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Accelerate Your Data Strategies and Investments to Stay Competitive in the Banking Sector

April 12, 2021   TIBCO Spotfire
TIBCO DigitalBanking scaled e1617201640806 696x366 Accelerate Your Data Strategies and Investments to Stay Competitive in the Banking Sector

Reading Time: 3 minutes

2020 changed banks’ priorities, focusing more on data-driven insights that enhance resiliency and ensure exceptional customer experiences. Emerging technology (like predictive analytics, data management, machine learning, and artificial intelligence) can transform financial institutions, creating capabilities business-wide—from customer interactions to redesigned business processes to new risk and pricing models. 

A recent IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by TIBCO, Connected Intelligence in Banking, states that “one out of every three customers said that their banking needs have changed due to disruption, including increased or decreased spending; needing more credit; or saving and paying down debt. This disruption puts pressure on banks to respond to individual needs.”

How can financial services rise to face changing customer needs? With a data platform as the foundation for the future, like TIBCO’s Connected Intelligence Platform.

Read on to learn about the digital capabilities that are revolutionizing the banking industry and how banks are using TIBCO Connected Intelligence to gain a competitive edge.

Personalize Your Offerings

What if you could connect to your bank on your favorite smart device whenever and wherever you needed? What if it was easier to upload checks, get access to your money, and update your account? What if your bank could analyze your portfolios and offer unique advice? With an increase in digitalization, customers now expect these streamlined, personalized services from their financial services.

By utilizing new data capabilities, banks can engage with customers in an omnichannel way, whether on mobile, web, social media, in-person, or over the phone. They can integrate AI-financial planning to offer timely and relevant financial advice and better connect their partner ecosystem with APIs to provide the most comprehensive solutions.

BNP Paribas goes beyond simple channel integration and ensures seamless omnichannel engagement so that a customer can start and complete interactions without losing any data, no matter which device they are on. Additionally, BNL, part of BNP Group, launched the first 100 percent digital mobile bank in Europe to satisfy a new generation of customers.

Drive Insights in Real-Time

Streamlining business operations with automation is the top priority for banks worldwide going into 2021. Instead of missing customer opportunities or getting insights too late, use real-time capabilities to harness the power of data.

Real-time models allow banks to monitor business-wide operations more efficiently. Whether it’s fraud detection, next action models, or dynamic pricing, banks can execute decisions based on immediate, accurate information. They can increase customer satisfaction by sending relevant offers in real-time or by speeding up responses to customer service issues.

Bank of Montreal saw three times the acceptance of customer offers after implementing advanced analytics solutions. By presenting more relevant and timely offers, the bank now gets real-time responses from customers and can target them based on interactions that happened moments before.

Predict Future Outcomes

Where will the market shift next? What will customers want next week, next year? Predictive analytics can answer these questions, and more, allowing banks to understand consumer trends, anticipate future events, and reduce instances of fraud. The main benefits of predictive analytics are below:

  • Anticipate the needs of your customers 
  • Improve your portfolio risk with better models
  • Reduce the cost of fraud management

Consorsbank uses predictive analytics to identify prospective customers, analyze account opening and closing processes, and discover potential risks when onboarding new customers. The bank reports a 20 percent increase in revenue after launching TIBCO Spotfire to analyze customer dialogues. 

Simply put, 2020’s disruption has accelerated the banking industry’s digital transformation. Click To Tweet

Simply put, 2020’s disruption has accelerated the banking industry’s digital transformation. Banks should look to use data as a foundation for their future success. To holistically manage intelligent initiatives, consider using TIBCO’s Connected Intelligence Platform to solve all your data needs.

Read this IDC Infobrief, sponsored by TIBCO, Connected Intelligence in Banking, to learn how financial services can become more personalized, more predictive, and more real-time than ever.

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SQL Server Security – Fixed server and database roles

April 12, 2021   BI News and Info

Managing Security for SQL Server is extremely important. As a DBA or security administrator, you need to provide access for logins and database users to resources within SQL Server. SQL Server has both server and database resources where access might need to be granted. Access to these resources can be granted to either individual logins or database users or can be granted to roles, for which logins or database users can be members. Granting access via a role is known as role-based security.

There are two types of roles: fixed or user-defined. In this article, I will discuss the different fixed server and database roles provided with SQL Server and how these roles can be used to support role-based security to simplify providing access to the different SQL Server resources. In a future article, I will discuss user-defined server and database roles.

What is role-based security?

Role-based security is the concept of providing logins and/or database users access to a SQL Server resource by being a member of a role. A role is an object in SQL Server that contains members, much like a Windows group contain members. When a login or database user is a member of a role, they inherit the role’s permissions.

When role-based security is used, the actual access permissions to SQL Server resources are granted to a role and not a specific login or user. Role-based security reduces the amount of administration work needed to grant and manage security when multiple logins or users require the same access to SQL Server resources. Once a role has been set up, and the appropriate permissions are granted to it, it is just a simple matter of adding logins or users to the role to provide them with the same access as the role. Without using roles, an administrator would need to grant the same permissions to each login or database user, thus causing additional administration work. There is also the possibility of making an error which would result in some logins and users getting the wrong set of permissions.

There are two types of fixed roles in SQL Server: Server and Database. The fixed server roles provide specific security access to server resources. In contrast, the fixed database roles provide access to database resources.

Fixed server roles

Fixed Server roles have server-wide scope. They come with a set of canned permissions tied to them. The permissions for server roles can’t be changed or extended.

There are nine different fixed server roles provided with SQL Server, which are shown in Table 1, along with a description. The information in the table is directly from the Microsoft SQL Server documentation.

Table 1: Fixed Server Roles

Server Role

Description

sysadmin

Members of the sysadmin fixed server role can perform any activity in the server.

serveradmin

Members of the serveradmin fixed server role can change server-wide configuration options and shut down the server.

securityadmin

Members of the securityadmin fixed server role manage logins and their properties. They can GRANT, DENY, and REVOKE server-level permissions. They can also GRANT, DENY, and REVOKE database-level permissions if they have access to a database. Additionally, they can reset passwords for SQL Server logins.

IMPORTANT: The ability to grant access to the Database Engine and to configure user permissions allows the security admin to assign most server permissions. The securityadmin role should be treated as equivalent to the sysadmin role.

processadmin

Members of the processadmin fixed server role can end processes that are running in an instance of SQL Server.

setupadmin

Members of the setupadmin fixed server role can add and remove linked servers by using Transact-SQL statements. (sysadmin membership is needed when using Management Studio.)

bulkadmin

Members of the bulkadmin fixed server role can run the BULK INSERT statement.

diskadmin

The diskadmin fixed server role is used for managing disk files.

dbcreator

Members of the dbcreator fixed server role can create, alter, drop, and restore any database.

public

Every SQL Server login belongs to the public server role. When a server principal has not been granted or denied specific permissions on a securable object, the user inherits the permissions granted to public on that object. Only assign public permissions on any object when you want the object to be available to all users. You cannot change membership in public.

Note: public is implemented differently than other roles, and permissions can be granted, denied, or revoked from the public fixed server roles.

Each fixed server role provides a unique fixed set of permissions that can provide different kinds of access to server resources. The set of permissions associated with fixed server roles (with the exception of the public server role) cannot be modified.

The public role is a little different from all other fixed server roles in that you can grant permissions to this role. When permissions are granted to the public role, all logins with access to SQL Server will inherit the permissions of the public role. The public role is a great way to provide some default permissions to every login.

When a login, Windows account or Windows group becomes a member of one of these server roles, they inherit the rights associated with the role. If someone needs the same rights as a server role, it is much easier to make them a member of the role instead of granting them access to each of the permissions associated with a role. Additionally, when you want to grant the same server rights to multiple logins, placing each login in the same server roles makes it easy to accomplish this, ensuring they get exactly the same permissions. User-defined roles can also be added as members of a server role. I’ll leave the discussion about user-defined roles for another article.

There are a number of different stored procedures, views and functions that can be used to work with fixed server roles. If you are unsure of the permissions associated with a server role, you can use the system stored procedures sp_srvrolepermission to displays the permission assigned to a single fixed server role or all the fixed server roles. The code in Listing 1 shows two different examples of how to use this stored procedure.

Listing 1: Using sp_srvrolepermission

– Displaying all server role permissions

EXEC sp_srvrolepermission;

GO

– Displaying permissions for only the dbcreator role

EXEC sp_srvrolepermission @srvrolename = ‘dbcreator’;

For a complete list of all stored procedures, commands, views and functions that work with fixed server roles, you can check out the list by using this link.

Adding a login to a fixed server role can be done using SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) or TSQL. To use SSMS, follow these steps:

  1. Connect to an instance
  2. Expand the Security item
  3. Expand the Server Roles item
  4. Right-click on the fixed server role and then click on the properties option
  5. Click on the Add button on Server Roles Properties page
  6. Select the login or user-defined server role that you want to add to fixed server role
  7. Click on a series of Ok buttons to complete the addition of new member to the role

Before clicking to add the member, the dialog should look like Figure 1.

word image SQL Server Security – Fixed server and database roles

Figure 1: Add a new login to a fixed server role.

Alternatively, you can use the TSQL code to add a login to a fixed server role. The code in Listing 2 adds the Red-Gate login to the sysadmin fixed server role.

Listing 2: Adding a login to the sysadmin fixed server role.

ALTER SERVER ROLE sysadmin ADD MEMBER [Red-Gate];  

Removing logins from a fixed server role can be done as easily as you added them by using SSMS or TSQL. The code in Listing 3 shows how to remove the Red-Gate login from the sysadmin fixed server role.

Listing 3: Removing login from sysadmin fixed server role.

ALTER SERVER ROLE sysadmin DROP MEMBER [Red-Gate];

Fixed server roles are a great way to provide DBAs, Security Admins, and operators access to the server resources they need to perform their job duties. By using server roles, you can simplify the granting of permissions to server resources. In addition to fixed server roles, there are also fixed database roles.

Database Roles

To help manage security at the database level, SQL Server has databases roles. Just like server roles, there are two different types of database roles: fixed and user-defined. Fixed database roles are just like fixed server roles, meaning they have a specific set of permissions associated with each one that cannot be altered. Fixed database roles only provide permissions to database resources in a specific database.

If a database user is a member of a fixed database role, they inherit the permissions that have been pre-defined for the fixed database role. Each database contains the same set of fixed database roles. Table 2 contains the names and definitions for each fixed database role definition, as found in the Microsoft documentation.

Table 2: Fixed Database Roles

Fixed Database Role Name

Description

db_owner

Members of the db_owner fixed database role can perform all configuration and maintenance activities on the database, and can also drop the database in SQL Server. (In SQL Database and Azure Synapse, some maintenance activities require server-level permissions and cannot be performed by db_owners.)

db_securityadmin

Members of the db_securityadmin fixed database role can modify role membership for custom roles only and manage permissions. Members of this role can potentially elevate their privileges and their actions should be monitored.

db_accessadmin

Members of the db_accessadmin fixed database role can add or remove access to the database for Windows logins, Windows groups, and SQL Server logins.

db_backupoperator

Members of the db_backupoperator fixed database role can back up the database.

db_ddladmin

Members of the db_ddladmin fixed database role can run any Data Definition Language (DDL) command in a database.

db_datawriter

Members of the db_datawriter fixed database role can add, delete, or change data in all user tables.

db_datareader

Members of the db_datareader fixed database role can read all data from all user tables.

db_denydatawriter

Members of the db_denydatawriter fixed database role cannot add, modify, or delete any data in the user tables within a database.

db_denydatareader

Members of the db_denydatareader fixed database role cannot read any data in the user tables within a database.

A few additional special fixed database roles only apply to the msdb database or SQL Database on Azure. For more information on these special roles, see Microsoft documentation here.

There is also the public database role. Just like the public server role, rights can be granted to the public database role. When rights have been granted to the public database role in a database, those rights are inherited by each database user that has been defined as a user of the database. The public role is a great way to provide the same permissions to database resources for every database user in a database.

Not all organization will use each of these roles to provide access. Most shops use the db_datareader, and db_datawriter roles. If you make a database user a member of these roles, they will be able to read and/or update any user table in the database. Not only that, but they will also be able to update and/or read any data from any new user table that might be added in the future. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. It is a good thing if you want users to automatically gain read and/or update rights to all new user tables, regardless of the table. If you ever think you might want to add one or more tables to your database that only a few database users should have access to, then avoid using these two roles to provide blanket read and/or write access to database tables. Because these two roles automatically provide access to any new user table defined in the future, some shops prohibit the use of these roles to ensure database users only have access to the tables they need to perform their job function.

Just like fixed server roles, there are a number of system stored procedures, commands, views, and functions that can be used to display and manage fixed database roles. The code in Listing 4 shows how to use one of those system stored procedures sp_dbfixedrolepermission, to display all the permissions associated with each fixed database role in the AdventureWorks2019 database, as well as how to use this stored procedure to display just the permissions associated with the single fixed database role db_datareader.

Listing 4: Displaying permissions associated with fixed database roles

USE AdventureWorks2019;

GO

– Show all permissions for fix database roles

EXEC sp_dbfixedrolepermission;

GO

–Show permissions for db_datareader

EXEC sp_dbfixedrolepermission @rolename =  ‘db_datareader’;

For a complete list of all stored procedures, commands, views and functions used to display and manage fixed database roles you can review the documentation found here.

In order for a database user to inherit the permissions of a fixed database role, they need to be a member of a fixed database role. To determine if a databases user is a member of a database role, you can review the role membership using SSMS by following the steps:

  1. Connect to an instance
  2. Expand Databases
  3. Expand the database for which you want to review fixed database roles
  4. Expand the Security item
  5. Expand the Roles item
  6. Expand the Database Roles Item
  7. Double click on the role in which you want to see members
  8. Review the properties window display to see the members of the role

Figure 2 shows the members of the db_datareader role:

word image 1 SQL Server Security – Fixed server and database roles

Figure 2: Review fixed database role permissions

An application might need to programmatically determine if a database user is a member of roles. The IS_MEMBER function allows you to write TSQL code to do that. Using this function would allow you to build an application that displays different menu options for different database users, depending on the database roles that the current user is a member. To programmatically determine if the currently logged-on database user is a member of db_datawriter role, in the AdventureWorks2019 database, you could use the code in Listing 5.

Listing 5: Determining if current database user is a member of a role

USE AdventureWorks2019;

GO

SELECT IS_MEMBER(‘db_datawriter’);

GO

The IS_MEMBER function returns a 1 if the current user is a member of the db_datawriter role or 0 if the user is not a member of this role.

Predefined Server or Database Roles

Several predefined server and database roles are provided in SQL Server. These predefined roles provide members with a fixed set of permissions based on the role. Using these predefined roles makes it easy to grant logins or database users access to a predefined set of permissions by just making them a member of a server or database role. One thing to keep in mind when using fixed server and database roles is that the permissions cannot be changed or expanded. Using predefined server and databases roles are a great way to provide a set of canned access to server and/or database resources with minimal administrative effort.

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Teradata Named a Leader in Cloud Data Warehouse Evaluation by Independent Research Firm

April 11, 2021   BI News and Info
forrester wave teradata is named leader.png?width=640&height=336&ext= Teradata Named a Leader in Cloud Data Warehouse Evaluation by Independent Research Firm

Teradata (NYSE: TDC), a leading multi-cloud data warehouse platform provider, today announced that Forrester Research has named Teradata a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021,” written by VP and Principal analyst Noel Yuhanna, on March 24, 2021. Forrester analyzed and scored the top 13 vendors in the Cloud Data Warehouse market according to 26 criteria.

“Over the past 12-18 months, Teradata has been laser-focused on our cloud capabilities and the performance of our cloud business,” said Steve McMillan, CEO of Teradata. “From shoring up our cloud credentials with key new executive appointments to significantly increasing our cloud R&D spend, our commitment to and investment in the cloud has successfully positioned Teradata as a modern, relevant cloud platform for our customers. We believe that this recognition from Forrester is another validation that our cloud-first agenda is winning in the market.”

Forrester’s analysis of Teradata in the Cloud Data Warehouse Wave evaluation is based on Vantage — a multi-cloud data warehouse platform that enables ecosystem simplification by connecting analytics, data lakes, and data warehouses. 

According to Forrester’s evaluation, “[Vantage] combines open source and commercial technologies to operationalize insights; solve business problems; enable descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics; and deliver performance for mixed workloads with high query concurrency using workload management and adaptive optimization. Teradata Vantage integrates multiple analytic languages – including SQL, R, Python, SAS, and Java – and supports various data types, including JSON, Avro, Parquet, relational, spatial, and temporal.”

The Forrester report also notes that “Customers like Teradata Vantage’s hybrid cloud platform, reliability, data science, advanced analytics, and ease of management from an infrastructure perspective. Top use cases include BI acceleration, customer intelligence, real-time analytics, embedded data science functions, fraud detection, time-series analysis, data lake integration, data warehouse modernization, and data services.”

Read the complete The Forrester Wave™: Cloud Data Warehouse, Q1 2021 report here. 

With Vantage, enterprise-scale companies can eliminate silos and cost-effectively query all their data all the time. Regardless of where the data resides – in the cloud using low-cost object stores, on multiple clouds, on-premises, or any combination thereof – organizations can get a complete view of their business. And by combining Vantage with first-party cloud services, Teradata enables customers to expand their cloud ecosystem with deep integration of cloud-specific, cloud-native services.

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Teradata United States

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Derivative of a norm

April 11, 2021   BI News and Info

 Derivative of a norm

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TODAY’S OPEN THREAD

April 11, 2021   Humor
blank TODAY’S OPEN THREAD

Got something interesting?

Just feel like bitching?

Need to unload?

Have at it in the comments.

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ANTZ-IN-PANTZ ……

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IBM releases Qiskit modules that use quantum computers to improve machine learning

April 11, 2021   Big Data
 IBM releases Qiskit modules that use quantum computers to improve machine learning

Transform 2021

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July 12-16, 2021

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IBM is releasing Qiskit Machine Learning, a set of new application modules that’s part of its open source quantum software. The new feature is the latest expansion of the company’s broader effort to get more developers to begin experimenting with quantum computers.

According to a blog post by the Qiskit Applications Team, the machine learning modules promise to help optimize machine learning by using quantum computers for some parts of the process.

“Quantum computation offers another potential avenue to increase the power of machine learning models, and the corresponding literature is growing at an incredible pace,” the team wrote. “Quantum machine learning (QML) proposes new types of models that leverage quantum computers’ unique capabilities to, for example, work in exponentially higher-dimensional feature spaces to improve the accuracy of models.”

Rather than replacing current computer architectures, IBM is betting that quantum computers will gain traction in the coming years by taking on very specific tasks that are offloaded from a classic computing system to a quantum platform. AI and machine learning are among the areas where IBM has said it’s hopeful that quantum can make an impact.

To make quantum more accessible, last year IBM introduced an open source quantum programming framework called Qiskit. The company has said it has the potential to speed up some applications by 100 times.

In the case of machine learning, the hope is that a system that offloads tasks to a quantum system could accelerate the training time. However, challenges remain, such as how to get large data sets in and out of the quantum machine without adding time that would cancel out any gains by the quantum calculations.

Developers who use Qiskit to improve their algorithms will have access to test them on IBM’s cloud-based quantum computing platform.

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Our site delivers essential information on data technologies and strategies to guide you as you lead your organizations. We invite you to become a member of our community, to access:

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Transitioning to Hybrid Commerce

April 11, 2021   CRM News and Info

I saw a report the other day about the future of commerce that made me smile.

It was unambiguously positive of the future of digital commerce and did its best to nail the brick-and-mortar coffin. The change had already occurred, it’s time to mop up, the report implied.

I had just been to the local mall for a repair at the Apple store and what struck me there was the sight of shuttered big-name stores that had gone out of business.

Certainly, the pandemic has caused some upheavals in American business and — it’s true that the record of progress in economics is littered with creative destruction. But the absolutist prognostications about the future of digital commerce taking over the world made me think “here we go again.” Trees don’t grow to the moon, retrenchment is common.

There is no doubt that digital commerce has played an essential role in getting us through the crisis. Taking deliveries at home has become much more preferable to risking contact in a crowded mall. Still, to think or say that the pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction is, at least slightly, delusional.

I don’t know if there is another cost-effective way to get my Mac fixed other than to take it in once tech support has done its best and come up with nothing. Hence the visit to the mall. How many other processes run along these lines?

Also, the problems with malls predate the pandemoclypse. For starters, in my humble opinion, they are at least overcrowded, hard to get into and out of, and carry an increasingly useless and overpriced array of marginally attractive or high calorie things. But that’s just me.

E-Commerce Only, Really?

Malls also serve as the latter-day town square: a place to meet, to socialize, and in some ways bond or keep up with pop culture. They are the descendants of medieval fairs and middle eastern bazaars. But cars are the direct descendants of the horse and buggy so, I wouldn’t say that a change from physical to all-digital commerce isn’t possible. My objection is to the certainty of the rapidity of the shift.

Typically, even in big shifts we would see a regrouping and reassertion of the old paradigm before it succumbs, and recovery is a distinct possibility. I think we have to wait and see what the post-Covid world looks like.

Already we’re seeing big companies like Google mandating a return to the office — with some modifications — and I expect we’ll see more hybrid arrangements in retail. The mall might not go away, but its importance might shrink the same way radio and TV shrank in the face of newer technologies.

The radio niche is still with us though we rarely hear radio shows anymore. That task was taken over by TV and since the debut of streaming, we might watch the same box but what gets delivered to it and how, is vastly different.

So, I am looking for a hybrid commerce experience to evolve and it’s one that CRM most certainly will have a prominent role in. But what does this mean for the typical company selling in the B2C or increasingly the B2B space?

It’s reasonable to expect they’ll have a need for new or revamped commerce solutions, but how should they prepare? I think there are three options, two are not very good.

  1. Do nothing and you face market risk or the chance that the market will change on you over night, more than it has. With this option you risk future profits and maybe your company, but you don’t spend money and there’s always the chance you can catch up.
  2. There is also risk in doing too much. Spend a lot on new systems for an opportunity that never materializes, and you’ve wasted money, a big sin in business. You might have also wasted opportunity time in another direction. So, before you leap do some analysis.
  3. Do something but not everything. I’m not a big fan of doing the Solomonic thing and cutting the baby in half because it rarely results in a usable outcome. This is different. Digital commerce depends on having a flexible software platform for building and changing CRM applications as needed. If you haven’t selected a platform provider or two yet, this is something you could do that will benefit your business regardless of which way the market ultimately bounces.

Time for Feedback

It’s good that you see the many changes that have happened in business and society the last year. Now you need some confirmation that change is here to stay. The idea of doing your own analysis is never a bad one.

Start with your customers.

Are they in love with buying online or do they see it as a necessary but less than ideal thing? What does a good buying experience look like to them?

Chances are they’ll tell you that online is fine for a variety of things but that sometimes they need to inspect the goods in person. Or, they might say they don’t need a traditional salesperson so much as they need a trusted advisor.

Whatever the feedback, getting to the best answer might require more of a skill we’ve all developed over the last year — waiting.
end enn Transitioning to Hybrid Commerce


Denis%20Pombriant Transitioning to Hybrid Commerce
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.

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Bad Excuses

April 10, 2021   Humor

Half of all Republican men refuse to get vaccinated against Covid-19. You might think that this could be a good thing because it might cause an extinction event for supporters of Donald Trump, but unfortunately it is just as likely to kill the rest of us as well.

But the crazy thing are the excuses being given for refusing a jab or two:

© Tom Tomorrow

The last panel reminds me of the time when people thought that cell phones cause brain cancer. I haven’t heard much about that for a while.

 If you liked this, you might also like these related posts:
  1. Out of excuses
  2. Having a Bad Day
  3. Living in a Bad Movie
  4. A Study in Bad Leadership
  5. Acquittal

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Understanding CRM Features-Better Customer Engagement

April 10, 2021   Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Selecting the best CRM tool for your business can be a challenging process. More companies today are utilizing modern technology business solutions to help reach business objectives.  CRM or Customer Relationship Management is essentially a business software system, or “Cloud Software” that helps individuals and teams maximize their productivity by improving customer communications and well as marketing, sales, and customer service effectiveness overall. Primarily, CRM is a system for recording and storing all customer-interaction information in one place; however, proper and effective management of your customers is one of CRM Features.

CRM solutions offer a standardized method for both gathering and sharing customer data as well as improving the way your company markets, sells, and supports customers.  CRM solutions help in improving customer service by assuring that every customer inquiry is handled. It holds users accountable for proper follow-up and KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) such as time to initial response. It also helps users provide better support by displaying all the vital information on dashboards, such as customer preferences, purchase history, past interactions, and more.

A Modern CRM System, such as Power-CRM,  can help you provide a positive experience to your valuable customers every time they interact with your company/employees. This is possible since CRM provides detailed information on each customer, thereby allowing the employees to engage with them effectively. Furthermore, an integrated connection to Microsoft Outlook, lets you populate your Power-CRM with relevant information. By having both CRM and Email on whatever device you use: desktop, tablet, or mobile device, Power-CRM can help boost customer service levels by having all relevant communication in one place.

In addition to having customer information that is easy to find, Power-CRM can help you stay connected to your customers by having a “Support” area to better serve your customers.  The Case Management/Ticket Management CRM Features in this system allow you to stay in communication with both your customer and internal team to provide a documented resolution for each support case matched up against your Account record.  As Customer Support Case gets sent in they can be delegated to certain people in your company with all supporting notes in Power-CRM as the support ticket progresses.

Power-CRM, offered by iCepts Technology Group, is a full-featured, yet affordable Cloud CRM solution that can help your business both the effective tracking of new leads and opportunities while offering a system for better customer engagement.  Pricing for Power-CRM starts at just $ 25/user/month + services.

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AI Weekly: Continual learning offers a path toward more humanlike AI

April 10, 2021   Big Data
 AI Weekly: Continual learning offers a path toward more humanlike AI

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State-of-the-art AI systems are remarkably capable, but they suffer from a key limitation: statisticity. Algorithms are trained once on a dataset and rarely again, making them incapable of learning new information without retraining. This is as opposed to the human brain, which learns constantly, using knowledge gained over time and building on it as it encounters new information. While there’s been progress toward bridging the gap, solving the problem of “continual learning” remains a grand challenge in AI.

This challenge motivated a team of AI and neuroscience researchers to found ContinualAI, a nonprofit organization and open community of continual and lifelong learning enthusiasts. ContinualAI recently announced Avalanche, a library of tools compiled over the course of a year from over 40 contributors to make continual learning research easier and more reproducible. The group also hosts conference-style presentations, sponsors workshops and AI competitions, and maintains a repository of tutorial, code, and guides.

As Vincenzo Lomonaco, cofounding president and assistant professor at the University of Pisa, explains, ContinualAI is one of the largest organizations on a topic its members consider fundamental for the future of AI. “Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began, ContinualAI was funded with the idea of pushing the boundaries of science through distributed, open collaboration,” he told VentureBeat via email. “We provide a comprehensive platform to produce, discuss and share original research in AI. And we do this completely for free, for anyone.”

Even highly sophisticated deep learning algorithms can experience catastrophic learning or catastrophic interference, a phenomenon where deep networks fail to recall what they’ve learned from a training dataset. The result is that the networks have to be constantly reminded of the knowledge they’ve gained or risk becoming “stuck” with their most recent “memories.”

OpenAI research scientist Jeff Clune, who helped to cofound Uber AI Labs in 2017, has called catastrophic forgetting the “Achilles’ heel” of machine learning and believes that solving it is the fastest path to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Last February, Clune coauthored a paper detailing ANML, an algorithm that managed to learn 600 sequential tasks with minimal catastrophic forgetting by “meta-learning” solutions to problems instead of manually engineering solutions. Separately, Alphabet’s DeepMind has published research suggesting that catastrophic forgetting isn’t an insurmountable challenge for neural networks. And Facebook is advancing a number of techniques and benchmarks for continual learning, including a model that it claims is effective in preventing the forgetting of task-specific skills.

But while the past several years have seen a resurgence of research into the issue, catastrophic forgetting largely remains unsolved, according to Keiland Cooper, a cofounding member of ContinualAI and a neuroscience research associate at the University of California, Irvine. “The potential of continual learning exceeds catastrophic forgetting and begins to touch on more interesting questions of implementing other cognitive learning properties in AI,” Cooper told VentureBeat. “Transfer learning is one example, where when humans or animals learn something previously, sometimes this learning can be applied to a new context or aid learning in other domains … Even more alluring is that continual learning is an attempt to push AI from narrow, savant-like systems to broader, more general ones.”

Even if continual learning doesn’t yield the sort of AGI depicted science fiction, Cooper notes that there are immediate advantages to it across a range of domains. Cutting-edge models are being trained on increasingly larger datasets in search of better performance, but this training comes at a cost — whether waiting weeks for training to finish or the impact of the electricity usage on the environment.

“Say you run a certain AI organization that built a natural language model that was trained over weeks on 45 terabytes of data for a few million dollars,” Cooper explained. “If you want to teach that model something new, well, you’d very likely have to start from scratch or risk overwriting what it had already learned, unless you added continual learning additions to the model. Moreover, at some point, the cost to store that data will be exceedingly high for an organization, or even impossible. Beyond this, there are many cases where you can only see the data once and so retraining isn’t even an option.”

While the blueprint for a continual learning AI system remains elusive, ContinualAI aims to connect researchers and stakeholders interested in the area and support and provide a platform for projects and research. It’s grown to over 1,000 members in the three years since its founding.

“For me personally, while there has been a renewed interest in continual learning in AI research, the neuroscience of how humans and animals can accomplish these feats is still largely unknown,” Cooper said. “I’d love to see more of an interaction with AI researchers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists to communicate and build upon each of their fields ides towards a common goal of understanding one of the most vital aspects of learning and intelligence. I think an organization like ContinualAI is best positioned to do just that, which allows for the sharing of ideas without the boundaries of the academic or industry walls, siloed fields, or distant geolocation.”

Beyond the mission of dissemination information about continual learning, Lomonaco believes that ContinualAI has the potential to become a reference points for a more inclusive and collaborative way of doing research in AI. “Elite university and private company labs still work mostly behind close doors, [but] we truly believe in inclusion and diversity rather than selective elitiarity. We favor transparency and open-source rather than protective IP licenses. We make sure anyone has access to the learning resources she needs to achieve her potential.”

For AI coverage, send news tips to Kyle Wiggers — and be sure to subscribe to the AI Weekly newsletter and bookmark our AI channel, The Machine.

Thanks for reading,

Kyle Wiggers

AI Staff Writer

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