Business and Technology Blog
On January 31, I was instructor at the Quantum Master Class at IBM Studio in Zürich.
I coded in Qiskit (IBM’s Python SDK for quantum information science) and demonstrated how different Bell states can be implemented in jupyter notebook, how one can code the entanglement of three qubits, how to develop of the quantum circuit for bit addition, and the logic behind Deutsch’s algorithm with its implementation in Qiskit. Continue reading “Quantum Computing Master Class”
On November 9 this year, I gave a speech at the first international AI conference in Serbia. The venue took place in the beautiful city of Novi Sad, in participation of around 300 AI developers and enthusiasts, data scientists, businessmen and representatives of academia. A first thing that you realize when going to Eastern Europe for a tech conference, is a high level of technical interests and expertise of the local people. This was the case also in Serbia. When you talk to them, you realize they are serious developers. It is estimated that there are around 50’000 people in total working in different IT jobs in Serbia, and this region around Novi Sad has actually the highest concentration of skilled IT professionals. Continue reading “AI Conference in Serbia”
As I have done this presentation already several times and got a good feedback, I’m posting here the slides and some useful links that allowed me to learn and understand DL better.
And some of the great resources I’d like to share
Continue reading “Introduction to Deep Learning”
It was fun to play with Watson Studio and create my own convolutional neural network. Watson Studio is complex but easy and graphically intuitive tool, and integrates well with Watson Machine Learning engine. I used standard MNIST data set (with images of hand-written digits), created three layers deep CNN, exported the algorithm in TensorFlow / Keras, trained the model both using GPUs on Watson and locally on my Jupyter Python Macbook environment and got nice results. To data scientists and AI developers : go and use it. And for all other enthusiasts, the best way to learn AI is to create it yourself 🙂 ! Continue reading “Deep Learning and Watson Studio”
Twenty years ago, IBM impressed the world with its specialized chess-playing system that won the match against the best chess player of all times, Garry Kasparov. Last year, Google repeated the same achievement with its Go-winning solutions AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero and most recently AlphaZero. How did this evolution happen and what are the key success factors of these remarkable events in the history of AI ?
First, a little bit of history and background theory. The history of chess-playing AI solution goes back to 1957 when IBM research scientist Alex Bernstein wrote the first complete chess-playing program and ran it on IBM 704. But it was only 40 years later, in 1997 that computer-based solution reached such a level to surpass the best human performance. AI-based solutions for game-playing haven’t changed a lot during this period. The best practice was the use of opening books for the first dozen moves, and then use of Minimax algorithm for the search. Chess has up to 35 different moves, and can go to 50 moves deep, which makes it computationally impossible for any computer to identify all possibilities until the end of the game (35^50 is higher than the number of atoms in the universe). Due to the wide search, even nowadays this algorithm would go to the depth of maximum 10 levels within the allotted time for the move decision. Alpha-Beta pruning was developed to discard those subtrees that don’t contribute to the evaluation of the best moves for the Minimax algorithm. This helped to reach deeper levels (up to 18 levels from the current position). Once this depth is reached, an evaluation function must be defined to assess the strength of achieved positions and to grade the selected moves. Evaluation functions are very complex, and this is were humans typically excel. Garry Kasparov had for example extraordinary sophisticated evaluation capabilities, better than any other player. Continue reading “From Deep Blue to AlphaZero”
The job of project managers is very stressful, often up to the point of being unbearable, and long term it can come with health hazards.
Frederic Kerautret, in a short 1.5 hour training session with >50 leaders in project management from Lausanne and all Switzerland, showed us that to manage it successfully, we need first of all to understand very well our emotions. Practical tools which are based on neuroscience, if exercised regularly and practiced the right way, can change our lives and significantly increase collaboration and productivity of the whole teams.
It reminds me of emotional intelligence, but specifically focused on how to cope with stress.
Especially important and not to be neglected in this era of digitalization !
Sasha Lazarevic
It was great pleasure to moderate a session with Cristoph Ebell at our PMI event on November 2 in Lausanne. Christoph is Executive Director of the Human Brain Project, European-wide initiative to provide the infrastructure and software tools necessary for decoding and understanding of the human brain. The interest was considerable, since this is one of the most important scientific projects in the world managed from Switzerland.
The Human Brain Project consists of 12 subprojects, driven concurrently in around 120 different institutions in more than 20 different countries. Christoph Ebell was talking about the project objectives, challenges and lessons learned, and how the collaboration stimulated by this project will create numerous innovation opportunities in neurorobotics, neuroinformatics and medicine.
The overall team consists of over 500 people from neuroscience, engineering and IT. The massive data and complexity of the mathematical models require ever-growing super-computing power. So, the day-to-day management, governance, technical and scientific leadership, and communication requirements are simply massive. We’ve learned how to deal with such challenges using some new concepts like science diplomacy, as a way of communicating with stakeholders, and co-design as a way to integrate the distributed engineering of innovative technologies.
Excellent atmosphere and after-event networking with more than 60 participants !
Sasha Lazarevic, November 2016
When I went to my first OpenStack summit in Paris 2014, it was a huge thing. A vision of an open-source private cloud went out of the bottle and the hype exploded. But in these two years, in the market where I work, I haven’t seen too much adoption. So this year I went to the summit in Barcelona with low to moderate expectations. Luckily I’ve been wrong, because OpenStack is still a huge thing. And here below are just few reasons why.
First of all – numerous improvements, which make OpenStack more robust, easier to maintain and upgrade. Auto-remediation, for example will automatically add more hypervisors or evacuate VMs in case of HW failure, resolve rabbitmq problems, clean log files etc. With Newton release you will be able to upgrade the cloud without taking it down. Another interesting feature is that now you can create pools of external IP addresses, or create a compute node without an IP address for later addition.
Next, a complete set of new projects. For example Murano, which facilitates application deployment. Developers can package and publish their applications in a catalog, and deploy them with a push of a button. Or Sahara for automatic deployments of Hadoop clusters for big data analytics.
I had an opportunity recently to learn a lot about Softlayer and get certified in Softlayer Solution Design, so I would like here to share my insights about some features, which may come as very useful for the post-digital world.
First of all I need to say that I work at IBM, and Softlayer is an IBM company. Softlayer cloud offering is actually, together with cognitive computing and Watson division, one of the strategic imperatives of the Big Blue. But I’m not directly attached to the Cloud Unit, so this certification was a challenge. IBM is known for the rigor in professional certifications. To get certified, it takes a lot of learning, practical exercises and experience, considerable time to prepare your certification package, and several levels of technical and peer reviews. All this hard work and learning has to fit into your regular work schedule, so in the end being certified at IBM is something IBMers are usually very proud of.
Continue reading “Accelerate Your Business with IBM Softlayer Cloud”
From April 11 to April 13, I attended Annual Investment Meeting (AIM) in Dubai, one of the most important world forums on the promotion of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI).
I had an honor to moderate a session on outsourcing within this conference, whose objective was to advise the governments on how to capture opportunities in this dynamic and global market of outsourcing. Here is a brief account on this session.
My panelists were renowned experts and global industry thought leaders:
Outsourcing was selected as one of the hot topics at AIM due to the fact that more and more money is being channeled into the alternative forms of investment, like mergers and acquisitions, licensing, subcontracting and outsourcing.
Several thousands participants, ministers of more than 100 countries, government officials, industry experts and consulting companies convened to a large number of sessions and country presentations. Here are just few numbers to illustrate the current state of foreign direct investments in the world:
Continue reading “From FDI to the Investment in Outsourcing”