Techno-News Blog

Danny Palmer, ZDNet

The Triton malware attack was far from the first time that hackers have attempted to target the networks of an industrial facility, but it was the first time that malware designed to attack safety systems was ever seen in the wild. The malware was designed to manipulate Schneider Electric’s Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers – emergency shutdown systems – and was uncovered on the network at a critical infrastructure operator in the Middle East. The malware campaign was extremely stealthy and was only uncovered because the attackers made a mistake and triggered the safety system, shutting down the plant. The outcome could’ve been much worse.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/cybersecurity-the-key-lessons-of-the-triton-malware-cyberattack-you-need-to-learn/

Marc Fischer, Entrepreneur

Research firm Korn Ferry predicted that companies in technology, media and telecom will face a talent shortage of 1.1 million by 2020. By 2030, that number will grow to 4.3 million, the report said; and the result will be intense competition for a dwindling pool of tech professionals. The same survey showed that insufficient staff is already holding back digital transformation at 54 percent of companies surveyed. Skilled coders, of course, won’t materialize out of thin air. So, instead of hoping that traditional recruiting tactics will solve their mounting talent shortage, companies should consider a new approach — one that looks for alternatives to the human talent companies will always need but may have to struggle mightily to find. That approach: artificial intelligence.

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/332896

Deloitte
There is good news for blockchain enthusiasts: Progress is being made in addressing these obstacles. Deloitte has identified five key vectors of progress that could drive wider adoption of blockchain. Three of these vectors—increase in transaction speeds, standards and interoperability, and ease of implementation—enhance technical feasibility. The other two—regulatory advancements and expansion of consortia—help broaden the technology’s applicability to a greater number of use cases and industries.

https://apnews.com/sponsored/?prx_t=wYAEAVYYzAniAPA

Andrew Kreighbaum, Inside Higher Ed

Career and technical education, which was once known as vocational training, has shed some of that stigma thanks in part to growth of new fields in communications, health care and engineering. CTE programs also have created clearer connections between skills training and continued postsecondary education. And supporters have pointed to both improving test scores and graduation rates among CTE students in high schools. But a report from the American Enterprise Institute released today finds that those signs of progress can mask continuing struggles of students who are enrolled in more traditional career and technical education courses. That’s because overall academic gains for CTE programs may reflect higher enrollment of more academically prepared, college-bound students rather than improving quality of courses themselves.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/05/01/emerging-career-education-tracks-may-mask-struggles-students-traditional-programs

Blake Droesch, eMarketer
Fewer people in the US are accessing social networking sites via computers, with the majority of users now exclusively on mobile devices. We forecast that 51.7% of US social network users will be mobile-only in 2019. As smartphone use grows, fewer Americans are using desktops and laptops to access the internet. The number of US smartphone users will reach 232.8 million in 2019, surpassing desktop/laptop internet users (228.9 million) for the first time. And the number of those who access the internet exclusively on a mobile device will grow by 10.6%, reaching 55.1 million users.

https://www.emarketer.com/content/more-than-half-of-social-network-users-will-be-mobile-only-in-2019?ecid=NL1001

Ian Schwartz, AZ Family

Are you heading back to school, or maybe helping your kids pay for it?  Imagine college without having to pay for textbooks.   That’s the whole idea behind Mesa Community College’s new Z Degree Program, or zero textbook cost program.  The two-year associates is completely online and students do not have to buy any textbooks.  MCC faculty said this will save students around $8,500 over two years. So how do they do it?

https://www.azfamily.com/shows/cbs_5_this_morning/originals/college-without-paying-for-textbooks-it-s-possible/article_5f0f245e-67c6-11e9-96d7-931bc5a49513.html

Society for Consumer Psychology, Science Today

Although brands often target a certain gender, age group or social group with advertisements, personality-matching ads could potentially allow marketers to tailor their products to a wider group of people. A consumer who might not consider shopping online at one store may discover that there are in fact items that would be appealing. “It’s essentially bringing the benefits of talking to a salesperson to the online world,” says Matz. “Online marketers typically focus on a large audience, but now we could predict someone’s psychological traits to give them an individualized experience.” [ed note: consider implications for learning/education]

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190426142042.htm

Jon Marcus, Hechinger Report

As the number of undergraduates steadily declines in seeming direct proportion to rising costs, debt and the many other obstacles faced by college students, graduate enrollment is quietly on the upswing. It’s being driven by the better job prospects and higher salaries people think it will bring them — and by a conscious strategy among universities like this one to add graduate programs that produce much-needed revenue. While undergraduates get much of the attention, students who pursued graduate and professional degrees now account for 40 percent of the notorious $1.5 trillion worth of outstanding national student loan debt, the College Board reports; each owes three times more, on average, than an undergraduate, according to the Urban Institute.

https://hechingerreport.org/universities-increasingly-turn-to-graduate-programs-to-balance-their-books/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Machine learning is an application of artificial intelligence (AI) that provides systems the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. Now, human beings are in the process of building machines that will eventually act autonomously and with human-like intelligence. In order to achieve this aim, we need machines to, like infants, learn about the world around them on their own. With machine learning, programmers don’t create step-by-step rules for machines to follow. They allow machines to learn and come to conclusions on their own. With this approach, machines gather information on their own and in the process they become more accomplished.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/how-machine-learning-is-helping-us-to-understand-the-brain/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

The world is drowning in data. We are creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That is 2.5 followed by 18 zeros!  A university executive resolution, for example, is the culmination of many discussions in meetings, countless emails and many revisions before the final decision. The eventual resolution is one data point, but it’s accompanied by so much unstructured data. Through cognitive computing’s ability to discover patterns, meaning can be derived from unstructured data. These patterns are invaluable for insights and decision-making, but they are not obvious. They can only be revealed by cognitive computing through machine learning algorithms.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/taming-big-data-in-education-with-cognitive-computing/

Ben Unglesbee, Education Dive
In the coming years, advanced technologies like mixed reality, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain and virtual assistants could play a bigger role at colleges and universities, according to a new report from Educause, a nonprofit focused on IT’s role in higher ed. The 2019 Horizon Report, based on a panel of higher ed experts, zeroes in on trends, challenges and developments in educational technology. Challenges range from the “solvable,” such as improving digital fluency and increasing demand for digital learning experiences, to the “wicked.” The latter includes rethinking teaching and advancing digital equity. The panel contemplated blockchain’s use in higher ed for the first time in the 2019 report.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/how-blockchain-virtual-assistants-and-ai-are-changing-higher-ed/553434/

by Michelle Rakoczy, EDUCAUSE Review
Information technology in higher education is under a state of constant change. IT staff need to be able to maintain and grow their technical skills, but what about their overall professional growth? The latest report from the EDUCAUSE Center for Analysis and Research—The Higher Education IT Workforce Landscape, 2019—shows that for job success, technical staff also need “Business skills such as effective communication and the ability to manage relationships within the institution.” Many technical staff want to continually grow and for that growth to be recognized, and promotion is one way to achieve that recognition. However, many staff do not understand the organizational process for achieving a promotion. According to the report, “Promoting employees internally results in better performance evaluations, with employees staying in their position longer than external hires.” Given how difficult it can be to recruit many IT positions, retention is very important in higher education.

https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2019/4/providing-a-clear-path-to-advancement-for-it-staff

By Larry Dignan, ZD Net

IBM said its commercial quantum computing program, called IBM Q Network, is expanding to more universities in North America, including Notre Dame, Florida State, and Virginia Tech. The company’s IBM Q Network is designed to develop curricula for students and forge research partnerships with academia. The additions of the aforementioned universities as well as Stony Brook University and the University of Tokyo will round out a list that already includes Duke, Harvard, and the University of Waterloo.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-expands-universities-in-its-quantum-computing-research-network/

Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Artificial intelligence (AI) is able to capture, aggregate, and analyze data from several different sources to build a student learning profile. In the past, the only way to measure what students have learned was through tests, written and oral exams and assignments. However, these methods ignore much of what a student has assimilated over the years. Over the course of many years of learning a student produces a huge amount of output in the form of assignments, class tests, and classroom participation that gets forgotten or lost in subsequent terms. But AI forgets nothing. AI will analyse and store all this and more information, including seemingly irrelevant information to form a complete picture of the student as a learner: how and with what learning material they engage successfully as well as what material they struggle with.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/using-ai-to-personalize-education-for-everyone/

EDUCAUSE

EDUCAUSE is proud to continue the tradition of excellence begun by the New Media Consortium’s (NMC) work on the Horizon Report. The report serves as a reference and technology planning guide for educators, higher education leaders, administrators, policy makers, and technologists.  Topics include: Analytics Artificial Intelligence (AI) Badges and Credentialing Blended Learning Blockchain Competency-based Education (CBE) Digital Learning Digital Literacy Extended Reality (XR) Innovation Institutional Management Instructional Design Instructional Technologies Learning Analytics Learning Space Mobile Learning New Models

https://library.educause.edu/resources/2019/4/2019-h

By David Raths, Campus Technology
Universities share how they are making strides with the use of adaptive courseware in the humanities. Most of the publicized examples of adaptive learning focus on its use in improving student outcomes in STEM courses, but some universities are seeing promising examples in the humanities as well. For example, the University of Mississippi Department of Writing and Rhetoric is using adaptive learning to help first-year writing students grasp rhetorical concepts.

https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/04/24/new-frontiers-of-adaptive-learning.aspx

By JONATHAN VANIAN, Fortune
In recent years, researchers and journalists have highlighted artificial intelligence sometimes stumbling when it comes to minorities and women. Facial recognition technology, for example, is more likely to become confused when scanning dark-skinned women than light-skinned men. Last week, AI Now, a research group at New York University, released a study about A.I.’s diversity crisis. The report said that a lack of diversity among the people who create artificial intelligence and in the data they use to train it has created huge shortcomings in the technology.

http://fortune.com/2019/04/23/artificial-intelligence-diversity-crisis/

Brittany Chambers, Forbes

With the buzz of conference attendees, including renowned thought leaders and investors, who have developed a variety of new innovative technologies walking the venue grounds, ASU-GSV is not a conference to disappoint. The yearly conference, coined by its founders as one of “the most impactful convening of leaders in education and talent tech,” certainly has served as a space for some of the most innovative leaders to connect as they endeavor to challenge the ways we see and engage with the education and talent landscapes. In this article, five ladies in leadership share their work that has served to create more enriching, equitable and just educational and talent possibilities for a variety of learners of all ages at all stages.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brittanychambers/2019/04/22/5-ladies-leading-change-in-education-talent-technology/#2beadba94f4b

By Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
Nine universities from around the world announced Tuesday that they are teaming up to explore how emerging technologies like blockchain can help them give students a digital version of their academic record, including badges, certifications, internships and traditional degrees. The U.S. institutions involved in the project are Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of California System’s Berkeley and Irvine campuses. Such digital records would allow students to securely own and share their information instead of having to go back to the relevant institution each time they need proof of their accomplishments, said Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning, in the announcement.

https://www.educationdive.com/news/9-universities-partner-to-craft-standards-for-digital-records/553184/

Tom Vander Ark and Ramona Schindelheim, Working Nation

“AI is the most important invention and change in the world right now,” says Vander Ark, who calls the times we’re living in right now as the “innovation age.” “My career started in the information age in which we learned how to use computers to improve analytics around the problems we are interested in. This new age is really driven by code that learns, that gets smarter, the more data that we give it. And it’s quietly changing every sector of the economy.”

https://workingnation.com/getting-smart-in-the-innovation-age-of-ai/

by Matthew Lynch, Tech Edvocate

Cognitive computing is an extension of AI with one significant added component: cognitive computing systems are able to interact with humans using natural language.  IBM defines cognitive computing as,” systems that learn at scale, reason with purpose and interact with humans naturally. Rather than being explicitly programmed, they learn and reason from their interactions with us and from their experiences with their environment.” The big difference here being that cognitive computing agents are able to interact naturally with humans. AI are systems that follow a complicated set of rules to arrive at outcomes. Their usefulness is limited to structured data; they are not able to process unpredictable, nonlinear data, like natural speech. On the other hand, cognitive systems are probabilistic, meaning they can handle probabilities and uncertainties. They are able to make sense out of the changeability of unstructured information.

https://www.thetechedvocate.org/artificial-intelligence-vs-cognitive-computing-in-education-how-they-differ/