Interesting Reads – 2018-07-01
Blockchain
beyond the hype: What is the strategic business value?
Speculation on the value of blockchain
is rife, with Bitcoin—the first and most infamous application of
blockchain—grabbing headlines for its rocketing price and volatility. That the
focus of blockchain is wrapped up with Bitcoin is not surprising given that its
market value surged from less than $20 billion to more than $200 billion over
the course of 2017.1 Yet Bitcoin is only the first application of blockchain
technology that has captured the attention of government and industry.
Blockchain was a priority topic at
Davos; a World Economic Forum survey suggested that 10 percent of global GDP
will be stored on blockchain by 2027.2 Multiple governments have published
reports on the potential implications of blockchain, and the past two years
alone have seen more than half a million new publications on and 3.7 million
Google search results for blockchain.
Most tellingly, large investments in
blockchain are being made. Venture-capital funding for blockchain start-ups
consistently grew and were up to $1 billion in 2017.3 The blockchain-specific
investment model of initial coin offerings (ICOs), the sale of cryptocurrency
tokens in a new venture, has skyrocketed to $5 billion. Leading technology
players are also heavily investing in blockchain: IBM has more than 1,000 staff
and $200 million invested in the blockchain-powered Internet of Things (IoT).4
Despite the hype, blockchain is still an
immature technology, with a market that is still nascent and a clear recipe for
success that has not yet emerged. Unstructured experimentation of blockchain
solutions without strategic evaluation of the value at stake or the feasibility
of capturing it means that many companies will not see a return on their
investments. With this in mind, how can companies determine if there is
strategic value in blockchain that justifies major investments?
Our (McKinsey) research seeks to answer
this question by evaluating not only the strategic importance of blockchain to
major industries but also who can capture what type of value through what type
of approach. In-depth, industry-by-industry analysis combined with expert and
company interviews revealed more than 90 discrete use cases of varying maturity
for blockchain across major industries (see interactive).
Best Practices in Cognitive
Computing
Cognitive
computing is such a tantalizing technology. It holds the promise of
revolutionizing many aspects of both our professional and personal lives. From
predicting movies we'd like to watch to delivering excellent customer service,
cognitive computing combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, text
analytics, and natural language processing to boost relevance and productivity.
This compilation has four articles as detailed below:
- Cognitive Computing: Film at Eleven
- Is Netflix the Evolution of Cognitive Search?
- Cognitive/AI-Powered Customer Service: Use-Cases and Real-World Examples
- How to Steer Cognitive Applications With Semantic Technologies
12
ways to keep your kids safe from sexual encounters online
Naomi, who is 10 years old, is having a
sleepover at her friend Jaime’s house. A babysitter is there but she is on her
phone, distracted. Jaime tells Naomi she has something to show her.
The next day, Naomi goes home and tells
her mother that she saw a man and a woman having sex on the computer. Naomi was
not expecting to see this explicit material and is now very distressed about
what she saw. Her mother is devastated.
It is not uncommon for youth to
accidentally stumble across, or be exposed intentionally or unintentionally by
their peers, to sexually explicit images or videos online. A new study shows
that one in five children between the ages of nine and 17 report having
accidentally seen sexual material online through websites, pop-up videos and
spam emails. Moreover one in nine say they have received unwanted sexual
solicitations online.
There is near universal use of digital
technology among youth — 95 per cent of teens report they own or have access to
a smartphone and 45 per cent report they are online “almost constantly.”
Children under the age of eight also spend a considerable amount of time with
screen media — on average two hours and 19 minutes per day.
Internet technology can be used as a
valuable informational resource and learning platform. But, as it is largely
unregulated, it also has its disadvantages. There are a growing number of
initiatives to promote safe, ethical and responsible engagement online, under
the umbrella of a concept called digital citizenship.
Due to their inexperience, children may
not understand the risks they can be exposed to online. Below, we provide some
suggestions and resources to arm parents, educators and young people — to use
the internet safely and responsibly.
Ten
red flags signaling your analytics program will fail
How confident are you that your
analytics initiative is delivering the value it’s supposed to?
These days, it’s the rare CEO who
doesn’t know that businesses must become analytics-driven. Many business
leaders have, to their credit, been charging ahead with bold investments in
analytics resources and artificial intelligence (AI). Many CEOs have dedicated
a lot of their own time to implementing analytics programs, appointed chief
analytics officers (CAOs) or chief data officers (CDOs), and hired all sorts of
data specialists.
However, too many executives have
assumed that because they’ve made such big moves, the main challenges to
becoming analytics-driven are behind them. But frustrations are beginning to
surface; it’s starting to dawn on company executives that they’ve failed to
convert their analytics pilots into scalable solutions. (A recent McKinsey
survey found that only 8 percent of 1,000 respondents with analytics
initiatives engaged in effective scaling practices.) More boards and
shareholders are pressing for answers about the scant returns on many early and
expensive analytics programs. Overall, McKinsey has observed that only a small
fraction of the value that could be unlocked by advanced-analytics approaches
has been unlocked—as little as 10 percent in some sectors. And McKinsey’s AI
Index reveals that the gap between leaders and laggards in successful AI and
analytics adoption, within as well as among industry sectors, is growing (Exhibit
1).
That said, there’s one upside to the
growing list of misfires and shortfalls in companies’ big bets on analytics and
AI. Collectively, they begin to reveal the failure patterns across
organizations of all types, industries, and sizes. We (McKinsey) have detected
what we consider to be the ten red flags that signal an analytics program is in
danger of failure. In our experience, business leaders who act on these alerts
will dramatically improve their companies’ chances of success in as little as
two or three years.
These
10 startups are redefining healthcare in India
Over the past three decades, while
India’s GDP has constantly grown at about seven percent, the country’s
healthcare sector continues to lag behind. According to the Indian Medical
Association, India’s healthcare spending remains low at 1.2 percent of the GDP.
This is dismal, when compared with the US’s 17 percent or China’s 5.5 percent.
Presently, India has just 0.7 doctors and 1.1 beds for every 1,000 of its
citizens.
The government aims to increase the
healthcare spending to 2.5 percent of the GDP by the end of its 12th five year
plan, and to 3 percent by 2022. Much of this will be done through public
private partnerships and using tech to increase the reach and multitude of
healthcare services.
Rising demand
With a fast-growing middle class and
increased usage of Internet and mobile broadband, there is a high demand for
quality and affordable healthcare in India. Healthcare market in India is
poised to grow from $100 billion in 2016 to $280 billion in 2020, creating huge
opportunity for healthcare and healthtech companies and startups.
While most healthtech startups in India
are still in their nascent stage, there are larger trends emerging in
preventive healthcare, analytics, pathology, emergency services, among other
things. We share below a list of 10 startups and discuss the larger trends
emerging. The list in no way is exhaustive, but is representational of the
larger trends being witnessed in the sector.
Introduction to Cyber Security:
10 Steps – Executive Summary
Guidance
on how organisations can protect themselves in cyberspace, including the 10
steps to cyber security. This guidance is designed for organisations looking to
protect themselves in cyberspace. The 10 Steps to Cyber Security was originally
published in 2012 and is now used by a majority of the FTSE350. The 10 steps
guidance is complemented by the paper Common Cyber Attacks: Reducing The
Impact. This paper sets out what a common cyber attack looks like and how attackers
typically undertake them. We believe that understanding the cyber environment
and adopting an approach aligned with the 10 Steps is an effective means to
help protect your organisation from attacks.
Photos: The world's 25 fastest
supercomputers
The
latest TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world is out, and while
the US is back in pole position for the first time in six years, Chinese machines
continue to dominate the wider list. The new TOP500 list is led by Summit, a US
Department of Energy supercomputer capable of performing 122 quadrillion
floating-point operations per second. While there are many changes in the top
25, most of machines still rely on vast numbers of Intel CPUs, aided by Nvidia
GPUs or many-core Intel Xeon Phi processors. Here are the 25 most powerful
machines in the TOP500 list of supercomputers.
India’s mess of complexity is
just what AI needs
The
country’s diversity of scripts, dialects, dress, and culture is a challenge
that will make artificial intelligence more resilient..
In
2010, I (the author of the articel) hired two engineers from an Indian college
to help me develop a product that could automatically grade the spoken English
ability of job applicants. About a year later, they knocked on my office door
with concern etched on their brows. “We are doing machine learning here, but
all our friends are doing software engineering,” they explained. “Do we have a
future?”
Things
have changed dramatically. In India today, every engineer claims some type of
machine-learning project. Most businesses have a top-down mandate to incorporate
AI into their processes and products. The excitement has reached all the way to
the government: in this year’s speech on the federal budget, Indian finance
minister Arun Jaitley announced that the country will launch a national program
to promote AI research and development.
This
newly awakened interest in AI borders on euphoria, but little of it is
realistic. India has a relatively small body of researchers and research output
in the field of machine learning. From 2015 to 2017, the contribution of Indian
researchers to top AI conferences constituted one-15th of the US contribution
and one-eighth of China’s. At the most recent conference of the Association for
the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Indian researchers presented 20
papers, compared with 307 presented by our US colleagues and 235 from China.
Most Indian research institutions have, at best, a rudimentary AI research
program. India contributes little new knowledge in machine learning and lacks
local expertise in the knowledge that is being created every day by others.
To end hunger, we must make
smarter use of land and sea
Better
systems, information sharing and technological progress are vital for nutrition
security.
A
recent issue of National Geographic (February 2018) raises the question of who
will feed China. We have to ask a similar question about India. The answer lies
in the integration of ecological principles, technological advancement and
information sharing.
The Endless Scroll: How to
Tell if You're a Tech Addict
Don't
let your apps, games, and smartphone control you. Once you understand what's
happening in your brain while you use technology, you can do something about
it.
Brian
was cleaning his bedroom when he came across an old iPhone. The screen was
cracked, but he found a charger, plugged the smartphone in, and turned it on.
The college junior told himself it was just for nostalgia's sake. Then he
discovered an old tablet, too. He started tapping on apps and soon figured out
how to get a Wi-Fi hotspot working, so he could get around the blocks on his
home router. Brian's current phone and laptop had blocks on them too, but these
old devices didn't. He was online.
Brian
caught up on YouTube videos, scrolled through subreddits, and played a few old
games. Soon he fell back into a comfortable internet routine he'd been
repeating for years. A couple nights later, Brian fell asleep just before
sunrise. He'd spent hours playing a mindlessly fun tower defense game. He woke
up to find his parents had confiscated the old iPhone, which he'd left strewn
out on his bed. His mom found the iPad in his baseball bag the next day.
Brian
is a tech addict.
He's
recounting his recent relapse in a session at the Center for Internet and
Technology Addiction (CITA) in Hartford, Connecticut. Brian is in his sixth
week of treatment since taking a leave of absence from college, where he's an
engineering student. (Brian consented to having PCMag to sit in; his name has
been changed to protect his privacy.)
Archives of Interesting Reads at
http://infoforuse.blogspot.in/2018/05/interesting-reads-archives.html
http://infoforuse.blogspot.in/2018/05/interesting-reads-archives.html
Feedback
We
will be pleased to have your feedback on the “Interesting Reads” being sent
once in five days. Pl. share the links
of any interesting things you come across so that we can include them in these
email posts. Also, pl. share the email
ids of your colleagues, friends, peers and contacts, if you want them to be
included in the google group to get regular posts.
You
may pl. send your communications to hrmohan.ieee@gmail.com
