Hello everybody and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. If you remember the headlines from November last year, you will recall that ChatGPT became so popular that it broke all records held by any platforms and apps in the past and reached a mind-blowing one million users in just five days of its launch. This huge surge in user sign-ups was hailed as an undeniable testimony to the growing interest in large language models and as an indicator of the beginning of a new era powered by artificial intelligence. Countless reports of potential job losses and rampant unemployment triggered by AI circulated, while there were also plenty of reports highlighting how the world was going to change for the better thanks to artificial intelligence.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. We talk about the recently released “The State of Developer Ecosystem 2023” Report by JetBrains. This report is a culmination of insights gathered from 26,348 developers from all around the globe. The world of developers is vast and diverse, making it an endlessly fascinating realm for exploration & learning. Through yearly research initiatives like this one, our goal is to explore this captivating world, uncover valuable insights about developers and their craft, and then share these facts with the community. The State of the Developer Ecosystem Report analyzes and presents valuable insights on a wide range of topics from programming languages, tools, and technologies to demographics and fun facts.

It also digs deeper into the lifestyle of developers, showcasing the current passions and hobbies among developers. The 2023 State of Developers Report also includes insights on artificial intelligence, a category that has been newly introduced to the Report. The Report showcases the features of AI that developers are commonly using, the challenges they face, and some insights into how the situation is around the adoption of AI-enhanced tools.

Now, this begs the question of who is doing the research for this and how is the research done. Well, the State of the Developer Ecosystem Report is a report brought out by JetBrains. JetBrains is a company that aims to make professional software development a more productive and enjoyable experience. JetBrains helps developers work faster by automating common, repetitive tasks to enable them to stay focused on code design & the big picture. For this, they provide tools to explore and familiarize with code bases faster. JetBrains’ products are designed to help developers take care of quality during all stages of development and spend less time on maintenance tasks.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. When developing applications, one often needs to integrate third-party or open-source dependencies into the applications to meet the intended business requirement or utility. For instance, a food delivery app could be dependent on Google Maps or MapMyIndia for the Map functionality on which a user can track their food. An e-commerce app or website could have a dependency on WhatsApp for enabling a live chat with a customer service bot or a customer service rep to help answer any queries that the customer of the platform may have. These dependencies could be paid for by the using entity to the service/API provider or it could be open-source and play an important role in supporting the efficient functioning as well as any other features that the application might be providing.

The simple logic here was instead of building a whole functionality from scratch, which by no means is an easy feat since it takes looking for and hiring the right people with the right skills and domain knowledge, and a boatload of resources to put together a team, lots of time, and so much more. Instead, one could use the API or functionality built by someone else, something that is already tested and ready to use with established success, just integrate it into whatever you are building, and voila! The functionality creator could get a licensing fee or a royalty payment of sorts, and the user entity has a perfectly functioning feature that would be highly valuable for its users.

Sounds like a great thing, right? It totally is. Then where exactly is the problem?

Well, whenever great innovations have taken place, haven’t the unscrupulous elements always caught up with them sooner or later for their gains while penalizing or harming others in some way?

Dependencies are no exception. Enters Dependency Confusion Attack.

Dependency confusion attacks are relatively new to the world, but in the short time they have been around, they have sent ripples around the world showing the unimaginable levels of harm they can cause. So, who is at risk? How do these attacks function? Can we do something to stop it or fight it once it happens? We are sure you have many questions, and we will try our best to answer as many of these as possible in this podcast episode.

New research by OX Security, a DevOps software supply chain company has revealed that just about every application that has more than 1 billion users and more than 50% of applications with roughly 30 million users are highly vulnerable to dependency confusion attacks. The research also makes a shocking revelation – organizations that are at the most risk would likely have about a whopping 73% of their assets exposed to dependency confusion attacks!

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. we talk about something that has been in the news a lot this year and actually makes it to the news for all the undesirable reasons every year for quite some years now. Today, we talk about the AQI or the Air Quality Index. This year, Delhi became the World’s most polluted city in the world, with Mumbai and Kolkatta not far behind in the air quality index. Diwali time makes the air in these cities become absolutely unbreathable, with the rampant air pollution from bursting firecrackers, construction work, industrial pollution, burning the stubbles in farms, etc. and it is affecting the lives and health of everyone in and around these cities.

Air pollution levels in most of the urban areas are a cause of serious concern. It is the right of the people to know the quality of the air they are breathing. However, the data generated by the National Ambient Air Monitoring Network are reported in a form that may not be easily understood by common people. This system of air quality information was found inadequate to facilitate people’s participation in the air quality improvement efforts. With this in mind, the Central Pollution Control Board developed the Air Quality Index for Indian cities as a tool to disseminate information on air quality in qualitative terms, as well as its associated and likely impact on health. The Air Quality Index has six key objectives:

1. Resource allocation

2. Ranking of locations

3. Enforcement of standards

4. Trend analysis

5. Public information, and

6. Scientific research

Let us begin by first understanding what is the Air Quality Index. The Air Quality Index or AQI was introduced in 2015 and aimed at quantifying the severity of air pollution at a particular location. It is measured by recording the levels of multiple pollutants in the air. It is a single composite index that monitors eight important individual pollutants. These eight pollutants are PM10, PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone, ammonia, and lead. These metrics are measured at different monitoring stations and the metric values are calculated using their average concentration values over a 24-hour span for all metrics except the carbon monoxide and the ground-level ozone metrics, which are measured over 8 hours. The health breakpoint concentration is also taken into consideration when calculating the AQI. Based on this, the worst sub-index value would be taken as the Air Quality Index for the location.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. we continue our conversation about Generative AI, this time with a focus on different job roles and how managers can use Generative AI to design better job roles for the organization as well as employees. Organizations do their best to improve employee engagement and keep employee turnover as minimal as possible. But, there is one key metric, or rather a very important attribute that often gets ignored or hasn’t been checked much so far employee burnout. Surveys conducted by Gallup in the United States in 2022 showed that 40% of the employees surveyed reported that the job hurt their mental health and around 30% have shared that they regularly face burnout. About 32% have said that they feel engaged at work while 17% have said that they were actively disengaged. On a global level, the employees’ lack of engagement has been estimated to cost employers roughly $7.8 trillion, which is equivalent to a whopping 11% of the global gross domestic product, according to a report in the MIT Sloan Management Review.

Experts opine that a lot of disengagement and work stress employees go through is rooted in how organizations design job roles for the employees. Decades of extensive research by experts have discovered that poor work design leads to negative employee outcomes – mental strain, high turnover, job dissatisfaction, decreased productivity, impaired learning, etc.

The MIT Sloan research goes on to highlight that quite often, the managers in organizations lack the understanding and insight to design high-quality jobs. With the recent advances in technology, this is a very critical area in which artificial intelligence can help organizations. It can help bridge the knowledge gap among managers and enable organizations to design high-quality work which would be a win-win situation for both the organization as well as the employees, current and potential. But before the managers are empowered to do this, they need to be well-versed in the pros and cons of using Generative AI for work design.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. The ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup is in full swing in India, packed with nail-biting action and some stellar performances by different cricketers and teams. For all of us at home, watching the matches on our televisions, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones, our match-viewing experience has been significantly enhanced in recent times. We can see the analytics and charts clearly on our screen, while chilling on our couches, munching on our favorite chips and dips. Like all sports, cricket has benefitted greatly by embracing technological advances. It has enhanced the experience not just for the players and viewers, but also for the umpires, commentators, coaches, selection committees, and a lot of other people.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. To understand what large language models are, we first need to understand what transformer models are. As a human, we see the text as one word at a time and comprehend it accordingly, whereas machines see the text as just a bunch of characters. Machines were usually unable to interpret text like human beings can. However, this began changing when Vaswani et al published a paper establishing something called the transformer model. A transformer model is based on the attention mechanism, which enables the machine to read an entire sentence or even an entire paragraph instead of one character or one word at a time, and once the machine has consumed the entire input text, it will be capable of producing an output based on the input received. This enables the transformer model to understand the context of the input and deliver better outputs. These transformer models are the basis of many other models commonly used in machine learning and generative AI today. They process data by tokenizing the input and simultaneously conducting mathematical equations to.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. With the Search Generative Experience, Google is bringing the power of Generative AI to its search platform to offer its users new ways of finding, visualizing, and creating content.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. Twenty years ago, Dan Brown published his world-renowned book – the Da Vinci Code. Three years later, a film adapted from it with the same title starring Tom Hanks was released worldwide. The book and the movie both, were super interesting, and make for a great read and a great watch even today. The story takes the viewers and readers through the Louvre in Paris, stars the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, and so many other renowned paintings, all on a quest for the Holy Grail. If you paid attention to the book or the movie or both, you would have encountered a sequence of numbers mentioned in the plot that was essential to decoding a clue that Professor Langdon is working on with Sophie. This sequence of numbers is usually written in a triangle form and is called the Fibonacci Sequence.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cognixia podcast. The important aspects of project management, that is, conflict management. A project runs on the back of the efforts of its people. These people come from different backgrounds, different teams, different disciplines, and different ideologies, and are required to work together for the success of the project. Often, these people may have never worked together before. To top it off, the project works within the defined constraints of resources, time, and scope. This makes the environment quite conducive for conflicts to arise. Since the project manager leads all the teams and is responsible for ensuring everything runs smoothly, it becomes an important part of their job to address any conflicts that might arise and to resolve them at the earliest in the best possible manner.