The Nominal Group Technique and the Delphi Method

Today I am introducing going to discuss two group methods for gathering and evaluating subject matter expertise are the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and the Delphi method.  The NGT offers a more immediate result which can then be refined through additional meetings as necessary.  The Delphi, adaptive to networked data calls, is conducive to gathering a wider and more reflective response however the technique is more time and labor intensive.  Though the intent and goals are similar, each approach has its supporters and critics.  Before recommending one process over another, Table 1 details the significant parallels and differences between NGT and Delphi. 

Table 1 - Compare and Contrast NGT with Delphi
Nominal Group Technique	Delphi Method
Compare
group brainstorming
forecast oriented
structured group of individuals
encourage contribution
facilitator moderated
solution ranking
seek group consensus
Contrast
Session time limit	Process stopped based upon predefined criteria
Each member writes their ideas in free form	Each member completes a questionnaire and comments
No discussion, questions, or clarification allowed	Participants are physically separated
Participants do not initially consult or discuss their ideas with others	Participants remain anonymous
Each member reads aloud their idea	Facilitator provides an anonymous summary of the each members’ contribution
Each member in turn states one idea	Participants remain anonymous
Wording may be changed only when the idea’s originator agrees	Participants may change their earlier answers
One round in one session	Two or more rounds over longer duration
Similar to up or down vote, therefore may be better for more narrow problems	May be better for more significant issues because of more time to research and respond

Delphi should be used if polling is appropriate and sufficient time is available.  The Delphi input may also be more candid than with the NGT.  However with Delphi there is more procedural work involved in gathering, evaluating, and repeating the session.

Despite the possibility of group influence upon individual participants, the NGT has the advantage of immediacy.  Prior knowledge of the subject can also be injected by means of the weighted rankings – this is helpful to get to the relevant results more quickly.  While not well adapted to larger groups, a smaller group is actually a strength if the participants are well versed in their respective areas.  However, the NGT requires an authoritative facilitator to instill discipline into the process, ensure a balanced representation of ideas, and arrive at a valid conclusion.  For an example of how NGT may be used Vella, Goldfrad, Rowan, Bion and Black (2000) formed a group of 10 doctors and 2 nurses to establish clinical and health services research priorities in critical care in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland.  Of the 1000 suggestions submitted for research, the expert group, considers 106 of the most frequently suggested topics of which 37 attracted strong support, 48 moderate support and 21 weak support.  The group’s views represented the views of the wider community of critical care staff (r = 0.73, P < 0.01).  The statistically valid results indicate that NGT was a feasible method to establish priorities for clinical and health services research in critical care based on the views of a small selected group of the principal clinicians involved – doctors and nurses.

With either NGT or Delphi there is administrative overhead associated with collecting the input and managing the participants; these are not simply brainstorming sessions and should be used appropriately to ensure the best results.  Yet if the investment in time and resources to create an NGT program yields supportable results, then the effort may actually prove to be an economical collection model over time if reused.

References

Vella, K., Goldfrad, C., Rowan, K., Bion, J., & Black, N. (2000). Use of consensus development to establish national research priorities in critical care. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 320(7240), 976.

Google Glass - Another Step Towards Intelligent Services

I again viewed “Why Google Glass” presented by Sergey Brin (2013) at a TED conference.  Brin who is a cofounder of Google, introduced the Google Glass and the motivation behind its creation which took about two years.  Essentially, Glass is a wearable, WiFi-connected computer with an optical head-mounted display to capture photos and record 720p HD video.  In addition to third-party developed apps, Glass incorporates Google applications such as Google Now, Google Maps, Google+, and Gmail.  The intent was to have information come to the individual as needed, mirroring the original vision for the Google search engine.  Glass, shown in Figure 1, brings low-cost, hands-free Internet access useful for any number of safety and productivity functions such as law enforcement (recording arrests), email, directions, and video chat.

 

Google Glass represents a seed endorsed by the public; the YouTube video “One Day…” that announced Glass on April 4, 2012 has logged more than 21.6 million viewers.  Pedersen and Trueman (2013) summarized the technological and social forces impacting this innovation, “Glass’s birth is not only a marketing phenomenon heralding a technical prototype, we also argue and speculate that Glass’s popularization is an instigator for the adoption of a new paradigm in human-computer interaction” (p. 2089).  The fundamentals of a connected society are in place to support the graduated deployment of more sophisticated social networking devices and contextual intelligent support.  In particular, two forces stood out to me as impacting the innovation illustrated in the video:  technological and social.

Technological Force:

As noted by Baldwin (2012), currently there are several glasses with integrated displays, though the technology will continue to advance significantly to offer more sophisticated and comprehensive capabilities such as 3D hologram display and contextual information.  The innovation continues due a deeper integration among the individual, the physical device, and the social environment.  These factors are indicative of the forces that are shaping how people want to embrace their personal computing experience (addressed separately as a Social Force), as well as the wider infrastructure implications.  Greenfield (2010) provided the concept of Everyware to describe ubiquitous computing.  A more encompassing, progressive approach embeds degrees of reasoning support into the environment.  As stated by Augusto (2007), “The basic idea behind AmI [ambient intelligence] is that by enriching an environment with technology (mainly sensors and devices interconnected through a network), a system can be built to make decisions to benefit the users of that environment based on real-time information gathered and historical data accumulated” (p. 214).  The backend support for the transmission, storage, and security for ever-growing amounts of data is a concern.  Hyman (2013) observed that, “If cloud security is an issue to be reckoned with today, the problem will only worsen as more and more data is saved and backed up to the cloud” (p. 18).  Koning (2013) further noted the contradiction between the autonomic behavior of ambient computing systems hidden from the user and a central objective of data protection to precisely and fully identify purpose limitations, stating that, “As a rule, the purposes need to be specified prior to, and in any event, not later than, the time when the collection of personal data occurs” (p. 10).

Social Force:

Unlike some innovations that may be subtle or require time to discern, the Glass is clearly distinguishable not unlike the introduction of the Sony Walkman or the Apple iPod though more so for the later due to the online support represented by the iTunes application and store.  Similar to other portable personal electronic devices, wearable heads-up displays are beginning to realize a form, capabilities, and price that consumers may find attractive, perhaps leading to either supplementing or as an alternative to other types of mobile handhelds.  A survey by BiTE interactive (2013) found that 10 percent of American smart phone users would buy and regularly use Google Glass if they could afford it.  Fung (2013) also noted that compared with the iPhone’s deployment history, “In the first quarter of its existence [beginning June 2007], the iPhone made just 270,000 sales.  It took another two years for it to break the 31-million mark.”  Cumulative iPhone sales since 2007 will reach over 318 units in 2013.  But unlike smart phones which are refined versions of cell phones, Glass is a different type of product not previously seen in the marketplace, making it challenging to gauge the consumers’ acceptance.  However, given the success of other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, people readily seek social connectivity.  Glass therefore represents the union of ubiquitous computing and an information-driven society immersed in an augmented reality environment.

What I found most interesting about the video was the fact that we can identify a demarcation point, one of those rare moments when in the future we will be able to look back and singularize an Internet-era milestone not unlike the first Web browser (1990), Wi-Fi (1991), the one billionth Facebook user (2012), and greater than one petabits per second transmission over optical fiber (2013).  As a wearable personal computer, in Google Glass we can observe a synergy of cloud and communication systems in support of an individual’s immediate information demands within a dynamic environment.  With future enhancements that take into consideration a user’s stored preferences and data history, Glass would provide the precursor to a basic personal expert system by offering the user timely, customized recommendations.  The Glass template might not make people smarter would be enable them to make more informed choices. 

References

Augusto, J. C. (2007). Ambient intelligence: the confluence of ubiquitous/pervasive computing and artificial intelligence. In Intelligent Computing Everywhere (pp. 213-234). Springer London. 

Baldwin, R. (2012, November 4). 6 glasses with integrated displays that you can buy today. Retrieved on 12 July 2013 from http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/04/6-glasses-with-integrated-displays-that-you-can-buy-today/ 

BiTE interactive. (2013, May 15). Only one in 10 American smartphone owners would wear google glass regularly. Retrieved on 12 July 2013 from http://www.bite-interactive.com/blog/only-one-10-american-smartphone-owners-would-wear-google-glass-regularly 

Brin, S. (2013, May). Why Google Glass? In presentation at TED conference (filmed February 2013), www. ted.com/index. php/talks/sergey_brin_why_google_glass. html 

Fung, B. (2013, May 30). A staggering share of americans would use google glass if they could. Retrieved on 12 July 2013 from http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/a-staggering-share-of-americans-would-use-google-glass-if-they-could-20130515 

Google. (2012, April 4). Project Glass: One day... Retrieved on 12 July 2013 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4 

Greenfield, A. (2010). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. New Riders .

Hyman, P. (2013). Augmented-reality glasses bring cloud security into sharp focus. Communications of the ACM, 56(6), 18-20. 

Koning, M. E. (2013) Purpose limitation and ambient computing. Retrieved on 12 July 2013 from http://www.pilab.nl/ifip-summerschool-2013/submissions/Koning.pdf 

Pedersen, I., & Trueman, D. (2013, April). Sergey Brin is Batman: Google’s project glass and the instigation of computer adoption in popular culture. In CHI’13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2089-2098). ACM.

Future Generation – Towards a Personal Expert System

While experimental and commercial specialized expert systems have been created for several decades there has been no examination of the requirements associated with an expert system that is tailored to an individual user.  A more comprehensive assemblage entails an adaptation of a rule-based expert system architecture in which the facts, rules, and inference capabilities reside on the client device.  A personal expert system (PES) of this type would be dedicated to:

- Learning the user's preferences.

- Increasing in knowledge through interactions with the operator.

- Acquiring facts from the external environment.

- Applying knowledge libraries made available by businesses and organizations.

The PES would enhance the user’s decision-making ability by learning the user’s inclinations and providing focused recommendations in specialized knowledge areas, further enhanced by feedback from information retrieval.  With the user’s consent commercial vendors and other organizations would provide properly formatted content through a controlled gateway to expand the system’s knowledge base.  The seminal knowledge core would enlarge according to the dynamics of the user, ameliorating the user’s communication with the world in ways distinctively beneficial to the user.  The PES would dynamically evolve within the confines managed by the user.  This approach is contingent upon common data format and ontology standards among participants.

Such a personal expert system would interface both autonomously within parameters and under user direction with the external environment, over time becoming increasingly familiar with the user’s preferences.  It would provide the user’s preferences to external processes as permitted and appropriate.  It would also capture the user’s human behavior and recognize its evolution over time.  The PES could essentially represent the user as a virtual presence based upon identity, status, location, and other predefined preference parameters.  This intelligent learning system would in effect become the user’s enduring companion, retrieving and providing information from external sources, interacting with ambient sensors for identification and adjustments, and offering recommendations based upon past experiences and current data as shown in the illustration below.  A PES, transferrable among devices, could become a pivot point around which future interaction between the owner and society would be individualized.