Daily Tech Digest - October 12, 2024

Technically skilled managers can be great leaders, if they do this

Outlier leaders often struggle with delegation because they hold themselves—and their work—to impossibly high standards. To ensure that everything is perfect, you may take on too much, which leads to burnout and stifles your team’s potential. This approach drains your energy and can cause your team to feel undervalued or micromanaged. Building trust in your team is crucial for leveraging their strengths and empowering them to contribute to the organization’s success. Trust isn’t just about assuming your team will do their job; it’s about giving them the freedom to innovate, make mistakes, and grow. When your team feels trusted, they are more likely to take ownership of their work and deliver results that align with your vision. Start by delegating smaller tasks and gradually increase the responsibility you give to team members. ... Fostering a culture where team members feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, ideas, and concerns is key to maintaining strong team cohesion. It also helps outlier leaders stay connected with their teams, giving them a better understanding of what’s working and what’s not. Make communication a priority by holding regular team meetings focused not just on project updates but on sharing feedback, discussing challenges, and exploring new ideas.


6 biggest healthcare security threats

Traffic from bad bots — such as those that attempt to scrape data from websites, send spam, or download unwanted software — present another major challenge for healthcare organizations. The problem has become especially pressing when governments around the world began setting up new websites and other digital infrastructure to support COVID vaccine registrations and appointments. Bad actors bombarded these new, hastily established and largely untested sites with a huge volume of bad-bot traffic. Imperva says it has observed a 372% increase in bad-bot traffic on healthcare websites in the first year of the pandemic. “Increased levels of traffic result in downtime and disruption for legitimate human users who are trying to access critical services on their healthcare providers’ site,” Ray says. “It might also result in increased infrastructure costs for the organization as it tries to sustain uptime from the persistent, burdensome level of elevated traffic.” ... Wearable and implantable smart medical devices are a proven cybersecurity risk. These technologies certainly offer better analysis, assisting diagnosis of medical conditions while aiding independent living, but mistakes made in securing such medtech have exposed vulnerable users to potential attack.


Cybercriminals Are Targetting AI Conversational Platforms

Besides the issue of retained PII stored in communications between the AI agent and end users, bad actors were also able to target access tokens, which could be used by enterprises for the implementation of the service with APIs of external services and applications. According to Resecurity, due to the significant penetration of external AI systems into enterprise infrastructure and the processing of massive volumes of data, their implementation without proper risk assessment should be considered an emerging IT supply chain cybersecurity risk. The experts from Resecurity outlined the need for AI trust, risk, and security management (TRiSM), as well as Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) to identify and mitigate potential or known impacts that an AI system may have on privacy, as well as increased attention to supply chain cybersecurity. Conversational AI platforms have already become a critical element of the modern IT supply chain for major enterprises and government agencies. Their protection will require a balance between traditional cybersecurity measures relevant to SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) and those specialized and tailored to the specifics of AI, highlighted the threat research team at Resecurity.


Leveraging digital technologies for intralogistics optimisation

With rapid advances in digital technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT), companies can now optimise their intralogistics processes more easily and achieve better results. The following sections focus on a range of key aspects that can be significantly improved by leveraging digital technologies in support of intralogistics. ... Wearables are often used in warehouses to optimise worker movements, enable picking and packing efficiency, and ensure worker safety. Wearables equipped with augmented reality technology can be used for navigation and guiding employees for picking and packing operations. These techniques yield benefits not only by speeding up processes and reducing errors but also by reducing employee training time. ... The overall benefits of intralogistics optimisation are significant in terms of process efficiency, but securing the benefits depends on a range of sub-domains as described above. These technologies enhance visibility of operations by enabling real-time monitoring at every stage of production, right from the raw material supply stage up to the final delivery of the manufactured goods stage, which in turn can enhance efficiency and reduce downtime and production cost. 


Do we even need Product Managers?

The brand manager of the past was in many ways the product manager of the present. And not long after we began our discussion, Shreyas brought up the rather famous example of Procter and Gamble’s ‘Brand Man’ memo. ... And then, as tech gave businesses the ability to slice and dice consumer categories and cohorts and track multiple data points, the more ‘artistic’ PMs—those who made decisions based on intuition and taste—had to find patterns that would align with what the data suggested. But consumer data isn’t absolute truth. Humans are irrational. They might do one thing, and say something completely different in a survey. Or a feedback form. And as Chandra outlines, most companies are drowning in data now, with no clue what to do with all the metrics they track. ... When do you hire your first Product Manager? This is a question that an increasing number of CEOs and founders are asking in the post-ZIRP era—where efficiency is key and AI is pushing into more and more functions. So what happens when you sit down and ask yourself, “Do I need to hire product managers?” ... The one certainty that emerged from our discussion was that the role of a Product Manager has to evolve and break out of the boundaries it is now enclosed in, although some skills and characteristics will remain constant.


Scaling Uber’s Batch Data Platform: A Journey to the Cloud with Data Mesh Principles

One significant challenge that Uber has faced during the migration process is the need to accommodate changes in data ownership and the limits set by GCS. Data ownership changes can occur due to team reorganizations or users reassigning assets. To address this, Uber implemented an automated process to monitor and reassign ownership when necessary, ensuring data remains securely stored and managed. Additionally, Uber optimized its data distribution to avoid hitting GCS storage limits, ensuring that heavily used tables are separated into their buckets to improve performance and make monitoring easier. ... Looking to the future, Uber aims to further expand on its use of data mesh principles by building a platform that allows for self-governed data domains. This will simplify infrastructure management and enhance data governance, ultimately creating a more agile, secure, and cost-efficient data ecosystem. The cloud migration of Uber’s batch data platform is a significant undertaking, but through careful planning and the development of innovative tools like DataMesh, Uber is positioning itself for greater scalability, security, and operational efficiency in the cloud.


ShadowLogic Attack Targets AI Model Graphs to Create Codeless Backdoors

By using the ShadowLogic method, HiddenLayer says, threat actors can implant codeless backdoors in ML models that will persist across fine-tuning and which can be used in highly targeted attacks. Starting from previous research that demonstrated how backdoors can be implemented during the model’s training phase by setting specific triggers to activate hidden behavior, HiddenLayer investigated how a backdoor could be injected in a neural network’s computational graph without the training phase. “A computational graph is a mathematical representation of the various computational operations in a neural network during both the forward and backward propagation stages. In simple terms, it is the topological control flow that a model will follow in its typical operation,” HiddenLayer explains. Describing the data flow through the neural network, these graphs contain nodes representing data inputs, the performed mathematical operations, and learning parameters. “Much like code in a compiled executable, we can specify a set of instructions for the machine (or, in this case, the model) to execute,” the security company notes.


What Goes Into AI? Exploring the GenAI Technology Stack

Compiling the training datasets involves crawling, compiling, and processing all text (or audio or visual) data available on the internet and other sources (e.g., digitized libraries). After compiling these raw datasets, engineers layer in relevant metadata (e.g., tagging categories), tokenize data into chunks for model processing, format data into efficient training file formats, and impose quality control measures. While the market for AI model-powered products and services may be worth trillions within a decade, many barriers to entry prevent all but the most well-resourced companies from building cutting-edge models. The highest barrier to entry is the millions to billions of capital investment required for model training. To train the latest models, companies must either construct their own data centers or make significant purchases from cloud service providers to leverage their data centers. While Moore’s law continues to rapidly lower the price of computing power, this is more than offset by the rapid scale up in model sizes and computation requirements. Training the latest cutting-edge models requires billions in data center investment.


Navigating the Challenges of Hybrid IT Environments in the Age of Cloud Repatriation

Cloud repatriation can often create challenges of its own. The costs associated with moving services back on-prem can be significant: New hardware, increased maintenance, and energy expenses should all be factored in. Yet, for some, the financial trade-off for repatriation is worth it, especially if cloud expenses become unsustainable or if significant savings can be achieved by managing resources partially on-prem. Cloud repatriation is a calculated risk that, if done for the right reasons and executed successfully, can lead to efficiency and peace of mind for many companies. ... Hybrid cloud observability tools empower organizations to track performance, boost productivity, ensure system health, and swiftly resolve issues, leading to reduced downtime, fewer outages, and enhanced service availability for both employees and customers. By enhancing transparency and intelligence, observability tools ultimately strengthen the resilience of the entire IT infrastructure — no matter what path a company takes regarding the cloud. When deciding which workloads to move back on-prem versus which to keep in the cloud, companies should carefully consider their specific needs, such as cost constraints, performance requirements, and compliance obligations.


Solve People Silo Problems to Solve Data Silo Problems

According to Farooq, a critical aspect of any Chief Data Officer’s role is ensuring that data is both accessible and fit for purpose, supporting everything from revenue generation to regulatory compliance and risk management. Achieving these goals requires a robust data strategy that is closely aligned with the overall business strategy. Ultimately, it's all about the data. Reflecting on the challenges of integrating GenAI into institutions, particularly in managing unstructured data, Farooq likens the AI journey to Gartner's hype cycle, highlighting how innovations initially peak with inflated expectations before experiencing a period of disillusionment. However, unlike trends such as blockchain, Farooq believes AI is here to stay and will follow a different trajectory, leading to lasting productivity gains. From a data governance perspective, Farooq sees immediate practical applications for GenAI, such as creating synthetic test data for market scenarios and writing data quality rules. He emphasizes the importance of democratizing AI across all levels of an organization, similar to how data literacy became crucial for everyone—from CEOs to marketers. 



Quote for the day: 
"The whole point of getting things done is knowing what to leave undone." -- Lady Stella Reading

No comments:

Post a Comment