Tag Archives: Machine Learning

CIOs of the Future: How to Help Your CEO Grow the Business

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My guest this week is Chetan Raval, an accomplished Information Technology Leader and huge proponent of AI and automation. His broad areas of expertise include IT security, technology, regulatory affairs, business acumen, finance, and business processes. Throughout his career, Chetan has held various leadership positions with organizations including Mannatech Inc., Analysts International, Cap Gemini, Sony Corporation, and Systems Plus.

Chetan has a strong background in AI, and in the interview, we discuss his success in deploying chatbots and his obsession with automation. We also talk about how to leverage partners for proof-of-concepts, and different ways to find and develop expertise.

I think that one of the things that makes this interview unique is Chetan’s perspective on how an IT Leader can help his CEO grow the business. I believe this is the question that CIOs of the future should be constantly asking themselves.

I encourage you to listen to the interview with Chetan and hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

The items we cover in this interview are:

  • Hyper growth and slow down curve and the role of the CIO
  • Innovative ways to keep the business profitable
  • The power of experience plus technical knowledge of programming language
  • AI, machine learning, chatbots
  • Success in deploying chatbots
  • Using partners for proof-of-concept
  • Ways to find expertise (slack channels, partners, Meetup.com)
  • Examples of Automation that saved human labor
  • Develop internal skills for Incentive Modelling and predictive analysis
  • How to partner with sales and marketing to provide deeper meaning for insight.

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Does the Security of Your Applications Respond at the Pace of Your Business? – with Jeff Williams

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard

My guest this week is Jeff Williams, co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Contrast Security.

The reason that I wanted Jeff on the program is that his technology was massively interesting to me, given that application attacks are the single biggest vector for security breaches. In 2017 There will be 111 billion new lines of code produced resulting in endless complexity.

His product was an Innovation Sandbox Finalist at RSA this year. So I wanted to understand more.

I have tried to integrate application level firewalls and experienced working through real & hard human challenges of coders and network security people trying to defend and deploy at the same time I wanted to understand his technology better AND because iterative application development is going to be even more important for companies for their security to move at the pace of the business innovation and applications development and testing becoming more and more iterative and agile. So how do we do this? Continue reading

What Makes A World Class Innovation Lab? Experian DataLabs and Eric Haller

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard

I am excited to share with you my conversation with Eric Haller as this is the first time I have had someone on the show that is in charge of a major innovation lab so our conversation will give you a window of visibility into several areas.

Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

  • Why he believes that “Ruthless Competency Wins”.
  • Innovation is more powerful when linked to a higher purpose.
  • Managing an innovation portfolio and the development of the Intellectual property comes out of these efforts.
  • The organizational structure he reports to.
  • The culture of Experian from the types of people Eric hires as well as the culture of the Experian business as it supports the development efforts of the Innovation Lab.
  • LDA – Machine Learning Techniques.
  • Latent Dirichlet Allocation.
  • Unsupervised and supervised Machine Learning.
    • Unsupervised is based on recognizing patterns.
    • Supervised – modelling known outcomes.

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AI Safety in Cyber Security | AI Decision Making | Wireheading | AI Chatbot Privacy – with Roman Yampolskiy

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard

My guest for the most recent episode was an AI expert Roman Yampolskiy. While listening to our conversation, you will fine-tune your understanding of AI from a safety perspective. Those of you who have decision- making authority in the IT Security world will appreciate Roman’s viewpoint on AI Safety.

Major Take-Aways From This Episode:

1) Wire heading or Mental Illness with Machines – Miss aligned objectives/incentives for example what happens when a sales rep is told to sell more new customers, but ignores profits. Now you have more customers but less profit. Or you tell your reps to sell more products and possibly forsake the long term relationship value of the customer. There are all sorts of misaligned incentives and Roman makes this point with AIs.
2) I can even draw a parallel with coaching my girls’ teams where I have incented them to combine off each other because I want this type of behavior. This can also go against you because you end up becoming really good at passing but not scoring goals to win.
3) AI Decision making: The need for AIs to be able to explain themselves and how they arrived at their decisions.
4) The IT Security implications of AI Chat bots and Social Engineering attacks.
5) The real danger of Human Level AGI Artificial General intelligence.
6) How will we communicate with systems that are smarter than us? We already have a hard time communicating with dogs, for example, how will this work out with AIs and humans?
7) Why you can’t wait to develop AI safety mechanisms until there is a problem…..We should remember that seat belts were a good idea the day the first car was driven down the road, but weren’t mandated till 60 years after…
8) The difference between AI safety and Cybersecurity. Continue reading

An Exponential Organization CIO Who Brings Ideas to Market Fast, Executes and Delivers on Revenue and Customer Service

This episode is sponsored by the CIO Scoreboard

My guest for this episode was a great IT Leader Prabhash Shrestha.

Prabhash, Vice President of Information Technology, currently overseas, manages, strategizes business and operation of digital and Health IT at American Gastroenterological Association (AGA). He actively works with AGA’s senior management team, board and volunteers, members, and business partners in analyzing the trends and the direction of technology of AGA.. Previously, he was Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Association of Fundraising Professionals for eight years, from 2006 to 2014.

He was chosen as DC’s Top Association Tech Gurus by Trending 40. He was honored as the Top Ten Association Technology Leaders by Association Trends in December 2015. He was also awarded Top Association & Non-Profit Innovators 2015. Prabhash was chosen as the Top Innovators in the Washington, DC Association and Non-Profit community in January 2015. He was featured on the The A List on 2014 Nov/December issue of Associations Now magazine. He also was featured as one of the Top 5 under 35 in 2007. He has been interviewed on by various publications, radio and news media, and magazines. He speaks frequently at non-profit/association technology conferences and other conferences on various technology, leadership, management and business issues.
Prabhash holds a Master of Science in Information Systems. and holds Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan Executive Certificate on Strategy and Innovation. He has been teaching at Georgetown University’s Master’s Degree program in Technology Management since 2010. He has won several teaching excellence awards at Georgetown University.
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