A conversation with Peter Mohany CMO Nuance Communications, Susan Hunt VP Federal Nuance Communications, Simon Bisson Freelance Technology Journalist, Richard Mack VP Communications Nuance Communications, Jeanne Harris Managing Director Information Technology Research Accenture Institute for High Performance increase
As the Internet becomes increasingly crowded with personal data and information collection, from amazon to facebook, there is an intensification in the desire to protect ones identify. However, we are challenged by the ability of technology to adequately utilize personalized biometric information to protect personal identity. Additionally, with the increase in cyber crime and computer hackers ability to crack strong case sensitive passwords, there is a growing need for stronger security protection of personal information. Nuance Communications is currently working in the field of telephonic voice recognition and meta biometrics to address these issues and discussed some of the emerging trends and areas they see this field going.
There are multiple industries which can benefit from telephonic voice protection to include:
Banking
Retail
Government/law enforcement
Healthcare
Voice recognition and meta biometrics provide two obvious benefits
Increased security
Enhanced customer experience
The security aspect allows you to provide increasing layers of security and voice authentication based on the need to authorize, identify and verify the user.
Telephonic voice recognition services are revolutionizing law enforcement’s ability to track criminals by cutting back on both cost and resources put into wire tapping as you can automatically identify the criminal based on voice samples, thus cutting back on need for in person surveillance to confirm suspect identification of the wire.
The customer experience gives retail companies the ability to identify the specific individual and personalize the advertising and product placement of their products to the specific demographics of the particular customer
Given the specialized characteristics of telephonic voice recognition and meta biometric technology it creates a multivendor environment and allows company’s to partner in both consulting and software development roles
Taveau describes privacy with regards to the cloud as existing in 5 realms, or The Rule of 5 P’s for the Cloud. These P’s are described as Personal, Private, Professional, Proprietary and Public clouds. Part of the modern privacy issue revolves around, in Taveau’s opinion, the bleeding of the first four P’s into the public cloud, or the making public of information over which an individual seeks to maintain control. How can we maintain a sense of privacy when so many forms of technology and social networking that we use on a regular basis can be made public?
Key points of discussion:
-Europe tends to see freedom as the “freedom from” whereas North America perceives freedom in terms of the “freedom to”. This is reflected in the emerging European idea of the “Right to disappear”
-Social networks, which are seen by individuals as part of a “private cloud” are regularly infringed upon and made public (think companies firing individuals based on Facebook profiles).
-”We’ve got this bleeding right now between work and personal life. We used to think in terms of work-life balance, now we have a work-life blend [...] It all seems to be melting together now.”–Mary Branscombe, Freelance Technology Journalist
-”For a long time people have considered the mobile device to be part of the cloud. What people need to realize is that a mobile device is just a lock, equipped with a natural ID. You become the key, the phone is the lock, and you use both to access the data on the cloud. So the recently coined idea that identity is the new money is absolutely correct.”-Sebastian Taveau
-Major tech companies are trying more than ever to move from the Pin and Password security model to more advanced models, because breaches are becoming unsustainable.
-Biometrics are increasing in popularity, and the tech industry is seeking to decentralize the databases that hold the identity information required to secure companies and their workforce.
-Biometrics have the ability to create one-time passwords in order to verify that an individual has checked out on a device without actually placing their identity on the cloud.
-”We have to worry about the number of people who will sign a page to get a free pen.”–Mary Branscombe
-Facebook is “boiling the frog of privacy” so that you get “privacy exhaustion” (Mary Branscombe), and also divides privacy agreements and settings into so many “slices of privacy”(Sebastian Taveau) that you cannot track which peices of information are accessible to the company.
-The issue with security using soon-to-be available technology is that it may require the removal of personal privacy through observation of location (proximity to devices) and biometric verification. This will make hacking much harder, but will require a sacrifice of convenience, location and biological identity.
It will become important that consumers understand what they are being asked to sacrifice in the name of security. Mary suggests that “we have trained the monkey to press that button” and that people are already prepared to give up whatever they are asked to. However, Sebastian notes that companies have a vested interest in attempting to train their clients to more carefully assess these compromises, and that Fido, among others, has actually begun trying to do so.
In summary, there are a number of privacy issues that come with using the cloud. However, there are possibilities using Biometrics and location services (matching proximity to a device with the personal signal used to access it) to create far more secure templates which verify identity. If the biometric account on a device is set up only in a secure situation (such as a local bank branch, using identity cards etc) that secure template could be maintained and transferred to additional devices by the consumer. This would allow for a much more secure set of mobile devices and security of private information stored on the cloud, which could only be accessed biometrically.
A conversation with Tony Blau, Professor of Medicine/Hematology, Adjunct Professor of Genome Sciences and Co-Director, Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine, University of Washington; hosted by William Harris, President and CEO, Science Foundation Arizona
Tony Blau on current state of stem cells
New kind of stem cell uses skin cells to create a stem cell that subverts controversy around embryos.
Adult stem cells do a pretty good job of reconstituting blood, but so far haven’t done too much else
Embryonic stem cells can now make any human tissue
Number of people in need of a transplant vastly outstrips the number of available organs. Stem cells can actually be turned into heart mussel cells that beat like the heart
Initial studies of gene therapy in humans are not going to be a homerun. Instead, we need to understand what happened sufficiently to have a single. The first attempt at a bone marrow transplant was 14 years before it actually succeeded
Heart replacement has been done successfully in baboons and is about 3 years away from being successful in humans
Opportunities around Cancer and big data are huge
Every cancer is a unique permutation
We need a new framework to understand that.
1. Fuse research and clinical care. Develop a hypothesis around vulnerabilities.
2. Treat patient according to hypothesis and use that experience to understand tumor.
Patients are central to this process and are playing a heroic role in our research.
It’s important to be transparent: We will be wrong more than we will be right
Success is not trying to be better than an oncologist; but to “prove that we can be outstanding custodians of this process.” “If you come back in 5 years, I bet we’ll beat the pants off of an oncologist’s guess.”
With judges Mark Anderson, Founder and Chair, INVNT/IP; and Steven Sprague, CEO, Wave Systems, and Founding Member, INVNT/IP.
And CTO task force Barry Briggs, IT Chief Architect and CTO, Microsoft; Ty Carlson, Senior Manager, Technology Program Management, Digital Products Group, Amazon; Jeff Hudson, CEO, Venafi; Pete Nicoletti, Chief Information Security Officer, Virtustream; Eric Openshaw, Vice Chairman and US Technology, Media and Telecommunications Leader, Deloitte LLP; Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego/Irvine Partnership (HQ Qualcomm Institute), UCSD; Vaclav Vincalek, President, Pacific Coast Information Systems Ltd.; and Jerry Woodall, Founder, WoodallTech, and National Medal of Technology Laureate
Mark Anderson: IP theft can and has destroyed global economic sectors. For example, cellular.
Nortel penetrated by China, now they don’t exist.
RSA penetrated by China
Coke tried to purchase a new Chinese company, but wasn’t able to because their strategies were stolen by the Chinese.
How much of global GDP does not depend on IP and proprietary technology? Most global GDP today depends on IP.
Considerations:
The top 1 percent of the IP pyramid is what needs to be controlled and protected.
Military-grade team will come into your company, you won’t know it was there, they stay there.
All companies have been penetrated
Phishing has been used more and more often
Employees are the largest problem; students and interns are a strong source of loss.
Travel is a problem: The contents of your laptops will be stolen
Putting research center in China is not a good idea; nor is training employees in countries with IP theft
If you succeed in solving this problem, you will make world economic history.
Richard Marshall: For the purposes of our discussions this week, legality is irrelevant. Look at technical and policy solutions and be completely unconstrained. “Nothing is off the table as far as I’m concerned.”
Avoid compliance regimes and security. Compliance regimes are a lawyer’s full employment act. Don’t fall into that rabbit hole. Think more of asset management
Steven Sprague: How do we get to the point that it’s a natural part of the process of doing business.
With Peter Mahoney, CMO, Nuance Communications; Cary Bran, Senior Director, Innovation and New Ventures, Plantronics; and Kirsten Bay, President and CEO, Attensity Group; hosted by Stephen Socolof, Managing Partner, New Venture Partners
Peter Mahoney: Nuance has much broader world-view than voice recognition and voice synthesis. They are reinventing the relationship between people and technology. Motion, gesture, context, personalization are all required for smarter systems.
Nuance has basic capability to understand emotion.
Eg. If someone’s dropping F-bombs, customer service application knows, “They’re probably angry or from New York”
Systems have to have ability to be available as needed, convenient, not in the way
Enterprise has specific verticalized applications of these technologies:
ie. Healthcare: Voice to text, translation from Dr. prose into medical code in real-time
Nuance created speech-based interactive audio ads, but need sensors to contextualize settings
Carey Bran: Plantronics is focused on letting developers integrate into their audio devices, which can be fed into speech recognition technologies; enabling technologies and integrating more and more sensors to enable easier, more intuitive experiences.
Future is being able to walk into a sensory environment and having it sense who you are and morph around you.
Durable, rugged devices can be designed for enterprise/call center applications, but consumers want sleekness
Devices must be able to morph between consumer and work phones
Kirsten Bay: As sentiments move into digital, sentiment is lost. The future is being able to reintegrate sentiment into digital.
Customer satisfaction on Twitter is much better than on phones. Customer service agents are more highly trained and valued than phone representatives.
Enterprises use sentiment in communications with call centers, social media to design their products.
With Tom Lantzsch, Executive Vice President of Strategy, ARM Inc.; hosted by Robert F. Anderson, Director, Technology Transfer and Intellectual Property, Illinois Institute of Technology
Lantzsch says ARM is working on a long-scale timeline that gives it a unique ability to see the future of technology.
Mobile and social are waves of technology in which ARM is currently working.
Next up is a things wave
A focus on power and efficiency will underline all of this
The server problem: Every 600 smartphones drive demand for 1 server. That number drops to about 125 for iPads. That’s driving a huge need for power.
On security, technology isn’t the problem. ARM already has the hardware-based security that everyone’s talking about, but no one’s using it. The real challenge will be who gets to decide who can see and access information.
Last year 25% of Kenya’s GDP was transacted using crude text-based services.
We are driving toward extremely small, low-power,
But on the other hand, we’ve got to fix this data center issue
The next digital planet? Focusing on adaptive learning, closed loop, pervasive computing system.
Intelligent driving systems are here today: Google car actually avoids blind spots, Mercedes slams on the brakes if something runs in front of you. We’ll see more and more of this, moving from cars that are safe in accidents to those that don’t get into accidents at all.
3D transistor structures are becoming mainstream at the most advanced side of conductor industry. That will be around for 2-4 generations of applied technology.
Semiconductor design is moving away from everything on a CPU core, which is leading to heterogeneous computing: Multiple blocks on a chip that allow us to drive down power.
China’s unwritten rule: Agriculture will produce 600 million unemployed farmers as technology advances farming.
One Laptop per Child is now an institution. It’s called a smartphone. They cost $50.
With Vint Cerf, Chief Evangelist, Google; hosted by Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego/Irvine Partnership (HQ Qualcomm Institute), UCSD
“They’ve run out of prizes to give Vint, so Queen Elizabeth actually had to invent a prize to give Vint,” quips Larry Smarr.
Vint Cerf sees several Internet trends:
Mobile and email reinforce each other and
Bandwidth has increased, which means video demand is going up.
Commerce is increasing
On security: Mistakes can happen and they can appear to be attacks
If you decide to adopt a posture of response, you come up against questions like, “Where do you respond? How do you respond?”
Responses can escalate: Country A decides to attack Country B posing as Country C. “Attribution is absolutely critical and it’s really hard.”
“Anonymity or pseudonymity is a very important part of democratic society. On the other hand, I don’t think that people should be free to cause harm.”
Big fan of strong authentication as desired and appropriate.
We don’t have a cyber fire department and that’s something we should be exploring. For eg. A box that analyzes which IP addresses your computer is communicating with to ID known botnets or malware IPs.
Internet hygiene?
Vint says we need more hardware Internet security. “We should be designing hardware and software systems that mutually reinforce each other.”
Our social conventions around technology have not kept up with technology itself: One reporter recorded Cerf’s rant about net neutrality and threw it online, without telling him.
We are going to be immersed in a sea of information
One side will keep us healthier
The other side will make society increasingly transparent
If you were to design the Internet all over again, what would you do differently?
Actually did work with NSA on building a secure Internet, but it was classified information, so couldn’t share the technology at the time. Today though, it’s widely used.
Quantum computing is breathing down our back. Factorization as a work factor may turn out not to be adequate.
With John Hagel III, Director and Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge LLP; and Eric Openshaw, Vice Chairman and US Technology, Media and Telecommunications Leader, Deloitte LLP
John Hagel addresses the impacts of big data at Future in Review.
John Hagel asks, What are the structural implications of big data? Will we all become independent contractors or will this concentrate talent?
“Both of these are going to happen” in different parts of the economy
Product implementation and adaptation as a market will fragment
Infrastructure providers like manufacturing and data centers will concentrate.
Companies must adapt from a “product rules” mindset to coordinate on a global scale
“I’d like to view big data as the new solar. It is a renewable source of highly disruptive value creation.”
Media, tech and telecom have been at the forefront of data disruption; healthcare, financial services and the energy business will be next
Discussion should not be about how to hand data to executives, but about how to feed it back to the front-line workers so that they can improve their performance based on real-time feedback.
Eric Openshaw says that the securitization of big data and disruptive opportunities keeps him awake every night.
Crowd-sourced research is disrupting the work of traditional consultancies
The best data is not necessarily the data that you own. Nor is that necessarily the most useful. Instead, there is enough outside publicly available information to predict bank failures and other trends ahead of time.
A conversation with Chris Johnson, Director, Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, and Distinguished Professor, School of Computing University of Utah; and Bob Bishop, Founder and President, ICES Foundation and past CEO, Silicon Graphics; hosted by Larry Smarr, Director, Calit2, a UC San Diego Irvine Partnership (HD Qualcomm Institute), UCSD.
ICES Foundation- Bob Bishop
ICES Foundation is working to integrate all the sciences that apply to the planet and create predictability. The challenge is going from analytics into discovery, and then support. The data is so big, it’s hard to come to grips with unless you consolidate thru geoformat. Dynamic interactive visualization can be used to understand all of the big data at hand.
You can use all this data to build an Earth System Model, to look at everything from the ocean atmosphere to the solar system.
The whole solar system is talking to itself and is interconnected. ICES has satellites that are monitoring the Earth’s magnetosphere in real time. Visualization is the only way you can possibly understand all the information at our hands.
In the future, Bishop would like to see a more complete climate analysis with these newly coupled visualization systems.
Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah- Chris Johnson
Chris Johnson has been using scientific visualization to study the complexity of the inner body and much more. The ability to see things at high resolutions for the first time, and the ability to see them in a time dependent interactive way instead of a play back way, gives scientists insight they need to progress forward.
New technologies, such as high performance computing, high resolution walls, new hardware and software, and algorithms open up fresh ways for science to be viewed and applied to solve problems that previously couldn’t be solved.
Some of the projects Johnson and the Institute are working on include:
-Creating personalized patient dependent models of the body and their function (ie. computational models of the heart and simulations of the activity to create modeling in the field)
-Real time seeing during surgery of the body
-Cultural Heritage: the Digital Michelangelo Project (scanned the entire “David” statue with lasers, to yield almost a billion triangles to visualize the statue. The product? An amazingly high resolution that is essentially a perfect copy of the statue.
A conversation with Patrick Hogan, Project Lead, NASA World Wind; and Kevin Montgomery, CEO, Intelesense Technologies; hosted by Mark Anderson
World Wind
World Wind is Google Earth, only you can do what you want with it: It’s open-source, and available to anyone. Originally designed for education, its biggest user currently is the Department of Defense.
Patrick Hogan: Purpose of World Wind is “To build the technology that allowed Earth to be seen in its native context and … to allow innovation to occur by others. The government in its capacity should be facilitating innovation.”
Have opened World Wind up to developers in Europe to encourage innovation and effective use of data.
“The excitement is just seeing the possibilities freed up of what people are able to do with their own data.”
Announcing the Open Beta release of Collaborate.org exclusively for FiRe members
Climate change, pandemics and disasters are going to increase, but resources are decreasing. No one individual or agency or government can do it all. We need an infrastructure to support these efforts.
Collaborate.org is an online global community empowered with geospatial tools, using World Wind to aggregate, collaborate data irrespective of geographic boundaries.
Collaboration tools allow us to video conference, share documents, etc.
“What if we could empower that group of thoughtful, committed citizens to allow them to do their job better?” And, more importantly, what if we could empower them to find other groups like them?
Includes: Environmental and imagery sensors, GIS data and databases, news and RSS feeds, social media, satellite imagery, aerial imagery integrated and accessible through laptops, tablets, etc
Zoom in and out anywhere on the planet.
Customizable. FiRe users can contribute data and information to this, bring it home, put it on your desktop, etc.
“Go forth and do great things,” says Kevin Montgomery. “The only caveat is, what can you contribute?”
Kevin Montgomery announces the Open Beta of Collaborate.org at FiRe 2013.
