18 Years and counting....

November 13 made my 18th work anniversary at IBM and I couldn’t help but look back and wonder what it was all about… I would also like to Thank you all my fellow LinkedIN professionals who wished me on my 18th anniversary (200+ messages and counting )

I recall my reluctance to move from Minnesota to California in July of 2000 when there were some opportunities coming my way. California’s cost of living and busy work life were the main reasons, however a close friend at IBM who was instigating my career change and the unique job position together played a big role in influencing my decision to move to bay area. As I look back, I can see the impact some of my mentors made on my decision making and how they shaped my career. My goal initially was to make the most of opportunities given to me, and to keep learning and growing incrementally. 

Why IBM for so long?

If you live in Bay Area and work in Software industry, good chances you are surrounded by people who take pride in changing jobs every 2-3 years. They will tell you all the reasons that were important for their career growth. If you are in the same company for more than 10 years, then you are likely to be branded as a looser. I find this unconvincing because I believe that an individual can professionally grow by taking risk and going out of his comfort zone every 2-3 years and doing something new. Throughout my 18 years at IBM, I have changed jobs several times while keeping my 401K and benefits at the same place. More than anything, the opportunities that were provided to me and people I worked with made me stick here.

Technology is moving faster than ever, and it shows no sign of slowing down. Adoption curve for new technology is also shrinking significantly. While it took self-driving cars technology to get to main stream more than 20 years, it took less than 3 years for consumers to start adopting the technology. If the past is any indication, the real game changers of tomorrow are the ones diving into emerging technology today. I am fortunate to be given the opportunity to lead and run emerging technology development for IBM Analytics business.  

What is emerging technology of 2018?

In my sphere of work (Data Analytics and Information Governance), these technologies are emerging and worth watching. In IBM Analytics, we are one step ahead in bringing some of these technologies in our offerings.

1.    Augmented Data Discovery and Analytics

Future business analysts and citizen analyst would access data and information using Natural Language Query (NLQ) augmented with data discovery capabilities. They would not care how information is processed under the cover whether using a complex data pipeline or an instant access to the data. My team is bringing NLQ capability to our flagship data platform called ICP4Data for business users to perform augmented data discovery in a totally new way.

2.    AI powered information governance and regulation on-ramp

Businesses today need to enable their users’ access to curated catalog of internal and external data to derive business values from their analytics investment. My team brought up an ML powered data classification and governance technology in IBM Unified Governance & Integration portfolio which allows Data curators and Compliance analysts to do their jobs 10 times faster. Think of discovering new data (structured or unstructured) and bringing to a common catalog where it can be given a business meaning by mapping to your company’s glossary and terms. This suddenly unlocks the hidden value of the metadata you have had sitting there idle. We are taking this approach to a new level using AI powered on-ramp for regulations in your industry. This is already helping businesses deal with complex regulations quickly and effectively. Please read my white paper on Cognitive data governance and let’s have a dialog.

3.    Story telling from Data

Compelling business graphs and charts have been a proven way to tell a story with data. Using AI, specially with Natural Language Generation (NLG), storytelling with data is going to be a key driver for how information will be accessed and used. With the emergence of Chat assisted device like Alexa and Google Home, future business user’s natural language queries will be answered using NLG technology. We are developing AI powered NLG to help our business users more productive.

4.    Privacy preserving data analysis

Centralized data storage and analysis is becoming a thing of the past with the emerging need for data sharing and collaboration among various parties. At the same time various privacy regulations and concerns of data breach is making this difficult. However, technology like Multi-party computation (MPC) making compute and analysis possible while preserving the privacy. This technology was used and demonstrated by Boston Women Workforce Council group which ran a city wide wage gap analysis project. See https://100talent.org/ MPC tech will play a huge role in many areas including:

a)    Multi-cloud data sharing

b)   Tax fraud detection

c)    Multi-party financial data analysis

d)   Prevention of satellite collusion

e)   Privacy preserving statistical studies

f)     Key distribution among all parties (SSL/TLS)

5.    Privacy preserving message protocol

With recent advances made in Cryptography and the performance of communication networks, many advanced cryptography protocols are now considered practical to implement. Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKP) is one such protocol which is making big buzz in cryptocurrency area. A zero-knowledge proof is when a prover convinces a verifier that they have some secret knowledge, without revealing the knowledge directly to the verifier. Cryptocurrency experts when refer “zero-knowledge proofs”, they’re usually referring to a particular type of proof — zk-SNARKs (succinct non-interactive adaptive argument of knowledge) Without getting into the math underpinning this protocol, think of the benefit this technology will have on crypto currency exchange on the platform like Blockchain. We have started to see some banks implementing this protocol for KYC and identity management use cases. See the open source project zkrangeproof by ING Bank. 

At IBM Analytics, we are fortunate to work on emerging tech everyday and advancing them to products and services. I do not know for sure, what my future holds, but one thing is certain that some of these tech are going to change how our clients do business so lets be part of that change and collaborate with us.