Sudarsan: Breaking technological barriers and implementing AI to innovate, adapt and build at scale

In an economy full of uncertainty and risk, data becomes one of the most valuable assets, or as Digital Pioneers’ guest and Spark Cogniton CTO stated: ,,Today we’re watching the world through the lence of data“ .

In a in-depth diaolgue with Sridhar, Digital Pioneers pinpointed advances in AI technology for data infrastructure, the pressing subject of national security, cognitive AI solutions that can be operationalized, the reinvention of national security through emphasis on social impact, and the making of Society 5.0.

In the interview, the hosts were Mark Minevich, Angelica Sirotin, and Andjelina Petrovic, while the guest was Sridhar Sudarsan.

As a CTO at Spark Cognition, Sridhar Sudarsan has been responsible for driving product and technology strategy, leveraging next-generation artificial intelligence systems to secure and optimize assets across key industries such as oil and gas, defense, utilities, aviation, and financial services.

Prior taking the role of CTO at SparkCognition, Sudarsan spent more than 20 years working with different technologies across various industries, and played different roles at IMB, including the last 10 years that he spent developing Watson at IBM.

As one of the most important takeaways from his rich experience, he pointed out the ability to innovate and adapt rapidly to the everchanging world of technologies and its challenges.

-What I've learned is how to break technological barriers and boundaries and find new areas or challenges. As the society is moving forward, the enterprise and customers are moving forward and changing the way entire ecosystem plays and how we reinvent ourselves. To me, the greatest learning has been- how do you innovate, change and grow at scale.

Foto: Printscreen

Going deeper into the discussion, Sridhar explained that the ability to adapt fast is important not only on a corporative level, but on a national economy’s level as well.

-There are a lot of market dynamics, as well as geographical, social and political dynamics that are specific for each market. When it comes to the use of AI technologies and digital transformation technologies, the ability to adapt rapidly and understand your own local nuances plays vital role. AI is more of a means to driving toward the objective you’re going after.

Digital innovations play a big role in building and developing an ecosystem that will bring the benefits of the technology and the innovations to all stakeholders through things like improved health care, safer and cleaner transportation systems. AI and digital technologies can be used to increase energy efficiency and being able to track when and where electricity is needed the most, reducing the wastage, finding ways to do smart heating, being able to safe oil and fuel etc.

He also pointed out the importance of innovation when it comes to revolutionizing digital strategies around disruptive technologies and building products for industrial application.

As he explained, Spark cognition has a mission to drive efficiency within physical assets, and using AI technologies, cloud computing and cybersecurity as ways to prevent infrastructure from going down, always looking for innovative ways to do so.

Digital Pioneers

Given his knowledge and the experience working within key industries such as oil, gas and aviation, Digital pioneers explored the topic of green economy and sustainability, and talk about some of the most pressing environmental issues and discussed how oil and gas companies can deploy AI predictive analytics to improve reliability and reduce carbon footprint in their operation.

-Following sustainability trends and current market demands, many of the leading oil and gas companies are embarking on new journey of transforming themselves into energy companies. This will bring some radical changes and bold decisions that company leaders will have to make, such as reducing oil production by 40 percent, which is the core part how they consume their business today. But once they do that, they will spend multiple billion dollars in renewable energy, and if anyone can bring this transformation in the sustainability field it’s these global energy companies. They have the expertise, distribution and supply chain to be able to do that. Digital transformation is core part of this journey.

However, the wider usage of this data and new technologies, and embarking on the path of digital transformation as a result has shown the rising threats of cybersecurity attacks in this field. Digital Pioneers explored the issues from the AI perspective, and asked how can AI-based technologies help industry players in energy and national security defend remote critical infrastructure from escalating cyberattacks?

Foto: Printscreen

-The side effect of growing digital footprint that all large stakeholders, including companies, academia, governments, state and national entities are going through is the fact that the number of connected devices, the number of areas the surface area of where compute and data infrastructure is going to be available is consequently growing exponentially.

As Sridhar said, being able to protect infrastructure is not just a checkbox for a company to do, and it asks for a systematic approach.

- Infrastructure is not just laptops, desktops and servers anymore, it is also the critical assets, your pipelines, it is your control systems that are running in your power plants, and human and machine interfaces. it’s all of these different pieces of infrastructure that need to be protected.

The number of connected devices where data is going to be available is growing exponentially, leaving the space for bad actors.

Cybersecurity needs to be thought in radically different. The same way we are all practicing different ways of working we need to think about security in very different ways as well. At Spark Cognition, we’ve been focused to taking data centric and AI focused approach to cyber security, where we focuse on what we call zero day malware ,which is can I detect malware that I've never seen before and how do I protect myself against that and that's what our core strength is and we truly believed that the only way to do that is by applying machine learning and AI based techniques.

In the end, Sridhar talked about the importance of developing ethical AI, and using AI to do business more ethically.

Younger generations are especially prone to sharing their private information online, but as Sridhar noticed, while they are open to give out and share personal info online, they are the most devoted in terms asking for information to be protected.

-The corporations need to be playing a much bigger role in terms of building and protecting that trust and reinforce it. That’s the responsibility of large companies.

CSR are more important than before and it will only continue to grow. Finding a way to build an ethical supply chain will be important. Companies need to demonstrate actions in this direction. Moreover enterprises will have an important role in educating employees, and consumers about ethical AI principles.

When it comes to Sridhar’s personal take on AI, he shared his holistic approach and explained that AI is much wider concept from what we usually think of it.

As he stated: There are technology aspects of the AI: audio video processes, streaming, encryption, machine learning, deep learning etc. those are the things we generally think about AI. But when I think about the AI, it goes beyond the technology. Technology is the start and the trigger.

Digital Pioneers

Hardware has grown in terms of our ability to process faster, or compute, our ability to generate, process and store information, but AI goes beyond it. One of those aspects is the ethical AI- how are models built, what are the ways you do models governance?

It’s a 360 view where we’re all playing an important role in that ecosystem. We all need to find a way to develop our own mindset, find the roles we play and see how we can find the new normal in the way how we work and build things. 

When It comes to developing digital strategy and implementing AI techniques, there are only milestones, there’s no end. It is a journey. The destination continues to extend further as we go.

You can watch the full in- depth Digital Pioneers discussion in the video at the top of the article.

(Telegraf.rs)