Monthly Archives: June 2017

Intelligence analysts are swimming in data pouring in from an array of vehicles and platforms a problem that isnt new, but for which government leaders still seek the right solutions.

To help stem the deluge and better position analysts and key mission-critical data, intelligence community officials are targeting automation as a high priority, with a futuristic vision for applications down the road as well.

A significant chunk of my analytic workforce today, I will send them to a dark room to look at TV monitors to do national security-essential work but boy, is it inefficient, Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, told reporters at the annual GEOINT Symposium in San Antonio, Texas. The number of people needed to maintain awareness of, if not exploitation of, one sensor is really daunting. I suspect were going to get more of those sensors. I cant double my human population in those dark rooms.

The near-term goal particularly centers on analysis of full-motion video that streams in from unmanned aerial systemsthe wolf really close to the door, as Cardillo put it.But he and other officials also are looking toward future uses for different types of automation, including artificial intelligence. And Cardillo, among others, are looking to partner up for help.

As the commercial industry and academic think tanks and advanced science and engineering schools move to artificial intelligence and machine learning, theyre all desperate to get a hold of some data with [which] to train their algorithms and teach their machines to learn, Cardillo said. He added that intelligence community leaders, including those at the NGA, are looking at how to safely expose data sets to accelerate development in automated tools.

But the NGA isnt just looking outside for solutions. Internally, the agency has launched a new Office of Ventures and Innovation aimed at guiding emerging technology from incubation through the entire life cycle.

To get to this automated, augmented future that were talking about, we need to coordinate across a lot of different parts of the agency, Anthony Vinci, NGA director of plans and programs, told C4ISRNET. Its not just a technology issue, its bringing technology and [research and development] into the operational units, into analysis or into the business services units, human development or finance for business analytics.

Vinci said the NGA is working closely with other government agencies, including the Defense Department, to further automation and AI and get to a new level of intelligence and military operations.

How can we use automation to take some of that pressure off of the analysts who are putting together those products? How do we buy back some of their time by automating some of these processes so they can focus on the higher-end analysis that they need to be focusing on? Thats a fundamental thing were trying to do using all the tools at the agencys disposal, Vinci said.

On the higher endthe exquisite analysishow can we bring in modeling and AI and some of those tools that are on the high end of technology to support analysis and do missions that werent even possible until now because we didnt have the tools to analyze that amount of data, or because we couldnt analyze some complex phenomenonologies? How can we bring them those tools and those models?

In a future operational landscape where autonomous vehicles dominate and interact with adversaries, its easy to see where intelligence missions cross over to operational military missions, Vinci noted.

These tools are not just intelligence tools; theyre operational as well. Were not just an intelligence agency, were a combat support agency, so we help across the spectrum, he said. Were a support function to someone who has to make a decision.

"We have to be able to act faster and get as far left of boom as possible.

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Intel officials pin high hopes on automation, artificial intelligence - C4ISR & Networks

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Automation Controllers With MQTT and Analytics Onboard Enable Lean IIoT Architectures - Automation World

New technologies are transforming our profession, and theyre also transforming the skills well need to stave off extinction.

In a paper titled The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation? University of Oxford researchers Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne tried to gauge the odds that certain occupations will be completely automated within the next 20 years. Among their predictions:

In fact, only seven occupationscargo and freight agents, watch repairers, insurance underwriters, mathematical technicians, hand sewers, title examiners, and telemarketersfared worse in the study than tax preparers.

The researchers admit that these estimates are rough and likely to be wrong, writes National Public Radios Quoctrung Bui. But consider this a snapshot of what some smart people think the future might look like. If it says your job will likely be replaced by a machine, youve been warned.

Other studies offer similar predictions:

One way or anothercomplete automation or partialour jobs are about to change. This type of disruption is coming. In one notable example, in fact, it has already arrived.

Perhaps the biggest disruption bearing down on the CPA profession is coming from IBM Watson, a cognitive learning system that is capable of answering questions asked in natural language. From health care and education to law and finance to food preparation and satellite imagery, Watson is redefining how work gets done in stunning ways.

Heres what:

This stuff isnt science fiction anymore. Its here and its impacting our profession as we speak.

How will CPAs react? Will they scramble to keep up, as usual? Or will they work to position themselves to move beyond that disruption and create future-focused value for their clients?

If theyre smart, theyll do the latterand that means learning the new skills theyll need to remain relevant in an age of automation.

Numerous studies conducted over the past several years are nearly unanimous: Going forward, CPAs must become proficient at skills that have little to do with the professions traditional data-driven core. These skills include the following:

The most important skill of all, though, might also be the most ambiguous. Its anticipationthe ability to identify future trends early and position your organization and your clients to take advantage of those trends before they arrive. Renowned futurist and New York Times best-selling author Daniel Burrus calls it the key missing competency in business today.

He might be right. A 2014 report from The Sleeter Group found that the most often-cited reason why small and midsized businesses leave their CPA firms is because those firms provide reactive advice instead of proactive services. In essence, clients say they leave because their CPAs arent future-ready enough.

It seems the age of automation has also given birth to the age of anticipation. The good news is this: Were starting to see more and more resources being developed specifically to deliver these types of competencies for accounting and finance professionals.

One is Burruss own Anticipatory Organization. The Business Learning Institute worked with Burrus to create a version of his Anticipatory Organization learning platform specifically for accounting and finance professionals. Thats available now and is becoming extremely popular among CPAs throughout the country.

Another is IBMs Big Data University. Its an online curriculum designed to help accounting and finance professionals learn key skills in artificial intelligence, big data, and cognitive computingskills that will be huge differentiators going forward, and will help CPAs play a bigger role in guiding digital transformation within their organizations. The Maryland Association of CPAs and the Business Learning Institute have entered into an exclusive partnership with IBM to deliver these skills to accounting and finance professionals throughout the world.

As this age of automation progresses, accounting and finance professionals would be wise to ask themselves a few key questions:

What can I become quite good at thats really difficult for a computer to do one day soon? Seth Godin writes. How can I become so resilient, so human and such a linchpin that shifts in technology wont be able to catch up? It was always important, but now its urgent.

Put another way, to paraphrase Fast Company Editor Robert Safian, the most important skill going forward will be the ability to learn new skills.

The learning must begin now.

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Why Lifelong Learning is Our Competitive Advantage in the Automation Age - Accountingweb.com

BENGALURU: Mid-tier IT firm Mindtree says that the company has taken a more humane approach in its roadmap for automation by upskilling and reskilling its workforce, but the larger concern will be to find skilled professionals to fill new jobs.

Say there are five jobs that are lost (due to automation), but there are 10 more roles that are created. Preparing our students for the new roles is the challenge, said KM Madhusudhan, CTO, Mindtree. The bigger concern to me is lesser job creation and not job loss, he said.

Indian IT is currently going through a whirlwind because of rapid technological change with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Insecurity due to job losses of experienced employees has plagued the market fuelling concerns over new age technologies siphoning off traditional jobs. According to some estimates, the top four Indian IT services companies may let go 12,000 -15,000 employees in the coming months. Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar has pointed out that in the outsourcing industry 50-60% requirement will be new-age skills.

Companies are in fact, witnessing the early stages of new roles being created. For instance, technologies like Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are increasingly being adopted by many enterprises for multiple business processes.

We have been working on VR/AR solutions. Though the mainstream adoption of AR/VR might not happen in the next three years, there are new roles like avatar designer a skilled professional who can create new avatars in virtual reality being created, Madhusudhan said.

The Bengaluru-based IT company prides itself on being born digital with close to 40% of their revenues coming from new generation technologies like cloud, automation, etc. or in business speak SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud).

To tackle the problem of old jobs turning obsolete, Mindtree has developed a curriculum to find adjacent skills to the jobs that are fast eroding. For every competency and job portfolio, we are identifying adjacent skills and are defining the entire upskilling and reskilling roadmap for every role, Madhusudhan said.

For example, the job of an infrastructure engineer who monitors servers and runs codes when the server goes down is now being automated. The next level of adjacent skills for that person is writing scripts. So, we teach him scripting skills since the person may not have an engineering background to know code.

The software company counts the likes of Microsoft and US-based American International Group (AIG) amongst its top clients and employs close to 16,623 employees with a net addition of 320 people in the quarter ended march 2017. In the last three months alone 4,774 have completed certified courses in Mindtrees reskilling platform Yorbit. The skilling platform introduced in July 2016 has trained 10,463 at a project ready level covering 481skills from basic vocational training to high-end skills like Hadoop, data Science, ML, AI etc.

Sometimes this reskilling happens just in time before starting a new project. Say we are starting a new project which we need 10 skills out of which we only have six, then we train employees on the four new skills and then deploy them on project, Madhusudhan said, adding they have partnered with Coursera, Udemy, Simplilearn amongst others to support the skilling programme. While the strides to reskill employees are happening on one side, the company has been focused on leveraging automation. Eight months ago, Mindtree developed its in-house automation platform CAPE which has gained a lot of traction.

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Mindtree finds humane fix to automation - Economic Times