OPEN Tech Talks: AI worth Talking| Artificial Intelligence |Tools & Tips

An open talk on the challenges of having a data pipeline for the images, audio and videos, The Hub enables to have several famous machine learning datasets with just a single command, like CIFAR-10, MNIST or Fashion-MNIST, Google Objection, ImageNet, COCO, and many others.

As I came from a Relational Database management system (RDBS) background, this talk gives me a new perspective and helps to think outside of the known areas. Enjoy the talk with the CEO of Active Loop. This session was recorded in October 2021 and is now being published.

Today's Guest

Davit Buniatyan, CEO at ActiveLoop.ai

A great insight talk with the guest speaker on a topic, a product owner focuses on a dataset format to offer API for creating, storing, and collaborating on any size of AI datasets.

• What were the challenges faced in the unstructured data storage and how the hub is offering a solution to solve the data problem?
• The question of where you will store the large data sets of images, and videos - you will get all the answers in this talk
• How the opensource Github repo is helping thousands of people to use datasets to PyTorch or TensorFlow with one line of code.

• Website: ActiveLoop.ai
• Twitter: activeloop

Resources:

• ActiveLoop
• hub - dataset for AI
• Book: Good to Great

Every day, we are reading reports on cyberattacks and massive data breaches worldwide, resulting in substantial financial losses, disruption, and downtime. The most important thing to notice is that every day cybercriminals adopt new attacks to avoid traditional security measures and bring new approaches to achieve the target. There is a concept of having layered security, with this approach of layered security enables you to have a system for an Internet security strategy that ensures an attacker who tries to penetrate one layer of defence will be stopped by a subsequent layer. Let's get first the definition clear about layered security.

What is Layered Security?

According to, Techopedia, the layered security is:

"Layered security refers to security systems that use multiple components to protect operations on multiple levels or layers. This term can also be related to the term defence-in-depth, which is based on a slightly different idea where multiple strategies and resources are used to slow, blog, delay, or hinder a threat until it can be completely neutralized"

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Guidance, NIST has defined a layered security model that has 17 control families

This session was recorded back in October 2021, and it is now being published.

Today's Guest

Greg Edwards, CEO at CryptoStopper

An inspirational talk with the guest speaker on a topic, a SaaS product targeted to help detect and stop ransomware.

• Why it is important to focus on security and have a Layered security approach for your organization.
• As a CEO the favourite tool is being used every day for SaaS product development.
• What are the qualifies required to get hired from a CEO perspective and many more such insights you will have

• Website: CryptoStopper
• Twitter: CryptoStopper

Resources:

• CryptoStopper
• Techopedia, the layered security
• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Guidance NIST has defined a layered security model that has 17 control families

An overview of Oracle's different Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and data science solutions available on Oracle Cloud. If you are new to this website, it is a learning and sharing platform where we will learn publicly.

Before I cover today's show schedule, let me admit that procrastination is sometimes very dangerous, as I could not record/host the podcast for the last 4 months. It wasn't easy to have a work-life balance due to the two factors. First, as I am doing MSc in AI and the previous 4-5 months were crucial to complete the key subjects, now I am on the last topic of robotics, which will be completed very soon. And 2nd factor was that I was dedicating a lot of my time to office work, where I worked with several EMEA-based customers and helped them migrate on-premise workloads to the Oracle cloud.

On the procrastination, James clear's book 'Atomic habit' and specifically the article "Procrastination: A Scientific Guide on How to Stop Procrastinating" has helped me to come out of the phase and be back with the podcast 😊

Let's dive into today's topic. Oracle has solutions that broadly cover three areas from the product's point of view. We will also talk about some of the use cases along with these products.

1-Artificial intelligence services, 2- Machine learning services and 3- AI apps for SaaS services

1-Artificial intelligence services deliver pre-trained models that can also be custom trained to improve model quality and enable organizations to use the AI services.

2-Machine learning services enable organizations to build, manage and deploy machine learning models with the different open source frameworks or they can use in-database machine learning capabilities.

3-AI apps for SaaS services provide organizations with capabilities in pre-integrated and fully functional AI functionalities in the Software as a Services (SaaS) model. These services are primarily part of the Oracle Cloud Applications. It uses deep semantic parsing with natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and custom algorithms to understand common conversations to derive real intent and context. In addition, users can communicate with the business application using voice commands capabilities available in the digital assistant offered by Oracle's Voice, it is not relying on any third party offerings.

You'll Learn:

Different offerings for AI, ML and Data Science from Oracle Cloud:

• Overview of the AI/ML & Data science services
  1. Oracle Digital Assistant
  2. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Language
  3. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Speech
  4. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Vision
  5. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Anomaly Detection
  6. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Forecasting
  7. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science
  8. Machine Learning in Oracle Database
  9. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Labeling
  10. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Virtual Machines for Data Science
  11. Oracle AI Apps for Finance
  12. Oracle AI Apps for Human Resources
  13. Oracle AI Apps for Sales
  14. Oracle AI Apps for Service
  15. Oracle AI Apps for Procurement
• Common uses cases to achieve with these cloud services/solutions.

Resources:

• Procrastination: A Scientific Guide on How to Stop Procrastinating
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) from Oracle
• OCI Anomaly Detection Service is an innovative algorithm called the multivariate sampling estimation technique (MSET)
• Forecasting use cases
• 97 – What are the leading cloud migration challenges?
• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started

Project management is changing how emerging technologies are becoming on-board, and complex business transformations are happening in different industries. All this requires new approaches and methodologies. In this podcast, I discussed the role of artificial intelligence in project management, how we can get ready with the future of project management, and what it looks like. What are the traits someone needs to have? What is impacting the current project management and the challenges being faced?

You will also learn why project management professionals & executives need to understand the need to transition to an AI-powered approach in project management. You will also learn the vital steps for effective collaboration between intelligent technology and project professionals. The organization is collecting enormous amounts of data and how the collected data can help have informed decisions for the project management.

You will get the answers to 4 key areas:

• What are the current challenges with project deliveries, their root causes, and why AI is the cure?
• Which AI will impact areas of Project Management?
• How will AI work in the project management practice, and what is the impact on current practices?

Understand the steps that organizations and project professionals need to take to prepare for the future

Another view to look the future of project management as Gartner reported that "By 2030, 80 percent of the work of today's project management (PM) discipline will be eliminated as artificial intelligence (AI) takes on traditional PM functions such as data collection, tracking and reporting, according to Gartner, Inc."

However, project managers need to be ready with the help of AI and to use the latest tools in routine tasks rather than just stopping them. The core skills like leadership, people stakeholder management, storytelling, communication and many more skills will play a significant role to be a great project manager.

Today's Guest

Marcus Glowasz, Project Management Coach, Speaker, Facilitator

A talk with the experienced project management practitioner as a guest speaker on how the latest Technologies and Innovations in Project Management.

• Website: Marcus Glowasz
• Twitter: MarcusGlowasz

Resources:

• Project Management Website
• PMI

The cloud adoption framework of several cloud vendors helps cloud architects, IT professionals, and decision-makers have a set of protocols, best practices, and tools for the journey to the cloud. Each cloud vendor has divided the adoption framework into different phases, and in this session, I will walk you through the high-level stages of each cloud adoption framework.

The first session on this topic is covered in session number 99 with the title "Cloud Adoption Framework". In this session, I will cover the Cloud Adoption framework of Oracle, Google Cloud, AWS, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba Cloud.

You'll Learn: Different Cloud Adoption Frameworks:

• Different Phases of Cloud Adoption Framework of different Cloud Vendors?

Resources:

• 99 – Cloud Adoption Framework
• Oracle Cloud Adoption Framework
• AWS CAP
• Microsoft Azure CAP
• IBM Cloud Cloud Adoption
• Google Cloud Adoption Framework
• Alibaba Cloud Migration Methodology
• Open Data Center Alliance Cloud Adoption Framework
• Unified Cloud Computing Adoption Framework during IEEE 2017 international conference on information systems and computer science
• Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework developed and shared by the MITRE
• 97 – What are the leading cloud migration challenges?
• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started

Cloud Adoption Framework is a set of best practices, tools, and guides that most public cloud vendors publish. The idea behind these cloud adoption frameworks is to assist organizations to embrace public cloud securely, efficiently and faster. The cloud adoption framework comprises each phase of cloud acceptance, from planning to living in the cloud. It provides a very well-tested checklist and steps to choose the right path for cloud migration and the right tools to help reduce potential security, governance, and budget problems.

The good thing about the cloud adoption framework is that it covers technological, people, processes and business aspects. Therefore, it helps to align business strategies with the culture, business and technology inspirations to achieve the business benefits.

Cloud growth

The cloud adoption framework is your guide to making the most of your cloud investment. Most organizations are adopting the cloud as per the IDG's 2020 Cloud Computing study reveals that 92% of the organizations are somewhat in the cloud.

Organizations must adapt to the cloud with proper planning and strategy in place. However, I observe that even if they have the strategy, they have just started consuming the cloud with the migration of simple applications and don't have any proper framework or rules to follow. Another challenge I am seeing is that organizations don't have clear visibility to their digital estate. When you start planning about cloud migration or adoption, the first question that comes to mind is to discover or assess the current IT state, which sometimes becomes painful to complete. Sometimes, what is being observed is that relevant stakeholders don't know where to start and the requirements or initial checklist they need to follow to migrate to the cloud.

According to Gartner, if we map to the trends impacting cloud adoption, there are four critical areas.

1. Cost optimization will drive cloud adoption
2. Multicloud will reduce vendor lock-in
3. Insufficient cloud IaaS skills will delay migrations
4. Distributed cloud will support expanded service availability

There is no doubt that each organization is unique with the operating model, products, services, organizational infrastructure and technology. Now adopting the cloud also depends on the business functions, services and applications are used in the organization; it will be unique to every organization. However, as we are seeing, most organizations are moving to the cloud, so we can say there is a pattern emerging. These frameworks are the results of these patterns concluded from a large number of cloud migrations journeys. Take an example of the work done by the Open Data Center Alliance Cloud Adoption Framework

Another paper was presented during the 2017 international conference on information systems and computer science with the name "Unified Cloud Computing Adoption Framework." which describes the process in six steps framework, current situation definition, requirements definition, providers analysis, providers assessment, decision, and migration.

Another interesting and the most I like Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework developed and shared by the MITRE and targeted areas to address are Political leadership, Organizational, Economic, Technical and Security (POETS) factors.

You'll Learn:

Different Cloud Adoption Frameworks:

• What is ECAF?
• What are the common Cloud Adoption frameworks?
• Why frameworks are important for the journey to the cloud?
• How different cloud vendors are treating these frameworks?

Resources:

• IDG's 2020 Cloud Computing study
• Gartner, 4 trends impacting cloud adoption
• Open Data Center Alliance Cloud Adoption Framework
• Unified Cloud Computing Adoption Framework during IEEE 2017 international conference on information systems and computer science
• Enterprise Cloud Adoption Framework developed and shared by the MITRE
• 97 – What are the leading cloud migration challenges?
• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started

A deepfake refers to a specific kind of media or photo where a person in an image or video is transacted with another person however it will look like the original person in an image or video.

To make a deep fake video, a creator swaps one person's face and replaces it with another, using a deep learning algorithm generative adversarial networks (GAN).

A formal definition as per Wikipedia:

Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. While the act of faking content is not new, deepfakes leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content with a high potential to deceive. The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative neural network architectures, such as autoencoders or generative adversarial networks (GANs) – Source: Wikipedia

Today's Guest

Ilke Demir, Research Scientist at Intel

An inspirational talk with the guest speaker on a variety of topics, like

• How to decide to pursue a short course or a degree program in AI/Data Science,
• What is a new fake catcher tool? and from where you can find out the number of large datasets.

• Website: Ilke Demir
• Twitter: ilkedemir

Resources:

• Ilke Demir's personal page
• What Are Deepfakes and How Are They Created?
• Deepfakes, explained by MIT management Sloan school
• What are deepfakes?
• https://www.otechtalks.tv/open-talk-how-to-detect-deepfake/

Cloud migration is challenging, cumbersome, and risky for traditional organizations relying on in-house custom-built systems to support achieving revenue from years on years. Today I will be discussing a wide variety of challenges organizations are facing while planning for cloud migration. These typical challenges are talks of every board room and the agenda of the meetings. However, there is no doubt that workloads migration to the cloud is helping organizations to reduce operating costs and build integrated, automated IT infrastructure.

Some Facts on Public Cloud:

• The global public cloud computing market is continuing to grow, and according to the Statista report of August 4, 2021, it will $482 billion in 2022.
• IDG's 2020 Cloud Computing study reveals that 92% of the organizations are somewhat in the cloud.
• According to the worldwide enterprise cloud strategy 2017-2020 report by Statista, 82% of the respondent reported that they had deployed hybrid cloud strategy in their organizations.
• Gartner's global forecast for public cloud end-user spending will grow 23.1% in 2021 to reach $332.3 billion, compares to $270 billion in 2020. (read diagram/table for podcast)
• Canalys report for the year 2020 that "total cloud infrastructure services spending grew 33% to US$142 billion, up from US$107 billion in 2019."
• IDC's report on global public cloud services $312 Billion in 2020
• Cloud computing market report published by marketsandmarkets "The global cloud computing market size is expected to grow from USD 371.4 billion in 2020 to USD 832.1 billion by 2025"
• Share of corporate data stored in the cloud in organizations worldwide from 2015 to 2021 "As of 2021, around 50 percent of all corporate data is stored in the cloud. This share reached 30 percent in 2015 and has continued to grow as companies increasingly shift their resources into cloud environments in the hope of improving security and reliability next to advancing business agility."

How to Secure and optimize your cloud migration

You have a daunting task in hand to migrate to the cloud and do it securely and efficiently. If it is not fully optimized and performed correctly, your dream of digital transformation in an organization can hit roadblocks/pitfalls.

Now I will share some of the common challenges which I see the cloud migrations; these are based on observation, reading a wide array of articles, and discussion with fellow IT friends/colleagues in the extended & broader community of IT professionals. What I will be doing is to mention all the typical challenges, and then I will also try to share the perspective of how you can overcome or what could be the strategy to address them. These could be starting from which workloads to be moved to what should be the order of migration to how we will have reliability and performance of business-critical services on the cloud. How I will implement required levels of security controls and regulatory compliance to who is my cloud vendor and this cloud migration must not disrupt my existing IT services, so on…

Gartner, in an article published, has beautifully categorized into six ways of cloud migrations challenge

You'll Learn: Common Cloud Migration Challenges and How to Overcome Them:

• Why cloud migration is challenging?
• Some facts on public cloud adoption
• Common Challenges:
  • Do you have a well-defined & documented Cloud Migration Strategy?
  • How do you see your requirements for Data Security and Compliance?
  • Do you have clarity on the Cost of the Cloud Migration Process?
  • How is your organization's response to adoption/change?
  • Migrating to cloud – is it Vendor Lock-In? and Who is the best Cloud Service Provider for me?
  • Have you done a proper evaluation of the current IT portfolio (workload migration assessment)
  • How to ensure minimum business downtime/minimum business disruption

Resources:

• Cloud Computing Trends: 2021 State of the Cloud Report
• Statista report of August 4, 2021, it will $482 billion in 2022.
• IDG's 2020 Cloud Computing study
• worldwide enterprise cloud strategy 2017-2020 report by Statista
• Gartner's global forecast for public cloud end-user spending
• Canalys report for the year 2020
• IDC's report on global public cloud services
• Cloud computing market report published by marketsandmarkets
• Share of corporate data stored in the cloud in organizations worldwide from 2015 to 2021
• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started

It is 2nd part of the session on CIS Benchmarks and controls for Cloud. The Center for Internet Security is a nonprofit organization with the mission to 'identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense.' Experts and IT professionals from different governments, institutes, and businesses across the globe are participating and finalizing the controls based on the consensus decision-making model.

Now let us link this to why it is essential for every one of us and every organization. I have got a chance to read the article on data breaches affecting millions of users and some of the biggest breaches in recent times published by CSOonline with the title "The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century."

CIS Benchmarks

The CIS Controls consists of a recommended best practices to secure systems and devices, and CIS Benchmarks are rules for hardening specific operating systems, middleware, software applications, and network devices. The CIS Controls and the CIS Benchmarks are developed using a consensus-based approach by communities of experts.

CIS controls have been mapped to many other standards and regulatory frameworks, for example. the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the ISO 27000, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and many others.

The decision must consider an organization's requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles.

In CIS 8 the number of controls is reduced to 18 from 20 in CIS 7. CIS 8 contains 153 Safeguards, which were called sub-controls in CS7 and they were 171 sub-controls

You'll Learn:

CIS Security areas to assist you in preparing cloud security architecture

In Part 1 (Session no 95)

• What is the role of CIS and how it is playing to ensure secure internet
• What are CIS Benchmarks & benefits?
• What are the seven core categories of CIS Benchmarks?
• Basics of CIS Controls 7 & CIS Controls 8
• What different cloud vendors provide you to meet CIS Benchmarks?

In Part 2 (Session no 96)

• What are the 18 controls of the version CIS 8

Resources:

• 95- Cloud Security with CIS Benchmarks
• Center for Internet Security
• CIS Benchmarks
• The 18 CIS Controls
• CSOonline "The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century."
• 5 of the Top Questionnaires for IT Vendor Assessments
• CIS Foundations Benchmark for Oracle Cloud
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started

The Center for Internet Security is a nonprofit organization with the mission to 'identify, develop, validate, promote, and sustain best practice solutions for cyber defense.' Experts and IT professionals from different governments, institutes, and businesses across the globe are participating and finalizing the controls based on the consensus decision-making model.

Now let us link this to why it is essential for every one of us and every organization. I have got a chance to read the article on data breaches affecting millions of users and some of the biggest breaches in recent times published by CSOonline with the title "The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century."

CIS Benchmarks

The CIS Controls consists of a recommended best practices to secure systems and devices, and CIS Benchmarks are rules for hardening specific operating systems, middleware, software applications, and network devices. The CIS Controls and the CIS Benchmarks are developed using a consensus-based approach by communities of experts.

CIS controls have been mapped to many other standards and regulatory frameworks, for example. the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), the ISO 27000, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and many others.

The decision must consider an organization's requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture principles.

In CIS 8 the number of controls is reduced to 18 from 20 in CIS 7. CIS 8 contains 153 Safeguards, which were called sub-controls in CS7 and they were 171 sub-controls

You'll Learn:

CIS Security areas to assist you in preparing cloud security architecture

• What is the role of CIS and how it is playing to ensure secure internet
• What are CIS Benchmarks & benefits?
• What are the seven core categories of CIS Benchmarks?
• Basics of CIS Controls 7 & CIS Controls 8
• What different cloud vendors provide you to meet CIS Benchmarks?

Resources:

• Center for Internet Security
• CIS Benchmarks
• The 18 CIS Controls
• CSOonline "The 15 biggest data breaches of the 21st century."
• 5 of the Top Questionnaires for IT Vendor Assessments
• CIS Foundations Benchmark for Oracle Cloud
• 94- How to develop a cloud migration strategy?
• 93- Cloud Migration Workload Assessment
• 91- Workload Migration to Cloud – Getting Started