Sunday Reading — March 3, 2019
Ethical AI: When concerned employees at Clarifai, a company that develops image and video recognition solutions, asked about the use of the technology for the Department of Defense, the response was direct:
In the days after Mr. Zeiler explained that Clarifai would most likely contribute to autonomous weapons, the employee who wrote the letter and was originally tapped to serve as an ethics adviser, Liz O’Sullivan, left the company.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft have had employees ask similar questions and the answers have been mixed. Notably, Amazon was clear that their terms of service precluded the use of their technology for unconstitutional reasons. Essentially, this defers the ethical of the use of these technologies to legal validation… which is going to be messy.
Getting chippy: Last year, Arm launched Neoverse, the project aimed revamping their existing architecture, and a couple of weeks ago, released its first chip designs “catered toward general-purpose cloud computing and edge computing”. Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, wasn’t impressed:
I can pretty much guarantee that as long as everybody does cross-development, the platform won’t be all that stable.
Or successful.
Some people think that “the cloud” means that the instruction set doesn’t matter. Develop at home, deploy in the cloud.
That’s bullshit. If you develop on x86, then you’re going to want to deploy on x86, because you’ll be able to run what you test “at home” (and by “at home” I don’t mean literally in your home, but in your work environment).
Dow exposed: Security researcher Bob Diachenko discovered a sensitive “watchlist” database by Dow Jones was left exposed due to a misconfiguration of an AWS server:
In other words, it contained the identities of government officials, politicians and people of political influence in every country of the world. The data is designed to help identify risks when researching an individual and efficient due diligence. Obviously banks use Watchlist data to identify money laundering and illicit payments through key information about a public figure’s identity.
Dow Jones took down the database the same day they were informed.
Who’s down with OCP?: The Open Compute Project, founded by Facebook 8 years ago to drive cost reduction and power efficiency in large data centers and hyperscalers, has released research from IHS Markit with details on adoption and revenue. “Usage by OCP Board member companies Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Microsoft and Rackspace was excluded from this study.” Of note:
- 2017 actual non-board revenue was $1.16 billion, just shy of the original forecast of $1.18 billion
- 2018 non-board OCP revenue tops the 2017 forecast, reaching $2.56 billion, compared to a forecast of $1.84 billion, with year-over-year growth of 120%
NetApp IT Perspective: A Hybrid Organizational Model for Data Science: Data analytics are essential to planning and driving modern business. Furthermore, data scientists and their portfolio of methods and tools are the key to unlocking the most value from our data and improving our odds of success. But what is the right relationship between IT and business functions to best promote the healthy and scalable practice of data science in an enterprise? Is it best to have an analytics center of excellence?
The IT Enterprise Architecture (EA) team answered these questions by taking an organizational perspective based on NetApp’s culture, industry research, and conversations with external peers. Inside NetApp the EA team is responsible for setting IT enterprise technology directions and strategy, along with a forward-looking analytics organization. Read more…
Events
Mar 4–8 RSA Conference San Francisco
Mar 8–17 SXSW Austin
Mar 18–21 NVIDIA GTC 2019 San Jose
Mar 18–22 Game Developers Conference San Francisco
Apr 30-May 1 F8 San Jose
May 13–15 Consensus New York
One last thing…
