Learning Curve of 2019!

Dear Reader, It’s been two plus years, my monthly cornicles and tidbits on technology continued to help me with a greater insights, learning and thus deeper understanding of the nuances of application of these technologies evangelizing a large canvas of digital transformation. The focused online research, fact finding on fundamentals and validating the approach, deployment with industry veterans in person broaden my network and of-course my published articles. Again, most Most of the articles are cross published in other forums, but this summary could help get a good insight of my work in 2019!

January 2019

RPA, Simplified!

There is no telling how far RPA will go in automation tasks that could previously only be performed manually, but the technology has a lot of potential in transforming the way businesses operate. Virtually every industry in every part of the world will benefit from the capabilities of an intelligent automation system in the coming years. Robotic process automation (RPA) is transforming the way companies are doing business. More businesses are leveraging RPA solutions to build a digital workforce by automating front, middle, and back office operations as well as audit, risk, and compliance functions. This automation allows humans to focus on more productive, impactful, and value-added activities. 

The evolving use cases are providing direction and blending technologies such as AI/ML and robotics with RPA to provide a completely new paradigm to solve the problems no one was thinking about solving due to limitations of complex workforce, lack of integrated tools and skill shortage.

February 2019

Internet Peering, Simplified!

As a network of networks, the Internet depends on coordination on for its success. The value of access to a given subscriber depends on the size of the whole network. Thus, the compatibility of, and interconnection among networks increases the value of access to all stakeholders.

The reality of connected global economy itself catering to a digital mobilized consumer that wants access to content and interact with each other, applications that interconnect at every layer and IoT devices that are extending our perimeter and reach.As of today this traffic, or most of it say over 98% of internet traffic getting routed via subsea cables and the creation, consumption of content is doubling it’s footprint posing the challenge of clogging the super highways of the Internet connectivity.

March 2019

Modern CDN, Simplified!

Content Delivery Network (CDN) has been around for more than a decade now, it started with a system of distributed servers (Read, PoPs ) that used to deliver pages and other web content to a user faster from the local cached copies of the content based on the geographic locations of the user from the nearest content delivery server rather than , the origin of the webpage / source server hosted faraway. CDNs were proposed to solve content delivery bottlenecks, such as scalability, reliability, and performance. 

The value of content delivery for a given user depends on the size, type of content, location of origin and the whole interconnected path it should traverse. The CDNs have become logical bridge between content and the consumer and carry more than 50% of the internet traffic today, the social media, connected devices, smart phones are all adding up to the need of having faster, secured and reliable delivery of the content and CDNs are fostering to serve the purpose.

April 2019

Framework of trustworthy AI, Simplified!

Artificial Intelligence helps improving our quality of life through personalized medicine or more efficient delivery of healthcare services. It can help achieving the sustainable development goals such as promoting gender balance, tackling climate change, and helping us make better use of natural resources. It helps optimizing our transportation infrastructures and mobility as well as supporting our ability to monitor progress against indicators of sustainability and social coherence. AI is thus not an end in itself, but rather a means to increase individual and societal well-being.

Europe has a unique vantage point based on its focus on placing the citizen at the heart of its endeavours and the EU is striving to preserve that focus that forms part of a vision that emphasizes human-centric artificial intelligence which will enable Europe to become a globally leading innovator in AI, rooted in ethical purpose. 

May 2019

Cognitive AI, Simplified!

During few recent interactions with AI start-ups and advisors the term “Cognitive computing” was used and often used as an alternate term for AI. Let me tell you that the nuances of both these terms are as similar to the difference between data analysis and data analytics. While data analysis refers to the process of compiling and actually analyzing data to gain meaningful insights to support decision making, whereas data analytics is a superset that includes the tools and techniques use to do so.

Similarly, Cognitive AI adds sentiment analysis, contextual references to understand, identify and mine the data, such as syntax, time, location, domain, business requirements, a specific user need, tasks or goals and combinations thereof mimicking human cognition over and above the AI we know. 

June 2019

The personal data protection bill 2018, in a nutshell!

The data protection bill in short called as PDP Bill, sets out how the personal data of individuals is processed by the government and private entities incorporated in India and abroad. The government believes storing and processing of all critical personal data and storing a copy of all personal data within Indian shores is important for national security and access. The bill is likely to be referred to the yet-to-be-formed standing committee on information technology before finalizing it, something that might not happen before this winter session for due deliberation.

The Bill seeks to bring about a number of significant changes to the existing general data protection regime in India. Complying with it will mean that Indian Data Fiduciaries will be aligned with global best practices on Personal Data. For Indian corporates, this will mean reassessing the nature and quantum of Personal Data they collect, store and process, re-evaluating their current practices surrounding consent and notice, and deciding on the treatment of their legacy data.

July 2019

About Blockchain & DLT!

The blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (Read, DLT) continue to lead the innovation curve and remain as a topline agenda of technology innovation leaders towards enabling digital transformation. Strong key tenets like distributed leger, in built cryptographic security and smart contracts make it a preferred choice of technology for niche usecases that need authenticity, repudiation, information security and trusted transactions to record, validate and reconcile by and between intermediaries since each data set is immutably fingerprinted on the blockchain with cryptographic hashes.

Blockchain technology presents an interesting opportunity to solve some of the well documented problems in the digital ecosystem. Blockchains & smart contracts have made it easy for anyone to create a token with just a few lines of code. They can represent anything from an asset to an access right, like gold, diamonds, a fraction of a Picasso painting or an entry ticket to a concert. Tokens could also be used to reward social media contributions, incentivize the reduction of CO2 emissions, or even ones attention for watching an ad.

August 2019

Machine Learning ecosystem, Simplified!

Businesses today, growth in data volumes and sources -- sensor, speech, images, audio, video -- will continue to accelerate as data proliferates. As the volume and speed of data available through digital channels continues to outpace manual decision-making, machine learning can be used to automate ever-increasing streams of data and enable timely data-driven business decisions.

Over the past two decades Machine Learning has become one of the mainstreams of emerging technology and with that, a rather central, albeit usually hidden, yet impact part of our life. With the ever-increasing volume and variety of data (Read, speech/text and video) becoming available there is good reason to believe that smart data analytics will become even more pervasive as a necessary ingredient for technological advancements. The right framework and libraries along with curated datasets enable this ecosystem to foster the constancy of purpose it is set to deliver. 

September 2019

Five Dimensions of Digital Transformation..

Organizations are at different places in the digital transformation journey, of course. But speed has become a business imperative for all. IT leaders face pressure to show that digital initiatives continue to translate to increased agility and speed for the entire organization. 

The adoption of upgraded technology does not ensure digital success, as much as being digitally fluent doesn’t refer to be a master’s in technologies. It actually calls for the ability to articulate the value of digital transformation to the organization’s future. the role of digital technology is shifting, from driving marginal efficiency to be a catalyst of innovation and disruption. There is going to be a big transformation in our production, distribution, and consumption systems. There is no escape from having to embrace game-changing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, drones and robotics, and managing the massive digital transformation of business and operating models that will ensue.

October 2019

Getting your microservices strategy right!

Microservices is a strategy that is beneficial to both raw technical code development process, and overall business organization strategy. Microservices help organize development teams into units that focus on developing and owning specific business functions to maintain granular focus that improves the overall business communication and efficiency.

Most of us, including me, keep talking about microservices in contrast to monoliths because it makes sense to acknowledge that there are systems out there that don't fit comfortably into either category or might be in evolving stage to fit into one. Let’s think of monoliths and microservices as two regions in the space of architectures with interesting characteristics that are useful to discuss as viable options wrt to goals they are set forth to achieve but no sensible enough to treat them as a comprehensive partitioning of the architectural space.

November 2019

World of CPU, GPU & FPGAs, Simplified!

Since the invention of abacus, the evolution of calculations to computing is aligned to the human inventions since they used abacus for the operation of addition and subtraction; however, this primitive device underwent extensive transformation the time has witnessed. The journey did not stop then and continues to surprise us with modern family of processors that forked out greater possibilities for general purpose processors to niche embedded integrated circuits within the devices such as cameras, mobile phones, washing machines and yes our Cloud Computing too, this changed our world onto a digital era we experience and count on each day touching everyone’s life! 

The flexibility of FPGAs comes at the price of the difficulty of reprogramming the circuit. There aren’t enough skills available to cope up with the demand and even though using FPGAs for accelerating deep learning looks promising, only a few have tried to implement it in real life. For most AI solution developers, a more common tandem of GPUs and CPUs and combination of accelerators might look less problematic and easier due to their large-scale adoption and market penetration in the current ecosystem.

December 2019

Video Streaming, Simplified!

Streaming services started as an add-on to DVD and digital download offerings with a trickle of second-run movies and TV shows. They were alternatives to the programs / episodes we missed watching on TV. But speedier internet connections and an abundance of video streaming devices have accelerated the decline of traditional cable. More and more viewers are cutting the cord entirely in favor of dedicated streaming alternatives and OTA players, the world of video content is and will dominate the share of eyeballs.

Today, Video streaming has become testimony of set of technologies behind YouTube videos playback, real-time video chats in Skype, Snapchat and TikTok’s of the world, and even drives the online broadcasting of your favourite team match to your smart TV via connected firesticks. With some limitations even a TV program, say, from 50 years ago, could have been referred to as video streaming, even though it was not digital and, of course, non-interactive. According to market estimates live video streaming market will be a $70.5 billion industry by 2021. The Video delivery and content is the largest consumer of data traffic today and takes major share of eyeballs in the world of mobile devices.

In Summary, the technology landscape remains vast and so dynamic that keeping pace with the innovation and applications thereof remains exciting and provides abundant opportunities of Exploration and Learning.

Thank you for reading these articles and for your encouraging feedbacks, conversations both online and offline, means lot to me!!

Have a happy, healthy and peaceful 2020!

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Jan 2020. Compilation from various publicly available internet sources, authors views are personal.

In case you have overlooked, here is the link for 2018 summary of my tidbits!

https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/learning-curve-2018-rajesh-dangi/