AI. The World Economic Forum created a toolkit for boards to learn about the different oversight responsibilities in companies involved with AI. They can use it to understand how responsible AI can be adopted across different areas of the business — including branding, competitive and customer strategies, cybersecurity, governance, operations, human resources, and corporate social responsibility — and prevent ethical issues from taking hold.

Responsible AI needs support at the top

Companies adopting the best practices of responsible AI extract benefits while mitigating AI’s risks.

technologyandthefuture

Human Factors when Developing new methods for Remote Work

Navigating People Concerns when Transitioning from Sustainment to Engineering Software-Reliant Systems

Accept that no one has all the answers

5 Ways to Start Growing an AI-Ready Workforce