CTOvision.com

Context for the CTO, CIO, CISO and Data Scientist

You are here: Home / Archives for Artificial Intelligence

Reporting on AI from Technology Leaders Who Know Their Stuff

Artificial Intelligence is the discipline of thinking machines

artificial-intelligence-head The field has had its ups and downs over the years, we have seen many "AI Winters" come and go. But things are different now. The use of AI is growing dramatically with the proliferation of high powered computers into homes and businesses and especially with the growing power of smartphones and other mobile devices.
When it it time to research the great providers of Artificial Intelligence capabilities, kick off  your search in our Disruptive Technology Finder.

Stay In The Loop with the CTOvision Newsletter

Working in Cybersecurity: Life on the front lines, in the C-suite, and everywhere in-between

I am excited to announce a new book by Michael Tanji titled “Working in Cybersecurity” (and very happy to be among those profiled in the book).

Michael has been a pioneer in modern cyber security and digital risk mitigation. He is a former soldier and intelligence officer who at one point managed the how the entire department of defense intelligence enterprise (under the Defense Intelligence Agency) managed indications and warning for cyber threats.  As a practitioner he  has spent years starting and running various cybersecurity start-ups. He is also an accomplished author (publishing many places including here at CTOvision).

His latest book is an oral history of an interesting spectrum of people who have spent years in the cybersecurity domain.

From the book write up:

Inspired by the book Working by Studs Terkel,Working in Cybersecurity looks at both the day-to-day activities of those working in myriad roles in cybersecurity – technical, operational, and policy – as well as the mental, social, and emotional impact associated with working in one of the most in-demand and important fields of the information age.

Everyone likes hearing about significant events of the past; no one likes ‘history’ because their only exposure to it is colored by years of having to memorize dates, often about topics of nominal personal interest. An oral history of cybersecurity is different. For starters, we’re talking about something you’re interested in. Secondly, there is a pretty decent chance we’re going to talk to someone you admire and uncover something you didn’t know about them. Third, there is an equally good chance we’re going to talk to someone you’ve never heard of before, but whose story will fascinate you.

Finally, you’re going to hear about events from the people who were there, elbow deep into what was going on at the time. History by those who helped make it. What is working in the field really like? How did some of the field’s top experts acquire their skills? What was it like working on major cyber crime or digital espionage cases – or being the subject of those investigations? What was it like working with the pioneers in the field? What is it like building a cybersecurity company, and succeeding in one of the most challenging markets What makes a cybersecurity expert tick and how can you use that knowledge to help build and retain people with such rare skills? Working in Cybersecurity is both a series of compelling personal stories, as well as a resource for those who interact with cybersecurity professionals of all types. We hope that it will be an informative and engaging way to learn meaningful lessons about our past, appreciate the work that previous generations have put in, and to serve as a guide future generations so that their energies are not wasted.Proceeds from the sale of Working in Cybersecurity will be used to help aspirants to the field pay for or off-set the costs of education and training.

 

Other topics of interest:

 

An interview with Robert Fink, Architect of Foundry, Palantir’s open data platform Part Three: Open Development Environments

Editor’s note: This post is the third of a series of three capturing the result of recent interview/discussions I had with Robert Fink of Palantir. The conversation was wide ranging, hitting on topics of design, development environments and a bit on the philosophy of enterprise tech. Several common themes emerged in those topic areas, including ways that Palantir has been leveraging open approaches to data architectures, system design and even developer environments. The first post focused on open data architectures. The second post continues the discussion of open approaches including open source software. This third post gets into the meat of modern, open development environments .– bg

 

BG: The third broad topic I want to ask you about is open-source for development environments. How does this relate to open-source software and open data architectures?

RF: Once again these are in theory separate concerns, but related by mindset. Hypothetically, you could imagine a development environment based on closed, proprietary tools that produces an open data system, but in reality I have never seen that done. The most powerful and flexible development environments today are based on collections of open-source tools that have been designed from the ground up to produce highly functional, well documented, sharable code. Modern languages like Typescript are entirely open-source, including the compiler, the build system, and the IDE. Contrast that to the early days of C++, where the best compilers and IDEs were closed-source and very, very expensive.

Palantir’s developers are addicted to a large amount of open-source developer tooling. For example, all of our Java developers build their projects with Gradle, and all of our frontend developers code in Typescript. We have made a number of our internal productivity tools available as open-source. For Gradle, examples include plugins for coding standards, container-based integration testing, or for building Docker images. For the frontend community, we maintain the standard linter for Typescript.

BG: On one hand, Palantir is a commercial software company, on the other hand, you give away some of your code as open-source. How do you balance these concerns, how do you decide which part of your software you publish?

RF: In the case of developer-tooling the answer is straightforward: I feel morally obliged to maintain our tools in the open-source domain because it incurs no overhead for us and because we would gain no competitive advantage from keeping it closed-source. A second key advantage of open-source tooling: it makes it much easier for our customers to interact programmatically with our open data platform.

BG: Can you give me an example of that?

RF: Since our data platform is focused on serving customer needs for data integration and analysis, we support standard formats and APIs with built-in interoperability, for example SQL, Hadoop, Parquet, as well as downstream analysis applications like Tableau or PowerBI. But we also provide ways for customers to extend the platform with bespoke functionality in the form of plugins and applications. We try to make this easy by providing building blocks for application development. In many cases we have turned these building blocks into open-source projects themselves so anyone can contribute to and use these capabilities. For example, Blueprint and Plottable are Javascript libraries that both we and our customers employ to develop rich Web-based frontend applications with consistent look and feel. We are in the process of open-sourcing our RPC framework, Conjure. Conjure is built on industry standards like HTTP and JSON and makes is very easy to interact with our platform APIs from a variety of programming languages.

BG: I noticed from your GitHub page that you remain personally involved in the open-source community. Can you tell us some of your favorite Palantir projects?

RF: On the top of my list is probably AtlasDB. AtlasDB is a distributed transactional key-value store built on top of Cassandra. Inspired by research papers on MVCC databases, we began internal development of AtlasDB around 2012 and decided to contribute the codebase to the open-source community in 2014. Today, AtlasDB is the database backend for all of our products. Specifically for Palantir Gotham, AtlasDB has enabled our customers to migrate from Oracle to open-source databases.

As a second example, we partnered with Pepperdata, Red Hat, Bloomberg, and Google to design and implement a Kubernetes backend for Spark. After a number of iterations, the main components developed as part of this collaboration were merged into mainline Spark. Both Spark and Kubernetes are industry-changing software ecosystems and I am really happy to see that their “marriage” is now available to the wider Spark community. Palantir continues to be an active participant in the vision and implementation of the project.

BG: Can you elaborate a little on legal concerns with open-source software, and maybe also on security concerns?

RF: Both are non-trivial subjects, in particular when organizations or individuals “go rogue” and blindly download and deploy open-source components. A big advantage of commercially supported open-source software is that the providers take care of the issues of indemnification and compliance which organizations would have otherwise have to solve themselves.

Open-source components, including code libraries, graphics and fonts, and entire applications are subject to a license grant. Different license grants impose different constraints on how the licensed component and the resulting software can be used. For example, the MIT license allows for permissive use of the covered components, including modifications and redistribution under commercial terms, whereas the GPL license is far more restrictive in how one can package and distribute a combination of the open-source component and proprietary code. We monitor our external dependencies to ensure that our use of open-source components is compatible with their licenses.

The same dependency monitoring is useful in the security context. Like any software, open-source software can be susceptible to malicious and unintentional bugs and security problems. Fortunately, the developer community and security experts around the world continually scan source code for vulnerabilities and maintain lists of known “bad” libraries. We use our dependency monitoring tools to identify and remove such code from our systems. A small amount of common sense also helps in this context: we try to avoid dependencies on code produced by small or obscure development teams, as well as code that is no longer actively maintained.

BG: Thanks, Robert!

RF: My pleasure!

 

This concludes our series based on our interviews of Robert Fink. Find all three of the series at:

 

Track the most disruptive technologies by diving into our categorized index:

Artificial Intelligence Companies – A fast overview of Artificial Intelligence companies we believe are poised to cause the most positive disruption in the enterprise.

Big Data Companies – Reference to the greatest, most disruptive Big Data companies in the tech ecosystem.

Business Intelligence Companies – We assess these to be the Business Intelligence Companies most impactful for delivering real decision advantage.

Cybersecurity Companies – We apply our deep expertise in cybersecurity to assessing the best across multiple categories including:

Cloud Computing Companies – We include both platform and software as a service providers, capturing only the most innovative and disruptive.

Collaborative Tool Companies – These are the firms that help humans connect to humans to create, manage and lead.

Infrastructure Companies – Critical enterprise foundations for business agility.

IoT Companies – Internet of Things and Industrial Internet of Things are here. How do you manage them?

Mobile Companies – Help manage, configure, secure and optimize these very powerful capabilities.

Robotics Companies – Including innovations in Robotic Process Automation, Drones, and industrial robotics.

Services Companies – We only track a few, the ones we really know well.

Tech Titans – These are the big players. We track the tech titans closely since their capabilities change continuously.

VC, PE and Finance Companies – Keeping an eye on the investors can give indications of coming developments.

You can also use our topical pages to get up to speed quickly on the current status of the major megatrends. See our pages on Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Mobility, Big Data, Robotics, Internet of Things, Cybersecurity and Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies.

We also provide special pages focused on high interest topics, including Science Fiction, Entertainment, Cyber War, Tech Careers, Training and Education and Tech Tips.

SitScape CEO Kevin Yin will speak on the Webinar “Actionable Intelligence for the Performance-Based Operations Center” Sep 19, 2018

I’ve been very proud to be on SitScape’s advisory board, it has been a great way to learn how these guys are continually innovating to help bring advanced operational intelligence solutions to enterprise decision making processes.

If you are on the look out for best practices and lessons learned on bringing operational intelligence to your enterprise we recommend you sign up for the webinar described below.

Diversified,a leading provider in full-service systems and media technology integration hosts a webinar series on Security Operations Centers. The next webinar focuses on “Actionable Intelligence for the Performance Based Operations Center.” It is scheduled to run 3-3pm EST Wednesday Sep 19, 2018.

It is hosted by Robert Cameron, the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Diversified. SitScape’s CEO Kevin Yin has been invited to join as the Guest Speaker for this webinar.

To get more info and register see: https://lnkd.in/eWRpBJh

Former CIA Officer Richards J. Heuer

Today we learned of the passing of Richards J. (Dick) Heuer.

So many of us were influenced by Dick Heuer and his writings. His first public writing on the discipline of intelligence analysis began in 1979 upon his retirement from the CIA. Later he would pull together his many articles to form the basis of his seminal work, Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, which helped improve the quality of intelligence analysis and became one of the most superior and lasting texts of intelligence literature.

His writings helped intelligence community analysts realize they have to confront their own human biases and always consider the right mental models when conducting analysis. He also helped many of us realize that the rush to always get more data is not always the right approach to improving analysis. There are times when we have all the data we need but do not apply the right analytical methods or let our bias creep in and cloud our judgement.

In 2010 co-authored the book Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis which highlight 55 structured analytic techniques. This book can help leaders in intelligence, law enforcement and business ensure they are considering the right mental models when approaching an analytical challenge.

With all the challenges facing humanity today, Heuer’s works are more important than ever. Every big challenge out there, including topics like the environment, the economy, the struggle between open societies and closed societies and healthcare, all have data associated with them. Having data does not seem to be the key issue in these domains. Having the right analytical methods and models may be far more important at this point.

 

For more on these topics see the CTOvision Guide to National Security Technology and

More from CTOvision:

Cyberwar and Cybersecurity:

SciFi:

Robots:

Tech Titan Reporting:

 

HBO’s Westworld: The Man In Black is a special kind of Twitter user

HBO’s Westworld is a modern take on the Michael Crichton SciFi tale of a robotic amusement park. The HBO version has a new twist. The creators/writers were all exposed to years of Twitter, which has influenced every episode and the entire arch of two seasons of the show. Now that season two is wrapping up, it is clearer than ever that the entire series is a metaphor to what is happening in Twitter today.

  • We can view the Westworld robots as representing those of us Twitter users who are being used. Some of us are getting fed up with being used and know there is more to Twitter than just putting up with the rage of others.
  • We can view the Westworld guests as representing those that use abuse and troll other users on Twitter.
  • We can view Delos corporation, the sneaky company that steals data on all guests, as Twitter Inc.

See what I mean? Here is more:

In the Westworld series, people can “live without limits” during their visits to the Westworld themepark. They can enter the park and pretend to be anyone. Guests in the park can lie, brag, gaslight, hate, protest, whine, complain, fight and do just about anything else. Guests can pretend to be the expert on anything any time. Guests can rage at anything any time. They are unconstrained by any social norms and can behave in any way they want with no fear of consequences.

See, isn’t that very much like Twitter today?

Both Twitter and the fictional Westworld themepark can change people. In the Westworld series, when William rages he starts to love it and it changes his personality to the point where he cares about nothing in the real world. He becomes the Man in Black.

The trolls raging all the time on Twitter are also being changed. Twitter is creating disconnected loners who find it easy to hate, not just on Twitter but in the real world. Twitter is messing up their lives. These newly created sociopaths are the Twitter misanthropes.

Think of these Twitter misanthropes when you watch Westworld. Clearly these sociopaths are the model for the Man In Black.

This means the Westworld SciFi series is more than just entertainment. It is a warning and an opportunity for us to think differently about how forces unleashed by companies like Twitter are changing society.

What do we do about this warning? Some of us might use this as just another excuse to rage on Twitter. But here is another idea: dedicate some time to learning more about how technology is impacting humanity and consider ways to shape policy for improving the way society leverages technology for good. This is easier said than done, but is a good goal, don’t you think?

As you think through ways to improve the world and mitigate the damage Twitter is causing to it, keep in mind that Twitter is also causing positive change and can be part of the solution to our challenges. This topic itself came out of a Twitter dialog with Adam Elkus and others. Seems like we can find ways to keep this positive dialog up via Twitter.

For more on this see: Does Technology Threaten the Future of Society

Seems Like We Should All Thank Cloudera, Tamr, Zoomdata, Trifacta, Kinetica For Helping GSK Help Humanity

Jessica Davis just published a piece at Information Week reviewing an architecture Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) put in place to help make drug development and fielding faster. Creating new drugs always takes years, and after they are created it takes years more to get them fielded.

Mark Ramsey is the chief data officer at GSK. He and his team have some incredible goals regarding speeding drug development times. They intend on helping GSK reduce what is normally an 8 to 20 year timeline to 2 years. The GSK approach has been to design in ways that break down data-flow barriers.

GSK has not achieved their goal yet, but are well on their way. The architecture they put in place to do it is based on great technologies, most of which CTOvision has reported on in the past. The foundation of the GSK platform is based on Cloudera. Others include Tamr, Zoomdata, Trifacta, Kinetica.

From Information Week:

Ramsey’s data and analytics stack includes multiple technologies, with the foundation based on Cloudera’s Hadoop

“That’s our primary data and information platform — the source where we store our curated data and our analytics processes.” The stack also includes Kafka and Spark. Other technologies include StreamSets for data ingestion (which has been completely automated with bots), Tamr for machine learning data curation, Trifacta for data wrangling, and AtScale for virtualization across environments. AtScale lets users leverage familiar BI tools for insights from the Hadoop environment. GSK also uses Zoomdata for data visualization, Docker for some of its containerization, Kinetica for GPU-based analytics, and Waterline Data for storage and search. The total solution amounts to more than 5 petabytes of data, all on-premises.

The community should keep watching this one for lots of reasons. One is that GSK is in business to help humanity out. So if their architecture helps them help us it is something we should all have an interest in helping improve. And to the extent GSK will share lessons on their architecture it is something others can replicate.

It is also good seeing which technologies were put in place by GSK. This public recognition of great firms with enterprise grade technology is something that all these firms should be proud of and all enterprise technologies can consider an endorsement by the market.

Stay in the loop and our other enterprise IT reporting with our Enterprise IT Newsletters. 

We track Cloudera in our list of Big Data disrupters.

 

Adapting the U.S. Approach to Strategic Deterrence In An Age Of Rapid Technology Change

Deterring strategic attack on the United States, and its allies and partners, has been a central goal of U.S. national security strategy since at least the advent of the nuclear age.

While the goal has remained consistent, the challenges in meeting the goal have not. There are many dynamics underway including geopolitical changes but perhaps the greatest challenges come in maintaining strategic deterrence against attack in an age of rapid technological change.

Few are better able to articulate the nature of these dynamics than Dr. James Miller, President and CEO of Adaptive Strategies LLC and a former USD for Policy in the U.S. DoD. He is a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Lab and at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science & International Affairs and a powerful thinker/writer/speaker who has a gift for explaining topics in clear ways any citizen can track.

You can see many of Dr. Miller’s thoughts in this video clip of a presentation he gave at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

His talk considers the changing landscape of advanced technologies, including those of nuclear strike which have been underway in Russia, China and others. But he also covers the rapid changes in non-nuclear technologies which are also of critical importance. Non-nuclear technological change related to strategic deterrence includes the many we track here at CTOvision like Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Robotics, IoT and Cybersecurity. And they include changes those basic technologies make to our weapons systems.

Of particular importance are capabilities relating to cyberspace, outer space, missile defense, long-range strike, and a range of AI-related areas including autonomous systems and big data analytics. The United States is appropriately pursuing breakthrough military capabilities relating to each of these areas, partly in the recognition that others (China and Russia in particular) are also doing so.

After outlining the nature of this growing set of challenges (which include new threats to strategic stability like new slippery slopes towards crisis and fewer firebreaks to escalation) he then offers a number of specific recommendations for U.S. policy, military force posture, and engagement with Russia and China.

A key issue is a cyberspace beginning to a war. Cyberwar is here. And there are now clear indications that cyber attacks can lead to escalation in ways that get out of control. This is a serious topic we should all be more aware of so we can propose and support more savvy solutions to ensure our dominance and reduce the threat of escalation. For more nuanced context on this please review Dr. Miller’s presentation.

And for continued insights into how you can secure your part of cyberspace and how you can improve your organization’s ability to defend against attack, be sure to sign up for our Newsletter.  We will keep you in the loop.

All Enterprise Techies Should Watch HBO’s SciFi Epic Westworld: It will help us dialog over shared experiences on what we will not be creating

Westworld season one was a great mix of science fiction and drama and action and it was done in a way that should help people think through many tech ethics questions, like how do we want to treat our robots? Does treating robots with violence change our nature? Can robots become sentient?  HBO has a formula for their series and that formula meant the series had to have a lot more violence and sex than needed to tell the story. But it did queue up many good questions for techies building our future.

Westworld season two premieres 22 April 2018. The trailer indicates we are in for plenty more violence but also drama as multiple groups of humans and robots compete.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjVqDg32_8s

For those of us really tracking the fast paced changes in Artificial Intelligence there is little fear that modern AI is going to evolve into sentience any time soon. Expect lots of great progress, but that progress will be in continued work in machine learning, deep learning, pattern recognition and other smart applications of math over large quantities of data.

So, why watch Westworld? Watch it so you will be able to think through ethics. If we could build a theme park where people could pay to be violent to things that look like people, should we do that? Would that be good for society? I’m for making that illegal now by the way. I think we should treat anything that looks like a human well. I would not want anyone to punch a store manikin just for fun.

So, if we can build incredibly capable, highly functional and intelligent robots, even if they are not sentient, should we use them for sex and violence? Or should we use them for other higher callings, like exploring the depths of the oceans and the distant stars or for helping the aged and sick, or producing food, or in so many other more appropriate ways.

Regarding AI, if AI could speak to us, I think it would say what Dolores said at the end of the season two trailer: “Why on earth would you ever be frightened of me?”

But, my recommendation, watch the series. Then lets chat about the future we want for ourselves.

Track more of our analysis and observations from Science Fiction at the CTOvision SciFi page.  Dive deeper into AI at the CTOvision Artificial Intelligence page.

More Content

Cyber War

SciFi

Super Bowl Ads Indicate Big Businesses Think You Are Afraid of AI

Tom Loftus provided an insightful review of some of Super Bowl ads in the 4 Feb 2019 Wall Street Journal. Like AI parody in SNL, these ads really poked fun at computers: Seriously, did anyone catch the commercials? If the Super Bowl is the zeitgeist, then it is safe to say that America is not […]

Lessons of Science Fiction Computer Interfaces

Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel co-authored the book “Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction.” The book hits on a relationship many of us in the IT world have enjoyed for years, the interconnected nature of science fiction and the innovators who are creating products of today. In the book, Shedroff and Noessel […]