The Turing Test: #PepperatIE
I first met IE Business School Big Data & Analytics lecturer Ms. Christina Stathopoulos in June last year at an IE faculty reunion, during which I told her about some of my communications initiatives, such as IE Humanities in @ minute, The other side of IE alumni, The other side of IE professors, and so forth. A few days later, Ms. Stathopoulos contacted me via Linkedin to explore the possibility of shooting a video. We then initiated a long-distance conversation that led to any number of postponed meetings due to Ms. Stathopoulos’s extremely busy agenda: apart from her IE duties, she has a demanding job at Google and keeps busy with myriad other projects. Eventually we were able to meet again a few months later: on October 29th to be precise.
When we finally sat down to discuss her video, I discovered that Ms. Stathopoulos is among many things, a bookworm, so we automatically connected and had soon agreed on doing something about the thorny issue of the dialogue between the worlds of technology and the humanities, or as Scott Hartley describes it, between the fuzzies and the techies.
That was the easy part, but from that initial agreement to getting round to filming took a while longer, but we persevered and managed to shoot the video on March 15. I hope you enjoy it. I think the wait was more than worth it.
Please let us know which of the three poems #PepperatIE is reading in this video you think were written by the robot. And if you want to see part of what keeps Ms. Stathopoulos busy, check out her #bookaweekchallenge
P.S: this video wouldn’t have been possible without the invaluable help of Carlos Ernesto Muñoz Sanz, a data specialist at IE, and who programmed #PepperatIE to read the poems and move around…
Digital Humanities
In this video Digital Humanities Prof. Susana Torres proposes a new approach to the humanities because, she says, today’s students are iconic – they learn from what they see.
This is just one of several reasons she believes that in this digital era the humanities matter more than ever.
Prof. Torres specializes in medieval Russian literature and culture, focusing particularly on the survival of oral tradition or lore and the endurance of cultural models, as well as on the theory of literary genres. She has conducted her research in Cambridge, Paris and Columbus (Ohio).
She has published extensively on medieval Slavic culture and literature. Part of her research undertaken in recent years is the subject of her latest book “A Quest for Glory: Heroism in Medieval Russia” (Slavica, Bloomington, Indiana) due out shortly. She is currently working on a new book.
A Poker Game
Here Norman Kurtis, professor of consumer insights & behavior at IE Business School, talks about poker and how players’ behavior is similar to that of consumers in general. He says, for instance, that the concept of aversion, which means that the amount of suffering most consumers experience when they lose $100, is greater than the amount of joy they experience when given $100, is also seen in poker. His main point though is that the biggest change in the market research industry in the past 50 years is not the advent of online research, but rather the increased access to more relevant information from different sources that tell a holistic story (traditional research data, transactional data, social media data, web data, etc.).
Prof. Kurtis is half American, half Spanish, and has over 20 years of experience helping brands ask the right questions from a strategy, marketing and consumer insights perspective. He has worked at American Express in New York, at Accenture as an associate partner, and he was the CEO for Spain of marketing & market research agencies like Kantar and Ipsos… He is currently the vice dean of behavior & human development at IE School of Human Sciences and Technology. He holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Notre Dame and an MBA from London Business School.
Don’t miss seeing him play poker. Who do you think won? Anyway, don’t believe everything you see…!
