Natural Language Processing and Watson APIs

Cognitive APIs

Year 2016, marked by the win of Google DeepMind in strategy game Go is definitely the year of artificial intelligence. Cognitive computing, machine learning, neural networks, natural language processing – these new concepts offer tremendous opportunities for bringing god-like intelligence and judgment capabilities to our everyday technical and business applications.

In January we, at IBM, made a presentation to the FinTech community in Geneva on cognitive computing and on how to use Watson APIs. Here in this article is a summary of what cognitive computing is and how to put it easily in practice.

Sasha Lazarevic, Alexandre Gaillard (Swiss Fintech Leader), and Pierre Kaufmann (IBM Cognitive Solutions Architect)
Geneva, January 11, 2016 : Sasha Lazarevic, Alexandre Gaillard (Swiss Fintech Leader, InvestGlass CEO), and Pierre Kauffmann (IBM Cognitive Solutions Architect)

 
But first of all, I feel I need to clarify some concepts:

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Digital Lean

The Future of Project Management in the Digital Age

I am tempted to conclude that project management is on the decline. There is saturation in the number of project managers, in the activities called projects, in the number of projects managed by professional project managers, and many other metrics used to measure the effectiveness of project management discipline. It seems that this practice , as designed and used more than 15 years ago needs to redefine itself to be able to produce strategic advantage in the era of digital transformation.

If it is so, what other methods and concepts should business companies use to execute the work in an efficient manner? And also, what should the project managers do?

To answer these questions, we need first to remember how project management achieved such a high visibility and popularity in the last 15 years. Recall that this was the time of big investments in IT infrastructure and in-house developped IT applications. These investments required very strict scope management, time scheduling, resource deployment and cost management skills to make sure the company resources are used wisely.

But nowadays, the data is moving onto the cloud platform, and business value is created by using readily available APIs from an external ecosystem to make our business and application experiments. And it seems we don’t need project managers for that.

Let me then outline some advice on how to navigate through this new digital world without traditional project management.
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User Experience for Project Managers

User Experience for Project Managers or UX-PM is a new aspect of the project management, which emphasizes effective management of a specific kind of new projects in the domain of digital transformation, and particularly geared towards the final customer’s user experience. Project managers who work on this kind of projects need to master a very specific methodology and understand the use of various tools and techniques that facilitate the communication around the UX.

User Experience (or UX) is defined as a collection of person’s emotions and attitudes with regards to using a particular product, system or a service, and as such is a critical success factor of web and digital projects, since human-computer interaction is increasingly getting in the center of all modern IT activities.

I had chance recently to work with Continue reading “User Experience for Project Managers”

ChinaIT: Aliyun (阿里云)

October 27, 2014

Owner of Alibaba (阿里巴巴) is known in the West as Jack Ma, but his real name is Ma Yun (马云), or if translated literaly : Cloud Ma. If we consider the fact that the word “cloud” appears one hundred times in the Alibaba’s IPO prospectus, this anectode about the Ma Yun’s name shows also very clearly that the world’s biggest e-commerce company based in Hangzhou sees itself as a major cloud services provider.

For those who would like to know more about this world-class business, I will analyze the structure of Alibaba Group and then place the focus on their IT operations. The story about Alibaba is a blueprint for successful cloud and e-commerce companies.

Alibaba’s main source of revenue is a group of e-commerce businesses:

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ChinaIT: Infocore (信核数据)

2014, September 7

Storage virtualization is not a new concept, but in the light of disaster recovery requirements, cloud computing and big data, it is still a hot topic. Storage virtualization allows your applications to see data being stored on a logical volume, while the configuration and location of the physical storage resources are unknown to you and completely irrelevant. This allows transparency in moving the data from one location to another, uninterupted service delivery during infrastructure migrations and increased data protection during disasters.

Storage virtualization controller is a device that is actually doing the whole work : mapping the underlying disk systems with logical volumes, replicating data to your secondary data center, providing data snapshots for the database backups, deciding and automatically moving data to the faster flash-based SSD disks if they are frequently accessed, etc. This is a very sophisticated piece of equipment that has to perform flawlessly, since all applications and business processes depend on the underlying data.

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ChinaIT: Geak (果壳)

2014, August 31

The gadget of 2014 is definitely not a smartphone, but a smartwatch. If the revenues of the global watch industry are stable at around $60B, the smartwatch market has been increasing tenfold per year and is estimated to reach $2.5B in 2014.

Among the companies that offer innovative products, Shanghai-based Geak company is forerunner in one domain: they are preparing to be first in the world to launch the round face smartwatch in September 2014 – Geak 2. The new Geak 2 watch will also feature Android 4.3 OS, a completely independent Chinese app ecosystem, and low energy consuming CPU. Take a glimpse here at the design.

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ChinaIT: Umeng (友盟)

2014, August 22

Umeng (友盟) is Beijing-based company providing the most comprehensive, multi-platform data analytics services of the mobile phone users behavior. A vast majority of Chinese mobile app development companies are Umeng’s clients. It is estimated that Umeng’s SDK is embedded inside 180’000 mobile apps in China.

Company led by former Google employee Jiang Fan was created in April 2010, and it became visible already in November 2010 when it attracted funding by Li Kaifu‘s venture capital fund Innovation Works. And more recently, in April 2013, Umeng was acquired by Alibaba for (estimated) $80M, but retained a separate brand and management structure.

So, what are exactly the services provided by this company?

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ChinaIT: Software Export to China

2014, August 7

If you are a company that is considering to market your software in China, what should you do ? Let me analyze the market and legal issues around the export of software and business development in China.

First of all, on which kind of software one could expect to make money there ?

Chinese market is especially hungry for the solutions in Smarter cities, Cloud management, and Business intelligence. Following in demand are social analytics, platform-as-a-service, internet of things and big data. As for the value of the market for this type of software, you need first to know that in this country, Continue reading “ChinaIT: Software Export to China”