Tech jobs for all, robots and fighting fake news at IBM InterConnect 2017

Spreading the love

She also showcased an IBM partnership with Girls Who Code, a program that trains young women across the U.S. for tech jobs, introducing founder Reshma Saujani and three recent program graduates to the audience.

One of the girls, Michelle Liang, described using IBM's cloud software development platform Bluemix and a natural language processing tool to comb online reviews for, say, a retail store and come up with an average percentage.

"It's really consolidating all of the big data into a much more digestible form that we would like to provide our users," Liang said.

Conference attendee Caitlin Long found the girls' passion for technology heartening. She's a product marketing manager at Global Knowledge, a Cary, N.C., company that partners with IBM, Microsoft and other tech companies on IT training and development classes. She'd love a program like Girls Who Code to go to her North Carolina hometown of 15,000 and get her 10-year-old sister hooked on technology, because girls typically aren't encouraged enough to enter the field, she said. She speaks from experience.

"It was never presented as an opportunity," Long said. "It's like, 'Oh, you could go be a lawyer, you could go be a doctor, you could go into business or marketing' -- but computer science is separate; it's siloed and it's gated."

Sideshows galore

IBM tried to put a friendly face on technology at InterConnect. In one corner of the cavernous convention space was a Pepper robot -- which started working in Softbank mobile phone stores in Japan in 2014 -- powered by Watson in IBM's cloud.

There was a small crowd around the big-eyed automaton, with people asking it questions such as "How old are you?" It would stare at the questioner with big eyes, and then answer, somewhat cryptically, "I'm as old as I look." It was surefooted, though, when someone asked, "Where are you?"

The response: "Vegas, baby!"

Software vendors tried, too, to get people to stop and ask questions. On the show floor, exhibitors drew attendees in with attractions such as candy buffets, comfy spots to try on virtual reality headsets and, at one point at least, a magic show.

Making business digital

But there was a lot more than sweets and sideshows at IBM InterConnect 2017. Big Blue customers joined panels to tell how they're using technologies such as cloud to fundamentally change how they run as businesses. Takhliq Hanif, chief architect at Etihad Airways, was one of them. Etihad is the national airline of the United Arab Emirates and, Hanif said, has a "fantastic" product -- its fancy Boeing Dreamliner forms part of it -- and signature services such as a flying nanny.

But Etihad is in the process of moving beyond the physical world of products and services.

"How do we reflect that in the digital experience?" Hanif said. He imagined himself as one of his customers: "I'm thinking of taking a flight to wherever in the world; what's that experience going to be like? And when I book a flight, what's that experience going to be like? And then when I take one of our transportation services to get to the airport, what's that digital experience like?"

To conjure those experiences, Etihad relies on its investment in cloud computing, orchestrating its services using APIs and "our better, deeper understanding of our data," Hanif said.

Cloud security matters

Wherever there are cloud enthusiasts, though, there are doubters -- especially when it comes to how much security cloud providers offer their customers. One CISO, Adrian Asher, from the London Stock Exchange Group, sought to dispel such concerns.

He asked people in a session he led on cloud security how many, by a show of hands, thought the traditional method of keeping data and applications in a data center was more secure than trusting those resources to a cloud provider. Most chose traditional. He disagreed.

"The amount of servers, the amount of legacy you have sitting in your environment -- how hard it is to manage and maintain those, to patch those, to keep the routers up to date to the latest firmware, the disk firmware," Asher said. "Can you imagine the amount of effort that you put into doing that?"

Cloud providers, in contrast, have manifold security controls in place -- from holding many cloud certifications to auditors and regulators reviewing physical security. And in their data centers, he said, there's no way for a casual observer to figure out which servers hold which companies' data. That's not the case in his.

"I have racks which have names on them," Asher said.

Don't call me fake news

Another session at IBM InterConnect 2017 veered away from the cloud and largely from technology altogether -- and it had folks in stitches a good portion of the time. It was led by Mike McAvoy, CEO of self-declared "America's finest news source," The Onion. His topic: fake news.

Some people, McAvoy said, think the news outlet disseminates fake news -- false information in the guise of news reports that catapulted into a major issue during the 2016 U.S. presidential race.

But The Onion produces satire, he said, using "tools of humor to point out truth in society. And sometimes what we do is we have to actually make things uncomfortable and challenge people to actually highlight the truth."

McAvoy flashed headlines on a screen as examples: "Drugs Win Drug War," which skewered the War on Drugs campaign and "Romney Slowly Turning Into $100 Bill," which targeted multimillionaire Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

The Onion tackles fake news directly, too, as it did in a video McAvoy showed, "5 Things to Know About Pizzagate," which addressed the debunked conspiracy theory that connected Democratic Party officials to a child sex trafficking ring.

"This has become the world that we live in, where fake news is everywhere," McAvoy said. "And as a society, we need people to be smarter in order to combat that."