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The professional development company Dale Carnegie just published results of its survey where it set out to determine the qualities that separate highly effective teams.  Using the 2,650 responses to its survey, it was able to narrow down seven recommendations to build a high performing team. Define a clear purpose and vision Teams must have clear goals in order to ensure that team members can see how their own skillsets and tasks are contributing to the big picture.  Dale Carnegie recommends that leaders break big picture goals down into smaller milestones to enable teams to track progress, have discussions, and make changes to improve performance.  Close perception gaps between productivity, satisfactions, and culture between leaders and employees  The study cites a report from Microsoft, which claims that 87% of employees feel productive at work, while only 12% of CEOs believe this is true.  In order to close this perception gap, the recommendation is to improve underst

Microsoft revealed the addition of a new series, “Generative AI for Innovators,” to the AI Kick-off Projects collection, which is a collection of projects that use AI that students can learn from.  This series is designed for aspiring AI entrepreneurs, providing them with guidance on utilizing the capabilities of AI, including tools like GPT-4 and DALL-E, to generate ideas, prototypes, and business models for their startups. The curriculum encompasses using AI for crafting impactful solutions to real-world problems, prototyping and testing products, and developing viable business models.  The series contains three modules involving generative AI for innovators. In the first, participants will use Bing Chat to come up with ideas for their project and then generate a one-slide summary of that idea. In the second, Bing Chat provides guidance on creating prototypes and mock-ups for their solution, as well as assistance in implementing the project. In the last, participants step into t

Tel Aviv – December 11, 2023 –  CitrusX  exited stealth today, announcing $4.5M in seed funding for their end-to-end AI validation and explainability platform. The round was led by Canadian VC Awz with the participation of several angel investors. As more industries adopt AI, the journey from model development to deployment in production is increasingly becoming a critical bottleneck for businesses. Machine learning (ML) models are often not understood outside of the data science team that developed them, posing challenges for validation, explainability, risk assessment, and legal approval. ML models are usually validated by generic open-source tools, but these are not well suited for increasingly complex and specialized use cases, or for explaining the models to non-experts. It typically takes 6-9 months for a model to make it to market. CitrusX has built a platform for all stakeholders in an organization’s AI pipeline to ensure ML models are robust, explainable, and fair, enabling

Over the weekend, the European Council presidency and the European Parliament’s negotiators concluded three days of talks to reach a provisional agreement on a proposal for regulating AI in the European Union (EU).    “The draft regulation aims to ensure that AI systems placed on the European market and used in the EU are safe and respect fundamental rights and EU values. This landmark proposal also aims to stimulate investment and innovation on AI in Europe,” the European Council wrote in a press release .   Under the artificial intelligence act, the EU plans to regulate AI using a risk-based approach. For situations that are riskier, more strict rules will be imposed. AI with limited risk would still be subject to “transparency obligations” to ensure users can make informed decisions on AI-generated content.    The artificial intelligence act also sets up a fine system that is percentage based, so that fines would be proportional to the revenue of the company (or a fixed amoun

Project estimation holds a pivotal role in the domain of project management. It entails foreseeing the labor, time, and resources necessary to achieve project completion. This vital step significantly bolsters a team’s capacity to manage their workflow efficiently and set feasible expectations.  Project estimation offers transparency regarding resource prerequisites, allowing managers to assess the viability of initiating and concluding a project within predetermined schedules.  This pivotal process involves the meticulous prediction of essential factors, including resource allocation, project duration, and associated costs. In this article, we delve into the core concept of software project estimation, emphasizing its importance in the technology sector and its fundamental role in software development. At its core, software project estimation is both an art and a science. It serves as an indispensable tool for project managers, developers, and stakeholders, guiding them through the

Meta’s AI team has announced the release of a new project called Purple Llama  that will include tools and evaluations to assist in responsibly building AI models.  The components within Purple Llama will be released with a permissive license to enable collaboration by the community and to help standardize the development of trust and safety tools.  RELATED CONTENT: IBM and Meta lead 50 other organizations to form global AI Alliance Its initial release will focus on tools that help address the risks outlined in President Biden’s Executive Order on AI . These include developing metrics for quantifying LLM cybersecurity risks, tools for evaluating the frequency of insecure code suggestions, and tools to evaluate LLMs to make it harder for them to be used to generate malicious code or help execute cyberattacks.  In addition to this announcement, Meta also announced Llama Guard , which is a safeguard model that is designed for Human-AI conversation use cases.  Meta says that it wi

JetBrains has introduced an AI Assistant in all of its IDEs, with availability in other JetBrains products expected soon.  “Empowering developers with AI-backed features supports the long-standing mission of JetBrains: to improve your experience by automating common and repetitive tasks, enabling you to stay in the flow and focus on the big picture,” said Svetlana Zemlyanskaya, team lead for AI Assistant at JetBrains. “We can now incorporate these features seamlessly into your workflows. Because our IDEs have a deep understanding of your code and project structure, AI Assistant is so easy to use and already yields great results.” Developers can ask it questions about their project or ask it to iterate on a specific task. Its code assistance features include multiline code completion, documentation and test generation, refactoring, code explanation, and more.  While the JetBrains’ IDEs supply the AI Assistant with detailed information on project code and its structure, the company cl

HCL Software has announced it has renamed its DevOps portfolio to better align products with their core functionality. The company hopes that with this rebrand, it will be easier for customers to navigate the portfolio and get to the right product. The company recently hosted a webinar to announce the changes, where Chris Haggan, head of product for DevOps at HCL Software, explained that the old names were a “bit opaque.” “They don’t necessarily convey a sense of family,” he said. “They’re not straightforward for people to understand what each product does.” The name changes are as follows: HCL Software DevOps → HCL DevOps Automation HCL Accelerate → HCL DevOps Velocity HCL Launch → HCL DevOps Deploy HCL OneTest → HCL DevOps Test HCL Compass → HCL DevOps Plan HCL VersionVault → HCL DevOps Code ClearCase HCL RTist → HCL DevOps Model RealTime HCL RTist in Code → HCL DevOps Code RealTime “With this refresh, we’re going to provide customers with a much more direct understand

The ingress platform ngrok has announced the release of ngrok-python, which is an SDK that enables developers to implement ingress in their Python applications.  This allows Python developers to serve their apps through ngrok’s network without much configuration.  The SDK creates a secure, persistent connection to ngrok’s ingress-as-a-service platform, and then ngrok transmits the application’s configuration information to the nearest Point of Presence. It offers benefits like easy installation, easy integration, works from one line of code, idiomatic functional options, built-in forwarding, and out-of-the-box logging support.  According to ngrok, the inspiration to create ngrok-python was to enable developers to ignore the complexities of the network stack.  “Instead of focusing on core business logic, developers often invest substantial time and effort in adding non-functional capabilities such as authentication, authorization, observability, and high availability that are outsi

IBM and Meta have come together — along with 50 other organizations — to form the AI Alliance , “a group of leading organizations across industry, startup, academia, research and government coming together to support open innovation and open science in AI.” By bringing together a diverse set of types of organizations, the AI Alliance hopes to shape AI’s evolution in a way that reflects the ranging needs of society.  It’s starting off with a number of projects, including developing benchmarks and evaluation standards, responsibly advocating for open foundation models with diverse modalities, enabling a strong AI hardware accelerator ecosystem, supporting global AI skills building, developing educational content and resources, and launching initiatives to support open development of AI in safe ways, including hosting events to explore AI use cases.  “The AI Alliance is focused on fostering an open community and enabling developers and researchers to accelerate responsible innovation

Google has announced its latest AI model, Gemini , which was built to be multimodal so that it could interpret information in multiple formats, spanning text, code, audio, image, and video. According to Google, the typical approach for creating a multimodal model involves training components for different information formats separately and then combining them together. What sets Gemini apart is that it was trained from the start on different formats and then fine-tuned with additional multi-modal data.  “This helps Gemini seamlessly understand and reason about all kinds of inputs from the ground up, far better than existing multimodal models — and its capabilities are state of the art in nearly every domain,” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, and Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder of Google DeepMind, wrote in a blog post .  Google also explained that the new model has pretty sophisticated reasoning capabilities, which allow it to understand complex written and visual info

Apiiro , a leading application security posture management (ASPM) solution, today announced the addition of integrated software supply chain security (SSCS) into its platform. Now, Apiiro’s ASPM is extended to natively provide source control manager (SCM) and CI/CD pipeline visibility, risk detection and assessment, and governance.  Apiiro’s ultra-connected and holistic approach to software supply chain security also uniquely enables the detection of chained risks—known as toxic combinations—across application and software supply chain components and unifies context across code, developer behavior, AppSec findings, and supply chain posture.  “We believe software supply chain security is a core component of ASPM and that the key to protecting modern applications is to provide end-to-end integrity across software, processes, and tools from code to runtime, ,” said Moti Gindi, Chief Product Officer at Apiiro. “Taking this connected approach enables our platform to bridge gaps left by s

Vercel is releasing new features in its Developer Experience Platform to enable development teams to “move fast, don’t break things.” “As organizations grow, it can become hard to sustain fast release cycles without diminishing code health and letting errors slip into production. It shouldn’t be this way. We should be able to move fast without breaking things—making quick updates and innovating while retaining great performance, security, and accessibility,” Brody McKee and Cody Brouwers, software engineers for Vercel, wrote in a blog post .  Conformance is a new feature that automatically detects critical issues early in the development lifecycle. It does this by running static analysis checks before merges happen.  Conformance rules work across multiple files, meaning that each file doesn’t have to be individually verified. This provides developers with a more holistic perspective on their codebase, Vercel explained.  It also provides a score for issues, which provides developm

A couple of week’s ago, Microsoft announced it would be bringing together several of its separate AI products —  including Bing Chat and the AI capabilities in Microsoft 365, Microsoft Edge, and Windows — under the single umbrella of Microsoft Copilot to provide a more unified experience.  Now the company is announcing it has started testing several new features that will be coming to Copilot soon, and is sharing a sneak peak. Microsoft Copilot will soon be able to use GPT-4 Turbo, OpenAI’s latest AI model, which allows it to handle more complex tasks. The integration is expected to rollout in the next few weeks, and a few users have already received access to it for testing purposes. The company has also just incorporated the new DALL-E 3 model, which allows users to create higher quality images from prompts. Another upcoming feature in Microsoft Edge is the ability to select text on a webpage and rewrite it. According to Microsoft, this feature will be available soon. Bing is ge

The database company MongoDB has announced new capabilities to enable companies to better leverage generative AI.  MongoDB Atlas Vector Search is now generally available, which allows customers to build generative AI into their applications based on their own data. This enables the AI to provide accurate, relevant responses for a specific organization or domain.  Customers can build AI features, such as semantic search or image comparison, into their applications. It uses a “flexible and scalable” document-based data model, which, according to the company, enables customers to combine queries for vector data, analytical aggregations, text-based search, geospatial data, and time series data. As an example, a user could request “Find real estate listings with houses that look like this image, were built in the last five years, and are in an area within seven miles north of downtown Seattle with top-rated schools and walking distance to parks.”  The application can then provide a resp