#it is understandable magic even though it gets very probabilistic at times

[jaunesdust]

It’s not a binding circle guys

[wirsindkrieg]

On Many Worlds and the Multiverse

It’s common in metaphysical circles to see discussions about the multiverse and parallel realities. These discussions often center around past lives, especially when those past lives contain details that contradict what we accept as the basic nature of our reality. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation floating around these ideas, and I feel like I need to do what I can to clear some things up.

To begin, we need to discuss one of the most misused concepts in metaphysics: Quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics dealing with things at the sub-atomic scale, which act in ways very different from the larger scale physics we deal with on a regular basis (from the easily observed human scale of apples falling up to plants and galaxies). There are a lot of competing theories to explain various quantum phenomena, with varying amounts of evidence in their favour. In general, though, it’s a sub-field with a lot of complicated mathematics and some unique problems with observation.

(A small aside: The common adage about “observations affect outcomes” largely comes from quantum mechanics, and it isn’t some odd physical law that causes it. The only way to observe things at the quantum scale necessitates interacting with what you’re trying to observe, and at that scale even something as tiny as a photon of light bouncing off of a particle is enough to substantially affect that particle. At the larger scale we deal with on a daily basis, observation doesn’t have the same kind of influence.)

When dealing with the concept of the multiverse and parallel realities, the main quantum mechanical theory that’s tapped is known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation, which is an attempt at explaining the way that particles sometimes seem to act in random ways that are essentially impossible to predict with any accuracy. The way that Many-Worlds reconciles this is by saying that for every possible outcome, every outcome does occur, but in a separate universe. To use a slightly inaccurate but easy to understand example: Imagine you are flipping a coin. That coin can land on heads, tails, or (very, very rarely) on its edge. According to Many-Worlds, the coin will simultaneously land on heads, tails, and its edge, but each outcome becomes a new universe where only that outcome occurred.

There are a few important details about Many-Worlds that get misrepresented in metaphysical discussions of it, however. First, the parallel universes that occur can only contain outcomes which are physically possible. To return to the coin example, it can land on any of its sides, but there will never be a universe where the coin spontaneously turns into a dove and flies away. Second, the parallel universes have no lasting connection to each other. After the coin is flipped, each of the universes diverges and there’s no way to communicate from one to the other. It also means that there is no way to travel between these universes; whichever sequence of universe splittings has led to where you are, that is the sequence that will always be true from your point of view.

Coming back around to the metaphysical side of things, this means that Many-Worlds does not support universes with what might be called “fantastical” elements (including things like obvious functional magic as seen in fantasy media, creatures that cannot function under our current physical laws like giants and dragons, and so on), nor does it inherently point to all fictional settings being real “somewhere” (as some claim regularly). It also doesn’t support the concept of movement between universes, whether through the cycle of reincarnation or astrally shifting to another universe, since that would mean that it is possible to communicate between universes (if only by remembering information from another universe). All Many-Worlds says is that for every probabilistic event, all possible outcomes will occur. Nothing more, nothing less.

Many-Worlds is also a contentious theory among those professionally studying quantum mechanics, with limited (though not non-existent) support. There are multiple competing theories that do not include Many-World’s branching universes, and they are at least as rigorous and well-tested as Many-Worlds is. We can’t be certain that parallel universes exist (since there’s no way to transfer information from another universe here), and there is a reasonable chance that Many-Worlds is entirely wrong. It will likely be some time before we are certain one way or the other, though.

In brief, the multiverse and parallel realities aren’t all their hyped up to be, if they’re even real. If you’re wanting more information, I’ll recommend the Simple English Wikipedia page on quantum mechanics [link] and the standard English Wikipedia page on the Many-Worlds Interpretation [link] (unfortunately, there isn’t a Simple English version of the page about Many-Worlds). I won’t pretend to be any kind of expert on these things (I’m at best an amateur with aspirations), but it’s not hard to find information on these things in a digestible form. You just have to know what to look for.

[queenlua]

hey look i’m still talking about Magic the Gathering

walonvaus said: as a total Magic newb would you describe it as similar to FE16’s complexity versus uhhh hearthstone = FE7? ie the latter is “solid” but doesn’t quite have the replaability depth as 3H.

i've been mulling over this, and i think i have a better explanation than "the stack" for Magic's crunchy strategic goodness.

the thing that actually makes Magic interesting is  just the fact that you can do stuff during your opponent's turn.

this sort of thing feels intuitive and simple at first blush.  "oh, i have a counterspell, i can use it to counter my opponent's spell!"  duh.

but a ton of complexity arises from this—are there any restrictions on when i play my counterspell? if i play a spell that destroys your creature while your creature is attacking, does your creature still do damage? if there was a card on the battlefield that was buffing everyone and i destroy it in the middle of combat, is that card still buffing everything?

("the stack" is just a way of describing "how we figure out the order that various effects resolve when multiple spells are cast at the same time."  but the reason we need a stack at all is mostly (though not exclusively) because Magic lets you do shit during your opponent's turn.)

games like Hearthstone and Pokemon TCG simply don't let you play cards during your opponents turn.  a few other card games let you play cards during your opponent's turn, but with much more restrictions than Magic has—you can only play them during a very specific phase, or only in response to very specific actions.

but Magic lets you do this, and is very liberal with letting you do this.  anticipating what your opponent's going to do next is an important part of all strategy games, but in Magic you're thinking about this in a more detailed, reactive, and visceral way than in most strategy games.  more detailed: because you have more opportunities to disrupt your opponent's flow.  more reactive: because you have to pay attention and be able to respond to randomized plays as they happen and evaluate the correct countermove.  and more visceral, because watching your opponent play their Big Bad Card, and knowing you can't do anything about it because you wasted your counterspells on lesser threats, is like—feels like a gut punch, yo.

(compare this against, say, chess.  there's no randomness in chess, so while you still have to react to your opponent's move, you aren't doing any kind of probabilistic reasoning based on what they may or may not be able to do; all the legal moves are right there.  and chess feels less visceral, at least until you get into a very high level of play—because you often "lose" a chess game due to a series of minor blunders in the midgame that snowball into endgame, but in a very subtle and hard-to-see way.  magic is similar, but the punchy moments feel punchier; even though in reality you "lost" four turns ago, the result is a big splashy finish, rather than a slow and excruciating pressing into checkmate.)

to speak to your specific question (YEAH SORRY IT TOOK ME A LONG TIME TO GET BACK TO FIRE EMBLEM—the games are so different it's sort of hard for me to directly compare them!)—

my understanding is that succeeding in FE16 Maddening mode is based pretty heavily around battalion choice, proximity-based support buffs, and strategic positional plays (e.g. locking down a specific enemy's movement for a turn, abusing Pass to pick off some units earlier than you'd be able to normally, yada yada), versus FE7 just being more Vanilla Fire Emblem Mechanics TM.  thus it certainly sounds like there's more to exploit in FE16, more variables to consider in every position, and so on—but Magic isn't complex just because it has more systems and positions to consider (though it does have that); it's complex because it offers a categorically different thing—letting opponents meddle during each other's turn is the core thing, and the complexity arises mostly from that.

[thebigg-v3]

AI – Thoughts and Rants

This summer semester I decided to take Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, which the university I go to offers as an elective for CS majors. Which is awesome, I know! As a computer science student I had been curious for a while about the robots, talking computers that assist Iron Man, and even the “magic” behind things like Siri. Yes even I, someone who is in the “know” about a field like software engineering, which is intertwined with AI in more ways than one, fantasizes (or used to, maybe?) about a future where robots assist us on all kinds of tasks and make our lives better/easier, or in the case of I, Robot, a lot worse. All jokes and fiction aside, the fact is that AI exists already in our lives. In fact it is so infused with our day-to-day lives that we don’t even notice it. You ever look at the weather app on your phone? Do you ever go to Google Translate? Do you ever ask Google for directions? Do you ever ask Siri anything? All of these things use some technique that was born in the field of AI, or machine learning (which is a very close sibling to AI). I could go into all  kinds of impressive, and not-so-impressive, techniques that I learned about in the class. A-Star search; Informed Search; Probabilistic Reasoning; Markovian Models; Neural Nets, etc. But this is not the reason why I write this.

The reason why I write this essay/blog post is because a friend of mine, who is planning on taking the class next semester, asked me a very simple question, “How is AI?”. Well...the truth is that is not a simple question at all. It’s a tough question. Because I do have MANY reservations about AI. They range from the philosophical, technical and even reach out to my ethical concerns about Artificial Intelligence. Now, before I go on, I want to be clear about something: THIS IS A BIASED PIECE. As I go on, you’ll notice I have specific opinions about AI as a software engineer. I also want to state that this is NOT a piece meant to attack/offend anybody/anyone/ any organization that is researching AI or building products powered by AI/machine learning. I think you are all awesome people(a little crazy, but in a good way), and you have my utmost and sincere respect. Now that that is out of the way, let’s get down to business.

Before coming to this class I thought AI was an awesome/fascinating field(at the moment I still do). That with everyone—mainstream media, programmers, Google, Microsoft—hyping up AI, I thought to myself, there has to be reason for all the buzz and fuzz about this “AI thing” . And to be honest, MOST of it is undeniably granted. So...as a software engineer I was surprised by how mathematical AI really was. You’d think that a field that is, as stated before, so infused with our lives would be somewhere on the vicinity of software engineering in regards to practicality. But it’s truly not. The truth is that a lot of problems, rightfully so, have to be theorized/generalized in some way before they’re solved in an intelligent manner by a machine. And this makes sense. Think about it, if you want to talk about path-finding, “paths” aren’t simply cities A-F, and find the shortest path. This could be the surface of a new planet with a different landscape, New York, a colony in the moon or you might even have a case where you’re concerned about the cost of moving a piece on a chessboard. It’s also not just about making the algorithm fast. And it’s not that AI doesn’t welcome nice Big O notations like constant time and linear and logN—and these are becoming less central to any algorithm given all of the crazy-fast hardware we have today and the crazier-faster that is still to come. These are, like any algorithm, preferred over N^2 or something above that. However, AI’s top priority to my understanding(at least if I learned what I was supposed to learn), is to solve problems, or find answers, in an intelligent way.

But what the in the world does intelligent mean, anyway?

This is when AI becomes philosophical. And, if you ever take this class(or at least the specific AI class I took), you won’t be tested on the philosophical definitions of AI. But even though you won’t be tested on those when doing the projects, which is the most important part of the class, you won’t directly use anything philosophical, it’s worth keeping in mind that any algorithm in AI is trying to do things intelligently. This means that brute force is not welcome; that randomness, with some exceptions(like hill climbing), is not very welcome; most things that aren’t generalized(in an intelligent manner) are not very welcome. This is one of the reasons why AI is math-heavy: AI scientists need a way to generalize intelligence. But how general can intelligence really be? Can it really mimic the intelligence of a human to the point that it can compose songs, write an essay on the politics of the world and even make moral judgments? At the end of the day, not really. I mean you can take all of the songs recorded up to this day, and write a fancy neural net(don’t ask me how they work, they’re not super-complicated, but not a walk-in-the-park either) and it can classify and recognize some patterns and put something together….but it’s just re-mixing what we’ve already heard and listened to a million times. So no, AI is not that general. The AI of today is very narrow. This is not to say that it is useless. AI is very useful and will be in the future; speech recognition will get better; self-driving cars will improve; it will be able to write “better” songs. But AI won’t have a face; it won’t (and this is subjectively my opinion) have the ability to make moral judgments(and if we allow it to, then we are fools buying snake oil). As a software engineer I found the radical uses of Bayes Theorem somewhat interesting, but not very exciting. I found myself subscribing to the idea to program intelligence into the machine, rather than program it and tell it what to do. This, if I’m being frank, made me a little uncomfortable. As a software engineer I like tinkering with machines, I like to write programs that solve problems(rather than “program” intelligence and let It solve the problems for me). I felt as if I were being submissive to this idea—I know, it’s a stretch. And yes, I am probably romanticizing programming as a craft, but I’m sorry, I can’t help it. Speaking of programming machines, that reminds me, to the AI people(and I’m speaking about the specific people that guided me throughout the class—professors and TAs) the code did not matter. Which struck me as surprising, and a little unnerving. To them all that mattered was the theorems, excel charts and “report”. Which again, given the fact that the code itself in practice is the building block for the AI agent to do whatever it is that it needs to do, was unnerving—borderline frustrating. I don’t write code to plot charts, theorize formulas or see trends. That’s not to say, I write code without documentation. Documentation is not what we are talking about here. Indeed, self-documented code is a must. But to write code to satisfy Bayes Theorem? That itself is frustrating and, in my opinion, goes against the spirit of creativity in programming. It goes against the lemma I follow when I code—hack away. Hack the malloc calls to the point where all of the segments you allocate are continuous; trick the OS into caching at all levels only your processes; manipulate CPU priorities to make your process priority 1 because the game you’re building is over-bloated with physics calculations and unnecessary art, and that computer does not have a GPU. AI felt nothing like hacking computers. AI felt nothing like engineering solutions. It felt like forcing code to comply with some theorem—Bayes Theorem,  making informed decisions, Perceptron, etc. I seriously respect these techniques, because all of them are incredibly cool and quite impressive. And heck, software engineers do use these techniques today. But, in my humble opinion, an engineer doesn’t have to fully comply with a mathematical rule. They are nice because they make a bunch of assumptions that MOST of the time are true. But in engineering, when we have to directly sometimes interact with hardware and users, some of these assumptions are not very useful in practice. Sometimes as engineers, if we were building an OS, one might have to hard-code stuff with macros in C to make a specific architecture/piece of hardware faster. Sometimes in software engineering, one doesn’t have the luxury of just “throwing memory” at a problem—which is part of the idea of machine learning, along with some statistics. Throw memory at it, implement perceptron and you can classify pictures! Engineers have to keep in mind the cost of adding two gigs of ram—cost in terms of money and resources. As an engineer, when handling CPU scheduling, sometimes one doesn’t know what the best scheduling scheme is. Sometimes engineers have to wait till users actually use the software, and get a “feel” for what’s the best CPU scheduling scheme, given the different use cases. AI doesn’t like hard-coded macros, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t love edge-cases hacks, that’s not intelligent. AI doesn’t care about beautiful code that might be 10% faster because one follows good practices. AI, from the impression I got in this class, is almost programming-independent. One might even say it finds programming languages hindering because there isn’t a language that fully expresses how “great”(ahem, intelligent) It really is. I could be wrong about these assumptions. Because, heck, what do I know? I’m only a software engineer.

Despite my reservations about AI, I highly recommend taking the class as a CS major. Having said what I said, AI is not going away. For better or worse, it will stay in the lives of people, software engineers and not-software engineers. It is and will be a necessary evil of our present and future. Take the class, get a feel for what you think of it. And if you’re like me—you like to hack computers—you’ll survive in that jungle of probability and intelligence greatness. I honestly can’t tell you to stay or not, that’s your choice. In the meantime, I choose not to.

[thedefinitionofbts]

Of Stardust and Spacetime (6)

Ch. 1 | Ch. 2 | Ch. 3 | Ch. 4 | Ch. 5 | Ch. 6 | Ch. 7 | Ch. 8 (Final)

Pairings: Jeon Jungkook x Reader | Kim Seokjin x Reader

Genre: Scifi, Angst, Fluff/Romance, Comedy

Words: 4.3K

Description:

On clear nights he looks up at the sky, and he can still see you. He can see the image of you transcending alternate universes tied together by iridescent ribbons, passing through the iron cores of distant stars, and sliding across Orion’s belt to meet him in that magical place between the stratums of space and time. And he can remember that you existed, and that you stood next to him, just like this.

Our happiest moments are never those during a certain occurrence. They are the times when we are imagining what a certain happy moment will feel like, the stage when we are anticipating that outcome of happiness before it actually happens.

“I would suggest looking into Quantum Consciousness” Jimin is the first to speak after the period in which they were all listening very intently to Jungkook’s story that he was barely able to explain without sounding insane.  

“Consciousness…” Yoongi makes a disgusted face, shaking his head and sighing. Like most theoretical physicists, the young professor cringes every time the topic of consciousness is brought up in the context of understanding the universe. He’s not too keen on the idea that the purely material world of physical matter would depend so heavily a purely immaterial phenomenon such as consciousness.

Jimin laughs, throwing his head back and carding a hand threw his fluffy blond locks. “Please excuse that reaction.” He smiles as he directs the statement to Jungkook, who was looking very uncomfortable to have revealed so much about something most people would have a hard time accepting, let alone, telling others about. “Professor Min is not a huge fan of anything to do with consciousness.”

Taehyung furrows his brows. “Quantum Consciousness...what is that exactly?”

“I’m glad you asked.” Jimin replies, sliding over to the chalkboard. “You’ve all heard of Schrödinger's cat, right?”

“Cats…” Yoongi mutters again in the background, for no apparent reason other than the fact that he knew his cat loving assistant would grab at any chance he got to bring up those furry little animals and make it extremely relevant to context.

“The one that is dead and alive at the same time?” Jungkook chimes in, recalling the famous thought experiment devised by an Austrian physicist nearly a century ago.

“Mmmhm” Jimin affirms, smiling impishly. “Matter is 99% empty space, and quantum particles have no dimensions.” He uses a piece of chalk to draw a bunch of random dots on the black slate. “Quantum particles have a property called superposition, meaning they can be in two places at one time.”

“How is that possible?” Taehyung cuts in, not that he’s never heard of the concept before. It was more of a question born from his lack of understanding.

Jimin pauses, biting his lower lip as he decides how to explain such an unintuitive concept. “Microscopically, all particles exist in a probabilistic state. We call this the probability cloud.” He smudges all the tiny dots he previously drew on the chalkboard to aid in the visualization of this “cloud”. “They are not in a specific position but rather in every possible position in space as a probability. Mathematically we can calculate this probability with a wave function.”

“Are you implying we’re going to have to do a lot of math?” Jungkook groans, tilting his head up and squeezing his eye shut in agony.

“Dude, you’re studying to become a theoretical physicist and you can’t even handle a little math?” Taehyung reaches over and pats his shoulder. “Must be tough man.”

Jungkook doesn’t verbally respond, but instead only groans again.

Jimin giggles bubbly. “The math has already been proven, so don’t worry about that part. The main point I’m building to is the fact that this wave function is said to collapse from the collection of possible states into just one when an observation is made in the macroscopic world. In other words, particles in the universe do not physically exist in a definitive state until they are observed by a conscious being.” Jimin turns around to see if Jungkook and Taehyung are following his line of logic, only to find that both of their faces are conveying varying degrees of confusion.

Yoongi lets out another one of his signature sighs and walks over to Jimin. He slowly takes the piece of chalk from the younger male’s hand and places it back in its original position before turning to face the two befuddled students. “Outside of our consciousness, the world remains in a probabilistic state. Nothing is set in stone. Any thing is possible.” He pauses, letting his audience soak in the points he just made, a technique he practiced as an instructor of higher education. “Once a conscious being, like you or me, decides to view the world, we retrieve information from our surroundings creating the now moment- the present reality that we see right before our eyes. Now what do you think that means?” He directs the question to Jungkook, who was beginning to understand what his professor and TA are trying to get at.

Jungkook clears his throat tautly. “Reality is dependent on the observer.”

Yoongi nods calmly. “Your mind can alter the probability distribution of unobserved states of matter, and by doing so, it essentially chooses what to perceive from the options provided by the aforementioned probability cloud.”  

“Whoa…” Taehyung gasps in realization.

Yoongi smiles proudly for the first time. “Consciousness determines the fate of your reality.”  

 …

 Jungkook will never forget the day he got into college and a surprise visit from you.

The college part was self-explanatory. He had been studying his ass off for the entrance exams and keeping his grades up for the past four years of his high school career through blood, sweat, and tears. It was tough being a star athlete and valedictorian, but they don’t call him golden for nothing.

He was happily walking home from school ready to share the good news with his family, enjoying the sunny spring weather and the cool breeze that swirled by. He’s satisfied with the content feeling settling in his stomach, but he’s secretly wishing that he could get a chance to tell you first, or that you would come to him as a reward for doing so well and working so hard. That would make everything about this day perfectly complete.

To his delight, he hears the voice of the exact person he had made a wish to see. The familiar melody of your speech makes his body tingle with excitement.

“Jungkook” You shout, waving at him even though he can’t see you. You’re glad however that he can sense your presence.

He turns around, lips forming that blissful smile of recognition. “Wow, you did come!” He gasps, pupils beaming with enthusiasm.

“You seem extra happy today” You comment, taking note of how much he was smiling today, not that he didn’t smile a lot before, it’s just today it seemed like his lips were permanently curved upward.

He giggles, eyes crinkling at the edges. “I am,” He chirps. “I got my acceptance letter to university and I get to see you.”

“Wow, you’re already going to university?” You take a moment to ponder over how quickly time has passed for him, how it feels like he was just a pre-pubescent teenager not long ago. “How old are you?”

“18” He answers. “You said you were 19 when I was thirteen right? That means….you’re…” He uses his fingers to count; math was never his strong suite. “24?”

“Actually I’m only 20.” You reply, remembering that he doesn’t know time seems to progress differently for the two of you. You had always been able to tell he was aging rather quickly by his rapidly maturing physique alone, and had forgotten that he didn’t have the luxury of viewing your physical appearance as you did his.  

Jungkook’s eyes widen considerably, a habit of his when he’s surprised or in shock. “You age differently?” He inquires in an astonished tone.

“I don’t think it has to doing with an aging disparity, but rather a time one.”

He cocks a brow in puzzlement. “A time discrepancy? What do you mean?”

You don’t know how to explain it accurately; after all, you had no idea what was going on either. “I’m seeing you at different stages in your life, and for me, they seem to be non-consecutive.” Your statement doesn’t really elucidate anything, and you’re afraid the revelation will turn into a cause of concern for him as well, the very one that you have been plagued with for quite a while now. Not to mention, there was that one other thing you hadn’t told him yet, the one about you being from the distant past. You don’t know why you’re so reluctant to tell him, but you think it might have to do with not actually having all the answers yet, or maybe there’s more to it than that, but you decide it’s best to hold off on complicating things.

“That’s weird,” He notes, snapping you out of your reverie. “That means I’ll be older than you soon!” He giggles again, nose scrunching up in the most adorable way possible.

You’re so stunned by his unexpectedly animated reaction that you can’t even verbally respond. It was something so drastically different from the troubled thoughts you were afflicted that you find yourself caught completely off guard. You don’t even know how long you stare at him bewildered before he speaks again.

“Y/N?” He tilts his head in your direction, wondering why you weren’t responding. “Are you ok?”

“Y-yeah” You manage to answer, eyes still glued on the spirited young man.

“Does being younger than me make you that unhappy?” He jokes, as a tiny smirk forms over his previously innocent smile. His untainted eyes remain blameless though.      

You don’t understand why the way he’s looking at you makes you want to envelope him in your arms, and hold him as tightly as you can. But it’s always that same feeling of knowing that no matter how much you long to, you will never truly be able to hug him with firm, unwavering arms made of solid physical matter that stops you from inching towards him. You will probably never get over such a cruel limitation, but seeing his jubilant smile was enough, and even if it wasn’t, you just need to keep telling yourself it was.  

“Of course not!” You reply as you sweep aside your own wallowing. “It was just awkward being so much older than you when you were still underage.” The statement is not entirely true because you found him absolutely adorable as a child, but it is considering how you see him now. Back then being with him was like taking care of a younger brother, now it’s….you shake your head before your face overheats at the inappropriate thought.

“Underage?” His smirk gets bigger. “Does that mean you and I-”

“No!” You interrupt before he can finish. If your face was on the verge of overheating before, it’s now burning in flames. For the first time ever, you’re glad he can’t see you physically or you’d be dying of embarrassment in that moment. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I meant, now I-I don’t have to play the role of b-babysitter.” Your stuttering gives everything away, but Jungkook doesn’t call you out directly.

“Whatever you say~,” He sings with a tinge of skepticism.    

 …

 Figuring out how to explain a phenomenon that has yet to be fully proven is tough. Applying it to something that might not be real in the traditional sense is nearly impossible. Jungkook is lucky Taehyung is still willing to be his partner.  

“God this is so hard!” Taehyung releases a maddened groan, running both hands through his silvery locks. His mind was running on overdrive, and there were too many intricacies that he just couldn’t piece together.

“Dude, are you ok?” Jungkook raises his right brow, looking at the older male with questioning eyes. He would be concerned by such an exasperated utterance, but said male was always a rather vocal type of gamer, so this in comparison wasn’t too out of the ordinary.  

“Time, time, time. It doesn’t make sense!” Taehyung exhales heavily, looking like he’s going to toss his laptop across the room.

The two of them were in one of the empty study rooms the physics building, a relatively secluded place due to the fact that so few students opt to major in physics these days. They’ve been reading paper for the past few days, brushing up on the basics of Quantum Mechanics, Particle Physics, General Relativity, and to Jungkook’s dismay calculus, linear algebra, and probability theory. It would’ve been pretty dull and tedious had Jungkook not been so determined to find answers to the mystery of you. He also knows that same paradigm could be applied to the past twenty years of his life. Did he really like physics? Sure. But would he really be dedicating this much of his life studying it if there wasn’t something important on the line? Probably not.

“Professor Min did say time was complex.” Jungkook softly reminds, understanding why his partner is so frustrated. He’s reminded of how he almost put up a fight to avoid math, but realized soon enough that would not be reasonably possible. “But what does time have to do with quantum consciousness?”

Taehyung points a finger at the article pulled up on his computer screen. “It says here that the way we can perceive physical space is by the time it takes for light to reach our eyes. You know, like how people say looking at the stars is like looking in the past?”

Jungkook frowns but bobs his head in acceptance.

“Well it’s also saying that time is meaningless without a conscious entity to perceive it. Doesn’t that sound a lot like those quantum particles that aren’t real until we look at them?” Taehyung exasperates. “Ok, maybe I should just stop reading this article. It’s probably useless anyways.” He huffs, shaking his head as closes the tab.

A hush of taciturnity hovers over the room. Taehyung continues staring as his screen but not actually processing any of the information his visual cortex is receiving. A bird flies by outside. It’s shadow flashes across the room as its minuscule body temporarily blocks part of the sun’s light cascading through the dusty glass windows.

Jungkook doesn’t speak for a few minutes. He isn’t thinking about time or physics anymore because the information you revealed to him the last time he saw you makes its way to the anterior of his mind. “Tae?” He murmurs.

“Yeah” The other male responds, not really paying too much attention because he was too busy absentmindedly scrolling through a list of other scientific papers that came up on his web search.  

“I saw Y/N again a couple of days ago.” Mentioning you as if you were a real person still feels a bit strange to Jungkook, but he’s gotten used to it more or less.

After all, he’s basically told the world, ok, maybe not to that extreme of an extent, but it sure felt like every person around him knew. And to be completely honest, he’s only able to speak so freely about you around Taehyung because he’s sure the older male won’t judge. If he did, neither of them would even be here now. Taehyung had agreed to dedicate the entire semester solving the mystery of you with Jungkook, so that had to mean he didn’t mind, right?

Jungkook exhales as he ensues with what he was going to say. “This time I was able to see her physical form completely, and it really felt like she was real. She was telling me how she feels less and less rooted on her home planet, and more and more like she belongs here. I don’t know…I’m starting to think that she can only fully exist in one place, and if it’s wrong for me to even have thoughts of wanting to bring her here or if something bad might happen if I don’t stop actively trying to perceive her. And if by consciously searching for her, I’m putting her in danger. ”

“Are you scared?” Taehyung turns away from his screen and faces Jungkook.

The younger male shakes his head dejectedly. “I should be, shouldn’t I?”

There’s another long moment of silence as neither of the two make any noise. The afternoon sunlight was still filtering through the age encrusted windows of the old physics building, and the elongating shadows of the trees outside were swaying gently from the wind.

“Have you told her how you feel about her?” Taehyung voices softly, breaking the reticence.

“I want to.” Jungkook switches his fixation to the scene outside the window. “But I’m going to try and figure this all out before I do.”

  “I can vaguely understand why he is able to interact with your consciousness, but I fail to fathom how he would be able to see you physically.” Namjoon furrows his brows after listening to your most recent account. “There’s no way particles could actually configure into your complete physical form with such a small amount of information, especially not with the fact that the parcel has yet to even reach Earth.”

“I was shocked too.” You murmur, staring down at your hand that still retains the sensation of holding his hand for the first time. How warm he felt, how perfect that pause in time was. It felt so real. He felt so real. 

“Unless…” He trails off, but you barely notice he’s even talking. “Consciousness is not constrained by time…”

You have a flashback to the way Jungkook’s eyes had effusively soaked in the image of you as he took your hand in his. You relish in the memory of the slight tremble of his fingers as he gently swept them across your own before interweaving his being with yours and giving you a light squeeze that sent shock waves up your arm.

Then everything goes black.

 When your vision steadily returns, you see Jungkook’s obscure figure leaning against the railing of his apartment’s balcony as the crisp morning air tousles his fluffy bangs. The area is still dark, but you can tell the vibrant rays of yellow are steadily beginning to lighten the sky.

“Jungkook?” You whisper, timidly moving closer to where he was standing. It feels so dreamlike you have a hard time believing it’s real, but the moment he turns his head at the sound of your voice, gaze landing on yours, you know without a single doubt that it is.

“You’re here” He smiles faintly, clearly still half asleep.

“You were waiting for me?”

“I always am” He responds, reaching out to intertwine your hand with his once again, pulling you nearer to him until you can sense the undiluted warmth of his body. It somehow seemed so natural; it makes you wonder how many times he’s actually done it. But this is only the second time, isn’t it?

To your relief, you don’t flinch this time, choosing instead to drop your gaze and be consumed by the image of your hand laced with his. You wouldn’t have believed how tangible his soft skin was if it weren’t for his firm grip and the muted pulsing of his heart pumping blood to his hand. Your eyes flutter up to his face, and you see that his attention is fixated on the scene unveiling before the two of you.

You allow your own observation to mimic his as you trace the mountain range hiding the light that is about to fill the sky. The opaque wisps of water vapor twisting and wrapping themselves around the jagged peaks, veiling them in a thin layer of ivory that slowly dissolved as the warmth of the rays originating from below the horizon vaporized them.

“I’ve always wanted to watch the sunrise with you” He murmurs affectionately as he turns back to face you.

You eyes snap back to look at him. “Can you see me right now?”

He nods, eyelids still droopy but pupils containing a sort of depth that entire oceans would envy.  

“You’re so beautiful.”

 “Y/N!!”

“Y/N, Y/N!”

Namjoon’s face is the first thing you see through your squinted eyes as they adjust to the lights of the astronomy lab.

“W-what happened?” You mutter, trying to clear your vision and the all too familiar throbbing in your head. 

“You fainted….again” He replies. “I think something’s not right.” Namjoon’s voices it as if he had just begun to notice when in actuality his concern has been growing exponentially. “We absolutely cannot continue overlooking this.” His tone towards you is unusually stern.

“W-what do you mean?” You ask, sitting up wobbly and pretending like you haven’t noticed how frequent your fainting spells have become and how each time you faint, you’re able to be with Jungkook.

“You were out for almost an hour.” Namjoon shakes his head. “I was almost tempted to call an ambulance.”

“That long?” You head immediately whips over to the clock hanging on the wall. Indeed, you were supposed to meet up with Seokjin 45 minutes ago. He was probably worried sick. “Shit, I have to go!”  

 …

 Kim Seokjin’s exasperated expression is the initial thing you that greets you when the elevator doors open. He doesn’t look angry per se, but he is most certainly not pleased.

“I’ve been waiting for over an hour!” He complains, following you as you walk past him not really in the mood to provide him an explanation.

“Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?” You don’t know why you’re responding so indignantly. You were the one who was late, and he had been the one waiting.

He’s understandably not the least bit entertained by your attitude. Honestly, who would be? “What happened?” He grabs onto your wrist as the two of you step outside the building.

“I fainted.” You avoid his gaze as the truth spills out of your mouth for the first time. You hadn’t told him about your fainting spells, much less the thing about you losing consciousness more and more frequently, for longer and longer periods of time as well.

“And you’ve been hiding all of this from me?” He isn’t oblivious to the way you look sick every time you leave Namjoon’s lab, but he didn’t want to squeeze that kind of information out of you, knowing that force is never the answer. He had hoped you would be sensible enough to bring it up yourself, wanting to give you room and time to open up to him, but today he just couldn’t hold back any longer. “How long has this been going on?” He demands, not letting go of his grip.

You contemplate on telling him it’s only a recent happening, but ultimately decide that’s not your best option. “Since the beginning.” You confess, knowing that Namjoon wouldn’t even stand back and watch in silence the next time you lose consciousness for almost an hour. What if you’re rendered into a state of vegetation permanently? The thought sends a shiver down your spine.  

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?” He avoids your gaze as he says it, letting go of your wrist and choosing instead to allow his line of sight to graze the silhouette of the city’s skyline as Solaris sinks behind a cluster of tall buildings. A waft of air glides by, tickling a few loose strands of his hair.

“It’s not that simple.” Laced with irritation, you close your mouth and bite your bottom lip the second the words escape. You knew you were just responding on reflex, not wanting to make this whole thing seem so trivial, for the reason to be as simple as you having naively developed feelings for someone millions of light years away. But something inside was telling you it was that simple, that Seokjin was right in believing you were letting all of this take over you because of someone you could never be with.

“Y/N” He turns back to look at you, and it was in that moment that you realized you’ve been blind all this time. Blind to the way he gazes at you, and only trusting in his own lies of seeing you as no more than a sister. “I can’t say I know how you must feel, but I know it’s not that simple. It never is.” His voice is barely above a whisper.

You’re hit with a pang of guilt at his words. Why were you acting this way? Making it seem like it was his fault or something when in reality you have no right to blame any of this on anyone but yourself. “I-I’m sorry,” You utter, dropping your gaze dejectedly.

“Why are you apologizing?” He cups your cheek and wipes away a small tear that had unknowingly slid down with the pad of his thumb. “You’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Ugh, I’m being so stupid.” You sniffle, covering your embarrassed face. “This is so ridiculous.” How far could you have gone anyways? What was the best outcome of these precarious escapades? You splitting yourself in half, merely to partially exist in two places separated by 50 million light years? Or would you just end up not existing at all?

Seokjin only smiles gently, and you almost miss the twinge of heartache in his eyes. “You’re feelings are never ridiculous.”  

His words pierce through the barrier that had prevented you from evaluating the situation with rational thought. It was then you decided something must be done, that you can’t continue like this any longer, putting yourself in danger and hurting the people who you care about the most.

You had to tell Jungkook that the space between the two of you cannot be traversed no matter how hard either of you tried. This was no way to live your life. You were risking so much just tinkering with your illusions and attempting to find a way to break the laws of the universe, tearing your consciousness apart at the seams, and reaching towards something that was never meant for you to begin with.

...

[martechadvisor-blog]

Marketing Intel – Visual IQ CMO Connects the Customer Journey Dots

Wayne St. to break data silos and take a cross-channel or cross Amand, CMO at Visual IQ shares insights on people-based marketing and marketing intelligence. He suggests marketers CMO, Amand Wayne St. tactical way and form a cooperative ecosystem. According to him communication and collaboration together are a perfect combination to succeed adjusting machine learning in between. Wayne St. Amand is a veteran marketing leader with a track record of significantly increasing the growth trajectory and valuation of technology businesses

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Hello, I'm Ginger Conlon and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s Executive Interview Series. Joining us today is Wayne St. Amand who is CMO of Visual IQ. Welcome Wayne!

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Thank you Ginger, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So glad you're here with us today. Let's talk briefly about Visual IQ. What is Visual IQ and what makes it unique?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Sure, happy to. So, first and foremost, Visual IQ is a software company and we provide a marketing intelligence platform, as you indicated earlier, and really

what marketing intelligence is all about is sort of a unique and powerful combination of audience data and attribution data

and essentially we are bringing the concept of people based marketing to life, given the fact that audience data is so central to the idea of people based marketing, we are really a powerful enabler of that concept.

Too often we jump into the tactics as marketers, we’re very eager to get started and we arrive at our knowledge of the audience as an afterthought. Of course, we begin by thinking about targeting, but we really learn about the performance of our programs and whether or not we're reaching people way after the fact. We look at the success of those programs and the impact of those programs and try and guesstimate, are we reaching the right people, is this impacting the audiences, the audience segments that we really care about, are we reaching the people, the large groups of individual people that matter most to us and you could say, in a manner of speaking,

that marketing intelligence is all about finding and discovering your best performing marketing and targeting it to those who matter most to you

connecting it to those who matter most and the essence of marketing intelligence, we believe, is a single view, a single platform that delivers that benefit, discovering your best performing marketing and allowing you to connect it to the people that matter most to you and your company.

You've probably heard of the idea of probabilistic versus deterministic targeting and these two concepts. Probabilistic is essentially educated guessing with regard to targeting, you think based on certain demographic data or other targeting criteria that you are probably, hopefully reaching the right people. When you use a deterministic strategy you know for a fact that you're reaching the right people and viewing your performance via the lens or through the lens of audience data enables you to use that deterministic style targeting strategy concept all the way through your marketing process.

We believe, again, going back to that idea of people based marketing, that this is an essential approach to deliver on the promise of people based marketing, not just in one channel, but across all of your marketing and media channels. Again, it's a bit of a Holy Grail concept but we're excited about bringing this to marketers and I have the honor and the privilege of being a marketer who markets to marketers and I'm excited about helping my peers and my colleagues be more successful in this regard.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So, to that point, there are so many ways to use marketing analytics to improve marketing performance, what is one opportunity that you see for marketers to really up their game and take a more marketing intelligence approach that maybe they're overlooking but has the potential for such positive impact?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Yeah. I think to say overlooking is perhaps too strong, I think marketers these days are really working hard to leave no stone unturned in terms of figuring out what's the best approach, what's the best way forward. What is often a challenge though for us is the fact that everything is producing data but it's all disparate and much of it is redundant.

So, there is the opportunity, I think, for marketers to connect the dots, to tear down the walls of these silos and really understand in a cross channel, cross tactical way, how one activity is impacting another activity and that's often a guessing game.

It is a finely tuned skill amongst senior marketers to sort of divine, almost through magic, what's truly working and how is one thing impacting another and we often make these decisions with a little bit of data and a lot of gut feel. I think as we move forward into the future and we have the ability to use these deterministic strategies with an audience based view, people based marketing approach, and connect all of this data between programs, campaigns, down to the individual tactic level, that is, again, I keep going back to the idea of the Holy Grail, but that is the opportunity to turn over that final stone and really move forward as a marketer with not just belief that you're doing the right thing but the data to prove it so.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Again, you mentioned it before, but, what are some elements of people based marketing that really resonate the most to you that you feel are the most important for marketers to keep in mind and where should they then focus their use of marketing intelligence to make the biggest positive impact on the customer experience for customers but also potentially for prospects who are just kind of entering the marketing funnel?

A- Wayne St. Amand:     

It's a great question, there's a variety of ways to answer that. I think the approach that I will take is to start out by acknowledging the fact that although we as marketers work really hard to curate experiences, and I use that word curate on purpose because we're attempting to truly create a brand experience through both addressable and non-addressable media. We all love these days addressable media, the ability to linearly view and connect programs and understand their performance, but the world still has many many billions of dollars of non-addressable media in it and as marketers,

if we can connect the dots between those addressable, mostly digital, and non-addressable, offline, in-store even, marketing touch points, then we can do a much better job of curating that content and understanding the impact of that content on the customer journey, on the consumer or prospect experience.

I think it's particularly important in the B2C marketing world where you don't always have a direct relationship with the consumer there becomes a buyer, they’re buying through vast distribution networks not directly from you, so, your ability to influence them in all these addressable and unaddressable ways and again, understand the interplay between these tactics and channels and how you're meeting your goals, which, again, may not relate directly to revenue growth but other measurements is so incredibly important and often slips through the grasp of the typical marketer.

Marketing intelligence when fully fulfilled, when a marketer really has a grasp on that idea, on that concept, they can view their world through these addressable and non-addressable channels, tactics, mediums and really curate a high impact, a customized, highly relevant experience for consumers as they move through their life and you mentioned earlier, customers expect that. We know from the data that we're pulling that six out of ten consumers won’t even consider interacting with your brand unless you show evidence that you’re being relevant to them, that you know them, that you understand them because again, we're working hard to create this incredible experience for customers that we think are on a journey but they’re not on a journey, they're just living their life.

So, we have to find ways to be as relevant as possible at those moments in time when they're going to be susceptible to our curated message and pulling all this together in a simple and singular view as possible is the essence of what we're after when we talk about marketing intelligence.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. So, one of the things that you mentioned earlier and you’ve talked a lot about is data, that's obviously one big challenge that you’ve mentioned, any other challenges that you are finding marketers facing when they're trying to get their analytics to really work for them and what advice do you have for them for overcoming that challenge?

A- Wayne St. Amand:      

So, what I hear again and again, I was just in the UK earlier this week, we had a customer dinner and had the opportunity to sit in a kind of intimate setting and really talk one on one with a variety of our customers in Europe and what I heard from almost every one of them was I have too much data, I have too many tools. It's really clear that many of you, when they are talking to us, many of you in the vendor community, you're saying very similar things but you're not necessarily making an effort to talk to one another to leverage one another, to actively build out a cooperative ecosystem.

I see it myself in the tools that I use to market Visual IQ, we have to really be knowledgeable about a variety of tools, a variety of measurement techniques, it's a full stack of technology and all the data associated with that technology that we have to be incredibly expert in and I think that given all the other things that we have to worry about, it can be tough to build that expertise and what we heard again and again is,

if you were silos guys figure out how to make sense of all this disparate data.

You mentioned the idea of you know duplication, de-duplication of users, of individuals, people in our systems is critical and systems that can do this de-duplication to find the individuals, track them, expose them to the relevant things as they're on that journey, again, this is vital, and this is what my peers, this is what our customers are looking for. So, too much data, too many tools, not enough cooperation, not enough working together within the ecosystem to make life easier,

I think that the future is going to be about ecosystem plays and lots of partnerships to bring capabilities that help us do a better job and reduce the complexity that marketers have to deal with.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Thinking about that look forward, let's talk about that and bring AI back into the conversation. So, clearly you’re excited about AI, it's such a hot topic, what about that are you excited about going forward? Is there anything else, a trend or a tool that you're hot on right now and also, it may very well be related, anything coming up with Visual IQ, either a new feature or an upgrade that we should know about?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Sure. I'll start with the Visual IQ piece just because it's near and dear to my heart. We have a major release, I would put it way past an enhancement, a major new platform that's going to be coming out in the fall. Can't really talk at a detail level about what's coming but you might imagine from some of my comments previously what we're thinking about and what we're attempting to do and marketing intelligence is a very good moniker, a very good wrapper for all the thinking that's gone into this platform that will be coming out in the fall.

So, more to come, stay tuned for more information there but we think that both our strategic and our tactical value to marketers is going to go way, way up, not that it's not significant already, but, again, the ability to combine audience and audience based view of performance or audience and attribution is particularly powerful and much more to come on that front. Sort of going back to your first question, your more general question, as I mentioned before, I'm really excited about the impact of machine learning and AI. I think

these days we're actually seeing more machine learning approaches than true pure AI and I think as marketers we're probably spinning that machine learning into true AI, but it's probably a little bit of a mix of both of those.

At the end of the day, as I mentioned before, the idea that using these technologies which are inherently about looking at massive amounts of data and finding patterns in that data that the end user can deem useful, for whatever reason, and then begin to suggest based on what you've done in the past and eventually be predictive based on past learning and future potential for success, I think marketing, every facet of marketing, is going to be touched by this. I think you're going to see it in the creative industry, you're going to see much more data driven creative, when I say data driven I don't just mean oh we've done a bunch of research, qualitative research and maybe even quantitative research, and we’ve put it in the hands of our creatives and our creatives have gone and built campaigns based on that, I think you're going to start to see that the words and the images that are used being fine-tuned and tweaked by the software because it's going to say, based on these 2.3 million data points we think you should use more yellow in this ad based on your audience because it's going to appeal, it's going to drive more engagement, you're going to get more clicks.

So, things like that I think you're going to see over the next 18 months, a significant wave of tools that are going to help the marketer be more successful and it's going to take, frankly, it's going to take I think a little bit of the power out of the creative agencies hands because a lot of the decisions that happen creatively are really gut feel, they’re artistically driven, and there's a time and a place for that and a lot of advertising is beautiful and should continue to be beautiful but it should be beautiful and impactful to the business and

if we can find a way to continue to give the creatives the power to build the art that they want but make it more effective through fine tuning, not taking over the process but fine tuning the process with lots and lots of data, that's the place where machine learning and AI can be incredibly impactful.

Then, of course, there's the opportunity to optimize media campaigns which are inherently mathematical and complex and in need of constant tweaking and adjustment. The life of a media buyer is a very challenging one and that is an area that is just primed for the inclusion of machine learning and AI technologies to make life easier and help them either manage more or be more effective with what they're already managing. So, over the next 18 months I think there's a wave of technologies coming in terms of platforms or small tools that are going to have an impact in this way, small at first but then as people realize, wow, this just makes my life better, not to mention drives more results, I think it's going to stop being science fiction and it's going to be our hands on in marketer’s tool belts.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Well, Wayne, thank you so much for all the great conversation and insight, really enjoyed it and I'm sure our viewers did as well. So, I want to let them know, if you've been joining us, Wayne and I had another great conversation on the skills that marketers need to succeed today, so, I hope you'll check out that video as well and also visit MarTech Advisor’s YouTube channel for other executive interviews and Wayne, thanks again so much for being here.

A- Wayne St. Amand:       

Thank you Ginger, my pleasure.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[martechadvisor-blog]

Talking MarTech with Wayne St. Amand CMO at Visual IQ

Wayne St. to break data silos and take a cross-channel or cross Amand, CMO at Visual IQ shares insights on people-based marketing and marketing intelligence. He suggests marketers CMO, Amand Wayne St. tactical way and form a cooperative ecosystem. According to him communication and collaboration together are a perfect combination to succeed adjusting machine learning in between. Wayne St. Amand is a veteran marketing leader with a track record of significantly increasing the growth trajectory and valuation of technology businesses

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Hello, I'm Ginger Conlon and welcome to MarTech Advisor’s Executive Interview Series. Joining us today is Wayne St. Amand who is CMO of Visual IQ. Welcome Wayne!

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Thank you Ginger, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So glad you're here with us today. Let's talk briefly about Visual IQ. What is Visual IQ and what makes it unique?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Sure, happy to. So, first and foremost, Visual IQ is a software company and we provide a marketing intelligence platform, as you indicated earlier, and really

what marketing intelligence is all about is sort of a unique and powerful combination of audience data and attribution data

and essentially we are bringing the concept of people based marketing to life, given the fact that audience data is so central to the idea of people based marketing, we are really a powerful enabler of that concept.

Too often we jump into the tactics as marketers, we’re very eager to get started and we arrive at our knowledge of the audience as an afterthought. Of course, we begin by thinking about targeting, but we really learn about the performance of our programs and whether or not we're reaching people way after the fact. We look at the success of those programs and the impact of those programs and try and guesstimate, are we reaching the right people, is this impacting the audiences, the audience segments that we really care about, are we reaching the people, the large groups of individual people that matter most to us and you could say, in a manner of speaking,

that marketing intelligence is all about finding and discovering your best performing marketing and targeting it to those who matter most to you

connecting it to those who matter most and the essence of marketing intelligence, we believe, is a single view, a single platform that delivers that benefit, discovering your best performing marketing and allowing you to connect it to the people that matter most to you and your company.

You've probably heard of the idea of probabilistic versus deterministic targeting and these two concepts. Probabilistic is essentially educated guessing with regard to targeting, you think based on certain demographic data or other targeting criteria that you are probably, hopefully reaching the right people. When you use a deterministic strategy you know for a fact that you're reaching the right people and viewing your performance via the lens or through the lens of audience data enables you to use that deterministic style targeting strategy concept all the way through your marketing process.

We believe, again, going back to that idea of people based marketing, that this is an essential approach to deliver on the promise of people based marketing, not just in one channel, but across all of your marketing and media channels. Again, it's a bit of a Holy Grail concept but we're excited about bringing this to marketers and I have the honor and the privilege of being a marketer who markets to marketers and I'm excited about helping my peers and my colleagues be more successful in this regard.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

So, to that point, there are so many ways to use marketing analytics to improve marketing performance, what is one opportunity that you see for marketers to really up their game and take a more marketing intelligence approach that maybe they're overlooking but has the potential for such positive impact?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Yeah. I think to say overlooking is perhaps too strong, I think marketers these days are really working hard to leave no stone unturned in terms of figuring out what's the best approach, what's the best way forward. What is often a challenge though for us is the fact that everything is producing data but it's all disparate and much of it is redundant.

So, there is the opportunity, I think, for marketers to connect the dots, to tear down the walls of these silos and really understand in a cross channel, cross tactical way, how one activity is impacting another activity and that's often a guessing game.

It is a finely tuned skill amongst senior marketers to sort of divine, almost through magic, what's truly working and how is one thing impacting another and we often make these decisions with a little bit of data and a lot of gut feel. I think as we move forward into the future and we have the ability to use these deterministic strategies with an audience based view, people based marketing approach, and connect all of this data between programs, campaigns, down to the individual tactic level, that is, again, I keep going back to the idea of the Holy Grail, but that is the opportunity to turn over that final stone and really move forward as a marketer with not just belief that you're doing the right thing but the data to prove it so.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Again, you mentioned it before, but, what are some elements of people based marketing that really resonate the most to you that you feel are the most important for marketers to keep in mind and where should they then focus their use of marketing intelligence to make the biggest positive impact on the customer experience for customers but also potentially for prospects who are just kind of entering the marketing funnel?

A- Wayne St. Amand:     

It's a great question, there's a variety of ways to answer that. I think the approach that I will take is to start out by acknowledging the fact that although we as marketers work really hard to curate experiences, and I use that word curate on purpose because we're attempting to truly create a brand experience through both addressable and non-addressable media. We all love these days addressable media, the ability to linearly view and connect programs and understand their performance, but the world still has many many billions of dollars of non-addressable media in it and as marketers,

if we can connect the dots between those addressable, mostly digital, and non-addressable, offline, in-store even, marketing touch points, then we can do a much better job of curating that content and understanding the impact of that content on the customer journey, on the consumer or prospect experience.

I think it's particularly important in the B2C marketing world where you don't always have a direct relationship with the consumer there becomes a buyer, they’re buying through vast distribution networks not directly from you, so, your ability to influence them in all these addressable and unaddressable ways and again, understand the interplay between these tactics and channels and how you're meeting your goals, which, again, may not relate directly to revenue growth but other measurements is so incredibly important and often slips through the grasp of the typical marketer.

Marketing intelligence when fully fulfilled, when a marketer really has a grasp on that idea, on that concept, they can view their world through these addressable and non-addressable channels, tactics, mediums and really curate a high impact, a customized, highly relevant experience for consumers as they move through their life and you mentioned earlier, customers expect that. We know from the data that we're pulling that six out of ten consumers won’t even consider interacting with your brand unless you show evidence that you’re being relevant to them, that you know them, that you understand them because again, we're working hard to create this incredible experience for customers that we think are on a journey but they’re not on a journey, they're just living their life.

So, we have to find ways to be as relevant as possible at those moments in time when they're going to be susceptible to our curated message and pulling all this together in a simple and singular view as possible is the essence of what we're after when we talk about marketing intelligence.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Excellent. So, one of the things that you mentioned earlier and you’ve talked a lot about is data, that's obviously one big challenge that you’ve mentioned, any other challenges that you are finding marketers facing when they're trying to get their analytics to really work for them and what advice do you have for them for overcoming that challenge?

A- Wayne St. Amand:      

So, what I hear again and again, I was just in the UK earlier this week, we had a customer dinner and had the opportunity to sit in a kind of intimate setting and really talk one on one with a variety of our customers in Europe and what I heard from almost every one of them was I have too much data, I have too many tools. It's really clear that many of you, when they are talking to us, many of you in the vendor community, you're saying very similar things but you're not necessarily making an effort to talk to one another to leverage one another, to actively build out a cooperative ecosystem.

I see it myself in the tools that I use to market Visual IQ, we have to really be knowledgeable about a variety of tools, a variety of measurement techniques, it's a full stack of technology and all the data associated with that technology that we have to be incredibly expert in and I think that given all the other things that we have to worry about, it can be tough to build that expertise and what we heard again and again is,

if you were silos guys figure out how to make sense of all this disparate data.

You mentioned the idea of you know duplication, de-duplication of users, of individuals, people in our systems is critical and systems that can do this de-duplication to find the individuals, track them, expose them to the relevant things as they're on that journey, again, this is vital, and this is what my peers, this is what our customers are looking for. So, too much data, too many tools, not enough cooperation, not enough working together within the ecosystem to make life easier,

I think that the future is going to be about ecosystem plays and lots of partnerships to bring capabilities that help us do a better job and reduce the complexity that marketers have to deal with.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Thinking about that look forward, let's talk about that and bring AI back into the conversation. So, clearly you’re excited about AI, it's such a hot topic, what about that are you excited about going forward? Is there anything else, a trend or a tool that you're hot on right now and also, it may very well be related, anything coming up with Visual IQ, either a new feature or an upgrade that we should know about?

A- Wayne St. Amand:   

Sure. I'll start with the Visual IQ piece just because it's near and dear to my heart. We have a major release, I would put it way past an enhancement, a major new platform that's going to be coming out in the fall. Can't really talk at a detail level about what's coming but you might imagine from some of my comments previously what we're thinking about and what we're attempting to do and marketing intelligence is a very good moniker, a very good wrapper for all the thinking that's gone into this platform that will be coming out in the fall.

So, more to come, stay tuned for more information there but we think that both our strategic and our tactical value to marketers is going to go way, way up, not that it's not significant already, but, again, the ability to combine audience and audience based view of performance or audience and attribution is particularly powerful and much more to come on that front. Sort of going back to your first question, your more general question, as I mentioned before, I'm really excited about the impact of machine learning and AI. I think

these days we're actually seeing more machine learning approaches than true pure AI and I think as marketers we're probably spinning that machine learning into true AI, but it's probably a little bit of a mix of both of those.

At the end of the day, as I mentioned before, the idea that using these technologies which are inherently about looking at massive amounts of data and finding patterns in that data that the end user can deem useful, for whatever reason, and then begin to suggest based on what you've done in the past and eventually be predictive based on past learning and future potential for success, I think marketing, every facet of marketing, is going to be touched by this. I think you're going to see it in the creative industry, you're going to see much more data driven creative, when I say data driven I don't just mean oh we've done a bunch of research, qualitative research and maybe even quantitative research, and we’ve put it in the hands of our creatives and our creatives have gone and built campaigns based on that, I think you're going to start to see that the words and the images that are used being fine-tuned and tweaked by the software because it's going to say, based on these 2.3 million data points we think you should use more yellow in this ad based on your audience because it's going to appeal, it's going to drive more engagement, you're going to get more clicks.

So, things like that I think you're going to see over the next 18 months, a significant wave of tools that are going to help the marketer be more successful and it's going to take, frankly, it's going to take I think a little bit of the power out of the creative agencies hands because a lot of the decisions that happen creatively are really gut feel, they’re artistically driven, and there's a time and a place for that and a lot of advertising is beautiful and should continue to be beautiful but it should be beautiful and impactful to the business and

if we can find a way to continue to give the creatives the power to build the art that they want but make it more effective through fine tuning, not taking over the process but fine tuning the process with lots and lots of data, that's the place where machine learning and AI can be incredibly impactful.

Then, of course, there's the opportunity to optimize media campaigns which are inherently mathematical and complex and in need of constant tweaking and adjustment. The life of a media buyer is a very challenging one and that is an area that is just primed for the inclusion of machine learning and AI technologies to make life easier and help them either manage more or be more effective with what they're already managing. So, over the next 18 months I think there's a wave of technologies coming in terms of platforms or small tools that are going to have an impact in this way, small at first but then as people realize, wow, this just makes my life better, not to mention drives more results, I think it's going to stop being science fiction and it's going to be our hands on in marketer’s tool belts.

Q- Ginger Conlon:

Well, Wayne, thank you so much for all the great conversation and insight, really enjoyed it and I'm sure our viewers did as well. So, I want to let them know, if you've been joining us, Wayne and I had another great conversation on the skills that marketers need to succeed today, so, I hope you'll check out that video as well and also visit MarTech Advisor’s YouTube channel for other executive interviews and Wayne, thanks again so much for being here.

A- Wayne St. Amand:       

Thank you Ginger, my pleasure.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor