How AI help universities

28 December 2020

How AI help universities

Reading Time: 3 minutes

All universities/higher education across the world are transforming their back end processes using artificial intelligence. The impact of artificial intelligence in universities grown so rapidly and spread so wide.

The usefulness of artificial intelligence is undeniable and evident in the way departments nowadays teaches and also in the way the student learns. Furthermore, artificial intelligence, smart AI tech can now do a diverse set of varying tasks.

Artificial Intelligence has transform various sectors, and amid this the educational world cannot afford to still operate in the old-school ways. When it comes to the issue of universities, AI can produce a better personify, recommendation, and also automated administration for universities.

Not only does artificial intelligence help in modifying the study patterns and materials for the students according to their capabilities and ability, but artificial intelligence also allows intelligent automation for administration tasks in university.

The technology can be friction to clarify the voluminous queries and application that are been received by the universities. Even for some of the educational institutions that collects intentional application along with the domestic ones, artificial intelligence algorithms can forecast the applicant most likely either to be accepted and enrolled as well.

Therefore, as we keep moving towards to more advanced world, we must keep focus on leveraging technologies like artificial intelligence to renovate the very place that initiates such education advancement.

Here are some of the ways in which Artificial intelligence has helped universities;

Student Acquisition

Personify of enrollment process with the help of artificial intelligence tech in universities, permit universities to target students who are likely to perform well in their program. Adaptive conversational assistants help universities to cater for student worldwide. Such incorporation of artificial intelligence in universities helps universities to boost the number of enrollment.

2. Operational Efficiency

Scientist have been flirting with the usefulness of artificial intelligence in universities for some years now, the outcome of this is the use of tools such as SOP grader, document recognition, and also chat-bots in universities. Artificial intelligence tech such as this will be able to use information from various campus system to guide the administrative decision and also channel the university syllabus towards the employer hiring needs.

3. Classroom Learning

Artificial intelligence mostly helps classroom learning by making available a comprehensive educational experience. It permits student to widen their imaginations with the use of tools and technologies such as virtual assistants and augmented reality. This classroom assistance tech for monitoring and evaluating helps the department to increase the educational experience.

Artificial Intelligence technology in universities makes classroom education easier and more efficient

4. Student Engagement

Artificial technologies such as the interactive assistants allows the student to be able to communicate their issues right when it pop up consecutively and increasing student retention rate. The engagement of student can also be advance by embracing unique artificial intelligence technologies such as the student success prediction model. Technologies like chat-bots in universities helps educators to improve their efficiency in the teaching based on the student opinions which is collected by the conversational assistants.

5. Reminders

With the help of artificial intelligence technologies in universities, institutions can help the student by sending them some useful text messages, push notification or emails. These will act as a reminder to them when there is a certain task needed to be completed, event coming up and also deadlines approaching messages. Such uses of artificial intelligence will help the student to get familiar with the AI tech and it will also increase student engagement.

Girl checking reminders from a chatbot in higher education

Conversational Artificial Intelligence chat-bots are used by universities to interact with students and send them relevant reminders via email and so on.

Resources

Successful AI Examples in Higher Education That Can Inspire Our Future

How Artificial Intelligence Can Change Higher Education

6 December 2020

Best practices for collaborating with Microsoft 365

Reading Time: 3 minutesThis time i want to write my thought on using a product, we use many variety of products in our daily life, sometime because we have to or we like to explore it or we because our family and friends using it. It’s obvious as end user we have register for hundreds or sometime thousands account from different websites, according to research on Digitalguardian a person in us has 130 accounts assigned to a single email address, and we have at least 3 email address in our life time then you multiply it.

Registering for an account never been easer than today, but using a product fully has decreased significantly, that is one of reason i would like to explain it in blog, How we can use Microsoft 365 products and whats the best practices ?

What is include in Microsoft 365 ? and what each product do ?

To learn about all Office Products and what each product do , please click open the Periodic Table of Office 365.

Ways to Collaborate Better With Office 365:

Co-Author Documents in Real Time With Office Online:

By Using office online multiple users/authors can work together on the same documents together at the same time, Office online saves all changes automatically, so every one sees last modified version of the document, with same font, layout and same formatting not matter what device or browser you or your team member use.

This real time sync will help a team to work more efficient and smooth with all changes you will always have up to date version.

Teamwork With Microsoft Teams

Communication is the key to collaboration in businesses. That’s why Microsoft has introduced a chat-based workspace called Teams to Office 365 to facilitate communication. This tool integrates with all other Office 365 applications, including Planner, Onenote and SharePoint. If you can get all your team member to discuss a projects they’re working on in teams, it could be of significant benefit in business.

All conversations will be available for review, and they will all be stored in the same place. The conversations are all stored on a secure cloud server, so you don’t have to worry about anyone accessing information your team member shouldn’t have.

Automate Workflow With Flow

Microsoft Flow was developed to help companies automate their workflows. In today’s digital age, team members use a large number of applications and services every day. Flow brings all these tasks together in a well-designed workflow so that everyone knows what they need to do at all times. With clear workflows, your projects can run more efficiently, increasing your team’s overall productivity and ROI.

With OneDrive for BusinessStore you can Store Files in the Cloud

One of the most important components of Microsoft Office 365 is OneDrive for Business. This is a place where you can store files and share them with your team members. Every time your colleague makes changes to a document, the content is automatically synchronized so everyone has access to the latest version.

If you want only a subset of your team members to have access to a document, you can set permissions so that only certain people can view or edit the files.

At the end, i hope i just scratch the only the surface of Office 365, your could do much more with Power BI, Powe App also that i didn’t include here. Making sure when you use a product fully will help you not just your student life but also your carrier or your business in future, i encourage you to read more about Microsoft 365 offical documentation to lean more. Not underestimating, remember that NSA used Sharepoint for there entire architecture.

Resources:
digitalguardian.com

Microsoft 365 documentation

23 November 2020

1 Comment

Bez kategorii

What’s Responsible AI – An alternative guideline

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Artificial intelligence is one of the fastest growing fields today. It is currently being used in several disciplines, across the globe. However, this technology needs to be monitored to prevent any bias or negative impacts from affecting the world.

Responsible AI is developed to help prevent any harmful implications of AI, by having policies related to bias, ethics and trust. It is relatively new; however, many companies are favoring its incorporation into their infrastructure. Responsible AI caters to managing and regulating intelligent systems, to make sure they do not harm the society.

There are three major contributors to consider while determining if a certain piece of AI tech is suited for the society:

Awareness

Awareness of the accountability of AI research and development is necessary. That is, who is to blame if an intelligent machine makes an error? The research should be capable of determining the possible effects of releasing a system into the world.

Reason

AI algorithms learn from the data they receive. However, they should be capable of reasoning and justifying their actions.

Transparency

Transparency is required to make sure people know what a particular intelligent system does, and what it is capable of. It requires governance to ensure it delivers societal good.

Responsible AI research is being done across different platforms to devise rules and regulations to govern AI. RRI (Responsible AI Research and Innovation) is an interactive and transparent process that holds individual or groups of innovators responsible for the acceptability, desirability and sustainability of a certain technology in the society. It can be implemented between different parties using the following approaches:

Permanent individuals/groups from different backgrounds can discuss the innovation and its possible outcomes. This includes ethical review boards within organizations.
Set of rules and guidelines that should be followed by the outcomes of research and innovation, so its ethical, legal and safe.
Code of conduct detailing on the behavioral choices for stakeholders in different sectors
Industry standards that set a minimum threshold for the safety required for testing and development of new technology.
Approaches and methods of keeping track of the future impacts of a particular technology like scenario planning and modeling.

Since AI is prone to biases and misjudgments, RRI can ensure the technology is being utilized for the ultimate good of the world. At the end, human input is required to make sure technology is not going against humanity and that the processes are following the ethics, trust and bias standards. This improves accountability and promotes a better public image of such systems.

Resources:

Wikipedia

ngi.eu

Tandfonline

Google Responsible AI

ec.europa.eu

Tagged AI, ethics, misjudgments, technology

9 November 2020

2 Comments

Open Source

Transition to open source, Poland government is open-source now, what ?

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Secrets of Successful Open Source Business Models

It’s not just a click bait, maybe Poland not yet, but now a day we see more companies, as well as governments, choose open source.

A month ago Google, open-sourced its pre-trained models and fine-tuning code for Big Transfer (BiT), And Microsoft last weeks Akri project, NSA Ghidra from a tool that kept from the public to open source, the examples piling up weekly, and we hear daily companies in big bold title Announcing new projects and introducing with a big welcoming applause as OPEN SOURCE.

Back in the late ’90s, when the Open Source Initiative was born, the idea of releasing source code would have been considered a bad strategy for technology companies because proprietary software was the standard and companies were doing everything they could to protect their software, in 2020 The concept of open source has changed dramatically and is now mainstream.

Not only high-profile acquisitions and investments in open source projects but also tech giants like Google and Facebook have placed importance on open source to attract new product innovations and build a huge developer community. Flutter vs React Native, PyTorch vs Tensorflow, Kubernetes, etc. are the best examples.

Ghidra, it’s not every day we see Government bureaus making their projects open source, and it was far away from my imagination to see and use the spy agencies program on my personal computer. NSA started back in 2014 to make a tool called “Niagarafiles (Nifi),” first open-source not only that but they were very proudly put “NSA Releases First in Series of Software Products to Open Source Community” as the title. And after that in the 2019 tool for cracking software or some call it reverse engineering tools were open to the public.

“NSA views on releasing Ghidra as a kind of recruiting strategy, making it easier for new hires to enter the NSA at a higher level or for cleared contractors to lend their expertise without needing to first come up to speed on the tool.” Said NSA cybersecurity adviser Rob Joyce

“The significance is that the product can be improved by the community instead of being solely funded by the NSA. The development of such a product is costly, and even the NSA doesn’t have unlimited funds. It’ll be a great demonstration of the value of open-sourcing internally developed projects.” Rob Graham, consultant, and owner at Errata Security. told Business Insider in a Twitter DM.

community of contributors from all over the world who share an interest in meeting a common need, ranging from minor projects to huge developments, which they carry out using a high-performance collaborative development environment (CDE).

Companies and governments use open source because they understand even with big pockets are still highly costly, another aspect of Catalyst For Continuous Innovation, as the number of employees from a wide range of companies and backgrounds increases, the scope of technology innovation coverage will expand exponentially. Other than that Helps Build A Rich Developer Community, If a company doesn’t have open source in its DNA, it will be a big challenge to build a good relationship with the developer community. If you’re a big company like Microsoft, IBM, or Google, there are always a lot of people watching you. Everyone can read and criticize your code. Also, being open source means being open and transparent about release cycles and roadmaps, which takes a lot of effort and initiative.

And finally operating in open source requires companies to be leading members in how technology is built and how it evolves. This is achieved through collaboration and contribution to open-source software. Companies whose teams lead open source projects gain greater insight into how the technology is being built, where it is going, and why.

Throughout my personal opinion and experience, even companies and some Government bureaus chose open source but still some other business or academic institution, they are behind to take advantage of open source, live example during pandemic many universities rush their IT teams to build a fully online experience for the students. Most universities used 3rd party and hiring more developers. The greatest solution comes to mind what if a big community gathers to make an open-source CMS and LMS especially for an academic institution, wouldn’t be a great and powerful idea?

Resource:

Open Source: Advantages of Open Source Software

Microsoft’s turns over new ‘leaf’ with open source Akri

The NSA publicly released a tool for cracking software

NSA releases Ghidra, a free software reverse engineering toolkit

Why Do Large Companies Open Source Their Tech?

Announcing Akri, an open source project for building a connected edge with Kubernetes

Tagged Ghidra, governments, Open Source, Open Source Project, Open Source Software

23 October 2020

Microsoft Teams phishing campaign attack on O365 Users

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Image shows capabilities of Microsoft teams- a Network of sharing files, calendar, emotions, statics, comment, and mails.

Due to the COVID-19 situation many Governments, Organisations, and businesses transform into online communication platforms or integrate into their system and use it as a primary communication channel. Universities and academic institutions all around the world also decide for a sudden shift to online learning in a short period of time.

According to the New York Times analysis of internet usage in the US and special services that allow us to work and learn from home increasing continuously.

At Kozminski our main communication channel is Microsoft Teams, MS Teams is one of the products of O365, and a very popular subscription services that MS offer academic institutions among Google G Suite, Zoom for Education, and many more.

Cloud-based communication platform security is a huge threat that we as a student, employer, and user-facing threats daily, it’s clear to us there is no perfection in SaaS. Startup, Footprint, Runtime, Responsiveness, Hangs, rendering, and so many more that we use to hear as BUGS, but Security Bugs is one of the scariest to end user because makes us a vulnerable and the main target.

Abnormal Security researchers warn of a phishing campaign that pretends to be an automated message from MS teams, but actually aims to steal the credentials of O365 recipients.

Phishing is a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information or data, it’s a very popular and old technique of attack. This campaign attack was sent to 15,000 – 50,000 O365 users according to researchers with Abnormal Security

“Because Microsoft Teams is an instant-messaging service, recipients of this notification might be more apt to click on it so that they can respond quickly to whatever message they think they may have missed based on the notification,” said researchers in a Thursday analysis.

The phishing Email displays the name “There’s new activity in teams”, making look like it’s an automatic notification from Microsoft Teams.

As can be seen in the picture below, the email tells the recipient that his teammates are trying to reach him, warns him that he has missed the MS Teams Chat and shows an example of a teammate chat where he is asked to submit something.

Email Attack: The email is sent from the display name, ‘There’s new activity in Teams’, making it appear like an automated notification from Microsoft Teams.

It’s certain that Using 2FA or Multi-FA will make an important additional layer, low coast solution In many cases, it does stop phishing attacks from succeeding but it doesn’t mean your are immune to attacks. Also according to MS365 administration official documentation first task is to “Set up multi-factor authentication” and apply to the user as required widely within the organization and the Second task “Train your users” Also Microsoft recommended The Harvard Kennedy School Cybersecurity Campaign Handbook guidance.

In my opinion, due to rapid changes and system integration, most IT Teams can not feed their users enough information and updates, and it’s time for us as the end-user to watch tutorials to familiarises ourselves and read more informations about our daily software/tools.

And here is to learn more about how to set up 2FA on your Microsoft account Step by Step

The Image show steps, how 2FA works on clients point of view.

Resource: Abnomal Security

MS = Microsoft Teams – O365 = Office 365 – 2FA = Two-Factor Authentication

Tagged MS Teams, Phishing, security, Two-Factor Authentication

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