Category: News

Conversations around automation and artificial intelligence are eclipsing the existing challenges in the workplace related to, for instance, work-life balance, employee burnout and management of remote work, said Jim Love, chief information officer at IT World Canada, during a panel at the HRPA conference.

“AI is sucking all the oxygen out of the room in terms of the discussion, and that’s fair because it is a real force. What it will do to the workforce is unquestionably going to be very dramatic,” he said. “But it’s not the only thing happening out there. We had no shortage of problems before this.”

Love was joined by Lisa Taylor, president and founder of Challenge Factory, a research and consultancy firm focusing on the future of work, and moderator Thomas Wardman, vice president, information technology and operations, HRPA.

Taylor argued that there’s a lot to focus on beyond AI when a company is organizing for the future of work, including the demographics and longevity of the workforce, career ownership, flexible work models, the emergence of platform-based work models like Uber or Airbnb, and finally, automation and the consequent potential job losses, gains, and more.

“Really, the future of work is human. Work is a human activity. So technology can enable work, but if we’re talking about the future of work, we have to be talking about human beings,” said Taylor. “Otherwise, we’re talking about the future of tech enabling work, and that’s a great topic, but it’s a different topic.”

Conversations around diversity, inclusion, and equity are as essential, the panelists concurred, stressing that there has been an honest attempt to embrace diversity.

“Over their careers, people have developed, and we’re bringing out the best in people in management,” said Love. “They’re trying to embrace diversity, but at the same time, they’re somewhat frustrated or confused by how to make the change.”

Diversity metrics and reports are helpful to track the progress a company has made, but they often run the risk that the metric itself becomes the goal, explained Taylor.

“When we’re focused on the report as the goal, it means that we’re going to do the surface level stuff that may or may not get us a good report, but definitely will not advance how much we mature in our understanding of being diverse workplaces as well as if we actually took a hard and honest look, and really look from the ground up of how we can do better,” said Taylor.

Technology can also be the very tool to foster DEI, Love said. He explained that generative AI caught on so much because it finally allowed us to have a conversation with a system.

“Friends who emigrated to Canada, and while they have great English, they’re not as comfortable in some areas,” he noted. “But to be able to get stuff in their own dialect, their own language instantly from an AI because you interact with the machine – it doesn’t care what language you speak, it will speak back to you in your own language.”

AI is also getting better, he added, in the sense that it can be trained on smaller, curated models. Additionally, the ability for AI to create data is promising, because it allows you to create data that is less biased.

Finally, a key reminder when having conversations about DEI, Love noted, is that “we have to look at each other as humans first and then explore the dimensions, because as you get to know people, you’ll get to know that they will find the commonality rather than the things that make us different.”

He continued, “I think we have to give people the opportunity to experience the depth. And when we put labels on people of any side, even if they’re the labels of prejudice or privilege, I think we make mistakes.”

Having full diversity in the workplace is also allowing for diversity of thought, Taylor said, so that people who think differently or come from different backgrounds are comfortable having productive discussions.

“We have to learn to have discussions with people we don’t agree with,” Love said, “because otherwise we’re in this echo chamber which social media has done to us, where we always stay with our tribe, in our group, and we tell people how righteous we are.” Encountering people you do not agree with and finding common ground as humans, he concluded, is key.

The post Keeping the human at the centre of an AI-powered workplace: HRPA conference first appeared on IT World Canada.

What are Canadian companies actually doing in terms of projects with cloud and generative AI? How are they navigating the uncertainty of a relatively new technology? Those were the questions that were addressed by a customer panel during a briefing with Canadian media at AWS re:Invent 2023.

The panel featured a number of companies from different verticals, ranging from born in the cloud startups to large established enterprises.

Here’s some of what they had to say about the use cases they are working on, and the rationale for using generative AI versus more traditional approaches to AI such as machine learning (ML):

Dwayne Benefield, SVP connected homes & entertainment, Telus

In customer service, Telus is deploying an AI engine to improve customer service in call centres, to “take questions, understand intent and generate answers.” But beyond that, Telus is looking to AI to take a further step and help troubleshoot issues.

Benefield asked us to imagine someone “streaming Netflix and all of a sudden it goes down and you’re like, ‘what’s wrong with my WiFi?’ AI is capable of checking a wide range of potential issues and proposing actions to resolve the situation. These answers can be real time and proactive.”

He also outlined Telus’ plans for smart homes, focusing on an issue that is a sore point with everyone who has adopted more than one smart device in their home.

“Every device you buy comes with their own hub,” he stated. “That’s not very smart.” As a case in point, he noted, “I actually have 39 apps on my phone right now (to manage smart home devices).”

Benefield knows that AI can change this. “We’re leveraging AI to remove that complication and actually make it more personalized and easy to set up,” he said.

He announced that Telus is working with AWS to to build the world’s first device-agnostic smart home solution. “Now all the devices you have, or devices you plan to bring in…are controlled by a single pane of glass or a single voice system.

“Instead of having to program your morning routine in five different apps…you just say, ‘hey Jarvis, wake me up at 7 am, open the blinds and get my morning coffee’. And Jarvis will say, ‘what temperature do you like your coffee?’”

Benefield noted that Telus is deploying this in beta next month, and in consumer-facing applications starting in Q1.

Eman Nejad, head of data science, WAHI Realty

WAHI is a startup, less than a year old, but the company has already become a disrupter in the real estate market, with a “cashback” promise passing the savings back to the buyers. Their AI offering promises even further disruption.

The company is using AI to pull information from the photos supplied by the sellers. Doing this means they can go beyond the standard listing information to personalize the search for the home on a new level.

Nejad noted, “we can spot things like specific cabinets, finished basements or a specific type of backyard.” This adds “a new dimension to the industry.” These AI-enabled image searches “automate the interface, and the image (will) clearly help the home buyer to find the (most) appropriate, more personalized, and relevant sale.”

The company had originally started with standard machine learning solutions. But when generative AI came to the forefront, Nejad realized that it was far superior to standard approaches for this particular type of application. It was also much faster to implement. As a result, their new system is in beta test today.

Iran Reyes Fleitas, VP, global head of engineering, Experience.Monks (Formerly Jam3)

Experience.Monks offers highly creative, technically enabled services for a wide range of major brands around the world. For them, generative AI adds new dimensions to their  offerings.

For example, they would traditionally create one ad for one region. If that was successful, they manually updated those ads for other regions, customizing them for language, locality and ethnicity. This was time and labour intensive work.

Fleitas said they are working to leverage generative AI to allow them to “create an ad on one site, and it creates and replicates that ad in all the regions that you want.” The customization covers language and even the images used. “So what used to happen in a month, now is happening in a few days.”

Another example was their work with Adidas, where, Fleitas noted, “we created a platform that could generate a sneaker in 3D based on user prompts.” Further, and this is the critical point, he noted, the AI will ensure that customizations are within the brand’s guidance. “So in the end, we’re not going to create a Nike sneaker, we’re going to create an Adidas sneaker with all of the personalization of what the users (want).”

He referred to this as “hybrid personalization,” where AI can ultimately allow customers to actively help customize products.

Everyone who has interacted with generative AI is taken by how it feels like conversing with a real human being. Experience.Monks leverages this to captivate their audiences.

The company is using AI to produce surprisingly realistic avatars to be used for customer service. These shockingly realistic avatars not only provide answers to a wide range of questions using natural language, they also detect and respond to emotional cues and sentiment indicators.

AI brings this puppet to life

The company has gone beyond images on screen. It has used AI to animate a mechanical and comical puppet creature used in one of their programs. Usine AI, the puppet, truly comes alive, with lifelike interactions, as it follows facial and verbal cues.

Generative AI made it possible to breathe life into these devices, but also to do so quickly and within the budgets of their customers.

Jean-François (JF) Gailleur, SVP engineering, AlayaCare

AlayaCare is working with AI enabled solutions to address systemic issues of home care that have become more acute with the combination of an aging population, cost restraints and the shortage of trained staff.

AlayaCare is looking to generative AI to deal with three key issues:
– attracting and retaining people
– scheduling
– managing patient data

With a shortage of skilled workers, it’s essential that they get the maximum productivity from everyone in the field without causing huge amounts of stress that could lead to retention problems.

Any time even one person is unexpectedly unavailable for work, it can cause major disruptions and significant staff time to manage. For example, an average home care worker may have 40 clients, all with different conditions and needs. If you have 50 similar workers in an area, that’s a huge population.

So if a worker is off suddenly, the number of permutations of clients, location, special needs and times make even minor adjustments a logistical nightmare. Yet, managing this many permutations and finding the optimal balance is a task perfectly suited to generative AI solutions that can manage this type of scheduling in real time.

Yet another issue faced by healthcare workers is in dealing with the vast amount of data that needs to be collected on a patient. Sorting through that amount of data takes time that could be spent in patient care.

Once again, AI solutions can review this data and do the “heavy lifting” to create and help manage individualized care and risk profiles.  Freed up from sifting through, analyzing and prioritizing records manually, caregivers can have an AI “dashboard” to help manage their work.

Gallieur was careful to note that these applications don’t take the place of trained staff and clinicians, but they free up those trained workers to spend the time where their precious skills are most needed – on patients, treatment and services.

Anne Steptoe, VP of engineering, Wealthsimple 

Wealth Simple already has significant experience with traditional AI solutions in a cloud based environment. As Steptoe noted, “Our company is digital native, born in the cloud, so I think that makes us more agile. Our data warehouse, our production workloads, our ML platform, are all hosted on AWS. We have built our own ML platform (on AWS) … that allows us to be really innovative and have a much faster response to our clients.”

But generative AI solutions in the cloud make the company even more responsive and agile by vastly reducing the time to delivery required by traditional ML. Steptoe noted that recently, the company was able to leverage generative AI to “put out a brand new model in two steps with one line of code.” As she noted, “it’s pretty amazing what we are doing with this technology ourselves.”

Steptoe noted that productivity gains in areas like call centre applications accelerate productivity but also allow their teams to provide the type of oversight that is “making sure they are checking, making sure that (answers) are as accurate as possible.”

Appreciating the strengths and challenges

All of the panelists acknowledged that there were both advantages and challenges to working with generative AI models. None claimed that these models were a panacea. But even in the early stages of generative AI, each company has been able to generate high degrees of productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and have extraordinarily fast time to market with their products, services and ideas.

Generative AI is not ideal for every application, but where it can be employed, its speed and capabilities allow for applications where ML would be too expensive or take too long to implement. It offers speed to delivery which is orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than past approaches. And in some unique areas, like, for example the way it can deal with visual and unstructured data, it has capabilities that are not available from traditional ML applications.

With the right use cases, and with human oversight used strategically, it is, even at this stage of development, a powerful tool for these businesses, and one that will continue to improve over time. As it does, these companies will have the added advantage of having developed the experience to leverage it and exploit its full potential.

The post Five Canadian companies share experiences and use cases for generative AI at AWS re:Invent 2023 first appeared on IT World Canada.

Identity and access provider Okta now says the threat actor who accessed its customer help desk system last month got the names and email addresses of all contacts of organizations that use its support system.

Originally, the company said that, after an investigation, it determined only one per cent of the contacts from its 18,000 customers had information stolen, which included session tokens that could be used to infiltrate the IT networks of those firms. Of that, only a handful of organizations were actually hacked through those tokens.

However, on Wednesday Okta CSO David Bradbury acknowledged the hacker also ran and downloaded a report that contained the names and email addresses of all Okta customer support system users and, for a small number of people, their phone numbers.

“All Okta Workforce Identity Cloud (WIC) and Customer Identity Solution (CIS) customers are impacted except customers in our FedRamp High and DoD IL4 environments (these environments use a separate support system NOT accessed by the threat actor),” he wrote. “The Auth0/CIC support case management system was also not impacted by this incident.”

The file had fields that included the company name, name of the Okta customer that contacted support, and their office and mobile phone numbers. “The majority of the fields in the report are blank,” Bradbury said, “and the report does not include user credentials or sensitive personal data. For 99.6 per cent of users in the report, the only contact information recorded is full name and email address.”

Recognizing that stolen email addresses are a phishing risk, Bradbury added this advice:

“Many users of the customer support system are Okta administrators,” he noted. “It is critical that these users have multi-factor authentication (MFA) enrolled to protect not only the customer support system, but also to secure access to their Okta admin console(s).”

“While 94 per cent of Okta customers already require MFA for their administrators, we recommend ALL Okta customers employ MFA and consider the use of phishing-resistant authenticators to further enhance their security.”

Okta also identified additional reports and support cases that the threat actor accessed, which contain contact information of all Okta-certified users and some Okta Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) customer contacts, and other information. Some Okta employee information was also included in these reports. This contact information does not include user credentials or sensitive personal data, Bradbury said.

On the one hand, that means perhaps hundreds or more of IT staff who have dealt with Okta support may get spear phishing messages that appear to come from the company. On the other hand, the number of companies vulnerable to stolen session tokens hasn’t changed.

The session tokens were included in some Okta HAR files that IT customers uploaded to Okta support to help narrow down the cause of a problem.

SCMagazine.com quoted Ken Westin, field CISO at Panther Labs, saying it’s “irresponsible” of Okta to continue to downplay the compromise by making statements like there’s no “direct evidence” the threat actors are using the compromised data to target these customers.

“If they didn’t know the scope of the compromise or who the unknown actors are, they are not in a position to understand the attackers’ intent or the full risk the breached data poses to their customers. This kind of rhetoric can further erode trust in an already difficult situation,” said Westin. “At this point, it’s best for Okta to stick to facts and be transparent about the breach, so customers can make appropriate decisions about how best to manage the risk. In a world of ‘zero-trust,’ if your identity provider is compromised, it can mean zero security.”

The post All Okta customer support users had their email addresses copied first appeared on IT World Canada.

Despite the money being poured into cybersecurity by IT departments, the leading cause of breaches of security controls was the failure of technology to detect an attack, a new survey from Trellix suggests.

Forty-two per cent of respondents to the international survey of infosec leaders whose organization had suffered a recent cyber attack said their technology didn’t detect the breach.

Other top causes (multiple responses were allowed) included a breach due to an attack on the organization’s supply chain (40 per cent); a missed vulnerability (40 per cent); an analyst missing an alert (38 per cent); and password misuse (36 per cent).

More significantly, the number of infosec leaders reporting the root cause of a successful cyber incident was lack of detection is increasing. Respondents said more than three years ago, technology not detecting an attack was the root cause of nine per cent of attacks. But in the past year it was the root cause of 22 per cent of attacks.

“It’s increasingly more likely technology cannot keep up with the attacker’s ability to penetrate their defenses,” the report concludes.

The study, called “The Mind of the CISO: Behind the Breach” interviewed 512 security leaders in medium to large organizations from 13 countries who have managed at least one major cybersecurity incident in the past five years.

Despite the seeming failure of technology to detect many breaches, respondents equally felt that people, processes, and technology needed an overhaul in the IT departments after a successful breach.

Many of those surveyed said in the aftermath of an attack, almost every process and technology was changed (multiple responses were allowed): Forty-six per cent of respondents said they got increased budgets, 44 per cent said they created regular reviews of capabilities, IT infrastructure and staffing, an equal number said they contracted with additional cybersecurity services such as incident response, 42 per cent said they rethought their overall cybersecurity strategy, and 41 per cent said they implemented new frameworks or standards.

Interestingly, few infosec leaders questioned found a successful breach of security controls was devastating to themselves. Ninety-one per cent of respondents slightly or strongly agreed they had an increase in motivation levels during the incident.

“Organizations need to prioritize building cyber resilience to prevent future attacks,” the report concludes. “This requires significant investment in the right people, processes, and technology solutions. As made evident in this research, CISOs are in need of additional resources and support, starting at the board level, to make the required investments, training, and overhaul needed to keep pace with the evolving threat landscape.

“New global regulations and legal ramifications in the wake of cyber incidents should help to prioritize the needs of CISOs moving forward, equipping them with the resources to effectively and efficiently manage cyber threats.”

The post Failure of technology to detect attacks is a prime cause of breaches: Survey first appeared on IT World Canada.

A group consisting of Canadian university researchers and Ericsson Canada is the latest to have won government funding under the National Cybersecurity Coalition for advanced investigations into meeting cyber threats.

Researchers from Concordia University, the University of Manitoba, the University of Waterloo, and Ericsson said this week they will spend three years on a $2.2 million project looking into using artificial intelligence and automation to improve the security of 5G and future wireless networks. Of that, the partners are putting in $1.2 million, while $1 million will come from a government fund.

The goal is to develop intelligent anomaly detection, mitigation, and prevention mechanisms using machine learning and AI, to give mobile operators automated, closed-loop control security mechanisms that secure their networks against cyber attacks.

“We’re only at the start of 5G,” Paul Baptista, Ericsson Canada’s sales director and former lead of its Montreal site, said in an interview. “There’s going to be evolution of 5G over the next five years. What we’re doing is getting ahead of that by doing research before the releases come to bear around the world.”

Eva Fogelström, director of security at Ericsson Research, noted in an interview that the  company’s Montreal facility has been doing research on cybersecurity for years.

“This is a research project,” she said. “What we are looking at are new solutions and new methodologies for 5G and beyond.” Results of the research, which could be commercialized, will be published.

Azadeh Tabiban, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Manitoba, said in a statement that the industry-academia collaboration and funding support will enable building practical solutions that can be integrated with real-world environments. “Such a joint effort leads to more transparent and secure 5G networks, which increases the wider adoption of 5G-enabled technologies with cost-effective and life-saving benefits to our society.”

Ottawa has set aside $80 million for projects under the Cyber Security Innovation Network, a public-private initiative announced last year to support the growth of Canada’s cyber security ecosystem. The Coalition, made up of industry and academic members, selects the projects. So far, just over $11 million has been allocated for 20 projects, including $1 million for the 5G project.

The Ericsson group is not the only project looking at the use of AI. A group composed of researchers from Rogers Communications and the University of New Brunswick’s Canadian Institute for Cyber Security have been awarded just under $241,000 to see if AI can be used for vulnerability management.

Other groups are working on finding new ways of digitally fingerprinting customers’ behaviour to cut down on fraud, using what is called emotional AI to identify negative mood and distraction of car drivers, and finding ways of using quantum computing to improve the security of the computer hardware security modules that manage digital keys.

The post Canadian group gets $2.2 million to research AI threat detection for wireless networks first appeared on IT World Canada.

Amazon’s new generative AI assistant, Amazon Q, sounds a lot like OpenAI Q. Are cyber professionals less likely to get fired after a major cybersecurity incident? And AI threatens to kill clergy jobs.

These and more top tech stories on Hashtag Trending.

I’m your host James Roy.

AWS is not lagging behind, just ‘re-invent’-ing a bunch of stuff that many other tech giants released and re-released, a long time ago.

That reinventing, however, mostly consisted of comparing and taking jabs at OpenAI and Microsoft.

The comparison could not be more stark, when AWS introduced Amazon Q – its newest generative AI assistant. Q rings a bell though. It started trending out of the blue a week ago, rumoured to be OpenAI’s latest model, capable of achieving artificial general intelligence. Did Amazon take inspiration from OpenAI, maybe?

AWS also announced that Agents for Amazon Bedrock are now generally available to customers, which looks very similar to the custom GPTs. And it introduced its first-ever in-house LLM models while Microsoft also announced an in-house-built open-source model called phi-2.

And, AWS finally released an image generator joining the ranks of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

To be fair, the goliaths are all doing pretty much the same thing in the ongoing AI juggernaut, so guess how AWS sought to demarcate itself? Responsible AI.

It detailed its advocacy for responsible AI and announced guardrails for Amazon Bedrock. Will that be enough for AWS to actually set itself apart and pick up the pace?

Source: Analytics India Mag, Tech Crunch

Cyber professionals have long feared getting fired after a cyber incident. But that might be changing.

Trellix’s “The Mind of the CISO” report revealed that only 13 percent of the 500 chief information security officers surveyed said their company fired people in the first year, following a major cybersecurity incident.

Instead, companies are likely to increase cybersecurity budgets in the immediate aftermath of an event.

46 per cent of CISOs said their companies increased budgets for new tools and technologies, 38 per cent created new jobs and 44 per cent added new contracted services to their cybersecurity program, post incident.

The report, however, notes that post-incident job losses are still happening. Not immediately, but eventually, after a company understands what happened.

31 per cent of CISOs said their companies fired people more than three years after the event.

The report says, “Perhaps impacts to the team aren’t an immediate change following an incident but occur as time passes, when the dust has settled, and CISOs look to restructure or make team overhauls.”

Source: Axios

Okta has admitted that the scale of its October data breach could be potentially much larger. 

The company’s chief security officer, David Bradbury, originally said that the files of just 134 Okta customers or less than one percent were accessed by attackers.

But an update published this morning revealed that the data related to every single Okta customer support system was accessed.

For 99.6 percent of customers, the data accessed was the full name and their email address.

Bradbury said, “While we do not have direct knowledge or evidence that this information is being actively exploited, there is a possibility that the threat actor may use this information to target Okta customers via phishing or social engineering attacks.”

Okta advised all its customers to employ multi-factor authentication and consider the use of phishing-resistant authenticators to further enhance their security.

Source: The Register

Researchers at Google DeepMind claim that they have been able to demonstrate that AI can acquire capabilities by social learning. 

Social learning is how one individual or animal acquires skills from another by copying.

In a physical simulated task space called GoalCycle3D — a sort of computer-animated playground with footpaths and obstacles — they found AI agents could learn from both human and AI experts across a number of navigational problems, even though they had never seen a human or had any idea what one was.

The study said, “Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution to play an algorithmic role in the development of artificial general intelligence.”

Source: The Register 

The fate of the Apple Card and the Apple Savings Account is up in the air after Apple and Goldman Sachs ended their partnership.

This news comes as rumours swirled that Goldman Sachs was looking for a way out of its deal with Apple. Regulatory filings show that the company has lost a lot of money on the Apple Card partnership so far.

In a statement to CNBC, Apple said that it will “continue to innovate” for Apple Card customers.

Apple has also been working to bring as many of its financial products in-house as possible. 

Reportedly, it is developing its own payment processing technology and infrastructure, called   “Project Breakout” that would make it less reliant on partners such as Goldman Sachs.

Source: 9TO5Mac

And here’s another one on the nail-biting relationship between AI and religion, which by the day gets more ridiculous.

The UK’s Department for Education found that the country’s clergy, of all things, is among the professions most at risk from AI.

A number of jobs ranked above the clergy as more likely to be taken over by AI. They include telephone salespersons at the top, further education teaching professionals, market and street traders and assistants, legal professionals, and more.

(Psychologists also feature in that list, really.)

But the researchers admitted that the report’s usefulness is limited. They emphasize that “the estimates of which jobs are more exposed to AI are based on a number of uncertain assumptions, so the results should be interpreted with caution.”

Plus, just because you can automate the writing of a sermon, does not mean you should or that it’ll completely erode the quintessential human experience of religion.

But, some other cases continue to raise eyebrows. Like when 300 churchgoers attended a service led by OpenAI’s LLM in Germany. Or as we reported in a previous episode, when tech entrepreneur Anthony Levandowski decided to bring back his idea of an AI church, and make AI the ultimate God to pray to.

Source: The Register

And that’s the top tech news for today.

Hashtag Trending goes to air 5 days a week with a special weekend interview show we call “the Weekend Edition.”

You can get us anywhere you get audio podcasts and there is a copy of the show notes at itworldcanada.com/podcasts 

And while we cover cybersecurity stories that we think are of general interest, you can keep really up to date on cybersecurity with our podcast featuring security journalist Howard Solomon. It’s called CybersecurityToday.  It’s rated as one of North America’s top 10 tech podcasts.

I’m your host James Roy.  Have a Thrilling Thursday!

The post Hashtag Trending Nov.30-Amazon’s new generative AI assistant; Cyber pros less likely to get fired post-incident; AI can acquire skills through social learning? first appeared on IT World Canada.

After months of pushback and meetings, Google has finally struck a deal with the Canadian government over the enactment of Bill C-18, which is expected to come into effect in about two weeks.

“Following weeks of productive discussions, I am happy to announce that we have found a path forward with Google for the implementation of the Online News Act,” said Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge. “This will benefit the news sector and allow Google to continue to play an important role in giving Canadians access to reliable news content.”

The legislation, which received Royal Assent in June, forces Google and Meta to enter into agreements with news publishers to pay them for linking to their content.

Meta, has as a result, blocked news links in Canada. Google threatened to do the same, but also expressed interest in working out a resolution with the government.

As part of the agreement, Google will contribute C$100 million in financial support annually, indexed to inflation, for a wide range of news businesses across the country, including independent news businesses and those from Indigenous and official-language minority communities.

This is lower than what the government initially estimated, whereby it proposed a formula forcing Google and Meta to cough up four per cent of their annual Canadian search revenue, or C$172 and C$62 million, respectively. That remained unpalatable to Google, which insisted on a firm cap on its financial liability.

“We thank the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Pascale St-Onge, for acknowledging our concerns and deeply engaging in a series of productive meetings about how they might be addressed, ” said Kent Walker, president, global affairs, Google.

Another win for Google is the option to work with a single collective to distribute its contribution to all interested eligible news businesses. That would help the company limit its arbitration risk.

“We’re pleased we will be able to continue sending valuable traffic to Canadian publishers while we are in the process of receiving an exemption based on agreed upon contributions to support the Canadian news ecosystem,” said Google.

The government has not resumed talks with Meta, and news links remain blocked on Facebook and Instagram.

The post Google reaches an agreement with the government of Canada over Bill C-18 first appeared on IT World Canada.

RoboGarden and University of Northern British Columbia Continuing Studies (UNBC CS) have announced a new collaboration, with RoboGarden offering its Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bootcamp experience to the UNBC CS students. 

This learning program was developed with career progression and earning potential in mind, aimed to provide students with access to an industry with an average base pay of over C$88k per year, a release stated. It was created to offer guidance to anyone interested — with no prior programming experience or credentials required. 

The release also noted that new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) surveys of employers and workers in the manufacturing and finance sectors found that that both workers and their employers are generally very positive about the impact of AI on performance and working conditions, and that both training and worker consultation are associated with better outcomes for workers.

Based in Calgary, RoboGarden, a cloud-based publisher that delivers AI-driven digital skill learning experiences, is using its online learning platform to help offer this course to UNBC CS students.

Students work on 10 progressive learning modules delivered online through the RoboGarden platform. The course offers live virtual instructor sessions, providing students with industry expert instructors and curated content to help them prepare for the workforce. 

“Part of reimagining how we educate and learn to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world is through collaboration. Our partnership with RoboGarden to deliver this online, instructor-supported Machine Learning and AI Digital Workforce Upskilling Bootcamp will provide residents in northern British Columbia with the most up-to-date tools and resources in this field,” said UNBC Continuing Studies interim manager Stacey Linton. “This innovative partnership will empower our learners with the cutting-edge knowledge and skills to meet the emerging needs of the workforce, both at home and further afield.”

“We know that the Canadian economy across sectors is transforming rapidly with the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning-based tools, services and solutions,” said Dr. Mohamed Elhabiby, co-founder and president of RoboGarden. “It gives me great pleasure to know that we’re equipping the Canadian workforce with the skill sets they need to innovate and succeed in this new AI-driven era.”

Students can learn more, and enroll in the Machine Learning Foundations course by visiting the University of Northern British Columbia Continuing Studies program information and registration page.

The post RoboGarden and University of Northern British Columbia Continuing Studies to launch new machine learning & AI bootcamp first appeared on IT World Canada.

Imran Ahmed, chief executive officer (CEO) of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), told the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC) yesterday that Meta’s algorithms are designed to feed the spread of disinformation and, in turn, maximize user engagement.

Ahmed appeared by videoconference as a scheduled witness before the CHPC’s hearings into “tech giants’ use of intimidation tactics”.

The passage of Bill C-18, the Online News Act, which led to Meta blocking news links for Canadians, has created a news vacuum which, he said, is being filled with the hate speech and disinformation generated by the platform’s harmful algorithms.

“Platforms’ algorithms don’t give you what you want. That’s a myth. They give you what they want you to want,” said Ahmed.

Meta and other platforms, he added, do not want editorial responsibility for their content for liability and financial reasons, and because content moderation and editorial control require lots of resources. 

However, by blocking news posts in Canada, Meta, he said, “is proving that they’ve always had an editorial power and will use it indiscriminately if content threatens their all important bottom line.”

He continued, “These highly personal, highly invasive systems have resulted in the polarization of economic, democratic and social thought and are correlated to a rise in radical hate groups networks’ extremism.”

Ahmed explained that what we’re seeing on social media is not the “content of a billion people” or the “global discourse”. It is, he said, “discourse controlled by algorithms which are designed for commercial impact.”

In October, 41 states in the U.S. sued Meta for allegedly harming the health of young users. 

Now, an unredacted court document in that lawsuit discovered by the New York Times revealed that Meta has allegedly, actively “coveted and pursued” under 13 year old users for years on Instagram, targeting young users, manipulating them into spending unhealthy amounts of time on the apps, promoting body dysmorphia, and exposing them to potentially harmful content.

The bar is low for Meta and other similar platforms, Ahmed lamented, and we have to come to expect them to behave in the worst way possible, which is why regulations are of value.

But tech giants like Meta engage in a wide range of intimidation tactics to counter regulation, said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next.

He detailed five intimidation tactics that goliaths like Meta use:

Threats to whistleblowers. A whistleblower shared documents with the Wall Street Journal that corroborated reports that Meta blocked news in Australia in March 2021, just as vaccines were being rolled out, and allegedly, purposefully during the most critical week of Parliament’s deliberations. He, however, got scared away from testifying and went underground.
Threats to investments. Mark Zuckerberg had allegedly threatened to pull back investment in the U.K. after he was asked to testify before its Parliament.
Threats to publishers and newsrooms. In 2018, Facebook allegedly threatened to sue the Guardian, a day before they reported on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Record spending on lobbying, including through proxies. Google and Facebook registered in the top 10 lobbyists in the EU and the U.S.
Threats to consumers. Repeated claims that regulations will stifle innovation and end the free and open internet are made to drive outrage among consumers. Facebook, Kint said, often takes it a step further by suggesting it will have to charge for services, which could kill thousands of small businesses and cost millions of jobs.

Michael Geist, University of Ottawa internet law professor, however, argued that in Canada, for instance, there is ample evidence of regulatory capture, with legacy cultural groups dominating meetings with officials and time with the committee, and voices of Canadian digital creators, including those from BIPOC (“black, indigenous, and other people of color”) communities dismissed and at times disrespected.

Meta’s reaction to block news, he said, was a consequence of regulation and not a tactic to influence it, adding that Meta and Google have been consistent in their discourse from the beginning.

“It’s essential that this committee and the department ensure that it avoids regulatory capture and provides a forum for all voices. Failure to do so makes for bad policy and, I have to say, raises the risk of intimidation in which, inadvertent or not, it may be the government or this committee that can do some of the intimidating.”

The post ‘Meta has editorial power to use indiscriminately if content threatens their bottom line’, says Center for Countering Digital Hate first appeared on IT World Canada.

The Trudeau government’s proposed law regulating high-impact artificial intelligence systems is “fundamentally flawed” and gives so much power to a cabinet minister that it’s “an affront to Parliament,”  a Canadian privacy lawyer testified Tuesday.

The proposed Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) fails to protect the public from significant risks and harms, and hinders innovation, Barry Sookman of the McCarthy Tétrault law firm told the House of Commons Industry Committee.

While it would set rules for how businesses should create and implement high-risk AI applications, Sookman complained AIDA doesn’t define “high-risk”, doesn’t include guiding principles on how AI systems will be regulated, and will hinder private sector innovation.

Not only that, AIDA puts too much power in the hands of the Minister of Innovation to create regulations for overseeing the proposed act, Sookman said. And while it would create an AI Commissioner to enforce the legislation, that person would report to the Minister and not be an independent officer of Parliament as is the federal privacy commissioner.

For this last reason, AIDA “is in my view an affront to Parliamentary sovereignty,” Sookman said. “AIDA sets a dangerous precedent. What will be next? Fiat by regulation for quantum computing? Blockchain? The climate crisis or other threats? We have no idea.”

AIDA “paves the way for a bloated and unaccountable bureaucracy,” within the Innovation department, Sookman maintained.

In short, he said, “in its current form AIDA is unintelligible.”

AIDA is part of Bill C-27, which also includes the proposed Consumer Protection Privacy Act (CPPA), an overhaul of the federal privacy legislation governing the private sector. Many critics have told the committee the two pieces of legislation are so important they should be split. Sookman’s criticism has so far been the most pointed — and perhaps more is to come, because so far the committee has asked witnesses to focus on the CPPA. Later, the committee will turn its attention to AIDA.

One problem is that, while the government has said it is open to amending the wording of AIDA, it hasn’t yet delivered precise wording. A committee-set deadline is approaching.

RELATED CONTENT: Government releases some proposed changes

Opposition MPs on the committee — and Sookman — worry final changes the government is willing to make won’t be delivered until after witnesses have testified.

The fight over what approach is best for overseeing AI systems comes as businesses rush to adopt generative AI systems like ChatGPT.

The fear of many privacy experts is that, unless there is quickly some sort of regulation, soon AI systems will be allowed to deny people the ability to get loans, insurance or jobs, based on biased algorithms.

The European Union is close to finalizing the wording of an AI Act, but one news report says there are disagreements on how foundation models like ChatGPT would be regulated. One proposal from France, Germany and Italy is that foundation models would face lighter regulation, only having to publish some information on things like how models are tested to ensure they are safe. Initially there would be no sanctions for companies that don’t publish such information.

Former B.C. and U.K. information and privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham, who also testified Tuesday, approvingly said the proposed U.K. law “reads like a product safety statute.”

In the absence of AI regulatory laws, Canada and other countries say businesses and governments should follow certain guidelines for AI systems. This week, for example, 18 countries agreed on guidelines businesses should follow for the secure design, development, deployment, and operation of artificial intelligent systems.

Tuesday’s hearing also briefly delved into approaches by other governments:

— in the U.S., rather than wait for Congress to pass legislation, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order to federal departments buying and firms wanting to sell AI solutions to Washington. Federal departments and agencies have to develop standards, tools, and tests to help ensure that AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy based on guidelines issued by U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). Developers of the most powerful AI systems are required to share their safety test results and other critical information with the U.S. government.

— in the U.K., Sookman noted with approval, a private member’s AI bill has two features: A designated cabinet minister can create regulations controlling AI, but the regulations have to be approved by Parliament; and the proposed law would include principles that regulations have to follow, such as ensuring high impact AI systems deliver safety, security and robustness, and transparency into how they were tested before being released. “This is genius,” Sookman said. AIDA should adopt both features, he added.

Denham noted the U.K. government has decided not to regulate AI, but to give existing regulators the powers they need to oversee the technology. The government has also created an AI Institute to encourage all digital regulators to work together. This, she said, is a “wait-and-see approach.”

So far, it seems, the Canadian government is sticking with AIDA.

The post Proposed Canadian AI law ‘fundamentally flawed,’ Parliament told first appeared on IT World Canada.