Is There a Lack of Talent for Artificial Intelligence?
October 7, 2020
Absolutely, positively no. At least that’s what “Lack of AI Skills a Myth” reports. And the source of this oracular revelation? Pick one: [a] A Chinese fortune cookie, [b] US outfits dependent on whiz kids from Eastern Europe, India, and China (yes, China!), [c] consultants on a Zoom call making up great ideas for selling consulting, [d] tweets from a non-US disinformation service, or [e] Amazon Sagemaker training collateral?
According to the write up:
A Gartner poll of roughly 200 business and IT professionals in September,2020 revealed that 24% of respondents’ organizations increased their artificial intelligence investments and 42% kept them unchanged since the onset of COVID-19. Growth – namely customer experience and retention, and revenue growth – along with cost optimization were the top focus areas for their current AI initiatives.
A sample of “roughly” 200 selected how exactly? What about the margin of error for the global information technology, information research community, and smart software practitioners in places like Bangalore?
Okay? This is not Statistics 205, but it is a content marketing thing. I get it.
Let’s look at some of the other “findings” from the “roughly” 200 respondents. (Were these folks compensated in some way? Are they clients of the research company fresh from a Zoom webinar on AI and ML?)
Alleged findings:
- 75 percent of the sample will continue or start new AI projects
- 79 percent of the sample says something slightly different from the dot point above; namely, “79 percent of the respondents said their organizations were exploring or piloting AI projects
- 21 percent of the “sample” stated their AI initiatives were “in production.”
And the conclusion?
According to the consulting firm, “the lack of AI talent is a myth.”
Sounds like a rock solid conclusion based on the “sample.”
Truly remarkable.
Stephen E Arnold, October 7, 2020
Microsoft, Google: A Rose by Any Other Name?
October 6, 2020
Twenty twenty is unlikely to be remembered for outstanding brand decisions. Let’s look at the Corona thing. There was WuFlu, then Corona, and now for some the Rona.
The Google has taken a bold step and, at this time, it is not another messaging app. Google has changed the name “GSuite” to — close your eyes and imagine the bestest name in the world — Google Workspace. You know almost like Microsoft Works, the baby version of Office which went exactly where?
“GSuite Is Now Google Workspace” reports:
the company decided to also give the service a new name and introduce new logos for all the included productivity apps, which are now being used — and paid for — by more than 6 million businesses.
The addition of the word “space” makes Googzilla so much more homey, where those with real jobs can work. The article helpfully added:
In a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement, Google’s Javier Soltero, the company’s VP and GM for what is now Google Workspace, noted that the company wanted to ensure that the service that people use is the same thing that people buy.
Those are subscribers. The magic monetization technique popular as a business model borrowed from the ruins of the way things were.
Microsoft has jumped in the game as well. Bing is now — wait for it — Microsoft Bing. Instead of compression like Rona from Corona virus, Microsoft takes one syllable and enhances it with another word, “Microsoft.”
“Bing Gets Rebranded as Microsoft Bing (Yes, Really)” reports:
According to Microsoft, the new name “reflects the continued integration of our search experiences across the Microsoft family.” So yeah, not a big change, but just something that brings it a little closer to the rest of the “family.”
Yep, part of the family. What? No subscription to the search system which does not include some content readily found in such potent competitors as www.swisscows.ch?
Language enhances both of these services, doesn’t it?
Stephen E Arnold, October 6, 2020
Gartner Heads for the Clouds with Silver Linings
October 5, 2020
Organizations are offloading their computing, because it saves on expenses and allows them to have endless storage space, maintenance, upgrades, and customer service. At least cloud computing is supposed to be the end all solution. The Register reported on a recent Gartner review of cloud computing services, “Gartner On Cloud Contenders: AWS Fails To Lower Its Prices, Microsoft ‘Cannot Guarantee Capacity’, Google Has ‘Devastating’ Network Outages.”
Gartner’s review faced criticism from the start, because it only covered seven cloud infrastructure and platform services, because they fit the definition of “hyper scale cloud providers.” The biggest players are not surprising: Google, Microsoft, and AWS. The other companies are smaller but specialize in niches: Alibaba, Oracle, IBM, and Tencent. Gartner separated its review criteria into magic quadrants, but failed to identify any movers or shakers.
AWS soars to the top of the report and Gartner warns Amazon wants to own more parts of the value chain that delivers cloud computing services. Microsoft placed second, because it is a good service for Microsoft-based systems and company has a good approach to open source.
Readers of the article were unhappy with it, because:
“It’s not random speculation, it’s paid propaganda.
In 2011 Gartner “predicted” that windows phone would leap ahead of iOS in market share by 2015…
Back in 2003 they said that windows mobile would dominate the smartphone market.
Microsoft paid Gartner for this “analysis”.
Other observations included:
- There are some people who actually consider Gartner reports to be worth something, and this did result in a few companies standardizing on Microsoft mobile devices for a time based on reading the Gartner reports – only to be forced to quickly move to android or ios devices when the devices they were using got dropped.
- They don’t actually use or test the products/services they write about, information published by Gartner is supplied by the vendors themselves – ie it’s “best case” marketing material and doesn’t reflect real world experience where advertised functionality is almost never as good as the marketing literature claims it to be.
- At most what they do, is compare the claimed feature sets of vendors… Only many vendors will exaggerate their claims, they may have features X Y and Z on paper but that doesn’t mean you as a potential customer would need or want those features, nor does it mean that they actually perform as expected.
When it comes to choosing products or services, there really is no substitute for actual experience. There are people who have used a product extensively and know its individual strengths and weaknesses. Every product/service has its own strengths and weaknesses, but which set is best for your individual use case can vary.
Ah, marketing.
Whitney Grace, October 5, 2020
The Quantum Thing
October 2, 2020
Everywhere I look I see “quantum.” For example, consider this confection: “Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? One Scientist Thinks It Might.” And what about “Google Confirms ‘Quantum Supremacy’ Breakthrough.” Or “Intel and QuTech Demonstrate High-Fidelity ‘Hot’ Qubits for Practical Quantum Systems”.
The most recent quantum news to catch my attention appears in “D-Wave Launches its 5,000+ Qubit Advantage System.” The write up explains:
These new systems, with over 5,000 qubits and 15-way qubit connectivity, are now available in the company’s Leap cloud computing platform. That’s up from about 2,000 qubits in the previous system, which featured six-way connectivity. Using Leap’s hybrid solver, which combines classic CPUs and GPUs with the company’s quantum system, users can now solve significantly more complex problems, thanks to both the higher qubit and connection count.
Exciting. I have a few questions:
- When will this technology be available in a mobile phone?
- How much does the cooling component cost to operate per month?
- How does one extract “accurate” data from the system?
Progress in marketing is being made. In practical applications, the charge to the future may be moving more slowly.
Stephen E Arnold, October 2, 2020
IBM Watson Puts on the Football Gear for Fantasy Contact
October 2, 2020
Fantasy football fans will soon benefit from the power of machine learning just as golf, NASCAR, baseball, and other sports fans have. Neowin explains how “IBM Watson Integrated With ESPN Fantasy Football League To Drive Deeper Engagement With Fans” for an exclusive new feature.
Fantasy football is a game where players assemble an imaginary football team of real players and earn points from the players’ statistical performance and contribution on the field. Fantasy football players enter leagues through various apps, including the ESPN Fantasy Football app. ESPN hired IBM to utilize the Watson supercomputer to create the Trade Assistant. It is a new feature on the ESPN Fantasy Football app that allows users to make better and fairer trades. The new Trade Assistant with IBM Watson analyzes a player’s roster value, cost of losing them, and equity in the trade.
The new feature requires some heavy duty number crunching that only a super computer can conquer:
“At the heart of the feature will be the natural language processing (NLP) capabilities of IBM Watson, which will help the assistant in removing potential bias and uncover new insights from unstructured data from a variety of sources. To do this, IBM Watson will comb through multiple sources including blogs, news articles, and podcasts, to extract insights on player stats and sentiments….The motivation behind this feature is to make the Fantasy Football app more engaging and competitive. “Over the years, we have worked with IBM to uniquely integrate the brand and Watson technology to enhance the fantasy player experience and drive deeper engagement with sports fans,” said Marco Forte, Senior Vice President, Disney Advertising Sales, calling the feature a new height in the relationship between ESPN Fantasy Football and IBM.”
Watson should make playing ESPN Fantasy Football more enjoyable for players, especially those who do not lose a bet with their friends. No onto the bigger argument: is fantasy football and other fantasy sports legalized gambling?
Whitney Grace, October 2, 2020
Mayflower Autonomous Ship Gets a Mate Named Watson
September 24, 2020
Christopher Columbus had to make do with mere humans when he sailed the oceans blue. The Mayflower Autonomous Ship or MAS has IBM Watson on board. The MAS is a maritime autonomous drone. Drones are subject to command and control hacking. Will the MAS be the target of this type of attack with bad actors running the ship into vacationers sailing into Zephyr Sailing’s Pandora at six knots? DarkCyber sincerely hopes that IBM Watson can operate at Jeopardy game show performance levels. We learned from “Mayflower Autonomous Ship Launches”:
MAS features an AI Captain built by ProMare and IBM developers which gives MAS the ability to sense, think and make decisions at sea with no human captain or onboard crew. The new class of marine AI is underpinned by IBM’s latest advanced edge computing systems, automation software, computer vision technology and Red Hat Open Source software.
The MAS operates with no human interventions. The ship includes more than 30 sensors and has a maximum speed of 10 knots. The software includes “IBM Visual Insights computer vision technology, IBM edge systems, IBM Operational Decision Manager automation software, IBM Maximo asset management software, and data from The Weather Company.”
Will the MAS be hacked by bad actors? Will the Level 5 drone operate without creating excitement for those in fishing boards, kayaks, and rentals like the Pandora? Watson, what say you? Also, how did that dog matching gig in Mexico work out? And what’s the next PR play from Big Blue?
Stephen E Arnold, September 24, 2020
Microsoft Channels the Google: Users Moved to Second Class Status
September 9, 2020
Microsoft is notorious for angering its users, no matter how loyal they are to the brand. Microsoft developers must get perverse pleasure from annoying their clients, because Fossbytes details how “New Microsoft Edge Support Page May Have Pissed Users Even More.”
Another thing Microsoft is notorious for is its support and help pages not being helpful at all. Apparently they have upped the ante on useless support information, because users cannot uninstall Microsoft Edge.
Microsoft Edge is Microsoft’s built-in Web browser and users do not like it. They want to remove it. Windows will not allow users to install it. The only way to get rid of Edge is to switch to a Mac or join the Linux community. Most computers come with default browsers. Apple products have Safari and Chromebooks from Google use Chrome.
It is SOP for computers to come with a preinstalled Web browser and doing otherwise would not be good marketing, especially for a company as big as Microsoft. What rankles users more than anything is the aggravation and taunting behavior:
“But the way it’s promoting Edge may be easily called as too pushy. Probably, Microsoft shouldn’t have just created a page called “Can’t Uninstall Microsoft Edge” and blatantly tell users they can’t uninstall Microsoft Edge at all. Surely, a user browsing the web to find a solution wouldn’t dance in joy after reading it. If you think your product is good, then you have to release it properly and then at least trust your users that they’ll eventually start using it.”
There is a way around using Microsoft Edge. Download another browser like Chrome or Firefox, then make it the default browser. You might not be able to delete Edge, but you can delete the icon from the desktop and not browse the Web with it.
Whitney Grace, September 9, 2020
A Push for ISYS Search. Sorry, Lexmark. Oh, Right, Hyland
September 9, 2020
Those 1980s and enterprise search were a combo. Ian Davies’ search and retrieval system was very good. In fact, a long time ago I visited the old Crow’s Nest offices and sold a small job. After all, how many people from rural Kentucky end up in Sydney wanting to talk about search? Answer: Not too many. I wrangled an invitation because I complained about how the system displayed PDF files in a results list.
Flash forward and ISYS Search moved some operations to the US. Eventually the excitement waned and ISYS Search became a property of Lexmark. Lexington, Kentucky, had spawned a weird enterprise wide content management system which fetched a pretty price, and I assumed that Lexmark wanted its own content-centric technology. The wheels of time turned like a grindstone and Lexmark was caught between the business ends of the grist wheel. ISYS Search was now getting long in the tooth, and the company was sold to Hyland, also in the content management business. At this time, Lexmark had looped the loop from IBM to Chinese ownership.
Hence I was surprised to read “Why a Government Agency Needs Enterprise Search in the Modern World.” This was a message ISYS in the late 1980s was emitting as it marketed its system to law enforcement agencies with reasonable success. The write up by the Hyland’s Australia manager states:
Enterprise Search is becoming an essential ‘uber tool’ for content organization and discovery. More than just adding yet another layer of applications to the department’s arsenal of tools, enterprise search allows for the organized creation, indexing and retrieval of data – both structured and unstructured – through one simple interface.
In an interview with me in 2008, Ian Davies said:
What defined search back then was the significance of the need — users were after information that truly was mission critical. Now , juxtapose that with today, where search has expanded to address usability and the need to leverage corporate knowledge. What we have is a keen demand for mission critical search and retrieval, content processing, and analysis. In addition, there are large numbers of organizations that are trying to make the best use of the information in digital form. Mission-critical search manipulates information to identify a criminal, which may be a matter of public safety, or extract the key fact from information related to a legal matter. Essential search helps employees find the answer or the information needed to do their work today. Both drive the growth of ISYS. I don’t see either need diminishing going forward.
Similar? Yep.
Observations:
- Enterprise search is a challenge and shall remain so
- The lingo used to explain enterprise search is almost timeless
- The technology and its “promises” have persisted at ISYS for more than two decades.
Why hasn’t ISYS generated greater traction? Why has the core plumbing remained the same for decades? Those are important questions because they reveal much about the enterprise search sector which seems like an easy way to generate oodles of cash.
One issue is that enterprise search, like most policeware and intelware systems as well, is that the market sector is a very difficult one. One of the most popular enterprise search systems is, for instance, open source and free of license fees. That’s new. The sales pitch and arguments for paying for search are not.
Stephen E Arnold, September 9, 2020
Thought Leaders Thought Lead: Better Late Than Never
September 8, 2020
I read “Scale Digital Technologies to Thrive in New Reality: KPMG.” This document is what I would characterize as a “thought leader piece.” The idea is that consulting firms have to give the impression that their sales pitches are in step with most business thought just a tiny bit ahead. Then the thought leader becomes an expert on the subject and can use that perception to sell consulting work. The method has worked since the efficiency studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Gnostic message of the buggy whip case study.
This particular blue chip consulting firm output tackles the importance of being digital by Oscar Obvious Wilde, who wears upscale casual clothing, has a family confident in its wealth and connections, and a day time TV star smile. What’s not to like?
The write up states:
Improved decision-making is the top criteria for investments in emerging technologies…More than 90 per cent of companies are investing across emerging technologies as enterprises believe more in combined use of emerging technologies.
I think this means invest to make better decisions. Don’t worry about silver bullet technologies. Combine technologies.
Let’s go back to “what’s not to like”.
Sticking or combining technologies together is not magnetic. Two magnets will either snap together or push one another away. Now dump 12 magnets on the table and push them together. What happens? That’s tough to predict, so one has to be prepared to run tests, then fit the data to a pattern.
Does that sound like a sure fire way to spend a lot of time without having a result on which one can depend?
Yep, that’s the purpose of being a thought leader. Sell time and services. Does the approach create improved decision making. Sometimes. The client learns to be less accepting of some experts’ pronouncements.
Transformation can be hard and digital ones can be harder if we are not bold to question the status quo. It is a reboot/reset moment for all of us. We either ride the wave or get drowned.
There is an alternative, particularly for firms which embraced digital solutions years ago. Another option is to stay out of the water. Not everyone wants to be a surfer writing big checks.
Stephen E Arnold, September 8, 2020
Intel Code Names: Horse Feathers, Horse Collars, and Fancy Dancing
September 3, 2020
Intel loves code names. And what a knack for coinages? Pentium. What’s not to like. I noted this item last year (2019) I believe:
Intel, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, and Cray, is building the nations first Exascale supercomputer. By accelerating the convergence of high performance computing and artificial intelligence, Exascale supercomputing will advance scientific research and enable breakthroughs in neuroscience and cancer research, aerospace modeling and simulation, and theoretical research of our universe. The Aurora system will be based on the future generation of the Intel® Scalable Processor, the future Intel® Xeon® compute architecture, the next generation Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, and supported by Intel’s One API software.
Note the word choice: Convergence, high performance, artificial intelligence, Exascale, super computing, modeling, simulation, theoretical research, scalable, Optane, and One API.
Do I have a problem with this English major with a minor in marketing writing? Nah. Makes zero difference to me. We switched to Ryzen 3950X silicon. Workin’ just fine.
However, the venerable New York Times published “Intel Slips, and a High Performance Supercomputer Is Delayed.” That write up stated:
Intel, the last big US company that both designs and makes microprocessors, signaled in July that it might for the first time use foundries owned by other companies to make some cutting edge chips.
Now it’s September, and how is Intel doing?
Not too well. The Argonne Aurora supercomputer is delayed. Chinese computer scientists rejoice.
Is this Intel stumble important?
Yes, buzzwords and MBA speak cannot disguise the fact that Intel cannot deliver on time and on target. But, wow, Intel can spin fancy phrases; for example, Optane as in “Argonne can Optane its supercomputer.”
Another Covid moment?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
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