Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

Daily Tech Digest - February 19, 2017

Fantastic (data)-Beasts and Where to Find Them: Data Scientists and Data Engineers

In reality, data scientists as imagined by most do not exist because it is a completely new figure, especially for the initial degrees of seniority. However, the proliferation of boot camps and structured university programs on one hand, and the companies’ increased awareness about this field on the other hand, will drive the job market towards its demand-supply equilibrium: firms will understand what they actually need in term of skills, and talents will be eventually able to provide those (verified) required abilities. It is then necessary at the moment to outline this new role, which is still half scientist half designer, and it includes a series of different skills and capabilities, akin to the mythological chimera.

Intelligent Computers Could Replace Lawyers in Coming Years: Report

Advocates of the technology believe that AI machines could help create more jobs in the legal sector as the technology drives costs down and makes legal services more affordable to greater numbers of people. “It’s like the beginning of the beginning of the beginning,” said LawGeex CEO Noory Bechor. “Legal, right now, I think is in the place that other industries were 10 and 15 years ago, like travel.” LawGeex is an AI-powered platform for legal contract review. The LawGeex platform is designed to “take a new contract, one that it’s never seen before, read it and then compare it to a database of every similar contract that it’s seen in the past.” LawGeex, like other AI platforms, also learns from each review it performs. Can AI legal platforms do better than people? Will the machine miss things that an experienced lawyer would otherwise catch?

We’re only human: Vulnerability, machines set to disrupt sales jobs

The intangible benefit of being human may no longer be an advantage regarding relationship building skills. These human capabilities have been primary considerations for giving the nod over robots in any potential sales role—tech-related or otherwise. It could be argued that the benefit of being human, is no longer a benefit at all. People in sales get and keep customers. It’s what they do. If you’ve known successful sales people, you will have heard of the importance of building and fostering good relationships with clients. ... With the advent of the digital age and global economy, humans are increasingly not building or fostering relationships particularly well. This is ironic on any number of levels that are not lost upon me. The ability to engender consistent, quality communications with the assistance of unprecedented technology has resulted in the unexpected failure to do so.

Teaching Staff To Respect The Risk Of A Data Breach

Research by the Ponemon Institute reveals that just 35 percent of respondents who are familiar with their companies’ data protection and privacy training programs feel that executives prioritize their employees’ understanding of the causes and effects of data breaches. This statistic should concern every organization. Although attacks on data originate from external sources, the vulnerabilities exist internally. In fact, employees themselves are most often responsible for introducing a threat into an IT infrastructure. Most executives who realize that their employees don’t know much about security also struggle with the fact that, if there is a major breach, it’s them — the CEOs and CIOs — who will lose their jobs. ... Companywide security initiatives must place a major focus on social engineering in order to minimize the risk of user errors.

2017 Will Prove Pivotal in Efforts to Bring Smart Home Technology to Mass Market

An important year for smart home, 2017 will be the launch-pad year for EMEA and APAC adoption rates along with consolidation and maturity in North America. For the market as a whole, professional and DIY channels will continue to be fierce competitors, with a hybrid of the professional channel ultimately winning out at the end of 2017. Although DIY companies such as Apple will make large strides, DIY solutions will continue to suffer from mixed reviews and high upfront costs. As a result, the non-smart home enthusiasts will opt for professional support until DIY platforms become more reliable. As the price for connected devices come down, DIY systems will benefit until the cost of back-end services and maintenance allow service providers to lower monthly subscription fees.

The one critical skill many data scientists are missing

To be open and transparent with clients, we can’t just explain the potential for our products, we need to explain the possible pitfalls as well. We have started running “under-the-hood” sessions with some of our clients where they visit our offices and we talk about some of the more technical aspects of what we do. These are informal sessions, though, so people don’t want a math lecture or a discussion on coding practices. In this case, the challenge is finding the right balance between the formal, the detail, and the enjoyment. If any of the communication had failed, our product would never have got off the ground. It has all made me appreciate how vital communication is as a data scientist. I can learn about as many algorithms or cool new tools as I want, but if I can’t explain why I might want to use them to anyone, then it’s a complete waste of my time and theirs.

Designing the Data Management Infrastructure of Tomorrow

Enterprises struggle to create a data-driven culture in order to realise the true business value of data. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach towards creating a data-driven culture as this depends on the people and the precise work environment of an organisation, there is a unique business model that can be used as an inspiration to create an effective data management strategy and plan data management infrastructure. It is called Agile. The Agile approach is being used by renowned firms like Google, Spotify, Zappos, and Netflix. The purpose of this approach is to empower people to collaborate in multidisciplinary teams and enable them to make the right decisions quickly and effectively.

Evolution of Business Logic from Monoliths through Microservices, to Functions

The first steps to reduce cost of delivery focused on process automation. Many organizations developed custom scripts to deploy new hardware, and to install and update applications. Eventually common frameworks like Puppet and Chef became popular, and “infrastructure as code” sped up delivery of updates. The DevOps movement began when operations teams adopted agile software development practices and worked closely with developers to reduce time to value from months to days. Scripts can change what’s already there, but fast growing businesses or those with unpredictable workloads struggled to provision new capacity quickly. The introduction of self service API calls to automatically provision cloud capacity using Amazon EC2 solved this problem.

An Angular Wish List

There are many ways of implementing browser screen sharing – what is proposed here is to have a new Angular platform type (let’s call it Platform-Shared). It would have a composite renderer with functionality similar to what is both in Platform-Browser (to display locally) and in Platform-WebWorker. It could be configurable whether the remote user only gets to see the rendered output or could also send events back. The X Window System has the concept of a display server, which runs on the machine the human user sits in front of, and this offers a display service that remote applications can use to render on screen. Currently with Angular, the entire application runs in the web browser where the user is located. Imagine a new Angular Platform-DisplayServer that would allow the web application to run on some remote machine

10 things to consider when buying a router

Keep in mind that networking hardware doesn't last forever. Not only do the standards change fairly often, but networking hardware is put through a lot of stress on a daily basis. Your Wi-Fi connection is stretched across your computer, gaming console, smartphone, tablet and streaming devices. And with more devices being added to the mix, such as smart lights or thermostats, that load is only getting larger, and over time, a router's performance can degrade. ... The positioning of your router is extremely important. It should be in a central location, away from other gadgets or obstructions and, ideally, high up on a shelf. Still, even with great positioning, you're likely to run into dead spots inside your home, places where the wireless signal just can't reach. Using heat map software can help you maximize your wireless coverage, and buying a more expensive router might give you better range, but it still doesn't mean the signal will reach the far corner or your basement.

Quote for the day:

?Sometimes things fall apart so that better things can fall together." -- Marilyn Monroe

Daily Tech Digest - February 18, 2017

The Rise of AI Makes Emotional Intelligence More Important

Those that want to stay relevant in their professions will need to focus on skills and capabilities that artificial intelligence has trouble replicating — understanding, motivating, and interacting with human beings. A smart machine might be able to diagnose an illness and even recommend treatment better than a doctor. It takes a person, however, to sit with a patient, understand their life situation (finances, family, quality of life, etc.), and help determine what treatment plan is optimal. Similarly, a smart machine may be able to diagnose complex business problems and recommend actions to improve an organization. A human being, however, is still best suited to jobs like spurring the leadership team to action, avoiding political hot buttons, and identifying savvy individuals to lead change.

Support Grows For Robo-Advice

Accenture's report Financial Providers Transforming Distribution Models For The Evolving Consumer says that seven in 10 consumers around the world would welcome robo-advisory services – computer-generated advice and services that are independent of a human advisor – for their banking, insurance and retirement planning. Yet, a large number of consumers still want human interaction for their more complex needs, leaving firms challenged with blending a physical presence with an advanced digital user-experience, as they look to integrate robot and human services. ... The survey also found that consumers are willing to switch to non-traditional providers for financial services. Nearly one-third would switch to Google, Amazon or Facebook for banking, insurance and financial advisory services.

Protecting your digital enterprise—it’s not just up to IT

So, how do organizations protect their digital enterprise and ensure that they are compliant? It will be essential to provide your IT team with the resources it needs to manage data effectively, including where it goes and who can access it. At the session, my team members and I discussed how HPE’s ControlPoint and Structured Data Manager are ideal tools to help businesses achieve this level of data hygiene. But achieving compliance isn’t just up to the IT team. It requires an organization-wide commitment. “What’s really important is to create a pervasive information governance culture throughout the organization,” said Duncan. “GDPR is not a security problem. It’s not even an IT problem; it’s a business problem.”

Tapping the Entrepreneurial Spirit for Successful Digital Transformation

The likeliest place to find these change agents is right in the trenches, in the lines of business. These are the individuals who are intimately involved with and exposed to daily operations, who are uniquely positioned to see opportunities for problem-solving. Taking a fresh perspective on the mundane tasks that are performed every day can inspire creative solutions using custom apps. Here’s a real-life example of an individual who put this experience and perspective to good use. Never one to do things conventionally, Pete Tucci was a pro baseball player with Major League Baseball. When a career-ending hand injury cut his dream short, he founded the Tucci Lumber Bats Company, producing custom baseball bats. The fact that he had no woodworking experience didn’t deter him; he was determined to figure out how to make world-class bats. In short, Tucci was a change agent.

From disrupted to disruptor: Reinventing your business by transforming the core

For all the fundamental change that digital reinvention demands, it’s worth emphasizing that it doesn’t call for a “throw it all out” approach. An engine-parts company, for example, will still likely make engine parts after a digital reinvention, but may do so in a way that’s much more agile and analytically driven, or the company may open up new lines of business by leveraging existing assets. Apple, with its move from computer manufacturer to music and lifestyle brand through its iPhone and iTunes ecosystem, reinvented itself—even as it continued to build computers. John Deere created a whole series of online services for farmers even as it continued to sell tractors and farm equipment. There are many elements to a transformation, from end-to-end journey redesign and embedding analytics into processes to open tech platforms.

3 Big Blockchain Ideas MIT is Working on Right Now

Work on the multifaceted world of blockchain tech now sits easily alongside transparent robots that eat real-world fish, solar nebula research, and other imaginative, futuristic projects in progress at the university. Part of MIT's Media Lab, DCI now has a team of 22 people and at least seven ongoing research projects, and it nurtures three startups that use cryptocurrencies and their underlying technology in a variety of ways. To date, the initiative has funded the work of bitcoin protocol developers, and has supported a range of research, going beyond bitcoin to partner with distributed ledger tech startup Ripple and developing enterprise data projects. DCI research director Neha Narula, who helps drive the initiative, told CoinDesk:

Raking in the Ransoms: How the Russian Ransomware Threat Landscape Ticks

If you think Russian threat actors code a piece of ransomware and directly target users with it, you’re wrong. All native ransomware enterprises are much more sophisticated than that. It all begins with a developer who creates the crypto-malware. They are the one responsible for coding the software, adding additional modules, and setting up IT infrastructure to support the ransomware’s distribution. To coordinate this operation, a creator inevitably hires or enlists the help of a manager. The manager is the only person in a Russian ransomware enterprise who gets to communicate with the author. Their job is to internalize the directives of the creator and find partners who can realize the developer’s vision. In other words, a manager is responsible for finding partners who can help expand the ransomware initiative. Kaspersky Lab explains how they do this in a blog post:

Putting digital transformation on the business agenda

Since embarking on this new world of work, Microsoft Japan now regularly measures how successful its work style innovation has been. Employees are rewarded for making calls and arranging meetings more promptly. “A Japanese company, on average, takes about 10 days before they have an official meeting, from asking for the meeting to an actual meeting to happen; in our case, 5.5 days,” says Hirano. “The new work style empowers employees with the flexibility to not only become more productive but also achieve more work-life balance. This has helped significantly in attracting and retaining talent. In fact, we have halved the attrition rate of female staff.

How Fintech Will Change The Way We Bank In The Developing World

The spread of mobile phones has spearheaded this opportunity. The economic benefit of this inclusion is massive at an individual and societal and organisational level. Not only is there opportunity to provide financial services to 80 percent of the global population through their mobile phones, there are also 200 million businesses in emerging economies without access to financial services including savings and credit. By bringing down the barriers of entry of the banking institutions, entrepreneurs now have the opportunity to enjoy the economic benefits previously available exclusively to established institutions. Blockchain solutions have provided a digital platform which enhances transparency. Furthermore, for governments, a cash run economic ecosystem means that transactions are not captured into the system and tax revenue is lost.

How Machine Learning Transforms Digital Experience, One Industry at a Time

Every customer’s journey is different. Someone looking for wedding items, DIY repairs or Halloween costumes will have different preferences and different stages of the buying journey. ... Machine learning can cultivate this personal experience automatically, quickly and at scale.

Knowing exactly what they want ... Natural language processing (NLP) will help create an incredibly efficient marketing machine from a simple site search bar. One person’s “Cable knit jumper” is someone else's “chunky sweater,” and NLP continuously learns to identify and connect intent. These super-charged analytics give insight to more than just trending search terms, but can also tell you what overall topics and categories are likely to be the next big thing — and which of your current catalogue already fits nicely into these trends.

Microsoft Aims To Expand Into Healthcare With AI And Cloud Services

This is a slight departure from Microsoft's previous healthcare projects like Microsoft Health that has focused on data-based patient programs. The new initiative will create partnerships between various players in the healthcare industry and Microsoft's AI and Research organization, starting with a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC). UPMC's product development experts will work with Microsoft's research and technology expertise to build tech solutions that are customized to the needs they are serving. The synergy between the products designed to solve healthcare issues and the realities of everyday healthcare is a crucial stepping stone in healthcare tech initiatives. More efficient information and workflow tools can improve health care systems and even save lives.

Quote for the day:

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln

Daily Tech Digest - February 17, 2017

Extending COBIT 5 Data Security and Governance Guidance

COBIT 5 encourages each enterprise to adapt the COBIT content to the enterprise’s own priorities and circumstances. However, among the processes COBIT 5 recommends are 3 especially suited for security, and the metrics suggested for each are only a subset of measurements that might be meaningful to the enterprise. First is that a system is in place that considers and effectively addresses enterprise information security requirements. This appears overarching (a good thing), and the measures suggested for it include the number of key security roles that have been clearly defined and the number of security-related incidents. Most enterprises would wish to add other measures to the list in keeping with their own situation.

7 tips to turn threat data into true threat intelligence

Unvetted threat intel is a bit like getting raw data feeds about the stock market. Responding to such data, you may be the next investment millionaire, or you could completely lose your shirt. You need to filter through it to eliminate the useless portions, and carefully weigh the balance. As Malcovery Security said in a blog some months ago, most of what the industry refers to as threat intelligence is really just threat data. It is just a list of data elements, full of noise and false positives. Until the intelligence part is applied to this data feed, it is fairly useless, or even worse, may lead to false conclusions. According to Mark Orlando in his presentation to the RSA Security Conference in 2015, raw threat intel data is highly commoditized, has poor quality control, a short shelf life, and promotes a false sense of awareness.

CTO: Our quest for agility led us to the OpenStack framework

The OpenStack framework has been around for a reasonably long time. Even more important, OpenStack was an early manifestation of an approach purposefully designed to help us deliver agility. In the years since the OpenStack framework became available, others have created alternatives to Open Stack, but they are all built to do similar things: leverage commodity hardware, open standards, virtualization and orchestration tools to deliver fluid, portable and complete services (compute, storage and networking). With fluid, portable and complete IT services, we can flex, scale, move around and revise our services as needed. These are capabilities we need -- no, must have -- if we are to survive and thrive in a technology-driven marketplace.

58 Mind-Blowing Digital Marketing Stats You Need to Know

While there are several forms of traditional marketing including print, radio, and television, statistics show that digital marketing is taking over in terms of popularity and success. In fact, by 2021 it’s projected that marketing leaders will spend 75% of their total marketing budget on digital marketing rather than traditional marketing. ... Social media is changing the face of the marketing culture in several ways. With social media, it’s easier to collect useful data on consumers, build a visible and popular brand, and sell products on various social media platforms. The following statistics will boggle your mind and help you understand the importance of getting your social strategy right this year.

Gain competitive advantage with NoSQL databases

Till yet we learned the reasons that worked as a catalyst for the failure of relational databases. However this is not completely true as relational databases still have a fair share of the market however NoSQL drew the attention of many companies which wanted to deal with big data. Some of the NoSQL advantages are- Make the system agile- NoSQl databases work on a dynamic model that allows storing and maintaining data without defining it beforehand. This makes the faster and responsive than ever before. Easy scaling- Scaling up the relational databases were complex and expensive. Unlike this the NoSQL databases can easily be scaled-up and down as per the workload as these have a dynamic architecture offering much more operational benefits than RDBMS.

Russian Cyberspies Blamed For US Election Hacks Are Now Targetting MACs

The group, which is known in the security industry under different names, including Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, and APT28, has been operating for almost a decade. It is believed to be the sole user and likely developer of a Trojan program called Sofacy or X-Agent. X-Agent variants for Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS have been found in the wild in the past, but researchers from Bitdefender have now come across what appears to be the first macOS version of the Trojan. It's not entirely clear how the malware is being distributed because the Bitdefender researchers only obtained the malware sample, not the full attack chain. However, it's possible a macOS malware downloader dubbed Komplex, found in September, might be involved.

How to use Instant Tethering on your Google Pixel or Nexus device

Staying connected on the go is a constant struggle for business professionals and everyday techies alike. However, a new feature from Google called Instant Tethering could offer a more intelligent way to keep your devices online. A recent product forum post by Google product manager Omri Amarilio explained that Instant Tethering uses Bluetooth to allow to Google devices to communicate. The devices, such as tablets and Pixel phones, must be logged into with the same Google account. "When you unlock a tablet such as the Pixel C, it will notice if there is no internet connection available, and will ask your Pixel phone if it has internet and battery life," Amarilio wrote in his post. "If it does, we will give you an option to enable a secure hotspot and pair [automatically], without even taking your phone out of your pocket."

Real-World, Man-Machine Algorithms

There are many machine learning classification problems where using log data is standard, essentially giving you labels for free. For example, ad click prediction models are typically trained on which ads users click on, video recommendation systems make heavy use of which videos you’ve watched in the past, etc. However, even these systems need to move beyond simple click data once they reach large enough scale and sophistication; for instance, because they’re heavily biased towards clicks, it can be difficult to tune the systems to show new ads and new videos to users, and so explore-exploit algorithms become necessary. ... As another example, suppose you're an e-commerce site like eBay or Etsy. You're starting to see a lot of spammy profiles selling Viagra, drugs, and other blacklisted products, so you want to fight the problem with machine learning.

2 powerful new features on their way to Android right now

Android can be full of surprises. Thanks to the deconstructed nature of the operating system, individual pieces of the software receive updates all the time -- in a way that has nothing to do with the big, attention-grabbing OS rollouts. It happens with a large and ever-expanding list of core system apps that now exist in the Play Store and are updated accordingly, but it also happens silently and seamlessly with some behind-the-scenes tools that are easy to overlook. As a result, useful new features can sometimes appear in random areas of your device -- and you might not even realize they're there. Such an update is underway as we speak. Google is in the midst of rolling out a refinement to its Google Play Services app that brings two powerful new options into Android's settings -- options you might never notice but don't want to miss.

Bruce Schneier: It's time for internet-of-things regulation

Schneier argued there is precedence for creating such an agency to address new technologies, from trains and automobiles to radio and nuclear. And he said those agencies tend to be created for two reasons. "New technologies need new expertise," Schneier said. "And new technologies need new controls. And this is something markets can't solve. Markets are, by definition, short-term profit-motivated. That's what they're supposed to do. They don't solve collective action problems." Government, he said, is "the entity that is used to solve problems like this." But Schneier also admitted that a regulatory approach to IoT threats brings a lot of problems, from a general lack of technical expertise in the government to historical problems with regulatory capture.

Quote for the day:

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe" -- Anatole France

Daily Tech Digest - February 16, 2017

Biometrics lead to liberty, security debate

“It’s going to apply to all of us, because there is a global priority of security and that philosophy has been clearly illustrated by President Donald Trump,” Joyner said. The benefits of these systems is the potential to reduce fraud, increase security by accurately assessing and identifying individuals, eliminating the need for passwords and, possibly, a cashless society, he said. “There have already been programs like this in effect, and I think that’s why nobody is questioning it now,” constitutional law professor Joseph Ignagni said. The issue presents an interesting legal question about the Fourth Amendment, which protects people against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant or probable cause, since seizing biometric data is technically a search that is being recorded or kept without probable cause, Ignagni said.

One in three cybersecurity job openings go begging, survey finds

The experience part is paradoxical, of course, since someone somewhere has to bet their infrastructure on an inexperienced but eager candidate willing to learn. There are some choice certifications that make the difference, led by the Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, sought by 27 percent of security managers. The survey report's authors recommend nurturing talent from within, to invest in offering support for training and certifications to current staff members. The advantage is these individuals already understand the business, and who owns what line of business. At least 26 percent of security professionals say they have positions that have been open for more than six months, and another six percent say they have positions they haven't been able to fill.

Demand for qualified cybersecurity professionals continues to outstrip supply

Studies show most corporate job openings result in 60 to 250 applicants. Compounding the problem, ISACA’s State of Cybersecurity 2017 found that 37 per cent of respondents say fewer than 1 in 4 candidates have the qualifications employers need to keep companies secure. “Though the field of cybersecurity is still relatively young, demand continues to skyrocket and will only continue to grow in the coming years,” says Christos Dimitriadis, ISACA board chair and group director of Information Security for INTRALOT. “As enterprises invest more resources to protect data, the challenge they face is finding top-flight security practitioners who have the skills needed to do the job. When positions go unfilled, organisations have a higher exposure to potential cyberattacks. It’s a race against the clock.”

Board Can Play A Key Role In Curbing Cyber Threats

The good news is, there has been an increase in the number of firms whose boards of directors and management that are actively engaged with cybersecurity and adopting best practices in their IT departments. Protiviti’s 2017 Security and Privacy Survey shows that current board engagement levels are at 33 percent, compared to 28 percent in 2015. “While there has been an increase in boards of directors’ and company management’s engagement with information security is a positive sign, it’s imperative that leadership keeps closer tabs on the state of their organizations’ cybersecurity programs,” said Scott Laliberte, a Protiviti managing director and leader of the firm’s global IT security and privacy practice.

Lawmakers Want Self-Driving Cars To Thrive But Still Fear Hacks

The vision of widespread self-driving cars might not be realized without Congressional help. The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Chair John Thune, R-S.D., and Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., announced plans Tuesday to eventually introduce legislation that promoting the autonomous vehicle industry. Today's federal safety standards involve concepts such as the "placement of driver controls" that "assume a human operator," they wrote in a statement. "While these requirements make sense in today’s conventional vehicles, they could inhibit innovation or create hazards for self-driving vehicles." They also plan to examine the "existing patchwork of laws and regulations and the traditional roles of federal and state regulators.”

Hands on with the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 hybrid

A notebook should take you from workstation to couch to the road, with as few peripherals or headaches as possible. But as notebooks get thinner and lighter, more manufacturers have followed Macbook's footsteps and ditched full-sized HDMI, DisplayPorts and USB ports. Instead, the trend is turning towards USB Type-C connectors that can do it all -- as long as you have the right adapter. I've had to temper my great port-expectations because I know it's not reasonable to expect a full USB or HDMI port on a thin, compact device. But, that doesn't mean I'm ready to say goodbye to every port. While the Macbook is an extreme example -- it features just one USB Type-C port for everything, including charging -- Dell found a comfortable middle ground on the XPS 13 2-in-1.

Google Assistant Will Soon Be Able To Buy Stuff For You On Command

There isn’t much you can do with the feature after it’s set up, but presumably Google will announce support for third-party stores shortly. At the start of the set-up process, you’ll need to accept the terms and conditions for both Google Payments and Google Express, an online marketplace that links to a number of popular stores, such as Walgreens, Costco, and Toys R Us, so at the very least you'll be able to buy things there. However, asking Google Assistant to shop for something on Google Express merely brings up a search results screen. Since the feature is tied to your Google account and not the Pixel phone specifically, it’s likely it will work with all of the devices integrated with Assistant, including Google Home and Android Wear 2.0 watches.

There Are A Lot Of Open Questions When It Comes To Machine-Based Innovation

The trend in machine learning has been strongly in favor of neural networks. If 2016 was the year when Alpha-Go bested world's best Go players, I think 2017 will be the year where we make continued progress towards neural-networks based technologies entering the every-day world. I'm thinking better personal assistants (Amazon's Alexa and Google Home are already great successes), greater progress towards autonomous vehicles, machine learning in health-care, etc. People way smarter than myself have been thinking about this. I really like Andrew Ng's perspective: 'if a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.' A lot of analytics that are done require way more than one second of thought!

10 Management Techniques from Born-Digital Companies

Born-digital enterprises are “a generation of organizations founded after 1995, whose operating models and capabilities are based on exploiting internet-era information and digital technologies as a core competency.” “It’s actually the superior leadership thinking, patterns of thought and competencies they’re employing that are beginning to be the differentiators,” said Mark Raskino, VP and Gartner Fellow at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Barcelona, Spain. But conventional companies are often resistant to the idea that they might be able to replicate some of these ideas in their own enterprise. However, the excuses are starting to fall away as companies move toward digital. Traditional companies previously may have thought, those are startups so they can operate differently or those are small companies, they work in the ephemeral, or they are all U.S.-based companies.

Clear goals, patience required for successful IT automation strategy

"There is a training curve for digital systems that does not elicit better work in the short term; it takes time to get there," Conlee said. An IT automation strategy can be a huge help when it comes to one common issue facing modern digitized companies, Galusha said: process and data complexity. Because these companies are responsible for many systems with numerous internal/external data sources, it is difficult to connect all that information to the company's processes. A robotic process automation strategy can help with consolidating data for analytics purposes, Galusha said, and apply unique business rules to information contained in these numerous data sources. "Your processes, and how you are making decisions, [is] only as good as the information," Galusha said. "If you are doing it manually, it's slow, it's inefficient, and you're probably making errors along the way."

Quote for the day:

"Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing." --Theodore Roosevelt

Daiy Tech Digest - February 15, 2017

Operational - the Forgotten Architectural View

DevOps requires embracing new, often unfamiliar technologies and ideas. Architectural thinking and design can help clarify who the stakeholders are, what concerns they have, and how those concerns are being met. Len Bass and his colleagues recently published a book on DevOps technology and practice for software architects2. Beyond that, little guidance exists for architects dealing with their systems' operational environments. To help fill this gap, I outline here an architectural viewpoint, one that updates and reworks the operational viewpoint Nick Rozanski and I described in Software Systems Architecture

Big Data: Why Should You Be Aware of It

As businesses, of all sizes, push to become more competitive in a rapidly developing global economy, there are a number of influences that are moving front and center. It would be difficult to identify one singular component of business that has had the impact of Big Data over the last several years, and there is a good reason for this. Whether you are running a training company or a marketing agency, Big Data will play an immensely powerful role in the development of effective models of customer engagement, branding, research and development, and more. Big Data represents a massive opportunity for businesses around the world, primarily based on its capacity to transform and disrupt the status quo. If you are a business owner, it is imperative that you are aware of Big Data and how it can benefit your business.

CIOs disrupt IT operating models to align with digital business

For many CIOs operating in the digital era, the need to meet customer demands is paramount. But many CIOs also realize that before their organizations can serve customers they must empower employees with premium tools. Borrowing a page from Apple’s Genius Bar playbook, Salesforce.com CIO Ross Meyercord instituted Tech Force teams in the SaaS software vendor’s break rooms. Employees needing technical help can approach the Tech Force staffers to troubleshoot computer, phone or other issues. They get face-to-face with IT staff, rather than filing impersonal help-desk tickets from their desks. ... Unbounded IT and startup culture extend to healthcare organizations such as St. Luke's Healthcare Systems, which includes 10 hospitals in Kansas City, Mo. In true bimodal fashion, CIO Debe Gash is splitting her IT projects into two categories: run-the-business efforts and transformational activities.

Revolutionary Navigation Standard by Volkswagen and Mobileye

"The future of autonomous driving depends on the ability to create and maintain precise high-definition maps and scale them at minimal cost", said Professor Amnon Shashua, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobileye. Professor Shashua adds this: "The Volkswagen agreement is a turning point. It not only utilises crowd-sourcing technology to automatically generate high-definition maps and scale them cost-effectively. A much more important aspect is that the agreement provides a framework for industry-wide cooperation between automobile manufacturers to jointly produce the map contents that are needed for autonomous driving." In fact, the agreement is the first of its kind to merge the data of different automobile manufacturers worldwide to create a single ‘high-definition world map'.

Data Center Security Critical for Securing Enterprise Data

These cyber-attacks will continue to increase, both in number and sophistication, as we become more globally connected—and the bad actors intent on carrying out their malicious acts become more connected. Unfortunately, detecting and preventing cyber-attacks is made more difficult because the security strategies of the IT teams and the facilities teams—who are responsible for data security and building/physical security, respectively—often don’t align. This problem becomes much more pronounced on a macro level when your organization uses cloud or colocation hosting services from a third-party data center provider. So how do you maintain the highest levels of data security…and who’s ultimately responsible? The truth is, it’s a shared responsibility.

Google brings global database system 'Spanner' to its Cloud Platform

“When building cloud applications, database administrators and developers have been forced to choose between traditional databases that guarantee transactional consistency, or NoSQL databases that offer simple, horizontal scaling and data distribution,” product manager for Cloud Spanner, Deepti Srivastava, said in a blog post. “Cloud Spanner breaks that dichotomy, offering both of these critical capabilities in a single, fully managed service.” He added: “Over the years, we’ve battle-tested Spanner internally with hundreds of different applications and petabytes of data across data centers around the world. At Google, Spanner supports tens of millions of queries per second and runs some of our most critical services.”

Risk Level Categorization in Insurance Policy.

Market Segmentation Is The Key To The Insurance Industry. It is virtually accepted that no risks will be identical. If you are insuring a home within the same locality, it is entirely possible that the risks on one of the homes will be slightly higher than the other homes. You have to understand that insurance is all about pooling risks. If the calculation of these risks is inaccurate then the insurance company will have a heavy price to pay. That is why there are always ways in which the insurance policy is changed. The segmentation is also the key to profits for the insurance company. At the bottom of the pile in terms of cost are the low-cost insurance policies. If you decide to go with budget flood insurance for your area, then it is likely that you will first be assessed to check whether you fall on the lowest level of insurance.

RXJava2 by Example

Reactive programming is a specification for dealing with asynchronous streams of data, providing tools for transforming and combining streams and for managing flow-control, making it easier to reason about your overall program design. But easy it is not, and there is definitely a learning curve. For the mathematicians among us it is reminiscent of the leap from learning standard algebra with its scalar quantities, to linear algebra with its vectors, matrices, and tensors, essentially streams of data that are treated as a unit. Unlike traditional programming that considers objects, the fundamental unit of reactive reasoning is the stream of events. Events can come in the form of objects, data feeds, mouse movements, or even exceptions. The word “exception” expresses the traditional notion of an exceptional handling, as in - this is what is supposed to happen and here are the exceptions.

UK debuts new National Cyber Security Centre to take on cybercrime

The NCSC's launch comes after the UK government recently experienced a number of high-profile security breaches ... and a ransomware attack at Northern Lincolnshire and Goole NHS Foundation Trust. Earlier this month, the Public Accounts Committee called the government's approach to cybersecurity "inconsistent, dysfunctional and chaotic," ZDNet reported. ... "The NCSC will work together with UK organisations, businesses and individuals to provide authoritative and coherent cyber security advice and cyber incident management," the report stated. "This is underpinned by world-class research and innovation." The NCSC aims to manage cyber incidents as well as help citizens protect their machines before a security breach occurs. The strategy is to "use government as a guinea pig for all the measures we want to see done at national scale," said NCSC technical director Ian Levy in the report.

IBM integrates Watson into its security operations platform

Big Blue announced general availability of Watson for Cyber Security, an offering that has been tested with more than 40 customers over the last year. In that time, Watson has ingested more than 1 million security documents. The aim is to help security analysts go through Watson's knowledge base with natural language. IBM is also integrating its X-Force Command Center network, which tracks security events. IBM is announcing the Watson Cognitive Security Operation Centers at the RSA security conference this week in San Francisco. ... One key takeaway from IBM's move is that the company is hoping to use Watson to patch a shortage of security analysts and knowhow. With its various tools and data, IBM security operations platform aims to cut the time spent on cybersecurity investigations. IBM's cognitive security operations platform is available on premise or as an IBM Cloud offering.

Quote for the day:

“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is.” -- Anita Roddick