Human Resource Management Meets Predictive Analytics

1 - DARPA Challenge Tests AI as Cybersecurity Defenders

In August, seven teams will compete in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, pitting autonomous AI systems against threats and attacks from other network servers and patching up proprietary software errors in the process. The U.S. military agency hopes to promote programs that can work side by side with humans examining crash reports and assessing network vulnerabilities. Network protection can be implemented in the form of either 'binary armor' or through the finding and correcting of software malfunctions. In addition to a $2 million prize, the winning team will compete against human hackers at the DEF CON 2016 conference taking place in Las Vegas at the same time, marking the first time that a completely automated system will go 'head to head' with human experts.

Episode Summary: A lot of companies in the San Francisco Bay area make the claim that they can do something great with data; many fewer are at a degree of scale to make this vision possible. Today we speak with Nicholas Clark, CEO of DoubleDutch, a company now powering thousands of events nationally and implementing machine learning into their operations, including predicting business results from actual attendees. DoubleDutch is at the beginning of its journey with predictive analytics, having to make hard choices around what sort of information and thought processes they need in order to use machine learning and remain profitable. Nicholas gives his perspective on these decisions, as well as how he thinks DoubleDutch’s efforts will impact the conference/event industry at scale.

Episode Summary: The artificial intelligence field is normally seen as burgeoning and new, populated with lots of small, scrappy companies aiming to become the next de-facto solution, with maybe one exception - “Big Blue”. IBM has been involved since the ‘beginning’ and is perhaps best known for Watson, which has from Jeopardy to a range of applications in small and big businesses, as well as the public sector. Swami Chandrasekaran is chief technologist of industry apps and solutions for IBM, and he speaks in this episode about what he sees as some of the low-hanging fruit for applying predictive models to business data. Swami has seen this technology applied in a variety of contexts, from automotive and shipping to telcos and more, providing an informed perspective for industry executives, data scientists, and anyone else interested in the intersection of predictive analytics and business.

Episode Summary: What does the world look like when we can replicate human expertise in an assistant? Are we close to developing human-level chatbots that we can ask about law or medical conditions? We dive into this topic with Founder and CEO of exClone, Dr. Riza Berkan, whose personal assistant and chat-bot company is leveraging day-to-day human conversational templates in machine learning technology in order to better approach the tough task of replicating human expertise through a machine. Berkan talks about the edge layer of his company's “secret sauce”, and touches on the future applications of what might manifest in this field in 5 to 10 years in medical and other consumer applications.

Dr. Patrick Hopkins is a philosopher and bioethicist. In this interview, we don't contemplate traditional bioethic concerns of animal testing or disease treatment. Instead, we discuss some important considerations of how emerging technologies might alter our bodies, minds, personalities and gender – and, indeed, what "human" might imply in the first place.