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
========================================================
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 days — and on which our
lives depend — is 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.
More
details at https://researchersjob.com/national-fellowship-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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