Business Continuity and Web-based Technologies, 6/26/20

This webinar looked at web-based technologies that help answer such questions as, are we prepared for change? Are we proactively shaping or at least leveraging change?

The opening presentation took about 15 minutes. As a way to stay up to date with product and service innovations, we first considered a few technology-related websites. We looked at two articles on techcrunch.com about secure microchips— “secure enclaves.” We also skimmed the headlines of  SupplyChainDrive’s daily news stories, looking for open source apps. 

With a view toward anticipating change, we demonstrated how to use Savant X’s Scan program (from Visual Purple). This machine learning platform applies hyper-dimensional relationship analysis (up to five dimensions) to Youtube videos. We selected a presentation by Professor Pokutta as he guest lectured at Georgia Tech University: “Applications of Machine Learning in Supply Chains.”

The demo showed a nodes-and-linkages visualization of many relationships, the density of which can be increased and decreased. We selected two nodes—“machine learning” and “forecasting” to look at the associated text of the video as a way to discover relationships between those two ideas. The results led us to a reference about Facebook’s open source Prophet  Library. 

From that information, we found a relevant paper by Sean Taylor and Benjamin Letham entitled, “Forecasting at Scale.” 

Analytics in the paper depicted events on Facebook over several years. These were broken down by months, weeks, days and hours. From the Prophet model (based on Python and R), we saw how considering the behavioral patterns and trends of potential customers on Facebook could be useful to business continuity.

The discussion that emerged after the short presentation ranged across several related topics. There were interests from the enterprise-level to small businesses. Topics included the following

• web-based apps as  protection and threats
• the need to increase threat awareness via education
• the rapidity of app development-deployment
• roles and impacts of cryptocurrencies
• CMMC certification
• non-SWIFT finance messaging systems. 

We concluded the webinar with mention of our next scheduled topic, Pandemic-related Government Compliance Initiatives.