Thursday 8 November 2018

Interesting Reads – 2018-11-06



Interesting Reads – 2018-11-06

Contents

Articles

  • Principles for Digital Development
  • USAID Guide: How to Use Machine Learning in International Development
  • The AI Cold War With China That Threatens Us All
  • 8 Best Practices for Robotic Process Automation
  • Organize for Innovation: Rethinking how we work
  • Get ready for humanity's dumbest ritual: turning back the clocks for daylight-saving time
  • A Solar Cell That Does Double Duty for Renewable Energy
  • What a 100-year-old idea can teach us about cybersecurity --  Randomness: The Fix for Today’s Broken Security
  • Unbundling The Autonomous Vehicle
  • ‘Poop vault’ of human feces could preserve gut’s microbial biodiversity—and help treat disease

Events / Announcements

  • COMSOL Day Chennai on 30th Nov 2018
  • Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellowship 2018 – 19
  • Digital Disruption and Transformation Summit 2018
  • SPIN Chennai: Watts Humphrey Awards 2018 event on 12th Nov 2018
  • CSI-2018: 53rd Annual Convention of Computer Society of India 2018 at Udaipur  during 14-16 Dec 2018
  • INDICON 2018: Theme “Harnessing Technology For Humanity” at Coimbatore during 16-18 Dec 2018


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Articles

Principles for Digital Development

Nine “living” guidelines designed to help digital development practitioners integrate established best practices into technology-enabled programs.


USAID Guide: How to Use Machine Learning in International Development

Emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence applications promise to reshape healthcare, agriculture, and democracy in the developing world, and show tremendous potential for helping to achieve sustainable development objectives globally.

At the same time, the very nature of these tools — their ability to codify and reproduce patterns they detect — introduces significant concerns alongside promise.

  • In developed countries, machine learning tools have sometimes been found to automate racial profiling, to foster surveillance, and to perpetuate racial stereotypes.
  • Algorithms may be used, either intentionally or unintentionally, in ways that result in disparate or unfair outcomes between minority and majority populations.
  • Complex models can make it difficult to establish accountability or seek redress when models make mistakes.

These shortcomings are not restricted to developed countries. They can manifest in any setting, especially in places with histories of ethnic conflict or inequality. As the development community adopts tools enabled by machine learning and artificial intelligence, we need a clear- eyed understanding of how to ensure their application is effective, inclusive, and fair.

The USAID Guide to Making Artificial Intelligence Work for International Development aims to inform and empower practitioners as they navigate an emerging machine learning and artificial intelligence landscape in developing countries.

Related link: The USAID Guide to Making Artificial Intelligence Work for International Development (98 pages)

The AI Cold War With China That Threatens Us All

On October 18, 2017, China’s president, Xi Jinping, stood in front of 2,300 of his fellow party members, flanked by enormous red drapes and a giant gold hammer and sickle. As Xi laid out his plans for the party’s future over nearly three and a half hours, he named artificial intelligence, big data, and the internet as core technologies that would help transform China into an advanced industrial economy in the coming decades. It was the first time many of these technologies had explicitly come up in a president’s speech at the Communist Party Congress, a once-in-five-years event.

In the decisive span of a few months, the Chinese government had given its citizens a new vision of the future, and made clear that it would be coming fast.


8 Best Practices for Robotic Process Automation

Automation has become an integral component of digital transformation strategies for enterprises around the world. Specifically, today robotic process automation (RPA) is the technology of choice to streamline business operations and reduce costs. But how do you judge whether your RPA initiative is successful? It’s not just whether the first “go live” instance does well. It’s about building momentum with strategically selected RPA projects so you continuously automate more and more complex business processes, and achieve a sustainable—and ever-increasing—ROI.

To realize this kind of success, you should follow the below mentioned 8 critical best practices that leading companies have learned from their RPA deployments.


Organize for Innovation: Rethinking how we work

In Organize for Innovation, Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst reflects on the technological, social, and economic forces impacting the ways we work. Arguing that solving contemporary business problems requires new organizational principles, models, and dynamics, Whitehurst explains how leaders everywhere can begin rethinking how they utilize data, approach failure, structure teams, and set goals—in short, how they can become more innovative.

Compiled three years after the publication of his widely read management book, The Open Organization (Harvard Business Review Press), Organize for Innovation, collects Whitehurst's writing on organizational culture, organizational design, and organizational leadership today—all part of an ongoing conversation about the challenges we face in transformative, fast-moving, and uncertain times.


Get ready for humanity's dumbest ritual: turning back the clocks for daylight-saving time

Daylight-saving time (and no, it's not daylight "savings" time) was created during World War I to decrease energy use. The practice was implemented year-round in 1942, during WWII. Not waking up in the dark, the thinking went, would decrease fuel use for lighting and heating - and help conserve energy supplies to win the war.

Nearly 100 years later, though, the US is a divided nation on this topic. For example, a 2012 survey of 1,000 American adults by Rasmussen Reports found that 45% of American adults think daylight-saving is worth it, while more than 40% say it's worthless.

Advocacy groups like Standardtime.com are trying to abolish daylight-saving time altogether. Energy-saving claims are "unproven," they write: "If we are saving energy, let's go year-round with daylight-saving time. If we are not saving energy, let's drop daylight-saving time!"

More than 127,000 people have petitioned Congress to end daylight-saving time. Many of the comments on the petition are biting.

"Daylight saving time is an antiquated practice and serves no purpose in the modern world," wrote Dustin M. from Kings Mountain, North Carolina. "It causes undo stress to millions of Americans and does nothing for anyone."


A Solar Cell That Does Double Duty for Renewable Energy

In the quest for abundant, renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, scientists have sought to harvest the sun’s energy through “water splitting,” an artificial photosynthesis technique that uses sunlight to generate hydrogen fuel from water.


What a 100-year-old idea can teach us about cybersecurity --  Randomness: The Fix for Today’s Broken Security

A 100 year-old idea, brought to life by modern technology, can protect us from even the smartest hackers, most powerful intelligence agencies and the fastest quantum computers.

The cyberworld in which we spend our daysand on which our lives dependis not safe, and is becoming more dangerous all the time. From nation-states trying to sway elections with fake news to ransomware that shuts down hospitals, we are living in a Wild West in which any data, or any transaction, may be attacked at any time. And like travelers in a lawless frontier, we are left to scan the horizon constantly for trouble, scrambling to plug the leaks in defenses we don’t quite trust.

We are vulnerable not just because of the increasing sophistication of hackers, who are today as likely to be well-funded criminal organizations or governments as petty thieves or amateurs out for the thrill of defacing a Web site. Nor is the greatest threat the development of new offensive tools such as quantum computers, which might soon be powerful enough to crack today’s most widely used cryptographic ciphers. The biggest problem is that our basic approach to cyber security is flawed.


Unbundling The Autonomous Vehicle

Autonomous vehicles rely on several advanced technologies to self-navigate. We unbundle the AV to see how these technologies work together and which companies are driving them forward.

Autonomous vehicles rely on a set of complementary technologies to understand and respond to their surroundings.


‘Poop vault’ of human feces could preserve gut’s microbial biodiversity—and help treat disease

Whether in villages on the coast of Ghana or in the mountains of Rwanda, asking for people's poop is a good icebreaker, Mathieu Groussin says. "Everybody laughs," says Groussin, a microbiologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. "Especially when we stress that we need the whole fecal sample and show them the big bowl."

He's asking on behalf of the Global Microbiome Conservancy (GMC), an effort to identify and preserve gut bacteria from different peoples around the world. Most microbiome research has focused on Western, urban populations, which typically eat processed foods and use antibiotics. The few studies of traditional peoples have found a far more diverse gut microbiome that appears to be linked to the absence of certain diseases.


Related story: Your poo is (mostly) alive. Here’s what’s in it. If you’ve ever thought your poo is just a bunch of dead cells, think again. Most of it is alive, teeming with billions of microbes. Here’s what studies in healthy adults reveal makes up our poo.

Related story: In China, Bill Gates Encourages the World to Build a Better Toilet

Events / Announcements

COMSOL Day Chennai on 30th Nov 2018

COMSOL Multiphysics is a cross-platform finite element analysis, solver and multiphysics simulation software. It allows conventional physics-based user interfaces and coupled systems of partial differential equations (PDEs). COMSOL provides an IDE and unified workflow for electrical, mechanical, fluid, and chemical applications.

COMSOL Day Chennai on 30th Nov 2018 is a day of minicourses, talks by invited speakers, and the opportunity to exchange ideas with other simulation specialists in the COMSOL community.

It is a free event. To attend pl. register at http://comsol.co.in/c/7u0j

Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellowship 2018 – 19

Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) will be awarding Abdul Kalam Technology Innovation National Fellowships in the area of Science & Engineering to outstanding engineers to recognize, encourage and support translational research by individuals to achieve excellence in engineering, innovation and technology development.

Last Date for Apply– The last date for the receipt of nominations for the second call of Nominations for the Financial Year 2018-19 is 31 December 2018.


Digital Disruption and Transformation Summit 2018

FICCI TNSC with support from Government of Tamil Nadu is organizing its 3rd Edition of Digital Disruption and Transformation Conference (also known at DT3),  the 3rd annual flagship event of FICCI under the theme of “Digital Rumpus – Perish or Prosper” on 1st December 2018 at Hotel ITC Grand Chola, Chennai.

CSI & IEEE members are eligible for 10% discount in the registration fee. The discount code to be applied at the time of registration is  CSIDT3, IEEEDT3 respectively.

For details pl. visit http://ficci-tnsc.com/it-ddts-2018/  or contact: Mr R Sudharsan at sudharsan.ramu@ficci.com, 044-42849614-15

SPIN Chennai: Watts Humphrey Awards 2018 event on 12th Nov 2018

The most prestigious Watts Humphrey Awards 2018 event will be held on 12th Nov 2018 at Chennai. The shortlisted teams will be presenting their projects. Dr. Bill Curtis - Co-creator, CMM, PCMM, IEEE Fellow, Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University – USA will deliver a special address and  also present the prizes to the winning teams.

For more details contact: R Ragavendra Prasath, admin@spinchennai.org, 9944.111.920

CSI-2018: 53rd Annual Convention of Computer Society of India 2018 at Udaipur  during 14-16 Dec 2018

The 53rd Annual Convention of CSI will be held at Hotel Inder Residency. Udaipur, Rajasthan, India during 14-16 Dec 2018.

For details visit the convention website at http://www.csi-2018.org

INDICON 2018: Theme “Harnessing Technology For Humanity” at Coimbatore during 16-18 Dec 2018

With the theme of “Harnessing Technology for Humanity”, the 15th IEEE India Council International Conference (INDICON 2018), being organized by the IEEE Madras Section during December 15-18, 2018, at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, with technical support from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, promises to be bigger and better than before. With plenary sessions, keynote addresses by reputed academicians, tutorials, workshops, Student Paper contests, industry exhibits and stalls and most importantly, high quality presentations from the best of the researchers in India, no effort is being spared to make INDICON 2018, the best so far.

For details visit the website at http://indicon2018.in/

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