Category Archives: Digital

A-Z of Digital – S is for Social

10 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Digital, Social Media

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

,

SocialFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “S is for Social”.

Years ago people gathered in a market square to hear the latest news and gossip and meet in a tavern to hear the tales of friends and strangers from afar. Nowdays we just pick up our smartphones and have all that information at or fingertips.

Being a member of one of the many social tools available today is seen as the “norm”. The majority of people joining the well known social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, or one that’s less well known or used for specific purposes. We publish details of our lives online for all our friends and followers to see what we are up to or use the tools to help gather information and keep up to date.

Being social is not just around how you use the tools and what you communicate, but also what you don’t say and being Social Media Savvy on your communications. What ever is posted online even if its in a private group should be considered to be in the public domain as at some point someone could easily open that communication up outside of your group.

Here are my top 5 tips on being Social Media Savvy

Social Channels – Choose the channels that you want to use and look at the audience on those channels. They type of things being posted. Split your channels between personal and professional work.

Listen, Research, Listen Again – Listening to what is going on in your channels is important to understand the trends and topics being talked about.

Be Authentic And True – Be yourself – don’t try to be someone your not.

Keep It Regular and Relevant – Posting a couple of times a week is a good measure. Making sure that your posts are relevant to what you want to say and what your audience is looking for.  You could always automate your posts – e.g. writing some blog posts and having them published during the week via a scheduler.

Think Security – Would you want anyone outside your friends network seeing that post? Eventually your post could be public as once something is posted you don’t have control on what other people can do with it.

 

 

 

A-Z of Digital – R is for Robots

01 Friday Sep 2017

Posted by in Digital, Robotics

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

MachineFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “R is for Robots”.

What used to be Science Fiction is now reality as robots become an every day part of our lives. Even if you are not working with Robots they still have a big influence on your everyday life by making some of the things that you may use, such as a car or computer.

Isaac Asimov set out “Three Laws of Robotics” which in the main are obeyed by robots:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

The exception to these laws at the moment are military based AI robots and there is currently a lot of debate around this subject and how far AI should be allowed to go.

When the term robot is thought about, it most probably conjures up visions of automated arms in a factory plant or a humanoid robot carrying out tasks. Lots of this is influenced by novels and movies. However robots do not always take this form and the term robot is applied to a number of scenarios such as “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA) which takes clerical tasks and automates them through the use of software based robots.

Through learning to program and the use of applications and Open API’s (Application Programming Interface) RPA can be used to automate parts of the business.

An example of RPA: I recently needed my windscreen repaired on my car. Through my insurance companies website (after logging on to verify myself) I started a claim for the repair. The process then presented a number of steps to help identify the damage to the windscreen through the use of pictures and choices. After entering the number of chips and location on the windscreen the process determined that I needed a replacement windscreen (Lots of motorway driving and lorries/cars flicking up stones off the road).

The next stage was to pass all my details to the windscreen company and all I had to do was choose the date and time for the replacement screen to be fitted. The only human interaction I had in this process was when the repair person came to fit the new screen. Following the fitting and signing electronically that I was happy with the repair the process finished by settling the claim (and excess) and sending a survey to complete about the process.

Although there was little human interaction in this process, it was a smooth transaction that resulted in a happy customer experience. There is however always an option to revert back to a human if needed.

Robots and the ability to build your own robot have also become readily available through the advancements in computing and cheap components such as the Raspberry PI and Arduino computing boards. Building a simple Quadruped robot through the use of an Arduino and some programming in Python demonstrates this ability.

Through the use of robots whether physical or software based, business can take advantage of these technologies to help automate the repetitive tasks that employees carry out and let them concentrate on the deeper tasks that need their attention – this leads to the Rise of the Cobots and their ability to help and work alongside employees.

Further Reading:

 

 

 

A-Z of Digital – Q is for Quantum Computing

28 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

QuantumFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “Q is for Quantum Computing”.

A computer which makes use of the quantum states of subatomic particles to store information (Source: Dictionary)

Although still in its infancy, there have already been huge developments in the field of Quantum Computing and predictions are showing a mass market in the future “Quantum Computing Market – Will Reach $10.7bn by 2024‎”.

Today’s computers make use of transistors to compute binary states (on/off, 1/0) where as Quantum Computers are based on quantum-mechanical phenomena, superposition and entanglement. See a colleagues post “Through the looking-glass: Quantum computing 101” for an explanation of these.

So what is special about Quantum Computers? Its their ability to compute data at an exponential rate allowing for quick computing of complex data. This is boosting the abilities of Machine Learning and AI to quickly deliver results and allow for greater computations to take place.

The measure of quantum information is called a qubit (the quantum version of the binary bit). Google already have a 20 qubit processor in test and are working on higher speeds. There have already been large systems capable of 2000 qubits (with a cost of around £15m the system). Higher qubit counts are expected as developments continue by the industry. MIT are looking at how “Ultracold molecules hold promise for quantum computing”

The applications for business and industry are vast with the ability to process information quickly, provide predictive analytics and machine learning, tackle cyber threats and provide a system for AI.

It will be a while before Quantum Computing becomes fully mainstream with some analysts predicting this around 2025. In the meantime there are advancements in existing computer methods with companies making new developments around Machine Learning and AI- e.g. “Google says its custom machine learning chips are often 15-30x faster than GPUs and CPUs“.

 

 

A-Z of Digital – P is for Programming

24 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital, Programming

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

code2Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “P is for Programming”.

Programming or Coding is something that everyone should learn (How you can begin to code), even if its just to produce a simple programme to print  “Hello World” to the screen.

Why? Because programming/coding is becoming an integral part of businesses moving towards its Digital Transformation. Having an understanding of code or being able to write it, helps understand whats behind as code services, automation and connecting systems together with API’s. The manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow.

The phrase “Learning to code” may strike fear and thoughts of hundreds of lines text and numbers, but it doesn’t need to. The ability to learn to code has grown with the availability of free resources, books and videos available on the internet that takes you through from a beginner upwards.

Choosing a language will depend on what you are looking to achieve, but if your starting out try Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) as its based around blocks to create a programme. Alternatively there are lots of languages to try and below is a list of the current top 10 languages compiled by RedMonk.

Top 10 Programming Languages from RedMonk (June 2017)

1 JavaScript
2 Java
3 Python
4 PHP
5 C#
6 C++
7 CSS
8 Ruby
9 C
10 Objective-C

Source: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2017/06/08/language-rankings-6-17/

What language will you try?

Further Reading:

 

 

A-Z of Digital – O is for Organisation

21 Monday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Organisation

Organisation

Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “O is for Organisation”.

The “As Code” economy is growing at a fast rate with computing services being consumed as code rather than physical entities (Cloud, As a Service , etc.) Infrastructure as Code looks at making hardware being able to be controlled at a code level, enabling Micro Services and the ability to consume capability quickly.

This is allowing organisations to grow without the need for real-estate or physical assets such as an office or IT system.  This is moving organisations to the next stage of “Organisation as Code”. Companies such as Airbnb and Uber provide a good example of an Organisation as Code, building services and the supporting organisation in the cloud allowing it to be consumed anywhere by users across the world.

Currently there is still a need for a physical presence, as an organisation grows, to meet laws and criteria for operating a business across the many countries they operate, however some of these criteria are starting to be challenged through automation of processes.  Other demands such as security create a need for staff to monitor, patch and maintain the levels of security required for the code and organisation, drive the need for staff and ultimately an HR person or department.

AI bots can be used to interface with the users of the system and employees, but ultimately there is a need for a human at the some point in the conversation.

It may be some time before we see a fully coded organisation, but we are moving that way in small and big steps over time.

Digital Transformation is after all a Business Transformation activity not just  Technical Transformation. One aspect of business change will always be organisational change.

 

 

A-Z of Digital – N is for Networks

12 Saturday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital, Networks

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Network CablesFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “N is for Networks”.

Networking in general is well known and understood as its an integral part of the worlds infrastructure today. In this post I will cover two areas at a high level where there is significant developments going on – Neural Networks and 5G.

Neural Networks

A Neural network is a network that is modeled on a biological brain and nervous systems pathways (synapses) that allows computations to take place at speed and across many nodes.  Neural networks have been used across a vast number of tasks but are probably best recognised  today as the underlying network of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and Machine Learning.

You are using neural networks in your every day lives without knowing it with things like the voice activated assistants Alexa, Siri, Google Home, Cortana, which deploy neural networks at the back end to provide the basis of the AI and machine learning algorithms that take your voice commands and transact the outcomes based on the instruction. These networks are constantly being developed and improved to provide the services of today and tomorrow.  There are lots of other services that we use daily that have neural networks behind them.

Businesses are looking at neural networks as part of their move to AI and machine learning, especially as neural networks are becoming easier to use with availability via online services for developers, scientists, companies or even a home user to start to consume.

A great site to play with a neural network and look what they can achieve is at Tensorflow (Google).  http://playground.tensorflow.org/ Here you can operate a neural network in your browser and increase and decrease the input and hidden layers to change the output.

Tensorflow

Further Reading

 

5G

One of the latest developments in networking and mobile communications is 5G (the fifth generation of wireless systems). A set of criteria that 5G should fulfill has been set out by the Next Generation Mobile Network Alliance:

  • Data rates of tens of megabits per second for tens of thousands of users
  • Data rates of 100 megabits per second for metropolitan areas
  • 1 Gb per second simultaneously to many workers on the same office floor
  • Several hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections for wireless sensors
  • Spectral efficiency significantly enhanced compared to 4G
  • Coverage improved
  • Signalling efficiency enhanced
  • Latency reduced significantly compared to LTE.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G

There are currently field trials of test networks across the world operated by some of the telecom providers using the 28GHz spectrum band and development in to using Drones across the 5G networks.

5G will not only provide improved bandwidth to mobile devices, but provide the next generation communications infrastructure to things like autonomous cars requiring a low latency (around 20Gbps download, 10Gbps upload speeds and 1ms latency) and the IoT (Internet of Things) allowing a greater performance for large scale deployments.

The timescales for 5G are expected around 2020 for a release of the networks following development and testing till then.

Further Reading

 

A-Z of Digital – M is for Machine Learning

08 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital, Machine Learning

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

learnFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “M for Machine Learning”.

Machine Learning (ML) allows a computer to learn and act without being explicitly programmed with that knowledge. For example, if you get a computer to recognise a picture of a car and show it some examples of a car, it will then be able to recognise cars going forward and apply what it has learnt against new pictures shown.

Machine learning tasks are typically classified into three broad categories, depending on the nature of the learning signal or feedback available to a learning system. These are

Supervised learning: The computer is presented with example inputs and their desired outputs, given by a “teacher”, and the goal is to learn a general rule that maps inputs to outputs.

Unsupervised learning: No labels are given to the learning algorithm, leaving it on its own to find structure in its input. Unsupervised learning can be a goal in itself (discovering hidden patterns in data) or a means towards an end (feature learning).

Reinforcement learning: A computer program interacts with a dynamic environment in which it must perform a certain goal (such as driving a vehicle or playing a game against an opponent). The program is provided feedback in terms of rewards and punishments as it navigates its problem space.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

Machine Learning has opened a lot of uses and applications within business and industry such as a manufacturing process that looks for defects in products by telling the computer what good looks like, with imperfections being identified for further investigation.

One common place for interacting with Machine Learning is through the use of Chat Bots. You may have used a chat bot without knowing it, with machine learning helping to provide the answers to your queries.

An interesting chat bot to try out through Facebook Messenger is Keiko, a people search droid. The search can provide a series of questions to help narrow the search to who you are looking for. Yes you could do this through a normal search engine, but the thing I like about Keiko is the ability to interact and respond to the query with additional questions or suggestions for the search. Keiko can provide other functions other than just searching for a person. Search engines themselves have a lot of machine learning involved in ensuring that the results returned are the best match to the person searching and the search criteria.

If you want to have a go with a Machine Learning program try Googles Autodraw https://www.autodraw.com/. In this application you can draw an object and Google will try and suggest clip art that is similar to your drawing. As the program is used it learns from the drawings and selections that people make.

Further Reading

 

A-Z of Digital – L is for Legal

06 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by in Digital

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Legal

Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “L is for Legal”.

With the increasing about of things interacting with our daily lives, the area of Legal and Security play a big part.

The most common of these is the Terms and Conditions (T’s and C’s).  We are presented with a myriad or applications each with their own T’s and C’s to tick a check box to say we have read them when we install or update them. Most people will just click the box and accept them, but when was the last time you actually read the Terms and Conditions and you have just signed up to clean toilets for a couple of weeks? Makes you wonder what you have actually agreed to in all those T’s and C’s previously accepted!

With further adoption of the as a service economy, it is important to  read the T’s and C’s and keep up to date with any changes that are made to them as they are updated. Changes could mean that your data can be used by the provider – e.g. Robot vacuum company mulls selling maps of homes.

One of the next big legal items to come along is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation);

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. The primary objectives of the GDPR are to give control back to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU. When the GDPR takes effect, it will replace the data protection directive (officially Directive 95/46/EC) from 1995. The regulation was adopted on 27 April 2016. It becomes enforceable from 25 May 2018 after a two-year transition period and, unlike a directive, it does not require any enabling legislation to be passed by national governments and is thus directly binding and applicable.

Source: Wikipedia

GDPR will introduce one of the biggest shakeups of data protection in years. Understanding its impact on your businesses is an important role for legal, IT and the business to ensure compliance going forward when it takes over the current data protection laws on 25 May 2018.

The main points of GDPR cover new rights that need to be considered include:

  • Valid consent must be obtained to store data
  • Right to be forgotten
  • Access to data and sharing and portability of data
  • Protection of data by design and default
  • Obligation to notify of any breaches

Are you ready for GDPR?

Further Reading

 

 

A-Z of Digital – J is for Jacking

26 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Digital, Wearable Tech

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

,

Cyborg Eye

Following on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “J is for Jacking”.

Jacking is a term used when you plug into something. Body Jacking is a growing area where the body is being used from generating power through movement to implanting chips to interact with the environment such as open a door or unlock a computer.

Previously the main development area for jackables has been in the medical industries with things like robotic limbs, artificial organs, pacemakers and implanted hearing aids. The market is now shifting with recent examples of this include someone who had lost their eye replacing an eye with camera to create films of what they see to employees being implanted with chips to open doors and use the vending machines. There are also Bioables which collect data on your body such as glucose levels using sensors that penetrate into the under the skin.

Whilst there are some medical and ethical questions to be looked at around the growing use of Jacking, the evolving market for non medical use (ie chips implanted under the skin) is starting to create a demand that will trigger these debates.

Being implanted with a chip under the skin may not be for everyone, this is a growing area where it may become part of an induction to a new company on your first day.

There are no clear standards at the moment and chips can use a number of technologies such as NFC or RFID to operate the surrounding environment. Consideration should be give to those that do not want to be implanted or contractors who may not want lots of chips in their bodies.

There have been a number of demonstrations around the insertion of the chips. In some instances professional tattoo artists are used to insert the chips as they have a level of training around injecting the skin. What has yet to be seen is the removal of the chip should someone leave a company or it needs replacing for some reason.

A-Z of Digital – I is for IoT

25 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by in Digital, IoT

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

ThingsFollowing on from my blog post outlining an A-Z of Digital, here is “I is for IoT”.

IoT (Internet of Things) is where physical things are connected by the internet using embedded sensors, software, networks and electronics. This allows the items to be managed, controlled and reported on.

There are lots of news stories of IoT devices being developed to enhance our lives. Some of these are user controlled and some with a central control such as the ability to turn on a washing machine when renewable energy is available. Some supermarkets already use a similar service to reduce power bills by allowing remote control of power to refridgerators.

There are many reports estimating the number of IoT devices likely to be connected in the future, these are between 20 and 50 Billion devices by the year 2020.

With all the developments in IoT, the main concern is that of security and the ability to stop a hack or a control takeover of the IoT devices.

Hybrid IoT networks will help with protection for businesses providing a perimeter for protecting IoT devices and data, but end users will need additional security to help protect themselves.

A number of IoT Standards have been drafted such as:

  • IOT Security Compliance Framework
  • Connected Consumer Products
  • Vulnerability Disclosure

however there are a number of groups introducing a set of standards and frameworks across the industry for IoT.

Choosing to follow best practices is a good thing. Choosing which best practice to follow can be a harder choice to make.

Until such time as a couple or even one set of standards, a hybrid Best Practice may present a good approach, picking the synergies between the best practices and standards, then bringing in the other ones needed.

These latest best practice standards do state that they are generic and up to the indivudal to adopt.

Further reading:

Blog Series on:  IoT Device Security Considerations and Security Layers.