Reports of the first job interviews conducted in the UK using Artificial Intelligence and facial analysis technology have been met with mixed reactions.

The Software

The AI and facial analysis technology used for the interviews comes from US firm HireVue. The main products available from HireVue for interviewing are Pre-Employment Assessments and Video Interviewing.

For the Pre-Employment Assessments, the software uses AI, video game technology, and game-based and coding challenges to collect candidate insights related to work style, how the candidate works with people, and general cognitive ability. The Assessments are customisable to specific hiring objectives or ready to deploy based on pre-validated models. The data points are analysed by HireVue’s proprietary machine learning algorithms, and the insights gained are intended to enable businesses to save time and use recruitment resources more effectively by enabling businesses to quickly prioritise which candidates to shortlist for interviews.

The Video Interviewing product uses real-time evaluation tools and can assess around 25,000 data points in one interview.  During interviews, candidates are asked to answer pre-scripted questions with HireVue Live offering a real-time collaborative video interview that can involve a whole recruitment team. The benefits of on-demand video-based assessments, which can be conducted in less than 30 minutes, are that recruiters and managers don’t have to synchronize candidates and calendars, and can evaluate more candidates, thereby being able to spend their time deciding between the best candidates.

Who Is Using The Software?

According to HireVue, 700+ companies use the software (not all in the UK) including Vodafone, Urban Outfitters, Intel, Ikea, Hilton, Unilever, Singapore Airlines, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. It has been reported, however, that the technology has already been used for 100,000 interviews in the UK.

Concerns

Even though there are obvious on-demand expertise, time and cost savings for companies, and HireVue displays case studies from satisfied customers on its website, AI and facial analysis technology use in interviews has been met with criticism by privacy and rights groups.

For example, it has been reported that Big Brother Watch representatives have voiced concerns about the ethics of using this method, possible bias and discrimination (if the AI hasn’t been trained on a diverse-enough range of people), and that unconventional but still good potential candidates could fall foul of algorithms that can’t take account of the complexities of human speech, body language and expression.

Robot Interviewer

Back in March, it was reported that TNG and Furhat Robotics in Sweden have developed a social, unbiased recruitment robot called “Tengai” that can be used to conduct job interviews with human candidates. The basic robot was developed several years ago and looks like an internally projected human face on a white head sitting on top of a speaker (with camera and microphone built-in).  The robot is made with pre-built expressions and gestures as part of a pre-loaded OS which can be further customised to fit any character, and the HR-tech application software that Tengai uses means that it can conduct situation and skill-based interviews in a way that is as close as possible to a human interviewer. This includes using “hum”, nodding its head, and asking follow-up questions.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Like the Swedish Tengai robot Interviews, the HireVue Pre-Employment Assessment (and possibly the video) appear to be have been designed to be used at the early part of the recruitment process as a way of enabling big companies to quickly create a shortlist of candidates to focus on. As businesses become used to, and realise the value of outsourcing as a way of making better use of resources and buying in scalable and on-demand skills and resources, it appears that bigger companies are also willing to trust new technology to the point where they outsource expertise and human judgement in exchange for the promise of better, and more cost-effective recruitment management.

AI, facial recognition, and other related new technologies and algorithms are being trusted and adopted more by big businesses which also need to remember, for the benefit of themselves and their customers and job candidates that they need to make sure that bias is minimised, and that technology is unlikely to be able to pick up on every (potentially important) nuance of human behaviour and speech.  It should never be forgotten that we each have the most powerful, amazing and perceptive ‘computer’ available in the form of our own brain, and for vast amount of medium and small businesses that probably can’t afford or don’t want to use AI to choose recruits, experienced human interviewers can also make good recruitment decisions.

That said, as technology progresses, AI-based recruitment systems are likely to improve by gaining their own experience, and be augmented, and become more widely available and affordable to the point that they become a standard first challenge for job applicants in many situations.

Research from techUK shows that less than half of small UK businesses consider themselves to be ready to face a no-deal Brexit on 31 October, whereas 87% of larger businesses think they are prepared.

Small and Medium

The techUK research shows that only 43% of UK small businesses think they are ready for the prospect of a no-deal Brexit, which is not too different to the mere 50% of medium-sized companies that expressed readiness.

Not Up To Date With Government Guidance

The survey revealed that although most enterprises are aware that the government has given guidance on getting ready for a no-deal Brexit, only 30% of small businesses and 33% of medium-sized businesses regard themselves as being up to date with that guidance.

Popular Concerns

In addition to the impact on the UK economy, some of the popular concerns that many businesses have about a no-deal Brexit include how they stand in terms of regulatory plus any extra regulatory barriers that may hinder trade compliance, and difficulty in finding staff after an end to freedom of movement (there is already a tech skills shortage and tech ‘brain drain’).  Also, businesses are clearly worried about post-Brexit relationships with suppliers, whether contracts will need to be updated, and whether they will have enough of the right raw materials and parts to keep production running smoothly and meet their customer demands while keeping their costs and prices down.

Data Protection Guidance For Brexit

As far as being prepared to stay compliant with data protection laws, the ICO has recently stated that if a UK business or organisation already complies with the GDPR and has no contacts or customers in the EEA, that business or organisation doesn’t need to do much more to prepare for data protection compliance after Brexit.

The latest guidance for businesses facing a no-deal Brexit can be found on the website here: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-brexit/data-protection-and-brexit-for-small-organisations/

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

It doesn’t take a study to find out that there is still a great deal of uncertainty about trading post-Brexit, particularly after the impact of a no-deal Brexit. As the businesses in the study indicated, many are aware that there is guidance available from government sources and that SMEs don’t appear to be up to date with that guidance.  It is good, at least, that the ICO has issued clear, easily accessible guidance on its website to help companies prepare to remain GDPR compliant after Brexit. Other Brexit guidance for small businesses can be found on the FSB website here https://www.fsb.org.uk/standing-up-for-you/brexit/resources  and on the main UK government website here https://www.gov.uk/find-eu-exit-guidance-business.

IBM has announced that it is opening a Quantum Computation Centre in New York which will bring the world’s largest fleet of quantum computing systems online, including the new 53-Qubit Quantum System for broad use in the cloud.

Largest Universal Quantum System For External Access

The new 53-quantum bit/qubit model is the 14th system that IBM offers and IBM says that it is the single largest universal quantum system made available for external access in the industry, to date. This new system will (within one month) give its users the ability to run more complex entanglement and connectivity experiments.

IBM Q

It was back in March 2017 that IBM announced that it was about to offer a service called IBM Q that would be the first time that a universal quantum computer had been commercially available, giving access to (and use of) a powerful, universal quantum computer, via the cloud.

Since then, a fleet composed of five 20-qubit systems, one 14-qubit system, and four 5-qubit systems have been made available, and since 2016 IBM says that a global community of users have run more than 14 million experiments their quantum computers through the cloud, leading to the publishing of more than 200 scientific papers.

Who?

Although most uses of quantum computers have been for isolated lab experiments, IBM is keen to make quantum computing widely available in the cloud to tens of thousands of users, thereby empowering what it calls “an emerging quantum community of educators, researchers, and software developers that share a passion for revolutionising computing”.

Why?

The hope is that by making quantum computing more widely available, it could lead to greater innovation, more scientific discoveries e.g. new medicines and materials, improvements in the optimisation of supply chains, and even better ways to model financial data, thereby leading to better investments which could have an important and positive knock-on effect in businesses and economies.

Partners

Some of the partners and clients that IBM says it has already worked with its quantum computers include:

• J.P. Morgan Chase for ‘Option Pricing’ – a way to price financial options and portfolios. The method devised using the quantum computer has accelerated things dramatically so that financial analysts can now perform option pricing and risk analysis in near real-time.
• Mitsubishi Chemical, Keio University and IBM, on a simulation related to reactions in lithium-air batteries which could lead to making more efficient batteries for mobile devices or automotive vehicles.

Quantum Risk?

Back in November 2018 however, security architect for Benelux at IBM, Christiane Peters, warned of the possible threat of commercially available quantum computers being used by criminals to try and crack encrypted business data.

As far back as 2015 in the US, the National Security Agency (NSA) warned that progress in quantum computing was at such a point that organisations should deploy encryption algorithms that can withstand such attacks from quantum computers.

The encryption algorithms that can stand up to attacks from quantum computers are known by several names including post-quantum cryptography / quantum-proof cryptography, and quantum-safe / quantum-resistant cryptographic (usually public-key) algorithms.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The ability to use a commercially available quantum computer via the cloud will give businesses and organisations an unprecedented opportunity to solve many of their most complex problems, develop new and innovative potentially industry-leading products and services and perhaps discover new, unthought-of business opportunities, all without needed to invest in hitherto prohibitively expensive hardware themselves. The 15 hugely powerful systems now available to the wider computing and business community could offer the chance to develop products that would provide a real competitive advantage in a much shorter amount of time and at much less cost than traditional computer architecture and R&D practices previously allowed.

As with AI, just as new technologies and innovative services can be used for good, their availability could also mean that in the wrong hands they could be used to pose a new threat that’s very difficult for most business to defend against. Quantum computing service providers, such as IBM, need to ensure that the relevant checks, monitoring and safeguards are in place to protect the wider business community and economy against a potentially new and powerful threat.

Two security specialists who performed a physical break-in on the US courthouse that hired their company for a penetration test have claimed that their break-in was part of their assessment of security.

What Happened?

Dallas’ State Court Administration (SCA) is reported to have hired security company Coalfire Labs to conduct testing of the security of the court’s electronic records at the Dallas County Courthouse in the town of Adel, around 20 miles west of Des Moines.

The police were called to the courthouse just after midnight on the 11th September where two men, who had been seen walking around on the third floor, came to the door to meet the police.  When the two men, named as Justin Wynn and Gary Demercurio, came to the door, they were allegedly carrying multiple burglary tools and allegedly claimed that they had been contracted to break into the building and to check the courthouse alarm system and how responsive the police were.  The two men were promptly arrested, jailed and released on a $50,000 bond.

No Knowledge

It has been reported that at the time, Dallas County claimed to have no knowledge of the security company or their plans, but Iowa’s State Court Administration did later release a statement confirming that it hired the company Coalfire Labs to test the security of the court’s electronic records.

The State Court Administration did, however, say that although it had asked the company to attempt unauthorised access to court records through various means to learn of any potential vulnerabilities, it didn’t intend or expect those means to include forced entry to the building, an act that it could not condone (certainly not for cyber testing).

Would A Physical Break-In Be Part of a Pen Test?

Some tech commentators have speculated that some cybercrimes require the criminal to be physically close to target devices, which would, therefore, require companies and organisations to perhaps consider investing in physical defences as well as cyber defences.

Coalfire

Coalfire Labs, the global company that was hired to carry out the pen testing assessment, (reported to have carried out hundreds of assessments for government agencies in the past) has been unable to comment on this particular case due to the confidential nature of its work, security and privacy laws, and the fact that a legal case is active.

Similar?

One thing that may not be good news for the two penetration testers is that there have been reports that a break-in at the Polk County Historic Courthouse in nearby Polk County on 9 Sept was apparently similar in nature to the Dallas County Courthouse break-in.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

Physical security is, of course, an important part of protecting the whole business, but under GDPR, data security should not involve leaving personal data anywhere that it could easily be accessed by unauthorised persons, whether it is in a physical or virtual location.

Penetration testing is a legitimate and valuable way for companies and organisations to assess where more work needs to be undertaken to ensure the safety of all data and information that they hold, but it is unlikely that many UK businesses would consider a physical break-in to be a legitimate part of what is usually and electronic-based assessment.  It remains to be seen what happens in the US court case.

The new cloud market report from the Synergy Research Group shows that cloud-associated markets, such as the public cloud, are growing at rates ranging from 10% to over 40% and the annual spending on the cloud may double in four years.

IaaS & PaaS Biggest Growth

Synergy’s half-yearly report shows that across the seven key cloud service and infrastructure market segments, revenues for operator and vendors in the first half of 2019 exceeded $150 billion, which is a rise in growth of 24% from the first half of 2018.

The biggest area of growth in the cloud infrastructure sector was in the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) market segments where there was a massive 44% growth rate.  IaaS is online, virtualised computing resources over the internet, and PaaS is where a provider hosts the hardware and software on its own infrastructure with PaaS products enabling developers to build custom applications online without having to worry about data serving, storage, and management.

The Synergy report also showed growth rates of enterprise SaaS at 27%, UCaaS at 23% and hosted private cloud infrastructure services at 20%.  The report also shows that spending on cloud services is now much greater than spending on supporting data centre infrastructure.

Infrastructure Investments

In the first half of 2019, cloud service providers spent $55 billion on the hardware and software used to build cloud infrastructure (evenly split between public and private clouds).  These infrastructure investments helped cloud service providers to generate over $90 billion in revenues from their cloud infrastructure services (IaaS, PaaS, hosted private cloud services) and enterprise SaaS.

Leaders

The Synergy report shows that the leaders in the IaaS and PaaS segments in the first half of 2019 are Microsoft, Amazon/AWS, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE and Google.  Back in February, Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) reported a massive 45% growth in revenue within the fourth quarter, mostly fuelled by big profits from its public cloud arm.

Other big names in that market segment include Salesforce, Adobe, VMware, IBM, Digital Realty, Equinix and Rackspace.

All these big players together account for over half of all cloud-related revenues.

What Does This Mean For Your Business?

The public cloud is being embraced by businesses as they seek to outsource and ditch traditional capital investment and maintenance problems and costs while reaping the benefits of having the pay-as-you-go scalability, security, and outsourced expertise that allows them to free up more of their own resources.  Cloud service providers are now investing heavily to win large slices of the cloud market with Amazon and Microsoft as market leaders, and as the Synergy report shows, this investment is delivering big revenues and impressive growth rates, particularly in the IaaS and PaaS market segments.