November 30, 2020

Pairing AI With Human Judgment Is Key To Avoiding 'Mount Stupid'

We are in the midst of what has been called the age of automation — a transformation of our economy, as robots, algorithms, AI and machines become integrated into everything we do. It would be a mistake to assume automation corrects for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Like humans, dumb bots and even smart AI often do not understand the limitations of their own competency. Machines are just as likely to scale Mount Stupid, and it can just as likely lead to disastrous decisions. But there is a fix for that. For humans, the fix is adding some humility to our decision making. For machines, it means creating flexible systems that are designed to make allowances and seamlessly handle outlier events — the unknowns. Having humans integrated into that system allows one to identify those potential automation failures. In automation, this is sometimes referred to as a human-in-the-loop system. Much like an autonomous vehicle, these systems keep improving as they acquire more input. It’s not rigid; if the autonomous vehicle encounters a piece of furniture in the road, a remote driver can step in to navigate around it in real-time while the AI or automation system learns from the actions taken by the remote driver. Human-in-the-loop systems are flexible and can seamlessly handle outlier events.

UK government ramps up efforts to regulate tech giants

Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden said: “There is growing consensus in the UK and abroad that the concentration of power among a small number of tech companies is curtailing growth of the sector, reducing innovation and having negative impacts on the people and businesses that rely on them. It’s time to address that and unleash a new age of tech growth.” While the Furman report found that there have been a number of efforts between the tech giants to support interoperability, giving consumers greater freedom and flexibility, these can be hampered by technical challenges and a lack of coordination. The report's authors wrote that, in some cases, lack of interoperability are due to misaligned incentives. “Email standards emerged due to co-operation but phone number portability only came about when it was required by regulators. Private efforts by digital platforms will be similarly hampered by misaligned incentives. Open Banking provides an instructive example of how policy intervention can overcome technical and coordination challenges and misaligned incentives.” In July, when the DMT was setup, law firm Osborne Clarke warn about the disruption to businesses increased regulations could bring.

Consumption of public cloud is way ahead of the ability to secure it

As the shift to working from home at the start of the year began, the old reliance on the VPN showed itself to be a potential bottleneck to employees being able to do what they are paid for. "I think the new mechanism that we've been sitting on -- everyone's been doing for 20 years around VPN as a way of segmentation -- and then the zero trust access model is relatively new, I think that mechanism is really intriguing because [it] is so extensible to so many different problems in use cases that VPN's didn't solve, and then other use cases that people didn't even consider because there was no mechanism to do it," Jefferson said. Going a step further, Eren thinks VPN usage between client and sites is on life support, but VPNs themselves are not going away. ... According to Jefferson, the new best practice is to push security controls as far out to the edge as possible, which undermines the role of traditional appliances like firewalls to be able to enforce security, and people are having to work out the best place for their controls in the new working environment. "I used to be pretty comfortable. This guy, he had 10,000 lines of code written on my Palo Alto or Cisco and every time we did a firewall refresh every 10 years, we had to worry about the 47,000 ACLs [access control list] on the firewall, and now that gets highly distributed," he said.

IOT & Distributed Ledger Technology Is Solving Digital Economy Challenges

DLTs can play an important function in driving data provenance yet ought to be utilized in conjunction with technologies, for example, hardware root of trust and immutable storage. Distributed ledger technology just keeps up a record of the transactions themselves, so if you have poor or fake information, it will simply disclose to you where that terrible information has been. All in all, DLTs alone don’t address software engineering’s trash in, trash out issue, yet offer impressive advantages when utilized in concert with technologies that ensure data integrity. Blockchain innovation vows to be the missing connection empowering peer-to-peer contractual behavior with no third party to “certify” the IoT transaction. It answers the challenge of scalability, single purpose of disappointment, time stamping, record, security, trust and reliability in a steady way. Blockchain innovation could give a basic infrastructure to two devices to straightforwardly move a piece of property, for example, cash or information between each other with a secured and reliable time-stamped contractual handshake. To empower message exchanges, IoT devices will use smart contracts which at that point model the understanding between the two gatherings.

Does small data provide sharper insights than big data?

Data Imbalance occurs when the number of data points for different classes is uneven. Imbalance in most machine learning models is not a problem, but imbalance is consequential in Small Data. One technique is to change the Loss Function by adjusting weights, another example of how AI models are not perfect. A very readable explanation of imbalance and its remedies can be found here. Difficulty in Optimization is a fundamental problem since that is what machine learning is meant to do. Optimization starts with defining some kind of loss function/cost function. It ends with minimizing it using one or the other optimization routines, usually Gradient Descent, an iterative algorithm for finding a local minimum of a differentiable function (first-semester calculus, not magic). But if the dataset is weak, the technique may not optimize. The most popular remedy is Transfer Learning. As the name implies, transfer learning is a machine learning method where a model is reused to enhance another model. A simple explanation of transfer learning can be found here. I wanted to do #3 first, because #2 is the more compelling discussion about small data.

84% of global decision makers accelerating digital transformation plans

“New ways of working, initially broadly imposed by the global pandemic, are morphing into lasting models for the future,” said Mickey North Rizza, program vice president for IDC‘s Enterprise Applications and Digital Commerce research practice. “Permanent technology changes, underpinned by improved collaboration, include supporting hybrid work, accelerating cloud use, increasing automation, going contactless, adopting smaller TaskApps, and extending the partnership ecosystem. Enterprise application vendors need to assess their immediate and long-term strategies for delivering collaboration platforms in conjunction with their core software.” “If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s that the business environment can change almost overnight, and as business leaders we have to be able to reimagine our organizations and seize opportunities to secure sustainable competitive advantage,” said Mike Ettling, CEO, Unit4. “Our study shows what is possible with continued investment in innovation and a people-first, flexible enterprise applications strategy. As many countries go back into some form of lockdown, this people-centric focus is crucial if businesses are to survive the challenges of the coming months.”

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