Tag: technology

From Arches to Algorithms: Foundations Across Time

When we think of Roman architecture, what comes to mind? Colosseums, aqueducts, and basilicas—structures that stood the test of time. The Romans weren’t just building for beauty. They engineered for symmetry, durability, and public utility. Their aqueducts carried water across miles with remarkable precision, and their basilicas and forums became centers of civic life and governance.

Now, fast forward nearly 2,000 years. Today’s architects of generative AI face a very different medium—code and cloud instead of stone and marble—but the design questions aren’t so different.

In the world of AWS generative AI, the foundations are about scalability and modularity. Instead of concrete and arches, we build with services like:

  • Amazon SageMaker for streamlined training and deployment, bringing together widely adopted AWS machine learning (ML) and analytics capabilities, the next generation of Amazon SageMaker delivers an integrated experience for analytics and AI with unified access to all your data. Collaborate and build faster from a unified studio using familiar AWS tools for model development in SageMaker AI (including HyperPod, JumpStart, and MLOps), generative AI, data processing, and SQL analytics, accelerated by Amazon Q Developer, the most capable generative AI assistant for software development. Access all your data whether it’s stored in data lakes, data warehouses, or third-party or federated data sources, with governance built in to meet enterprise security needs.

  • Amazon Bedrock for direct access to generative AI models via APIs. Amazon Bedrock is a comprehensive, secure, and flexible service for building generative AI applications and agents. Amazon Bedrock connects you to leading foundation models (FMs), services to deploy and operate agents, and tools for fine-tuning, safeguarding, and optimizing models along with knowledge bases to connect applications to your latest data so that you have everything you need to quickly move from experimentation to real-world deployment.

  • AWS Inferentia chips to deliver cost-efficient performance at scale. AWS Inferentia chips are designed by AWS to deliver high performance at the lowest cost in Amazon EC2 for your deep learning (DL) and generative AI inference applications. 

Just as Roman engineers thought about structures that would last for centuries, AWS engineers design digital systems that can scale globally, adapt instantly, and endure change.

The underlying truth is timeless: whether in stone or in cloud, strong foundations determine what endures. Rome’s enduring arches echo in today’s scalable pipelines. Both ask the same question: what can we build today that will still matter tomorrow?

4b: Decentralized Finance (DeFi) – Cryptocurrencies

“If you don’t believe it or don’t get it, I don’t have the time to try to convince you, sorry.” – Satoshi Nakamoto

We continue our journey into Decentralized Finance (DeFi) with the discussion around Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains. In the past several posts, I have provided background on the various aspects of the Web 3.0 ecosystem.

The timing of this post comes in the heels of the recent development in Terra Luna and UST  which in itself is terrible but not a death knell for cryptocurrency. I approach the cryptocurrency subject as a technological innovation rather than a speculative asset class. If you recall the dot com boom, there was innovation and fraud that permeated the system and eventually some companies came out of it successfully. We can see similar situation here. Let’s get back to our learning on the Web 3.0 and focus on cryptocurrencies.

What is Cryptocurrency?

According to Wikipedia, Cryptocurrency is a digital currency designed to work as a medium of exchange through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank to uphold and maintain it.

There are three key characteristics that makes it difficult to dismiss the importance of cryptos.

      1. Trustless – Since the system is peer-to-peer, no trust between the sender and recipient is required. In addition, the incentives for the miners is adequate enough to not defraud the users but to add it to the blockchain resulting in the integrity of the environment.
      2. Immutable – Transaction cannot be reverted since it is permanently recorded in the ledger and transmitted across all nodes.
      3. Decentralized – No central agency that controls the creation of the new coins or transfer of the coins from one entity to another. Granted exchanges facilitate those transfers but there are multiple exchanges and a user can go to any exchange to get the task completed without having rely on only one.

Let’s take an example of sending money from one country to another country through wire. The processing has the following steps and it will take at least five business days (may change depending not the recipient country) for the recipient to get the payment.

The central banks/correspondent banks act as intermediaries to oversee the payments to or from the senders/receiver. Now let’s review how Cryptocurrency works.

 

Making sense of bitcoin and blockchain technology: PwC

In this peer to peer system, because there is no central agency, the entities easily transfer their resources (currencies) to make an entry or exit on the positions. As a result, the payments are near real time. Bitcoin transactions can take place within 10 to 15 minutes, Ethereum within five minutes and so on. The quickness of the transfers is unbelievable and liquidity is instantaneous.

Another benefit would be to prevent corrupt and oppressive governments intervening and siphoning off funds from the citizens. By using cryptocurrencies, the citizens can protect their wealth since it will be stored in their wallets with the private keys that is not accessible by the governments. They can migrate to other countries and liquidate the cryptocurrencies without any issue.

Requires just internet and anyone can begin transacting with the cryptocurrencies. Today there are over 300+ million users and this is huge considering there were zero users a decade ago.

Global Cryptocurrency Courtesy: Small business blog

The adoption rates are comparable to the internet growth

cryptocurrency

Courtesy: Small business blog

Numerous brands and companies are accepting the crypto payments. Here is a list that may not be exhaustive for Bitcoin payments.

Who Accepts Bitcoin - Infographic

Courtesy: Spendmenot

Why do they matter?

      • Cryptocurrencies allow low cost, nearly instantaneous, borderless, peer-to-peer transfers of actual value
      • Low barrier to entry and not subject to business hours in mainstream financial institutions
      • Payment blockchains open up access to financial services to unbanked/underserved people worldwide
      • Mobile wallets make it cheaper for immigrants to transfer money to their homeland
      • Can provide safer store of value in countries with hyperinflation

The market cap as we speak is hitting $1.3 Trillion which is no joke and of course, the volatility is not for faint of heart. It went up to $3 Trillion last November before coming down to the current levels. Comparing this withUS Stock Exchange that has the market cap of around $53 Trillion, we are at the early stages of a financial asset.

In our next installment we will review other aspects of DeFi like lending, farming etc., Meanwhile I will be taking few weeks off this summer and resume the posts in July. Happy Summer everyone!

Part 3: Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

DAO is an entity that lives on a network and exists independently, but also relies heavily on the human person to perform certain tasks that it cannot. – Vitalik Buterin

Let’s continue to explore further in our journey. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 before reading this post.

  • Web 3.0 applications – Community managed applications
  • Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) – Community owned governance
  • Decentralized Finance (DeFi) – Community Finance
  • Stable-coins and Central Bank Digital Currencies – Fiat collateralized and Government issue digital coins
  • Creator Economy & Non Fungible Tokens (NFTs) – Community creations
  • Blockchain based games – Community built, created and owned Games

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs):

Before we review the merits of DAO, it is important to review the challenges in a centralized system. Every publicly traded companies are centrally organized with a CEO at the top. As such, it is important for the CEO to be ethical, trustworthy, and showcase a flawless image to the public. Otherwise, we have seen how Elon Musk’s interview while smoking marijuana evaporated $4 billion Tesla stock. Or how Lukin Coffe’s revenues catapulted the company stock to $24 and fell down to $2.40 after it was identified. In addition, when the central head dies or leaves there’s an impact to the stock price and company. Is there a way to fix this dependency? DAOs emerged to address this issue.

Decentralized – Power lies in the community not with a single individual. Rules cannot be changed by single individual but by the community voting.

Autonomous – With on-chain governance, there is no human intervention, votes are tallied and decisions are implemented through smart contracts.

Organizations – entities that coordinate activities among stakeholders

The following captures the differences between the centralized and decentralized organizations.

Source: BlockchainHub

DAOs are fundamentally changing the ways the work is done. They remove the capital and human resource limitations by converting them to community ownership and machine contracts. The resources can reside anywhere in the world to contribute and get rewarded. There is no central authority and everyone has an equal say in the future or operational aspects of the project. While there are benefits of adopting the decentralized organizations, they also come with some challenges.

    1. It may be challenging to coordinate multiple decisions to be made initially when the project is kicked off. However over a period of time these will reduce and will be more manageable.
    2. Governance conflicts between shareholders, company managers and creditors. These cannot be resolved through the current legal framework and there is no entity that validates the smart contracts.
    3. There is a tradeoff done between scalability, security and decentralization for the blockchain. Security and decentralization may have some impact on scalability of the blockchain
    4. Security and economic are the biggest blockers for the growth of DAOs as the combined security and economic attack would render them useless.

However, there are tools like Discourse, Tally, Snapshot, Cybill etc.,  have emerged to solve the above challenges. The DAOs are great solution to mitigate the ills of centralized organizations but it is still in its infant stage. The tools, regulations and security breakthroughs will help grow DAOs and eventually be adopted across the board. One of the areas that has blossomed is the Decentralized Finance which we will review in detail next.

 

Opportunities in Healthcare post COVID-19

Recently, I had the opportunity  speak at a  webinar on Post-COVID-19 Global Job Opportunities in Healthcare to final year Engineering students in India. I shared the following highlights which may be relevant to everyone in the Healthcare technology industry. The following are the broad sectors within healthcare.

Specifically the tools/technologies in this space are listed below:

In addition, the soft skills required to be successful.

Comment if you can think of any other trends?