Tag Archives: Microsoft

04.09.21
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AI is good – or is it?

A computer only does what it is told. Provided we are diligent in our programming and keep track of our code before the algorithms run wild, articifical intelligence and machine learning liberate us and make our lives more efficient. When we coexist, decisions made and carried out based on algorithms are as liberating as the invention of the washing machine.

In his book Människor och AI (Humans and AI) written together with co-author Professor Jonas Stier, Swedish technologist Daniel Akenine looks at a multitude of scenarios where using AI can benefit and enhance human existence. And a multitude of scenarios where it cannot – or should not. A quick review of his discourse:

AssumptionPositive PotentialNegative Potential
AI is good for humansAI’s maximize freedom and give us more time to do the things we want to do.AI’s maximize profit and productivity whilst ignoring the risk of creating chasms in society or human integrity.
AI is fairAI’s do not discriminate based on gender, sexual preferences or ethniticity.AI’s mirror or reenforce inequality in our society by using inappropriate source of data.
AI is secureAI-based systems in warfare are subject to limitation. Civilian AI-systems are built with well tested security standards and robust security protocols.Cheap AI-based systems maximize casualties when these systems are used in conflict. Civilian AI-based technology can harm people due to bad objectives or faulty programming.
AI is transparentWe understand how algorithms make decisions and when they have difficulties making the right decision.AI can be compared to a black box where the results can neither be explained nor questioned.
AI is responsibleEverybody has a clear responsiblity for the results achieved from the algorithms they build. From developer to user.Nobody takes responsibility for the damage an AI-system may cause.
Daniel Akenine is a frequent lecturer on all aspects of AI

In the book, subject matter experts consider these points from their field of expertise. Daniel Akenine’s purpose, as he clearly states, is to create a more nuanced view of what an AI and its smart algorithms can and cannot do and how this will impact human existence in the near future. Topics like AI-supported judicial systems, the future of urban development, taxation, conflicts and warfare, human integrity.

Let me pick just one for a further deep dive

How do we prepare for the risks?

Contributor Åsa Schwarz, Sweden Security Profile of the Year 2017, thinks as I do that algorithms as such cannot be trusted blindly: Open your eyes – your AI is biased. On the other hand, there is not yet reason to fear a Terminator/Skynet or Matrix scenario where machines take over and human kind is in danger of being eliminated.

But if we circumvent the human influence which hopefully includes an ethical starting point (AI is responsible in Daniel Akenine’s chart), there are bad decisions being made today using AI which lead to severe consequences for people and nations. If you feel inspired, the recent Netflix release Coded Bias helps you understand what I mean with consequences.

Just consider something simple like using AI to make selection of job candidates more efficient. By ticking all the boxes that were pre-determined and programmed, the system will not see the potential of candidates who do not fit but may add unique experiences and creativity which the recruiting company would need to grow and survive. Uniformity and stagnation led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. You need barbarian forces who are not following the rule of “this is the way” to continue to evolve.

Åsa Schwarz, Head of Business Development at Knowit Cybersecurity & Law. 

An AI can evolve based on the construction of its algorithms and make decisions that impact its actions. And there is both the malicious and the accidental consequence of AI to consider. Accidental negative consequences may be prevented but it requires the imagination of the programmer to provide the AI with the potential risk assessment: The AI has no imagination.

If you program an AI say to remove rubbish from a predefined surface (Åsa Schwarz uses the example of the Stockholm Central Train Station), it will do just that. Remove what the coding identifies as rubbish = not belonging there from the area. Now imagine you have designed a self-programming AI to help it continue to become increasingly efficient. And it may take that further instruction to remove the cause of the rubbish – i.e. remove the humans. Boom.

Malicious intent is everywhere, eg. in the physical sense through the use of drone warfare. But much worse – as an ever growing threat to us all – in Cybersecurity. Tom Leighton, Founder and CEO of Akamai Technologies, mentions during TechBBQ (2019) how a concerted attack on critical online systems can paralyze entire nations: “You can disconnect most countries now from the rest of the internet now through a coordinated Denial-of-Service attack…”, he says in the video interview.

If humans want to safely reap the obvious benefits of integrating AI even further into every aspect of society, we must understand who owns the system. We do.

So we have to act responsibly, and focus on developing concepts for the safe and secure architecture and design of AI driven processes with built-in failsafes and barriers. Microsoft as one example provides a comprehensive framework called the Security Development Lifecycle . Another important aspect is the sophisticated support for incident handling. And my favourite topic: Complete documentation so that you are able to trace and track the problem to fix it.

Lawmakers can only do so much – the real power of artificial intelligence lies in the hands of the developers of the systems.

AI’s have no ethical subroutine – you do.

10.07.16
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Creating your own pathways through the cloud

Companies like Microsoft have many types of customers, but by embracing cloud they have multiplied their impact on IT’s everyday dilemma – the rogue customer.

Meet the customer where the customer is – a truism pervasive to sales and marketing speak over the past few years – is now also the overall motto where IT meets business.

James Staten, Chief Strategist Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft, spent a few days in Stockholm at IP Expo Nordic  and a few minutes with me on the balcony overlooking the trade show floor. Just off the stage speaking about the end of the era of IaaS we were looking at the specifics behind his statement:

“Hybrid Cloud is the future and Microsoft will continue to invest in the dynamic interchange and complexity of public cloud and on premise computing.”

The Microsoft Cloud offers customers a global infrastructure with 30 available, and 36 announced, datacenter regions. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella just confirmed this commitment on Oct 3, 2016 by adding several European countries to the list of countries hosting or acting as hubs for their datacentres. And by introducing a novel concept where access to customer data is controlled locally through a trustee – T-Systems International in Germany. Thus addressing the continuous resistence to placing and handling data outside of your jurisdiction which is particularly fierce in Germany.

The dilemma of empowerment and control

In 2010 we could still put everything into boxes and linear progression charts

4layers_of_cloud

This linear layered view of computing vs cloud as illustrated by industry expert R Wang in 2010 was a nice illustration of where the -as-a-Service had disrupted traditional IT – but this no longer applies: It is being disrupted by the citizens=users themselves.

“Just about 15% of the world’s developers have the highest level of skills required to build advanced and full scale deployments on Iaas (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) but there are 10 times as many developers who have excellent basic coding skills in various languages who are creating business value for the enterprise,” James Staten explains. “If you then consider that there are 80 times as many people in the world who can code and deploy to a selected cloud platform, there is a nightmare scenario out there from the IT Operations perspective which can inhibit innovation and growth.”

James Staten is a visionary. As a former Gartner and Forrester Analyst   and ex-CMO he is an expert at connecting the dots and creating a cohesive narrative.

To understand the reason why Microsoft believes in the hybrid cloud and is leaving the focus on -aaS combinations, you need to understand who your customers are and under which assumptions they operate.

With new tools at their fingertips, your customers will always find their own way – even in IT
Only the really skilled can really navigate the maze of IaaS

 

Historically, IT called the shots when business needs were met in the enterprise. And even structure lovers like myself, can see that what the architecture of today’s large enterprises mostly resembles is a maze. But with today’s tools at their fingertips, customers want to do their own thing. And the challenge is on the IT management to keep it safe and secure despite everyone going rogue on them.

When basically everyone can or can learn to code, or at least subscribe to cloud based business process applications they could deploy themselves, the infrastructure has been disrupted by user behaviour. Just like a path created by people simply trying to find an easier way.

James Staten feels that if you support the developers by providing them with the tools they feel comfortable with as they navigate safely in the Cloud, you are also helping IT to stay in control of their infrastructure and protect their investement in existing platforms and processes. This is where among others the Microsoft Azure Security Center wants to help  IT managers sleep at night.

If we want to achieve true developer empowerment in this next generation of cloud, we have to encourage more coders to be productive with their existing skills. We can do this by letting them program with the languages they want to use — and are most appropriate to the type of app they are building — giving them reliable and consistent access to as broad a set of services as possible, and doing this in such a way that leverages open source and open standards. You want their processes to be painless and intuitive to encourage productivity and be applicable across the needs and services that your business operates and leverage where your customers are when they want you there. (Source: Geek.ly “Cloud Empowerment should not stop at highly skilled developers” by James Staten)

Star struck

When you meet people like that, who have visions that reach beyond and above, you should always remember that they are people who want to make the world a better place – in this case, James Staten even held my phone when we took the img_0928traditional SpeakerSelfie – and I am still slightly shaken by the encounter.

Hope to meet again soon at another conference somewhere in the universe to continue our conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and if you would like to see what a rogue customer can look like, here’s one. (Photo courtesy of Miroslav Trzil)

< Disclaimer> Image has no connection to the interview topic or person interviewed.

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09.29.16
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What really happened at IPExpo Nordic Sept 2016

Cloud or not Cloud is no longer a discussion we need to have at IT trade shows – for most companies today, it’s by default. The discussion is not about the technology platform, it revolves around the transformation which cloud has enabled.

IP Expo is a trade show  on Cloud and Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Datacentre, Data Analytics and Developers. Vendors use it as a platform to show off new technology, and delegates to educate themselves with training sessions and workshops – and some stellar keynotes. It’s held held annually in the UK, but this year for the first time in Stockholm as a pan-Nordic event.

Overall, there was a gap between the vendors’ view of the IT shop floor and how we work, and the visions and experiences of the  Nordic IT professionals listening to thshowflooreir pitches.

 

Among the 52 exhibitors, there very few were outside the box, so to speak. Mostly, they were addressing singular IT challenges such as cyber security, infrastructure or offering access to the “Cloud” ( eh, what!?).  I am not saying it’s not important, just saying that we need to maintain a broader perspective.

 

You can check out some of the exhibitors and their messages and posts on the IP Expo Nordic Facebook page

Transform – don’t wait for digital, it’s already here. And bring your own lunch

Of course, as the conference program is very congested – no scheduled lunch or coffee break (a NO-NO in Sweden, organizers!) – you cannot possibly get the complete picture if you are not a machine and can sustain yourself on battery energy alone. So naturally, I did not see all the aspects of the messaging and content delivered at the sessions, but delegates I spoke with agreed that from their perspective there was really very little news. As a learning experience, it did not quite deliver.

Out of 81 speakers, only 9 were women (!)

The non-profit organisation Womengineer with their programs to engage large corporations in empowering more women in engineering both in education, trainee programs and in careers was given a small corner on the trade show. Luckily, they also had their own session which was extremely well attended, despite the more glamourous main programme in the auditoriums. Similar to the worldwide efforts to inspire girls to code, Womengineer holds Introduce a Girl to Engineering Days – mark your calendars for the next event on March 17, 2017.

Aroshine Munasinghe, Head of Business Relations at Womengineer and Jenny Stenström, blogger had checked out the gender balance  in the conference program – and including themselves, there were 9 female presenters out of 81. Quite unusual for a high profile conference in Sweden.

And I encountered many professional women in the various sessions.

 

Barbará and Carla from Lisbon, Portugal and were extremely satisfied with the content of the sessions and the high technical standard of many of the presenters. Among their personal highlights was Susanne Fuglsang in the Digital Transformation Panel who literally took center stage in challenging a lot of preconceptions on what digital susannefuglsangtransformation is about.

 We should stop speaking about digital transformation – it has already happened. We should focus on making the transformation a strategic objective in top management and more importantly middle management where resistence to change is prevalent.

(Susanne Fuglsang, Executive Producer, Another Tomorrow)

 

Len Padilla of NTT echoed this very well in his Digital Transformation session tugged away in the basement and coinciding with Trend Guru Alexander Bard’s glamourous keynote. Happy to say, we were at least 25-30 people who were brave enough to go against the celebrity flow and took some practical advice in the dungeon, as Len called it.

Not only do you need to involve more levels of your organisation in the process, you need to enable those managers who’s job it is to “keep the lights on”. They are the least willing to take risks, so to truly transform you must learn to encourage and reward risk taking and the consequent potential failure. (Len Padilla, NTT)

Smarter citizens – not devices

What IPExpo Nordic showed, was the obvious focus these large players and other software vendors have on the Nordics as a market, and the effort they are making to gain momentum with their key messages.

The keynotes from Microsoft, IBM and Amazon Web Services were all delivered by some of the company’s top speakers and all on what PR professionals call “on message”.  Gleefully interrupted by a worldclass presentation on how the CIO of the City of Stockholm, Ann Hellenius, and her team will make Stockholm the world’s smartest city.

How? Not by adding infrastructure: We have that already with Fiber Optics Bands reaching 30 times around the globe covering the greater Stockholm area.

No, by defining a smart city as the merger of human, financial and technological interactions to achieve the highest quality of life and the best environment for business. The main focus here is the interaction between citizens and services, between human and machine.

stockholmvision

The best digitalisation is when you do not notice that it’s there (Ann Hellenius, Stockholm City CIO)

Making sense of the data – the Big data

IBM’s visionary Rashik Parmar  addresses similar thoughts on the concept of smarter cities– but at IP Expo Nordic, illustrating that the focus of the presentations was not on the vision but on the product, he showcased IBM’s cognitive intelligence Watson instead.

(The program also had an encounter with Furhat the Robot Head, but alas, Furhat and I are yet to meet in person, so to speak).

The potential of this technology of course is enormous, and the Nordic audience, albeit not new to the concept, can relate to the potential of using cognitive intelligence to make the world a better place.

Some of us covering IT innovation, gadgets and business opportunities combined, are always looking for the killer app. For Watson and alike there are many, and Rashik Parmar introduced just one: using Watson analytics to “listen” for cracked wheels on long distance trains.

This is a really important job that used to be a manual one, with a railroad worker hitting with a hammer on each and every wheel at each stop to listen for cracks. According to Rashik Parmar, the ability to filter out everything but the sound defining a crack is unique to the Watson technology – the sheer amount of data involved and the processing required to make this a seamless process and not create delays is unique (at this stage) to IBM’s technology. And this saves lives.

No more -aaS abbreviations, let’s all code

Microsoft’s James Staten, Chief Strategist Cloud and Enterprise Division (The Era of IaaS is Coming to an End) warmly enthused about the hybrid cloud being the future and where Microsoft will continue to invest heavily: The combination of on premise computing and public cloud as a strategy.

jamesandpatrick

What Microsoft has probably realised is that they need a broader audience for their products and concepts in order to meet today’s real customers – the so-called citizen developers  as defined by Gartner.

Basically, it means that end users are taking over the world of software applications because everyone today can learn to and uses code. And Microsoft wants to help IT departments stay in control via Azure Security Center, among other concepts. Read more on the visions and strategies for Cloud in my exclusive interview with James Staten in my next blog post due in a few days.

Listening to Amazon Web Services Technical Evangelist Danilo Poccia was perhaps not as inspiring for leaps of thought, but all the same very useful and constructive. The Amazon Journey to the Cloud was just that – his step by step introduction to and presentation of the various services in the Amazon Web Services portfolio addressing today’s needs among developers and IT departments.

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The journey as a strategy is what captured the interest of one of the delegates I asked right after the lights were turned on. Per Nordahl, IT Strategy Manager at Telia, found that Amazon could focus more on the journey when walking through the services as a case – many larger enterprises can relate to this story of digital transformation.

 

What is innovation – can we capture this elusive pimpernell

Amazon defines innovation as (f = mechanism + culture).

Unfortunately I could not reach Danilo Poccia to ask how to attach some real metrics to this. But I think an equation like that could help many businesses quantify and qualify their rate of innovation ultimately to get more senior management buy-in for those crazy ideas we all know we need to stay ahead of the game in a digital world.