Should There Be Enforceable Ethics Regulations on Generative AI?
Companies might claim they conduct ethical uses of AI, she says, but more could
be done. For example, Rudin says companies tend to claim that putting limits on
speech that contributes to human trafficking or vaccine misinformation would
also eliminate content that the public would not want removed, such as critiques
of hate speech or retellings of someone’s experiences confronting bias and
prejudice. “Basically, what the companies are saying is that they can’t create a
classifier, like they’re incapable of creating a classifier that will accurately
identify misinformation,” she says. “Frankly, I don’t believe that. These
companies are good enough at machine learning that they should be able to
identify what substance is real and what substance is not. And if they can’t,
they should put more resources behind that.” Rudin’s top concerns about AI
include circulation of misinformation, ChatGPT putting to work helping terrorist
groups using social media to recruit and fundraise, and facial recognition being
paired with pervasive surveillance.
6 reasons why your anti-phishing strategy isn’t working
Many organizations are trying to solve the phishing problem solely with
technology. These companies are buying all the latest tools to detect suspicious
emails and giving employees a way to report then block those suspicious emails,
says Eric Liebowitz, chief information security officer, Americas at Thales
Group, a Paris-based company that develops devices, equipment, and technology
for the aerospace, space, transportation, defense, and security
industries. While doing that is great, in the end the bad actors are always
going to be more sophisticated, he says. “One of the big things that I
don't think enough organizations are focusing on is training their employees,”
Liebowitz says. “They could have all the greatest tools in place, but if they're
not training their employees, that's when the bad thing is going to
happen.” While some organizations have deployed the right tools and have
workflows and processes in place to combat phishing campaigns, they haven't
adequately and proactively configured those tools, says Justin Haney, executive,
North America security lead at Avanade.
Observability and Monitoring in the DevOps Age
The first step towards achieving success is to know what to measure and monitor.
Your business technology ecosystem may be comprised of different modular
applications with all sorts of possible dependencies. It is important to first
lay out the key indicators that must be tracked if engineers are to find
remedies when unusual behavior is observed. These indicators are not just
internal operational metrics but also customer-facing ones like performance and
speed of page loads, erroneous crashes of web interfaces, etc. The key to
finding the best remedy for any unexpected defect or bug is to trace the root
cause of the problem. This means developers and QA engineers must be able to
navigate the exact workflow that resulted in a defective output. For this,
traceability is an essential factor in every transactional workflow. It helps
DevOps teams understand how data and insights are passed between different
systems when a transactional request is processed.
The importance of optimising IoT for retailers
Innovation has radically altered the retail customer experience, with e-commerce
and brick-and-mortar stores redefining the way the world shops. By supporting
customers, interactive digital terminals, virtual and augmented reality tools,
and robotic sales assistants have increased both business efficiency and
customer satisfaction. Furthermore, retailers have implemented IoT technologies
to optimize existing processes. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tracking
is utilized to streamline warehouse inventory processes, enabling efficient
asset management. Once consumers venture to stores, cameras and sensors are
employed for footfall tracking purposes, and Wi-Fi connections can detect repeat
customers and target them with digital advertisements beyond their trip to the
store. While these modifications have improved the retail experience for
customers, they may also have increased network traffic and masked visibility
for IT teams, complicating operations and performance management.
3 ways data teams can avoid a tragedy of the cloud commons
Industry analysts estimate that at least 30% of
cloud spend is “wasted” each year — some $17.6 billion. For modern data
pipelines in the cloud, the percentage of waste is significantly higher,
estimated at closer to 50%. It’s not hard to understand how we got here. Public
cloud services like AWS and GCP have made it easy to spin resources up and down
at will, as they’re needed. Having unfettered access to a “limitless” pool of
computing resources has truly transformed how businesses create new products and
services and bring them to market. For modern data teams, this “democratization
of IT” facilitated by the public cloud has been a game-changer. For one thing,
it’s enabled them to be far more agile as they don’t need to negotiate and
justify a business case with the IT department to buy or repurpose a server in
the corporate data center. And as an operational expenditure, the
pay-by-the-drip model of the cloud makes budget planning seem more flexible.
However, the ease with which we can spin up a cloud instance doesn’t come
without a few unintentional consequences — forgotten workloads, over-provisioned
or underutilized resources — with results including spiraling and unpredictable
costs.
3 Reasons Women Should Reskill to Work in Cybersecurity
According to an (ISC)² study, women make up roughly a quarter of the overall
cybersecurity workforce. We’ve come a long way over the last decade (women
made up about 10% of cybersecurity jobs in 2013), but we know the industry
needs to work toward even greater diversity. Addressing the gender gap starts
with sparking interest at a young age. We can also get creative with our most
passionate and loyal current employees and realize not every cybersecurity
role is a ‘special snowflake.’ There are many open roles that call for
in-depth skills that have been honed and developed over time. What about all
the roles that don’t? Here’s the secret: Not everyone who works in
cybersecurity needs to be a cybersecurity expert. At least not right away.
Cybersecurity expertise can be taught or learned. So, one way to get closer to
bridging the talent gap is to reskill talent from other professions.
How Aerospike Document Database supports real-time applications
A real-time document database should have an underlying data platform that
provides quick ingest, efficient storage, and powerful queries while
delivering fast response times. The Aerospike Document Database offers these
capabilities at previously unattainable scales. JSON, a format for storing and
transporting data, has passed XML to become the de facto data model for the
web and is commonly used in document databases. The Aerospike Document
Database lets developers ingest, store, and process JSON document data as
Collection Data Types (CDTs)—flexible, schema-free containers that provide the
ability to model, organize, and query a large JSON document store. The CDT API
models JSON documents by facilitating list and map operations within objects.
The resulting aggregate CDT structures are stored and transferred using the
binary MessagePack format. This highly efficient approach reduces client-side
computation and network costs and adds minimal overhead to read and write
calls.
Taming the Data Mess, How Not to Be Overwhelmed by the Data Landscape
One common thing that happens is that people get pressed a little bit because
of marketing or because of buzz of the peers about what is the next nice thing
everybody's using? Sometimes this is not appropriate for the problems you
have. This is something that happened to me with a friend a long time ago, who
asked me, "You see there is these companies. Now we're hearing a lot about
this thing called feature stores, and we want to do machine learning in our
company. This is a little startup. Maybe I need a feature store to this."
That's not the right way to approach this problem. The first question I asked
was, do you already have data available and is this data clean and of good
quality? Do you have processes to keep it like that? Because it's not only a
one-time shot, you have to keep these things going on. More important, is that
data already used in your business? Do you have reports, or things like that?
This is all the steps that were pretty important, even before thinking about
machine learning and stuff like that.
4 data challenges for CIOs
CIOs are becoming more aware that they cannot afford to have hidden stores of
data or data that exists in siloes. Siloed data may be unknown to the teams
that can derive the most value from it, which undercuts its value. And if
there are data stores that are completely unknown to a company, there’s no way
to protect them. Question your past assumptions about how and where your
organization stores and processes data. The results of an end-to-end data
discovery process across the network will bring to light previously unknown
security issues. To better understand the flow of data, open lines of
communication throughout the company. Meet with people at all levels,
including the CISO, security manager, operations manager, IT service manager,
and individual IT staff, to ensure everyone’s data usage and goals align. Ask
employees their perspective on what’s working, what changes must be addressed,
and where data blind spots may be. Involving all departments responsible for
data improves knowledge and skills and ensures a stronger data strategy
overall.
With sustainability gaining importance to companies, the CFO’s value-creation
mandate calls for a new way of thinking and making decisions—one that uses
sustainability information to guide choices about how to deliver strong
performance for investors. Working with the CEO and governing board, today’s
CFOs are integral to the development of a sustainable business model, bringing
financial and nonfinancial data to bear on a company’s strategic goals, its
resource and capital allocation, and its measures of long- and short-term
performance. ... In bringing sustainability factors into business decisions,
CFOs must also pay attention to the specific priorities of each region where
their organization has a presence. In Asia, for example, the United Nations’
Sustainable Development Goals have identified both greater developmental needs
than in other regions and greater susceptibility to climate risk. CFOs there
need to consider how to be ambitious about decarbonization in a way that is
also considerate of local communities, whose interests may differ from those
of communities in other regions.
Quote for the day:
"People buy into the leader before
they buy into the vision." -- John C. Maxwell
