Though we are fighting it, summer is just about winding down - and students of all ages are getting ready for a new school year come September. If you are one of those heading back to school - or even if you are inspired to learn something new this time of year - we have put together a “Fall Reading List” of great books to cozy up to as fall heads our way.
Enjoy - and we hope these books inspire you to learn something new!
1) Rethink Your Marketing: 7 Strategies to Unleash Revenue Growth, by Tom Shapiro
If your business is stagnant or your marketing efforts have you frustrated, get ready to turn things around. Rethink Your Marketing teaches you 7 strategies to identify the specific levers of your marketing that will lead to revenue growth. Along with interviews of the President of Domino's Pizza, CMO at Tough Mudder, Global Digital Marketing Director at Nike, Founder at Moz, shed insights on how to cut through the noise to what truly moves the needle.
2) Heart of the Machine: Our Future in a World of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, by Richard Yonck
Instilling emotions into computers is the next leap in our centuries-old obsession with creating machines that replicate humans. But for every benefit this progress may bring to our lives, there is a possible pitfall. Emotion recognition could lead to advanced surveillance, and the same technology that can manipulate our feelings could become a method of mass control. And, as shown in movies like Her and Ex Machina, our society already holds a deep-seated anxiety about what might happen if machines could actually feel and break free from our control. Heart of the Machine is an exploration of the new and inevitable ways in which mankind and technology will interact.
3) The Future of Happiness: 5 Modern Strategies for Balancing Productivity and Well-Being in the Digital Era, by Amy Blankson
Technology, at least in theory, is improving our productivity, efficiency, and communication. The one thing it’s not doing is making us happier. We are experiencing historically high levels of depression and dissatisfaction.
But we can change that.
Knowing that technology is here to stay and will continue to evolve in form and function, we need to know how to navigate the future to achieve a better balance between technology, productivity, and well-being. Technology can drive—not diminish—human happiness.
4) Affective Computing (MIT Press), by Dr. Rosalind Picard
The latest scientific findings indicate that emotions play an essential role in decision making, perception, learning, and more—that is, they influence the very mechanisms of rational thinking. Not only too much, but too little emotion can impair decision making. According to Rosalind Picard, if we want computers to be genuinely intelligent and to interact naturally with us, we must give computers the ability to recognize, understand, even to have and express emotions.
Read more & buy Affective Computing
5) The Internet of Healthy Things, by Dr. Joseph Kvedar
By 2020, experts predict that more than 20 billion everyday objects will be able to capture, receive and share data via a vast, interconnected global network linked together by inexpensive sensors, GPS and ’the cloud.’ Just around the corner, real time biometric data will be automatically captured and used to learn more about the impact of lifestyle on chronic diseases and wellness, and ultimately change behavior to improve our health. A technological and social shift of this magnitude will be felt by virtually every sector of the economy, every business and every human being. It’s a story that needs to be told by someone who has more than an academic understanding of this megatrend — it needs to be told by someone who helped to create it. In his book, The Internet of Healthy Things, (IoHT) connected health pioneer and visionary Dr. Joe Kvedar describes the phenomena driving this trend and the business opportunities that arise from it.
Buy the Internet of Healthy Things
6) Heartificial Intelligence: Embracing Our Humanity to Maximize Machines, by John Havens
Featuring pragmatic solutions drawing on economics, emerging technologies, and positive psychology, Heartificial Intelligence provides the first values-driven approach to algorithmic living—a definitive roadmap to help humanity embrace the present and positively define their future. Each chapter opens with a fictional vignette, helping readers imagine how they would respond to various Artificial Intelligence scenarios while demonstrating the need to codify their values, as the algorithms dominating society today are already doing.
Funny, poignant, and accessible, this book paints a vivid portrait of how our lives might look in either a dystopia of robotic and corporate dominance, or a utopia where humans use technology to enhance our natural abilities to evolve into a long-lived, super-intelligent, and altruistic species.
Read more & buy Heartificial Intelligence
Meet the Authors: Emotion AI Summit
All of these authors are currently speaking at Affectiva’s first-ever Emotion AI Summit on September 13th at the MIT Media Lab - many of which will be available for book signings throughout the day. If you haven’t already, reserve your seat now: we hope to see you there!
