Pānui December 8th
Kia ora Koutou IT Professionals and supporters, welcome to the 2nd last digital pānui for 2023 which is jam packed with news. My focus this week has been on finishing up a raft of projects that have languished or drifted during the year. I have also been working on developing a memorandum of understanding with our counterparts in Australia the ACS (Australian Computer Society) designed to enable us to work more closely together and leverage each others IP and collateral.
On Wednesday Kendra Ross fell ill and luckily for all of us Nadia Yousef, CEO of Cyber Lens, was able to step in for our scheduled Fireside Chat on Cyber Security. Thanks to everyone who joined and the great questions. Sorry but the video isn’t up yet - technical issues - will get this out next week. Kendra will be joining me in the New Year.
Speaking of Cyber - it was great to see Minister Collins joining other nations in a joint statement condemning Russian Cyber Attacks. Great because she is setting a tone we are taking this seriously early in her tenure. You can read more about this announcement on the UK’s NCSC’s website.
Finally from me today, the 360Learning report on re-skiliing and up skilling is something I finally got to read this week. It isn’t Aotearoa based research but the themes resonated with what we see here. One key finding was a lack of skills assessment is holding employees back - I can’t stress this point enough. This is one of the key benefits of embracing a skills framework like SFIA so we can all assess capability and progression in a really consistent manner, identify what training we need as individuals and demonstrate our capabilities in a really tangible manner. Lecture over.
IT Professionals Fellows gravely concerned about digital technology education
I met with Fellows of IT Professionals this week to discuss their grave concerns about both our education system and the future workforce. We collectively understand Te Pūkenga’s latest round of redundancies has included teaching staff in Polytechnics who teach digital technology. We also understand various universities around the country are also laying off lectures and researchers in digital tech - along with other disciplines.
Fellows were already concerned about the shortage of digital technology teachers in high schools and the need lift the capability of all teaching staff at all levels.
The ITP Fellows will be writing to Minister Simmonds with urgency to ensure she understands the impact of reducing teaching capacity at both Vocational and Tertiary levels on our future workforce.
Blogs this week
Peter’s editorial today - Barry Young is no Edward Snowden - discusses whistle blowers and contrasts the Te Whatu Ora data leak (more on this below) with Snowden as a whistle blower. He also tackles Google’s Gemini release (also more on this below) and exposes the investment tentacles of big tech - who has invested in which AI platforms which is fascinating.
Working from home is here to stay, AUT study - Peter’s summary of this study is a great read and highlights the challenges we have as a country where the internet is not readily available to everyone. This post inspired Brendan’s cartoon today - Working from home, Then and Now - reminding us of the bad old times when we were locked down during Covid compared to the flexibility we enjoy today.
A year of ChatGPT: 5 ways the AI marvel has changed the world - is our guest blog this week. It’s unbelievable that this technology only arrived in our lives 12 months ago really, it’s dominated our news and projects and practices ever since. Love this article too with the 5 impacts.
Government agencies grapple with Digital Trust Breaches: ACC and Te Whatu Ora
Both of these breaches by staff of the organisations is a timely reminder that 85% of data breaches are still caused by employees (deliberately or human error).
Te Whatu Ora vaccination data leak
Described as a devastating breach of trust by their CEO, this breach by a staff member, was discovered last week. The accused individual, facing charges of accessing a computer system for dishonest purposes, purportedly aimed to spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines. The incident is being treated as an isolated case but does raise concerns about data security and the spread of misinformation.
ACC fraudulent travel claims
According to ACC’s own announcement ACC staff have accessed individual accounts via their self service platform MyACC “The people behind the apparent fraud appear to have used MyACC to submit fraudulent travel re-imbursement claims to ACC for financial gain.” Which has resulted in them turning off the MyACC portal which has upset many users highly dependant on ACC payments including those with disabilities.
AI News this week
Google announced Gemini yesterday their latest large language model and we can all use it right now by logging into Bard which is cool. The kinds of things you can ask Gemini to do include asking it to look at a photo of food and write you a recipe for it; or ask Bard for a course structure to help you learn a foreign language; or ask it to explain an academic paper by sharing a link to the paper - that is cool.
“Gemini is more than a single AI model. There’s a lighter version called Gemini Nano that is meant to be run natively and offline on Android devices. There’s a beefier version called Gemini Pro that will soon power lots of Google AI services and is the backbone of Bard starting today.”
They are being bullish about it’s capabilities from the outset saying - “Google says Gemini beats GPT-4 in 30 out of 32 benchmarks”
However developers are very disappointed there is no API at release date.
Meta also made a series of AI announcements this week. The main one is a new image generator - Image with Meta - which you can try today but I read isn’t fully deployed yet. Others are wrapped up in this announcement post.
Time magazine’s CEO of the year is Sam Altman - approx a year after ChatGPT was launched weeks after he was fired then rehired and OpenAI’s board completely changed, Time selected Sam Altman as CEO of the year. Time has written up an really extensive article on the history of OpenAI and the saga of recent weeks,
UK Education report - the UK’s Department of Education has issued a report on Generative AI in Education. I found this an inspiring read with evidence many teachers are already early adopters of GenAI, understand the risks and challenges with the technology and have been able to introduce learners to practical applications of the tooling. Would be awesome if we could conduct the same evidence gathering exercise here.
Other news in brief
Keeping this list brief:
Te Reo Māori Digital Technology Terms
Here are some of my favourites from the year so far. Full list can be found here.
Social media = Pae pāhopori
You're on mute = kua ngū tō reo
Data = raraunga
Finally
What to expect in next week’s pānui - survey results on what we don’t love about working in tech, a wrap for 2023 and looking forward to 2024. For today, hope you are all staying hydrated and enjoying the sunshine. Meri Kirihimete Vic
