Procter & Gamble and Microsoft: Data and Digital Transformation

Microsoft talks about how they work with key customers.   Notably with my former employer, where I worked on many related problems, and can agree that using data effectively was well understood to be key.  Fairly good detail here about using Microsoft Azure.

For Procter & Gamble, data is at the heart of digital transformation

August 17, 2021   Microsoft

For more than 180 years, Procter & Gamble (P&G) has built a thriving business by challenging norms and delighting consumers. Its range of household products, from toothpaste and soap to paper towels and laundry detergent, can be found in millions of homes—in nearly every country on Earth.

True to its innovative nature, P&G sees data and algorithms as a way to constructively disrupt how it operates, leading to growth. P&G developed a multicloud-driven data strategy—and data culture—that informs every decision the business makes to fuel its future success.

In order for P&G to understand and best serve consumers, we need to drive a data-enabled culture and operationalize algorithms into every major business decision. 

Guy Peri: Chief Data & Analytics Officer, P&G

“The way we approach excellence as a company is to get the right product, the right package, the right communication, and the right in-store execution,” says Guy Peri, Chief Data & Analytics Officer for P&G. “Pretty much everything about how we do that with our customers and the consumers who buy our products is changing—and data and algorithms are central to staying ahead of that change.”

Lots of data, but out of reach

Given its broad scope and long history, P&G had numerous data points about its business, including what drives sales and product preferences. But the data resided in geographically dispersed silos, and P&G’s legacy systems couldn’t link the hundreds of disparate data types to gain collective insights.

P&G sought a platform that could unlock those silos and provide a single view for business users. At the same time, company leaders realized that they needed to foster a data-driven culture—a growth mindset that put data and analytics at the forefront. AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics were all seen as crucial to becoming a true digital leader.

P&G found what it needed with the powerful suite of Microsoft Azure data and AI solutions, such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Lake Storage, and Power BI. “Azure is helping optimize the impact of digitization across Procter & Gamble, from democratizing AI with no-code features to embedded capabilities in Power BI,” says Peri. “We appreciated the scale, flexibility, and analytical muscle of Azure. The stack can go up and down depending on our business needs. It also gives us leading data and algorithm capabilities with both the Azure Synapse back-end and front-end Power BI tools.”

For us, only two variables are important: performance and scale. Can we scale at a cost-effective rate? With Azure and the co-innovation we did together, we’re able to get positive outcomes on both fronts. 

Guy Peri: Chief Data & Analytics Officer, P&G

With these scalable, dynamic data solutions, P&G is bringing the power of data to bear on three key challenges: creating a resilient supply chain, improving retail execution, and delivering superior products and packaging.

A more resilient supply chain

P&G data scientists and business analysts combine information from existing and new data sources inside the data lake to create predictions that help ensure consumers can get the products they need, when they need them.

Better retail execution

P&G is using granular analytics capabilities to ensure that retail partners are putting the right products and right in-store displays in front of consumers. 

Superior products and packaging

P&G is using data and analytics in its products and packages to shift from a point-in-time assessment to a real-time, sense-and-respond approach. A key component of this shift is a global architecture with automated collection of data to fuel analysis that uncovers insights, speeds the innovation process, and determines manufacturability and cost optimization.

“We need to act with agility to be competitive with the fast startups in the world,” says Peri. “But we also need to act with precision to leverage our scale for competitive advantage. Data algorithms help us do both. So, the faster we can bring data insights to our decision makers, the more competitive we’ll be.”

Neighborhood analytics and smart selling

In addition to gaining important insights at a global level, P&G has been able to do the same at a local level. One initiative, called “Neighborhood Analytics,” helps P&G understand at a local level how consumers shop and what they need. By combining external and internal data sources, the company can more effectively partner with retail customers to expand specific categories for consumers.

A second initiative, called “Smart Selling,” gives P&G insight into what its distributors are doing in developing markets. By using big data and AI, the company can help distributors be precise when ordering products. “COVID-19 is a great example of where we’ve been able to use these tools to be much more precise,” says Peri. “We overlaid our Azure analytics capability with COVID-19 data and then understood exactly where we had the biggest risk of out-of-stock opportunities to address or where we anticipated the need for inventory.”

Creating a data-driven culture

Beyond specific use cases, P&G is also using Azure to create a strong data culture that makes employees aware of the power of data and how to use it every day.

The ease of use with Azure fosters P&G’s data culture from the technology side, making it easy for employees to understand data, manipulate it, and use it to inform major decisions. These decisions, in turn, positively affect P&G’s ability to better serve consumers and constructively disrupt how the company operates.

“Our data culture is a combination of data technology, work processes, and reward systems,” says Peri. “If we have only one or two of those things, we’re not going to deliver the outcomes we want. We have partnered closely with our line business leadership and our function leadership to really transform in a way that constructively disrupts how we operate.”

A foundation for the future

Looking ahead, P&G will connect more data types and find new ways to delight its customers—and the consumers who fill their homes with P&G products. And it will continue to strengthen its data culture, operationalizing algorithms into key decision processes across the company. Procter & Gamble may be 183 years old, but its future has never been brighter. ...

Very few vendors can serve our needs at scale, given how much data we’re processing. Azure Synapse Analytics can, and Microsoft’s vision on how to scale is among the best in the industry. 

Guy Peri: Chief Data & Analytics Officer ....

Pratt @ Whitney with Low-Code

Had a few long ago links with Pratt & Whitney, and continue to like the idea of Low-Code approaches if they can ensure that security is built in with standard codes that are used.  Have not looked at WEBCON

Pratt & Whitney’s Low-Code Strategy to Save Development Time

Aircraft engine maker leverages platform from WEBCON to tighten up some of its operations.

By Joao-Pierre S. Ruth, Senior Writer  in InformationWeek

Aerospace engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney expanded its use of a low-code resource to streamline certain operational processes and make more efficient use of its veterans’ institutional memory.

With nearly a century of history, Pratt & Whitney is a staple of the aerospace and defense industries. Its engines can be found in the F-35 Lightning II fighter, the venerable B-52 bomber, as well as commercial and civilian aircraft.

The breadth of its production led to the company accumulating more than 2,000 different types of forms that became a challenge to track, says Jocelyn Brulé, digital technology manager with Pratt & Whitney. In the past, such forms might have been printed and signed for approval, but he says that was no longer feasible with much of the staff working remotely through the pandemic. Further, the old method of getting printed approvals was inefficient -- something had to change. “It’s not just the signature that is painful,” Brulé says. “To track where the approval is at, if it’s on paper or an email, you can’t track it.”

Pratt & Whitney ramped up its use of the WEBCON BPS low-code platform, which first got introduced to the engine maker via a plant based in Poland. Brulé says the pace of change in technology can be too fast at times for companies and their IT departments to absorb, with details and institutional knowledge not always getting where it is needed. “It’s not just about throwing more money, more people at all of this,” he says. “Companies need to put in place agile, DT (digital technology) organizations where the pace at which they can deliver things is at least as fast as the market evolves.”  ... ' 

Rotor-Cipher Cryptography Machines

On rotor-cipher machines.   A historical view, with comments.

Via Bruce Schneier

Jon D. Paul has written https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-scandalous-history-of-the-last-rotor-cipher-machine  the fascinating story of the HX-63, a super-complicated electromechanical rotor cipher machine made by Crypto AG.  in  Spectrum IEEE   ...'

Static Analysis

Short intro to the idea and its application to managing software: 

In “Static Analysis: An Introduction,”      author Patrick Thomson provides a perspective on the history, current state and future of static analysis, an important tool in helping programmers manage the complexity of modern software. At stake is software quality, he says, as empirical studies indicate that a codebase's complexity -- and the ability for programmers to understand the software -- correlates with its rate of defects.

Thomson draws distinctions between static and dynamic analyses such as valgrind, which extracts facts from a program as it runs, and model checking, which verifies the correctness of a separate external specification of a program.

Not all static analyses are feasible. As a codebase becomes larger, it takes more time to parse and traverse, notes Thomson, requiring more sophisticated and efficient analyses. Additionally, many static analyses are computationally expensive. Perhaps the most important barrier to adoption of static-analysis tools is the requirement that programmers change their behavior to account for the discovery of issues such as false positives and false negatives.

Looking toward the future, Thomson says the subfield of static analyses targeted toward detection of security vulnerabilities becomes more valuable and continues to attract industrial and research attention.

Queue is ACM's magazine for practicing software engineers. Written by engineers for engineers, Queue focuses on the technical problems and challenges that loom ahead, helping readers to sharpen their own thinking and pursue innovative solutions.   ... ' 

IBM and Raytheon Collaborate

Collaborative breadth is very interesting

IBM and Raytheon Technologies to Collaborate on Artificial Intelligence, Cryptography and Quantum Technologies

October 11, 2021  in HPCwire

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 11, 2021 — IBM and Raytheon Technologies will jointly develop advanced artificial intelligence, cryptographic and quantum solutions for the aerospace, defense and intelligence industries, including the federal government, as part of a strategic collaboration agreement the companies announced today.

Artificial intelligence and quantum technologies give aerospace and government customers the ability to design systems more quickly, better secure their communications networks and improve decision-making processes. By combining IBM’s breakthrough commercial research with Raytheon Technologies’ own research, plus aerospace and defense expertise, the companies will be able to crack once-unsolvable challenges.

“The rapid advancement of quantum computing and its exponential capabilities has spawned one of the greatest technological races in recent history – one that demands unprecedented agility and speed,” said Dario Gil, senior vice president, IBM, and director of Research. “Our new collaboration with Raytheon Technologies will be a catalyst in advancing these state-of-the-art technologies – combining their expertise in aerospace, defense and intelligence with IBM’s next-generation technologies to make discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever.”

In addition to artificial intelligence and quantum, the companies will jointly research and develop advanced cryptographic technologies that lie at the heart of some of the toughest problems faced by the aerospace industry and government agencies.

“Take something as fundamental as encrypted communications,” said Mark E. Russell, Raytheon Technologies chief technology officer. “As computing and quantum technologies advance, existing cybersecurity and cryptography methods are at risk of becoming vulnerable. IBM and Raytheon Technologies will now be able to collaboratively help customers maintain secure communications and defend their networks better than previously possible.”

The companies are building a technical collaboration team to quickly insert IBM’s commercial technologies into active aerospace, defense and intelligence programs. The same team will also identify promising technologies for jointly developing long-term system solutions by investing research dollars and talent.  ..."

Microsoft Translates 100 Languages

More translations emergences,  MS beating equaling Google in number of languages covered.  Do these methods create completely fluent multi lingual interaction?  Or just phrase by phrase translation?  

Microsoft taps AI techniques to bring Translator to 100 languages

Today, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Translator, its AI-powered text translation service, now supports more than 100 different languages and dialects. With the addition of 12 new languages including Georgian, Macedonian, Tibetan, and Uyghur, Microsoft claims that Translator can now make text and information in documents accessible to 5.66 billion people worldwide.

Its Translator isn’t the first to support more than 100 languages — Google Translate reached that milestone first in February 2016. (Amazon Translate only supports 71.) But Microsoft says that the new languages are underpinned by unique advances in AI and will be available in the Translator apps, Office, and Translator for Bing, as well as Azure Cognitive Services Translator and Azure Cognitive Services Speech.  ... '

Trade Skill Schools and Pandemic

Virtual reality is not near enough as yet.   So how do we teach physical skills?   I was asked in recent days by a training manager of electricians.  Quickly,  because we need them now. 

Virtual class was a devastating blow to trade school students  in Fastcompany

For students learning trades like carpentry, cosmetology, or automotive technology, in-person class time is crucial. School closures hit them hard.

Mark Chaney hates that the pandemic has forced the Buckeye Hills Career Center in Rio Grande, Ohio, where he teaches to still have a schedule with students in school only part time. That may work for English and math classes during the pandemic, he said, but his students are trying to learn physical skills, not just intellectual ones. They need to handle, build, and take apart pipes, ductwork, and breaker boxes every day, not spend half their week doing online work at home.  ... " 

AI to Keep the Lights on?

 This deserves a deeper dive, especially if you are into complex modeling of the operation of systems.  The contest is over, but by examining the overview of the statement of the problem, I was impressed.  I am continuing to review.   Was particularly interested if they could model and minimize  or potentially re design Power Grids for events like solar CMEs. An ultimate grid security issue. Could this be a starting point? Anyone know?  We worked with Los Alamos and they were impressive. 

Los Alamos scientists take top prizes in national competition to help improve electrical grid

Artificial intelligence-driven algorithms could help keep the lights on

Los Alamos, N.M., Oct. 4, 2021—Two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory took top prizes in a national competition for developing algorithms to help improve the resiliency and efficiency of the electrical grid. The algorithm developed by Hassan Hijazi of the Applied Mathematics and Plasma Physics Group took first place in all four divisions, while the one developed by Carleton Coffrin of the Laboratory’s Information Systems and Modeling Group placed second in two of the four divisions. Their work outperformed 14 other entries in the competition:   https://gocompetition.energy.gov/   funded by Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E), a United States government agency that promotes and funds research and development of advanced energy technologies.

“Grid security is a national security issue, which is why this is important work for Los Alamos,” said Nancy Jo Nicholas, associate Laboratory director for Global Security at Los Alamos. “Every five minutes, optimization problems arise in the U.S. electrical grid that require a mathematical solution. Hassan’s and Carleton’s achievement will help advance national efforts to create a more reliable, resilient, and secure electrical grid.”  ... 

Updates for Apple Glass (Updated with a number of competitors)

Following Apple's look at Smart Glasses.   Should note that Google Glasses are apparently still being used in test in some specialized situations.  But not in any standard way to interact with the real world.  One of the primary issues has been the consideration of privacy.   Is someone wearing the glasses using a front facing camera to record me?     Is there a good way to alert me of that?  Like showing they are turned off, and is that trustable?   I had noted that it had been rumored that the Apple version would not have any forward facing camera at all.  But only a Lidar scanner. Below some recent information. 'Every thing they know ...  But note some of this is clearly speculation.  We did early work in manufacturing maintenance using the idea.   I have a potential client in the space.  

See below and also from TechValley:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLNvSYr4eeI   Which shows some good, but also speculative consumer uses.

UPDATE:   Pointed out to me:   7 Best Smart Glasses 2021 Take Your Life Far Away:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbWiCzpnCTY  Video which also includes some useful novel uses. 

Apple Glasses: Release date, price, features and leaks,  Excerpt from Tom'sGuide,  By Kate Kozuch 17 days ago

Apple Glass could redefine wearable computing. Here's everything we know so far.

The Apple Glass augmented reality glasses could be a futuristic wearable product that overlays graphics in the real world around you.

When we first heard word of "Apple Glasses," rumors suggested the lenses would launch as soon as this year. But based on newer leaks and insider intel, the near future Apple augmented reality glasses looks blurry.

A longtime source for Apple product releases believes the release won't happen until 2022. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said the earliest we'll see them is 2023. Either way, the project is definitely in the works.

Apple Glass is expected to run on Starboard (or perhaps glassOS,) a proprietary operating system uncovered in the final version of iOS 13. The augmented reality framework shows up multiple times in code and text documents, meaning Apple is likely testing activation and application. 

Here's everything else we know about Apple Glass, including the potential release date, price, design and specs.   ....' 

Google Pledges a Million to Secure Open Source

Securing Open Source.

Google Pledges $1 million to Secure Open Source Software

By Computing (U.K.) October 5, 2021

Google has pledged $1 million in funding to a new open source security project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Dubbed the Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards program, the pilot project aims to improve the security of critical open-source apps by offering eligible developers financial rewards of $10,000 or more for their security-related work.

"SOS rewards a very broad range of improvements that proactively harden critical open source projects and supporting infrastructure against application and supply chain attacks," Meder Kydyraliev and Kim Lewandowski of Google's Open Source Security Team said in a blog post.

"To complement existing programs that reward vulnerability management, SOS's scope is comparatively wider in the type of work it rewards, in order to support project developers."

From Computing (U.K.)

Rise of Robo Voices

If we can insert voices, and are starting to insert believable synthetic 'acting', it may not be long before the entire experience will be fabricated?  

ACM NEWS

The Rise of the Robo-Voices

 The next time you see a movie or TV show that was dubbed from a foreign language, the voices you hear may not belong to actors who rerecorded dialogue in a sound booth. In fact, they may not belong to actors at all.

Highly sophisticated digital voice manufacturing is coming, and entertainment executives say it could bring a revolution in sound as industry-changing as computer graphics were for visuals. New companies are using artificial intelligence to create humanlike voices from samples of a living actor's voice—models that not only can sound like specific performers, but can speak any language, cry, scream, laugh, even talk with their mouths full. At the same time, companies are refining the visual technology so actors look like they are really speaking.

As streaming services export American fare globally and foreign markets send their hits to the U.S., dubbing is a bigger business than ever. But the uses of synthetic voices extend well beyond localizing foreign films. AI models can provide youthful voices for aging actors. The technology can resurrect audio from celebrities who have died or lost the ability to speak. And it can tweak dialogue in postproduction without the need for actors.

All the tinkering raises thorny ethical questions. Where is the line between creating an engrossing screen experience and fabricating an effect that leaves audiences feeling duped?

From The Wall Street Journal  

A Challenge: Are we Close to AGI?

 Artificial General Intelligence. Quite interesting note ... we started in the 80s.  How far are we now?  

Artificial General Intelligence: Are We Close, and Does it Even Make Sense to Try?   By MIT Technology Review, August 25, 2021

The idea of artificial general intelligence as we know it today starts with a dot-com blowout on Broadway. 

Twenty years ago—before Shane Legg clicked with neuroscience postgrad Demis Hassabis over a shared fascination with intelligence; before the pair hooked up with Hassabis's childhood friend Mustafa Suleyman, a progressive activist, to spin that fascination into a company called DeepMind; before Google bought that company for more than half a billion dollars four years later—Legg worked at a startup in New York called Webmind, set up by AI researcher Ben Goertzel. Today the two men represent two very different branches of the future of artificial intelligence, but their roots reach back to common ground.

Even for the heady days of the dot-com bubble, Webmind's goals were ambitious. Goertzel wanted to create a digital baby brain and release it onto the internet, where he believed it would grow up to become fully self-aware and far smarter than humans. "We are on the verge of a transition equal in magnitude to the advent of intelligence, or the emergence of language," he told the Christian Science Monitor in 1998.

Webmind tried to bankroll itself by building a tool for predicting the behavior of financial markets on the side, but the bigger dream never came off. After burning through $20 million, Webmind was evicted from its offices at the southern tip of Manhattan and stopped paying its staff. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001 ...

Part of the problem is that artificial general intelligence is a catchall for the hopes and fears surrounding an entire technology .... 

From MIT Technology Review

View Full Article

Compressing Data for Humans in the Loop

Compressing data for teleoperation. Human in the loop requires images that can be used to adapt to changing reaction times and decision making in coordination with very remote devices.  Technical. 

 PICO: Pragmatic Compression for Human-in-the-Loop Decision-Making   by Siddharth Reddy,    Berkeley Bair

Imagine remotely operating a Mars rover from a desk on Earth. The low-bandwidth network connection can make it challenging for the teleoperation system to provide the user with high-dimensional observations like images. One approach to this problem is to use data compression to minimize the number of bits that need to be communicated over the network: for example, the rover can compress the pictures it takes on Mars before sending them to the human operator on Earth. Standard lossy image compression algorithms would attempt to preserve the image's appearance. However, at low bitrates, this approach can waste precious bits on information that the user does not actually need in order to perform their current task. For example, when deciding where to steer and how much to accelerate, the user probably only pays attention to a small subset of visual features, such as obstacles and landmarks. .... '

Retail Grocery Podcasts

 Just reintroduced to Jungle Jim's International Market's Podcasts, which do a good job of introducing the novelty of their retail world.  In our retail innovation days we used them as an example of what could be done with engaging tech.  Then they used a simple blog, now they have expanded this to a complimentary YouTube site with the same name.     Check it out, use the name above to fetch podcasts, or the YouTube channel. 

Helix Model for Future Proofing Organizations

Unaware of this method.

Future-proofing the organization the ‘helix’ way

The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.

By Kirsten Weerda,    McKinsey

The German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen is reinventing a key division. Its head of transformation explains how separating the company’s people leadership from its product lines improves both.

Balancing flexibility and stability is the goal of any organizational structure. In fast-changing industries, flexibility supports the mastery of technological shifts while stability provides the much-needed efficiency to scale them up. Yet, too much flexibility breeds inefficiency or even disorder. And too much stability invites inertia and bureaucracy. Locating the sweet spot is elusive. Julian Fieres and his team are trying to find it—and bring the organization along with them.

Fieres, the head of transformation, strategy, and sustainability at ZF Friedrichshafen AG (ZF), Electrified Powertrain Technology division, is in the thick of a transformation involving two newly merged business units that together account for 30,000 employees and $10 billion in annual sales. Rather than combine the divisions in the usual way, however, ZF shook up the management hierarchy by separating people-leadership responsibilities from the task of running the product lines that form the traditional heart of the division. The result is a “helix” model featuring two parallel lines of accountability—a “dynamic axis” for the product lines themselves and a “stable axis” for the people, capabilities, and functional domains that support them. As with other agile organization models, the helix allows people and other resources to be shifted much more flexibly across product lines, helping ZF to compete in the fast-evolving landscape of e-mobility. ... "

Media Lab and Blockchains for Secure Robot Teams

Interesting link, especially coming from the MIT Media Lab, where we had a membership. 

Blockchain Technology Could Provide Secure Communications for Robot Teams

MIT Media Lab, Adam Zewe, October 5, 2021

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Spain's Polytechnic University of Madrid suggest blockchain technology could ensure secure communications for robot teams. A blockchain supplies a tamper-proof record of messages issued by robot team leaders, so follower robots can note inconsistencies in the data trail. In a simulation, data was stored in each block as a set of directions from a leader robot to followers; a malicious robot attempting to alter the content of a block changes the block hash, so the doctored block is no longer connected to the chain and false directions can be easily disregarded by followers. MIT's Eduardo Castelló said, "These techniques are useful to be able to validate, audit, and understand that the system is not going to go rogue."   ... ' 

CarPlay Expands it Reach to AC, Stereo and Seats

 Interesting view of what we might expect for new and updated capabilities, but not driving interfaces in the 'smart home' automotive division.   So far there have not been many impressive examples.   In part because of the safety sensitivity of driving.   And also privacy considerations for related data being used and generated.   Also potentially opening your car, as an IOT device, to malware attack.

Apple CarPlay could control more parts of your vehicle in the future

‘IronHeart’ could build a new CarPlay that easily controls your car’s A/C, stereo, and seats

By Richard Lawler@rjcc 

Ever since it was introduced in 2015, Apple CarPlay has represented a notable upgrade over the user interfaces most cars have by default, but many of our concerns about it, and Android Auto, come up due to their limitations. Newer features like dual-screen support and third-party apps like Google Maps could help, but there are still huge parts of the driving experience that exist outside of Apple’s control panel. Now, Mark Gurman reports for Bloomberg that Apple’s “IronHeart” push envisions tying settings like climate controls, seat positioning, and even specific surround sound tweaks to your iPhone.

This is a gap that Google has closed by cutting deals with automakers like Polestar, Ford, Honda, and GM to use Android Automotive as the basis for their UI. According to Bloomberg, while Apple’s plans would require carmaker participation, this isn’t a plan to provide the basis for an infotainment system like Android Automotive.

Instead, Bloomberg suggests it could resemble Apple’s smart home push with HomeKit, with an API that devices (in this case, cars) access with varying levels of support for control and sensor communication. One interesting wrinkle is the mention that with iOS 15, Apple removed several API features from SiriKit, making its occasionally disappointing assistant less capable than before. That includes controls that could, on compatible vehicles, manage these exact settings, like seat position, climate control, or audio source.

If the plans turn into real upgrades, that could mean different cars have different levels of feature support, with some using CarPlay to customize seat position, while others might not support that but could configure the vehicle’s A/C settings based on your iPhone preferences. As the report notes, so far, there has been limited support for things like manufacturer-provided CarPlay apps that can access these deeper control settings, and only BMW supports Apple CarKey so far.

So what does this mean for Apple’s not-so-secret Project Titan car program? Bloomberg reports that the CarPlay expansions wouldn’t collect car or user data, so whatever project Kevin Lynch is now leading will need to glean useful insights in another way.... ' 

GM and Cruise Get California DMV Approval for Waymo

Observing this space I have received many questions about how likely autonomous driving will become, and how soon.  Mainly due to safety considerations.  Yet there still seems  a continuing movement to the approval of autonomous vehicles of  many kinds.   Here an example.   With carefully tailored regulation.  Interesting details below.  In the US this is often by State,  which adds complexity and thus cost.

Alphabet's Waymo, GM's Cruise Get California DMV Approval to Run Commercial Autonomous Car Services By CNBC 

GM-based Cruise and Alphabet's Waymo were granted autonomous vehicle deployment permits from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. This will allow them to charge fees and receive compensation for ride-hailing and other autonomous services offered to the public in certain areas.

However, the companies also need approval from the California Public Utilities Commission before they can offer such services to the general public outside of a testing program.  The new authorization allows Cruise vehicles to operate on public roads in certain areas of San Francisco between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. at speeds no faster than 30 mph, while Waymo can operate in designated parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties at speeds no faster than 65 mph.

Both companies are permitted to operate vehicles in light rain or fog. ..... 

Both companies have been testing fleets of autonomous vehicles in California with permits that allow for free driverless rides to passengers in test vehicles.  .... "

Interacting with Computers Through Smell

In our innovation spaces we also looked at 'communication', and sales via smell and taste.  Since at the time we were makers of some very large coffee blends.    We worked with simulations of blends and how people interacted with them via taste and aroma.  We even tested the ability to 'smell' with computers to test blends and model consumer reaction.  And their reaction in virtual reality settings.

Interacting With Computers Through Smell  By Sandrine Ceurstemont, Commissioned by CACM Staff, October 7, 2021

We typically interact with computers and virtual environments using vision, hearing, and touch, but there is growing interest in also incorporating smell, to replicate more closely how we interact with the real world.

Odors could help people feel more present in virtual reality settings, for example, while smell could also play a role in how we make rapid decisions or recall memories when using computers.

"The question is how can we harness the power of smell in this increasingly digital world," says Marianna Obrist, professor of multisensory interfaces at University College London in the U.K.

There are still challenges to overcome before smell can be widely used as a mode of human-computer interaction, though. A better understanding of how it could impact different aspects of behavior in virtual environments, for example, is needed.

"What we are trying to do is to understand the temporal and spatial diffusion of scent in order to really understand the effect on the user," says Obrist.

In recent work, Obrist and her colleagues investigated whether smell could help direct a person's attention in a virtual reality environment. They conducted experiments in which participants were presented with an abundance of visual stimuli, and had to pick out those that looked like mint leaves. Either sounds, smells, or both were incorporated into the virtual scene, and were emitted from different positions  in the virtual environment, in order to learn whether they could help guide a person towards the mint leaf icons.

Participants were assessed based on the number of mint leaves they spotted and where they were located. The position of each person's head was tracked as they completed the task, to determine the direction they were looking and whether that matched up with the location from which a scent or sound was being emitted.

Obrist and her team found participants typically directed their attention to the source of a sound or smell. Furthermore, they seemed to explore the left side more thoroughly when a sensation was delivered from the left, compared to when it originated from the right side. The researchers think that could be because all the participants were from cultures that read from left to right. "That might have some effect which would need to be accounted for in the future," says Obrist.

They also found differences in how effectively people focused their attention when sound or smell were used on their own, compared to when both modalities were combined. "The integration of sound and smell definitely produced the best results," says Obrist. ... ' 

Using AI in Particle Physics

An old interest of mine, how can AI be applied?   An investigation.  A further question:  How can AI be used generally elsewhere as a means to 'drill' into a complex space, with known rules,  play with their testing and extension?     ... 

Using AI to Drill Down in Physics  By Bennie Mols, Commissioned by CACM Staff, July 8, 2021

If a computer can teach itself to play the age-old board game Go better than the human world champion, if a computer can even conjure up a genius new Go move, couldn't a computer also discover new physics?

Jesse Thaler, an associate professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), investigates the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) in particle physics. In 2020, Thaler also became the director of the National Science Foundation's AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), which is dedicated to advancing physics knowledge and galvanizing AI research innovation.

At the moment, the Standard Model of particle physics is the best description of three of the four fundamental forces of nature, and of a large family of elementary particles. Finding deviations from the Standard Model might lead physicists to discover new particles or new interactions, and AI might be able to play an important role in this.

In a Zoom interview, Thaler talks about the present and the future of applying AI to particle physics.

Why does particle physics need AI?

Particle physics is a data-rich field. In CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), particles collide every 25 nanoseconds. Processing and analyzing these collisions has to be done in an automated and robust way. We are seeing now that our traditional tools have reached their limits. AI has the potential to exploit new features of these datasets."

Where are we right now with AI in particle physics?

Right now, AI has augmented and improved on strategies that particle physics has already used for many decades. AI gives physicists a better ability to reconstruct particles from the collision debris and interpret the results.

What type of AI is used in particle physics?

It's almost all machine learning, and the biggest distinction to make is between supervised and unsupervised machine learning. Thus far in particle physics, we have focused on supervised learning, based on training sets with labeled data.  ... '

US Fed Gov AI Spending Increasing

It appears in most the usual spaces.

Federal Government Spending on AI is Accelerating 

By AI Trends Staff  

AI is a major priority for US federal agencies and its adoption is accelerating, in part due to urgency following the COVID pandemic but also rooted in the long-term IT and R&D strategic plans.   

This is a key finding of the Federal Artificial Intelligence Landscape, 2022 report from the Federal Market Analysis team of Deltek, a global provider of enterprise software with a project focus. The report examines the major considerations around budget, policy, acquisition and workforce issues that influence federal AI priorities.   

Christine Fritsch, principal research analyst, federal market analysis, Deltek

“That research has found that as government mission requirements grow, federal agencies are seeking ways to maximize the use of the vast data sets they collect and store,” stated Christine Fritsch, principal research analyst, federal market analysis at Deltek, author of the account on Deltek’s report in Federal Times.  

The report describes how AI and machine learning technologies are enabling agencies to improve the effectiveness of missions, stretch workforce capacity, combat waste, fraud, and abuse, and drive operating efficiencies. The maturation of AI technology, a growing list of AI use cases and applications, and the growth in commercial solutions, have all contributed to pushing AI beyond the R&D work at scientific agencies such as NASA and the Department of Energy to a broader pool of agencies, the report found.   ... ' 

Combine Robots and Drones for Data and Compliance

Makes much sense.   Have recently been following the usage of how drones and directed robotics are opening up data availability in the time and space dimensions.   And here also in the dimension of compliance.

Insurers Increase Investments in Drones, Robots  By The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2021

International Data Corp. (IDC) predicts that the insurance industry will spend approximately $602 million globally on robotic systems, including drones, this year, rising to $1.7 billion in 2025.

IDC's Patrick Van Brussel said, "All these technologies are about augmenting the capacities of the so-called knowledge workers." Travelers Cos., United States Automobile Association, and Farmers Insurance Group are among the big insurers that used drones to inspect property damage from Hurricane Ida.

Farmers also plans to roll out a robotic dog, Boston Dynamic's Spot, to inspect catastrophe damage.

Said Farmers' Samantha Santiago, "Spot gives us the ability on the ground to see what's ahead of us. Things that may be difficult for an adjuster to see."

Travelers' Jim Wucherpfennig  said drones make it possible to write damage estimates and pay claims faster.

From The Wall Street Journal  

Unilever Building a Stronger Social Playbook

Plans to include methods like livestreaming, shoppable media, group buying and gaming.   Note $3 Trillion mentioned below.

Unilever’s Social Commerce Playbook Adds New Start-up Platform

The Positive Beauty Growth Platform initiative is led by Unilever’s beauty and personal care division, which includes such brands as Dove, Axe and Love Beauty & Plane. 

Unilever is readying for the $3 trillion-plus social commerce tsunami with a new initiative wooing start-ups.

The No. 6 consumer goods company’s Positive Beauty Growth Platform is inviting scale-up and start-ups to apply to collaborate on beauty tech and innovation projects. It will host a series of pitch competitions and challenges for companies operating in social commerce — especially those in livestreaming, shoppable media, group buying and gaming.

The initiative is led by its beauty and personal care division, which includes such brands as Dove, Axe and Love Beauty & Planet, and accepted partners will pilot their idea in collaboration with select brands.  

The global social commerce market is pegged to be valued at $3.37 trillion in 2028, up from $474.8 billion in 2020, according to Grand View Research, which cited personal and beauty care segment as one segmented expected to especially benefit.

Social commerce is being propelled both as a discovery and a buying channel thanks to an increase in social media usage during the pandemic, with more brands investing in their ability to provide immersive and convenient experiences to seize on this growth.

Social platforms, meanwhile, are doing their part to grease the wheels: TikTok last week launched the TikTok Shopping solution suite that includes additional commerce experiences, integrations with third-party commerce partners, and live shopping, among other features.

Beyond growing sales, leveraging social commerce provides brands with another opportunity to leverage the benefits of direct-to-consumer selling — chiefly forging closer relationships with consumers and the first-party data it can bring. Twenty-three percent of consumer goods companies in the annual Retail and Consumer Goods Analytics Study said they’re investing in social media analytics for the first time, while 40% are making upgrades to a current system.  

And while today’s large legacy consumer goods brands are “trying” social commerce rather than defining it as an imperative at this point, Len Schlesinger, Baker Foundation professor at Harvard Business School and former vice chairman/COO of Limited Brands, told CGT recently, “the smart ones are trying everything.” For some, this is taking the form of investing in acquiring DTC brands for learnings, with others are building out their venture capital capabilities.

For his part, Sunny Jain, Unilever president of beauty and personal care, noted the importance of collaborating when it comes to the “mega-trends of the future.”   .... ' 

New on D-Wave Quantum

If you have followed this blog, you know that I have followed D-Wave since nearly their beginning.  They introduced me to solving combinatoric models their way.  Today found the below a report by TechCrunch on how D-Wave to further generalize their methods to build a gate model quantum computers. Similar to what is being done by IBM.  And the engineering needs for such a system. Worth understanding.  Comments? Plan to continue to follow here.

D-Wave plans to build a gate-model quantum computer  By Frederic Lardinois@frederic  in Techcrunch

For more than 20 years, D-Wave has been synonymous with quantum annealing. Its early bet on this technology allowed it to become the world’s first company to sell quantum computers, but that also somewhat limited the real-world problems its hardware could solve, given that quantum annealing works especially well for optimization problems like protein folding or route planning. But as the company announced at its Qubits conference today, a superconducting gate-model quantum computer — of the kind IBM and others currently offer — is now also on its roadmap.

D-Wave believes the combination of annealing, gate-model quantum computing and classic machines is what its businesses’ users will need to get the most value from this technology. “Like we did when we initially chose to pursue annealing, we’re looking ahead,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “We’re anticipating what our customers need to drive practical business value, and we know error-corrected gate-model quantum systems with practical application value will be required for another important part of the quantum application market: simulating quantum systems. This is an application that’s particularly useful in fields like materials science and pharmaceutical research.”

Early on, the company argues, annealing provided the fastest path to building quantum applications. Today, about 250 D-Wave customers have built applications for its hardware, which virtually all of its users access through its Leap cloud service. And since there’s clearly value in quantum annealing, too, D-Wave won’t do away with it. “Annealing remains core to our roadmap,” the company says, and it plans to continue to invest and develop its current systems. Indeed, D-Wave believes that annealing — and the optimization use cases it enables — will account for about a third of the quantum application market.

But the company is also clearly aware that this is a major change in its strategy and that it has a bit of explaining to do. For years, after all, D-Wave argued that its annealing technology might one day be able to be used for a general quantum computer, too. Now, however, the company notes that since the technology and theory behind it has matured — and D-Wave itself has learned a lot about the materials engineering challenges involved — it’s “exactly the right time from a technical and theory perspective to face the challenges of gate-model implementation head-on.”  ... ' 

Hint at Dystopian Futures

Expected direction?

‘Dystopian world’: Singapore patrol robots stoke fears of surveillance state

Trial of robots to police ‘undesirable’ behaviour such as smoking or breaching social-distancing rules   in The Guardian

Singapore has trialled patrol robots that blast warnings at people engaging in “undesirable social behaviour”, adding to an arsenal of surveillance technology in the tightly controlled city-state that is fuelling privacy concerns.

From vast numbers of CCTV cameras to trials of lampposts kitted out with facial recognition tech, Singapore is seeing an explosion of tools to track its inhabitants.

That includes a three-week trial in September, in which two robots were deployed to patrol a housing estate and a shopping centre. Officials have long pushed a vision of a hyper-efficient, tech-driven “smart nation”, but activists say privacy is being sacrificed and people have little control over what happens to their data.

Singapore is frequently criticised for curbing civil liberties and people are accustomed to tight controls, but there is still growing unease at intrusive tech. The government’s latest surveillance devices are robots on wheels, with seven cameras, that issue warnings to the public and detect “undesirable social behaviour”. .....' 

Home Depot Hires Wal-Mart

 Yes, an intriguing retail development.

Is Home Depot’s deal with Walmart a sign of bigger things to come?

by George Anderson

Home Depot is hiring Walmart to handle local deliveries for its stores.

The retailers revealed today that they are teaming up to give Home Depot’s customers another way to have their online orders delivered on the same or next day. The two companies did not specify details, such as the length of the agreement or their financial arrangement.

The development marks the first publicly announced retailer deal for Walmart’s GoLocal delivery service, which debuted in August. The white label service, which uses third-party drivers, delivers orders for other businesses across the country. Walmart had said that it signed deals with both national and smaller accounts when it launched GoLocal but did not specify any companies at that time.  ... ' 

Stuck in a Logic Box?

Can think of a number of times. Can see how this could be added to ML delivered choices.

Are you stuck in a “logic box”?

Beware the trap of making a smart choice among flawed options.

In Strategy+Business by Adam Bryant

Many years ago, as a young business reporter at the New York Times, I learned about the pernicious concept of institutional imperative. The phrase was coined by Warren Buffett, who first wrote about it in his 1989 letter to shareholders, to help explain why organizations that are run by generally smart leaders often make misguided decisions. Though the term institutional imperative sounds like a good thing, Buffett characterized it as a sheeplike response to power and the status quo that can derail critical thinking.

“In business school,” the sage of Omaha wrote, “I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.”

Two of Buffett’s examples: “Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops,” and “the behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.”

This powerful insight helped me understand the ways in which CEOs explained the rationale for deals that seemed puzzling in the moment, such as Time Warner’s merger with AOL in 2000. The US$350 billion deal, which was largely unwound ten years later, has been studied endlessly as one of the worst business transactions in history. But in the heat of the moment, once the leaders of each company had convinced themselves that the combination made sense, the institutional imperative kicked in to build unstoppable momentum and make the deal happen. ... ' 

Podcasting and all That

Never related SAS to Podcasts. Then I saw the below.  Have been interested this kind of promotion/broadcasting that you can ingest as and where you want, and repeat as you need.  I even did an internal podcast for P&G when I worked there that discussed the uses of technology. I still get questions about it. I now frequently follow podcasts. And mention them here.   Easy to do on a smartphone. Now SAS has written up a piece on branded podcasts, see below:    With pointers to some I will hear:  -Franz

Why I listen to branded podcasts (and 5 great ones to add to your list), by ALEX COOP on SEPTEMBER 30, 2021    in the SAS Blog. 

Since 2015, the number of Americans who to listen to at least one podcast per month has increased by approximately 40 million people. The number of podcast listeners has also ballooned globally in tandem with a rise in smart speaker adoption. People are consuming them at home, on the go and at work.

In many cases, podcasting has become a legitimate substitute for traditional advertising. Corporations understand the value of creating something that people want to consume instead of ads that listeners ignore.

It's been a pleasant surprise watching a personal podcast palette consisting of news, sports, video game and cybersecurity commentary invaded by branded podcasts covering a host of other topics. And while none of these branded podcasts crack the Top 50 list for most weekly listeners, some of them are legitimately worth your time. .... '

Data Science Books

In KDNuggets:

Data Science books to start reading:   Good selection,   I would pick one or more that makes the most sense based on your current background and go from there. 

By Przemek Chojecki, CEO Contentyze

Data science is undoubtedly one of the hottest career choices right now. Companies (many of whom have data science departments) are hiring data scientists around the board. It is a considerable thing to become a data scientist. It is also a fantastic opportunity to hone your expertise if you are already a statistician and want to step through the ranks.

This article discusses the most popular data science books for any level.  .... '

Machine Learning can Catch Natural Language Attacks

Particularly like the broad notion of 'honey pot' or attraction approach for threats.  Reading the broader article to see possible reapplication.

Honeypot Security Technique Can Stop Attacks in Natural Language Processing  By Penn State News

A machine learning framework can proactively counter universal trigger attacks—a phrase or series of words that deceive an indefinite number of inputs—in natural language processing (NLP) applications.

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) and South Korea's Yonsei University engineered the DARCY model to catch potential NLP attacks using a honeypot, offering up words and phrases that hackers target in their exploits.

DARCY searches and injects multiple trapdoors into a textual neural network to detect and thresh out malicious content produced by universal trigger attacks.

When tested on four text classification datasets and used to defend against six different potential attack scenarios, DARCY outperformed five existing adversarial detection algorithms.

From Penn State News

UC Center for Business Analytics Data Science Symposium

UC Center for Business Analytics

Data Science Symposium 2021 will be a virtual event on Tuesday, October 12 from 12:00 PM - 2:45 PM.  There will be three speakers from Coterie Insurance, McDonald's, and the University of Cincinnati.

Registration is complimentary and open to all!

Register free: https://ucincinnati.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IoV4jjiDR1ihP7tmpqXqxw

12:05-12:55 PM

Speaker: Paul Bessire, VP of Data, Coterie Insurance

Title:  “Data Science and the Business of Sports”

Abstract: Through various examples spanning everything sports related - from tickets, to hiring, to strategy, to gambling - learn why sports is both the ultimate catalyst and proving ground for innovation in data science and what this means for all business.

Bio: Paul Bessire has been in predictive analytics and data science for 15+ years. He has used data and technology to become one of the world's foremost disruptors in sports analytics and is now focused on doing something similar in insurtech.   Paul recently joined Coterie after four years in consulting where he and team help middle-market clients, nonprofits and sports teams make more efficient decisions using information and technology.

1:00-1:50 PM

Speaker:Mathew Zettinger, Data Scientist, McDonald's

Title: "Understanding Customer Behavior in the Drive Thru"

Abstract:  The drive thru has long been a staple of any quick service restaurant and is perhaps more important now than ever before. McDonald’s is turning to data and analytics to better understand customer habits and pain points in the drive thru, seeking improvements in speed, efficiency, accuracy, and the overall customer experience. In this talk we will explore how McDonald’s uses machine learning, deterministic methods, and engineering tools to uncover insights on customer ordering patterns in the drive thru.

Bio:  Matt is a Data Scientist on the Global Data and Analytics Hub at McDonald’s, where he constructs models and analyses to drive value for a variety of business units. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to McDonald’s he spent time building credit models in the financial technology space and forecasting demand in the retail/consumer packaged goods industry.

1:50-2:40 PM

 Speaker:Denise White, Assistant Professor-Educator, University of Cincinnati

Title: "Simulating Large Systems: Challenges and Approaches to the Design of a Whole Hospital Model"

Abstract: Hospitals differ from most systems in the complexity of operations and the unparalleled variability and uncertainty of demand.   How do you model a system where virtually every entity has a uniquely defined path and set of needs?  Using simulation modeling, we explore how data analysis techniques, appropriate definition of stochastic and probabilistic elements, and streamlined design can be used to develop a complete model of patient flow through a large hospital.  We explore unique business challenges in managing the operations and demonstrate how to incorporate decision making based on hospital status into a simulation model.

Bio: Denise L. White, PhD, MBA, is an Assistant Professor – Educator at the University of Cincinnati where she is the Director of the Master of Science in Business Analytics and teaches courses in analytics, operations management and healthcare.  She also holds a position as an Assistant Professor- Research at the James M. Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Before joining UC as a full-time faculty member, she was the Director of Quality and Transformation Analytics at Cincinnati Children’s where she was responsible for overseeing analytic staff members supporting hospital-wide improvement efforts

Register:  https://ucincinnati.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IoV4jjiDR1ihP7tmpqXqxw

Saving Capitalism

A podcast of interest,  based on my employers of the past,  plan to listen to.

First He Saved Unilever. Now He Wants to Save Capitalism.

HBR IdeaCast

Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever, led a dazzling career in consumer goods, from Procter & Gamble to Nestlé to the British multinational. His experience fending off a hostile takeover bid taught him that the doctrine of shareholder capitalism is wrong. He believes there’s a better way of doing business, one that embraces all stakeholders — not just stockholders — and improves the environment. He cofounded the consultancy IMAGINE to further sustainable goals, and he shares his advice for the next generation of leaders. With Andrew Winston, Polman wrote the new book “Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More than They Take”.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hbr-ideacast/id152022135?i=1000537615229

Deep Learning for Material Design

 Notice the advanced methods being used, like genetic algorithms to improve training.  Use for materials.  Material design continues to be a strong area of use.   See my 'materials' tag.  Technical.

Deep Learning Framework to Enable Material Design in Unseen Domain

KAIST (South Korea), September 29, 2021

Researchers at South Korea's KAIST and the University of California, Berkeley have developed a framework that uses a deep neural network to facilitate more efficient material or structure design beyond the domain of the initial training set. The method compensates for the weak predictive power of neural networks.

This involves three steps:

• using genetic algorithms to search for candidates with improved properties close to the training set, and mixing superior designs in the training set;

• determining whether the candidates actually have improved properties, and using data augmentation to duplicate validated designs and expand the training set; and

• using transfer learning to update the neural network with newly generated superior designs to broaden the reliable prediction domain.

Researchers are using the optimization framework to design metamaterial structures, segmented thermoelectric generators, and optimal sensor distributions.  ... " 

Common Sense is Hard

A key consideration .... 

An AI expert explains why it’s hard to give computers something you take for granted: Common sense

August 17, 2021 8.09am EDT, Author, Mayank Kejriwal

Research Assistant Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering, University of Southern California

Disclosure statement, Mayank Kejriwal receives funding from DARPA. Partners  ... 

Imagine you’re having friends over for lunch and plan to order a pepperoni pizza. You recall Amy mentioning that Susie had stopped eating meat. You try calling Susie, but when she doesn’t pick up, you decide to play it safe and just order a margherita pizza instead.

People take for granted the ability to deal with situations like these on a regular basis. In reality, in accomplishing these feats, humans are relying on not one but a powerful set of universal abilities known as common sense.

As an artificial intelligence researcher, my work is part of a broad effort to give computers a semblance of common sense. It’s an extremely challenging effort.

Quick – define common sense

Despite being both universal and essential to how humans understand the world around them and learn, common sense has defied a single precise definition. G. K. Chesterton, an English philosopher and theologian, famously wrote at the turn of the 20th century that “common sense is a wild thing, savage, and beyond rules.” Modern definitions today agree that, at minimum, it is a natural, rather than formally taught, human ability that allows people to navigate daily life.

Common sense is unusually broad and includes not only social abilities, like managing expectations and reasoning about other people’s emotions, but also a naive sense of physics, such as knowing that a heavy rock cannot be safely placed on a flimsy plastic table. Naive, because people know such things despite not consciously working through physics equations.

Common sense also includes background knowledge of abstract notions, such as time, space and events. This knowledge allows people to plan, estimate and organize without having to be too exact.

Common sense is hard to compute  ... ' 

Neuro Rights Laws

 First I had heard it stated this way.    May also effect things like 'neuromarketing'? 

In the Face of Neurotechnology Advances, Chile Passes 'Neuro Rights' Law

By Agence France-Presse, October 1, 2021

Chile has become the first country to pass a "neuro rights" law that establishes the rights of individuals to personal identity, free will, and mental privacy.

The legislation takes aim at neurotechnology that could manipulate a person's mind. Columbia University's Rafael Yuste said researchers have demonstrated they could implant images of things never before seen by mice into their brains, which affected their behavior.

Such experiments have raised concerns that neurotechnology could be used to record or modify people's mental data.  The law aims to protect individuals’ "neurodata" and impose limits on the analysis and modification of the contents of a person's brain.

From Agence France-Presse

Digital Nomads Surging

A look at studies of the surge.

The Number of Digital Nomads Surged Again in 2021  

The pandemic-driven seismic shift to remote led to continued strong growth in the number of American digital nomads in 2021.  By Steve King

The MBO Partners 2021 State of Independence research study found that 15.5 million American workers currently describe themselves as digital nomads, increasing 42% from 2020 and 112% from the pre-pandemic year 2019 (click on the study chart below to enlarge).   .... ' 

Thoughts on the Great Resignation

Quitting vs Keeping

With So Many People Quitting, Don’t Overlook Those Who Stay

by Debbie Cohen and Kate Roeske-Zummer,  October 01, 2021  in  HBR

Summary.   The marketplace for talent has shifted. You need to think of your employees like customers and put thoughtful attention into retaining them. This is the first step to slow attrition and regain your growth curve. And this does not happen when they feel ignored in the...more

For anyone who doubted, the data is in. The Great Resignation is real and it’s happening. The U.S. Department of Labor reports that during the months of April, May, and June 2021 a total of 11.5 million workers quit their jobs. And it’s not over. According to Gallup research, 48 percent of employees are actively looking to make a change, and according to Personio research, nearly 1:4 will do so in the next six months. Those looking for new opportunities will find ripe opportunities; in June the U.S. hit an all-time high of 10.1 million job openings.

What does this all mean to your organization? You are likely juggling two pressing needs: hiring to backfill people who have left and hiring new people to support business growth. The scarcity is real — too few people for too many jobs. The imbalance of this supply-demand highlights more than ever that productivity is about people. ... ' 

McKinsey has some How To's on what They Call Cyber Resilience:

McKinsey comes up with some good ideas about the process of being cyber smart.  Here are all the headings,  click through for much more.

How to be cyber smart

October 3, 2021  The pandemic amped up all things digital and accelerated the need for innovation, while also creating fertile ground for cyber attackers. Now, more than ever, protecting your organization and its digital assets is crucial. As Cybersecurity Awareness Month begins, here’s the intel you need to #BeCyberSmart, including:

-Ways to develop cyber resilience and safeguard digital infrastructure

-Where industries stand on protecting information assets, and what cybersecurity leaders do differently

-The role of third parties and supply chains

Cyber resilience: Protecting America’s digital infrastructure:

Organizational cyber maturity: A survey of industries

Enterprise cybersecurity: Aligning third parties and supply chains

Securing small and medium-size enterprises: What’s next?

The energy-sector threat: How to address cybersecurity vulnerabilities

Boards and cybersecurity

Security as code: The best (and maybe only) path to securing cloud applications and systems

Safeguarding against cyberattack in an increasingly digital world  ...

Graph Aware Machine Learning

New to me.  But makes sense to use to add the knowledge inherent in a graph used to represent its application as in a Semantic Ontology.  Looking forward to consider that. 

Cognitive Analytics: Graph Aware Machine Learning   by 7wData, October 2, 2021

The industry as a whole is beginning to realize the intimate connection between Artificial Intelligence and its less heralded, yet equally viable, knowledge foundation. The increasing prominence of knowledge graphs in almost any form of analytics—from conventional Business Intelligence solutions to data science tools—suggests this fact, as does the growing interest in Neuro-Symbolic AI.

In most of these use cases, graphs are the framework for intelligently reasoning about business concepts with a comprehension exceeding that of mere machine learning. However, what many organizations still don’t realize is there’s an equally vital movement gaining traction around AI’s knowledge base that drastically improves its statistical learning prowess, making the latter far more effectual.

In these applications graphs aren’t simply providing an alternative form of AI to machine learning that naturally complements it. They supply the setting—the visual capabilities, dimensionality, and topology—for expanding the merit of the vectors at statistical AI’s core with a range of techniques including embedding, manifold learning, and clustering.

Utilizing AI’s knowledge base to better its statistical base via graph’s ability to increase machine learning’s aptitude is further testament to the undisputed truth that, for AI, “if you’re not using a diversity of approaches you’re limiting yourself in the generality of your system,” remarked Kyndi CEO Ryan Welsh.

The chief advantage knowledge graphs provide for machine learning is a relationship-savvy environment for depicting all the intricacies of the connections between individual nodes of data. A technique known as embedding is particularly useful in this regard. According to Katana Graph CEO Keshav Pingali, “Embeddings are a way to find relationships between entities that are not always obvious if you look at the connectivity of the graph.” In some use cases, embeddings simplify—if not obviate—the need for otherwise time consuming feature engineering.

In almost all deployments they identify non-linear relationships between entities to inform query results and searches for attributes used to build machine learning models. “The beauty of embeddings is if you do them right, those seemingly unrelated nodes that are far away in a graph end up close together in a three dimensional space,” Pingali observed. Such results are critical for building machine learning models with the proper weights and measures to maximize the use of training data for the most accurate models possible.  ... '

Self Healing Materials

 Impressive direction introduced here, ultimately linked to healing,  'intelligent' materials.

Imperial College London researchers have created 3D building blocks that can heal themselves in response to damage.

The engineered living materials (ELMs) exploit biology’s ability to heal and replenish material and could respond to damage in harsh environments using a sense-and-response system.

We’ve created living materials that can detect damage and respond to it by healing themselves.

Professor Tom Ellis:  Department of Bioengineering  Imperial College London

This work, published in Nature Communications  , could lead to the creation of real-world materials that detect and heal their own damage, such as fixing a crack in a windshield, a tear in the fuselage of an aircraft or a pothole in the road. By integrating the building blocks into self-healing building materials, scientists could reduce the amount of maintenance needed and extend a material’s life and usefulness.

Lead author Professor Tom Ellis of the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial said: “In the past we’ve created living materials with inbuilt sensors that can detect environmental cues and changes. Now we’ve created living materials that can detect damage and respond to it by healing themselves.”... ' 

Active, Self-Healing Cybersecurity

 Ideal, intelligent, but like AI, how generally practical today? 

On Active, Self-Healing Cybersecurity

ACM NEWS, Active Defenders

By David Geer, Commissioned by CACM Staff, September 30, 2021

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center received 791,790 cybercrime complaints in 2020, with losses exceeding US$4.1 billion, according to the FBI's 2020 Internet Crime Report. Cyberthugs have been automating cyberattacks for years using tools such as command and control (C&C) servers to puppet their botnets and malicious infections. Cybersecurity needs to automate its response to the schemes of these criminal hackers.

According to Innovation Origins, a European platform for independent journalists who write about innovation, start-ups, and "technologies that will shape the world of tomorrow," Dutch bank ABN AMRO will use self-healing cybersecurity software developed by TNO (The Netherlands Organization for Applied Science Research) to protect applications running in software containers. Containerization benefits software development with standardized application container images that accelerate secure development and deployment. The human immune system inspired the self-healing concept, which will replace containers periodically to remove unknown infections. The self-regenerating software solution will replenish containers when security monitoring and threat detection tools identify infections.

Developers from TNO created and integrated software called Lympho, which implements the Self-Healing-4-Cyber-Security (SH4CS) concept, with Kubernetes + Docker platforms to heal containers through regeneration automatically. Kubernetes is a popular open-source container orchestration platform from Google, which many organizations use to develop and deploy their software. Docker is a popular open-source application container platform that automates deployment, typically using container images.  ... ' 

OpenAI Codex Turns Written Language Into Computer Code

 How different than LoCode?

OpenAI's Codex Turns Written Language Into Computer Code

By Axios, August 11, 2021

OpenAI is releasing an improved version of its Codex AI model that can read written instructions in conversational language and transform it into working computer code.

The model is the latest example of progress in natural language processing, and points toward a future in which coders will be able to offload some of their work to AIs, and where ordinary people may be able to code without programmer training.

Codex is a descendant of OpenAI's text-generating model GPT-3. While GPT-3 was trained on a huge quantity of language data taken from the Internet, Codex was trained on both language and billions of lines of publicly available computer code.

As a result, users can issue commands in written English, and Codex will produce computer code capable of carrying out those instructions, essentially making it an English-to-Python (or any of more than a dozen programming languages in Codex's training data) computer code translator.

From Axios

View Full Article

Smart Toilets, Again

 During a visit to Japan in the 80s we saw related work being done.   Not sure where that went, but was a collaboration with a university.  And as a toilet tissue maker we also made a connection.  The word Smart Toilet was used. 

The  smart toilet era is here! Are you ready to share your analprint with big tech?

Toilet roll with a camera in the centre  ...  in The Guardian

Loo design has barely changed in 150 years – until now. Will people trade their privacy for the chance to find out exactly what is in their waste?

By Emine Saner, @eminesaner  Thu 23 Sep 2021 

For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets – and more specifically what we deposit into them. “We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool,” says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. “We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool.”

As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyse waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. “The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced,” she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. “All other aspects of your life – your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell – have enhanced capabilities.”  (more detail in article) ...'

Death Due to Ransomware?

Out of Schneier: 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on a baby’s death at an Alabama hospital in 2019, which they argue was a direct result of the ransomware attack the hospital was undergoing. ... '

Discussion of where the negligence was, in part for allowing the malware intrusion?

China and US AI Startups

AI Startups are Roaring,  led by China and US

VCs invested over $75B in AI startups in 2020 in Venturebeat

Investments in AI are growing at an accelerated pace, according to a new report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The Paris, France-based group found that the U.S. and China lead the growing wave of funding, taking in a combined 81% of the total amount invested in AI startups last year, while the European Union and U.K. boosted their backing but lag substantially behind.... '   

Room Temperature Quantum Computing on a Desktop

Not seeing how this is done exactly, but it appears quite a jump forward, more at the link.   Claims to be able to achieve about 50 Qubits.  

Quantum computing hits the desktop, no cryo-cooling required,  By Loz Blain  in NewAtlas.com

An Australian/German company is developing powerful quantum accelerators the size of graphics cards. They work at room temperature, undercutting and outperforming today's huge, cryo-cooled quantum supercomputers, and soon they'll be small enough for mobile devices.

Superconducting quantum computers are huge and incredibly finicky machines at this point. They need to be isolated from anything that might knock an electron's spin off and ruin a calculation. That includes mechanical isolation, in extreme vacuum chambers, where only a few molecules might remain in a cubic meter or two of space. It includes electromagnetic forces – IBM, for example, surrounds its precious quantum bits, or qubits, with mu metals to absorb all magnetic fields.

And it includes temperature. Any atom with a temperature above absolute zero is by definition in a state of vibration, and any temperature more than 10-15 thousandths of a degree above absolute zero simply shakes the qubits to the point where they can't maintain "coherence." So most state-of-the-art quantum computers need to be cryogenically cooled using complex and expensive equipment before the qubits will maintain their state for any length of time and become useful.... ' 

" ... The company has already built a number of "Quantum development kits" in rack units, each with around 5 qubits to work with, and it's placing them with customers already, for benchmarking, integration, co-design opportunities and to let companies start working out where they'll be advantageous once they hit the market in a ~50-qubit "Quantum Accelerator" product form by around 2025. "We think over a decade," says Luo, "we can even produce a quantum system-on-a-chip for mobile devices. Because this is truly material science technology that can achieve that."  ...  " 

The Value of Phone Location Data

 The Another example of how valuable personal data can be.

ACM NEWS

There's a Multibillion-Dollar Market for Your Phone's Location Data

By The Markup, September 30, 2021

Companies that you likely have never heard of are hawking access to the location history on your mobile phone. An estimated $12 billion market, the location data industry has many players: collectors, aggregators, marketplaces, and location intelligence firms, all of which boast about the scale and precision of the data that they've amassed.

Location firm Near describes itself as "The World's Largest Dataset of People's Behavior in the Real-World," with data representing "1.6B people across 44 countries." Mobilewalla boasts "40+ Countries, 1.9B+ Devices, 50B Mobile Signals Daily, 5+ Years of Data." X-Mode's website claims its data covers "25%+ of the Adult U.S. population monthly."

In an effort to shed light on this little-monitored industry, The Markup has identified 47 companies that harvest, sell, or trade in mobile phone location data. While hardly comprehensive, the list begins to paint a picture of the interconnected players that do everything from providing code to app developers to monetize user data to offering analytics from "1.9 billion devices" and access to datasets on hundreds of millions of people. Six companies claimed more than a billion devices in their data, and at least four claimed their data was the "most accurate" in the industry.

Full article

US First Class Mail Slowing

In an attempt to decease costs of infrastructure.   Has anyone looked at US Mail as a current infrastructure, and what impact it has?  Slowing, but no indication of how much.

Mail delivery to slow down starting today,  CBS NEWS, 10/01/2021

The U.S. Postal Service will slow mail delivery beginning today as part of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s plan to cut operating costs. Roughly 40 percent of all first-class mail will take longer to get to intended destinations. Western states and parts of Texas and Florida are expected to see the biggest delays in receiving new mail.  ... ' 

Conceptualization as a Basis for Cognition

What do we mean by 'understanding'?  Can we check that off if it means we can perform some specified tasks?

Conceptualization as a Basis for Cognition — Human and Machine

A missing link to Machine understanding and Cognitive AI

By Gadi Singer  in TowardsDatascience

 While most contemporary discussions and classifications of AI capabilities center around what a system can do, I believe the path to higher intelligence and machine cognition relies on what a system can know and understand. Using rich AI knowledge representation frameworks and comprehensive models of the world can increase an AI system’s ability to transform information into deep knowledge, understanding, and functionality. To pursue this path to better AI, it is essential to understand what “understanding” really means for the human brain. Doing so allows for implementing frameworks that enable machine learning to parallel human understanding by integrating modeling and conceptualization with data and task generalization.

Conceptualization: The Basis for Human Thought

“Concepts” are the most basic building block in human thinking. Concepts serve as ontological roots for objects that we think about. Concepts represent a persistent set of essential attributes of an object class, which can change and expand with experience. Existing concepts can be abstracted or linked through analogy to additional domains and object classes. Examples of concepts include |dog|, |democracy|, |white|, and |uncle|. Physical or mental objects can be stored as a concept and accrue more data and attributes over time (e.g., |my dog Lucky| and |snow white| versus |off-white|). Even if the referent is invisible or abstract, like |love|, it can still be stored as a concept. Our understanding of the world relies on concepts, attributes of concepts, and relationships between concepts. We use concepts and facts composed of concepts and the relations between them to construct our world model. ... '

Machines Unlearning

Perhaps yet more important, unlearn in new contexts.  Say for maintenance. With new or changed metadata.  And help us understand the difference.

Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?

Researchers see if they can remove sensitive data without retraining AI from scratch.  By Tom Simonite, Wired.com

Companies of all kinds use machine learning to analyze people’s desires, dislikes, or faces. Some researchers are now asking a different question: How can we make machines forget?

A nascent area of computer science dubbed machine unlearning seeks ways to induce selective amnesia in artificial intelligence software. The goal is to remove all trace of a particular person or data point from a machine-learning system, without affecting its performance.

If made practical, the concept could give people more control over their data and the value derived from it. Although users can already ask some companies to delete personal data, they are generally in the dark about what algorithms their information helped tune or train. Machine unlearning could make it possible for a person to withdraw both their data and a company’s ability to profit from it.

Although intuitive to anyone who has rued what they shared online, that notion of artificial amnesia requires some new ideas in computer science. Companies spend millions of dollars training machine-learning algorithms to recognize faces or rank social posts, because the algorithms often can solve a problem more quickly than human coders alone. But once trained, a machine-learning system is not easily altered, or even understood. The conventional way to remove the influence of a particular data point is to rebuild a system from the beginning, a potentially costly exercise. “This research aims to find some middle ground,” says Aaron Roth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is working on machine unlearning. “Can we remove all influence of someone’s data when they ask to delete it, but avoid the full cost of retraining from scratch?”

Removing Rubble with Robots

What robots can be taught to do.

 Faster Path Planning for Rubble-Roving Robots

University of Michigan News, August 13, 2021

A new algorithm designed by University of Michigan (U-M) scientists could enhance the performance of robots traversing treacherous terrain. The algorithm can accelerate path planning for robots that use arm-like appendages to maintain balance on rough ground like disaster areas or construction sites. U-M's Yu-Chi Lin said, "First, we used machine learning to train the robot on the different ways it can place its hands and feet to maintain balance and make progress. Then, when placed in a new, complex environment, the robot can use what it learned to determine how traversable a path is, allowing it to find a path to the goal much faster." In a virtual experiment, a humanoid robot using the new algorithm outperformed previous methods in negotiating a corridor of rubble..... 

On Retail Product Shortages

Back to the supply chain.

How bad will product shortages get this time?  by Tom Ryan

Costco plans to bring back purchase limits on toilet paper and other basic merchandise, although it’s largely due to supply chain challenges and inflationary pressures, rather than the hoarding that took place in the early months of the pandemic.

The wholesale club reported U.S. same-store sales excluding gas inflation and currency effects increased 10.3 percent in the fourth quarter and 13.6 percent in the year ended August 29.

“The factors pressuring supply chains and inflation include port delays, container shortages, COVID-disruptions, shortages on various components, raw materials and ingredients, labor cost pressures and trucker and driver shortages,” Costco CFO Richard Galanti said last week on its quarterly call.

Various major brands are requesting longer lead times, partially due to hurdles finding drivers and trucks on short notice. Lead times on ingredients and packaging have been extended in some cases. “We’re putting some limitations on key items, like bath tissues, roll towels, Kirkland Signature water, high-demand cleaning-related SKUs related to the uptick in Delta-related demand,” Mr. Galanti said

Major shortages in computer chips are also still “impacting many items” including tablets, video games and major appliances, and those problems “will likely extend into 2022.”

Asked about differences from 2020, Mr. Galanti stressed that the core problem is supply chain related, citing an example of one cleaning supply company’s logistic bottlenecks. He said, “A year ago there was a shortage of merchandise. Now, they’ve got plenty of merchandise, but there’s two to three-week delays on getting it delivered because there’s a limit on short-term changes to trucking and delivery needs of the supplier. So, it really is all over the board.”