Wide Scope for Innovation for Students & Developers at MS’s Machine Learning & Data Sciences Conference

Microsoft India has announced the winners of the 24 hour hackathon held as part of the first Machine Learning and Data Sciences (MLnDS) Conference. Team Builders won the grand prize, while Eavesdroppers and NHacks emerged as the first and second runners up respectively by creating applications to address challenges in the field of agriculture, call center management and human behavior. The hackathon invited students and early-stage developers to work in teams to build intelligent, working applications with the help of Microsoft Cognitive Services, Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft R Services.

The top three teams won cash prizes worth Rs. 50,000, Rs. 40,000 and Rs. 30,000 for developing solutions fulfilling parameters on design, innovation, foreseeable impact and marketability.  In addition to the cash awards, the student participants from the winning teams will also be offered interviews for internships and full time positions at Microsoft India (RnD) Pvt. Ltd.

Speaking on the occasion, Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (RnD) Pvt. Ltd. said, “Microsoft has the vision, strategy and talent to democratize data and machine learning and use it to realize our mission to empower every individual and organization on the planet to achieve more. The hackathon was designed to spark curiosity among diverse talent to develop applications using our services and demonstrate the versatility and potential of using the platform. It has also shown us how Microsoft’s APIs could help scale ideas with global relevance in a very short time.”

The winning teams showcased their innovative thinking, technical skills and creative solutions to address everyday challenges. Team Builders created a cognitive model to help farmers to identify what to grow based on soil, weather and other parameters while Team Eavesdroppers created a dashboard for call center management which analyzes audio files and derives actionable insights for employee assessment and training related questions. TeamNHacks, developed a cognitive system that detects if individuals are suffering from depression by conducting a sentiment analysis basis the tweets of the individual extracted from Twitter. According to the sentiments extracted, notification is sent to the guardian or doctor of the individual.

Over 800 participants from across India expressed interest in participating in the hackathon of whom 80 participants were shortlisted. At the event, 18 teams from all over the country comprising students and developers battled it out in the intense hackathon to create applications. 15 senior machine learning and technology experts from Microsoft who have built intelligent services using Microsoft tools mentored the teams throughout the competition. A range of ideas including how to tackle college bullying, accessibility for the hearing impaired and a travel app were judged by a jury comprising Microsoft and industry experts.

The hackathon marked the closure  two-day conference was aimed at exploring the tremendous possibilities with Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Open Source technologies to enable a rich set of platforms, intelligent apps, services and experiences to accelerate economic growth, empower people and drive real impact. Nearly 600 attendees, including data scientists, students, developers, government elites, start-ups, cricketers and Microsoft experts, gathered to learn and share new insights and showcase powerful solutions that are driving digital transformation for organizations and communities in India and worldwide.

Online Market for Professional Courses Expected to Grow Over 22.05% by 2016-2020

Technopak and Simplilearn, a leading global Ed-tech company, have jointly published a report titled, “Technopak and Simplilearn Whitepaper on the Digital Learning Market in India”. Covering the most significant trends expected to impact the digital learning landscape in India. The report highlights that the online professional education market globally is expected to exceed US$9bn by 2020, growing at compound annual growth (CAGR) of 14% from 2016 – 2020.

Rapidly Growing Ed-Tech Sector - Online Certification Training

With the growing demand for skilled talent in the IT industry today, the report highlights that working professionals are increasingly looking to enhance their employability by up-skilling with online certification training in emerging technologies like Big Data, Cloud Computing and Salesforce, Project Management, Mobile App Development and Digital Marketing.  Technological advancements in the IT industry has raised awareness about certification training, which is reinvigorating the Indian online professional education space. 

Emerging Learning Trends – Gamification, Augmented and Virtual Reality

The report also indicates emerging trends, and forecasts the gamification of learning and simulation as well as the implementation of augmented and virtual reality in education. It states that the global market size of simulation-driven learning is ~US$4.4bn. With a share of 0.25%, the simulation based learning market in India is estimated to be worth US $13mn in FY’16, and is predicted to grow at a CAGR of over 100% in the next 4-5 years.

“Skilling is one of India’s most critical needs today. However, given the pace of development, there’s a growing realization that skilling needs to be seen from the perspective of lifelong learning. Digital-Learning and online certifications open up a gamut of options for students looking to enter both traditional and non-traditional fields. It also makes learning more interactive, personalized and self-paced. Students get access to world class content, faculty, pedagogy and certification – anytime, anywhere and at a much affordable cost”, says Aurobindo Saxena, Vice President at Technopak Advisors. According to Technopak’s analysis, India’s digital learning market is currently estimated at US$2bn, growing at a CAGR of 30% and is expected to reach US$5.7bn by 2020. There’s a huge demand emerging from working professionals as well to reskill themselves. This rapid demand is supported by the increasing requirement of skills such as data analysis, project management and digital marketing.

Krishna Kumar, Chief Executive Officer of Simplilearn said, “The whitepaper summarizes the different growth drivers of the Indian digital learning market, along with the opportunities and challenges they bring for the online education service providers. Keeping in mind the current skill-gap and the advances in Ed-tech, it’s indeed exciting to see how online certifications have opened up a gamut of opportunities for students and professionals in a world where technologies are changing every few years.”

Technopak education analysts also highlighted the various factors that are contributing to the growth of the digital-learning market in India:

·         Increasing integration of world economies

·         Rise in Internet penetration in India

·         Reduction in prices leading to rise in ownership of mobile devices

·         Rising aspiration for world class education backed by willingness to pay for it

·         Government focus and support

Internet and digital penetration

India currently has 462 million internet users with a penetration of 35%. This growth is driven by the adoption of mobile internet, with 65% of internet traffic originating from mobile devices. With programs such as the Digital India Initiative, digital literacy and penetration is projected to increase significantly in the next few years.

MOOC enrollment

India has the second largest MOOC user base after the US and its rapid expansion means that an increasing number of courses have a majority of people from India. Being affordable and accessible, MOOCs are helping address the quantity and quality education gaps in India by supporting traditional classrooms.

Government Support

The government of India’s Digital India initiative is a flagship programme that envisions to transform India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. Around 20+ new initiatives have been launched to widen the scope of the Digital India Programme to include projects in the areas of digital infrastructure, digital empowerment, on-demand government services and promotion of industry with the aims of universal digital literacy and universally accessible digital resources.

The report further outlines that while there are positive trends regarding the adoption of Digital Learning in India, lack of content in regional languages and poor internet connectivity in smaller towns and semi-urban areas poses the key impediment towards widespread adoption of this technology-driven learning. 

Global Information Security Spending Will Grow 7.9 Percent to Reach $81.6 Billion in 2016

Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $81.6 billion in 2016, an increase of 7.9 percent over 2015, according to the latest forecast from Gartner, Inc. Consulting and IT outsourcing are currently the largest categories of spending on information security. Until the end of 2020, the highest growth is expected to come from security testing, IT outsourcing and data loss prevention (DLP).

Preventive security will continue to show strong growth, as many security practitioners continue to have a buying preference for preventive measures. However, solutions such assecurity information and event management (SIEM) and secure web gateways (SWGs) are evolving to support detection-and-response approaches. Gartner expects the SWG market will maintain its growth of 5 to 10 percent through 2020 as organizations focus on detection and response.

"Organizations are increasingly focusing on detection and response, because taking a preventive approach has not been successful in blocking malicious attacks," said Elizabeth Kim, senior research analyst at Gartner. "We strongly advise businesses to balance their spending to include both."

Ms. Kim said that security spending will become increasingly service-driven as organizations continue to face staffing and talent shortages. Managed detection and response (MDR) is emerging, with demand coming from organizations struggling to deploy, manage and use an effective combination of expertise and tools to detect threats, and then bring their environment back to a known good state. This is particularly true for targeted advanced threats and insider threats. With more MDR providers emerging targeting the midmarket, Gartner foresees these services being an additional driver for security spending for both large and smaller organizations.

According to Gartner, spending in security markets such as consumer security software, secure email gateways (SEGs) and endpoint protection platforms (EPPs) continues to show constrained growth due to commoditization.

Other assumptions in the information security market behind Gartner's latest forecast include:

The average selling price for firewalls is expected to increase by at least 2 or 3 percent year over year until the end of 2018.

This is driven by the market benefiting from higher demand for high-end equipment among cloud providers and other service providers, due to larger bandwidth needs and an increasing number of devices. While vendor competition continues to put pressure on pricing, enterprises, service providers and web-scale organizations are moving toward deploying bigger and more expensive firewalls. As a result, the deployment of large firewalls by cloud service providers will remain an important source of revenue growth for vendors.

By 2018, 90 percent of organizations will implement at least one form of integrated DLP, up from 50 percent today.

Organizations have been deploying DLP to address regulatory compliance, intellectual property (IP) protection and data visibility and monitoring. Newer solutions that include user entity and behavior analytics, image analysis, machine learning, and data-matching techniques are being used to augment existing solutions.

Public cloud adoption will impact firewall spending by less than 10 percent until the end of 2019 but will have an impact after that.

While software as a service (SaaS) adoption is growing, the effect on firewall spending will be limited for the next three years. SaaS is the first choice for only 16 percent of CIOs surveyed by Gartner in 2015. Transitions also take time, during which vendors of cloud access security brokers (CASBs) will not only continue to evolve to cover more than just SaaS, but also perform similar roles for infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS). In addition, firewall vendors will also have to deal with one of their main challenges for the next few years: decrypting Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) at scale.

Half of midsize and large organizations will add bigger, more advanced inspection-oriented features to their network firewalls by 2019.

Bandwidth has been increasing, requiring larger-scale, higher-performing and more expensive firewalls. In addition, organizations are looking to firewalls to consolidate other features, such as web filtering and intrusion prevention capabilities. Some are enhancing their firewalls with new content inspection features, such as malware sand boxing.

Indian employees Fear Worse Retirement Life Compared to Parents: Willis Towers Watson Survey

More than half of Indian employees anticipate that they will be up against a less comfortable retirement than their parents’ generation, according to the latest survey by global advisory, broking and solutions company Willis Towers Watson. The 2016 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey found that while employees’ satisfaction with their financial situation in India has increased 9% since 2013, 56% of Indian employees still fear that they will be worse off than their parents in retirement.

When questioned about their current financial state, as many as 46% of employees express concerns and more than 1-in-3 stated that their financial problems negatively affect their lives.

The study of over 2,000 employees in India found that almost 54% worry about their future financial state. A growing proportion of employees expect to work through their sixties to meet their financial obligations. All these factors pertaining to financial insecurities hinder performance of employees at the workplace.

The research found that 52% of employees think that they are less effective at their work due to financial problems. Among employees who have both short-term and long-term concerns, 75% admit to above average or high stress. In contrast, the same is true for less than 2-in-5 employees in the unworried group, employees who are not worried either about the short or long-term. Employees with both short- and long-term concerns are 1.5 times more likely to report poor health and twice as likely to leave for another job.

Kulin Patel, Director, Willis Towers Watson India said, “The growing insecurities of employees around long-term financial stability demands the immediate attention of employers. Companies are beginning to take steps by making their employees’ financial well-being a core component of their overall well-being strategy and employee value proposition. Gradually, employers are understanding the link between their employees’ well-being and their performance and productivity at work, and how this affects the organisation’s bottom line. Soon, they will realise that a holistic approach is needed to address these issues effectively.”

According to the survey, 57% of Indian employees support the idea that their employer should have a role in encouraging them to save for retirement. However, 32% would be uncomfortable receiving targeted messages from their employer on these matters. Such complexity should be addressed with sensitivity.

Notably, 46% of employers intend to offer a comprehensive suite of tools, seminars and education that cover budgeting, planned large purchases, debt reduction, wealth accumulation, protection/insurance and tax assistance/advisory by 2018, as revealed by the findings of the Willis Towers Watson’s Staying@Work 2015/16 survey**.

The biggest growth in promoting financial well-being in India will be in the use of customised and targeted messages, where 50% of employers intend to do so over the next three years, on top of the 13% currently doing so. Employers should aim to help employees address their different issues, from short-to-medium-term savings, through to the traditional long-term retirement savings.

The survey results also suggest that 1-in-4 employees, when asked about their top priorities, prefer superior retirement or health benefits to pay and bonus and more than 2-in-5 would prefer some alternative to pay and bonus.

Kulin Patel further said, “There is a need to boost engagement and productivity by reconfiguring the benefit package offered by employers. Different employee segments may require a different mix of benefits that depend on their financial priorities at their given stage in life. For employers to move beyond their conventional role and intervene to support their employees, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot be adopted consistently across all organisations as a solution.  

Disruptive Technology for eSports Global Gamers with New Radeon RX 460 Graphics

AMD has unleashed the new Radeon RX 460 graphics card, engineered from the ground up for eSports gamers who demand pristine HD gaming, extraordinarily smooth beyond-HD streaming capabilities, and a distinguished assortment of future-proof gaming technologies. With an ultra-quiet cooling solution and sub-75W power footprint, the Radeon RX 460 brings this wide array of enthusiast class features with a stunning SEP starting at $109.

 “The Radeon RX 460 delivers the perfect balance of price, power, performance and package size, the four key pillars of modern GPUs,” said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. “The Radeon RX Series is built on architecture designed for extraordinary power efficiency and is especially well suited to desktop gaming PCs targeted at mainstream price points. Radeon RX 460 users will enjoy an optimized software and hardware graphics card solution ideal for both eSports and iCafé systems.”

The supercharged Radeon RX 460 graphics card delivers surprising performance in the most popular global eSports titles, and was engineered from the ground up to take advantage of next generation DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs that power the most popular AAA game titles.  The Radeon RX 460 graphics card has up to 14 compute units, 2/4 GB GDDR5 memory and 2.2 teraflops processing power, yet typical board power is less than 75 watts, making it ideal for iCafé deployments that typically place a high value on a low power footprint. This produces astonishingly quiet gaming and incredible frame-rates.

Radeon RX 460 Features

* Astounding 1080p Gaming – Optimized for the most popular resolution gamers use today, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card delivers superior framerates at 1080p in eSports titles such as League of Legends, Overwatch and DOTA 2, even allowing for better image quality and reduction of “jaggies” with the Virtual Super Resolution feature and smooth gameplay using AMD Freesync technology, and latency optimizations available from Radeon Settings. The Radeon RX 460 excels in DirectX 12 and Vulkan, APIs that are powering the future of gaming.

* Cool and Quiet Gaming – Gamers can reduce fan noise with silent gaming features made possible by the revolutionary Polaris architecture, optimized for the 14nm FinFET process. The Polaris architecture-based Radeon RX 460 intelligently adapts to card temperature and completely turns off fans during idle and light gaming workloads With no power connector and low temperatures, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card is the optimal plug and play option for gamers looking to upgrade.

* Stunning HDR Pixels – Featuring a brand new display engine, the Radeon RX 460 graphics card is ready to help power the new generation of HDR content and displays for video and gaming

·* Game Changing Control –  As sophisticated as the Polaris architecture-based graphics cards are at a hardware level, the software that powers the cards is equally so. Radeon Software drivers enable the ultimate in performance, features and stability, designed to ensure an exceptionally smooth and fast out-of-box experience.

Radeon RX 460 Availability

Radeon RX 460 graphics cards are available from retailers and e-tailers around the world starting today. 

SQLServerGeeks Annual Summit - II to be held at NIMHANS from August 11- 13, 2016 at Bangalore

Asia’s Largest Data and Analytics Summit, SQLServerGeeks Annual Summit 2016 (SSGAS 2016), is being held in Bangalore from the 11^th to the 13^th of August 2016 at the NIMHANS Convention Centre. SSGAS 2016 organized in close collaboration with Microsoft will feature Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President (Data Group) from Redmond USA who will deliver the Keynote Address. He is being accompanied by a 20+ team of senior level data/analytics professionals. Legendary SQL Guru Bob Ward will also be speaking at the event. For additional information visit www.sqlservergeeks.com/summit2016. 

Close to a 1000 SQL & Data Professionals are expected to attend the 3-day summit that will feature 6 parallel tracks on Big Data, Analytics & Business Intelligence, Data on Cloud + Internet of Things (IoT), Database Administration and Database Development. 140+ Sessions will be delivered by 80+ Speakers across the 3 days. There will also be new ways of learning through Open Talks and Chalk Talks. SSGAS 2016 is the largest gathering of data professionals in Asia with participation from 250+ companies. 

The conference will showcase cutting edge tools, products & technologies focussed around Data & Analytics. For the first time in Asia, the summit will feature SQL Star Speakers such as Denny Cherry, Joey D Antoni, Grant Fritchey, Andreas Volter, Jen Stirrup, Alex Yates, Rimma Nehme, Tomer Weisberg and many more.  SSG Annual Summit will also feature battery of Microsoft SQL Product Team members from Redmond, USA.

Commenting on SSGAS 2016, Amit R S Bansal, Conference Chairman and Director of eDominer Systems, said, “Data and Analytics are the two big factors for any organization’s success today. The 80+ speakers and 140+ sessions at SSGAS 2016 make it bigger and better than last year and one of the leading tech events in this part of the world. Asia has one of the largest talent pool of data professionals. The summit will expose the data professionals to the latest in the world of data and analytics as well as facilitate skills up-gradation and immense networking opportunity.”

Lexis Practical Guidance First Online Solution Complements Legal Industry Works in India

Following overwhelming success in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore, Lexis Practical Guidance, an innovative online workflow-based solution, was launched in India at The Lalit Ashok, Bengaluru, on July 28, 2016, in presence of distinguished members from the Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF) and the Indian Corporate Counsel Association (ICCA), along with several other eminent senior law firm partners, senior advocates and corporate counsels by LexisNexis, a leading global provider of content-enabled workflow solutions.

On Lexis Practical Guidance’s success globally, Karen Taylor, Executive Director, Lexis Practical Guidance Asia, said, “Lexis Practical Guidance has been a tried and trusted solution for legal practitioners across the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. LexisNexis’s award-winning platforms, combined with expert local content, bring the very best in know-how, drafting and compliance all underpinned by market-leading analysis and commentary with on-point links to cases and legislation. Whether for Indian matters, cross-border deals, or international compliance requirements, Lexis Practical Guidance is the solution. It is time for Digital India, Digital World.”

During the event, Vikesh Dhyani, Director Marketing, Customer Discovery and Innovation, LexisNexis India - Legal and Professional, said, “This solution provides an unprecedented advantage of having a specialist on their desktop to guide their associates that, in turn, enables them to save time on research, increase their billable hours and get instant guidance on unfamiliar subjects. Whether you are a law firm, or a corporate counsel, a solo practitioner or a start-up, struggling with competition driven by new players and offerings from alternative legal services, together with tighter economic conditions, it is a pioneering solution to drive efficiencies, bring more strategic approach to risk management and most importantly achieve a value-based cost structure.”

Sandeep Ganju, Senior Director, Sales & Business Development, LexisNexis India, said, “Now is the age of information, and the manner in which information is consumed and analyzed by law firms and corporate counsels is going to be a key differentiator in making product decisions, mitigating risks and managing the litigating process better. With solutions like Lexis Practical Guidance, LexisNexis has brought an advanced online platform that enables professionals to seamlessly navigate from case law to commentaries and legislations, thereby examining a point of law in a holistic fashion and giving a pragmatic view of the matter at hand.”