Structure News: The security of big data

Where We're Only Five Days Away March 4th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll talk about the best data conference on the planet and the growing symbiosis between security researchers and data scientists. STRUCTURE NEWS MEET MICHAEL FRANKLIN AND UC BERKLEY'S AMPLAB, WHERE BASIC TECH RESEARCH STILL REIGNS I was finally able to catch up last Friday with Michael Franklin (pictured) of UC Berkeley's AMPLab, which has produced some essential research and even products (Apache Spark) that have changed the world of big data. Franklin will speak next week at Structure Data about how universities and companies can work together to make tech breakthroughs in research. JUST ANNOUNCED: ELENA GREWAL OF AIRBNB TO TALK DATA-DRIVEN DIVERSITY AT STRUCTURE DATA We got this one just in under the wire. We are thrilled to welcome Elena Grewal of Airbnb to Structure Data, where she'll be interviewed by Techcrunch's Megan Rose Dickey about an internal study and data science experiment Airbnb conducted to successfully improve its hiring of women. HOW MICROSOFT AND PETER LEE ARE DISCOVERING THE FUTURE OF DEEP LEARNING Microsoft's Peter Lee is looking into salesforce automation in truest sense of that jargony term. Lee, who will be interviewed by Bloomberg's Jack Clark Thursday at Structure Data, talked to me about a skunkworks-like project within Microsoft Research that applies deep-learning techniques to sales databases to try and predict the best ways to corral stray customers back into the fold. WHERE ARE ALL THE CYBER DATA SCIENTISTS? The reluctance to share data within the security community (more on that in a bit) is really start to frustrate some data scientists. In a guest post from In-Q-Tel, Steve Bowsher (who I'll be interviewing at Structure Data), Sri Chandrasekar, and Charlie Greenbacker lay out a few remedies for either getting more security data out there or improving the reliability of analysis on the amount of data available.   INDUSTRY NEWS THE PROMISE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE UNFOLDS IN SMALL STEPS Steve Lohr of the New York Times (who will be moderating two sessions at Structure Data) wrote a nice piece over the weekend about the difficulties that companies have encountered in trying to commercialize artificial intelligence. There's no doubt AI is going to change the world of computing in huge ways, but as veterans of the AI community know, this change is not going to happen overnight. THE MAN WHO'S BUILDING A COMPUTER MADE OF BRAINS It was a good week for deep pieces on AI from our friends in the tech media. Motherboard has a look at a very interesting startup called Koniku, which is trying to raise money and build a company that will build chips that use neurons grown in labs. U.S. ANNOUNCES "HACK THE PENTAGON" BOUNTY PROGRAM There's a joke in here somewhere about our foreign aid budget, but the U.S. Department of Defense is joining the bug bounty party. It announced this week that it will let "vetted hackers" probe Pentagon networks and other infrastructure for bugs, with the possibility of cash prizes for some, according to NPR. DOCKER ACQUIRES CONDUCTANT AS IT LOOKS TO HELP BUSINESSES RUN LARGE-SCALE SYSTEMS Docker showed signs this week that it's thinking bigger with the acquisition of Conductant. The people behind Conductant were also instrumental in the development of the Apache Aurora project, and Techcrunch reported that Docker plans to build "a commercial distribution for Aurora" that could potentially compete with Mesosphere.   BIG PICTURE I spent a lot of time this week at the RSA Conference, along with 40,000 others, trying to assess the current state of the security industry and get a feel for where it's headed next. It was a pretty massive event, spread across all three halls of the Moscone Center in San Francisco (thankfully the folks behind the conference resisted the urge to go full Ellison/Benioff and shut down all of Howard Street). The idea is to keep gathering ideas and meeting people in preparation for our first Structure Security conference this September. But over the course of several conversations this week, I kept hearing more and more security professionals talking about big data and machine learning as core parts of the next generation of security tools. One of the most interesting sessions I watched was a panel of cryptographers (including Martin Hellman and Whitford Diffie, the inventors of public-key cryptography who won the coveted Turing award this week), and you know that field is going to be transformed by advances in artificial intelligence: Diffie actually worked for the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when co-developing that award-winning technology. I spoke at length on the show floor with Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne, about the machine-learning techniques his startup is applying to move beyond traditional antivirus software capabilities. Next week at Structure Data you'll hear from some of the finest people in data science, explaining how they are pushing the envelope of existing knowledge in AI, deep learning, and data analysis. Based on what I saw this week at RSA, the security folks are definitely on board with this future. And if something as vital and lucrative as cyber security is cozying up to machine learning, you know this field is poised to explode.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.