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The cast of ‘Emma’ explains why it’s so important to keep reinventing the Jane Austen novel (exclusive) – Yahoo Sports

Take note, literary-minded movie buffs: Rock photographer Autumn de Wildes spirited new adaptation of Jane Austens romantic novel Emma is coming soon.

The vibrant and funny film is a largely faithful reinterpretation of Austens 1815 book, with Split star Anya Taylor-Joy in the title role of Emma Woodhouse, a charming but shallow society matchmaker who finds joy bringing couples together but is herself unlucky in love.

As with previous adaptations, like the 1996 version starring Gwyneth Paltrow or more loose ones like Clueless Emmas well-meaning actions often land the spoiled heroine in trouble.

De Wildes debut film, adapted by Man Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton, is delightfully mannered, finding rich seams of drama and comedy in the etiquette of the Regency period, and its cast tells Yahoo that, while matchmaking may have evolved, romance hasnt.

[Emma] has universal themes, Bill Nighy, who plays Emmas father in the film, tells Yahoo.

Mia Goth and Anya Taylor-Joy take a stroll in a still from Emma. (Photo: Focus Features)

Theyre famous elements of human behavior, from Emmas control-freakery to coming a cropper doing all that kind of thing ... match-making the wrong people, making all kinds of mistakes.

These are great themes and people dont change. The clothes change, the technology changes, apart from that, the range of human behavior is narrow-ish ... and people pretty much respond to the world in the same way throughout time. So, its always relevant.

Bill Nighy as Emma's father, Mr. Woodhouse. (Photo: Focus Features)

Living with her father in the fictional Surrey village of Highbury, Emma is too busy trying to find suitors for her friends that she fails to see that her own perfect match is right in front of her eyes.

Its this short-sightedness that Johnny Flynn, cast as the rugged George Knightley, thinks revisiting Austens work helps 21st-century society and culture to avoid.

Johnny Flynn as George Knightley in a still from Emma. (Photo: Focus Features)

If we dont keep reinventing these classic texts, we lose a lifeline to the past, Flynn tells us.

And therefore a deeper sense of self-knowledge of our journey through history as human beings. The thing you get from looking at society in the past, is [you see that] beneath the difference in etiquette and language, and how people talk to each other, theres still love and friendship, and people, and we realize whats really important.

Mia Goth's Harriet Smith and Anya Taylor-Joy's Emma Woodhouse take tea in a still from Emma. (Photo: Focus Features)

And some of the stuff thats celebrated in Emma, people are losing touch with today, so I think its a great thing to do for each generation that rediscovers this book.

Emma comes to U.S. cinemas on Friday, Feb. 21. Watch a trailer below.

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The cast of 'Emma' explains why it's so important to keep reinventing the Jane Austen novel (exclusive) - Yahoo Sports

Better Innovation Through Adventure: Sally Dominguez On 21st Century Design Thinking – DesignNews

The pressure for engineers and designers to come up with increasingly innovative and novel concepts has never been higher. But how are employees and leadership supposed to adapt in a world where failure has become riskier than ever?

Sally Dominguez has worn many hats in her career inventor, educator, journalist, and adventurer. She's spoken all over the world about a modern update to design thinking that she calls Adventurous Thinking. Used by NASA as well as startups and organizations worldwide Dominguez's system points to a methodology for making not only ideas and concepts but existing products, services, and systems more resilient.

Ahead of her keynote at Pacific Design & Manufacturing 2020, Dominguez spoke with Design News*about the 10X Mindset, how her Adventurous Thinking framework leads to innovative thinking, and the importance of failure.

Design News: Can you briefly define the Adventurous Thinking framework and talk about how you came about creating it? Were there particular insights or moments in your own career that led you to it?

Sally Dominguez: I had designed my Nest highchair, accidentally pioneering a new rotomolding finish in the process, and it was winning awards and ultimately acquired by the Powerhouse Museum. Then I invented Rainwater HOG and a new structure for flat plastic tanks. I was judging inventions on TV [for ABC's The New Inventors] so I had a reasonable profile with school students and the NSW Board of Studies asked me to lecture to busloads of teens and their design technology teachers about my design process.

I panicked, because my process is so swirly, the opposite to linear. Then I decided to think hard about what that process actually looked like. I considered all the innovators I had interviewed and worked with as well as my own way of thinking, and I started seeing some common angles. As I identified this concept of poking and prodding and questioning I wondered how I could get someone who felt profoundly uncreative to think in the same way. And I came up with the concept of a diverse set of lenses with particular points of view. The lenses would focus a persons thinking in a particular way, but also refract their usual thinking off on tangent to give them results and insights they would never usually find.

DN: Can you briefly describe the Five Lenses of Adventurous Thinking (Negative Space, Thinking Sideways, Thinking Backwards, Rethinking, and Parkour) and how one should go about applying them. Are these a series of steps, or are they more like tools where each can be applied when needed?

SD: [They're] definitely not steps - the Lenses are not a what you should do they are a how you should look at something based on the theory of multiple intelligences. That is, walking around an issue or thing and poking and pulling from different perspectives gives us greater understanding and meaning, and a proliferation of unexpected options and solutions.

These lenses are not just for ideation. Some are for generating new ideas, but, you know, ideas are worth nothing if you don't do anything with them. The Lenses are designed to apply to an entire process, cradle to grave (or ideally to cradle) and to keep the process decisions and the handovers as open and innovative the entire journey as possible.

Too often all the innovation is at ideation and then delivery funnels down into something incremental. The lenses ensure that processes and other parts of the delivery are equally innovative. So you might use Parkour to come up with ideas or reinvigorate a project that is losing steam; Negative Space and Sideways to hone and optimize them and the way a team works together; Backwards to ensure the delivery not only of a product or service, but also a campaign is as robust, economical, and sustainable as possible; and Rethinking to look at a part of the business you have always done the same way and seek either new unexpected markets, or new scales of impact and delivery.

DN: What is the 10X Mindset? And how does this play into the larger framework of Adventurous Thinking?

SD: The 10X Mindset is the mindset we need to confront the exponential change happening in every facet of our lives right now. The exponential curve is not something humans intuitively understand: We like a linear outlook with a prize at the end and a series of steps. The exponential curves explodes into an ecosystem of stakeholders digitally connected, and this instant connection changes human behavior at a speed and scale we have never seen before.

In order to find opportunity in this chaos we need a mindset that is resilient, opportunistic, and confident with no knowing an answer or an outcome. It's the opposite of the classic MBA mindset. This is brand new territory. Adventurous Thinking developed in order to show people how the swirly thinking of many creative innovators worked, and it turns out to be the perfect mindset to stay optimistic and on point in an era of unrelenting change.

DN: Adventurous Thinking seems based a lot around the idea of creating a flexible mindset that's open to change. In your observation why are we so resistant and rigid in our thinking to begin with?

SD: We are simply comfortable in our expertise. Logic and knowledge are celebrated throughout our schooling and far prioritized over creative thinking. Einstein said it best: "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. Thinking in the area of possibility is hard because we don't know the answers and we can't look them up. It is not a place people default to unless they have practiced it and they know the exhilaration it can bring.

DN: Your site mentions A key premise of Adventurous Thinking is a willingness to fail. Can you elaborate a bit on this? How can a willingness to fail be an asset? How do you tell your clients how to reconcile this mindset in a work environment that is increasingly driven by performance and deadlines where failure may not be welcomed or encouraged?

SD: In order to plan business strategy and run the day to day in this new environment of unrelenting change leaders and their teams need to have a stated strategy around failure. Companies are not seeing the growth they have historically been able to plan for because 10% better is no longer yielding results. Change happens too fast, products and services can be copied too fast. Growth will only come with bigger, bolder innovations and those are higher risk. But cheaper to try than ever before.

The new business environment facing everyone in this new era demands an alternative to classic risk-averse planning, but you can't just tell people who are employed to do a job that suddenly it's cool to fail. Failure needs to be demonstrated with full transparency by leadership, outlined in company expectations and assessed during performance reviews.

For instance Cokes 70/20/10 market strategy is a good one: You could tell your team 70% of the time do what you know works, 20% of the time try leading edge developments, 10% of the time try something that nobody else has done. And here is some training and tools to help you get to that space, that moonshot thinking. If every person in an organization is enabled to spend some of their time innovating with 10X thinking in their area, a company will see consistent growth. Failure needs to be defined and the scope built into the Innovation Scaffold of company strategy.

DN: Do you differentiate a willingness to fail from accepting failure?

SD: I think you need to accept that the failure will ultimately move you forward, and in many areas of disruptive innovation you need to accept that your endeavor will most likely fail, without letting that stop you trying. Failing fast is the key. We need to aim higher understand that means a high failure rate, yet still try.

DN: You've worked with a lot of different companies, organizations, and innovators. Are there certain qualities you've observed in your career that successful people and organizations seem to naturally have in common?

SD: The ability to take and give constructive criticism is a key attribute with consistent innovators. If you are working at the bleeding edge you need to be able to hear and appreciate the concerns and morph if necessary, but also be resilient enough to back yourself against criticism again, without taking it personally. I think always being receptive to adjacent opportunities is the hallmark of an innovator working in the exponential change of the Fourth Revolution. And then convincing others to come along for the wild ride!

DN: You've spoken all over the world. Have you observed certain challenges or mindsets that differentiate between cultures? Are there needs and challenges that are unique to the U.S. for example?

SD: Culture definitely has a big impact on collaboration and the way we think about problems. There is a great book called Geography of Thought that looks at the difference between Aristotle thinking - like the USA that places the individual as the focus and Confucian thinking, which is more socially oriented. Those are two completely different ways to consider an issue and they can deliver starkly different results with the same Adventurous Thinking tools.

I left Australia because it has Tall Poppy Syndrome, which means you can't tell people you are good at something or invent something without people wanting to cut you down. Same in Japan and the UK. So that affects the way people talk about their ideas with others. In California you tell someone an idea and they immediately support you and ask how they can help... at least that is how it is where I live!

So, again, that makes a huge difference to the way we share ideas and co-create. I love the USA for idea-sharing, but it is also the place where both my main inventions were ripped off because people are very commercially minded. Latin America is an exciting region in terms of idea sharing and co-creation. Super interested and proactive with new mindset tools, and extremely social and optimistic which helps when dealing with bearable discomfort.

DN: As an innovator yourself, are there any new innovations you find particularly exciting?

SD: I am excited that the rise in unexpected technologies - for example the conversion of CO2 to energy and the creation of hydrogen using solar, and the creation of meat substitutes with yeast - means we can rethink some big planet challenges around sustainable fuels, food production, and a bunch of other complex global issues. I am trying to work out which exponential technologies I could potentially harness to rethink the way we fight bushfires like the ones that have decimated Australias native wildlife.

Sally Dominguez will be delivering the closing keynote, Adventurous 10X Thinking Building the Resilient Mindset for Better Innovation on Thursday February 13th at 1:30PM at Pacific Design & Manufacturing 2020.

*This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

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Better Innovation Through Adventure: Sally Dominguez On 21st Century Design Thinking - DesignNews

AR, Other Technology Tapped for Expansion by US Ignite – Government Technology

US Ignite, a smart city advisory group for local government, has picked four projectsfor grants as part of an effort to scale successful community initiatives to more residents.

Dubbed Replicating Success, the initiative is a joint effort between US Ignite and the National Science Foundation, one that builds upon the duo's collaboration with the Smart Gigabit Communities initiative. This is its inaugural year, and the first group of recipients for related funding are Austin, Texas; Chattanooga, Tenn.; Eugene, Ore.; and Lafayette, La. More than $160,000 was awarded among the four teams.

According to an announcement from US Ignite, these four projects were selected based on demonstrable social impact, use of advanced technology, and the pre-commercial status of a proposed application or service. The technology involved with each of the projects is varied, ranging from augmented reality training for first responders to expanded use of 4K microscopes in public schools.

Scott Smith is president of Augmented Training Systems (ATS) in Austin, a startup that is a beneficiary of one of the four grants. Smith's companyhas been using augmented reality training in Austin to simulate mass casualty incidents for first responders to train, and the grant will enable it to now expand to other large jurisdictions in the state. The idea is that using AR gives emergency responders a far more realistic idea of what to expect in dire situations.

The unfortunate reality is that face-to-face, didactic, power point, online learning is not enough. And so we need to move beyond that. And we have the technology to do so, Smith said.

Smith has spent the last seven years researching and evaluating the impact of virtual environments on different psychological aspects of human behavior. About a year and a half ago, his company built its training program for Austin, evaluating it against the traditional training program, and found that the AR training outperformed the existing training and reduced errors by about 40 percent. It also increased time on task by about 30 percent, Smith said.

From that we realized how influential the VR-augmented reality environment could be in this space, he added.

With the help of the grant money, it will now work to reach even more responders who can benefit from the application of the new technology. In short, the virtual training system created by ATS has the potential to work with numerous other cities in Texas and beyond. That's the idea behind the program and its grants as a whole, officials said.

The proposals had to be both technically innovative and show demonstrable social impact, said Mari Silbey, director of communications for US Ignite.

Other projects to receive funding as part of the Replicating Success initiative include a collaboration between Chattanooga and schools in that region to expand a program to use high-powered video and microscopy for research to five additional schools.

Separately in Lafayette, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the city will collaborate on the Louisiana Smart Community Cloud Platform to deploy hardware and software developed for research purposes across the region for things like flood modeling and emergency operations.

A Digital Town Square developed by the Technology Association of Oregon in Eugene will expand to neighboring Springfield to address regional connectivity issues and bring more affordable gigabit Internet service to Springfield, opening up economic development and other possibilities. The Digital Town Square provides infrastructure to ensure a stable high-speed network at a low cost.

Ultimately, the Replicating Success initiative allows US Ignite to support the replication of the best of the best of these applications, showing how they can deliver benefit at scale, and transition to sustainable deployments that boost innovation, economic development, and quality of life, said Glenn Ricart, Smart Gigabit Communities Lead Researcher, in a statement.

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AR, Other Technology Tapped for Expansion by US Ignite - Government Technology

UW-Madison to Hold 12th Annual Reception Honoring Outstanding Women of Color – madison365.com

The 12th cohort of Outstanding Women of Color awardees will be honored at a reception on Thursday, March 5, 5 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. in the Alumni Lounge of the Pyle Center, 716 Langdon Street. The event to celebrate this years honorees is open to the campus and community.

In a campus tradition dating back to 2007-2008, the celebration of women who share their exceptional scholarship with the campus and community through their dedicated work, outreach and impact was an outgrowth of a similar award launched by UW System in 1994.

It is a privilege to celebrate extraordinarily talented, dedicated and hardworking honorees, who are just a few of the many women on campus and in the community, who never ask for praise or recognition, said Patrick J. Sims, Deputy Vice Chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion. This year we received more than 50 nominations for this opportunity to salute their exemplary contribution to campus and community. That means there is still an incredible number of candidates who need to know we value your tenacity, strength and wisdom.

The 2019-20 seven honorees include:

Desiree Bates, Computational ChemistryLeader,Chemistry, College of Letters & Science;

Shiva Bidar-Sielaff, UW Health Chief Diversity Officer, Madison District 5 City Alder;

Gina Green-Harris, Director, Center for Community Engagement & Health Partnerships, School of Medicine & Public Health;

Eden Inoway-Ronnie, Chief of Staff, UW-Madison Office of the Provost;

Laura Minero-Meza, Doctoral Student, Counseling Psychology, School of Education and 2019-2020 Internship at Semel Institute for Neuroscience & Human Behavior, UC-Los Angeles;

Ahna Skop, Professor, Genetics, College of Agricultural & Life Sciences;

Dr. Jasmine Zapata, Assistant Professor (CHS), Pediatrics, School of Medicine & Public Health and Centennial Scholar, UW Institute for Clinical & Translational Research.

The UW-Madison Outstanding Women of Color Awards acknowledge and honor women of color among UW-Madison faculty, staff, students (undergraduate or post-baccalaureate) and in the Greater Madison community, who have made outstanding contributions in one or more of the following areas:

Social justice, activism and advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged, marginalized populations;

Community service;

Scholarly research, writing, speaking and/or teaching on race, ethnicity and indigeneity in U.S. society, and;

Community building on- or off-campus, to create an inclusive and respectful environment for all.

For more on this years honorees, click here.

In 2007, UW-Madison launched an annual program of awards to women of color for outstanding service in higher education following in the footsteps of the UW System, which began their program of celebrating such women in 1994. More than 50 UW-Madison women of color have been honored in the past decade. Dozens more have been nominated for recognition by their campus and community colleagues and friends.

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UW-Madison to Hold 12th Annual Reception Honoring Outstanding Women of Color - madison365.com

Hey! Do You Know Who Is Electable? Literally All Of The Democratic Candidates! – Wonkette

I'm gonna share a story with you, America. One morning, in 1996, I woke up for school, came downstairs, toasted some rye bread (we can reasonably assume), and turned the on the television to MTV. And I see this music video featuring a bunch of ladies in halter tops and leotards, singing some pop music with the most trite sounding lyrics I had ever heard in my life nary a musical instrument to be seen.

"Whell, this will never catch on," thought I. After all, even most of the music on MTV then was either R&B, hip-hop or the more radio-friendly alternative/angry chick folk rock. Everyone I knew was, at that time, totally denying they'd ever listened to New Kids on The Block or Paula Abdul. Even the preppy kids were mostly listening to stuff like Dave Matthews, Barenaked Ladies and Hootie and The Blowfish. The only pop that seemed to be around was Madonna, and even she was putting shit out like Bedtime Stories that could hardly be considered bubblegum. And I thought I had a good grip on the way things were and what people were into.

And it was probably the most wrong about anything I have ever been in my life.

http://www.youtube.com

It was then that I first started to understand that not only can you never account for taste, but that people's tastes often depend less on what they are intrinsically and naturally drawn to than on what they are being sold and how effectively that thing is being sold to them. If you pay attention, you can see it happens all the time with music, media, fashion, food, and, yes, even political opinions and causes.

It is with this in mind that I would like us all to look at the results of the recent Quinnipiac poll showing Trump versus every Democratic candidate.

Now, sure. This does not take into account the electoral college. It doesn't take into account third party challenges. It does not take into account the fact that a lot of people don't so much know what Mike Bloomberg is about, other than his commercials that he has bought with his buttloads of money that he has. But if it shows any damn thing, it shows that there is not one magically super electable Democrat in the running, and that they basically all, at least, have a chance to be electable. With the right marketing.

To borrow a phrase from Martha Stewart, that's a good thing.

It means that we can all just vote for the people we genuinely and sincerely like the best, instead of trying to use our psychic powers to try to vote for who we think other people will vote for. Just as we might all be wrong about people going all in on our most beloved candidate, we also might be wrong that they won't. My theory has always been that people should vote for the candidate that speaks to them the most, because that's really all we have to go on. If someone really rocks your world, why assume that you are some special unique snowflake and they won't be able to do that for anyone else?

The problem with voting for someone based on their perceived electability and only their perceived electability is that one small thing can knock them off their game, and then what do they have to fall back on? If they have policies and stances that people want (like really, really want), those setbacks are so much more survivable. Trump was not wrong when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and would not lose any voters, because people care more about the stuff they feel he will do for them outlaw abortion, be super horrible to immigrants in a way that makes them feel good about themselves, lower the bar for acceptable human behavior etc. than they do about anything else he does. He's got a buffer. It's a gross buffer, but it's there.

Trying to do the "practical" thing here is not actually practical. It is not "practical" to believe you have psychic powers and know what everyone else in the country is going to do. If we learned anything from 2016, it should be that polls and what we think of as "electability" are really not to be trusted.

Vote for who you actually want, because "Eh, I could give or take" is not what we need right now if we're going to beat Trump and his legion of freakishly devoted followers. Trust that if everyone does that, the most "electable" person will win, and that whoever wins, we will all find a way to sell the shit out of that candidate. And the best chance we have of being able to do that is if there truly is a strong contingent of people who truly believe in them.

[Quinnipiac]

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Hey! Do You Know Who Is Electable? Literally All Of The Democratic Candidates! - Wonkette

CBP Moving Forward with Algorithm Update, MOU with NIST on Facial Recognition Evaluation – HSToday

Customs and Border Protection will be advancing its facial recognition technology into a new algorithm next month while maintaining that software used by the Department of Homeland Security is not reflecting racial or gender bias.

Since CBP is using an algorithm from one of the highest-performing vendors identified in the report, we are confident that our results are corroborated with the findings of this report, Office of Field Operations Deputy Executive Assistant Commissioner John Wagner told the House Homeland Security Committee at a Thursday hearing on the National Institute of Standards and Technologys recent report studying facial recognition hits and misses. More specifically, the report indicates the highest performing algorithms had minimal to undetectable levels of demographic-based error rates.

Tests in the December report,Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT) Part 3: Demographic Effects, showed a wide range in accuracy across developers, with the most accurate algorithms producing many fewer errors. In one-to-one matching, NIST reported higher rates of false positives for Asian- and African-American faces, notably African-American females, compared to Caucasians; elderly and young subjects were also more prone to false positives. U.S.-developed algorithms yielded more high rates of false positives in one-to-one matching for Asians, African-Americans and native groups, while some algorithms developed in Asian countries showed no such dramatic difference in false positives in comparing Asian and Caucasian faces.

NIST tested 189 face recognition algorithms from 99 developers using four collections of photographs with 18.27 million images of 8.49 million people, using images provided by the State Department, DHS and FBI.

The report also highlights some of the operational variables that impact error rates such as gallery size, photo age, photo quality, numbers of photos of each subject in the gallery, camera quality, lighting, human behavior factors all influence the accuracy of an algorithm, Wagner noted to the committee. That is why CBP is carefully constructed the operational variables in the deployment of the technology to ensure we can attain the highest levels of match rates, which remain in the 97 percent to 98 percent range.

Wagner noted that NIST did not test the specific CBP operational construct to measure the additional impact these variables may have, which is why we have recently entered into an MOU with NIST to evaluate our specific data.

Use of facial comparison technologies, he stressed, simply automates a process that is often done manually today and using facial comparison technology to date CBP has identified 252 imposters. to include people using 75 genuine U.S. travel documents.

We have met three times with representatives of the privacy advocacy community as well as discussions with the privacy and civil liberties oversight board and the DHS privacy and integrity advisory committee, Wagner said. In November, CBP submitted to the Office of Management and Budget a rulemaking that would solicit public comments on the proposed regulatory updates and amendments to the federal regulations.

Peter Mina, deputy officer for programs and compliance at DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, told lawmakers that his office has been and continues to be engaged with the DHS operational components to ensure use of facial recognition technology is consistent with civil rights and civil liberties law and policy.

Second, operators, researchers and civil rights policymakers must work together to prevent algorithms from leading to impermissible biases in the use of facial recognition technology and, third, facial recognition technology can serve as an important tool to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the departments public protection mission as well as the facilitation of lawful travel, but it is vital that these programs utilize technology in a way that safeguards our constitutional rights and values, Mina said.

Mina said the civil rights office recognizes the potential risk of impermissible bias in facial recognition algorithms and has regularly engaged CBP on the implementation of facial recognition technology in its biometric entry and exit program, including advising on policy and implementation of appropriate accommodations for individuals wearing religious headwear, for individuals with a sincere religious objection to being photographed and for individuals who may have a significant injury or disability and for whom taking photographs may present challenges or not be possible.

Mina said the office has received one complaint regarding DHS use of facial recognition technology but we have not seen a trend and that is when we would actually, in fact, open an investigation in this matter.

NIST Information Technology Laboratory Director Chuck Romine testified that the false-positive differentials in one-to-one matching are much larger than those related to false negative and exist across many of the algorithms tested and said the racial false-positive rates could be attributed to the relationship between an algorithms performance and the data used to train the algorithm itself.

The impact of errors is application dependent. False positives in one-to-many search are particularly important because the consequences could include false accusations. For most algorithms, the NIST study measured higher false-positive rates in women, African-Americans, and particularly in African-American women, Romine said. However, the study found that some one-to-many algorithms gave similar false-positive rates across these specific demographics. Some of the most accurate algorithms fell into this group. This last point underscores one overall message of the report: algorithms perform differently.

Romine told lawmakers that they did test NEC, the brand used by CBP, but we have no independent way to correlate whether those are the identical algorithms that are being used in the field.

CBP is using an earlier version of NEC right now, Wagner noted, and I believe we are testing NEC-3, which is the version that was tested. And the plan is to use it next month in March, to switch over to upgrade, basically to that one.

Wagner stressed that the 2 to 3 percent failure-to-match rate with CBP software does not mean that the person is misidentified, but that we didnt match them to a picture in the gallery that we did have of them, so we should have matched them.

It should be at zero, he said. And that is where we look at the operational variables, the camera, the picture quality, the human behaviors when the photo was taken, the lighting, those different types, and then the age of the photo.

Wagner said there may be a small handful of false positives; Im just not aware of any, but as we built this and tested it we are just not seeing that.

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CBP Moving Forward with Algorithm Update, MOU with NIST on Facial Recognition Evaluation - HSToday

CRM Watchlist 2020: And the winners are… – ZDNet

With every edition of the Watchlist winners, I explain my choices, identify the patterns that emerged from the entries, and to identify some of the changes that I made this year and am possibly making for next year. So, here's how it's going to go down:

So, let's get this show on the road. Though I suspect you've already demonstrated you couldn't contain your excitement and have checked the "And the winners" part. [Sigh.] You kids.

I've said this every year about the CRM Watchlist and it always bears repeating.

It is an impact award. To win the award you have to show that in the year immediately prior to submission (same year) you had a significant impact on the market and that you have the corporate infrastructure, strategy and resources to sustain that impact over the next three years.

What do I mean when I say "impact?" That means significant influence in the market that you participate in. It doesn't have to be global. It can be specific e.g. a vertical market, or a sized (small, midsized, enterprise) or a geographical market. It can be a market specific to your offering. For example. The Big 4.8 (Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, and Adobe) are in global markets. Xactly is focused on Sales Performance Management our newest official (no longer other) category though they were judged for their impact in the "value add" part of the sales technology ecosystem not just SPM. A few years ago, when consulting companies were still part of the competition Solvis Consulting won because of their impact in Latin America. Veeva won for their incredible dominance in the Life Sciences market. It can be specific.

However, at the same time, there is no winner by category. If I group together a set of reviews it's because it is convenient for me. You cannot be #1 winner in CX. There is no such thing. You win. Period. And if there is more than one in a grouped review (which by definition, there is), the listing is alphabetical, not in order of importance. There is also no ranking revealed beyond the #1 scorer in the entire competition regardless of market.

Additionally, though it's been called the CRM Watchlist for the last 10 years of its 15- year existence, it is open to all that provide customer-facing technologies. There are 53 categories to choose from on the registration and the questionnaire and something called "Other" in case you are doing something that doesn't fall under the 53 other choices.

Several of the winners used the following paragraph last year in their press release on the victory (I'm telling you that in advance because I don't give out individual quotes) to show what it takes to win so I'm literally putting it in here and if you want to issue a press release on this and want to use the following paragraph to show why you won, then go ahead.

For that impact to be sustainable, the company must be a complete company that has been doing this long enough to have established a rhythm. The company has to be well-rounded: it has financial stability, solid management, excellent products and services, superb culture, and a strong partner ecosystem to help sustain its efforts. It has to have a clear vision and mission and also clear-cut strategies for outreach to get external forces - customers, analysts, journalists, prospects, influencers, etc. - engaged. That takes a complete (and complex) set of tools and activities, which could include marketing, analyst relations and public relations programs, the subject matter expertise via the content produced and distributed for consumption, and the "theatrical" activities that establish the corporate identity necessary to stay top of mind, as well as capture share of wallet.

Ultimately a company has to prove that it had impact in the year that they submitted for (2020 = calendar year 2019) and that they have the infrastructure and resources going forward to sustain that impact three years further. If you can't prove them BOTH, you lose. So, this is not only looking at achievements, but more importantly how you are building your company for the longevity it needs to succeed in the market. This is about sustainable impact. That eliminates a one-hit wonder that lucked into a big year.

Another thing: While I do independent research on each qualifying candidate and also take note of how much I have run across them during the year, ultimately it's the quality of the submission that counts. If I have to give it relative weight it works something like this: 30% for my independent research and anecdotal and quantitative information I've gathered over a year in the course of my work as an analyst. The other 70% is the submission itself. The submitting company has to make the case for their impact. You may have had it and if my 30% doesn't put it over the top because you have made such a poor case for it (and that does happen) then you lose. A couple of years ago, two companies that should have made it given my research and what I already knew of them in the market would have made it but the submissions were so poor that they didn't make it.

Conversely, the case is the case, regardless of the quality of the writing. I place a real value on the presentation the quality of the writing and the look and feel. You can gain a marginal part of a point if it is really good but not lose if it really isn't. Though I will notice it and I'll let you know. But you can write poorly and sloppily and still even if it seems accidental make the case. This year one of the winners submitted a lazy submission (and I'm being kind about it) and yetthey still won because their case was irrefutable. As the sole judge, I have to separate that from the "facts of the matter." So, I do. But that doesn't excuse something written badly. Companies that submit are companies proving they have an impact. If they do, the face they present to the public should be something that engenders trust because the company clearly put an effort into it.

Think of it this way: When I write on customer engagement, I define customer value as "feeling valued." In other words when the customer feels valued, they are more than likely to continue to be your customer. To do that you have to show the customer that you care enough to about who they are to make them feel as if you value them. The same goes for a Watchlist submittal or anything a company does in analyst or public relations. Make the recipient feel as if you value them. Learn the lesson, please. It's important. That means not just tell the truth, but make sure that you tell it well. The failure of many companies is their inability to present and stay true to a corporate narrative. They lose the trust or don't gain the trust of those they need to trust them meaning not just their customers but their potential customers. In the case of this submission, the facts were indisputable, but the submission seemed to be an afterthought.

A factor that weighs heavily (and not positively) even though it might have been a good thing that happened to create it is uncertainty. For example, if you were acquired and/or had significant management turnover or if you were addressing a new market that you didn't have much history in I penalized you as harsh as that sounds. Sometimes, all other things being equal, the company would have won the Watchlist, but the uncertainty was the tipping point in their loss. Sadly, I have no way to see impact two or three years out when I don't even know how your new management team or new CEO is going to perform in their new environment, or you gave me no discernible proof of the results of your bold move into a new market. I have no way of knowing if you were going to be successful there over time even if you were successful in this year. Again, this is an impact award, not a "smart strategy" award. I might think that you made the right move, but you rarely are going to have impact in the new market in the first few quarters you are in it. Also, it's impossible to say that the new person or people are the right choice until they are. Even if I think that.

This year there were two companies that unfortunately suffered due to transitional uncertainty. They would have won if it wasn't for significant management turnover that led to the uncertainty. Both companies had,for the most part, important and positive changes but for the purposes of the Watchlist it damaged their ability to prove that they were going to be able to sustain the impact that they had this year.

The score is also driven by a raw score and then a weighted score and the weights vary year to year depending on macroeconomic conditions, industry movement, and trends that are discernibly more than self-serving justifications for hiring a "thought leader" or buying a vendor product. Based on that the weights vary every year though the raw score perfect total and the weight's perfect total never does. There are some 40-50 "intangibles" that I am looking for that are not indicated in the questions asked mostly negative but some positive. There is one larger question (I'm not telling you which), two if you stretch my definition, where you can gain some positive intangible points. Keep in mind, the intangible deductions or additions come off or are added to the final weighted score. Because they are so important to the outcome most of the time they are incrementally small though on occasion can be substantial (e.g. transitional uncertainty)

This year as the questionnaire makes clear, privacy and corporate social responsibility -- aka philanthropy or community participation -- makes a lot more of a difference than it ever had. They weren't questions or parts of questions last year. This year they are. Also, customer success and the organized programs around it (and their KPIs big and important part) are additions to the effort.

These changes are all playing a much bigger part in gaining and retaining customer trust, which is why they are now standing out in the crowd rather than either a part of the crowd or not even in the crowd as they were in the past.

The only other real changes are along the lines of changes made each year. I changed he weights for each category and the absolute positive or negative increment for some of the intangibles based, as I said, on current macroeconomic, market and sociological conditions. I also added one other factor to the scoring that made it once again MUCH harder to earn winner with distinction and almost impossible to win Elite. What won even last year would no longer be sufficient to win this year by a significant amount. However, to alleviate the almost suffocating difficulty in winning this, I now vow there will be no change in the scoring ranges for the remaining two years of the Watchlist. (You heard me!)

Overall Best Submission THREE WAY TIE: SAP, Verint, Pegasystems No one was perfect (Oracle was in 2019) but these won because of a combination of most well-articulated narrative and the fewest "not answered" questions. In other words, their submissions made the best case and paid attention to what I asked them to, please.

Most Creative Submission Oracle (including an overview video and a submission that was substantially visual as well as informative)

Highest Score in a category

There were several noticeable gaps and weaknesses in general in the submissions that stood out. They weren't universal meaning in most cases, except the privacy one, there were some standout but all in all it was too frequently an issue to not make mention of it.

Privacy Almost all the submissions were missing any mention of a Chief Privacy Officer anywhere. In fact, the ONLY submission that mentioned a Data Privacy officer of any kind was Thunderhead. Given that I know that several companies who submitted have them in accordance with GDPR requirements it was head scratching that they didn't say so and makes me wonder how they think about it.

Marketing Strategy, Outreach, Thought Leadership A Trio Marketing strategy, outreach and thought leadership were a trio that a significant majority were poorly prepared for. The vast majority of the time but not always all three were weaknesses simultaneously. The strategies lacked focus, direction and at times were disorganized to the point of random. The outreach was noticeably short-sighted and misaligned with current market realities. For example, while many of the companies had a Gartner, Forrester relationship, their lack of relationships with boutique firms, independent analysts and outright influencers tells me that they don't seem to have a clear picture of how this all works these days. The claim of thought leadership was there but the assets and the game plan weren't when it was discussed. Again, this was a significant enough plurality or majority to be weak or misaligned in all three to show me that the concept of being a trusted adviser, while given lip service when it is raised, is still foreign to a lot of companies

Social Good/Corporate Social Responsibility As you will see in the "trends" part social good or CSR or philanthropy is on the agenda of almost every company that submitted but on the downside of that is a severe reluctance to include it as part of their public discussion. I suspect that's due to a fear that it would appear "markety." Let me put it this way. A company spends $130 million (let's say) on grants, free software and professional services, community effort time etc. Then they say nothing about it because they fear it will be seen as marketing if they do talk about it then I'd worry more about their perception of what marketing is. Who spends $130 million on a marketing campaign and then doesn't say anything? You could not say anything a lot cheaper. Like for free. But the value of actually showing that you are a company who cares about people and the world and solving inequities and doing good says volumes to the world about what kind of company you are. People aka customers are looking for companies that support philanthropic good and they won't know that you do unless you tell them. If you want companies that communicate it in a way that doesn't feel like marketing to them and thus, their customers, or observers then look at what Sandvik AB (here is one of many examples) is doing. Or closer to home, what Salesforce and Zoho do and say.

Customer Journeys Customer journeys are very much in the conversation (see below), but not so much in the offerings. At best there are a few companies offering what I would call journey builders, not journey tracking. Some are confusing personalization at multiple touchpoints with journey tracking and orchestration. And those are the good ones. Most give it lip service and then just talk about personalization and hyper-personalization. The offerings need to be there for aligning with customer engagement and CX. They aren't there .

Market Impact Question 2 says the following "In 2019, in your own view, what impact did you have on what market and what form did it take? Multiple ways you impacted the market are perfectly alright to describe. This means that you might have developed a staggering product that changed the way that people thought of things, you might have done something for the social good, you might have become a company that changed the way that something was done. You might have achieved a dominant market position; other companies were so impressed by what you had done, they imitated you. Whatever you think regarding your own view of your own impact, works for me." This was a bit of a trick question. The result was pretty much astounding and a bit scary One short of 100% outlined only their technology and nothing else. That is NOT what I hoped for, because it indicates that the company is seeing itself through the eyes of its products not as an entity that is multi-faceted. Instead of taking the big picture view of the company as a whole and its impact in the world via specific areas, they outlined how important their technology was and their road maps which is actually question 6. A few of the companies ALMOST broke out but all but one only mentioned the technology ultimately.

The purpose of the above is to provide guidelines about where companies can look for holes in their evolution as organizations that will impact markets that lead to more revenue and a better world and the company viewed as a trusted adviser. There is nothing to be judgmental about the gaps are the gaps and they should be considered as means to identify areas of improvement.

But now, on a more positive note, patterns emerged that would be called trends under other conditions.

If I had to make a 30,000-foot observation of the submissions and the market, I would say that, first, they are well aligned with each other. Second, and most important, the 30K view of that movement is a move to the right-brained. Not the right. The right-brained. The market and the companies that inhabit and compete in it, thanks to the ongoing digital communications revolution, are now finally getting it human behavior and the likes, dislikes and efforts made by individual human beings to be happy are what drives customer behavior today. They now also recognize that they have to anticipate and then accommodate that behavior to stay competitive in the market. The Watchlist 2020 trends absolutely support this supposition.,

CX and customer engagement are now standard to the thinking of companies Eighty percent of all submissions -- and ALL the winning ones -- focused their efforts on proving customer experience and customer engagement, not CRM. It permeated everything they wrote and all that they offered. From the marketing, service and sales the pre-eminent theme was the improvement of the customer's experience. From the actual technology portfolio, the platforms were being rejiggered or evolved or developed around engagement, with the exceptions of Adobe and Oracle CX which are building out the technologies that foster consumable experiences (e.g. Disney-like). Not the overarching experience, which can't be enabled by technology. But it was enlightening to see the transition in thinking over the past five years of Watchlist entries to see that it has shifted from more operational solutions and thinking to ecosystems, and platforms designed to improve customer engagement and thus the overall customer experience due to the improved engagement. This was MANIFEST throughout nearly all the submission.

Personalization and Humanization Personalization -- which tends to be defined by the vendor submitters as "data driven individual insights used for optimizing offers" -- is now part of pretty much every single technology portfolio and also all discussions around marketing. There is a market awareness that the individual customer's interests and concerns have to be addressed, not just some broader demographic. In the technologies there are dozens of analytics applications, personalization engines, and engagement options that are offered to provide individual attention to the customers as per extant thinking in the marketplace. In marketing, a lot of the 1:1 thinking is reflected by the adoption of Account Based Marketing (ABM) by most of the best in class and even beyond that to the mid-level performers. Humanization is beginning to show up more frequently but is nowhere near as ubiquitous as personalization nor is it the same thing. Here is a piece I wrote on it if you'd like to dig a big deeper. Several companies are beginning to make that distinction notably, Salesforce, Oracle and about 10 others. While personalization is ubiquitous and embedded in the offerings of almost everyone humanization of culture and the externalization of that is just beginning to arrive on the scene.

User experience as a matter of culture Throughout the submissions, noticeable attention was paid to the look and feel of the user interfaces and the user experience. That has been apparent for the last two or three years. There is an evolutionary trend that is peaking out (meaning in enough of the submissions to be something to pay attention to) which is the interface between design and the culture of the companies. Which of course goes back to humanization. While I first noticed the intersection of design and organizational culture as far back as 2013 with Infor and their creation of internal design agency Hook and Loop, it is only now we are seeing mostly the largest companies beginning to incorporate design thinking into their actual cultural imperative so that it permeates not only the look and feel of their technology but also the design of their offices, the principles of their employee interactions etc. Notably Hillel Cooperman and Oracle and their Redwood initiative is a prime example of this. But far from the only one.

Microservices Architectures The most far-sighted companies are developing their own variations of a microservices architecture and platform. While sparse and almost non-existent in the CRM Watchlist 2019 (meaning 2018), this year, there were a noticeable spike in the number of companies who either were well along developing it or had it on a roadmap that started in the near future. The best example of microservices done well is the WeChat "apps" market which has what appear to be apps but are actually microservices offerings for the consumer numbering in the millions. This article doesn't really explain the concept well but tells some stories that do.

Ecosystems & Platforms For years, Esteban Kolsky (so VP of Strategy at SAP CX) and I among others have been pushing the importance of ecosystems and platforms. Esteban wrote this in 2018andI wrote this in 2016. We are redeemed. LOL! The vast majority of the vendors who submitted made at least a platform claim for their technology and most of them met the standard some not quite but they all understand that providing a platform at this juncture is pretty much the way that they will succeed with their offering. Ecosystems are a tad (scientific term for a little less) ubiquitous but they are both explicit and implied (via GTM partnerships to fill holes in their end to end customer requirements or something like that) enough to see that the age of ecosystems and platforms has arrived meaning that no one has to be convinced or almost no one any longer and now its who does it better.

Hopefully, these are helpful. They are a clear indicator that we are in the age of the customer, the age of CX or the era of engagement or whatever you want to call it but the stars and the markets are aligned to it so tightly that it is a prerequisite for success and at least, the companies that submitted know that, if not the broader market yet.

For those that didn't win: a free 30-minute consultation on why you didn't win. Hopefully, it will be of some value in pointing out areas that will be better when strengthened and also explain at times why you not winning was a closer decision that you might think.

For those who did win: A free one-hour consultation on any topic you want to cover. (That is an $1,875 value.) Plus, you will be getting a write up either individually (Winners with Distinction) or grouped with one or two other winners in the first half of the year.

There is a caveat to this though. Whether or not you won or not, you have until March 31, 2020 at 6pm ET to schedule the hour or half hour. After that, tough luck. You're outta luck.

If you are truly anxious to get the discussion scheduled, here's what I'm willing to do. If you can email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com by February 15, 2019 at 6pm to ask me for an appointment, I'll set it up with you previous to the launch. I'm gamifying!! It'll prove to me you read this post and didn't just look at whether or not you won and that you are interested enough to query me and get it set up. Plus the window is short. So let's see how you do. The only way to set it up is via email. Not Facebook, not LinkedIn, not Twitter, not ZDNet. The email here. Go!

None

Two companies would have won if it weren't for deductions for transitional uncertainty. Given that there will be a year of the story under their belts by next year, they are most likely to win, barring significant unforeseen things (which happen) or a bad submission (which happens too) and while they don't win, they should be at least called out. The two companies most likely to make it next year are:

ServiceNow - The only reason they didn't win is the transitional uncertainty generated by the departure of their CEO and the installation of the new, very different CEO. Here is where the analyst side of me and the Watchlist side of me diverge and it's a good example of how the Watchlist works. As I've repeatedly said, to win the Watchlist you have to be absolutely able to prove that you have had the impact in the year you submitted and going forward for a three year period, the infrastructure and the plan to sustain that impact. A new CEO (even if as an analyst I think it's a great choice) is unproven in the role until he/she is proven in the role and needs a good yearat least to establish himself or herself. Thus, there is a significant deduction for the uncertainty that is there since there is no history at the company to prove the case one way or the other. In the case of ServiceNow, their hiring of Bill McDermott to replace John Donahue which as an analyst I applaud, still provides that transitional uncertainty and if it wasn't for the deduction for that, ServiceNow, would have won in their first year. In fact, they would have leapt ahead of some of the lower scoring winners.

SugarCRM This was a different case that actually went deeper. They were acquired in 2018 by Accel KKR who has a vastly different model than SugarCRM or other PE firms have. Episerver, one of this year's two new winners, was sold in 2018 successfully by AKKR with this strategy. It is a strategy that as an analyst, I like a great deal. But that sale led to a significant number of senior level management changes in 2019 and that creates that transitional uncertainty that is unavoidable. But for the changes, SugarCRM would have won.

So, as a human being, I apologize. I know how hard that these companies worked on their submission and each made a good case. They didn't win but they are being recognized. As a Watchlist judge orthe ONLY Watchlist judge, it's a reality that has to be considered when it comes to identifying one of the many factors that go into sustainable impact in a marketplace. Though I'm still sorry.

If these two companies enter next year, their chances are good if they had good years and the uncertainty has vanished in the wake of a good or great effort by the CEO or those other newly minted execs who were fresh during the company's Watchlist submission year.

There were, if you do the math, 55 companies that didn't win. Two of them you already heard, would have won if it wasn't for transitional uncertainty. They deserved to be noticed even if they weren't winners. There were a couple of companies that didn't win that had genuinely interesting technology even though they didn't have the maturity necessarily to either have had an impact in the market in 2019 nor could they sustain it three years out. But their technology is worth calling out because of its combination of intelligence and use value.

That would be:

Techsee

In their own words from the submission:

"TechSee's cognitive visual engagement platform is built on multi-patented Computer Vision AI. The system recognizes devices, their parts and issues, with accuracy levels of over 95%, and delivers Augmented Reality guidance on customers' smartphone screens to resolve a huge range of issues.

TechSee Live for Contact Centers enables agents to remotely guide their customers in interactive video sessions, while the system automatically diagnoses issues and suggests steps toward prompt resolution. This "Smart Assist" feature works by cross-referencing each issue with a vast image knowledge base.

TechSee Live for Field Services provides field technicians with guidance from remote supervisors or other field agents via smartphone or smart glasses, enhanced by Computer Vision capabilities that can shorten costly training time and reduce time to resolution.

EVE, the world's first visual self-service assistant, enables consumers to receive visual guidance through their smartphone screens while interacting with a conversational visual tech assistant that can correct them if needed."

I will literally say no more because they didn't win, but they are worth paying attention to.

As always with the announcement of the CRM Watchlist 2020 winners, the registration for the CRM Watchlist 2021 is now open. Nothing really has changed from last year though the questionnaire will be tweaked (e.g. Sales Performance Management will be added as a category on the registration form and the questionnaire) The format for submission remains the same. Request the registration form, once received, you have 14 days (not business days, total days including weekends) to return it or you will not be able to participate in the CRM Watchlist 2021. Once you return the registration form you will be getting the questionnaire that is due on December 31, 2020 by 6pm PT or you will not qualify.

However, before I get to the calendar I'm going to make a point that I want any potential registrant to pay CLOSE ATTENTION TO. Part of the process is that if you haven't withdrawn by a designated date (see the calendar below for the date) you will be penalized. The reason is that the day after the final withdrawal date, I start doing corollary research for all the expected submitters. That takes me weeks. I mean, weeks of work that take me away from any leisure time, family etc. My expectation is that you will submit if you haven't withdrawn by that date. I send notices out to companies who have registered as we get close to the withdrawal date telling them it's coming up and please withdraw by then. Every year a few withdraw by the date and I'm sorry to see them go. But every year there are several who don't withdraw and at the last minute tell me after I've done HOURS of research on them that they aren't submitting, which I find incredibly disrespectful given I've made it very public and sent reminders more than once and yet they choose to ignore them and let me go on with the research. I realize that things happen and I'm pretty reasonable as those who know me. But now that I'm 70 I get to be crotchety -- so I have penalties that I exact.

First penalty: The company can't submit for the next year's competition. That's not a big deal really is it? Also, as an analyst, I will not cover you at all and I don't care if you are my client, my best friend or my parents I ain't showing up at the house for a full year. And worse, while I won't proactively do anything if anyone asks me about the company, I'll tell them why I'm not covering them that year. All of that, of course, given that it can be a multi-billion dollar company that does it (happened this year though they apologized to their credit it was a company that I had a good relationship to and a former client) it is relatively a yawn-inducing penalty. But the optics for you aren't real good.

The reason I'm spending so much time talking about this is that if you have any reason that you think you might not submit that is palpable then don't register please. I spend hundreds of hours ultimately on the Watchlist including once you register I begin tracking you throughout the year. So please note this is a competition for serious companies.

That said, I truly am honored that companies have been submitting for the last 14 years. This is year 15 but competition #14 because I skipped one year to revamp the Watchlist to reflect what the world now looks like and change the questionnaire significantly and tighten up and make the scoring much tougher. So thank you for all of the companies that have been submitting for all of these years. I know I can be hard on you but I truly appreciate the effort that you put into this its not just my effort its yours too. I also appreciate and am honored that you even care enough to submit. Again, my thanks and I bow my head to all of you who have been supportive along the way.

SO

Here is the calendar for the CRM Watchlist 2021 (the time is always 6pm PT)

If you're interested in the submission criteria for 2021, here is a brief version. If you want a fuller detailed version before you request the registration form, please email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com and I'll be happy to email you with them.

The 30,000 foot view: Be a company that produces a customer-facing technology and have $3 million or more revenue (USD or the equivalent) in the prior fiscal year. Note the big change is that the revenue requirement is up from $2 million to $3 million this year.

Here is a simplified set of details:

All in all, this is a tough thing to win, and if you do, I think at least you deserve to be honored for it. If you win in any way, you will get a review on ZDNet about why you won and things that you could do to be even better, if I have anything to say about it. I say that every year and typically only get about half of them done because they are extensive reviews and I have to earn my living too but this year I'm going to do the Winners with Distinction first and then work to put out the repeat winners who haven't gotten reviews due to my failures to produce them. My way of apologizing.

This is hard to win but I hope that you feel it is well worth it. It's kind of a tough love thing. Even with all the harsh behavior I'm really very touchy-feely.

The rules in this section are unbreakable. What that means, to be clear, is that if you break them in any way at all, there will be some form of penalty assessed, ranging from your final score being affected to disqualification and being taken off my radar.. In advance, I apologize for being so draconian, but at this stage, there are still too many registrants and submissions that are ignoring what I ask. If you'd like the full version of these rules again, email me at paul-greenberg3@the56group.com and ask specifically for the qualification rules for the Watchlist, NOT the registration form.

USUAL RELATIVELY CHEEKY DISCLAIMER: Several of the winners are clients of mine; several of the non-winners are clients of mine; several of those companies who didn't submit at all are clients of mine. Several of the winners are NOT clients of mine; several of the non-winners are NOT clients of mine - and thousands of NOT clients of mine didn't submit at all.

My newest book, the Commonwealth of Self Interest was published in April 2019. Sales are going very well, thank you. You can get it here if you really want it. If you are interested in bulk copies, contact me at (once again) paul-greenberg3@the56group.com and we'll make sure you get a significant discount.

I promised a website that I was launching last year (and the year before) but, alas, I didn't. It will be coming this year or else I'm going to can it. It's a great website but it's a lot of work and money to get it running the way I need it to run. So stay tuned. The site is The 56 Group, of course. If you look now, you'll just see my apology for not having it up last year. Pretty much what you read here .

Once again, thank you to all the Watchlist submitting companies for their effort. Even if you didn't win, I trust the exercise was worth the effort. The idea is that you get to step back and look at your company as a whole rather than just the technology that you offer and see where your strengths and weaknesses are. If you of course want me to help you with that request the free half hour if you didn't win and the hour if you did and I'll be happy to tell you and hopefully help you by a pair of third-party eyes or -- given my glasses four third-party eyes.

But I truly appreciate the honor of having the opportunity to learn more about you win or lose. See you this year!!

Read more here:
CRM Watchlist 2020: And the winners are... - ZDNet

Smarsh Teams with Brainspace to Provide Customers Advanced Analytics and Visualization Tools for Electronic Communications – AiThority

Smarsh Enterprise Archive customers can leverage Brainspace machine learning to find new patterns in complex data, reduce time and cost for e-discovery

Smarsh, helping customers get ahead and stay ahead of the risk within their electronic communications, announced an integration with Brainspace, the worlds leading data analytics platform for investigations, e-discovery, and compliance, at Legalweek 2020.

The combined power of Smarsh and Brainspace allows users to take full control of their data to greatly accelerate the eDiscovery process, enabling teams to work both smarter and faster

Smarsh Enterprise Archive customers can now leverage Brainspaces advanced data analytics and machine-learning engine across their archived electronic communications. This enables users to drill down into complex sets of messages and draw actionable insights for e-discovery, litigation and investigations.

Smarsh customers can harness Brainspaces machine learning and natural-language processing to visualize their communications data, revealing hidden themes and relationships between various messages, terms and participants, said Adam Miller-Howard, Vice President of Business Development for Smarsh. In this way, in-house discovery teams can quickly uncover hidden patterns in their data to reduce the need for expensive e-discovery software and outside counsel.

AiThority.com News: David Kovar Brings Industry Expertise, Leadership to Comptia Drone Advisory Council

The Smarsh Connected Suite enables the capture, archiving, supervision and discovery of more than 80 communication channels behind a single pane of glass. Content is captured in its native format with full fidelity metadata, enabling users to review content in its full conversational context. Customers can both leverage the productivity benefits of the latest social, mobile and collaboration tools, and strengthen their compliance and e-discovery efforts.

Brainspace applies machine learning capabilities to automatically organize archived data into interactive visual displays. The solution applies augmented intelligence to rapidly surface data insights while reducing false positives. Users can identify hidden patterns in their data, saving time and reducing their reliance on third-party case assessments.

AiThority.com News: GoodData Delivers Out-Of-The-Box Compliance With California Consumer Privacy Act

The combined power of Smarsh and Brainspace allows users to take full control of their data to greatly accelerate the eDiscovery process, enabling teams to work both smarter and faster, said Miller-Howard.

In addition, Brainspaces supervised machine learning enables users to train the machine to identify specific human behavior or intentions. Customers will be able to transmit data from Brainspace back to the Smarsh Enterprise Archive for retention, or to third-party review and production tools.

Brainspace is excited to work with Smarsh to provide a next-generation solution for e-discovery analytics and archiving, across electronic communications, said Barry Fields, Chief Revenue Officer for Brainspace. Now users can really dig into their archived communications data to visualize unforeseen connections, improving their outcomes for litigation and investigations.

AiThority.com News: Wirecard Becomes Official Development Partner Of SAP To Drive Innovative Customer Experiences

Read the original post:
Smarsh Teams with Brainspace to Provide Customers Advanced Analytics and Visualization Tools for Electronic Communications - AiThority

How to Protect People against Phishing and Other Scams – Scientific American

About 15 years ago, phishing went from a virtually unknown phenomenon to an everyday media topic. With new users pouring onto the internet, and the commercialization of the internet starting in earnest, opportunities abounded for phishers, who use identity deception to defraud e-mail users. As a result of this, and the absence of technical countermeasures, phishing e-mails were suddenly in everybodys mailboxes. Practically speaking, the only defense was the advice offered by security experts: Watch out for poorly spelled e-mails; and do not click on links.

Over the years, the sophistication of the attacks has risen constantly, and the number of varieties of deceptive e-mails has mushroomed, with attack strategies like the impersonation of colleagues (so called business e-mail compromise or CEO fraud) dramatically on the rise. The increased sophistication resulted in improved yields, tempting more and more would-be criminals to try their luck at deception.

Corporations and other organizations continue to believe they can train their users to evade cyberattacks. Gartner estimates the market for security awareness computer-based training will grow at a 42 percent compound annual growth rate through at least 2023, from $451 million in 2018.

But at this point, the traditional emphasis on user education is an expenditure of resources and end-user burden that can no longer be justified by the results. As online deception techniques proliferate and become more sophisticated, it becomes more and more difficult for individual users to detect fraud. The return on investment on any security awareness effort has dramatically fallen, and the user burden to make security decisions has gone up.

User awareness should no longer be the primary defense against social engineering. In fact, cybercrime technology has evolved to the point that it can only be reliably defeated with opposing technology. Unaided humans are no longer able to adequately defend themselves against cybercrime, any more than fighters with bows and arrows can defeat enemies armed with attack helicopters.

Most defenses are better suited for algorithms than for end users. Instead, security and risk management professionals should educate end users only on the threats they can reasonably be expected to spot, while depending primarily on technical defenses for the overwhelming majority of attacks.

Early on, traditional phishing attacks were reported to have yields on the order of 3 percent, meaning that the vast majority of the intended victims did not fall for the attacks. On the other hand, sophisticated attacks such as spear phishing are known to see yields exceeding 70 percent.

Carefully crafted phishing e-mails (as well as other types of deceptive e-mails) are very hard for typical users to spot.

Some types of attacks are close to impossible to identify, even for highly technical users. Consider, for example, an attack in which the attacker compromises a legitimate e-mail account (e.g., by phishing the owner) and then using the compromised account to attack contacts of the phished user.

Other attacks, such as those using deceptive display names to impersonate a colleague of an intended victim are easier for a user to spot, at least in theory. By always inspecting the e-mail address of the sender, and making sure that this is a known user, one can avoid falling for such attacks. However, the increased scrutiny comes with a high price: For every extra step added to mundane tasks, our productivity naturally falls.

Moreover, these attacks are hard to detect in practice, given human error: many people, at least occasionally, accidentally sends e-mails from personal accounts instead of work accounts, and vice versa, creating an ambiguity about what is trustworthy and what is not. As a result, one in 10 users click through e-mails with deceptive display names, the security company Barracuda reports.

Given finite budgets, both in terms of financial cost and attention, companies and individuals must decide which awareness battles to pick, based on what people struggle with versus what types of automated countermeasures work well. Take, for example, the advice if it looks too good to be true, it probably isas well as the variant if it looks too bad to be true, it probably is. People have emotions and judgment to warn them when something falls in this category, but so far, computers do not. Accordingly, this is something worthy of an awareness campaign.

On the other hand, deceptive display names are relatively hard for people to spot, but quite easy for computers to detect. This is a problem where automated defenses are more suitable than awareness efforts.

For both digital health and human health, the relative influence of behavior versus technology is the same. From the time they are small children, humans are taught to avoid risks to their safety: don't eat dirt, don't cross the road without looking both ways, don't smoke. But the big gains in life expectancy achieved over the past century or so have come primarily from advances in medical technology for fighting disease.

The prescription is also the same: for human health, take care of yourself and avoid common risks, but by all means get a good doctor and take your medicine. For electronic health, teach your users basic digital hygiene, but commit your budget and time to staying a step ahead of the enemy in the technical arms race that is impossible to avoid.

Read more from the original source:
How to Protect People against Phishing and Other Scams - Scientific American

Out of Touch: Depletion of Mechanosensors Drives Wound-Healing and Cancer – TMC News – Texas Medical Center News

Additional dates:Next Event:February 11, 2020

Dr. Michael SheetzWelch Professor of BiochemistryMolecular MechanoMedicine ProgramBiochemistry and Molecular BiologyUniversity of Texas Medical BranchGalveston, TX

Out of Touch: Depletion of Mechanosensors Drives Wound-Healing and Cancer

Tuesday, February 11, 202012:30 1:30 PMBRC, 10th Floor, Room 1060 A/B

Abstract: Loss of matrix rigidity sensing in tumor cells enables transformed growth. In over forty tumor lines tested, they lack rigidity sensing complexes because components are altered (about 60% had low Tpm 2.1). The rigidity sensing complex (about 2 m in length) contracts matrix adhesions by ~100nm; and if the force generated is greater than ~25 pN, then cells can grow (Wolfenson et al., 2016. Nat Cell Bio. 18:33). However, if the surface is soft, then the cells apoptose by DAPK1 activation (Qin et al., 2018 BioRxiv. 320739). Although tumor cells grow on soft surfaces, restoration of rigidity sensing restores rigidity-dependent growth (Yang, B. et al., 2020 Nature Mat. 19: 239). Surprisingly, mechanical stretch of transformed cancer cells activates apoptosis through calpain-dependent apoptosis (Tijore et al., 2018 BioRxiv. 491746). Thus, stretch sensitivity is a weakness of cancer cells related to transformation and not to the tissue type or other factors.

Bio: Prof. Michael Sheetz has a long history in mechanobiological research and was most recently the Director of the Mechanobiology Institute at the National University of Singapore. Prior to that he was a Professor at Columbia University where he headed a program in nanomedicine. At Duke University Medical School, he was Chair of Cell Biology from 1990 to 2000. He has received many awards including the Lasker Prize, Wiley and Massry Prizes.

Excerpt from:
Out of Touch: Depletion of Mechanosensors Drives Wound-Healing and Cancer - TMC News - Texas Medical Center News