Articles

It’s a trend for IT companies to go "flat" these days. With so many thought pieces and studies on employee empowerment and self-organization out there, it’s tempting for some CEOs to give it a try.

What Is a "Flat" Organization?

A "flat" organization is a distributed management system where no one is the boss and employees can make impactful decisions at all levels. Other typical characteristics of such organizations are transparency, continuous feedback, and "fluidity" – grouping task forces around current problems rather than having fixed teams.

Source de l’article sur DZone (Agile)

Mark Brewer is CEO of Lightbend, the company known for bringing Reactive to JVM application development. With Strata Data Conference in New York, DZone caught up with Brewer to hear more about trends he is seeing around microservices in the enterprise, and to learn about the 2.0 version of Lightbend’s Fast Data platform.

As the company behind the Scala language, Lightbend was very early on making new abstractions for microservices and data-driven applications available to the broader JVM ecosystem. Talk us through that a little bit.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Businesses have always been at the forefront as early adopters of new technologies. Advancements in computing like Machine Learning have already made a notable impact on the business world. With business operations and processes spread across varying levels, the inclusion of a Machine Learning framework can prove worthwhile in increasing efficiency, productivity, and speed.

Machine Learning has found widespread acceptance among enterprises. MIT Technology Review and Google Cloud recently published a report based on their studies in Machine Learning and its adoption. The reports state that about 60 percent of the respondents have already implemented Machine Learning into their business.


Source de l’article sur DZONE (AI)

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed the need for automation of data science and the need for speed and scale in data transformation and building models. In this part, we will discuss other critical areas of ML-based solutions like:

  • Model Explainability
  • Model Governance (Traceability, Deployment, and Monitoring)

Model Explainability

Simpler Machine Learning models like linear and logistic regression have high interpretability, but may have limited accuracy. On the other hand, Deep Learning models have time and again produced high accuracy results, but are considered black boxes because of the machine’s inability to explain their decisions and actions to human users. With regulations like GDPR, model explainability is quickly becoming one of the biggest challenges for data scientists, legal teams, and enterprises. Explainable AI, commonly referred to as XAI, is becoming one of the most sought-after research areas in Machine Learning. Predictive accuracy and explainability are frequently subject to a trade-off; higher levels of accuracy may be achieved but at the cost of decreased levels of explainability. Unlike Kaggle, competitions where complex ensemble models are created to win competitions, for enterprises, model interpretability is very important. Loan Default Prediction model cannot be used to reject loan to a customer until the model is able to explain why a loan is being rejected. Also, it is often required at the model level as well as individual test instance level. At Model level, there is need to explain key features which are important and how variation in these features affect the model decision. Variable Importance and Partial Dependence plots are popularly used for this. For an individual test instance level, there are packages like “lime,” which help in explaining how black box models make a decision.


Source de l’article sur DZONE (AI)

Only a year ago, industry discourse around artificial intelligence (AI) was focused on whether or not to go the AI way. Businesses found themselves facing an important choice — weighing the considerable value that would manifest against the investment of capital and talent AI would necessitate. But that was yesterday.

Today, we have reached a critical inflection point. With their technology deployments hitting maturity, early adopters of AI have begun to realize incredible advantages — the ability to optimize operations, maximize productivity, derive insights and be more responsive to real-time market demands. The results are out for the world to see.


Source de l’article sur DZONE (AI)


Understanding “Citizen Developer”

You’ve likely read the term “Citizen Developer,” or, according to Gartner: “An end user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.”* Why is this movement taking place? As end users, Citizen Developers better understand the functional requirements for an application. They can specialize to ensure that what’s needed is what’s done.

Pitfalls of Citizen Developers

But Citizen Developers worry IT for three reasons: The potential for lower security standards, poor performance, and a sub-par end-user experience. Still, the Citizen Developer has significant benefits for the enterprise, so the question is: How can IT address the pitfalls?

Source de l’article sur DZONE