Daily Archives: December 23, 2021

(Blackboard/Shutterstock)

Given the critical role data plays in helping companies achieve growth and competitive advantage, its no wonder that companies have been migrating their analytical workloads to the cloud. Cloud not only relieves companies of the capital cost required to operate their own data centers, but they offer the flexibility to dynamically adjust compute resources based on demand too. The cloud also offers a wide variety of cutting edge analytics services available from public cloud vendors to address a number use cases.

This is essentially the recipe that enterprises have been following to transform themselves digitally. However, when companies migrate their storage and compute workloads to the cloud, they quickly realize that their processes for authorizing access to data requires transformation as well. This is because earlier, manual processes were unable to keep pace with business in the cloud.

This lack of automation impacts companies in two key areas:

Self-service is critical for scaling data access in a governance regime (SFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock)

To be fair to the platform teams that are building the cloud infrastructure in companies, providing users with access to data at the right granularity is no trivial matter. In the absence of automated data access governance solutions that can administer user access at database, bucket, table, row or column levels, the best that a data platform team can hope for is to control access exclusively by business role. Yet, the organizational structure of most modern enterprises is too complex for coarse access control to be sufficient. For example, you might want to give access to a table in a database to only those users with manager designation rather than to the entire finance organizationor you might want to give access to data to the majority of the users in a department but exclude specific users until they complete their probationary period.

These are just a few of the myriad of other scenarios that leave data platform teams without a scalable way to manage access to each data set for custom groups or individual users. This may be why those teams have gone to the extremes of providing each user with their own instance of a data science platform, a process that is neither practical nor scalable, not to mention extremely expensive in the long run.

Scaling data access in an governed manner is a key ingredient for success, the author writes (Alexander Supertramp/Shutterstock)

The winners and losers in the data economy will be determined by their ability to share data securely; internally as well as externally with business partners. According to Gartner, by 2023, organizations that promote data sharing will outperform their peers on most business value metrics. However CIOs and CDOs struggle to implement data sharing in their organizations due to inflexible data governance frameworks and policies which often work as barriers to sharing data with business partners. Customers repeatedly tell us that the reason they consider implementing an access governance platform is because their data platform teams didnt realize how difficult it is to share the data that a partner needs.

Another reason enterprises seek a unified data access governance solution is to gain comprehensive visibility into their data ecosystem through centralized reporting. Traditionally, companies have struggled to trace user activity and are forced to depend on workarounds like comparing timestamps to determine which user accessed what cloud instance. Companies need airtight regulatory reporting and auditing for compliance or forensics purposes, yet IT has difficulty accessing, aggregating, querying and summarizing logs for disparate cloud data platforms to get a complete picture of access activity.

This presents a major risk factor for regulatory compliance, as companies should be able to prove to auditors and regulators at any time which user accessed what data, when and whether access was granted or denied based on which policy. Automating data access through a single user interface brings together users activity from different cloud services in a common format and is a critical component to enabling both internal and external audits.

Enterprises need unified data access governance to provide consistent data access control, governed data sharing, and strong compliance capability to support todays modern data management landscape that is spread across multiple cloud services. With fine-grained access control so that each data resource can be protected based on user roles, attributes, groups, or classifications, these platforms enable data with different access requirements to coexist in the same storage or analytics platform. These solutions empower data administrators to create role-, attribute-, and tag-based policies to control data access at the file, row, and column levelas well as implement dynamic data masking and filtering.

This allows data scientists and analysts to query data rapidly while still protecting against authorized access. It also enables data consumers to quickly acquire the datasets they have permissions to, alleviating the time-consuming process of manually requesting access from each data owner. Empowering data consumers to deliver high-quality insights and analytics faster with the ability to access authorized data, no matter where it resides, is to capitalize on all the advantages of todays modern landscape and empower the entire organization to generate faster time to insights.

About the Author: Balaji Ganesan is CEO and co-founder of both Privacera, the cloud data governance and security leader, and XA Secure, which was acquired by Hortonworks. He is an Apache Ranger committer and member of its project management committee (PMC).

Related Items:

Navigating Modern Datas Dual Mandates: Access and Governance

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Tackling Data Governance in a Multi-Cloud DW World

See the original post:

How Unified Data Access Governance Will Determine the Winners and Losers in the New Data Economy - Datanami

As national leaders gathered in Glasgow a few weeks ago for the COP26 conference, there was a feeling of progress toward net-zero carbon emissions.

President Joe Biden assured the global community America is committed to a greener future. So let this be the moment we answer historys call, said Biden, regarding the green deals expected to come out of the conference.

But the conference proved disappointing on several fronts, according to U.N. Secretary-General Antnio Guterres, citing the document signed by nearly 200 countries.

It is an important step but is not enough. We must accelerate climate action to keep alive the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees [Celsius], he said. He also cited crucial goals yet to be achieved: ending fossil-fuel subsidies, phasing out coal, putting a price on carbon, protecting vulnerable communities, and delivering the $100 billion climate finance commitment.

That disappointment may be coupled with national widespread environmental regulation rollbacks in the U.S.

Since the start of the pandemic, at least 73 far-reaching environmental regulations have been rescinded. Some 29 are still in effect. Those are likely to mitigate the ongoing economic effects from COVID-19 lockdowns and an artificially created recession.

The rollbacks still in place include:

The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer require disinfectant manufacturers to receive approval for changes to certain ingredient suppliers or for changes to ingredients. This rollback has already caused massive FDA recalls on products containing benzene, a chemical that can have dangerous levels present in the atmosphere when used daily in a manufacturing plant. Where have massive benzene-related recalls been? Mostly in hand sanitizers manufactured during the pandemic.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued an interim final rule that delayed an adjustment of the civil penalty amount for auto manufacturers that fail to comply with fuel efficiency requirements. This rollback has stayed in effect amid President Bidens recent goal to ramp up mileage and fuel efficiency rules for car manufacturers.

Georgia has reopened a polluting medical sterilization facility that closed because of concerns regarding high emissions of carcinogenic ethylene oxide.

Hawaii waived enforcement of air-quality compliance requirements. Citing that COVID-19 caused an unavoidable air pollution noncompliance situation for a regulated entity.

New York has placed an exemption on emergency construction from environmental review requirements. New York also withdrew from the Restore Month Nature Bond Act, which would have issued $3 billion in state bonds for resilience-building measures. This policy essentially removes an economic incentive to invest in environmentally conscious practices.

Jason Shogren, who holds the Stroock Chair in natural resource conservation and management and economics at the University of Wyoming, said these rollbacks will thwart innovation that benefits the environment.

You have to have these regulations to create incentives for innovation. People arent necessarily going to innovate and come up with more technologies to do more with less pollution unless there is not a financial reason to do so, said Shogren.

Why is it important?

There is a disconnect between what the Biden administration is saying about a greener environment and the reality of increased environmental rollbacks.

These rollbacks beg the question: Do environmental regulations only work in a strong economy?

This idea is not a new one. The 15 worst countries on environmental policies are also some of the worlds poorest countries. Wealthier nations can afford to care about the environment because their basic needs have been covered.

Poaching, illegal harvesting and killing of endangered species has skyrocketed around the world since COVID-19 lockdowns were enacted as people either desperate for food or eager to exploit a distracted government hunt giraffes, pumas, tigers and more at accelerating levels, said a spokesperson from CFACT or the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that focuses on environmental stewardship.

The World Economic Forum said poaching of endangered species harms the biodiversity of the environment, especially when it furthers the extinction of a species.

Wealthier nations have cleaner environments, so anything we can do to remove the devastating economic impacts of COVID-19 lockdowns should be applauded by those concerned about the environment, CFACT said.

Shogren agrees the better an economy is doing, the better the environment fares.

The argument is summarized by what is called the Environmental Kuznets Curve. As the economy grows, pollution goes up. When we get rich enough to take care of the problems, then it starts going back down. It is like an inverted U. You climb this hill of pollution, and you start going down the richer an economy becomes, Shogren said.

Environmental scientist Jesse H. Ausubel cites a specific example. He believes the cap is around $6,200 GDP per capita in 2021 dollars for deforestation to stop or a new forest to be created. This idea is evident in wealthier nations, like the U.S. or Europe, where there are more trees than there were 100 years ago. Conversely, deforestation is on the rise in poorer nations.

An economy grows a lot of times on the backs of the environment. To do both at the same time has always been a slow process, Shogren said.

Ben Bostick, an associate professor at Columbia Universitys Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, takes exception to this thesis, fearing it is the wrong approach. One of the things in our society that weve done is created a dichotomy. Either you are for the economy or for the environment.

It creates this idea that permeates all society on various levels. By definition, there is an economic cost to an environmental protection and similarly, there is an environmental benefit to an economic loss. Both of which are probably not necessarily well-grounded in the basics, he said.

So why are national, state and local governments, targeting the environment?

What else can you do to jump-start the economy? Well, you have two sides, you can either reduce the constraints that are causing industries to slow down. Another way to do it would be to reduce benefits to workers. But that is pretty hard to do. People can complain, and the reaction of people who have their benefits rolled back and different health and safety standards rolled back are going to speak up. The environment doesnt talk for itself, said Shogren.

It is unknown how long the U.S. environmental regulation rollbacks will stay in place or if they will produce an economic rise.

The EPA said in a comment relating to its environmental regulation rollbacks: The COVID-19 pandemic has affected EPAs ability to conduct inspections in the field, requiring EPA to utilize existing and novel tools to increase its off-site monitoring to ensure public health is protected.

But the agency also said: EPA has continued to initiate enforcement cases based on inspections in the pre-COVID-19 years, as well as off-site monitoring tools more recently.

Edited by Fern Siegel and Bryan Wilkes

Read more:

Do environmental protection laws only work when the economy is doing well? - Rolling Out

The cities adding their voices to the lawsuit say theyre worried about how the inlet closure will impact their local economies. Kenai has weighed in several times about its concerns for the fishery at different points in the regulatory process. (Sabine Poux/KDLL)

Two Kenai Peninsula cities are weighing in on a lawsuit over the closure of part of Cook Inlet to salmon fishing.

Kenai and Homer both are submitting amicus briefs to a suit from the United Cook Inlet Drift Association that attempts to stop the closure before it goes into effect next summer. The cities say the ramifications of the decision on their local economies could be intense.

If council was interested in participating in the lawsuit, I think that would be our narrow focus, said Kenai City Attorney Scott Bloom. That, Look, as a city, we were never consulted. We think there is a large impact to the city and the fishermen that participate in the fishery.'

The lawsuit is over the decision to close part of Cook Inlets federal waters to commercial salmon fishing, estimated to impact the 500 permit holders who fish from the southern tip of Kalgin Island to Anchor Point.

Then and now, the decision has been unpopular among commercial fishermen and Kenai Peninsula cities. But members of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to shut the commercial fishery down anyway last December, when they were tasked with picking a new fishery management plan. After the state said it wouldnt manage the fishery alongside the federal government, the council said it had no other option but to close the area entirely.

Two separate lawsuits have been filed against the federal government since.

The first is from several Cook Inlet fishermen and the Sacramento-based Pacific Legal Foundation. That suit argues that the composition of the North Pacific Fishery Management Council is illegal, and therefore the council does not have the authority to make decisions like the one it did last year.

Thats sort of not an argument I think the city has an interest in, Bloom said. Thats sort of a technical, legal argument.

The second is from the drift association, UCIDA. The association says the closure does not count as a management plan and that it could really hurt the fishery and its communities.

An impact statementfrom the North Pacific Fishery Management Council said last year the federal area makes up just under half of the revenue that comes from Upper Cook Inlet commercial salmon fishing around $10 million.

Those landings are spread out across the peninsula. Homer has the highest average ex-vessel value from that part of the inlet, at about $2,647,402. Kenais ex vessel value is about $938,453. Those estimates come from annual averages for the years between 2009 and 2018.

Homer Harbormaster Bryan Hawkins said the closure will have a huge impact on the city. Most of the permit holders in the Upper Cook Inlet commercial salmon fishery are from Homer.

We are continually challenged with the ups and downs of harvests and how it affects our fleet because that directly affects the community, he said.

He said it goes beyond the fishermen, tenders and processors that actively fish the area.

Of course theres the secondary revenue thats generated from commercial fishermen that are working on their vessels during the wintertime to prepare them for the end season, he said. All of those things play into the economy. Not just Homers economy but the peninsula in general.

Advocates of the closure plan said fishermen who typically fish that part of the inlet can take their business elsewhere, like closer to shore. They also suspect a redistribution of the resource could balance out some of the economic losses.

The state of Alaska also filed to join the lawsuit on the side of the federal government.

In an emailed statement, Aaron Sadler, a spokesperson from the states Department of Law, said that was because Alaska has significant interests in this dispute and is moving to intervene in order to fully and meaningfully represent those interests in all phases of the litigation.

The state was an advocate for closing the inlet at the council meeting last year. Unlike the cities, the state would be joining the case.

Bloom said Kenai will file its brief in February. He says UCIDA has asked for expedited consideration of the case, in anticipation of the closure that will go into effect in 2022.

See the article here:

Citing economic concerns, cities will weigh in on lawsuit over Cook Inlet commercial fishing closure - Alaska Public Media News

Nowadays, brines are mostly disposed of in the environment without treatment via discharge in water surfaces, sewers, deep-well injection, evaporation ponds and land application, or in wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). Desalination plants (DPs) inject brines into the ground, salinising aquifers, or they dilute the saline residue in the local WWTPs, affecting their biological process.

The main environmental concerns in this scenario are: increased salinity in soil with negative impact in crops and receiving water bodies, regional impacts on marine benthic communities near the discharge point, affecting ocean life and marine ecosystems, and the increase of heavy metals in the marine environment. Membrane and thermal based methods to treat the brines to avoid their discharge are unsustainable, restricted by high capital costs and non-universal application. Therefore, brine valorisation is critical.

On the other hand, due to the increasing demand of metals there is a scarcity of resources, rising prices and environmental impacts derived from both the demand and unsustainable scrap metallic waste management. In the EU only around 3% of the raw materials necessary to maintain an increasing demand for metals are produced. Despite the historical reuse of metals, it is important and required to find synergies with other industrial sectors.

In this sense, solutions with a new resource efficiency and circular economy model based on brine and metal wastes valorisation to produce coagulants for wastewater treatment and protect the environment are highly needed.

In Spain, for example, there are more than 2,000 WWTPs, 900 DPs and 1,300 drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) that use metal salts in coagulation processes for the removal of pollutants, including pathogens and emerging contaminants. The coagulation process involves the addition of ferric and aluminium chemicals. These coagulants are corrosive, require special equipment and hazardous substances for pH adjustment, as well as worker protection.

In this context, the LIFE Waste2Coag project aims to demonstrate a viable and cost-effective solution for brine and metal waste valorisation for the production of a sustainable coagulant as an alternative to commercial ones. The product will be used in water facilities, ensuring efficient use of resources for the provision of water services.

The project is currently working on the design and construction of a resource-efficient electrolytic pilot system (ELS) for the production of coagulants by direct recovery of brines and scrap metal, turning it into a completely sustainable process based on the use of wastes as raw materials and renewable energy. The focus is to promote ELS as a sustainable, autonomous and decentralised technology, proposing its inclusion in EU policies and for a wider implementation and replication in sectors where water purification and treatment are required.

The success of the 34 months project (which started in October 2021) will be ensured by a multidisciplinary and international consortium integrated by 5 partners based in Spain, Netherlands and Belgium, and led by Global Omnium- in Spain.

Dr. Tatiana Montoya (Global Omnium), LIFE Waste2Coag project coordinator said: We trust that with the self-supply of coagulants through the electrolytic technology to be developed, we will be able to reduce the dependence on external markets to supply of commercial coagulants, characterized by continuous price increases translated into higher costs in the treatment of wastewater. On the other hand, as Global Omnium is a group of companies dedicated to the Integral Water Cycle, with this new technology we hope to valorise the brines that are generated in different facilities managed by the group, increasing circularity within our own company.

Dr. FranciscoBosch Mossi (AIDIMME), said: We hope that the project will allow us to achieve and develop a sustainable technology, and to transfer this technology to the industrial sector in order to approximate and serve as a gateway to the industries not only the concept but also a real practice of circular economy.

Ing. Quinten Van haecke (Aquafin), said: Here at Aquafin we are always open to new insights and concepts. That is why we are very excited to be able to contribute to the Waste2coag project. We therefore hope that this project will provide new insights and bring us all one step closer towards a more sustainable world.

D. Arturo Domenech Lpez, legal representative of Creaciones Joviar, said: With the project, we hope to totally or partially replace the coagulation system used so far at JOVIAR, reducing the consumption of raw materials and self-supplying our own brine while avoiding externaltreatment and management.

Prof. Blanca Antizar (ISLE), LIFE Waste2Coag Chair of Innovation Board said: LIFE Waste2Coag exploitation and business strategy plan for a fast adoption of its innovative technology solution into the market will contribute to the shift towards a resource-efficient, low-carbon and circular economy model, helping protect and improve the quality of the environment. The project is aligned to the Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe and the European Green Deal. A targeted replication strategy will be organized to boost replication by encouraging the adoption, implementation and further replication of the project results, proposing them as best available technology for EU Best Available Techniques reference document (BREF)''.

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LIFE Waste2Coag project aims to boost the circular economy in ... - Environmental Expert

During its short existence, the State of Israel has become a center of innovation and technology, tipping the scales towards a thriving and robust economy based on a human capital rich in knowledge and capabilities while maintaining a healthy society in an economic system independent of natural and perishable resources.

In the near future, the population of the Negev will surpass 600,000 due to both natural growth in the Bedouin population and accelerated construction and positive immigration. (45% of new construction occurs in the Negev and Galilee, so the employment problem will increase). Based on all forecasts, the Bedouin population in the Negev will exceed 50% within the next few years. The future of the entire Negev region, Jews and Arabs alike, depends on the ability of the residents and the government to provide hope and employment, a robust economy, and a society that encourages all sectors of the population to lead and cooperate, for the future of the young generation to flourish.

To break the circle of underemployment and low wages, we must engage in activities that contribute to all the national and governmental economic anchors, in doing so, we must create a lever to shatter the glass ceiling, both in terms of faith and in the ability to augment required resources.

InNegev, the south's technology incubator and innovation center, was established in the middle of 2020. The Israel Innovation Authority's government tender for innovation and the incubator objectives were designed to skew the balance of activity in the technological and high-tech industries to generate a bustling center of activity, regional and national resource allocation, cooperation, and human capital development. Due to all of this, the income threshold expected to be affected by technology-related activities in the south will also rise. For this significant change to occur, we need to think big and use resources that have not been used in recent decades.

InNegev incubator operates as a center for cooperation and promotion of startups in the south and is a bridge between all factors for the promotion and cultivation of startup companies and advanced capabilities in the Negev region. The incubator also collaborates with most of the organizations involved in the advancement of technology and advanced industry among the Bedouin population, especially with MOONA organization that promotes technological exposure to youth in Arab society within the designated campus built as the "Innovation Center" in the Negev.

Having been active for nearly a year and a half, the incubator has already developed an impressive network of collaborations across all relevant actors in the South and forged close relationships with many partners in the region In terms of its strategic role, the incubator aims to improve employment and the economy by promoting innovation and technology, as well as promote good neighborliness, peace, and coexistence in the Negev. Improving the future of the Negev and the fate of its residents largely depend on the ability to reach an excellent neighborly relationship out of respect and joint efforts to promote, strengthen and create a joint socio-economic environment here in the South.

InNegev incubator chose to establish its facility at the Idan Hanegev industrial zone, an area jointly owned by the municipality of Rahat (44%) regional council Bnei Shimon (37% and landowners) and local council Lehavim. With the cooperation of the local authorities, Idan HaNegev has developed into a thriving industrial area that all of the residents perceive as their own, making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Arnon Columbus is the CEO of InNegev, an innovation technology incubator.

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How to transform the Negev into an innovation and high-tech center | Ctech - CTech

All roads lead to the brain. Depression and anxiety, loneliness, Alzheimers disease, learning disorders, substance misuse disorder, long-haul COVID (i.e., brain fog), the toxic effects of air pollution on the brain, and even deaths of despair are all brain-based challenges. These issues typically fall through the proverbial cracks given they cut across policy areas and sectors of government. We need a coordinated approach to manage and ultimately prevent these issues: Such an approach will boost economic dynamism through reduced suffering, optimized brain performance and productivity, and new industries.

Brain-based challenges all involve brain health and wellness at an individual and societal level. They all represent internal or external disruptions whether biological, economic, structural, environmental, or social. Collectively, they were reducing life expectancy in the United States, long before the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. The pandemic, in turn, has made all of these brain-based issues profoundly worse.

Brain function and the myriad of conditions that influence it are rarely considered in current economic or public policy approaches. This may in part be due to scientific advancements in the brain sciences outpacing economic and policy change. It is also a result of the siloed and growing knowledge of the brain and economics rarely converging to inform the development and implementation of policy.

Our collective failure to connect neuroscience and social policy may be most conspicuous in matters of social justice. Increasing homelessness, mass incarceration, and deaths of despair are all driven, in part, by untreated brain disorders. With the rising threat of automation, workers who are not brain ready for the knowledge economy will face job losses, loss of purpose, despair, and fall further behind. Further, over a dozen institutions within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) engage in brain research, which results in imperfect coordination, artificial siloes, resource waste, and redundancy. This is particularly troubling given many of the fundamental brain disease mechanics are shared across many disorders, and dysfunction in mood and cognition is common among brain challenges across the lifespan.

A new approach to improve economies and societies is long overdue. To this end, we have developed a novel asset, Brain Capital, which we believe can inform better policy development. Brain Capital incorporates brain health and brain skills and drives economic empowerment, social resilience, and emotional connection. As brains are indispensable drivers of human progress, Brain Capital provides an opportunity to invest in these valuable assets and nurture healthier, more resilient, and flexible brains. And yet, remarkably, Brain Capital is not captured by any existing measure of gross domestic product (GDP).

Download the full policy brief

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Build brains better: A proposal for a White House Brain Capital Council to accelerate post-COVID recovery and resilience - Brookings Institution

Attention is an invaluable resource in the digital age. For most of human history, access to information was limited. Centuries ago, access to information was a luxury. Today we have access to information on a massive scale. Facts, literature, and art are available (often for free) to anyone with an internet connection.

Global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. A zettabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes (21 zeroes for those counting). Simply put - a mind-boggling volume of data.

Clearly, today's consumers are presented with a wealth of information, but we have the same amount of mental processing power as we have always had. The number of minutes has also stayed exactly the same every day. Attention, and not information, is the limiting factor today.

Nevertheless, in the era of 8-second attention spans and highly crowded digital marketplaces, how are brands engaging consumers with viral and binge-worthy content?

Enter, Entropik - a startup that is working on making technology emotionally interactive.

In 2016, while my co-founder and I were contemplating various challenges, the profoundness of making technology emotionally interactive stuck with us both by its magnitude and novelty, says Ranjan Kumar, Co-founder and CEO, Entropik.

Often credited as a world leader in emotion AI, Entropik Tech recently introduced their ground-breaking eye tracking technology. It is a solution that is highly scalable as it is affordable its accuracy has been compared to mobile eye trackers 50x more expensive.

The startups multi-platform eye tracking technology works on both web and mobile devices, and maintains an accuracy rate of over 96 percent using AI and ML technologies. Moreover, it is built for enterprise-scale integration that enables brands to conduct multiple tests and leverage online respondents across 120 countries.

Brands face this massive challenge of understanding consumer preferences and how to drive customer-centric experiences. The entire market landscape of consumer insights is worth $70 billion globally. Entropik helps businesses measure consumers' subconscious preferences towards digital, media, and retail experiences and optimise these experiences to resonate emotionally with the consumers.

We started Entropik to fill the gap traditional market research surveys (typically manual) weren't able to address. Because brands relied primarily on stated survey responses, they missed out on the subconscious emotional preferences of consumers, says Ranjan.

Entropik taps into the emotional perspective of customers with products Affect Lab, AffectUX, and AffectAPI, supporting end-to-end consumer insights at scale. AffectLab is a cloud-based multi-tenant SaaS product, that delivers consumer insights in 48 hours as against 4-6 weeks when done manually.

The company recently launched the beta version of its new conversational intelligence platform, Decode, which comes ready to be integrated with the existing conferencing and collaboration ecosystem. It seamlessly gathers conversation data and creates a layer of intelligence on top to turn conversations (sales, team and HR/candidate conversations) into actionable insights that will increase the efficiency and productivity of organizations.

The solution comprises Facial Coding Technology that includes facial expression analysis,and inferring emotion from human facial movements; Brainwave Mapping, from understanding how the brain works and communicates leveraged by electrical impulses and brainwaves; and finally AI-Enabled Eye Tracking Technology that leverages origin and need-of-eye tracking.

Decode specifically focuses on conversational insights from audio and video conversations using voice tonality, transcription and NLP, apart from the other emotion AI capabilities.

The idea for Entropik Tech first came to Ranjan when he was managing his previous adtech startup, Red Castle. He realised that brands spend more time creating advertisements than incorporating consumer feedback and ensuring that their content resonates with users at an emotional level. Forging an emotional connection with consumers or creating emotionally resonating products has been a massive challenge for brands as it requires decoding a consumer's subconsciousness.

This led him to the idea of creating an emotionally intelligent consumer research platform that offers valuable subconscious insights. He believed that while surveys, focus groups, and interviews only help understand the conscious part of a user's brain, consumer behaviour research powered by emotion recognition technology is required to decode consumers' subconscious.

In February 2016, he started Entropik Tech along with his two co-founders Lava Kumar (CPO) and Bharat Singh Shekhawat (Head of Engineering) and raised seed funding of $200,000 that year. With Entropik Tech, he decided to use Emotion AI to create a solution that is an easy fit for any production cycle and serves as a platform that offers valuable subconscious insights and prediction data to brands.

The Intel Startup Program's mentoring, ecosystem connect, technology and AI best practices positively impacted our team during the technology scale-up phase. From processing a couple of thousand video streams to processing millions of video streams in parallel, it enabled us to scale the technology globally to a large set of clients, says Ranjan.

Talking about how the program powered their growth with technical mentorship, go-to-market best practices, scaling technology infrastructure, and business networking expansion, he adds, The key benefit of the Intel Startup Program is receiving hands-on mentorship from Intel and subject matter experts. Intel also provides us with access to technology, investor relations, knowledge, and resources.

The Intel Startup Program is Intel Indias flagship program to engage with technology startups who have an IP or innovative solutions that have the potential to create impact on customers and align with Intel's focus areas. The program is at the forefront of engaging with Indias startup ecosystem through high impact collaborations with the industry, academia and government and runs multiple initiatives that are either vertically aligned or focused on emerging technologies.

It engages with startups that have a unique global or local value proposition to solve genuine customer problems, enabling them with domain and business expertise from the industry and mentorship from Intel.

For more details visit: https://www.intel.in/startup-program

Originally posted here:

How Entropik is solving for the attention economy by humanising experiences with AI, powered by the Intel Star - YourStory

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of information for answers to complex questions. At least, that is, so long as you speak English or another of the worlds dominant languages.

But try talking to your phone in Yoruba, Igbo or any number of widely spoken African languages and youll find glitches that can hinder access to information, trade, personal communications, customer service and other benefits of the global tech economy.

We are getting to the point where if a machine doesnt understand your language it will be like it never existed, said Vukosi Marivate, chief of data science at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, in a call to action before a December virtual gathering of the worlds artificial intelligence researchers.

READ MORE: Native Americans use technology to keep traditions, language alive during pandemic

American tech giants dont have a great track record of making their language technology work well outside the wealthiest markets, a problem thats also made it harder for them to detect dangerous misinformation on their platforms.

Marivate is part of a coalition of African researchers who have been trying to change that. Among their projects is one that found machine translation tools failed to properly translate online COVID-19 surveys from English into several African languages.

Most people want to be able to interact with the rest of the information highway in their local language, Marivate said in an interview.

Hes a founding member of Masakhane, a pan-African research project to improve how dozens of languages are represented in the branch of AI known as natural language processing. Its the biggest of a number of grassroots language technology projects that have popped up from the Andes to Sri Lanka.

Tech giants offer their products in numerous languages, but they dont always pay attention to the nuances necessary for those apps work in the real world. Part of the problem is that theres just not enough online data in those languages including scientific and medical terms for the AI systems to effectively learn how to get better at understanding them.

Google, for instance, offended members of the Yoruba community several years ago when its language app mistranslated Esu, a benevolent trickster god, as the devil. Facebooks language misunderstandings have been tied to political strife around the world and its inability to tamp down harmful misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. More mundane translation glitches have been turned into joking online memes.

Omolewa Adedipe has grown frustrated trying to share her thoughts on Twitter in the Yoruba language because her automatically translated tweets usually end up with different meanings.

One time, the 25-year-old content designer tweeted, Tl b dn, Tl b tr. yin lm b e , which means, If the land (or country, in this context) is not peaceful, or merry, youre responsible for it. Twitter, however, managed to end up with the translation:

If you are not happy, if you are not happy.

For complex Nigerian languages like Yoruba, those accent marks often associated with tones make all the difference in communication. Ogun, for instance, is a Yoruba word that means war, but it can also mean a state in Nigeria (gn), god of iron (gn), stab (gn), twenty or property (Ogn).

Some of the bias is deliberate given our history, said Marivate, who has devoted some of his AI research to the southern African languages of Xitsonga and Setswana spoken by his family members, as well as to the common conversational practice of code-switching between languages.

The history of the African continent and in general in colonized countries, is that when language had to be translated, it was translated in a very narrow way, he said. You were not allowed to write a general text in any language because the colonizing country might be worried that people communicate and write books about insurrections or revolutions. But they would allow religious texts.

Google and Microsoft are among the companies that say they are trying to improve technology for so-called low-resource languages that AI systems dont have enough data for. Computer scientists at Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, announced in November a breakthrough on the path to a universal translator that could translate multiple languages at once and work better with lower-resourced languages such as Icelandic or Hausa.

Thats an important step, but at the moment, only large tech companies and big AI labs in developed countries can build these models, said David Ifeoluwa Adelani. Hes a researcher at Saarland University in Germany and another member of Masakhane, which has a mission to strengthen and spur African-led research to address technology that does not understand our names, our cultures, our places, our history.

Improving the systems requires not just more data but careful human review from native speakers who are underrepresented in the global tech workforce. It also requires a level of computing power that can be hard for independent researchers to access.

Writer and linguist Kola Tubosun created a multimedia dictionary for the Yoruba language and also created a text-to-speech machine for the language. He is now working on similar speech recognition technologies for Nigerias two other major languages, Hausa and Igbo, to help people who want to write short sentences and passages.

We are funding ourselves, he said. The aim is to show these things can be profitable.

Tubosun led the team that created Googles Nigerian English voice and accent used in tools like maps. But he said it remains difficult to raise the money needed to build technology that might allow a farmer to use a voice-based tool to follow market or weather trends.

In Rwanda, software engineer Remy Muhire is helping to build a new open-source speech dataset for the Kinyarwanda language that involves a lot of volunteers recording themselves reading Kinyarwanda newspaper articles and other texts.

They are native speakers. They understand the language, said Muhire, a fellow at Mozilla, maker of the Firefox internet browser. Part of the project involves a collaboration with a government-supported smartphone app that answers questions about COVID-19. To improve the AI systems in various African languages, Masakhane researchers are also tapping into news sources across the continent, including Voice of Americas Hausa service and the BBC broadcast in Igbo.

Increasingly, people are banding together to develop their own language approaches instead of waiting for elite institutions to solve problems, said Damin Blasi, who researches linguistic diversity at the Harvard Data Science Initiative.

Blasi co-authored a recent study that analyzed the uneven development of language technology across the worlds more than 6,000 languages. For instance, it found that while Dutch and Swahili both have tens of millions of speakers, there are hundreds of scientific reports on natural language processing in the Western European language and only about 20 in the East African one.___OBrien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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In Africa, rescuing the languages that Western tech ignores - PBS NewsHour

Published On 24 December,202106:12 am

President Alvi appreciated the role of overseas Pakistanis in country's socio-economic development.

ISLAMABAD (Dunya News) - President Dr Arif Alvi on Thursday urged the overseas Pakistanis to invest in their homeland, which was fast emerging as Asias premier investment and trade hub.

He emphasized the need for linking up Pakistani Diaspora with the industry, academia, experts and the relevant organizations in the country for proper utilization of their intellectual and business talent.

The President made these remarks while talking to a delegation of US-based overseas Pakistanis, which led by President Aspire Pakistan, Hassan Syed, called on him here at the Aiwan-e-Sadr.

The President said that Pakistan was improving and training its available human resource by imparting them contemporary skills and modern education.

He stated that efforts were being made to increase the number of university graduates, besides enhancing the quality of education.

Steps were being taken for digitalization of economy which would further boost foreign direct investment in Pakistan, he added.

The President was told that Aspire Pakistan was a network of overseas entrepreneurs, investors and technology experts with a vision to make Pakistan socially and economically prosperous through innovation and entrepreneurship.

The President appreciated the role of overseas Pakistanis in the countrys socio-economic development.

Originally posted here:

President urges overseas Pakistanis to invest in their homeland - Dunya News

US Summit for Democracy. (Photo: via Social media)

By Jim Miles

The US Summit for Democracy has come and gone without too much fuss. It was a strange little show with the leader of the so called free world being those democratic countries that for whatever reason support US dictates attempting through rhetoric and probably a few winks and nods to maintain its establishment as the groups leader. From what I saw in the MSM it really amounted to little and may well have shown how weak the supposed leadership is.

It did however raise the very good question of what democracy is. From its etymological roots, it simply means essentially power by the people although even that has various interpretations, none straying far from that simplicity. As for practical applications, there are many different routes that can be taken, different levels of democracy depending on initial premises. For example, the idea that capitalism is the main pillar of democracy is a premise that allows all kinds of actions that are decidedly non-democratic. To present arguments as to what democracy leads into a mess of philosophical arguments leaving no verbiage unturned in pursuit of its definition to support politicians practical applications.

It is therefore not a good argument to get into. Instead what makes more sense is to look at how societies apply their laws domestically in practical situations towards their citizens and with foreign affairs against others. In other words, the following is more a look at actions taken that are definitely non-democratic, a view that seriously limits the understanding of democracy as power by the people.

Freedom and Democracy

There needs to be a differentiation between freedom and democracy. While the two go together well, freedom can be had without democratic control, according to the whims of the government, and according to the perhaps unseen aspects of domestic control (laws and belief systems) that are disguised as freedom. An example of the latter would be the theorized rugged individualism as propounded by many US authorities which really indicates that, if one cannot make it in society it is all your own fault and not societys.

Domestic

There are some big obvious practical issues that deny democracy. Probably the biggest is racism in its many forms. Different laws for different sections of the population based on race or ethnic background are decidedly non-democratic. This includes various reservation systems as applied to all the British colonial heritage countries, mainly the Five Eyes, the imperial system as exercised in Canada, the US New Zealand, and Australia. It includes apartheid states like Israel, and formerly South Africa.

Domestic spying is another form of non-democratic action. Still, with the Five Eyes, their nominal designation is based on their actions of spying on foreign countries, including those within the group one of their main purposes is to avoid the legal entanglement of a government spying on its own people. Other countries are not so constrained and any government that has a security system for internal security certainly spies on its citizens. Canadas government has its Communications Security Establishment (1946) and its better-known component, CSIS. The USas various spy and policing agencies, the FBI being the best known, keeping records on many of its citizens mainly for political reasons. Israels Shin Bet works hand in hand with the military to control the indigenous Palestinian population.

Along with those spy organizations goes a highly militarized police force. These forces are used to control opposition street-level (democratic) protests against mostly corporate actions supported by governments. This comes back to reservations and apartheid as much of the use of militarized police is to control domestic protests originating from land and resource arguments from indigenous populations. Accompanying this on various levels are outright murder, torture, inhumane treatment, and outright deniers of humanitarian law. Examined in this light, the Five Eyes and Israel are decidedly non-democratic.

Election laws and rules have a large impact on the application of democracy. For all its self-vaunted mastery of democracy, the whole US system is clearly non-democratic. They put on a great show with constant year-round electioneering and much less governing for the people. The current system of the Electoral College was mainly established to keep the rabble, the factions from having any say in governance. The gerrymandered districts effectively assure certain areas of remaining with a particular party and are usually based on race or ethnic background although in Ireland it contains the religious component as well (although that is mostly ethnic-immigrant Scots versus indigenous Irish). Many other smaller seemingly innocuous laws limit democracy, some being simply outright petty and stupid, such as Georgias law against giving water to voters.

One of the larger factors in the US is the huge amount of money corporations are allowed to spend on elections as determined by Citizens United in which donations of money are considered free speech and corporations are people. Supposedly intelligent people believe this stupidity mainly as it serves their own power and finances. There is no peoples power when corporations are usually able to buy their favored candidate. The combination of predatory financialization (meaning most of us to live in debt servitude of some kind) to some bank or other) and corporate militarism (spending huge amounts of money liberally distributed throughout the country for political gains) certainly do not give power to the people.

Corporations

The corporate world straddles the domestic and foreign affairs realm. Basically, corporations are non-democratic by nature. Their purpose is to make profits and protect owners against financial losses as well as externalized costs such as environmental damage which includes the poisons of resource extraction, the removal of land from public or indigenous jurisdiction, and the creation of an impoverished workforce.

Much of that profit recently has come from the huge amounts of Quantitative Easing supplied by the US Government in liaison with the Federal Reserve (a series of private banks supposedly directing the economy). The stock markets and commodities markets are all manipulated and serve mostly the wealthy who benefit most from the tax cuts, low-interest rates, and government subsidies.

Corporations can be simply about business, but as seen above, corporations are also well tied into the security apparatus of the country, from the militarized police forces to laws that generally protect the rights of corporations over the rights of citizens, in particular indigenous citizens. Further, many that appear to be superficially benign are highly involved in the production of equipment and materials for various spy agencies and military agencies. Boeing, Kodak, Intel, General Electric, Amazon, Facebook are all well known domestic names with strong ties to the military and security apparatus of the US Israeli corporations are highly militarized as is the state and its field-tested security and military equipment is sold around the world to various other governments acting in a non-democratic manner.

Canadas corporations act decidedly in a non-democratic manner in certain situations apart from the externalized costs. Mining, forestry, and energy companies frequently intrude on indigenous land and retain special rights also to public lands. With the ultimate control of all land-based on the sovereign as per millennia-old racist laws, governments and corporations operate together against the will of the people.

Foreign Affairs- Economic

Apart from domestic non-democratic actions, actions taken within or against other countries are frequently non-democratic. It is a combination of military and economic actions that are used to deny the sovereignty of other nations even if many are nominally democratic.

Free trade is one of the more obvious non-democratic sets of rules globally. Designed in secret without public input, seldom if ever voted on either by referendum or representatives[1], these agreements are designed to give freedom only to the movement of money and profits. Any impedance to that movement is generally fought not in the courts but in private arbitration structures that abide by the decisions of the theoretical experts chosen by the aggrieved complainant, usually a large international corporation.

The agreements have nothing free for the workers and end up weakening workers rights. There is nothing free for the environment and quite the opposite pretend losses due to environmental laws are liable to lawsuit compensation against governments. Which adds to the point that people are not able to sue governments, in some cases governments cannot sue corporations, yet corporations are free to sue governments.

The global financial institutions are not democratic by any definition. Mostly controlled by the US the US or EU based international corporations (banksters et al) democracy is not available to those coming under the dictates of the IMF and World Bank [2], nor the larger constraints of the SWIFT settlement system or the rulings of the global oversight Bank of International Settlements (BIS).

Beyond the manipulations of financial institutions is the use of sanctions. Sanctions can be applied in a positive manner as exemplified by the BDS sanctions that worked to eliminate apartheid in South Africa [3] and are currently being used to support Palestinian rights in occupied Palestine (being all of Israel). Both of these uses developed from grassroots initiatives, truly democratic actions against oppressive non-democratic regimes.

Using sanctions as an economic/military weapon has become the main method of international relations with the US. Arguably better than outright war, they cause enormous suffering mostly to the citizens of the countries they are applied to. What is currently working against them is the indigenous resistance against ceding to the demands of the sanctions. Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Syria are all surviving the sanctions imposed by the US and its allies of the west, establishing a resistance to empire supported by other countries with more resources.

Russia to a degree has actually benefited from sanctions as it, fortunately, has a large resource base and has become a strong agricultural center. It has also divested itself of ties to US debt obligations and on a debt to GDP ratio is probably one of the strongest economic countries in the world. Counter to desires, sanctions have also pushed Russia and China much closer geopolitically creating a new multipolar world that does not necessarily make it all democratic, but it puts a preventative in place against US military and economic aggression.

Foreign Affairs Military

There is not much really needed to say about how military interventions and occupations are anti-democratic. Having ones country destroyed by someone elses military on any pretense simply denies democracy. The supposed right to protect mantra used by the US and NATO on several occasions has proven to be a total disaster which arguably is one of the hoped-for outcomes as these disasters are profitable for the corporate militarized world and ideal to shape a failed country that needs submit to imperial desires.

The US/NATO are the primary guilty party for all kinds of military interventions used to serve the purpose of the empire. Yugoslavia/Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ethiopia are all current examples of either direct western military interference or subsidized military manipulation. There are many other smaller events occurring globally, directed and supported by the US and allied (MI6, Mossad, CSIS) covert services. It is tiring to repeat it, but it is significant with over 800 military bases around the world in over 125 countries, U.S./NATO/EU foreign policy is mainly determined by illegal military interventions.

Democracy Now?

Contemporary geopolitical currents make global democracy a highly contentious issue. The US empire is continually looking for a bad guy as required by the military-industrial-financial community in order to maintain their power over the people of the world. They are currently acting aggressively against both China and Russia with two areas Ukraine and Taiwan being possible flashpoints for some kind of war, while continuing their smaller aggressive actions in areas of geopolitical interest Ethiopia and Yemen being two of many current hotspots.

Beyond wars, the current world of financial manipulations has led to huge inequalities within countries and between countries. Structured mostly on debt manipulations of one kind or another, the US economic system is slowly having its impact reduced, but its overall enormity mostly due to the global reserve nature of its currency keeps it powerful. But power built on debt and large manipulations of economic factors could also lead to an equally enormous collapse.

Finally, one of the more discussed but practically ignored situations is climate change. Lots of greenwashing occur but until the grassroots of society change and demand change to the overall debt-burdened consumer society powered by economic structures and military structures, climate impacts will simply be absorbed and placed under the rubric of disaster capitalism, and the corporate interests will harvest their profits until flooded or burned out.

In sum, democracy is a wonderful ideal, superficially widespread, but with major aspects of society that truly deny it. Many places have personal freedom, but limited also for many by economic, social, educational, and other civic structures, many racist, many class-oriented. Until the non-democratic aspects of the financial world, the military world, and global climate change are dealt with, democracy will be a commodity in name only.

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When Democracy is Commodified: On the US Summit for Democracy and Other Ruses - Palestine Chronicle