Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - January 25, 2017

What Happens When a Customer of IT Becomes an IT Leader

An IT leader must think about the business outcome of technology investments, keeping in mind that conflicts can surface in employees’ mindsets, corporate operating rhythms, team reporting structures and more. One approach I’ve developed is to speak in the language of business executives and highlight the business outcomes they want to achieve. For example, Intuit has no less than nine billing systems that IT must try to bridge across. Our objective is to retire them in favor of one global system. But when we talked about "retiring" systems familiar to them, it caused some business leaders to think about how it might be risky to do so. When we flipped it to talk about the new capabilities the initiative would deliver – from wholesale bundling to quick pricing adjustments – they were willing to take on much more risk in parallel with us to move to these new systems.

Why this CTO says you need a CDO to do digital transformation right

The CDO plays a central and pivotal role in the digital enterprise and therefore in the future success of any business. Why? Because digital companies, digital disrupters, base their new digital business models on software, connecting the digital and physical worlds. Therefore, if software is the connection between the digital and the physical, the CDO is the connection between IT and business. They are now two sides of the same coin. Based on software, digital companies can create enhanced or totally new business models that offer completely new digital customer experiences. We have seen this with the newborn digital enterprises that are typically free of any physical assets such as fleets, factories, machineries or goods. It is through this software platform-only based business model they can move so fast, often resulting in exponential growth.

The road ahead: the coming rise of Artificial Intelligence in GRC

The GRC landscape is under a lot of stress due to the large number of unexpected events. Once again, Brexit and Trump are the obvious examples, with very few predicting the outcomes to those historic votes. The domino effect is the uncertainty they have created. For instance, there’s the wildly fluctuating exchange rates between the Dollar, Pound and Euro, and the unknown extent of regulatory change, which will come about following the triggering of Article 50 and Trump’s declaration to de-regulate the US. Businesses are finding it more difficult to plan and are having to allow for wider risk margins. What is predictable, is that there will be far more unpredictable events in the next few years. As such, GRC technology and approaches will evolve to handle persuasive uncertainty and not simply the standard events.

When Machines Know How You're Feeling: The Rise Of Affective Computing

This particular branch of computer science is known as affective computing, that is, the study and development of systems and devices that can recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human experiences, feelings or emotions. But it’s also related to deep learning, because complicated algorithms are required for the computer to perform facial recognition, detect emotional speech, recognize body gestures, and other data points. The computer compares the data input — in this case, a human with whom it is interacting — to its learning database to make a judgement about the person’s emotions. A University of Ohio team programed a computer to recognize 21 ‘compound’ emotions including happily surprised and sadly disgusted. And, in tests, the computer was more accurate at recognizing these subtle emotions than the human subjects were.

Deloitte CIO Survey Finds Gap Between Business Expectations and IT Capabilities

Business priorities are focused on customers and innovation, says the Deloitte report, while IT capabilities are still lagging in these areas, which is where CIOs can play a critical role. Yet the business expectations for CIOs still focus on maintenance, efficiency, cybersecurity, and business process improvement. These gaps between business and IT may stand in the way of CIO inspirations. Deloitte classifies CIO types into three categories: “Trusted operators” ensure operational excellence, “change instigators” enable large business transformations, and “business co-creators” focus on revenue and growth. The survey found that 55% of CIOs report their current type as trusted operator and 34% as business co-creator, but 66% of all CIOs surveyed say their ideal state is business co-creator.

Tap into the new SELinux, DR features in RHEL release 7.3

Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is one of the biggest improvements in RHEL release 7.3, giving administrators better control over policies. It is now possible to override a system module with a custom module that has a higher priority, so the custom module takes precedence. ... With RHEL release 7.3, organizations can also deploy multisite disaster recovery (DR) services without having to use a third-party vendor; the DR components are built-in and will integrate with the operating system. Admins can configure pacemaker to enable the multisite functionality, and trigger pacemaker alerts to receive notifications of status changes. This built-in disaster recovery option will help RHEL 7.3 be more reliable than preview RHEL iterations.

Big data: It may be the new oil but have public failures damaged adoption?

A recent report released by MHR Analytics found that 88% of UK C-level executives agree that data analytics and BI will be crucial to the future of their business, citing factors such as driving growth 42%, helping drive cost reduction and efficiency savings 39% and the need to improve customer intelligence 36% as key factors as to why they are introducing data analytics into their organisation. Challenges exist, the same report found that almost one in five businesses don’t have a chief analytics officer or a chief data officer, while 21% of the C-suite execs say that a lack of big data expertise is a challenge at board level. These are clearly big problems that need to be solved, particularly so when you consider that 76% of organisations are planning a big data or data analytics project in the next 12 months.

Could You Go to Prison for Not Reporting a Data Breach?

Not coming clean in a timely fashion about a cyber-breach is a serious matter - and creates opportunities for all sorts of financial improprieties. If anyone profited from insider information by acting on knowledge of the breach while he, she, or others were covering it up, for example, it is easy to understand why that person could face jail time for insider trading. But the issue is much broader. How many people bought or sold Yahoo stock between the time Yahoo employees discovered the breaches and the time that the firm disclosed the breaches to the public? Did anyone with insider knowledge of either breach advise anyone on the outside? Did anyone profit from that insider information? Did any employees receive compensation based on company-stock performance that was effectively distorted by a breach being covered up?

Are You A Venture CIO?

Focus on two types of venture capital investments. One type, called “Enabling” investments, increases the demand or expands the market for the investor’s own products and services. An example is Intel’s venture capital investments in video and audio software development firms that built systems requiring more powerful Intel chips. “Emergent” investments instead explore new, future opportunities not currently part of the investor’s business strategy by leveraging related products or services. For example, General Motors invested $500 million in the online car- and- ride sharing company Lyft to investigate mobility services. Venture CIOs must support their business in deciding whether to be the sole investor or to co-invest, if the company should acquire minority or equal stakes, and at what stage of the startup’s life cycle to invest.

Building Reactive Applications with Akka Actors and Java 8

The actor model provides a relatively simple but powerful model for designing and implementing applications that can distribute and share work across all system resources—from threads and cores to clusters of servers and data centers. It provides an effective framework for building applications with high levels of concurrency and for increasing levels of resource efficiency. Importantly, the actor model also has well-defined ways for handling errors and failures gracefully, ensuring a level of resilience that isolates issues and prevents cascading failures and massive downtime. In the past, building highly concurrent systems typically involved a great deal of low-level wiring and very technical programming techniques that were difficult to master.

Quote for the day:

"Some people change their ways when they see the light; others when they feel the heat." -- Caroline Schoeder

Daily Tech Digest - January 24, 2017

On Building a “Data Culture” in a Real Organization

What will vary from organization to organization will be the manner in which data governance and data analytics services are managed. The CDO has to have the authority, responsibility, and resources to manage all the necessary development, services, staff, and support associated with key points in the data supply chain. One important issue is what ongoing services have to be provided to make data and analytics useful, given the mix of analytical skills of those who can use the data. This should be driven by a consideration of what problems we are trying to solve with the help of data. As I suggested in How Much "Data Science" Do You Really Need?, ... Interestingly, the question of technology is not being raised in this discussion. Instead, we’re focusing on management, policy, and organizational issues.

Exploring the Intersection of Machine Learning and Analytics

All this machine learning gives us other great ways to interact with our data as well. With the SiSense chatbot, you can carry on a chat conversation from a messaging system like Slack or Skype, in which you engage in a natural language conversation with Sisense to get insights. You might type something like “Summarize sales by region for the fourth quarter of 2016” and Sisense will present you with a written response that might also be accompanied by a graph to further elaborate on the data provided. From this point, you have information to ask other questions, such as drilling down on a region to look at the store or salesperson performance. You could even do this while you’re on the run with the Sisense mobile app.

Technology continues to disrupt the marketing industry

It is evident from the research that customer experience and technology are still having a major impact on marketers. Marketers recognise that tech disruptors, such as Amazon and Uber, have raised the bar on customer expectation – with almost half (49%) of marketers surveyed feeling the pressure to reinvent customer experience just to keep pace. Customer experience is clearly moving up the business agenda, as it clearly should, with one in five respondents asserting that customer experience is now the primary focus for their organisation, and a further 15% saying they have gone through a major process of transformation in the past year to ensure they stay relevant.

What’s next for blockchain and cryptocurrency

Think of what’s happening in India, where the government recently scrapped 86 percent of cash in circulation, and in Venezuela, where currency is so devalued people now need to carry stacks of cash just to buy food. As a result, many retail investors are turning their attention to digital currencies, as well. Cryptocurrencies are free from government control. Governments can’t easily call in bitcoins or halt their movement across international borders without taking drastic actions. Financial institutions, bound by charters that describe the types of investments they can embark upon, have had few means of putting their money into bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. But in 2017, we’ll see a greater push towards a diversity of cryptocurrencies as investments, and ETFs, hedge funds, and derivatives will start to act as conduits for institutions to gain exposure and get into the cryptocurrency game.

A CIO's role in 2017: Keep the lights on while planning for the future

Even with all the effort to digitally transform, there is an inherent tension between the past, or status quo, and future technology including either all the potential or complication it brings, depending on your view. But that tension can be eliminated if CIOs and IT organizations are conscious that the customer is their fellow employees. "If you pay attention to the concerns and to the people — [making] a cognizant decision that you're going to focus on making sure that the IT that they have is valuable to the company — and you're going to help them move into more current technologies without having them worry about their jobs, then they're going to continue to work well as a team," said Warren Perlman, CIO of Ceridian.

The Evolution of the 'Virtual Law Firm'

The biggest technological change around virtual law practice has been in cloud computing. Thirty-seven percent of all respondents to the 2016 ABA TECHSURVEY said that they used cloud technology, up from 30 percent in 2015. Cloud computing has especially caught in the small firm realm: 61 percent of small firms polled for the ILTA/Inside Legal Technology Purchasing Survey predicted that their firm’s software could be cloud-based in the next one to three years. “Core to a virtual law firm is going to be leveraging the cloud, using practice management software that’s in the cloud that you and your team can access from everywhere, using document storage where there’s collaboration there. It’s really focused around the cloud,” Burton says. The ABA’s TECHREPORT survey found that certain types of collaborative online client services haven’t really taken off, however.

Data science is easy; making it work is hard

With data science, it’s always smart to look backward from the point of action, from the decision being made to understand whether your systems are yet capable of handling the interaction. By focusing first on the decisions, and how they are being made, it becomes possible to understand where data science can truly add value. There are few things I find more frustrating than data scientists identifying value that could be delivered, but then realizing that there is no way to actually deliver it. Another common mistake is not identifying where inefficiencies are beyond your control — the delivery time from your logistics supplier, for example. No analytics will improve that. So data science is easy. Making it actionable is the hard part.

A star tech and media banker shares his thoughts on dealmaking in 2017

"The convergence of traditional and digital media will yield content synergies, advertising scale across several platforms and sales force efficiencies," Bourkoff wrote. He added that this convergence does not mean that we'll see more over-the-top streaming and skinny programming bundles. Demand for OTT falls sharply when prices rise, Bourkoff said, and the programming costs needed to create skinny bundles of channels will force prices so high that demand will ween. Bourkoff said his firm's deal pipeline included 50 mandated live deals at the end of the year. " As we build out LionTree in 2017, I firmly believe it has never been more important to take a long-term investment view as it is now," he said.

Why Slack, Chatbots, And Freelance Workers Have Your IT Department Freaking Out

Compounding these growing threats are a couple of workforce trends that make them more likely—namely, the rise of workplace collaboration tools. CompTIA’s report points out that as more workers take advantage of BYOD ("bring your own device") policies and use their own smartphones and laptops for work purposes, the use of project-management platforms and apps has risen in order to keep everybody connected. A new study from Okta, an identity and device management provider, based on data from its own customers who generate an estimated million+ logins, found that more than 50% of apps accessed through its service are not provided by IT departments. This means workers are using Okta to secure their personal apps and data as well.

How information security professionals can help business understand cyber risk

Business owners also do not like spending money on anything that does not make them money, says Holman, adding that even cyber insurance is a grudge purchase. “I’m never fond of paying a high premium, but I accept it if there’s a niggling feeling that I could lose my livelihood and house if I fail to get the right insurance cover,” he says. “And mitigating cyber risk is exactly the same. If companies don’t do it, they could go out of business.” But businesses tend to be overconfident in existing defences and often doubt they could be seriously affected by a cyber attack, leaving infosec pros with the challenge of persuading them there is a real need to mitigate security risks.

Quote for the day:

"A single conversation with a wise man is better than ten years of study." -- Chinese Proverb

Daily Tech Digest - January 23, 2017

The rise of the machines: lessons from history on how to adapt

Although at different stages of development and adoption, as these technologies bed in, becoming more widespread and convergent, we will see a radical shift in the way that individuals, companies and societies produce, distribute, consume and re-use goods and services. These developments are prompting widespread anxiety about what role humans will have in the new world. As the pace of change accelerates, so the alarm levels ratchet up. A University of Oxford study estimated that close to half of US jobs could be lost to automation over the next two decades. In the opposite camp, economists like James Bessen argue that, on the contrary, automation and jobs often go hand in hand. It’s impossible at this point to predict what the overall impact on employment will be. Disruption will happen; of that we can be certain. But before we swallow all of the bad news, we should take a look at history.

How to create work-life balance in tech: 7 tips from the C-suite

The overworked tech CEO is now a cultural trope for a reason: Only 65% of tech workers said they were satisfied with their work-life balance, according to a recent survey from Comparably. This is a problem, as constant work and the resulting stress can lead to health problems such as impaired sleep, depression, diabetes, and heart disease—which not only hurt the employee, but also the company, in terms of turnover and rising health insurance costs. Despite the pressure to be always on, finding the proper work/life balance is essential, experts say. "It's possible to be a tech leader and to make time for taking care of yourself," said William C. Fisher, president of Quicksilver Software, Inc. "But, it takes a willingness to make that a top priority and schedule the time."

Dublin, New York officials cite smart-tech challenges and successes

"We're on the verge of seeing smart city tech grow exponentially," he added, speaking during a visit last week to the Smart Cities Innovation Accelerator, sponsored by Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Cudden joined about 50 CIOs and CTOs from other cities, mostly from the U.S., to share ideas on taking advantage of the latest smart city technology. "One thing I learned from the U.S. cities is to take an entrepreneurial mindset and to use startups to address problems in cities, with something like an entrepreneurship-in-residence program," Cudden said. "A lot of cities are dealing with the same problems, and one takeaway is there's very little difference in the challenges in European cities or U.S. cities."

Introducing the Open Process Automation Forum. Finally.

Here’s the big news: 2017 marks the kick off the Open Process Automation Forum, a working group within The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral industry consortium. The new Open Process Automation Forum is focused on developing a standards-based, secure and interoperable process control architecture that can be leveraged across multiple industries including oil and gas, petrochemical, mining and metals, pulp and paper, food and beverage, pharmaceutical and utilities. The concept itself is not new, as it is already playing out in The Open Group’s IT4IT Forum that is building a vendor-neutral reference architecture for managing the business of IT. Similarly, The Open Group’s Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) is defining approaches for using open standards with avionics systems.

New game, new rules: 3 steps to secure your bank in the digital age

It’s no secret that the sheer volume of data being collected and stored is higher now than ever before. According to EMC, by the year 2020, about 1.7 MB of new information will be created every second for every human on the planet. The data boom isn’t any different for banks—as customers access their banking information across multiple channels and touch points, they’re able to capture new and unique information about customer habits, preferences and more. That information makes banks a goldmine for hackers. The number of endpoints and systems exposed to the outside world is increasing, which means data no longer remains locked inside a data center. Instead, it proliferates outside of the four walls of business, making it vulnerable to hackers and security threats.

Dive Deep Into Deep Learning

The most remarkable thing about deep learning is that we don’t program them to perform any of the acts described above. Rather, we feed the deep learning algorithm with tons of data such as images or speeches to train it, and the algorithm figures out for itself how to recognize the desired targets. The ability of Deep Learning methods to learn complex nonlinear relations by churning high amount of data, creating features by themselves makes it stand out from the other traditional Machine Learning techniques. To know how a standard Deep Learning algorithm works, we have to follow its predecessors, neural networks. Well, some practitioners also refer Deep learning as Deep Neural Networks, which is also a choice. In short, a neural network is a family of three layers — an input layer, hidden layer, and an output layer as discussed below.

Idempotent configuration management sets things right -- no matter what

As systems architects are not perfect, many systems end up woefully underutilized -- wasting hardware, power, licences and maintenance costs -- while others lack necessary resources -- leading to performance issues. Even with the elastic resources of cloud computing, systems administrators must still ensure that the operational environment is configured correctly to optimally host the workloads. This is where idempotency comes in. Based on a mathematical concept introduced by Benjamin Peirce in 1870, the term now applies in multiple areas of computing. This does lead to confusion, as idempotency within a database is different from that in a Java program, which is different again from idempotent configuration management, which concerns modern DevOps and IT administrators.

6 EMM predictions for 2017

MDM is quickly becoming old news. Instead, Gartner coined the term EMM, pointing to a shift in mobile management to complete suites that include multiple tools for device, app and software management. And as the line is starting to blur in what defines a mobile device, Silva says MDM solutions will have "an tough battle against more full-featured EMM suites." If anything, more businesses will embrace EMM platforms and continue to use familiar MDM tools that are included in the suite. EMM also helps businesses consolidate certain practices -- like compliance regulations for example -- and deploy updates and patches across a range of complex devices all at once. "Solutions that are seamlessly integrated across all existing enterprise systems and platforms will begin to increase in popularity due to their comprehensive visibility and ease of use," says Mitch Berry, vice president of EMM at MOBI.

Raspberry Pi rival: Asus launches Tinker Board

Much as is possible with the Pi 3, the Tinker Board can be used as a PC replacement or a media center, with Asus' board supporting a custom version of the Linux-based Debian operating system and the open-source media center software Kodi. However, it won't run Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi's official, Debian-based OS. Asus is also touting the machine as a board for makers, with the Tinker Board also packing a 40-pin header with 28 general-purpose input output (GPIO) pins. These GPIO pins allow the board to control a range of hardware, and in the Pi have allowed the board to be used in modding projects ranging from robots to book scanners. Another consideration for makers is battery drain, and the Tinker Board's max power consumption is five watts.

An Introduction to Differential Privacy

Differentially private algorithms are a promising technical solution that could ease this tension, allowing analysts to perform benign aggregate analysis while guaranteeing meaningful protection of each individual’s privacy. This developing field of technology is worth considering in any system that seeks to analyze sensitive data. Although the differential privacy guarantee was conceived of only ten years ago, it has been successful in academia and industry. Researchers are rapidly inventing and improving differentially private algorithms, some of which have been adopted in both Apple’s iOS and Google’s Chrome. This article discusses the historical factors leading to differential privacy in its current form, along with a definition of differential privacy and example differentially private algorithms.

Quote for the day:

"When your values are clear to you, making decisions becomes easier." -- Roy E. Disney

Daily Tech Digest - January 22, 2017

Why software is like water, and what it means for global leadership

Software is the international language. It allows us to do everything from receiving instantaneous news out of Syria to hailing a ride in the rain via our smartphones. Both of these examples and more are accomplished by software. The theme for this year’s World Economic Forum Annual Meeting is particularly timely and relevant. We need Responsive and Responsible Leadership as we all play witness to an earlier call by the Forum: the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, as the lines are blurred between the physical, digital, and biological spheres. For countries to survive and thrive in this era, software needs to play a central role. Agriculture, basic manufacturing, education, food production, and water filtration all require software to work well at scale. For companies and economies, software is key to sensing change and reacting to it.

Researchers condemn unsubstantiated WhatsApp “Backdoor” story by Guardian

A group comprising of 30 security researchers have now co-signed an open letter to mount pressure on the Guardian so that it retracts the false story asserting that the paper is trying ‘very concretely’ to endanger public. The security researchers who have co-signed this open letter include salient bigwigs of the security industry including The Tor Project’s Isis Lovecruft, cryptographer Bruce Schneier, Mozilla’s Katherine McKinley, security research Thaddeus T’Grugq’, security researcher and author Jonathan Zdiarski and Open Crypto Audit project’s Kenneth White. Security researchers believe that the vulnerability pointed out by the Guardian is a minor one and poses an insignificant threat. It is related to the way WhatsApp handles essential retransmission for unread messages when the user changes SIM or phone card.

Digital Transformation Or Digital Free Fall: What Every CEO Must Know

Many leaders have fallen into the trap of believing digital transformation is like playing a game of technology catch-up. That if they can harness a bit of digital exhaust and turn big data into smart data, that somehow their business will transform itself. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the billions of dollars being spent chasing digital shadows won’t change a thing. Organizations whose business models are a few revolutions back on the digital curve cannot transform from lagger to leader by simply implementing blockchain or machine learning. Digital transformation is really more of a leadership, culture, strategy, and talent issue than a technology issue. Real digital transformation occurs when business models and methods are reimagined by courageous leaders willing to manage opportunity more than risk, focus on next practices more than best practices and who are committed to beating their competition to the future.

The Eye In The Sky Gets A Brain That Knows What It's Seeing

Crowdsourcing can also help with training and testing machine-learning algorithms, since human workers from around the world can be paid to quickly label features on satellite images or verify labels applied by machines, he says. And while both crowdsourcing and automation let DigitalGlobe and its customers extract more detail from satellite images than ever before, Har-Noy says the company takes steps to protect people’s privacy and safety. The resolution of commercial satellite images, regulated by the U.S. Commerce Department, means people aren’t recognizable at the level of detail the company releases, Har-Noy says. DigitalGlobe also doesn’t release images of active U.S. combat areas. "We take privacy very seriously with regard to the information we release, we make accessible, and also that other people derive," Har-Noy says.

Algorithm does real-time, city-wide ride sharing

The biggest part of that challenge is finding the optimal solution within that entire decision space; algorithms often get hung up on a local optimum or can't explore the entire space within a reasonable amount of time. Fortunately, the authors recognized that they don't need the global optimum. A reasonably good local optimum may not be the most efficient, but it's good enough to get people in cars quickly. A first round of trip assignments is done using what's called a greedy algorithm, which simply starts with the longest trips first and tries to minimize travel delays. From there, the algorithm attempts optimizations, but it's capable of producing an answer at any time if a decision has to be made. In addition, it's possible to make some optimizations like limiting the cars that are considered for servicing a trip.

IoT Seen as Weakest Link for Attacking the Cloud

'Not only are IoT devices an attractive target because of their inherent insecurity, but also for the role they play in some organizations, such as closed-circuit television cameras, which can provide real-time information about everything that is happening at a given location,' Fortinet said. But vulnerabilities are not the only issue. As IoT devices are being deployed, they must also be managed, and they are increasingly being managed by cloud solutions that require a communications channel between the IoT device and its master controller in the cloud. 'We expect to see attacks leverage this trust model in order to poison the cloud, and then use that beachhead to start to spread laterally,' Fortinet said. 'These end devices can then be exploited to misuse their trusted relationship to upload malware to, and distribute it from the cloud.

Securing a board appointment: CIO requirements and benefits

CIOs can become more attractive board candidates by developing a deep expertise in a particular area, such as digital transformation, experts said. "The best thing that people can do is to make a name for themselves and the work they're doing. To just have CIOs go out and try to market themselves to get on a board isn't how it happens. The best people are tapped on the shoulder for the work that they're doing," Gambale said. She noted that CIOs also might secure a board appointment by working with executive recruiters, as the firms they work in often also handle board of director searches. Meanwhile, Morris said serving on a nonprofit board first eventually could lead to serving on a company board of directors.

Should Banking Build an Internet of Things (IoT) Strategy?

Financial companies have prioritized customer and product monitoring in response to higher levels of online fraud, difficulty with identity verification and fears of hacked computer systems and networks. Banks are also using the IoT to monitor and collect data about their customers’ financial transactions, while lenders are exploring ways to finance and track assets and value collateral based on sensor data. More advanced IoT implementations include the ability to conduct basic banking using wearables (smart watches or fitness bands) and voice-first devices (Amazon’s Echo), the integration of invisible payments in transportation (Uber) and restaurants (Dine and Dash), and the leveraging of smart home appliances (Amazon Dash, Samsung Family Hub refrigerators). Additional tests are also beginning with the Amazon Go™ grocery and the inclusion of Amazon Echo capabilities in automobiles.

How to Resolve Competing Information Management Strategies

Political objectives can create an undercurrent of issues beneath the surface of recognizable business challenges. They can prove to be the largest detractor to gaining a truly cohesive vision and IM strategy. Like a fault line waiting to erupt, the negative whispers from this undercurrent can cause much damage and must be brought from the hallways to the table to be appropriately addressed by leadership. The best way to address political issues is to have leadership come together and lay the concerns on the table in order to find the high-stakes, high-emotion touch points. Work through the list of concerns to find logical, justifiable solutions. By bringing these issues to light and turning the focus to true business value and return on investment, you will find tensions ease and emotions dissipate. Such an exercise can be eye-opening and significantly improve communications in a highly volatile environment.

Report: AI adoption to create surge in revenue growth by 2020

According to the Infosys report, organisations which have fewer AI-related skills within their business are more likely to re-deploy workers impacted by AI adoption. However, those with more AI-related skills are more likely to re-train their employees. Leading industries which plan to re-train employees include: fast-moving consumer goods, aerospace and automotive, energy, oil and gas and pharmaceutical and life sciences. For instance, IBM’s Watson chatbot has been significantly deployed across banks, while hospitals have been leveraging its AI capabilities to diagnose rare diseases. Sandeep Dadlani, President & Head of Americas, Infosys said: “Artificial Intelligence adoption is on the rise and we are excited to see the investments in AI that businesses are gradually making to derive meaningful and creative change.

Quote for the day:

"What we actually learn, from any given set of circumstances, determines whether we become increasingly powerless or more powerful" -- Blaine Lee

Daily Tech Digest - January 21, 2017

New details emerge about Intel's super-small Euclid computer for robots

Intel announced and demonstrated the Euclid computer in a robot moving on stage during CEO Brian Krzanich's keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in August. The Euclid Developer Kit launch page is up on the website of Mouser Electronics. Intel didn't provide a specific launch date or pricing. Once the Euclid is placed in a robot, it can be operated remotely through a mobile device or PC. The Euclid has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity to communicate with the PC. The Euclid can also "serve as a full, autonomous brain with sensing capabilities, or as a smart sensor controlled by a more powerful computer," Mouser states on its website. The computer has GPS capabilities for navigation. ... The Atom CPU provides the horsepower to process and analyze the images collected by the 3D camera. The CPU will drive a robot's movement and help it complete tasks.

How banking apps and digital cash solutions are all the rage in India

The National Payments Corporation of India, the nodal agency for all retail payment systems in the country, is working with Visa and MasterCard to develop a common QR code to facilitate cashless transactions in shops. “It is a huge market. There are hundreds of mobile banking apps and hundreds of e-wallets. All of them serve the same purpose using different means,” said Sony Joy, chief executive officer of Chillr. “If there is any direct competitor of ours, it is cash.” Not surprisingly, at this juncture, uninitiated consumers are lost. Credit and debit cards have been the most used cashless payment systems in India for over a decade. Internet banking solutions such as NEFT (national electronic funds transfer) and RTGS (real time gross settlement) for corporate customers are in place. There are offline payment methods, eliminating internet security and malware threats.

How Android One could complete Google's grand Android plan

From the get-go, the whole point of Android One was to make inexpensive Android phones that didn't suck -- phones that were affordable but still decent to use, without all the asterisks that often accompany budget-level devices. Part of that means Google maintains tight control over the software and also guarantees the devices will get reliable and timely ongoing updates -- both security patches and full-fledged OS releases. Thus far, Android One has been limited to a small number of so-called "emerging markets" -- places like Pakistan and India, where it can be "hard for people" to "get their hands on a high-quality smartphone," as Google explains it. Bringing the program to America, though, would give it a whole new meaning. In short, it'd help Google move closer to its goal of "fixing" Android -- a goal that started in earnest with the Pixel but remains only half-complete.

How -And Why-You Should Use A VPN Any Time You Hop On The Internet

The good news is VPNs aren’t expensive. You can usually pay as little as $5 a month (billed annually or in blocks of several months) for VPN coverage. We won’t get into specific VPN service recommendations in this article; instead, here are some issues to consider when shopping around for a VPN provider. First, what kind of logging does your VPN provider do? In other words, what information do they keep about your VPN sessions and how long is it kept? Are they recording the IP addresses you use, the websites you visit, the amount of bandwidth used, or any other key details? All VPNs have to do some kind of logging, but there are VPNs that collect as little data as possible and others that aren’t so minimalist. On top of that, some services discard their logs in a matter of hours or days while other companies hold onto them for months at a time.

China Unveils Memory Plans

Although China’s domestic IC sector is moving at a fast pace, the Chinese government has been grappling with the same problem for years. It is behind in semiconductor technology. This is a complex subject, but one of the causes is export controls. Multinational companies sell products into China, but they must follow various export control policies. Originally hatched during the Cold War period in the 1950s, export controls were established to limit technologies that could have potential military use. As part of those controls, multinational fab equipment makers for years were prevented from shipping advanced tools into China (and other nations) that were capable of processing chips at 0.25 microns and below. On top of that, China also lacked IC know-how, so it fell behind in semiconductor technology.

Google Sets Out to Disrupt Curating With “Machine Learning”

A few other Experiments involve organizing the Google trove of art images into 3-D landscapes. “t-SNE Map,” for instance, gives you a view of a landscape of rolling hills, composed of points. Zoom in on the terrain, and you discover that the points are actually images of artworks. The topography is formed by how the computer has decided to sort and cluster artworks in relation to one another, based on its understanding of aesthetic similarities. “The algorithms only ‘looked’ at the artworks,” the description explains. “No meta data was used, the visual similarity was calculated with a computer image algorithm used in Google Search purely based on the images.”

Why Cyber-Security Strategies Are Falling Short

While organizations around the world are more confident than ever that they can predict and detect cyber-attacks, they're still falling short on investments and plans geared toward recovering from a breach. Such is the double-edged finding of EY's 19th annual Global Information Security Survey, "Path to Cyber-Resilience: Sense, Resist, React." EY surveyed 1,735 IT and IT security executives from organizations around the world to uncover the most compelling cyber-security issues facing business today, and what it discovered was a marketplace still struggling to keep up with a fast-evolving threat landscape. "Organizations have come a long way in preparing for a cyber-breach, but as fast as they improve, cyber-attackers come up with new tricks. Organizations therefore need to sharpen their senses and upgrade their resistance to attacks," said Paul van Kessel, EY's global advisory cyber-security leader.

Automated Traders Take Over Bitcoin as Easy Money Beckons

The nation’s central bank conducted on-site inspections at some of the biggest bitcoin exchanges this month, looking for evidence of violations including market manipulation and money laundering. Similar scrutiny of stock-index futures in 2015 led to trading restrictions that cut volumes by 99 percent. ... Rather than moving money out of the country, most automated traders in China are focused on cross-exchange arbitrage, said Arthur Hayes, a former market maker at Citigroup Inc. who now runs BitMEX, a bitcoin derivatives venue in Hong Kong. They can transact multiple times per second, reacting to price changes caused by individual investors and other speculators who often use technical patterns to guide their buying and selling decisions, Hayes said.

Half of work activities could be automated by 2055

Advances in natural language processing and machine learning produce a Cambrian crush of light AI technologies emerged in 2016. Chatbots have extended from messaging platforms to corporate IT departments while ecosystems are springing up around virtual assistants such as Amazon.com's Alexa. Roboadvisers, in which software assists with delivering financial advice, are increasingly becoming a standard offering in financial services. As a result, Chui says that it is tough to estimate AI’s potential as machines learn to process natural language more effectively. "It will unlock a lot of potential," Chui says. But most corporate IT departments are just beginning to figure out how to incorporate AI to better serve customers, according to Forrester Research. Despite strong interest in investing in AI technologies, many enterprises don’t understand how to apply AI to meet specific business objectives.

Do you have a cyber A-team?

Retained executive search firms are busy matching executive cyber A-players to support their forward-thinking clients. The largest companies and biggest brands can offer the seven-figure comp packages to the very best talent.... Smaller private companies find it difficult to compete for top talent in this elite pool. What these companies can’t offer in cash comp, they can make up in pre-IPO equity. ... Rapid technological advances are changing the game and your company’s crown jewels are too often accessible to the bad guys. Cybersecurity has fast become a top priority management challenge and finding best-in-class leaders to be part of your A-team to assess, manage and mitigate threats must be a key element of your company strategy. Previously siloed risk-management functions today must be reinvented, strengthened, and funded more aggressively.

Quote for the day:

"Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it." -- George Jung, Blow