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The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy analytics and data science news items for the week of September 2, 2022.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant analytics and data science news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last month, in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy analytics and data science news items.

The launch of Server-FIPS is monumental for the use of analytics in public sector environments that require enhanced data encryption. Alteryx Server-FIPS is a FIPS-capable and scalable server-based product for scheduling, sharing, and running apps and models created in Alteryx Designer-FIPS for others in the organization to leverage.

Read on for more.

With this new feature, Amazon QuickSight customers can easily provide insights to end-users where they need them most by embedding individual visualizations from Amazon QuickSight dashboards into high-trac webpages and applications without the need for server or software setup or infrastructure management.

Read on for more.

The 9th annual report examines data science and machine learning end user deployment and trends, covering analytical features and functions, neural networks, data preparation, tool usability, model operations, scalability, and open source and big data.

Read on for more.

The pairing of CXOs purpose-built, web-based Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) reporting and Longviews modular suite of integrated products for tax, transfer pricing, close, plan, and consolidation will allow organizations to deliver richer narrative behind their data with built-in commentary and dynamic dashboards.

Read on for more.

Read on for more.

With these new capabilities, Vantage customers can now take advantage of the most in-database analytic functions anywhere in the market and critical artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) model management tools. This new functionality in combination with the launch ofTeradata VantageCloud Lake is intended to provide customers the ability to activate massive amounts of data and solve complex business challenges.

Read on for more.

For consideration in future analytics and data science news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.

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Tim is Solutions Review's Editorial Director and leads coverage on big data, business intelligence, and data analytics. A 2017 and 2018 Most Influential Business Journalist and 2021 "Who's Who" in data management and data integration, Tim is a recognized influencer and thought leader in enterprise business software. Reach him via tking at solutionsreview dot com.

Read more:

Analytics and Data Science News for the Week of September 2; Updates from Alteryx, AWS, Teradata, and More - Solutions Review

The increasing demand for cybersecurity analysts is a combination of playing catch-up, keeping up with growing threats/attacker capabilities, and a globally expanding IT footprint. With relief for the growing security skills gap nearly a decade out, we must find ways to support the analysts that are already working to protect us. In this blog, we discuss ways to augment their efforts and maximize their time by overcoming some of the key challenges they face.

Why do we need to augment our analysts?The global cybersecurity landscape is in crisis due to the lack of available skilled talent. A recent U.S. survey by Emsi Burning Glass (now Lightcast) showed that one million cybersecurity professionals are working in the industry, yet there are more than 700,000 open roles to be filled. The situation is similarly critical throughout Europe according to LinkedIn data, which indicates a 22% increase in demand for talent last year alone with no sign of slowing down.

Educational institutions, government efforts, and private training programs are creating new candidates as quickly as possible, but it takes five to ten years to create an experienced L3 security operations center (SOC) analyst. Thats clearly a solution for the future. So, what do we do in the meantime?

What about artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data science?Many people believe that machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) are going to replace SOC analysts. But thats not going to happen, at least any time in the next couple of decades.

Yes, we have self-driving cars, and yes, a self-driving car that drives on the road without crashing is impressive. But they are as much enabled by advances in computer vision as they are by AI/ML, Using the same tools to decide if a 10,000-endpoint company network is secure is like keeping 10,000 cars on the road simultaneously when youre not 100 percent sure where youre going or what the road looks like.

AI/ML techniques arent magic bullets to solve the whole problem. They are a collection of solutions to very specific parts of the problem, such as inferring facts about security data that may be difficult or impossible for a human to determine. For example, AI/ML can detect a predictable pattern to user logon failures which highlights it as an automated activity thats using low and slow timing to try and evade detection. Or it can identify anomalous user behavior and connect it to other anomalous system activity such as when an admin suddenly logs onto the system at 3:00am from a new location.

Does the use of AI/ML need any extra training?Data science is a vocation that most security analysts are not skilled or experienced in. AI/ML systems have started to help stem the tide of alerts, but it can become problematic if analysts are not able to understand what these tools are doing.

Early AI/ML tools, for instance, were famous for presenting a result such as anomalous behavior detected, but with no context for the analyst to determine why the behavior was anomalous. The lack of insight had the potential to devolve analysts into a state of environment blindness, allowing critical threats to go unnoticed.

Training provides benefits because security operations center (SOC) analysts want to improve the way they work. Its baked into every modern SOC as the core principle of continual improvement. If we give analysts additional ways to approach the problem space, they will use them to innovate and iterate better ways of creating and delivering security value.

Outside of the data science domain, SOC analysts regularly acquire and keep certifications up to date. But with an expanding number of SOC training courses and certifications available, it is essential that analysts focus on the courses that provide tangible benefits, are relevant to the security domain, and lead to demonstrable improvements in analyst performance and capability.

What tools can help SOC analysts to do more?Modern SOC tools can help make an analyst more effective and productive. These tools take advantage of all types of available security-related data to help analysts perform meaningful analytics. Data is prioritized and presented to the analysts, so they know what to look at first, making it quicker to drill into the important areas.

Similar to AI/ML, automation within SOC tools was cited historically as a way to eliminate the need for analysts. While that debate seems to have ended (for now), some important developments did come out of it.

Specifically, the term Security Orchestration Automation Response (SOAR) has become a key grouping for automated activities. SOAR, though, is much more than this. Its a way to let SOC analysts directly automate the parts of their job which can be automated in a structured, yet collaborative and freeform way with their peers.

For example, SOAR tools can pre-aggregate additional information that an analyst might want to review upon being fed an alert. This is a tremendous time-saver because it cuts out the manual steps of requesting that data.

Click Tax is also a major consideration that doesnt get much attention. This is a colloquial measurement for the time it takes an analyst to interact with and use tools such as loading times, complex chains of UI interactions, the distance of mouse movements, and the potential for errors in selecting or entering data. Click Tax increases the time it takes an analyst to complete a task, and gets in the way of the analysis throughflow. Saving just 30 seconds in Click Tax per alert could save an entire day of SOC analyst time. The title of a recent Forrester report sums it up: Analyst Experience (AX): Security Analysts Finally Escape the Shackles of Bad UX.

ConclusionThe crisis of staffing in the cybersecurity field is going to get worse before it gets better. The good news is that we can help current security analysts be more efficient and effective. We see the best results when cutting-edge technology is used correctly, training is available to help analysts make the best use of it, and tooling is focused on enhancing and augmenting SOC teams to do more better and faster. Combining data science, training, tools, and techniques with great analysts is where the magic happens.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from SilverSky authored by michele-johnston. Read the original post at: https://www.silversky.com/blog/augmenting-the-analyst-using-data-science-training-tools-and-techniques-to-enhance-performance/

Continued here:

Augmenting the Analyst: Using data science, training, tools, and techniques to enhance performance - Security Boulevard

Working for educational equality in Indonesia since sixth grade

Computing and data science major Selina Manua (CDS26) aims to blend her coding skills with her concern for equality in education while at BU. Photo by Cydney Scott

Student ProfileWorking for educational equality in Indonesia since sixth grade

A quick snapshot of the Class of 2026, the highest achieving and most diverse class in BU history: of the 3,620 entering freshmen, 19.4 percent are first-generation students and 21.2 percent are from underrepresented groups. They hail from 47 states (with Mississippi, West Virginia, and North Dakota the exceptions) and 65 countries and regions (23 percent are international students). The class is 59 percent female, 41 percent male, and has an average GPA of 3.9 percent.

But those are just numbers. To give you a better sense of just how accomplished the Class of 2026 is, we introduce four students who share their inspiring stories.

Many students find their involvement in activism and commitment to social justice ratchets up when they get to college. For Selina Manua, growing up in Jakarta, Indonesia, it started in sixth grade.

A family friend shared a news report about a bare-bones one-room school serving the children of a shantytown under a toll bridge. The school was set to be demolished for a public works project, and adults were movingsuccessfully in the endto save it. But Manua (CDS26) asked her mother to take her there, a 30-minute drive from their home, to see the school for herself. When she did, she volunteered to teach math to the children, who were only a few years younger than her, on Saturdays.

But she wanted to do more for the schools 60 students, boys and girls age 6 to 10.

I was shocked about the conditions they were in, Manua says. There was no [insulation] so it was very hot and there was water dripping from the roof, the children had to sit on the floor all the time, and it was poorly lit.

I was in schools that had nice facilities, so I decided to help them have better conditions, because we need to have equality, she says. Thats when I started a group called Reading Train.

Manuas parents, who encourage her giving back, work in real estate development, so she lived in a nicer part of the city and knew people and companies that could help. She set about raising money, collecting in-kind donations, such as furniture, and selling T-shirts. In six months, she collected the equivalent of $10,000, along with in-kind donations to the school, called Sekolah Anak Kolong Tol Jembatan Tiga.

Theres no official translation for the school name, but if it were to be translated, it would be School for Children under the Toll Bridge, Manua says. It sounds sadly Dickensian, but there is a bit of a happy ending.

We raised enough funds to renovate the school and make it a better place for the children and also renovate the small building next to it so they will have, like, a mini-library, she says. We fixed the roof, we painted the walls, we bought new bookshelves, desks and chairs, and insulation and fans, and fixed the floor because the tiles were all broken.

She is still involved with the school, and even wrote and published a reading primer for the students. She continued to teach there on Saturdays, when the students all get a free lunch and are sometimes treated to special events, like a magician.

She wont be there this fall, though. Manua arrived at BU a few days ago and hopes to continue working toward educational equity for women and underserved populations while here. She is a Presidential Scholar and is joining the inaugural class of data science majors in the new Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.

Reading Train was hardly her only prosocial activity back home though.

Manua attended the same K-12 school through her high school freshman year, and STEM was a major focus there. Thats where my interest really blossomed, she says. There were a lot of math olympiads and competitions, and our teachers really supported us in learning about science and performing experiments.

As a freshman, she studied writing computer code and found her (other) calling. The reason is, coding is more logic-based, and there are a multitude of ways to get the same outcome, she says. It just depends on how you think and how your logic flows.

When she changed schools after freshman year, she formed sheSTEM, an all-female club, because of what she saw among poor girls in the shantytown school and others where she volunteered.

Since theyre raised in a more traditional setting, theyre engineered to think that science or STEM is a scary thing for women, she says. They havent been exposed to the modern thinking that science is for everyone. Thats when I realized we need more inclusivity in STEM, especially for women.

The club, which has about 20 members, organizes events for schools and other nonprofit groups, such as an introduction to the history of women Nobel Prize winners in science and an actual visit to the shantytown school from a woman scientist who conducted an experiment with the kids.

I was in schools that had nice facilities, so I decided to help them have better conditions, because we need to have equality.

Afterward a lot of them said, Oh, this is so fun, especially hearing from the guest talking about what she does as a woman in STEM, Manua says. She hopes the students will realize that STEM shouldnt be for just a single gender, but for everyone in the world.

She strongly believes that a good education is for everyone in the world, and shes set about working to help other students. One of the problems in that school was that the parents are illiterate, she says. Literacy to me is everything, you need it for every job in life. And in the bigger cities, people at least have access to some education, but in rural villages that privilege is taken away. A lot of places do not even have proper schools because of problems like land scarcity and lack of teachers.

So she launched Roda Belajar (in English, Learning Wheels), a plan to create a mobile school that can travel to remote villages with a teacher on board, providing an education that would not otherwise be available. She envisions a classroom inside a bus that will travel to two or three towns a dayyounger kids, she notes, have short attention spansto provide a few hours of lessons, repeating the route daily. Manua has already designed the bus, she says, and is talking to the Ministry of Education about her idea in hopes of getting it up and running next year, when she is home for the summer.

She also put her nascent programming skills to work on the project.

We need data to identify which areas need the mobile school the most, she says. I looked at data from the Ministry of Education on things like student-teacher ratio and found the places where it was the worst. And I made a route using algorithmic optimization with the data to find out where the mobile school should go first and where it should end.

She does have interests outside STEM and education, including playing tennis and cooking Japanese and Korean food. Her older sister attends the University of Washington, and when asked why she chose BU, she points to the multitude of student organizations she can get involved in.

But the most essential reason Manua came here connects to her major: its the new Center for Computing & Data Sciences, rising 19 stories above Commonwealth Avenue, which is set to open in December.

That they dedicated a whole new building to computing and data science really sparked my interest, because thats where my passion lies, she says. By building that building, they really showed that they are ready to invest in the field, and that its going to be one of their main focuses. That looks like the best building at BU.

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Introducing the Class of 2026: Selina Manua | BU Today - Boston University