Cambridge Analytica has become a household name in recent days as we learn how they had access to valuable data about 50 million Facebook users which may have played a role in influencing the US elections in 2016. There are a lot of loose ends to this story that are emerging as every day goes by. This brings to the fore an issue that has existed for a long time – based on enthusiasm and euphoria, new technologies are adopted by millions and millions of people all around the world without carefully thinking through important issues such as data security and privacy. Rules and regulations that can potentially help, take a long time to develop and they lag. The rapid pace of technology in the past three decades, fueled by the adoption of internet, has increased this gap tremendously. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight.
Talking about rules and regulations, we are in the midst of implementing necessary protocols and controls as required by the European Union called General Data Protection Regulation. As the site reminds us, we all have 63 days to comply!
A disclaimer – this is a pretty complicated regulation, the details of which are still being vetted carefully and what you will read below is my interpretation based on internal discussions and consultations with other attorneys.
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We lost power in our house in CT last Friday around 1 PM. I expected this when I heard that the storm coming our way was packed with 50-60 mph winds. Friday morning, I was going to check the propane tank that feeds our fireplace to make sure that it had enough fuel and start it when we had electricity. Also, the winds arrived in the morning, but the electricity was OK and when I checked the weather forecast, the winds in CT were not as high as I had thought. So, I neglected to do it. And around 1 PM, just as were getting ready to eat lunch, the power went out. When it is windy and the power goes, sometimes it comes back within a few seconds. No such luck.
Waited for a couple of minutes and no luck. We went to Middletown (the next town) to grab lunch. We could have stopped at Dino’s in our neighborhood, but were not sure if they would be open. Apparently they were. I made a turn to go the usual way and saw that cars were turning back. Yup, a big tree had fallen and the road was blocked. So we turned back and went the only other way out of our street into the rest of the world.
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Mt Fuji from the Shonan Village Center
I was in Japan for 9 days, accompanying my wife who had a workshop to attend. I should say that we both enjoyed every minute of this trip. Japan is a great place to visit on a lot of counts. It is clean, orderly and people are courteous. Food for vegetarians can be challenging, but we managed really well, with the hotels and conference center going out of their way to accommodate our needs (I am not a strict vegetarian, but I do have shellfish allergy). We also found several vegetarian restaurants in Tokyo and Kyoto.
One of the most disappointing aspect of our trip was the poor WiFi. We took the bullet train a few times and there is no WiFi. Apparently there is a paid version available, which is expensive, but we could not find a lot of details. On the other hand, it turned out to be great in some sense because we enjoyed the ride and viewing the beautiful Mt Fuji a few times from the train. But, even in hotels, the WiFi was slow. They protect the WiFi big time. Each room had its own password regardless of where we stayed. In one case, it was cleverly done. You turned on your TV and a menu item provided the details for getting on a WiFi. I had to use my phone’s cell data a lot in the end.
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I had to go to India in late January to attend religious rituals after my elder sister passed away unexpectedly. It is customary in India to complete the cremation within a few hours of death, the origins of which have to do with the high temperatures and lack of easy access to cooling technologies. This has changed in recent years. Even now, generally, cremation is delayed only for a few important reasons, one of the most important one has to do with who, according to our religion, should carry out the last rites and how far they have to travel. In my sister’s case, there were no compelling reasons to delay the cremation because the person to carry out the last rite was her brother in law, who was right there. Unfortunately, there was another death in the family during my stay there and I participated in the cremation.
For Hindu Brahmins, there is a fairly long list of religious rituals that are carried out over 13 days after the death of a person. Nowadays there is an abridged version that go on from 9th to 13th day, so I was able to go and participate in these. I learned a lot by participating in these events thanks to the priest’s explanations as things were performed. During these days relatives join, recall past memories and participate in the various rituals. These rituals revolve around donation to some of the Brahmins, offering food to the soul of the dead person and a lot of chanting of mantras, all of which is supposed to help the soul rest in peace. Going into further details is daunting and I will leave it there.
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One of the topics that keeps coming back when I meet my CIO colleagues is “why are you still doing app development?” The rationale is that it is unsustainable and that there are much cheaper alternatives, so it doesn’t make sense. I have a different view point and I am sure that the Wellesley community members will agree that what we have been able to do in the past few years have been tremendously helpful to them. I briefly want to describe the rationale and provide two of the most recent examples though we have a lot I can talk about…
We are pretty strategic about choosing to write an app. By the way we are not talking about Mobile app, but just a plain old web app. We get requests, or more often, we generate ideas that result in an app. The process is to ask the faculty member of staff interested in an app to put in a request and we evaluate whether an app exists out in the world that will satisfy the request and whether it is something that we can support. If it does, we get the cost estimate. If it doesn’t exist or if we feel we can build it cheaper, we will do it. We always go into it as “forever beta”, meaning, “don’t expect a completed product, but we will incrementally add features” and are also not afraid to toss it out if an alternative emerges after a few years. We have adopted bootstrap, so our apps are reasonably responsive. Simple, right?
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For a place considered to have a high level of natural intelligence, it is funny that one would even think about Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Higher Ed. However given that Higher Ed has a lot to do with the creation of AI, we might as well think about if there is a way we can benefit from it. There has been a recent explosion in this area and there are many articles written on this that you can look up in Google. “The Most Exciting Artificial Intelligence Applications in Media” and “Top 10 Hot Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technologies” are a couple of interesting (totally randomly selected) readings.
I also encourage you to read “The Great AI Paradox” by Brian Bergstein. This article talks about the distinction between “true” AI and “Computational Statistics” and how some argue that machines are pretty far away from having “true intelligence”. Let us set aside these differences and explore if we can take advantage of what is currently being touted as AI. (more…)
This is a good time to reflect on 2017, a memorable year. I always think about these man made arbitrary boundaries such as weekends and end of the year which influences how one feels. We all get excited on Friday about the next two days and the same way we look forward to a new year during the last few days of December. And we make New Year’s resolutions which have a tremendously high failure rates.
In this piece titled “The Only Way to Keep Your Resolutions“, the author says “By Jan. 8, some 25 percent of resolutions have fallen by the wayside.” The author makes an argument that keeping up resolutions requires willpower and self-control which are extremely hard. Instead he proposes that we cultivate social emotions. “In nudging the mind to be more patient and more selfless, they benefit everyone whom our decisions impact, including our own future selves. In short, they give us not only grit but also grace.” As a skeptic of the typical New Year’s resolutions, this sounds like a plan to me!
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I hope everyone enjoyed Thanksgiving. We had a great time as always. Whereas for each of us there is a lot to be thankful for on the personal front, there is very little to be happy about in terms of what is happening around us in this country. One of the most disturbing topic (really mild in light of some of the other despicable news) is this administration’s resolve to revoke the net neutrality provisions that were passed in 2015. That in itself was a close call that many don’t seem to remember. I wrote about a court ruling that preceded FCC’s ruling in 2015 here. In short, the Federal Appeals Court’s rulings were based on the way the Internet Service Providers were classified and FCC basically reclassified the ISPs to make sure that the net neutrality can be imposed on them. The new chairman of the FCC wants to reverse them. This administration, whose only coherent message seems to be “reverse everything that the Obama administration did”, claims that deregulation is the key to innovation.
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8,000 plus attendees converged in Philadelphia from Oct 31 till Nov 3rd for the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference. The anticipation and expectations were high going into the conference. The agenda was rich and exhaustive (and exhausting too!). Here is my take on the conference.
I know how much time and effort goes into organizing such a huge conference, so I want to thank EDUCAUSE and all the volunteers for their hard work to make this happen. I am going to express the honest way I felt with the hope that some of this will be taken into consideration in the future conferences. I have shared this with others including a board member! You can also see my tweets which can help better understand my points below. I have completely omitted the vendors below because I derive absolutely no value in seeing them at the conference. I totally get it that they sponsor the conference and we need their support, but I also know that there are a lot of other attendees who are interested in visiting and learning from these vendors, including collecting those silly swags. I am not one of them!
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Month of October has been a little crazier than usual. I attended Workday Rising 2017 in Chicago earlier this month, which was a great experience. The conference was huge and I got to meet very interesting group of people. Keynotes were interesting, but nothing out of the ordinary, but some of the sessions were fantastic. All of us who attended learned a lot. Then I organized a NERCOMP Professional Development Opportunity on finding a unified alumnae system on Oct 19th. It was well attended and the attendees benefited from hearing from all of us who are in various stages of finding a solution to this.
I was in Philly for EDUCAUSE from Oct 31 till Nov 2nd and will be leaving for Hong Kong next week. Here is the scoop on Workday…
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