T-Shaped Teams and the Three Stages of AI Adoption June 22, 2021 | City Talk AI and data science will probably bring about the most significant changes to the financial services industry that the industry has witnessed in its short history. Yet, today, many financial institutions are still struggling to find their way to start the AI journey1. We propose a concept called T-shaped teams (See Exhibit 1) as the [...]
US Supreme Court gives LinkedIn fresh chance to stop data harvesters June 14, 2021 The US Supreme Court today granted LinkedIn another chance to prevent a rival recruitment data company from scraping personal data from its platform. LinkedIn previously tried to use the the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent rival hiQ from harvesting customer data from their public-facing user profiles. The Act prohibits accessing a computer without [...]
Investment professionals must beware of the cyber risks in portfolios May 25, 2021 | City Talk Internet security blog posts are usually more at home on the inside pages of IT trade publications than on the front pages of international newspapers. The one published by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Tom Burt on 2 March, about the emergence of “state-sponsored threat actor” Hafnium, was a notable exception. A new threat had emerged, [...]
Developing agile methodologies for algorithm products April 23, 2021 | City Talk Modern software methodologies have some catching up to do to accommodate data science practitioners. It was the early 2000s when The Agile Manifesto marked a step toward a more humane direction for software engineering by placing an emphasis on stakeholder collaboration and rapid feedback. This evolved into prescriptive frameworks like Scrum and Kanban that made [...]
What does the WhatsApp saga tell us about privacy in 2021? January 21, 2021 Public trust is steadily declining in the tech sector; WhatsApp’s latest ordeal is a perfect example. The company recently announced it would start sharing sensitive user data with Facebook, including information such as IP address, browser information and phone numbers. Cue a swarm of users deleting the app and fleeing to competitors such as Telegram [...]
Metrica Sports: Meet the tech company which works with FC Barcelona giving away its football analytics software to amateurs January 13, 2021 Barcelona were one of Metrica Sports’ first clients but it was when the video and data analysis provider signed up Stockport County that its founders knew they were really onto something. The company, created in 2013 by three football-mad neuroscience PhD students, proved quick to gain a foothold with a handful of elite clubs thanks [...]
Let’s hope tough new rules on children’s online data collection deliver, and give parents peace of mind September 8, 2020 From today, our children’s online privacy is protected by default. Literally. New rules will force companies to give children and young people automatic specific privacy protections. That’s 76 days, according to research, that neither you or they have to spend reading all those terms and conditions. Thankfully, from now on, the so-called Age Appropriate Design [...]
Science and tech has proved a damp squib in the fight against Covid-19 September 2, 2020 Few of us alive today have lived through a year so tumultuous, historic, and (yes, that word again) unprecedented as 2020. We are seeing the biggest health pandemic since 1918’s Spanish Flu; the biggest threat to the world economy since 1929’s Great Crash; and the biggest civil unrest in the US since 1967 — all [...]
Covid-19 threatens to set UK data protection back a generation August 14, 2020 There’s another crisis brewing. Millions of businesses across the UK have quickly adapted to the Covid-19 environment. While some companies have adopted technology to handle customer data collection, many have turned to more tried-and-tested track and trace systems — namely, good old-fashioned pen and paper. The hospitality industry, and especially pubs and bars, have had [...]
If we want cutting-edge R&D, we must rethink our attitude to failure March 11, 2020 A likely centre-piece of today’s Budget will be a new agency to fund high-risk, high-reward scientific research. Brainchild of the Prime Minister’s chief special adviser Dominic Cummings, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Arpa) is to be modelled after similar bodies in the US — most notably Darpa which has focused on defence related research. Darpa [...]