Let’s face it, fad or not, companies are starting to ask themselves how they could possibly use machine learning and AI technologies in their organization. Many are being lured by the promise of profits by discovering winning patterns with algorithms that will enable solid predictions… The reality is that most technology and business professionals do not have sufficient understanding of how machine learning works and where it can be applied.  For a lot of firms, the focus still tends to be on small-scale changes instead of focusing on what really matters…tackling their approach to machine learning.

In the recent Wall Street Journal article, Machine Learning at Scale Remains Elusive for Many Firms, Steven Norton captures interesting comments from the industry’s data science experts. In the article, he quotes panelists from the MIT Digital Economy Conference in NYC, on businesses current practices with AI and machine learning. All agree on the fact that, for all the talk of Machine Learning and AI’s potential in the enterprise, many firms aren’t yet equipped to take advantage of it fully.

Panelist,  Michael Chui, partner at McKinsey Global Institute states that “If a company just mechanically says OK, I’ll automate this little activity here and this little activity there, rather than re-thinking the entire process and how it can be enabled by technology, they usually get very little value out of it. “Few companies have deployed these technologies in a core business process or at scale.”

Panelist, Hilary Mason, general manager at Cloudera Inc., had this to say, “With very few exceptions, every company we work with wants to start with a cost-savings application of automation.” “Most organizations are not set up to do this well.”

One of the most recent additions to the iPhone is the Photo Editor, directly in the iPhone. Added in the update that came from Apple over the summer, this new photo editor brings efficiency, and simplicity to photo editing, right in your phone. If you have a photo that you just took a moment ago of you with your friends, and you want to edit some features before posting it on a social networking site, it becomes simpler with this new addition, right in the Photos Application.

Open up the Photos application, and tap on a picture you would like to edit. Once your picture comes up, tap in the top right on the button named “Edit.” A user interface that deals with editing will show up, and you are ready to rock and roll. First off, many times we take pictures at weird angles, we take them sideways, upside down, to the right, to the left, and our phone doesn’t recognize them. In the bottom left, you will see an arrow that is pointing counter clockwise; this is the button that you want to press if you want to flip your picture around to the correct orientation. Keep in mind that this flips counter clockwise, and it doesn’t matter if you pass the orientation that you wanted. Just keep flipping!

Next up is the simple enhance tool. Sometimes colors get drowned out if we don’t have the right lighting in our pictures, and makes the photo look dull, and dreary. You don’t want your colors to look dull and dreary while you are celebrating your trip to New York and seeing Times Square! Tapping on the button that looks similar to a magic wand, your picture will begin to look brighter and fuller. With the tap of a button, the iPhone detects what points in the picture is, as we said earlier, “dull, and dreary” and enhances those colors to their predicted colors, if the light was in the correct intensity. However, if you are dissatisfied with the outcome of the enhance tool, if your picture is not handled well by the phone, you are able to tap on the wand again, and remove your auto enhance.

In the rare case of red eye in your picture, the new photo editor has a solution. Moreover, a one-tap solution. With a simple tap on the red eye correction tool, between the crop tool, and the auto-enhance tool, you bring up a screen where you are now able to tap anywhere on your photo where red eye exists, and remove it. As simple as that. Remember when you had to do crazy dragging, selection, and odd stunts to remove red eye? Not any more.

As much as we love to assume free Wi-Fi is secure, this is far from the truth. Because you are attaching to a service many others are connected to as well, without security measures, your device can be hacked, especially if the network is unencrypted. Because this encryption involves handing out a 26-character hexadecimal key to every individual wanting to use that network, most places opt for ease of access over security. And even with a secure network, your information is vulnerable to everyone else who has the password and is on the network.

This may not seem like such a big deal and many people don’t believe they have anything to hide on their personal devices, but remember what you use on those devices. Chances are your e-mail is attached as well as all other social media sites. You may have apps that track your finances or private messages to certain others that you would never want anyone else to see. Luckily, there are steps that can be taken to reduce and prevent any unwanted information grabbers from accessing your personal information.

To start, go through your computer’s settings in order to verify your operating system’s security functions are all set to offer the highest protection. Open up the Control Panel and double check that your Firewall is enabled for both private and public networks. Then, go to Network and Sharing to open Change advanced sharing settings. In here, you can turn off file and printer sharing and network discovery for public networks.

One of the most important things to watch for is HTTPS. Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure ensures secure communication across the web. Many of the major email systems use this when you log in (as another layer of password protection) but drop the security as soon as the login is complete. To keep this going, HTTPS Everywhere is a browser extension that gives you a secure connection when browsing some of the more popular sites. It can also be programmed for other sites you like to visit that don’t use HTTPS.

Not every place on the internet provides the choice of HTTPS, and VPNs are there to fill in the security gap. Virtual Private Networks allows data to be sent and received through public access points as if it were directly connected to a secure network. Many businesses offer this for company devices, but if you are an individual looking for that kind of security, ProXPN is a free version that can be upgraded. Unfortunately, it limits your speed, but other choices include VPNBook, OpenVPN Shield Exchange, and OkayFreedom.

With these three steps implemented, secure public Wi-Fi can be achieved. No longer will you have to worry about connecting in an unsure environment with strangers, never knowing if your information is being stolen. With all of the options free of charge, it is also an affordable means of protecting yourself that only takes a little time and effort to implement and guarantee safety.

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It is said that spoken languages shape thoughts by their inclusion and exclusion of concepts, and by structuring them in different ways. Similarly, programming languages shape solutions by making some tasks easier and others less aesthetic. Using F# instead of C# reshapes software projects in ways that prefer certain development styles and outcomes, changing what is possible and how it is achieved.

F# is a functional language from Microsoft's research division. While once relegated to the land of impractical academia, the principles espoused by functional programming are beginning to garner mainstream appeal.

As its name implies, functions are first-class citizens in functional programming. Blocks of code can be stored in variables, passed to other functions, and infinitely composed into higher-order functions, encouraging cleaner abstractions and easier testing. While it has long been possible to store and pass code, F#'s clean syntax for higher-order functions encourages them as a solution to any problem seeking an abstraction.

F# also encourages immutability. Instead of maintaining state in variables, functional programming with F# models programs as a series of functions converting inputs to outputs. While this introduces complications for those used to imperative styles, the benefits of immutability mesh well with many current developments best practices.

For instance, if functions are pure, handling only immutable data and exhibiting no side effects, then testing is vastly simplified. It is very easy to test that a specific block of code always returns the same value given the same inputs, and by modeling code as a series of immutable functions, it becomes possible to gain a deep and highly precise set of guarantees that software will behave exactly as written.

Further, if execution flow is exclusively a matter of routing function inputs to outputs, then concurrency is vastly simplified. By shifting away from mutable state to immutable functions, the need for locks and semaphores is vastly reduced if not entirely eliminated, and multi-processor development is almost effortless in many cases.

Type inference is another powerful feature of many functional languages. It is often unnecessary to specify argument and return types, since any modern compiler can infer them automatically. F# brings this feature to most areas of the language, making F# feel less like a statically-typed language and more like Ruby or Python. F# also eliminates noise like braces, explicit returns, and other bits of ceremony that make languages feel cumbersome.

Functional programming with F# makes it possible to write concise, easily testable code that is simpler to parallelize and reason about. However, strict functional styles often require imperative developers to learn new ways of thinking that are not as intuitive. Fortunately, F# makes it possible to incrementally change habits over time. Thanks to its hybrid object-oriented and functional nature, and its clean interoperability with the .net platform, F# developers can gradually shift to a more functional mindset while still using the algorithms and libraries with which they are most familiar.

Related F# Resources:

F# Programming Essentials Training