Tag: VRM Day

Personal AI at VRM Day and IIW

March 20, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Prompt: A woman uses personal AI to know, get control of, and put to better use all available data about her property, health, finances, contacts, calendar, subscriptions, shopping, travel, and work. Via Microsoft Copilot Designer, with spelling corrections by the author.

Most AI news is about what the giants (OpenAI/Microsoft, Meta, Google/Apple, Amazon, Adobe, Nvidia) are doing (seven $trillion, anyone?), or what AI is doing for business (all of Forbes’ AI 50). Against all that, personal AI appears to be about where personal computing was in 1974: no longer an oxymoron but discussed more than delivered.

For evidence, look up “personal AI.” All the results will be about business (see here and here) or “assistants” that are just suction cups on the tentacles of giants (Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, Bixby), or wannabes that do the same kind of thing (Lindy, Hound, DataBot).

There may be others, but three exceptions I know are Kin, Personal AI and Pi.

Personal AI is finding its most promoted early uses on the side of business more than the side of customers. Zapier, for example, explains that Personal AI “can be used as a productivity or business tool.”

Kin and Pi are personal assistants that help you with your life by surveilling your activities for your own benefit. I’ve signed up for both, but have only experienced Pit,” or “just vent,” when I ask it to help me with the stuff outlined in (and under) the AI-generated image above, it wants to hook me up with a bunch of siloed platforms that cost money, or to do geeky things (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Python on my own computer. Provisional conclusion: Pi means well, but the tools aren’t there yet. [Later… Looks like it’s going to morph into some kind of B2B thing, or be abandoned outright, now that Inflection AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman is gone to Microsoft. Hmm… will Microsoft do what we’d like in this space?]

Open source approaches are out there: OpenDAN, Khoj, Kwaai , and Llama are four, and I know at least one will be at VRM Day and IIW.

So, since personal AI may finally be what pushes VRM into becoming a Real Thing, we’ll make it the focus of our next VRM Day.

As always, VRM Day will precede IIW in the same location: the Boole Room of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, just off Highway 101 in the heart of Silicon Valley. It’ll be on Monday, 15 April, and start at 9am. There’s a Starbucks across the street and ample parking because the museum is officially closed on Mondays, but the door is open. We lunch outdoors (it’s always clear) at the sports bar on the other corner.

Registration is open now at this Eventbrite link:

https://vrmday2024a.eventbrite.com

You can also just show up, but registering gives us a rough headcount, which is helpful for bringing in the right number of chairs and stuff like that.

See you there!

 

VRM Day: Let’s talk UMA and terms

August 29, 2015 / / 3 Comments

VRM Day and IIW are coming up in October: VRM Day on the 26th, and IIW on the 27th-29th. As always, both are at the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley. Also, as always, we would like to focus  VRM day on issues that will be discussed and pushed forward (by word and code) on the following days at IIW.

I see two.

The first isUMA-logo UMA, for User Managed Access. UMA is the brainchild of Eve Maler, one of the most creative minds in the Digital Identity field. (And possibly its best singer as well.) The site explains, “User-Managed Access (UMA) is an award-winning OAuth-based protocol designed to give a web user a unified control point for authorizing who and what can get access to their online personal data, content, and services, no matter where all those things live on the web. Read the spec, join the group, check out the implementations, follow us on Twitter, like us onFacebook, get involved!”

Which a number of us in the #VRM community already are — enough, in fact, to lead discussion on VRM Day.

In Regaining Control of Our Data with User-Managed Access, Phil Windley calls VRM “a perfect example of the kind of place where UMA could have a big impact. VRM is giving customers tools for managing their interactions with vendors. That sounds, in large part, like a permissioning task. And UMA could be a key piece of technology for unifying various VRM efforts.”

For example, “Most of us hate seeing ads getting in the way of what we’re trying to do online. The problem is that even with the best “targeting” technology, most of the ads you see are wasted. You don’t want to see them. UMA could be used to send much stronger signals to vendors by granting permission for them to access information would let them help me and, in the process, make more money.”

We call those signals “intentcasting.”

Yet, even though our wiki lists almost two dozen intentcasting developers, all of them roll their own code. As a result, all of them have limited success. This argues for looking at UMA as one way they can  substantiate the category together.

A large amount of activity is going into UMA and health care, which is perhaps the biggest VRM “vertical.” (Since it involves all of us, and what matters most to our being active on the planet.)

The second topic is terms. These can take two forms: ones individuals can assert (which on the wiki we call EmanciTerm); and truly user- and customer-friendly ones sites and services can assert. (Along with truly agreeable privacy policies on both sides.)

At last Fall’s VRM Day, we came up with one possible approach, which looked like this on the whiteboard:

UserTerms1This was posted on Customer Commons, which is designed to serve the same purpose for individual terms as Creative Commons does for individual artists’ copyright terms. We can do the same this time.

Lately Meeco has come out with terms individuals can set. And there are others in the works as well. (One in particular will be of special interest, but it’s not public yet. I expect it will be, by VRM Day.)

So be sure to register soon. Space is limited.

Bonus links/tweets: here and here.

 

 

© 2024 ProjectVRM

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑