Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence In Schools Is Closer Than You Think Forbes Education stands to benefit from rapid developments in artificial intelligence. But historically, adaptive learning software has been programmed in a top-down fashion. It asks a question, and if the child provides a particular answer, a set of prompts ...

Read more:

Artificial Intelligence In Schools Is Closer Than You Think - Forbes

When learning becomes cognition. Photograph by Agliolo Mike Getty Images/Photo Researchers RM

Spanish lender Banco Santander SA has invested in two artificial-intelligence companies, part of the financial industry's increased focus on technology smart enough to mimic human thinking, sources familiar with the deals told Reuters.

The bank's venture arm, Santander InnoVentures, bought stakes in Personetics Technologies, which provides automated customer service, and Gridspace, whose software can learn and interpret language the way a person would, the sources said.

The size of the investments could not be determined and the sources asked not to be named because they were not allowed to disclose the information publicly.

Get Data Sheet , Fortunes technology newsletter.

The deals underscore how lenders have become more interested in using artificial intelligence for a wide variety of tasks, including hiring, spotting fraud, improving call centers and recommending products for customers.

Personetics, which has offices in New York, London and Tel Aviv, creates "chatbots" that can respond to customer questions through popular messaging platforms like Facebook's ( fb ) Messenger. French bank Societe Generale, for instance, is using Personetics to answer queries about equity funds in its Romanian banking unit.

San Francisco-based Gridspace's technology can be used by banks to monitor conversations between customers and employees at call centers to improve service.

Its Time to Hire a Chief AI Officer

Santander ( san ) set up its London-based InnoVentures group in 2014 to invest in young financial-technology companies that can improve its digital offerings. The division was initially allocated $100 million to invest but was given an extra $100 million in July.

It has backed more than a dozen companies so far, including automated wealth manager SigFig, Swedish payments company iZettle and Digital Asset Holdings, which develops blockchain software and is led by former JPMorgan Chase & Co ( jpm ) commodities chief Blythe Masters.

Other global banks have venture units with similar remits. Santander InnoVentures was among the most active bank-owned investors in fintech companies last year, alongside Goldman Sachs Group ( gs ) and Citigroup ( c ) , according to data by CB Insights.

Follow this link:

Banco Santander Invests in Artificial Intelligence Startups - Fortune

You must sign in or register to continue reading content.

By Steven Overly

The Washington Post

Facebook plans to use artificial intelligence to identify posts that might promote or glorify terrorism, a move that follows growing concern about terrorists efforts to recruit on social networks.

In a 5,700-word missive posted Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the technology will take many years to fully develop because it requires software sophisticated enough to distinguish between a news story about a terrorist attack and efforts to recruit on behalf of a terrorist organization.

Currently, Facebook largely relies on users to flag questionable content.

Zuckerberg also expounded on the companys efforts to build a global community through Facebook, and wrote that its success will depend on whether were building a community that helps keep us safe that prevents harm, helps during crises, and rebuilds afterwards.

Critics have taken aim at Facebook, along with other social networks, for what they see as insufficient efforts to police the content transmitted across its network. From propaganda shared by suspected terrorists to suicides streamed live to friends and family, social networks have inadvertently become a breeding ground for the unsavory sides of the Internet.

Terrorism has been a particularly sensitive topic. A Department of Justice official told CNBC last October that most cases of domestic terrorism begin with communication on social media and that terrorism groups are targeting their messages at young people.

Looking ahead, one of our greatest opportunities to keep people safe is building artificial intelligence to understand more quickly and accurately what is happening across our community, Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook has attempted to tamp down potential terrorist propaganda for more than a year. A Wall Street Journal report from February 2016 said pressure from the government prompted the company to remove profiles of those suspected of supporting terrorism and scrutinize their friends posts more carefully.

In December, CNN reported that Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft would create a shared database to track and delete violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos.

Facebooks attempts to filter, or not filter, content on its network has led to controversy before. The company came under fire for failing to stop fake news stories from circulating during the recent presidential campaign, but also alarmed conservatives who expressed concern their views were being suppressed. Zuckerberg acknowledged the fake news problem in his letter Thursday, though he did not say whether artificial intelligence might help solve that challenge as well.

The letter states:

There are billions of posts, comments and messages across our services each day, and since its impossible to review all of them, we review content once it is reported to us. There have been terribly tragic events like suicides, some live streamed that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more.

More:

Facebook to use artificial intelligence to ID terrorist posts - The Daily Herald

The use of artificial intelligence and the next-generation of virtual learning environments (VLEs) are two areas of technology that have been forecast to have a major impact on higher education in the future, according to the expert panel of a major new report.

The NMC Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Editionis produced by the New Media Consortium a community of hundreds of universities, colleges, museums and research organisations driving innovation across their campuses and is the flagship publication of the NMC Horizon Project, which analyses emerging technology uptake in education.

Artificial intelligence, the report notes, has the potential to enhance online learning, adaptive learning software, and research processes in ways that more intuitively respond to and engage with students.

Samantha Adams Becker, senior director of publications and communications at NMC and the reports editor, said that the higher education world was already seeing the initial benefits of AI, which was very much driving the adaptive learning field.

If you think about online courses where there may be hundreds of students, its currently very difficult for a professor or instructor to maybe get a good grasp on how students not only are performing, but are feeling about the materialas theyre lecturing or a videos playing, she said.

Virtual avatars and chatbotshave the ability to assess that on an individual level, and if the student seems stuck then maybe you can replay part of the video. Or if a student seems bored, it can indicate to the instructor that its time to move on to new material.

Adaptive learning leverages basic AI algorithms to personalise learning and deliver content that students need. Theyre learning about students as students learn, which is helpful in informing educators and providing them with datasets to analyse and understand the needs of individuals and their classes as a whole. The possibilities are endless.

Meanwhile, the next generation of learning management systems (LMS) also referred to as VLEs was a topic entirely new to the Horizon project, according to Ms Adams Becker.

LMS is a category of software and web applications enabling the online delivery of course materials as well as the tracking and reporting of student participation.

Although they have been in use in higher education for some time to manage and administer online and blended courses and as a portal for students to access syllabuses, submit assignments or check grades some experts believe that they are limited in capacity and too narrowly focused on the administration of learning rather than the learning itself, the report notes.

Next-generation LMS refers to the development of more flexible spaces that support personalisation, meet universal design standards, and play a larger role in formative learning assessment, the report states.

Ms Adams Becker said that the technology would enable educational leaders at universities to unbundle all the components of the learning experience and allow them to repurpose content and educational apps in unique and compelling ways.

john.elmes@tesglobal.com

Go here to see the original:

Artificial intelligence 'to revolutionise higher education' - Times Higher Education (THE)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is being counted (pdf) among the hottest startup sectors in India this year, but the highly specialised space is struggling to grow due to the lack of a primary input: engineers.

Forget getting people of our choice, we dont even get applications when we advertise for positions for our AI team, said 25-year-old Tushar Chhabra, co-founder of Cron Systems, which builds internet of things (IOT)-related solutions for the defence sector. Its as if people are scared of the words artificial intelligence. They start freaking out when we ask them questions about AI.

India has over 170 startups focused purely on AI, which have together raised over $36 million. The sector has received validation from marquee investors like Sequoia Capital, Kalaari Capital, and business icon Ratan Tata. But entrepreneurs are struggling to expand due to a shortage of engineers with skills related to robotics, machine learning, analytics, and automation.

Racetrack.ai co-founders Subrat Parida and Navneet Gupta say that around 40% of their working time is spent searching for the right talent. Bengaluru-based Racetrack.ai has built an AI-driven communication bot called Marvin. People are the core strength of a startup. So hiring for a startup is very challenging. We are not looking for the regular tech talent and, since AI is a relatively new field in India, you dont get people with past experience in working on those technologies, Parida, also the CEO, told Quartz.

Only 4% of AI professionals in India have actually worked on cutting-edge technologies like deep learning and neural networks, which are the key ingredients for building advanced AI-related solutions, according to recruitment startup Belong, which often helps its clients discover and recruit AI professionals.

Also, many such companies require candidates with PhD degrees in AI-related technologies, which is rare in India.

While it takes a company just a month to find a good app developer, it could take up to three months to fill up a position in the AI space, said Harishankaran K, co-founder and CTO of HackerRank, which helps companies hire tech talent through coding challenges.

India is among the top countries in terms of the number of engineers graduating every year. But the engineering talent here has traditionally been largely focused on IT and not research and innovation.

Fields like AI require a mindset of research and experimentation. But most aspiring engineers in India follow a pattern: finish school, go to IIT, do an MBA, and then take up a job, said PK Viswanathan, professor of business intelligence at the Great Lakes Institute of Management in Chennai. To work on AI, you need people who not only have a strong technology background, but also have analytical thinking, puzzle-solving skills, and they should not be scared of numbers, he added.

Ironically, the subject has been a part of the curriculum at some engineering schools for almost a decade. However, what is taught there is mostly irrelevant to the real world.

Sachin Jaiswal, who graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2011, studied some aspects of AI back in college. But whatever he is doing at his two-year-old startup Niki.aiit has built a bot that lets users order anything through a chat interfaceis based on what he learned in his earlier jobs, he said.

A lot of people are disillusioned when they come out of college and begin their first jobs, said Jaiswal, whose startup is backed by Ratan Tata.

In fact, even now, when he interacts with graduates from elite institutes to hire them, he sees a glaring gap between what these youngsters have learned and what is needed on the work floor.

Given the shortage of AI-related talent in India, several startups aspire to tap Silicon Valley. But thats not a feasible solution for young teams.

A few months back, Chhabra of Cron Systems was in talks with a US-based engineer, an IIT-Delhi alumnus working on AI for seven years. The guy asked for Rs2.5 crore per annum as salary. As a startup you cannot afford that price, said Chhabra.

Cron Systems has found a jugaad to solve their problem, Chhabra said. Late last year, the company hired a bunch of engineers with basic skills needed to create AI-related solutions and trained them.

We broke down AI into smaller pieces and hired six tech professionals who understood those basic skills well. Then we conducted a three-month training for these people and brought them onboard with what we do, Chhabra said.

Niki.ai, too, is following this hire-and-train model. Training takes time and investment but we have no option because we need the talent, Jaiswal of Niki.ai told Quartz. If we had better access to talent, things would have been better.

Gurugram-based AI startup Staqu has started partnering with academic institutions to build a steady pipeline of engineers and researchers.

Despite this struggle, entrepreneurs and investors in India feel bullish.

In an ecosystem where e-commerce and food delivery hog the limelight, a recent report by venture lending firm InnoVen Capital named AI one of the most under-hyped sectors. But that is set to change, said London-based angel investor Sanjay Choudhary.

In September 2016, Choudhary invested in Delhi-based AI startup Corseco Technologies. He regularly interacts with the companys team and the genuine issue of finding talent comes up frequently, he told Quartz.

India is a late entrant into the AI space and talent crunch will be a challenge for the industry for some time to come, he said. But I plan to continue investing in AI in India because I feel that the space has a lot of potential and needs to be supported.

While there seems no end to the struggle, Jaiswal of Niki.ai sees a silver lining: Talent crunch ensures that companies cant enter the field easily. So we have a competitive edge.

Go here to see the original:

Indian engineers need to stop being so afraid of the term artificial intelligence - Quartz

Each winter, hundreds of AI researchers from around the world convene at the annual meeting of the Association of the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Last year, a minor crisis erupted over the schedule, when AAAI announced that 2017s meeting would take place in New Orleans in late January. The location was fine. The dates happened to conflict with Chinese New Year.

The holiday might not have been a deal breaker in the past, but Chinese researchers have become so integral to the meeting, it could not go on without them. They had to reschedule. Nobody would have put AAAI on Christmas day, says current AAAI president Subbarao Kambhampati. Our organization had to almost turn on a dime and change the conference venue to hold it a week later.

The 2017 AAAI meetingwhich ultimately relocated to San Franciscowrapped up just last week. And as expected, Chinese researchers had a strong showing in the historically U.S.-dominated conference. A nearly equal number of accepted papers came from researchers based in China and the U.S. This is pretty surprising and impressive given how different it was even three, four years back, says Rao.

Chinas rapid rise up the ranks of AI research has people taking notice. In October, the Obama White House released a strategic plan for AI research, which noted that the U.S. no longer leads the world in journal articles on deep learning, a particularly hot subset of AI research right now. The country that had overtaken the U.S.? China, of course.

Its not just academic research. Chinese tech companies are betting on AI, too. Baidu (a Chinese search-engine company often likened to Google), Didi (often likened to Uber), and Tencent (maker of the mega-popular messaging app WeChat) have all set up their own AI research labs. With millions of customers, these companies have access to the huge amount of data that training AI to detect patterns requires.

Like the Microsofts and Googles of the world, Chinese tech companies see enormous potential in AI. It could undergird a whole set of transformative technologies in the coming decades, from facial recognition to autonomous cars.I have a hard time thinking of an industry we cannot transform with AI, says Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu. Ng previously cofounded Coursera and Google Brain, the companys deep learning project. Now he directs Baidus AI research out of Sunnyvale, California, right in Silicon Valley.

* * *

Chinas success in AI has been partly fueled by the governments overall investment in scientific research at its universities. Over the past decade, government spending on research has grown by double digits on average every year. Funding of science and technology research continues to be a major priority, as outlined by the the Five-Year Plan unveiled this past March.

When Rao first started seeing Chinese researchers at international AI meetings, he recalls they were usually from Tsinghua and Peking University, considered the MIT and Harvard of China. Now, he sees papers from researchers all over the country, not just the most elite schools. Machine learningwhich includes deep learninghas been an especially popular topic lately. The number of people who got interested in applied machine learning has tremendously increased across China, says Rao. This is the same uptick that the White House noticed in its report on a strategic plan for AI research.

Chinese tech companies are part of the infusion of research dollars to universities, too. At Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, computer scientist Qiang Yang collaborates with Tencent, which sponsors scholarships for students in his lab.

The students get access to mountains of data from WeChat, the messaging app from Tencent that is akin to Facebook, iMessage, and Venmo all rolled into one. (With AI, they cant do it without a lot of data and a platform to test it on, says Yang, which is why industry collaboration is so key.) In return, Tencent gets a direct line to some of the most innovative research coming out of academic labs. And of course, some of these students end up working at Tencent when they graduate.

The quantity of Chinese AI research has grown dramatically, but researchers in the U.S. are still responsible for a lot of the most fundamental groundbreaking work. The very clever ideas on changing network architecture, I see those in the U.S., says Ng. What Chinese researchers have been very good at doing is seizing on an idealike machine learningand cranking out papers on its different applications.

Yet as the research matures in China, Ng says, it is also becoming its own distinct community. After a recent international meeting in Barcelona, he recalls seeing Chinese language write-ups of the talks circulate right way. He never found any in English. The language issue creates a kind of asymmetry: Chinese researchers usually speak English so they have the benefit of access to all the work disseminated in English. The English-speaking community, on the other hand, is much less likely to have access to work within the Chinese AI community.

China has a fairly deep awareness of whats happening in the English-speaking world, but the opposite is not true, says Ng. He points out that Baidu has rolled out machine translation and voice recognition services powered by AIbut when Google and Microsoft, respectively, did so later, the American companies got a lot more publicity.

And when it comes to actually shipping new features, China companies can move more quickly. The velocity of work is much faster in China than in most of Silicon Valley, says Ng. When you spot a business opportunity in China, the window of time you have to respond usually very shortshorter in China than the United States.

Yang chalks it up to Chinas highly competitive ecosystem. WeChat, for example, has built a set of features around QR codes (yes, really), chat, payments, and friend discovery that make it indispensable to daily life in China. American social media companies only wish they had that kind of loyalty. Product managers at Tencent have good sense of what customers want, and they can can quickly turn technology into reality, says Yang. This cycle is very short. And to stay competitive, theyre primed to integrate AI to improve their products. Whether Chinese tech companies use the AI wave to break into the international market remains to be seenbut theyre already using AI to compete for customers in China.

In the academic world, AAAI has now taken steps to make sure Chinese researchers have input on the meetings. The exact date of Chinese New Year changes every year, but its always in January or February, when the AAAI meeting usually takes place. Cant have them conflicting again.

See the original post:

China's Artificial-Intelligence Boom - The Atlantic

Forbes

Are Artificial Intelligence Companies Obliged To Retrain Technologically Displaced Workers? Forbes Don't technology companies who promote AI as the way forward also have an obligation to retrain our workforce to deal with the coming job disruption? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from ...

Continue reading here:

Are Artificial Intelligence Companies Obliged To Retrain Technologically Displaced Workers? - Forbes

The European Parliament today called for EU-wide liability laws to cover robotics and artificial intelligence. MEPs also want researchers to adopt ethical standards that "respect human dignity".

In a resolution today MEPs noted that several countries are planning robotics regulations and that the EU needs to take the lead on setting these standards, so as not to be forced to follow those set by third countries.

According to a European Parliamentary press release, MEPs said draft legislation was urgently needed to clarify liability in accidents involving self-driving cars.

Although manufacturers including Volvo, Google, and Mercedes say they will accept full liability if their autonomous vehicles cause a collision, this is not currently a legal requirement.

MEPs recommended a mandatory insurance scheme and a supplementary fund to ensure that victims of accidents involving driverless cars are fully compensated.

Additionally, they propose a voluntary ethical code of conduct for robotics researchers and designers to ensure that the machines operate in accordance with legal and ethical standards and that robot design and their use respect human dignity.

The resolution arises from a report by Mady Delvaux MEP, which was adopted by the European Parliaments committee on legal affairs in January.

Several of its clauses regarding the potential introduction of a basic income to deal with the effect that robotics and artificial intelligence may have on the jobs market were removed, prompting Delvaux to complain: Although I am pleased that the plenary adopted my report on robotics, I am also disappointed that the right-wing coalition of ALDE, EPP and ECR refused to take account of possible negative consequences on the job market. They rejected an open-minded and forward-looking debate and thus disregarded the concerns of our citizens.

MEPs also asked the Commission to consider creating a European agency for robotics and artificial intelligence, which would be available to supply public authorities with technical, ethical and regulatory expertise.

The European Parliament resolution will now be answered by the European Commission, which alone has legislative initiative in the EU. The Commission is not obliged to draft new laws but must explain its rationale for rejecting Parliamentary resolutions.

Therese Comodini Cachia MEP, of the Maltese centre-right Nationalist Party and Parliament's rapporteur for robotics, said: Despite the sensations reported in the past months, I wish to make one thing clear: Robots are not humans and never will be," EU Reporter reports. "No matter how autonomous and self-learning they become they do not attain the characteristics of a living human being. Robots will not enjoy the same legal physical personality.

"However for the purposes of the liability for damages caused by robots, the various legal possibilities need to be explored. Who will bear responsibility in case of an accident of an automated car? How will any legal solution affect the development of robotics, those who own them and victims of the damage?

We invite the European Commission to consider the impact of different solutions to make sure that harm caused to persons and to our environment is properly addressed, she concluded.

Go here to see the original:

MEPs in 'urgent' call for new laws on artificial intelligence and robotics - The Register

While leading Google through the aughts, Eric Schmidt made a miscalculation.

"I was proven completely wrong" about artificial intelligence, Alphabet's executive chairman said at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Schmidt has initially skeptical about the technology, and he's since acknowledged how vital it is to both the company's mission and to the global economy.

Indeed, Google ( goog ) CEO Sundar Pichai has described the world as having entered an "AI-first" era. The preceding phase was a focus on all things mobile- and smartphone-first (see: Android), according to Pichai, who succeeded Schmidt after a second CEO stint by Google co-founder Larry Page.

Get Data Sheet , Fortune s technology newsletter.

Schmidt's assessment back then was that artificial intelligence research faced tremendous obstacles that inhibited its progress. He "didn't think it would scale," he said of the machine learning tech.

And he said he also didn't think it would "generalize," meaning becoming more flexible and elastic, like the human mind, rather than remaining a specialized tool suited only to specific tasks.

Schmidt had underestimated the power of simple algorithms to "emulate very complex things," he said, while qualifying that "we're still in the baby stages of doing conceptual learning."

Read more: Forget Artificial Intelligence. Why 'Artificial Stupidity' Is the Real Threat

In other words, computer scientists are still teaching machines to heuristically categorize basic elements of the world: building representations of "things" and "actions" by parsing the components of images (like colors, shapes, and lines), as well as sounds (like tones, pitches, and phonemes).

"General AI," or mimicking the elasticity of human thought, is still decades away from reality, by Schmidt's estimation. But he has become more bullish about the prospect in recent years.

For more on artificial intelligence, watch Fortune' s video:

The moment that changed everything, he said, was the success of a particular Google experiment involving neural networks in 2012. Ironically, Schmidt said, the team's creation didn't uncover some major mathematical breakthrough. Rather, it found something far more mundane.

"You'd think it would have been the discovery of basic set theory," Schmidt said, referring to an esoteric realm of mathematics. "Instead, it was the discovery of cats on YouTube."

Indeed, the Google Brain team had tasked thousands of computer processors with recognizing objects in YouTube video thumbnail images. The resultan ability to distinguish catshelped launch a wave of renewed interest in the field of deep learning. (For more on that tech revolution, read this recent Fortune feature .)

As far as questions about apocalyptic scenarios, like a robot uprising, Schmidt echoed statements he has made in the past by throwing water on the alarmists. "These are important philosophical questions, but ones that we're not facing right now," he said.

In Schmidt's view, the positives far outweigh the negatives for AI. "Things that bedevil us, like traffic accidents and medical diagnoses will get better," he said.

"I will stake my reputation that that will be the real narrative over the next five years."

Read more:

Google's Eric Schmidt: 'I Was Wrong' About Artificial Intelligence ... - Fortune

EMERGING TECH

The future of federal IT belongs to CIOs who can build flexible, nimble organizations able to maximize the advantage of existing technologies like cloud services and automated machine intelligence while laying the groundwork for a range of emerging technologies on the horizon.

Thats according to a new report on government technology trends for 2017 published Wednesday by Deloitte. Researchers identified eight technologies they believe have an opportunity to disrupt and change the way the federal government leverages information, data and software over the next two years.

Some are a continuation of existing trends that are already established, like IT consolidation and greater reliance on cloud-based software and services. Others, like artificial intelligence, mixed reality and nanotechnology veer more into the outer edges of what is currently possible today, but may have far more relevance a few years down the line.

Scott Buchholtz, director of systems integration at Deloitte, said he is optimistic that the changing federal landscape will provide both the necessary space and incentive for CIOs to start thinking beyond their old legacy architectures.

I believe that some of the changing demographics in the marketplace, some of the restrictions on budgets that were likely to see and some of the convergence going on are likely to make government more open to automation and the role of technologythat a lot of our commercial clients have been using for years, said Buchholtz.

That includes tools like artificial intelligence, machine learning, along with virtual and augmented reality. Buccholtz said these still-nascent technologies have the potential for broad application in federal IT, but need more trailblazers willing to create successful and relevant test cases.

Last year, the Obama administration encouraged agencies to create their own high-risk, high-reward research on AI, remarking, the walls between humans and AI systems are slowly beginning to erode. Last October, the General Services Administration launched new digital communities to provide agency guidance on how to incorporate AI and mixed reality.

According to Deniece Peterson, director of federal market analysis at Deltek (disclosure: the author previously worked at Deltek), this has set the stage for IT managers to start laying the groundwork for some these technologies in 2017 and begin pilot and test programs to build a case for broader adoption down the line.

When it comes to dollars, a lot of this is stuff thats popping up in R&D [budgets] so when they want to expand it, they have an example to point to, Peterson said.

Breaking down the silos between IT and the agencies they serve is another trend that is expected to accelerate over the next two years. Building on past consolidation efforts, IT unbounded is Deloittes term for the process federal CIOs are using to change their operations in order to better match the nimble, adaptable nature of their private sector counterparts.

These efforts might get a boost in the form of a new president who hails from the private sector and has often spoke of making government work more like a business.

I believe that the new administration is placing a very different focus than has traditionally been the case on technology and management of technology, Buchholtz said. Were still in the early days, so it remains to be seen, but there are many indications that theres going to be a much higher expectation for outcomes and results, particularly in the technology space.

Peterson said a Trump administration may have the will to change the way federal IT works, but bureaucratic red tape and the long-term nature of the budget, appropriations and contracting cycles perpetually leave agencies dealing with yesterdays technology solutions.

Absent passage of legislative reform such as the Modernizing Government Technology Act, that process is likely to continue hampering efforts to make the federal government more nimble.

If the Trump administrations intent could meet with Congress passing [IT modernization reform], it will be a step in the right direction, said Peterson.

Rounding out Deloittes other trends are a greater reliance on inevitable architecture like cloud-based services and automated technologies that have been steadily gaining traction over the past few years, along with a list of exponential technologies like quantum computing, nanotechnology and biotechnology. These are the tools that Deloitte thinks will form the foundations of the modern IT architecture. To get there, Buchholtz said IT managers will need the freedom to think outside the box and discard the risk-adverse mindset that currently dominates federal decision making.

I think its important to realize that we collectively as a country have created an environment where failed experiments are punished disproportionately to success, Buchholtz said. We need to figure out how to better enable those with vision to fail small and fail quickly, but also get up, keep going and learn [the necessary] lessons.

About the Author

Derek B. Johnson is a freelance writer.

See the original post here:

Artificial intelligence and the promise of a changing federal landscape - Washington Technology