3 Ways To Make Conversational AI Work For Your Organization
AI systems possess features unlike any mechanisms we use in human-human
conversation. Consequently, you can use them in powerful ways to create
conversations and experiences that go beyond what’s possible with people alone.
Unlike humans, AI can be available around the clock -- whether to answer a
question in the middle of the night or to support an asynchronous conversation
that stretches over many days. In addition, machines have an absence of emotion
and moral judgment that provides a distinct advantage in some situations. When
the subject of a conversation is sensitive, interactions with AI can afford a
degree of anonymity that some customers welcome. And when it comes to detecting
patterns, AI excels at detecting fraud or breaches of regulatory requirements.
AI is vigilant about events about to happen and can proactively engage in
anticipation, thereby creating superior experience. And finally, AI is moving to
a point where it can literally read your mind. ... Another point of
tension is the potential for manipulation. Persuasive computing can change
people’s attitudes or behaviors, while practices like hyper nudging use data to
influence people to certain decisions.
Making transformation stick
Leaders must model the behaviors that will be required to sustain change. This
can be done with literal acts and symbolic acts that communicate to
rank-and-file employees the leaders’ commitment to the transformation. A study
by the National Institute for Health Research in the UK highlights the
importance of role modeling. The institute reviewed transformation programs in
clinical settings and found that out of a variety of factors affecting the
longevity of the transformation, senior and clinical leader role modeling was
the highest predictor of sustainable change. The study defined role modeling as
leaders being seen promoting and investing in the change. The transformation
experience of one of our clients bears out this finding. The company recently
adopted customer relationship management software that features a tool for
gathering insights from client meetings. But using the tool requires the
company’s client-facing employees to write up meeting notes, something many find
tedious. So, the CEO of the business regularly uses the tool and sends
notifications of his written reports to his executive team and their direct
reports. This is a powerful example of role modeling.
How smarter data analysis can transform financial planning
Reliance on legacy spreadsheets is inefficient and causes a tremendous amount of
overhead and friction for analysts – the opposite of what you want in a process
that should be essential for every business. Many of the solutions to these
problems involve moving away from Excel entirely, which also isn’t practical in
many cases. Smaller businesses, in particular, may not have the time or manpower
to migrate their data and the deep logic they’ve built into their Excel sheets
to a new platform. “While the rest of the business world moves to powerful,
cloud-based SaaS solutions driven by AI and automation, finance departments
remain entrenched in Excel,” says Gurfinkel. “While it’s a powerful tool, it
lacks modern features that could help drive better forecasting. The ideal
solution is one that builds on Excel to leverage its strengths while minimising
its weaknesses, rather than trying (and failing) to replace it.” “Automation”
has nearly reached buzzword status at this point, but that doesn’t mean the
advantages it offers aren’t real. Automation has the potential to transform
nearly every facet of work – including financial planning.
Banking is broken. This small FinTech startup plans to fix it
The sheer breadth of banking services Modularbank covers is one of the company's
key strengths, says Vene, who points out that competitors have often had to
partner with third-party firms to provide the same services. She also believes
that the decades of technology and banking experience under Modularbank's belt
mean it can tackle complex use cases and customer demands more comfortably than
some of its competitors. "To build highly configurable modules, you have to know
the product side of finance well. It's not enough to have great technology and
great engineers in your team if you don't know what the customer needs to
configure in your products," says Vene. Security is another area where
experience plays a critical role, and arguably nowhere is this more important
than in finance. "We have been working in this field for so many years with
highly regulated organizations, so it was normal for us to focus on liability
and security from day one," says Vene. For instance, GDPR compliance has been
designed into Modularbank's products from the beginning, she says.
How We Tracked a Threat Group Running an Active Cryptojacking Campaign
After the attackers find and enter into a Linux device with inadequate SSH
credentials, they deploy and execute the loader. In the current campaign, they
use .93joshua, but they have a couple of others at their disposal; .purrple and
.black. All of the loaders are obfuscated via shc. The loader gathers system
information and relays it to the attacker using an HTTP POST to a Discord
webhook. By using Discord, the threat actors circumvent the need to host their
own command-and-control server, as webhooks are means to post data on Discord
channel programmatically. The gathered data can also be conveniently viewed on a
channel. Discord is increasingly popular among threat actors because of this
functionality, as it involuntarily provides support for malware distribution
(use of its CDN), command-and-control (webhooks) or creating communities
centered around buying and selling malware source code and services (e.g. DDoS).
The information gathered at this step lets the threat actor witness the
effectiveness of their tools in infecting machines. The list of victims may also
be collected to carry out potential post-exploitation steps.
New AI-Based Augmented Innovation Tool Promises to Transform Engineer Problem Solving
What will often happen is that as you work through both the “Functional
Concepts” and “Inventive Principles” lists you begin to realize that you’ve
omitted elements to your description, or that your description should go in a
slightly different direction based on the results. While this represents a
slightly iterative process, each iteration is just as fast as the first. In
fact, it's faster because you no longer need to spend 10 minutes writing down
your changes. All along the process, there's a workbook, similar to an
electronic lab notebook, for you to jot down your ideas. As you jot down your
ideas based on the recommendations from the AI, it will offer you the ability to
run a concept evaluation, telling you whether the concept is “marginally
acceptable” or “good”, for example. You can use this concept evaluation tool to
understand whether you have written your problem and solution in a way that it's
unique or novel, or whether you should consider going back to the drawing board
to keep iterating on it.
Unconventional Superconductor May Unlock New Ways To Build Quantum Computers
Scientists on the hunt for an unconventional kind of superconductor have
produced the most compelling evidence to date that they’ve found one. In a pair
of papers, researchers at the University of Maryland’s (UMD) Quantum Materials
Center (QMC) and colleagues have shown that uranium ditelluride (or UTe2 for
short) displays many of the hallmarks of a topological superconductor — a
material that may unlock new ways to build quantum computers and other
futuristic devices. “Nature can be wicked,” says Johnpierre Paglione, a
professor of physics at UMD, the director of QMC and senior author on one of the
papers. “There could be other reasons we’re seeing all this wacky stuff, but
honestly, in my career, I’ve never seen anything like it.” All superconductors
carry electrical currents without any resistance. It’s kind of their thing. The
wiring behind your walls can’t rival this feat, which is one of many reasons
that large coils of superconducting wires and not normal copper wires have been
used in MRI machines and other scientific equipment for decades.
Combating deepfakes: How we can future-proof our biometric identities
Deepfakes refer to manipulated videos or other digital representations
produced by sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI), which yield fabricated
images and sounds that appear to be real. While video deepfakes are arguably
the most common, audio deepfakes are also growing in popularity. ... Firstly,
we must think about how biometric authentication works. Take voice biometrics
as an example: a good fake voice (even just a good impersonator) can be enough
to fool a human. However, voice biometric software is much better at
identifying differences that the human ear either doesn’t discern or chooses
to ignore, which means that voice biometric ID can help prevent fraud if
identity is checked against the voice. Even so-called deep fakes create a poor
copy of someone’s voice when analyzed at the digital level; they make quite
convincing cameos, especially when combined with video, but again these are
poor imitations at a digital level. Outside of this, the ability for deepfakes
to bypass biometrics-based solutions will ultimately be dependent on the type
of liveness detection that is integrated into the solution.
Is EDR The Silver Bullet For Malware?
Absolute security isn’t possible, as we all know — our control framework is
only as strong as our weakest link. In recent years, we’ve seen great strides
in innovation surrounding virtualization tools. This new technology, while
useful to organizations and users in general, has also given hackers more
power to bypass traditional defenses. To prove this, I carried out a small
exercise — I aimed to avoid an EDR solution using a virtualization tool.
Virtualization technology has opened up many doors for businesses hoping to
scale up, but security controls haven’t scaled fast enough to secure these
virtualized environments. As such, we’re currently only focused on deploying
EDR solutions on physical endpoints because many people assume that anything
running on a physical host will be protected from malicious activities. When
it comes to virtualization, these tools create an opaque layer on which they
manage an environment. Because of this, any EDR solution running on the
physical host won’t have visibility on the files and services running on that
virtualized image. I used this concept to bypass an EDR solution running on a
physical host to simulate an attack on the network.
Moving into "Modern Test Leadership"
Test leaders can ignite passion in testers by finding ways to engage them.
Start a community of practice, share blogs, videos, podcasts or get external
speakers to come and share their wisdom with the team. You may find from
trying some of these, that some of the testers may start wanting to try new
ways of testing, or start learning new skills. The next step would be to
nurture that passion, point them in the right direction for their career and
let them run with it. ... The role of a test leader needs to change; gone are
the days of a test manager being the sole point of contact from a quality
perspective and being responsible for handing out testing tasks to a team.
With the world of agile/DevOps becoming a lot more prominent, the role needs
to evolve to being more a test coach, advocating for good testing practices,
helping to evolve the culture, raising awareness of what the testers can do
and what good quality is. They need to be a servant leader and support their
team to fulfil their potential. Being a test leader in the current world is a
challenge, but you really can reap what you sow.
Quote for the day:
"Leadership should be born out of the
understanding of the needs of those who would be affected by it. " --
Marian Anderson
No comments:
Post a Comment