Last month, McKinsey presented the case of the implementation of an advanced analytic system in shrimp aquaculture. An exotic field demanded non-standard solutions. Here’s how McKinsey gained business productivity on the shrimp farm through IoT.

Compared with other industries, shrimp production fell behind in the use of technology across the value chain. Farmers often operated with highly manual processes and information written out with pen and paper.

McKinsey provided an analytics solution and set up a full digital ecosystem comprised of Internet of Things (IoT) equipment such as automatic feeders, sensors, and hydrophones to collect real-time data and standardize feed distribution. Also, the company designed a set of predictive analytics models to optimize the quantity and time of feed and a technical-advisory service that helps implement the solution in the field.

As a result, McKinsey managed to deploy the system across 300 hectares of shrimp ponds, achieving a median increase in biomass of 16% and reducing production cycles by 15%.

For more details, read the case on the company’s page.

#IOT

Gartner published new Essential Guides for Effective Decision Making. In the new research paper, the company points out to which decisions to reengineer and why, how to prioritize analytics and data, when to augment decisions with AI and what role data fabric will play.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, more than one-third of large organizations will have analysts practicing the discipline of decision intelligence. The analysts predict that by 2025, 95% of decisions that currently use data will be at least partially automated and by 2024, data fabric deployments will quadruple efficiency in data utilization.

FDA has approved the first AI smart stethoscope developed by digital health startup Eko. Heartbeat data collected by doctors using Eko's is analyzed by EMAS cloud-based software which helps to detect heart murmurs.

 "The software uses signal processing, such as waveform filtering, as well as algorithms derived from machine learning, to analyze the acquired data and generate clinical decision support output for clinicians," Eko’s spokesperson told.

Recognizing an unusual sound or pattern could be tricky and subjective. It requires careful listening and high qualification of health care professionals. That means valvular heart disease is frequently misdiagnosed or missed entirely. EMAS system proves better than primary care doctors at recognizing signs of heart trouble. Eko claims its EMAS tool can identify the disease with 85 percent accuracy. For comparison, general practitioners using traditional stethoscopes have accuracy within range from 44 to 69 percent.

EMAS is the first of its kind to receive FDA approval.

#AI

A recent Gartner survey finds that 56 percent of organizations had regret over the largest tech-related purchases. Executives are frustrated with being ill-informed about technology or it being oversold. The longer the decision-making took, the more likely remorse was to hit.

"The high regret is at peak for tech buyers that have not started implementation, indicating significant frustration with the buying experience. Buying team dynamics are changing and customers can find buying to be a real challenge," said Gardner’s VP analyst Hank Barnes.

Regret can be also blamed on the fact that 67 percent of people involved in purchases are not in IT departments.

Gardner notes the trend of a "technology chasm" diving the organizations that are confident tech-adopters and the vast majority that drop out of technology buying because of experienced buyers’ remorse.

Google fired engineer who said its AI was sentient

Blake Lemoine, a senior software engineer at Google, became known for interviews where he claimed that LaMDA, the company’s new system for building chatbots, had a conscious and a soul. During the conversational exchanges with LaMDA, Lemoine noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood. It was also able to change Lemoine's mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics. As a result, he wanted Google to seek AI consent before running experiments on it.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” Lemoine told to The Washington Post.

Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said the company has reviewed LaMDA 11 times. “We found Blake’s claims that LaMDA is sentient to be wholly unfounded and worked to clarify that with Lemoine for many months,” he said.

Most AI experts believe the industry is still very far from attaining true computer intelligence. For example, Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is a system that recognizes and generates text. It’s powered by Google’s advanced language neural networks which were trained on trillion-word datasets crawled from the Internet. LaMDA imitates conversational exchanges and produces humanlike speech, but it cannot understand language or meaning.

Lemoine says that after firing he is considering potentially starting his own AI company focused on collaborative storytelling video games.

#AI

Researchers at MIT, Stanford University, Intelligence Lab, and the Autodesk AI Lab developed AI that can figure out Lego Instructions

Scientists collaborated to develop a learning-based framework that can travel 2D instructions to build 3D objects. This system called the Manual-to-Executable-Plan Network (MEPNet) was successfully tested on Lego sets and Minecraft-style building plans.

So it will definitely help people who were driven mad with confusing Lego manuals. But the key idea is to integrate neural 2D keypoint detection modules and 2D-3D projection algorithms for high-precision prediction of unseen components.

Interpreting 2D instructions could be tricky for AI. The key problems are identifying correspondence between 2D and 3D objects, and dealing with a lot of basic objects, which could be assembled into complex forms. «It requires inferring 3D poses of unseen components composed of seen primitives," the researchers said.

At first, MEPNet analyses the current state of Lego set and creates 3D model of all components. Then the algorithm predicts a set of 2D keypoints and masks for each component.

Once that's done, the 2D keypoints "are back-projected to 3D by finding possible connections between the base shape and the new components." The combination "maintains the efficiency of learning-based models, and generalizes better to unseen 3D components," the team wrote.

The full paper of MEPNet is available via the link. And the algorithm’s code is also posted on GitHub.

#AI #ML

On Wednesday, IBM released the annual Cost of a Data Breach Report. The average cost of a data breach increased 13% over two years and reached $4,35 million.

IBM surveyed 550 companies worldwide and found that 83% of organizations encountered more than one data breach during their existence and 50% of their costs incurred more than a year after the incident.

Furthermore, the report showed that 60% of companies raised product prices due to the data breach, so the cost of cyberattacks were passed onto customers.

Read the full report by the link.
https://www.ibm.com/security/data-breach

#CyberSecurity

Summer months is the best time for Japanese surfers and sun seekers to descend on beaches. There is one beach on the Pacific coast of Japan that uses artificial intelligence to ensure that time in the water is without incident.

Kanagawa prefecture has introduced an AI system to identify rip currents which cause 60% of drowning deaths. The system is installed at the popular surfing spot which is expected to attract huge numbers of people. AI predicts a danger of currents and sends out warnings to bathers and lifeguards.

#AI

Developer, blogger and new father Caleb Olson built a hungry newborn baby early warning system. Baby crying is a lagging indicator of hunger, and that there are a host of face, head, and hand cues that precede the wailing. Caleb uses Google’s MediaPipe library, and baby monitor’s camera to track such behaviors as lip smacking, pacifier rejection, fist mouthing, and rooting. By putting together a system to recognize these cues and assign a weight to them, Olson's proprototype sends a message to parents before the baby gets to the screaming phase.

The Walton Center presented an interesting case of AI development in healthcare. This medical organization works with TCS to implement a time-saving AI chatbot. The chatbot is said to reduce waiting list for neurology appointments and the workload of specialists. It can interact with patients once they are referred to the hospital and, through a set of questions, collect information about symptoms. The answers, combined with a medical history, will be reviewed by clinicians before appointments, which will enable them to make an early assessment and to send them to fast track if necessary.

Last week, GitHub announced killing of zombie projects but later decided to backtrack. What was that?

The problem is that the company's repo hive is clogged with dormant projects in free accounts. It costs GitHub $1 million a year. The company decided to change its policy to remain sustainable.

To forestall users’ anger GitHub planned to give months of warning before deleting. A single action in the project would keep it alive for the next 12 months. Policy changes were scheduled to come into force in September 2022.

However, GitHub changed the decision after the backlash. The company pledged to archive zombie projects in slower storage instead of deleting them.

The problem is caused by the freemium business model GitHub had. It works fine if the cost of adding a new user is low enough. But if a company has 29 million non-active users at 5GB free space, it will turn into 145 petabytes repo and $1,3 expenses.

«Open source also means having code available for research, for education, for whatever unforeseen reasons. Nobody forced GitLab to offer a free service to open source, but it did – and that means a responsibility. It's part of the world's communal memory now. Noble ideals aren't any good if you can't afford them, though, and a megabuck off the bottom line won't stop bleeding away by itself,» — Rupert Goodwins says in his column on The Register.

Does AI dream of electric patents?

Google faces a legal problem: lawyers are unsure if they could patent plans created by AI algorithms. The company had filed patents describing a ML technique used to design and map out components in the custom AI accelerator TPU chips. 

However, US laws recognize and protect intellectual property created only by "natural persons". Although Google engineers built AI models, after training algorithms generated their products automatically with minimal human effort. Therefore, a legal catch arises: is it permissible to patent the outputs created by these systems?

During the meeting held by US Patent and Trademark Office, Laura Sheridan, senior patent counsel at Google, said that company pursued only patterns on ML models, not the floorplans it had created.

This case remains an important issue for the entire IT industry nevertheless. AI technologies already produce a lot of outcomes that could become valuable intellectual property for a business and entrepreneurs. ML systems can, for example, write a code, hunt for new drugs, and create digital art. That is why application of the patent laws to the AI algorithms’ outcomes should be clarified in the shortest time.

#AI #ML

The Register released an inspiring interview with Tarah Wheeler, an advisor to the US Council of Foreign Relations and CEO of security startup Red Queen Dynamics. In conversation, she mentioned that the cyber security industry should stop contempt ordinary users for their lack of knowledge and change the approach to its failure.

Firing employees is the most typical reaction of businesses to massive hacks or breaches. Companies blame not a system, but a small group of specialists that seems to fail. In the aircraft industry instead, every incident requires a lengthy investigation to backtrace all the circumstances of the crash. Wheeler says that it’s time for cyber security to refocus from blaming to analyzing system flaws.

What the full interview by the link:
https://vimeo.com/738428698

#CyberSecurity

1,900 Signal users exposed

The security breach affected users of the messaging app which is considered to be one of the better secured. Signal claims that an attacker got 1900 numbers but didn’t have access to the profile information, messages, or contact lists.

The breach happened on the side of Twilio, a company providing SMS and two-factor verification services for 250 000 customers worldwide. It appears that an attacker gained access to the customer support system, whereby they could send phishing messages asking users to re-register phone numbers. Exposed accounts were transferred to other devices controlled by malefactors.

They got access to the Twilio customer due to a well-designed phishing attack that happened last month. Employees received e-mails from the "IT Department" requesting to log in and change their password and linking to a sing-in page look-alike. Leaked credentials were used to get access to Twilio’s internal data.

In the security note, Signal claims that an attacker targeted specific users. However, they were hardly able to steal personal information, because it is stored on the devices and the messenger has no access to them. It is also protected with a private Signal PIN code.

#CyberSecurity

The best is the enemy of the good. Why CIOs should avoid "best practices"?

Good reading for a Friday! CIO.com published a column by Bob Lewis, who claims all common "best practices" are nothing but a fraud — that should be avoided at all costs.

‘The idea of “best practices” is deeply wrong for these reasons: (1) It’s argument by assertion, not evidence and logic; (2) “best” is contextual, not absolute; and (3) it encourages stasis by precluding innovation,’ — Lewis says.

Argument by assertion

When IT leader is being told about the best way of doing things, they should ask themselves what the criteria are for awarding it best-practice status? Or who is authorized to give out the award? There is no such group in most cases.

Best is contextual

There is no silver bullet for fixing all problems in business. For any given practice, different organizations need to optimize different dimensions. Which makes designing the best-at-everything practice in IT no more possible than designing anything else that’s best in all situations.

Stasis over innovation

A best practice should be, by definition, a practice that can’t be improved. If CIO masters it, they settle down knowing that the limit of perfection has been achieved yet. However, the rest of the market will keep evolving. So who is going to succeed after all?

Read the full column by the link.

#Management

Google and Oracle's datacenters suffer from the hot summer of 2022 too

Climate changes affect Big Tech companies by breaking down their datacenter. The temperature in Britain edged above 40ºC this year, and it caused the simultaneous failure of multiple cooling systems of Google and Oracle’s London-based facilities. Datacenters were forced to shut down to prevent additional data loss and damage to the hardware.

Сlimatologists predict further global temperature rising and more extreme heatwaves to come next years. Therefore, businesses should learn some lessons from these breakdowns The Register says.

Redundant temperature control systems

Datacenters always have to figure out a tricky equation in which not enough cooling causes damage and loss of revenue, and too much cooling also equals income decline, because it costs money to install.

However, companies that work in generally hot climates know well safety gives more profit than cutting expenses. Equinix, Texas based IT company, employs a complex and heavily redundant temperature control system. «In the event of a heat peak, backup machines can be called upon to reduce the overall effort of a particular site's cold production,» — Greg Metcalf, senior director of global design at Equinix told.

Double-check

Redundant temperature control systems won’t help to endure the heat peak if the mechanisms for starting up aren’t present and operational under any scenario. Datacenter should be regarded as a complex system. A disruption of energy supply, for instance, can affect the other systems and set down the path to an outage. This appears to have been what happened to Google and Oracle.

The age of the equipment can also play a factor

“Older equipment may be more sensitive to higher temperatures. Newer equipment may be less sensitive and they will accept higher ranges,” says Moises Levy, Omdia analyst. For example, Google extended the lifespan of its cloud systems to save money. Have they succeeded in cutting expenses after all?

Growing pains

Compute resources are growing more power hungry and by extension hotter. Many accelerators are now pushing 700W TDPs, with some box builders cramming multiple kilowatts of compute into a 2U chassis. Ignoring the future increase of capacity can result in problems down the line in the following years.

Read the full review by «The Register» via the link.

AI caught French tax dodgers out in their pools

Some big news comes from the state of France, where the officials used AI to track undeclared swimming pools. Home improvements increasing a property value are obligated by additional levies under the French tax law. A 30-square-meter pool, for instance, could set back an extra €200 (£170) a year to its owner. Hence, some people prefer to keep quiet and spend hot summer days in private lagoons without notifying the government bodies.

To catch tax dodgers out the Tax office tested ML software that can automatically recognize pools in aerial photography. The software analyzed images, scanning backyards for blue rectangles in backyards. Then officials used the code to identify homes with these pools, determined their addresses, and checked whether they have been reported or not by looking at a database.

The ‘all-seeing eye’ in the field secret pools was developed by Google and Capgemini. In April 2022, it was reported to have a 30 percent error. Such a high share of misrecognition was caused by arrays of solar panels and shadows from the trees covering pools. Engineers were also working to expand the application to look for different types of home modifications.

According to French tax officials, the software has revealed more than 20 000 secret pools which are going to bring €10 million in additional property taxes. The volume of the undeclared pool sector in France is estimated at €40 million.

The company Kolesa Group unites Kolesa, Krisha, and Market brands. These services provide the placement and publication of private ads for the sale and purchase of cars, real estate, and goods in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Global CIO talked to IT Director of Kolesa.kz Ilya Stekolnikov about the need to expand work with large-scale clients, staff shortages in IT, and the portrait of a modern digital transformation leader.