Article is from Cluster MVP David Bermingham
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mvpawardprogram/archive/2014/08/18/sql-server-high-availability-in-windows-azure-iaas.aspx
ACM CareerNews
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New Keynote: Chris Valasek
The Connected Car: Security Throwback - Chris Valasek serves as Director, Vehicle Security Research at IOActive, an industry leader in comprehensive computer security services, and he is the Chairman of SummerCon, the oldest US hacker conference. This keynote will discuss the connected car, its apparent testing methodologies, and examine the current and future security issues facing everyday drivers across the world.
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Visual Studio "14" CTP 3 Released http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2014/08/18/visual-studio-14-ctp-3-released.aspx
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ACM Bulletin: Jeannette Wing's areas of expertise are in trustworthy computing, formal methods, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her contributions in security and privacy include work on attack graphs and attack surfaces, formalizing privacy policies for automated compliance checking, and trust in networks of humans and computers. Within the computer science community, Wing is well known for her advocacy of "computational thinking," an approach to problem solving, designing systems, and understanding human behavior that draws upon concepts fundamental to computer science.
She is Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Research, where she oversees the organization's core research laboratories around the world. She joined Microsoft Research in 2013 after holding key positions in academia and government, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the National Science Foundation.
A Fellow of ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Wing received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the SIGSOFT Retrospective Paper Award in 2012. She earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science, a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an SB in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT.
What motivated you to coin the term "computational thinking" and are you optimistic that this concept is reaching the teachers, students, and parents that you hope to engage in this process?
It was 2005. Since the dot-com bust, there had been a steep and steady decline in undergraduate enrollments in computer science with no end in sight. The computer science community was wringing its hands, worried about the survival of their departments on campuses. Instead, I saw a different, much rosier future for computer science. I saw that computing was going to be everywhere.
The use of computational methods and tools will transform the very conduct of all disciplines, professions, and sectors. Someone with the ability to use computation effectively will have an edge over someone without. So, I saw a great opportunity for the computer science community to teach future generations how computer scientists think. Hence "computational thinking." How do computer scientists understand a problem, design a solution, and analyze results?
My vision is that that every child will learn computational thinking along with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Making computational thinking commonplace means we, as part of the broader academic community, have to figure out what makes sense to teach when. For example, when is the right time to teach recursion? Are some computational concepts innate? I realized early on that I was suggesting a new long-term research agenda for the cognitive and learning sciences communities, working in tandem with computer scientists.
I am incredibly optimistic that computational thinking is reaching teachers, students, and parents. The most gratifying impact so far has been in the United Kingdom, where through the combination of a grassroots effort by renown computer scientists (e.g., Simon Peyton-Jones) and a top-down government mandate, all K-12 students starting in fall 2014 will be taught some computer science concepts, appropriate for their grade level. I am rooting for their success! Moreover, I see the computational thinking movement, through different guises, sweeping the US (e.g., through persistent efforts by the ACM, CSTA [Computer Science Teachers Association], NSF, and industry-sponsored consortia such as Code.org). China is embracing computational thinking too.
As an advocate of educating government and society about the power and limits of information technology, what insights can you share on the balance between security and privacy in light of today's extensive practice of data mining?
There are two separate questions here. First, there is a question about the balance between security and privacy. The canonical example is whether we can have accountability and anonymity at the same time. Accountability means that if something bad happens, such as a security breach, we can identify the culprit. Law enforcement agencies want accountability because they want to find the bad guy. Anonymity keeps private the identity of an individual, and thus in this scenario, anonymity means we cannot determine the bad guy.
In the fall of 2012, Rebecca Wright and I ran an NSF Secure and Trustworthy Computing session on tradeoffs between accountability and anonymity. Our discussants came up with a healthcare chatroom as a motivating scenario where one would like both accountability and anonymity; and we discussed how, under certain conditions, it is technically feasible to achieve both. Quoting from our summary:
"People should be able to participate anonymously in the chat room in order to enable safe and comfortable discussion of their health concerns. Furthermore, sometimes posting photos can help convey information. However, this creates opportunities for inappropriate users and uses, such as people posting child porn photos in order to attract potential customers and other kinds of spam messages. In such a setting, it would be desirable to have accountability to deter such misbehavior without compromising anonymity for appropriate use.
"We also noted that accountability and anonymity need not always be in conflict. In particular, through the use of cryptographic techniques with revocable anonymity, it is possible to design systems so that participants can participate anonymously in general, but their anonymity is revoked if they break particular rules."
More generally, security and privacy are not always at odds; we rely on security mechanisms (e.g., cryptography and access control) to enforce privacy policies.
Second, there is a question about the tension between technology and privacy. Ever since Warren and Brandeis's 1890 Harvard Law Review article, "The Right to Privacy," society has been aware of how technology changes the social norms around privacy. Data mining is no different. It gets a lot of attention now because, with each privacy violation reported in the media, people realize that they do not know what others know about them. For each personal interaction with the physical or cyber world, from checking out groceries in a supermarket to walking the streets of London, from searching for medical information on the web to submitting our tax returns online, something about the interaction is recorded by someone—usually, unbeknownst to us. As consumers, we get annoyed when companies cross our personal creepiness line. As citizens, we lose trust in our government when we discover it monitors our behavior without our awareness.
The scale of the Internet has made it easy for a multitude of third parties to acquire information about us. Data mining and machine learning further make it easy to infer our personal habits and preferences so that these third parties can personalize their interactions with us (e.g., recommending what book to buy or reminding us to send a birthday greeting). Individuals, with consent or unknowingly, give up some privacy for more utility.
What we need is better and open communication about privacy concerns: between companies and consumers, government and citizens, technologists and policymakers, computer scientists and social scientists, scientists and ethicists. For example, new technology could allow individuals to know what others know about them. New policy could hasten wide adoption of a single privacy-preserving technology, making it more impactful.
How do you feel about your nickname "Dragon Lady," and does your pursuit of martial arts play into your view of the concept of computational thinking?
I like my nickname "Dragon Lady." It was actually given to me by CMU undergraduates because I had a reputation for being a tough teacher. Later, when I started doing karate, the nickname carried over and stuck. While I see computational thinking in the martial arts (e.g., patterns in the forms we practice), when I spar, I only think about not getting hurt!
As a computing visionary, what advice would you give to students who are pursuing stimulating career challenges?
Be passionate about what you choose to do.
You have the brains. You have the entrepreneurial spirit. And, you love mobile app technology. Enter now and find out if you have what it takes to be one of two global Appreneur Scholar award winners sponsored by the Kay Family Foundation. The deadline for submissions is October 20th – enter here at http://appreneurscholars.com/.
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Register TODAY for the next free ACM Webcast, "Async JavaScript at Netflix," presented on Friday, August 29, 2014 at noon ET (11 am CT/10 am MT/9 am PT/4 pm GMT) by Jafar Husain, Cross-UI Team Technical Lead, Netflix. The talk will be followed by a live question and answer session moderated by Erik Meijer, Founder and CEO, Applied Duality; ACM Queue Editorial Board. (If you'd like to attend but can't make it to the virtual event, you still need to register to receive a recording of the webinar when it becomes available). Note: You can stream this and all ACM Learning Webinars on your mobile device, including smartphones and tablets.
What's does a mouse drag event have in common with an Array of numbers? The answer to this question may surprise you: they are both collections. This key insight holds the key to dramatically simplifying asynchronous programming in JavaScript. In this talk you will learn how you can use the familiar JavaScript Array methods to create surprisingly expressive asynchronous programs. Using just a few functions, you will learn how to do the following:
“Power BI is new and emerging self-service business intelligence and business analytics framework brings together and enhances key Microsoft technologies:
“Fundamentally, Power BI is considered a premium Office option, because Microsoft licenses it that way. Yet, the technology details also comprise new collaboration technologies for SQL Server, Azure and SharePoint. A successful technology collaboration will have boundaries which could arguably belong to one or more of the contributing technology groups.
This document provides links and introductory information to Power BI. My analysis is more useful for the enterprise planner (CIO, CTO, Information Technology Architect), but also is useful for individual consumers. Power BI is a technology which extends from individual use on any device (laptop, tablet or smartphone) and all the way up to high-scale cloud or hybrid (cloud plus on premise) production architecture.”
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“There is an impending digital tsunami — or D-Quake — that can drive enterprises to destruction if they don’t continually update their business model canvas for competitive advantage. They should be dynamically adopting innovations led or influenced by Andrew Ng and other top leaders.
The most important attribute for successful executives and enterprises is to analyze exponential trends as they will influence your work, strategy and success. History provides the lessons: Think of the Internet, email, mobile, social media, crowd sourcing.”
Read more: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/interview-andrew-ng-chairman-and-co-founder-of-coursera/94863#ixzz3A6DJKj2t
For more on trends, here are extracts from my presentation at the ITU World Summit on the Information Society this year. The presentation is attached below.
Deep learning systems, a form of artificial intelligence, are paving the way for rapid positive change in enterprises and Microsoft has taken the leadership position.
Microsoft Adam (also featured in this article) enables software to recognize objects using 30 times fewer machines, 50 times faster, twice the accuracy by training a neural (brain-like) network of 2 billion connections. The system is scalable. Practical applications are limitless since you can point your phone at objects and get in-depth information such as nutritional information on foods on your plate or in the woods on a hike, medical diagnosis of physical conditions—essentially background on any objects.
Bing’s prediction engine demonstrated its prowess recently by picking 15 winners out of 15 games in the final elimination rounds in the World Cup all of this voiced when asking Windows Phone 8.1 Cortana, which significantly exceeds the capabilities of competing products.
Microsoft Skype Translator provides near real-time voice translation across languages providing the universal translator capabilities of science fiction but targeting to be released as a Windows beta app in late 2014. One fascinating fact is that as the system is trained on more languages, it gets better at prior learned languages and researchers are not sure why this happens.
While in Geneva at the ITU World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), I talked with Namir Anani, President and CEO of the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) and invited him to provide his views since they impact ICT executives and professionals. Here are his thoughts:
We have witnessed in recent decades unprecedented global economic growth that is expected to continue as young economies emerge, trade expands, and electronic connectivity bridges social and economic divides. It’s also fair to say that this growth has been and will continue to be largely the result of technology advances – a critical enabler behind any modern economy.
Demographic shifts, globalization of markets, changing consumer habits and expectations, and fierce competition are also factors that are radically altering how businesses operate in every sector of the economy. At the root of any success in this environment is innovation, a factor that is predominantly defined by technology and talent.
But the quest for such talent is accelerating. Our research indicates that in Canada by 2018 around 150,000 critical ICT position will need to be filled. These positions are reflective of an increasing skills gap that has been created by rapid technological change. While large companies have the finances and cycles to staff and upskill their workforce, SMEs find it much harder to do. This labour and skills gap is not unique to Canada. The European Commission in a recent announcement anticipated a shortfall of around 900,000 ICT positions by 2020.
While building a healthy talent supply through the educational system is the focus of policymakers around the world, the lead time to staff critical positions is a challenge for many industries and especially SMEs.
Faced with this reality, many businesses are now deploying workplace recruitment strategies that either focus on competing for global talent in a tight labour market, or are relocating their offices to geographies where skilled talent is available. A good example is what is taking shape in London, UK, which is becoming one of the fastest-growing tech hubs and a location of choice for organizations and entrepreneurs to start and scale successful digital businesses. While incentive policies are at the heart of this strategy, the availability of skilled talent is a key motivator for many international firms to set up shop.
Another labour dimension emerging in recent years is online labour availability. Fostered by an increasingly connected landscape, the value of the online labour worldwide market reached $1B in 2012, and is projected to hit $5B in 2018. Virtual labour marketplaces are now making available skilled talent that only large corporations have traditionally enjoyed. What happened to the brick-and-mortar retail sector several years ago could be an indication of the changing face of the labour market that is no longer defined by the cubical. Tomorrow’s business talent strategies will no doubt be as distributive as the technologies transforming them.
Namir’s profile
Namir Anani, President and CEO of the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), is the chief strategist and driving force in bringing ICTC’s world-class centre of expertise and services to industry, education and government; enabling Canada’s advancement as a leader in innovation, productivity in the global economy.
Before joining ICTC, Namir previously led Policy Development & Research at the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC). He has also held several executive leadership roles in both the private and public sectors including the Department of Canadian Heritage (Director General & CEO), CGI consulting, Nortel, and Novartis (Switzerland). Mr. Anani’s experience extends to; strategic policy development and implementation, learning and capacity building, business transformation, national/international strategic alliances, economic and market research, and technology innovation.
Are you a Human Resources (HR) person or an “in the trenches” ICT professional at the managerial level, who has technical knowledge and understanding of Business Technology Management (BTM) related occupations under your jurisdiction or perhaps you know an individual within your company who fits this profile? The BTM area includes occupations such as business analysis, project management, change management, consulting, entrepreneurship, and IT management. If you do, we would like to ask you (or your colleague) to participate in a brief 30 minute survey, dealing with BTM type occupations in your organization. The survey will ask you to respond to two main issues:
1. Identify a small number of key BTM related occupations within your organization, emphasizing those occupations that are current, but also including any “future” occupations of particular importance to you;
2. Identify the skill sets needed by individuals for the satisfactory performance of the occupations that have been identified.
Here is the link to the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/KKJP78Y
Background
In 2009, the Canadian Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills (CCICT now called ITAC Talent following a merger with the Information Technology Association of Canada in May) launched the Business Technology Management (BTM) initiative to revitalize and rebrand the field of Management Information Systems (MIS), and improve the quality and quantity of students who choose it. A steering committee comprising over fifteen (15) leading employers and university educators from across Canada defined a set of BTM program learning outcomes and competency standards. Fourteen (14) universities, now offer an undergraduate BTM. They see signs of improved enrolments, student quality, gender diversity and graduate placements. Another half dozen are on the way. CCICT partnered with the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) on BTM accreditation.
BTM programs have increased enrolments and graduations in this area, but they lack the capacity to meet current and anticipated demand. Estimates vary, but they agree that the number of people employed in BTM-related occupations has grown substantially – perhaps as much as doubling from 100,000 to 200,000 over ten years. In many organizations, BTM-type jobs replace programming roles that are offshored or eliminated. The demand far exceeds the supply: today’s BTM and MIS university programs produce fewer than 2,000 graduates per year.
Therefore, in 2013 CCICT, in partnership with CIPS, submitted a proposal to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) to expand the BTM program. The proposal was granted and some of the following initiatives will be rolled out in the next three years.
• Building a prioritized list of National Occupational Standards (NOS) within the BTM category;
• Reviewing the BTM learning outcomes in light of changing technologies and labour market needs;
• Expanding availability of actual BTM programs in two ways: 'vertically' - into colleges, polytechnics, graduate education, continuing education, and more university undergraduate programs - and 'horizontally' - into select specialty versions like digital media, operations/logistics, entrepreneurship, project management.
• Informing and involving students, educators, and employers in collaborative program activities, conferences and special events, in order to foster quality, engagement, adoption, and the flourishing of the BTM brand.
Taken together, these initiatives will lead to broader recognition of BTM-type careers as a distinctive, attractive and prestigious family of professions for Canadian students, career changers, educators, employers, and families. This, in turn, will result in better availability of these high leverage skill sets to employers and the Canadian economy.
The aforementioned survey deals specifically with the NOS. They exist in a number of other Canadian and overseas industries, but at this time there is no generally available Canadian NOS in the BTM area. The NOS project is designed specifically to fill this gap. The NOS will be made freely available under Creative Commons licenses and it will provide useful data and information to at least four sets of stakeholders:
• Assist organizations in recruitment and HR planning;
• Identify career paths for actual and potential employees, and thereby help to promote employee retention;
• Help to educate educators/students/parents and the public at large about BTM as a career, to help “demystify” IT by making it more transparent;
• Assist in the development of BTM educational programs, including those that target specific business requirements and those that provide CPD opportunities for employees.
For more information contact Gina van Dalen at gina@cips.ca or gvandalen@itac.ca
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Referring to Content Control using C
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Foreign markets contribute over 50 per cent to the success of many enterprises. If IT execs aren’t prepared to understand this, they — and their enterprise — will fail Read more: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/cios-must-understand-foreign-markets/95238#ixzz36W5WZpNx
Increasing ethics training is the answer to cyberthreats with over 90 percent of networks comprised and this happening in minutes when first exposed. Read more: http://www.itworldcanada.com/blog/increasing-ethics-training-is-the-answer-to-cyberthreats/95133#ixzz36W4Ir6vB
Enterprises, executives and ICT professionals must think global and work globally to survive and succeed. The biggest impediment is the serious lack of understanding and respect of foreign markets, customs and culture. The non-profit International Economic Alliance or IEA, initiated via the work of Harvard and US Presidents bridges the gaps. Tom Pickering is a founder and his insights are highly valuable to executives, and ICT professionals. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I enjoyed doing it.
Ambassador Thomas Pickering, Ambassador Retired, joined Boeing in 2001 upon his retirement as US Under-Secretary of State for Political Affairs, a position he held since May 1997. He served as Senior Vice President of International Relations as a member of the Executive Council of The Boeing Company until July 1st 2006, where he oversaw the company's international affairs, including those with foreign governments. He has been a Senior Advisor for the company since. In December 2006, he became Vice Chair of Hills & Company, which provides advice and counsel to a number of major US corporations. Ambassador Pickering was briefly President of the Eurasia Foundation, a Washington-based organization that makes small grants and loans in the states of the former Soviet Union.
Pickering holds the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the US Foreign Service, and has served as US ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria, and Jordan in a diplomatic career spanning five decades. From 1989 to 1993, he served as Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations in New York, and from 1973 to 1974, as Executive Secretary of the Department of State and Special Assistant to Secretaries William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger.
Pickering entered active duty in the U.S. Navy from 1956-1959, and later served in the Naval Reserve to the grade of Lieutenant Commander. Between 1959 and 1961, he was assigned to the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department and later to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and from 1962 to 1964 in Geneva as political adviser to the U.S. Delegation to the 18-Nation Disarmament Conference.
He earned a Master's degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, a Bachelor's degree *** laude, with high honors in History from Bowdoin College. Ambassador Pickering was granted both the Distinguished Presidential Award and the State Department's highest award — the Distinguished Service Award. He is a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations. He speaks French, Spanish and Swahili and has some fluency in Arabic, Hebrew and Russian.
To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link
DISCUSSION:
:00:30: What are your top career successes and lessons learned that you feel may be useful to the audience? "....If you are a Diplomat, listening is probably something you should be doing two thirds of the time. I try to practice that when I'm engaged with folks because in many ways what people have to say and what they want you to hear are often very, very important. But even more important is sometimes what they actually mean underneath all of that isn't exactly what they say. Occasionally I found that they're not really sure what they mean until you have a chance to sit down and ask them a few questions...."
:03:46: Can you describe your journey leading to your current role as Founding Co-chair of the International Economic Alliance (IEA) and how your prior roles play an integral part in this journey? "....I had been Ambassador to Russia for a number of months and it became quite clear that a very interesting set of activities were happening at Harvard (which used the business school when it attracted faculty and indeed the Harvard reputation). A number of people in and around Harvard plus some private folks helped to inspire and respond to a Russian desire to be able to meet, work with and develop business contacts that would eventually emerge through into investments in Russia. So Harvard began to sponsor conferences (I went because I was Ambassador to Russia), and that quickly morphed into a situation in which it became clear that many other countries wanted to participate....It has what is purely a historical connection with Harvard and a very useful way to bring to its meetings (which were held annually in New York at the time of the opening of the United Nations General Assembly), a number of key Harvard faculty members who constitute one area of interest to the countries involved, as well as to the corporations who invariably are able to gather two to three hundred people. We have fifty-one countries that have been involved very much in our work...."
:07:14: If you were to sum it up, why should significant leaders get involved in this work at the International Economic Alliance when there are other venues such as the World Economic Forum or the Economic Forum in Astana? "....I've been to the World Economic Forum and it's a great talk shop, but you don't have the opportunities that you have at the International Economic Alliance as a leading American corporate executive, to sit down in a private room with a foreign Head of State and talk directly one-on-one about what it is that you're interested in pursuing in that person's country. You gauge, understand and receive commitments and the willingness of that country to open doors to work with you, to support your investment and give you a clear-eyed idea of where that investment may put you in terms of expected returns. This is an enormously useful, targeted, specific set of activities that draws people back because they know and understand that we've had successes....This compresses distances, sparks interest, exchanges information, details the communication, takes the individual entrepreneur and the country leader down the road towards success and we stay with it all the way...."
:12:33: Why don't technology companies engage further — what are they missing? Can you give examples of why working internationally at the highest level is important to their bottom line and to their success? "....A lot of the places where we can help the various companies are brand new markets for them. In many cases they will also look for manufacturing, R & D or research opportunities, or cross investment opportunities in these countries and so on the manufacturing side often you are able to take advantage of lower cost manufacturing, not just for that country's markets, but often for other markets so there are real savings to be made and that's one of the benefits of globalization. We help our business clients and their friends to try to take advantage of these sorts of opportunities as rapidly as we can...."
:15:53: What do you hope to accomplish this year and how will you measure your success? "....We think this year we want to be able to move up from the 50 or so countries who are involved and move up from the several hundred companies where we have been involved. We would like to see many of the more successful series of events in mid-September in 2014 than we've been able to have before....I would say clearly we should be looking over the next three years at doubling our activity and certainly we would look at a one third increase in 2014 as a very important goal, one that we could meet but it would be a testing goal and I think that's significant. People don't like to come for things that don't represent wide participation, enthusiasm, strong speakers, strong government participation, strong corporate attendance and so I think we are able to continue to provide that and to strengthen them as we go ahead. That will be some of the hallmarks of our success...."
:20:20: What would a typical event look like? For example, people show up, there is probably a networking function, open table sessions perhaps, some keynote speakers, etc., could you describe a typical event for the audience? "....That's right and we rely on all of those techniques and more. Normally we would offer several Harvard Business School notables and we would try to offer very senior American business leaders (I mentioned some of them to you just a moment ago), who would give their perspectives. We would bring in the Heads of State from two or three countries, maybe a Prime Minister or two and they would bring a carefully crafted talk to in effect open the doors of the countries to the potential for US company investment and hopefully open the eyes to the US investor to the possibilities in that country....The open table conversations are very valuable and they often provide special introductions for American businessmen with key foreigners. The discussions at those tables, we know that their interests and aspirations are going to be, if not satisfied, at least provided for...."
:23:13: Everybody knows of your career and the tremendous contributions that you have made to your country and to the world, and yet it sounds like the International Economic Alliance is one of the crowning jewels in all of the things you have been doing? "....You are kind to say so and my interest in this has been longstanding beginning with Russia, but the people who make this go are the people who also give it 24/7 kind of attention and activism. I mentioned earlier Van McCormick and his student recruits, his interns, some of the Harvard professors who work very closely with us, the long list and then the opportunities we have to contact that list are the American firms and the growing number of partners. We have an Ambassadors Alliance in which we enlist Ambassadors who are in New York at the UN as well as those who are in Washington looking after their country's interests with respect to the United States....A number of us are pleased obviously to have been in on the early days and continue our work as supporters and advisors...."
:25:02: Are there things that continue to surprise you today in the work that you do? "....I think this is a world full of surprises, everything from the economic downturn in 2008 and 2009 and its ramified effects, beginning as it did with the total mishandling and misreporting of the household mortgage market in the United States, but spreading way beyond into critical issues into the future of the banking system, the survival of large companies in the United States and abroad and indeed the survival of such economies as Greece, Portugal and so on which were struggling to stay alive in the midst of these huge changes. Those are quite striking and important and hard to predict and I think we need to pay careful attention to those...."
:28:23: You have corporations, governments and leaders within the various government organizations, you have financial houses, and so on participating at these events. Is there a place for organizations or federations and other non-profits from different areas at an event like the ones held by the IEA? "....I think we would not want to have our International Economic Alliance meetings turned into a kind of money-raising session for particular non-governmental organizations, but if they felt they had something useful to contribute and showed that then I think that would spin out naturally into where our work is going...."
:30:19: We see it in the news all the time that there are Geopolitical and investment challenges worldwide. Are there areas that you want to point out that you think people in the audience should be aware of? "....I think that Northeast Asia in general is some place that people are continuing to look at (Korea, Japan, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan). I think that West Asia, the area which has developed a strong commitment to stability, to markets and to attraction to investment for economic development purposes is important. I think South Asia is important, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh in particular. Africa is growing and perhaps continentally speaking one of the largest continuous long term growth rates in history. I think similarly Latin America got to a much higher state of development with growth over the past two decades. All areas are moving but the ones I mentioned are worthy of particular importance...."
:32:07: This is probably a sensitive area to talk about, but are there areas of controversy in the areas that you work and what are your views on them? "....We have seen real change taking place in the Middle East where we still don't know the clear result so that in some ways put a damper on activity and development and we don't want to walk away from that....In Russia a climate that varies now is perhaps more of a down side than an upside and this is a very large market. I think in China the obvious role of the government in almost every aspect of Chinese life (some of it now in a much larger role than it used to be). It's important in India, there are some places where the government is weak and unable to provide security and support in a way that an investor would want to have....All around there are these kinds of local developments we have to be up to date with and follow as well as the general growth factors available in describing the country's economy and developing progress...."
:34:00: I’m going to put out the three topic areas to which you can provide commentary in any way. The topic areas are: The availability of free content on the internet and your views on that in terms of IP and digital rights and so on....Crowdfunding....Digital currencies. You may wish to comment on any of those areas or not at all. "....With respect to open media, of course this is a new driver. It's a regular source of valuable information. Sometimes you have to be careful as much of it is driven by futurists one way or another and much of it is loaded into a framework which is kept alive by advertising, but advertising has its own influence....I think that the topics you mentioned including IPR, the failure to recognize and honor patent rights and copyrights and things of that sort, are failings that are fairly widespread. As you know the US government had for a long period of time been urging its colleagues and foreign countries all around the world to straighten up and get rights, join some of the international conventions, observe them and do the things that make a lot of sense. The bitcoin phenomenon is very interesting because it's part an investment in a concept that has value, it's almost a derivative and at the same time it is a currency available to be spent in some limited areas at the present time...."
:38:04: Do you see some policy changes that should occur in the US in the next two years? What would you like to see internationally? "....I think by their nature, small wealthy city states do better than large ratified countries with vast populations and obviously a great deal of diversity. Secondly, for the United States which has in fact stayed alive by its innovation and its encouragement of innovation much of our most recent innovation has come through migration and we need to pay attention to that. The third point I would make is that fundamentally we need to pay a great deal more attention than we have been to primary, secondary and higher education in the United States....Innovation alone is not necessarily, in my view, the total measure of success, there are things like smart management, the adoption of lean manufacturing techniques, the ability to inspire and empower a workforce, the ability to generate from within almost organically new and superior ways of carrying out your business, whether it's in audits and finance to manufacturing line work the tool support mechanism or the movement and use of contributing parts or the design process to ensure that maintenance is superb and less costly than it has been in the past...."
:43:22: On the policy side is there just one policy change you'd like to see (and not just restricted to technology), it could be in anything, for example, better healthcare, better international relations or whatever? "....I'd like to see a lot, because I see education as such a vital resource for a country that I'd like to see us continuing to move education to the top of the list...."
:45:05: From your extensive speaking, travels, and work, please share some stories (amusing, surprising, unexpected or amazing). "....It turned out that the steward on the Air Force plane had given me somebody else's coat. This coat felt a slightly different texture than my suit, but it wasn't a terribly ill match except that it just didn't fit, it was very badly sized.......The Russian Foreign Minister was a very old friend and I took a nice stroll around the sloping ramp at the top of the building, and then we were called to walk several blocks to the Brandenburg Gate to have our picture taken and I was able to hide behind the other Foreign Ministers (probably my appropriate place in protocol). Then we climbed on a bus and went to a very nice palace. In the meantime I got on my cellphone (I wasn't able to contact the Embassy in Berlin because for some reason the phone didn't work), but I could get my office in the United States). I quickly told them what the problem was and said you've got to find my coat and that I needed it by this particular place by this particular time because by then we were going to be on cameras and photos sitting around a table working together. Sure enough they were able to do that...."
:50:10: If you were conducting this interview, what questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers? "....What's going to happen in the next 3 years in the world economy and where is the economy going?....What are the crucial technologies that we should be paying attention to that will help shape and move us in the days ahead?....In working in developing countries, particularly big ones, what are the kinds of rules you should follow as a prudent investor?...."
:52:42: Thomas, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your deep experiences with our audience.
Register TODAY for the next free ACM Webcast, "Simplifying Big Data with Hadoop," presented on Tuesday, July 23, 2014 at 1 pm ET (noon CT/11 am MT/10 am PT/5 pm GMT) by Denny Lee, Senior Director, Data Platform. Lee's work include HDInsight for Windows Azure (Hadoop as a Service for Microsoft's Multi-Tenant Cloud). The talk will be followed by a live question and answer session moderated by Michael Zeller, CEO of Zementis; Board of Directors, Software San Diego; Secretary/Treasurer, Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD.
(If you'd like to attend but can't make it to the virtual event, you still need to register to receive a recording of the webinar when it becomes available.) Note: You can stream this and all ACM Learning Webinars on your mobile device, including smartphones and tablets.
Duration: 60 minutes
Presenter: Denny Lee, Senior Director, Data Platform Denny Lee is a senior director and startup entrepreneur with a specialty in leading, architecting, implementing, and delivering solutions to solve complex data problems. As a passionate technologist, he has worked with numerous companies to solve their immense analytics problems both on-premises and in the cloud. Notable examples of Lee's work include HDInsight for Windows Azure (Hadoop as a Service for Microsoft's Multi-Tenant Cloud) and Yahoo!’s 24TB SQL Server Analysis Services cube (Campaign Display Web Analytics solution).
Moderator: Michael Zeller, CEO of Zementis; Board of Directors, Software San Diego; Secretary/Treasurer, Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD Michael Zeller is the CEO of Zementis, a software company focused on the operational deployment of predictive analytics. Zementis was recognized by CIO Review as one of the "Top 20 most promising Big Data companies in 2013" and named "Cool Vendor in Data Science" by Gartner in 2014. Michael currently also serves on the Board of Directors of Software San Diego and as Secretary/Treasurer on the Executive Committee of ACM SIGKDD, which is the premier international organization for data mining researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government.
Click here to register for this free webinar and be sure to share this with friends and colleagues who may be interested in this topic. And check out our past events, all available on demand.
The MVP Mentor Program has a new website! The Program connects students who want to learn more about Microsoft technologies with today’s leading independent experts, Microsoft MVPs. The goal is to foster the next generation of technologists to be leaders in their fields and communities.
Some very exciting updates to OneDrive and Office 365 were announced :
· OneDrive will come with 15 GB for free (up from 7 GB)
· All versions of Office 365 will come with 1 TB of OneDrive storage (up from 20 GB) – including OneDrive for Business (previously announced)
· Storage prices have been dropped by over 70%
The most important attribute for successful executives is to keep up with trends as they will influence your work, strategy and success. We have a singular opportunity to hear from Andrew Ng uniquely being in the Time 100, CNN 10, Fortune 40 under 40, MIT TR35. Andrew’s work is impacting you through speech recognition systems, artificial intelligence applications, robotics, machine learning systems and much more. To provide an example of the utility of machine learning and neural nets, Skype recently demoed their real-time universal language translator which I will be using in business. In addition, Andrew pioneered the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement which will deeply influence your enterprise teams by obtaining quality skills through free online courses from the top universities and providers. In May, Andrew was made Baidu’s head of research which also involves overseeing their Silicon Valley AI lab. There are partial extracts from the interview however it is best to listen to the full podcast.
Quoting extensively from his Stanford profile, ACM and Wikipedia, Andrew Ng is a co-founder of Coursera, the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and a Computer Science faculty member where he is a distinguished researcher in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning with over 100 publishing credits.
In 2011 he led the development of Stanford University's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera with his partners. Their goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education for free. Today their platform partners with top universities to offer high-quality, free, online courses. With over 100 partners, over 500 courses, and 7 million students, theirs is the largest MOOC platform in the world.
Ng's recent awards include being named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world; to the CNN 10: Thinkers list; Fortune 40 under 40; and being named by Business Insider as one of the top 10 professors across Stanford University. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2007, Ng was awarded a Sloan Fellowship. For his work in Artificial Intelligence, he is also a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award.
Outside of online education, Ng's research work is in machine learning. Ng’s Stanford research group focuses on deep learning, which builds very large neural networks to learn from labeled and unlabeled data. Recently, a Stanford team (led by Adam Coates) built the world’s largest deep learning system with over 10 billion learnable parameters trained via back propagation using inexpensive GPU hardware. This work was presented in ICML 2013. In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project which involved a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms that learned to recognize higher-level concepts, and is currently used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, the STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, and ROS, a widely used open-source robotics software platform.
More information can be found here.
PARTIAL EXTRACTS AND QUOTES FROM THE EXTENSIVE DISCUSSION:
:00:34: In terms of your research what are the big research questions in machine learning and artificial intelligence and what are the ways and processes for answers? "....I think the scene of AI and deep learning specifically (which I've been working in), has been taking off like crazy over the last few years. The number of academic research papers on deep learning and on the massive neural networks has been rising faster than almost anything on the scene and in industry too....Being at the center of some of this activity I feel like many causes of deep learning are still wide open and we don't really know where the future is going to go...."
:02:22: I had a discussion with Tom Mitchell and he talked about the Never-ending Language Learner (NELL) Project, and I guess Carnegie Mellon also has their NEIL Project and the ramifications of that. Do you think it's going to go in the direction where we are going to have really useful, almost human-like capabilities that are on the Web? "....I think Tom Mitchell's work is really inspiring because his vision about continuous learning software is inspiring....There are some things that computers vastly outperform humans just in terms of the sheer amount of text they can consume, but in terms of reasoning about the world and real human level AI (despite getting far more data, text or images or audio than any human could possibly get in their entire lifetime), our software still falls short. So to me this is a sign that we still don't have the right algorithms yet because whatever humans do we learn to be much more intelligent with much less data...."
:04:17: What are some controversies in your field and why? "....Deep learning is very exciting and one of the confusions in the discipline is that the term 'deep learning' encompasses really two ideas. The first idea is called Supervised Learning in which if you have a lot of labeled data, these algorithms are fantastic at soaking up the labels to make accurate predictions....But there's a second, not really unrelated body of ideas that also goes by the term deep learning that is very different, which is: 'can you get a piece of software to watch YouTube or read text on the internet or listen to audio for hours on end and without you telling it anything or tagging or labeling any data and have it figure it out for itself?'....I think the second unsupervised learning, learning from unlabeled or untagged data is maybe most human-like. I think most humans learn primarily from unlabeled data and I think that this unsupervised learning idea has tremendous potential for letting us make a lot of progress in machine perception...."
:07:36: Do you see some value being applied to the deep learning work? "....The world is so complex my instinct is to try to select incredibly flexible learning algorithms and let the learning algorithms examine data from the world and to sort out what is true or what is not true about the world for itself, so my instinct is to steer away from that body of work. But it would be interesting to see how the more traditional, the logical reasoning aspects of deep learning algorithms could come together some day...."
:09:00: In the work that you do what are the practical applications for 2015 or 2016 and how do they impact things like business/government/media/education and society? "....I think because of the work of the major tech companies using deep learning, many of us are already using deep learning algorithms....I think machine learning touches so many aspects of our lives, and I think what some of these organizations have done is create deep learning through the power engineered throughout their organizations in order to apply the deep learning algorithm to many different problems. I like to tell people that most of us use machine learning algorithms dozens of times a day without knowing it...."
:11:10: In your opinion, what will computers and robots look like by 2020? "....It's only in the last two or three years that there have been far more robotics startups than in the previous 3 or 5 or 10 years, but I really don't know where it's going to go. It's really exciting work and people are producing low cost robots for manipulation which is fantastic for researchers....I think if we want to make progress towards truly intelligent robots we have to be careful not to overhype the science. In order to make a little bit of progress towards AI or towards truly intelligent perception, I think there is tremendous potential in deep learning algorithms, especially the uncertified versions of learning algorithms...."
:14:52: There are varying opinions of Kurzweil and his idea of singularity. Do you support it in any way or do you think it is too far out? "....AI has tremendous potential that I think in the coming five or ten years we'll make tremendous progress in perception. I hope that deep learning will play a huge part of that but the discussion of the singularity I don't think is serving the science well, and I think it is far further out than the impression some popular media sometimes convey...."
:16:11: You are a founder of Coursera (with Daphne Koller). Can you overview your projections for 2015, the key KPIs of success? "....A couple things we care a lot about, one is growth....We want to give everyone access to great education so there is a lot of room to grow this season in our work on mobile apps to let learners access Coursera....A second one is credential value. The thing is that mobile learners around the world are getting credentials that they are earning from taking Coursera MOOCs and this is on their resume and are using them to find better employment opportunities....Another thing we are tracking is the degree to which employers understand the value of these MOOC credentials and we're seeing that grow rapidly already and I hope that continues to grow throughout the next couple of years...."
:19:09: The concept of MOOCs is so controversial. There are people who rally behind it and say it's the greatest thing that ever happened and others that say it is an old story. What are your feelings about that controversy or do you think it's just a transition point? "....The ability to deliver these highly scalable forms of education I think dramatically changes the economics of education. There is still a large upfront cost to producing the course content, then once you've done it the incremental cost of signing up new students is effectively zero so that's a change. Having said that I think the student experience isn't good enough. We haven't figured out the pedagogy, the software platform, the website needs a lot of work. I think it's still very early days...."
:21:40: Is there a value to other market segments such as business, government or society? "....In the broadest sense I think an education gives you super powers. With an education you can learn to write software, teach other people, learn to cook healthier food for your children, with an education you will live a longer life....At a societal level I think that we can accelerate the progress of civilization. Governments are looking to MOOCs as a way to level up their populations' skill set....The world today changes so fast that all of us need regular infusions of knowledge in order to stay current. Even though we work with universities and this is a project that the five of us had launched out of university, the biggest impact MOOCs is having today is not on college students, it is on continuing adult education. I think many businesses, either individuals, the working professionals or often management are coming or sending others to come to Coursera to take MOOCs in order to continue to develop their employees...."
:25:17: What are the latest research findings on online education (MOOCs)? "....By now we've had lots of things, dozens and dozens of studies done by Coursera or by our university partners. I will share one result that was surprising to me....this is just one example of the many dozens of studies that we and Coursera's university partners have done that I think are starting to allow us to more deeply understand student motivations and student learning...."
:28:10: Can you add additional insight to some of your biggest challenges and controversies in this field? "....I sometimes get asked, 'Will this replace professors? Will MOOCs replace professors?'....I think the opportunity is for technology to free up that favorite teacher of yours from the more routine, repetitive aspects of teaching so that they can spend even more time in the future in conversations, mentoring and coaching students, just as they did with you and just as my mentors did with me...."
:30:06: Can you describe your most significant and influential research achievement and the practical outcomes seen today and forecast it into the future? ".....One of the things I'm quite proud of was the fact that we launched these MOOCs....I'm also proud of the deep learning work that my students and my Google team have done....It was really team work. I feel that because of my role I tend to get outside credit for a lot of the things that were really the work of my students or the work of my teammates....And one last thing. You asked about robots just now. One thing I didn't mention is that my Stanford students and I have been spending a long time looking at building self-driving cars using deep learning algorithms. I think that could be another economically important application...."
:34:05: Can you generalize a little about what you see as the most difficult challenges in research in general and then some lessons that you can pass on to the audience? "....One of the books that has influenced my thinking a lot is a book called the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and this is a philosophy to building startup companies, but it's a philosophy that I think applies well to research projects as well because I think there is a certain emphasis not on laying out grandiose multi-year plans that have huge assumptions and huge risks and may ever come to fruition, but an emphasis on staying humble and running experiments like crazy and learning and iterating....I think we should have a grand plan, we should have some idea of where we are going....But when we think about what happens day to day over those five or ten years I think there are little pieces of day to day learning. The faster you can learn the faster you can make progress in research because I think fundamentally research is learning about the unknown...."
:41:53: Andrew, what are the greater burning challenges and research problems for today’s youth to solve to inspire them to go into computing? "....I think that computer science is fundamentally about scale. I think that in many professions that individuals could choose to go into, there are few disciplines as scalable as engineering or as computer science specifically....Computer science is impacting so many ideas. I hope more people will join me to work on AI, but even outside of AI I think the ability of computer science to change the world is almost unlimited...."
:45:31: There are a number of organizations, one of them is the ACM and it has a number of resources. How has the ACM and its resources supported your research? "....I always look forward to receiving the ACM newsletter and the new ACM magazine in the mail and flipping through that in order to have another channel to learn about the latest computing trends. I've been grateful to the ACM for the events it organizes for bringing the technical computer together...."
:46:40: In a broader way, including but even looking beyond computing, what do you see as the top challenges facing us and how do you propose they be solved? "....I think our planet faces a lot of challenges — I think that global poverty and inequality are some of the major challenges facing our society...."
:50:15: From your extensive experiences, speaking, travels and work, can you share any stories (perhaps something amusing, surprising, unexpected or amazing)? "....A few months ago I was at a party at LinkedIn here in Silicon Valley and I met one of the students who had taken one of my Machine Learning MOOCs. He came up to me and said 'you must be Professor Andrew Ng'. He said one of the features he most liked was the ability to play video at 2x speed because it allowed him to blaze through the video and if he missed something he could just do an instant replay. But he said to me, 'I've listened to about 20 hours of video of you talking and all of these videos are of you talking at 2x speed, but now that I meet you in person, I'm really surprised that in person you talk....so....slow'...."
:54:14: Andrew, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.