Category: Reading

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Your Face Belongs to Us

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It by Kashmir Hill

Kashmir holds a masters degrees in journalism from New York University. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Kashmir is a technology reporter at The New York Times after having worked at Gizmodo Media Group, Fusion, Forbes Magazine, and Above the Law.

Perhaps of the most shocking books in fact that I have read in some time. Kashmir is documenting how a small AI company provided facial recognition to law enforcement, billionaires, and businesses. Yet, it should be no surprise this has eroded privacy as we know it.

Kashmir introduces readers to this chilling story as a skeptic. A tip regarding a mysterious app called Clearview AI held a claim it could with 99% accuracy identify anyone based upon a single photograph of their face. The app indeed provided a person’s online name, social media profiles, friends, family members, and their home address. This was just for starters and in the wrong hands, would be a very powerful surveillance tool.

Clearview AI was a start up run by Australian computer engineer Hoan Ton-That and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor. The company was funded by conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel. In contrast, Google and Facebook chose that this type of tool was too dangerous to release. However, via private investors, Clerview AI would be pitched to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Profit over Privacy

Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain.

Profit over Privacy: How Surveillance Advertising Conquered the Internet by Matthew Crain

Matthew holds a PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is an assistant professor of media and communication at Miami University of Ohio and previously taught at Queens College, City University of New York.

The contemporary internet’s de facto business model is one of Surveillance has been the new black. While browser cookies follow us around the web, Web beacons can track and harvest every Google search, every webpage visited, In fact, on a growing number of global websites, beacons know where you click. Yes indeed they know everything about you and are monetizing all of your online activities every day.

In Profit over Privacy, Matthew is delivering a solid historical beginning to the billion dollar surveillance advertising business.

In fact, Facebook posted revenues over $319 billion in 2021 alone. Surprised learning this is below their 2020 revenue? The loss of our privacy is via Facebook, Google, and Amazon. They certainly resell our online activity to data brokers.

Matthew is tracing this surveillance advertising back to the Clinton administration. This includes the launch of the country’s Nation Information Infrastructure and how the long established Information Infrastructure Task Force (IITF) designed a safe approach which did acknowledge the coming online profiling of citizens. The FTC also looked to consumer empowerment. But in America, politics ran amok.

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Education Reading Technology

Latest Read: 97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know

97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts. Edited by Tobias Macey, host of the popular Data Engineering Podcast.

97 Things Every Data Engineer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts by Tobias Macey

This book presents 97 concise and useful tips for cleaning, prepping, wrangling, storing, processing, and ingesting data. Data engineers, data architects, data team managers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and software engineers will benefit from the wisdom and first hand experiences of their peers.

The Data Engineer is a rather new role. However, the management of data has been well known for over a generation. Data engineers tune data for use in analytics and machine learning. Today AI, Data Lakes, Predictive Analytics, and Data Science all roll up into the modern Data Engineer. This is a series of high level insights from various professionals. They work at Twitter, Google, Stitch Fix, Microsoft, Capital One, and LinkedIn.

Readers who seek insights will certainly find this a good reference. Since the topics range widely there is a good probability you will need to keep this reference within reach. It is refreshing to see contributions crossings areas that will be new to most readers.

Admittedly, the chapter on Data Security for Data Engineers by Katharine Jarmul from Thoughtworks is certainly a must read. In addition, Privacy Is Your Problem by Stephen Bailey must be on your list. The variety of topics is also appealing, so be ready to gain insights. Their shared postings have good ideas, warnings, and best practices all melting together.

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Artificial Intelligence Cyberinfrastructure Education Reading

Latest Read: Cybersecurity: The Insights You Need

Cybersecurity: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review.

Cybersecurity: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

So let’s start with the end in mind to avoid all misunderstandings: this is targeted to every leader and board member regardless of market or industry. They simply must fully comprehend why cybersecurity has been and always will be an ongoing risk.

This is a well written, high level and most importantly a non-technical overview of cybersecurity. This risk can no longer be overlooked by organizations and delegated like it was 1994. Today more than ever before cybersecurity impacts your bottom line, including non-technology based organizations.

And in 2024 we can simply cut to the chase. If your organization’s cybersecurity service is not AI based, it is time to pivot to a vendor that deploys machine learning services to protect your organization, your data and most importantly, your customer data. Just query your insurance carrier for a list of approved vendors that deploy AI cybersecurity services. For the most part the pandemic made this pivot mandatory.

In fact, cyber risk management can no longer be isolated to your organization’s CIO and CISO. This is simply an organization-wide issue. Today every organization’s technology services group have become the key component for organizational success.

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Artificial Intelligence Education Reading

Latest Read: Generative AI : The Insights You Need

Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

Generative AI: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

The world discovered Generative AI in the beginning of 2023. ChatGPT introduced over 100 million users to the possibilities of Generative AI. In less than 18 months society has shifted. With Wall Street and Madison Avenue literally banking on new markets, business, education and our globally connected society are witnessing transformation. Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI is perhaps the strongest indicator of what GenAI will be expecting to produce. However, there certainly remains a big hill to climb.

New AI startups are creating GenAI business models around generating text, images, code and even animation and video via Sora at rather amazing speeds. GenAI is certainly altering how humans create content on a scale and speed not previously understood by society, government, business and education. So get ready for disruption.

This book will help understand the baseline of GenAI and the potential to change the world. Yet for the organization who decides to jump right in, make sure you understand Chapter 3:?A Framework for Picking the Right Generative AI Project. AI is not the web and GenAI is not html. Organizations must understand risk. Just ask Samsung and you will quickly understand why tech companies are banning GenAI within their internal networks.

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