How and Why Enterprises Must Tackle Ethical AI
Explainability can also help humans who must work with algorithmic findings that
don't seem to make sense at first glance. For instance, Cloudera Fast Forward
Labs has a prototype available that predicts churn for telecom providers looking
to predict which customers are at risk to drop the service. The machine learning
model found that one of the most important factors in whether someone would
leave is whether they have a high degree of complaints about the service. But
it's not the complainers who are at risk of leaving. Actually, the opposite is
true. The complainers are the ones who are planning to stay for one reason or
another, so they have a higher stake in the quality of the service being good.
That's why they complain. They care about the service improving. The ones
without the high stake just leave if when they are dissatisfied. That's
important to know if you are a service representative who is empowered to offer
incentives to customers at risk for churn. Creating explainability is among
several important steps enterprises must embed in their artificial intelligence
operations in order to make responsible, ethical AI a part of doing business. A
key to making it work is to ensure that these steps are part of the overall AI
process.The Engineer’s Guide to Writing Meaningful Code Comments
In most cases, you aren’t the only person working on the same project or codebase. That means that other people get to read your code and have to understand it. That’s also true for the code comments you leave behind. Developers often write ‘quick and dirty’ comments without much context, leaving other developers clueless about what you’re trying to say. It’s a bad practice that creates only more confusion than clarifies things. So, yes - you should be bothered with writing meaningful code comments to help other developers. A code comment that describes the function, the reasoning behind the function, and its input and output will speed up the learning process of other developers. Especially for junior developers, this information comes in handy when learning the code. On the other hand, code comments lead us to the discussion whether we should write them? There’s a significant group of developers that advocate against writing code comments. The reason being that code should be self-explanatory. If another developer can’t understand the purpose of your code by looking at it, it’s bad code.Why quantum computers are a risk to your business today, and what you can do about it
We can’t be sure which quantum-safe algorithms NIST will standardise and because
these algorithms are still relatively new, you may not want to completely do
away with today’s standards. After all, quantum computers are still too
primitive to break current encryption standards, so using today’s methods is
still an effective way to protect against current info security threats.
Therefore, as we make the transition to quantum-safe security, it’s important to
practice ‘crypto-agility’. Crypto-agility is the process of understanding what
existing cryptographic measures can be migrated over to quantum-ready solutions.
... This crypto-agile approach will offer greater assurance against both
traditional attacks and future threats. This is vital as many devices, systems
and applications that rely on encryption for security are now looking to be
deployed and are expected to have a lifespan of over 10 years – if these aren’t
cryptographically agile enough to deal with a future quantum attack,
organisations will leave themselves vulnerable in the future.Inclusion Has to Be Continuous
A leader’s job is to create an environment where people can be challenged, and also show that they can be wrong. What my manager did afterwards on my first job was he went to his peers and to our whole team and said, "You know, you basically showed that I'm an idiot, I should have asked." He showed vulnerability; humans can make mistakes. By revealing this, he created safety. What I try to do now too, is now that I have the title and the authority, I really encourage my team to question me, because that's the only way a good idea becomes a great idea. I get them maybe too comfortable in challenging me. But that way I can create the safety we need. We need to have these open dialogues and conversations, showing that when someone asks a question, it's respected. It's not thought of as something “stupid”, it's about asking questions and showing immediate action to help. Literally, I had a new bathroom within a week; that demonstrated this was no longer lip service. It's about creating safety for people to speak up and take immediate action, whether you can or can't do it, giving them an immediate response to why. And then it becomes safe to ask for help. When leaders ask for help, it shows we all need help.The Future of Work is in for a (Gigantic) Change
With the advancement of work-from-home culture and future migration to four
weekdays and hybrid working models, there would also be a rethinking needed on
the large corporate offices. On one hand, people do not want to be in a
crowded office space and would prefer odd-even type models, on the other hand,
it’s not as easy to set up work from the home office if you do not have
additional bedrooms, dedicated space, childcare options, and a large home
overall and not everyone has that. Also, there is a need for most companies
where they encourage their own employees to interact more for enhanced output
and peer learning and competition. This would bring open many corporate
offices to be accessible as co-working spaces to everyone looking for
innovation, learning, and collaboration. Highly likely that the co-working
industry will be back with a big bang as they make possible the dream of
office next door or walk to the office culture. In fact, co-working companies
may be the new commercial real estate aggregators as there may be many new
collaborations underway between corporate offices and co-working companies, to
drive the abundantly existing commercial infrastructure into good use.Fighting Half-Blind Against Ransomware Won't Work
To tackle the ransomware information-sharing gap, the cybersecurity industry should establish the RIRN, as called for in the Ransomware Task Force report. The RIRN would serve several functions, including the receipt and sharing of incident reports, directing organizations to incident response services, aggregating data, and sharing alerts about ongoing threats. The RIRN should develop standard reporting formats based on existing standards to make automated sharing possible, and it should adopt business processes that avoid double-counting data, protect privacy, and focus on the value proposition to participants. This network should include nonprofits, cybersecurity vendors, insurance providers, incident responders, and government agencies. A functioning RIRN would help close the information gap that inhibits our response to ransomware. We should build such a network based on the lessons learned from past information sharing initiatives, thereby avoiding the usual flaws that undermine such efforts. The cybersecurity industry shouldn't wait for the government to take the lead. We can create the network now and invite governments to join something that already exists.IoT cloud services: How they stack up against DIY
Beyond their own services, the strategy adopted by the cloud vendors is to
build a rich ecosystem of partnerships, marketplaces, development platforms,
and APIs, so that they can offer as much flexibility and as many pathways as
possible—as long as the data that requires higher-level processing eventually
ends up in their cloud, says Dilip Sarangan, senior director of research at
Frost & Sullivan. Neil Shah, vice-president at Counterpoint Research, says
that the major cloud players are offering fully managed, end-to-end IoT
deployments for “maximum value capture.” But they are also covering their
bases by offering open interfaces and partnering with other players in
response to enterprise concerns about vendor lock-in. This “have it your way”
approach makes sense when you consider the vastly different types of IoT
scenarios and the different types of data generated by connected cars, smart
cities, smart homes, manufacturing, verticals like oil and gas or healthcare,
video surveillance, etc. Dubrova adds that the one thing the cloud vendors
lack is domain expertise in specific verticals. “Cloud vendor analytics
toolsets tend to be very horizontal and limited—that is where partnerships are
playing a key differentiation role.”Cybersecurity Beyond The Enterprise: The Top Tips Everyone Should Know
With an increasingly remote workforce, many companies are allowing employees
to use their personal phones or laptops for business purposes, and people are
using their work devices for personal use, too. These practices became more
common during the pandemic, and they open up the door for cybercriminals to
steal both personal and corporate data at the same time. Keeping your devices
separate is just good practice. That way, if one device gets infected, you
have a backup and you haven’t jeopardized both your personal data and your
company's security. It’s worth saying three times because the majority of
people aren’t listening. Using strong passwords that are complex and unique to
each account is the No. 1 way to prevent cyberattacks. A Google-Harris Poll
found that 24% of Americans admit to using the word "password" or "123456" to
secure their accounts. A whopping 66% say they reuse the same password across
multiple accounts. It’s such a problem that Google announced recently that it
will enable two-factor authentication by default, automatically pushing users
to take extra security steps.Global Trends That Will Affect Digital Lending And Payments In India
To the online transactions ecosystem, blockchain has been lauded as a technology
that will revolutionise the space. Maximising efficiency with exceptional
features that include transparency, traceability and enhanced accessibility.
Blockchain will be able to provide a high level of security when it comes to the
exchange of money and sensitive information, allowing users to draw off its
transparency while lowering operational costs and creating an environment for
safe real-time transfers. India is the biggest market for remittances, with over
$62 Bn sent to India from abroad in 2016. Yet, according to Foreign Exchange
Management Act of 1999 (FEMA) only an authorized person/entity under the
legislation may deal in foreign exchange. However, with incorporation of
blockchain and smart contracts the use case of international remittance for
blockchain technology will prove to be a promising proposition for the Indian
market. India is the biggest market for remittances, with over $62 Bn sent to
India from abroad in 2016. .
Edge Computing in Plain English With Lori MacVittie
There's a lot of devices and sensors that are monitoring equipment. I don't know if you've ever been on the floor of a foundry of a manufacturing plant that makes, say, toilet paper, because there's a lot of that in my area. There are the machines that have taken over to actually do most of that work are incredible, right? They do almost everything, but they also need constant supervision. Who knew machines need supervision? There are sensors and monitors that are constantly gathering information, data about the temperature, about the operation, how much oil is in this one, does this need lubrication? How long has it been working? All that data has to go somewhere to basically to the edge. There's an application, that's gathering it all, analyzing it and sending out warnings or, "Hey, it's almost time for maintenance", right? Whatever. But it's also a point of alert. If something happens, it can also turn off a machine which, when you have people and machines mixed together, especially if you're cutting things like cardboard or paper, there's a potential for a real harm to be done. So, they have to be able to react and say, "Turn that off now. Stop that. Alert someone”. So, they need to be able to react very quickly. That is not something you want to have disassociated from the actual location.Quote for the day:
"The problem with being a leader is that you're never sure if you're being followed or chased." -- Claire A. Murray
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