Saturday 25 May 2019

Digitalization: A Boon for Small Retailer 

Digitalization gives an apparent idea of development and technology dependent world. Digitalization means computerization of systems and jobs for better ease and accessibility. Digitalization refers to the adoption in use of digital technology by the key market players. It is the process of making everything digital that can be digitized and the process of converting information into digital format. Some of the advantages that have effected and educated the society, includes- 

  1. Increased Productivity- With a well-executed digitalization and document imaging plan can be reduced to a few seconds or less. 
  2. Cost efficiency- Document Imaging with APTARA can help reduce these costs to minimal levels, helping you focus on core business areas and increasing the investments for value adding verticals. 
  3. Easy to access and always accessible- Documents that have been converted can be easily accessed through the cloud or system using any device that has internet, anywhere or anytime. 
  4. Optical character recognition: OCR techniques along with proper indexing of the data help in searching and accessing the data efficiently saving time and efforts. 
  5. Enhanced security- A scanned document is traceable document. 

Digitalization has helped the retail sector too. Now many small businesses have access to a range of digital tools that allow them to increase accessibility, information availability, and customer connection. To assess how these tools improve business performance in small businesses, Deloitte surveyed more than 2,000 U.S. businesses with fewer than 250 employees, collecting responses on their use of digital technologies and performance according to key metrics such as revenue growth, job creation, exports, innovation, customer numbers, , social media for customer engagement, sales, marketing, or other business purposes, E-commerce and online scheduling capabilities via their own websites or third-party platforms, Online advertising, including ad banners on websites, social media advertising, and search engine marketing and optimization, internal productivity tools that improve internal business processes, such as cloud-based software, video conferencing, and corporate social networks. 

When the customer shops for the first time the retailers can get their personal details like phone number, email id, birthday and anniversary, occupation etc. If customer’s birthday/ anniversary are coming then they can wish their customer and add its emotional connection with the retailers. If the customer did not shop again then we can also contact with him. It will impact the customer behavior and will attract towards the retailer for future business. To make a regular customer, retailers can make the loyalty program. This type of services offered by the Exclusife.com and Nowfloats.com helps the small retailers to connect with the customers. 

In the similar manner, Digitalization has helped the education sector in the large manner. Students, while studying in the college or school can always remain up to date regarding their academics or any other activity. Online classes and lectures are being digitally arranged for easy and flexible learning. Student can now easily understand the topic in 3D through Digitalization, which once in the class was quite difficult to understand on a 2D platform. Communication with the mentors has also become easy through which results have impressively improved. With the aim to have convenient and smart education system with zero students’ dissatisfaction level, RBMI, Bareilly campus offers digitalized ambiance which allows learning in more advanced way and get themselves placed around the world with best placement opportunities. 

BHAWNA ARORA (ASST. PROFESSOR, RBMI-BAREILLY)

Thursday 16 May 2019

TECHNIQUES IN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR IMPROVING CYBER SECURITY 

In this era of digitization with the rapid growth of IOT and linked devices, experts of cyber security face a lot of challenges. They need all the help to prevent attacks and respond to unauthorized access. The rapid increase in cyber security threats facing global businesses can be controlled by the integration of Artificial Intelligence into cyber security systems. Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are being connected more extensively over industries and applications as the computing power, storage capacities and data collection increase. With machine learning and AI, that intensive amount of data could be broken down in fraction of time, helping the industry to identify and recover from the security threat. 

Security professionals tried to fix the flow of information. But the two fields have grown closer over the time, when the attacks have targeted to simulate the performance, not only at the human user level but also at lower system levels. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a very good example of connection of AI & Cyber Security. Improvements in automatic character recognition software, which can be considered to be a huge leap in AI technology, could take the field towards more refined pattern recognition. Artificial Intelligence systems that are intended to learn and adapt, and are capable of recognizing even the smallest changes in the settings, have the capability to act much earlier towards the cyber attacks. 

Techniques In Artificial Intelligence (AI) For Cyber Security 

  1. Expert Systems  - An Expert System is a computer system that imitates the decision making trait of a human and can be considered as the best example of Knowledge based system. These systems are composed of two sub-systems: the Knowledge Base and the Inference Engine. 
  2. Neural Nets - Neural Nets is also called deep learning. It is an advanced branch of AI and takes inspiration from the working of the human brain. When we implement the deep learning to cyber security, the system can identify whether a file is dangerous or legitimate without human interference. This technique generates strong results in detecting the malicious threats, compared with classical machine learning systems. The victory of neural nets in cyber security is their speed. Neural nets can define the exact detection of new suspicious threats and fill in the dangerous loop holes that leave industries wide-open to attacks. 
  3. Intelligent Agents - Intelligent Agent (IA) is self-sufficient entity which may gradually learn or use their knowledge base to achieve their objectives. They can be either extremely simple or very complex. ALEXA and SIRI are the examples of Intelligent Agents. They can adapt to real time conditions, has capabilities to learn new things rapidly through communication with external environment, and also consist of memory base and recovery abilities. 
In the current scenario where threats and cyber-attacks increase with every minute, the need of intelligent security system is essential. Artificial Intelligence techniques are easily adaptable yet hard to secure than contemporary cyber security solutions. Therefore AI is needed to increase security implementations and defend system from a growing number of advanced and complex cyber threats in a more effective manner. For this, RBMI, Bareilly continuously put its efforts to educate for the same by conducting the workshops, taking the classes and seminars and also by implementing in the academic structure too. With this, we thus aim that in future we may have more intelligent systems than what we have currently. 

SIDDHARTH PANDEY (ASST. PROFESSOR, RBMI-BAREILLY) 
SWATI JHA (ASST. PROFESSOR, RBMI-BAREILLY)