ITAC collaborates with Agorize, Microsoft and RBC Future Launch to unveil new upskilling initiative to help prepare students with future-ready skills to thrive in age of disruption and artificial intelligence

New AI Pathways Initiative aims to provide Canadian students with the training and skills development required in today’s AI-fueled economy

Mississauga, ON (October 9, 2019) – Today, Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC), through its Talent division ITAC Talent, is pleased to announce the launch of the AI Pathways Initiative. This new talent development program, created in collaboration with Agorize, Isobar Canada, Microsoft Canada and  RBC Future Launch, is designed to help unlock new opportunities for students and under-represented communities looking to pursue a career in artificial intelligence (AI).

The focus of this initiative is to equip Canadian students with the knowledge and skills needed to tackle the jobs of the future and be active participants in the digital economy through relevant training, networking, and employability opportunities, including those offered by RBC and Microsoft.

“It’s not enough to meet the demand for tech skills. We must extend our global leadership in innovation and technology,” explains Angela Mondou, president and CEO, ITAC. “Our role as an industry leader is clear: find people with cutting-edge skills in AI, business or leadership, and shape what tomorrow looks like.  The AI Pathways Initiative will help to address both talent development and employer needs, establishing a Canadian talent pipeline that will help drive a successful economy.”

AI Pathways is funded in part by the Government of Canada, and is rooted in a mandate to inform and educate Canada’s youth about the expanse of learning pathways and career strategies that are available to them, and the new tech and multi-disciplinary hybrid AI careers these changes are creating. This is important given that Canada’s need for qualified AI workers is growing exponentially, and most the country’s educational institutions are struggling to keep up with the rapidly evolving field. ICTC projects that by 2021, approximately 216,000 new ICT jobs will need to be filled[1]; many of which will incorporate AI skills and understanding.

The Initiative will include three key areas of focus, developed under the Made by AI Campaign brand. …

The only thing worse than no Wi-Fi is bad Wi-Fi

Times are changing quicker than people know

Two years ago, I spoke at Zeetta Networks’ ‘Smart Infrastructure’ event about some of the Wi-Fi broadband trends we were seeing in large venues, and its impact on the demand for mobile data, today, I see that demand only increasing for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, the way that we as equipment vendors look
at data consumption has changed too. What we’re seeing is a migration from
casual data connectivity to more real-time rich multi-media content which improves
the fan experience in the venue itself.

Wi-Fi

From cameras on field to body cams on referees, we see a desire to give fans at the top of the seating bowl the same experience as someone seated right at the front – all through their mobile device. Connected venues can do this, and more are wanting this functionality because it solves two problems: how do you sell those seats which aren’t premium, and how do you compete with the close intimacy that a television can offer?

The one thing fans can’t get sitting on their sofas is the sense
of community in the live sports venue – but understandably, they don’t want to
sacrifice their view. This application brings those problems together and
solves them in one, selling more tickets while enhancing the fan experience.

But the public still has some misconceptions about networks
in venues and large arenas

When you say there’s broadband available, people expect to
get the same experience as if they were home, if not better. They don’t want to
hear about the problems with the network, they just want it to work! That means
that from a design perspective, we are always designing for the highest usage,
loading, and capacity – and even then, we’re still surprised.

At a summer Grand Slam tournament 2 years ago for example,
we expected to be peaked out at a certain consumption, never expecting that we
would get to that level. What we couldn’t predict was that the football World
Cup would …

ITAC Health – questions to Candidates for Election 2019

ITAC Health, the Health Division of the Information Technology Association of Canada, has prepared 4 questions to the candidates of the 2019 election.  These questions will be further utilized as topics for future advisory discussions with the successful candidates, be it the new national political party caucus, or jurisdictional MP representatives.  We invite members and others to join in a social media discussion on the above questions to further the dialogue around these very important issues.

  1. Small and medium-sized Canadian companies are challenged to penetrate the Canadian Health ICT marketplace due to risk averse procurement practices and a lack of national standards for interoperability and data protection. What will your government do to support start-up and scale-up Canadian companies, developing innovative ICT solutions for the health sector, to effectively sell and deploy their solutions across Canada and into a global marketplace?
  2. Recognizing the extreme sensitivity of personal health information, and the fact that the Canadian healthcare system is critical infrastructure vulnerable to attack by malicious agents, what will your government do to enable healthcare organizations and healthcare professionals to meet the challenges of cybersecurity?
  3. In order to ensure a sustainable healthcare system, in that Canadians are enabled to in the management of their own health. What will your government do to ensure that the Virtual Care agenda is moved forward and encourage consumers/citizens to become more engaged in their health and well-being, including managing their personal health information on-line?
  4. While healthcare is a provincial jurisdiction, the federal government has taken a leadership role in facilitating a national consensus on digital health through federal agencies, government departments and national reports.  What will your government do to ensure that the benefits of digital health are accessible to all Canadians and their care providers?

The post ITAC Health – questions to Candidates for Election 2019 appeared first on Information Technology Association of Canada.

from Information Technology Association of Canada https://itac.ca/blog/itac-health-questions-to-candidates-for-election-2019/…

The Middle East moves toward a smart cities future

‘Smart cities’ isn’t just a buzzword.  More than 60 percent of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050.  Annual smart city technology spending in the Middle East is rising and set to double over the next four years, especially in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

smart cities

This is one of the reasons that more than 100,000 people from 140 countries will gather at GITEX Technology Week to share insight on megatrends, including ways to drive innovation around the future of urbanism.  Countries will share creative ways to use data to improve services and quality of life around healthcare, security, mobility, economic development, and housing.

It’s exciting to see the region prioritizing innovative technologies
that pave the way for the future of smart cities as network operators start the
commercial rollout of 5G.  With the acquisition of ARRIS and
Ruckus Networks, CommScope has the resources of a Fortune 250-sized company
that is well placed to drive the future of connectivity in the region.

For more on
how network operators can prepare for this smart cities future, check out this
video.

During GITEX Technology Week 2019, CommScope will highlight its latest solutions to enable a smart future for network operators across the region:

  • Fiber for High-Speed and Robust Connectivity: Smart cities will be built on fiber.  CommScope will be demonstrating fiber technologies for faster connectivity in buildings, the data center, and the central office.
  • Ultra-Connected Homes are Becoming a Reality: Consumers are experiencing an increasingly digital life and network operators are seeking ways to unlock the best user experience.  CommScope will demonstrate how the company is delivering reliable, high-bandwidth Wi-Fi to every corner of the home and showcase how the smart media device brings connected home technologies together for a unique personalized experience. 
  • Powering Connectivity for Smart Cities: As smart cities add new mobile-connected devices like security cameras and air quality sensors, they must have access to electricity.  This is not always an easy task considering devices may be several hundred meters away from
…

How To Have A Faster User Experience In Chrome

There are many fast browsers and search engines out there. Among all these, Google Chrome is one of them. When one uses a search engine, data is downloaded, uploaded, and stored. This causes the user experience to slow down. Servers can go slow, loading of pages go slow, and so on. This can cause frustration among users, especially those who are using it for work-related tasks.

If you are using Chrome to upload content during the deadline, or going online shopping because the item you’ve been eyeing on is finally on sale, there is something you can do to make things faster. These steps will help you improve the speed and overall experience.

The first thing you do is to clear the browsing data. The reason why you have data stored in your cache and history from all of your searches and pages you’ve opened is that Chrome wants to load them faster for you the next time you visit them. The more pages you open, the more data is collected and stored. This means that Chrome can work slower.

Thankfully, the solution to this is easy: clear your cache. To do this, simply access your browsing history by entering chrome://history on your address bar. From the left panel, select Clear browsing data. Choose which data will be deleted by clicking on the checkboxes of all items you want to delete, like cached images or cookies. You can also select the time range that will be affected by the deletion. You can delete your history for the past hour, the last 24 hours, the last 7 days, the last 4 weeks, or from the beginning of time. Once you’ve selected the files you want to delete and their corresponding time range, click Clear data.
(Via: https://www.techadvisory.org/2018/12/make-google-chrome-faster-with-these-easy-steps/)

Another thing you can do is to deactivate or not enable the extensions. Chrome extensions are available for download. These are like programs that give your Chrome browser a personal touch. Depending on what you need or want, you can download a lot …

ITAC and ITI comment on ISED proposal for modernizing PIPPEDA

ITAC and ITI comment on ISED proposal for modernizing PIPPEDA

The Information Technology Association of Canada (ITAC) and the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) recently had an opportunity to provide comments on ISED’s proposals to modernize the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). These proposals are set out in ISED’s discussion paper entitled “Strengthening Privacy for the Digital Age”.

The joint ITAC – ITI paper provides an outline of the importance of a balanced approach; addresses a proposed framework for modernizing PIPPEDA; and provides a number of recommendations for ISED to consider.

To review the full report, click here.

The post ITAC and ITI comment on ISED proposal for modernizing PIPPEDA appeared first on Information Technology Association of Canada.

from Information Technology Association of Canada https://itac.ca/blog/12908/…

Ways to Get the Most from a Managed Help Desk

Ways to Get the Most from a Managed Help Desk

Managed Help Desk

In any business, the customer is the King. For this reason, most organizations have a support desk to deal with the queries raised by their clients. However, understanding and anticipating consumer needs presents a challenge to many help desk managers. Why? Because the consumer gauges the effectiveness and service quality of an organization’s response to a raised concern based on their arbitrary metrics.

An organization’s help desk personnel adheres to internal guides and service-delivery systems to anticipate consumer needs. However, you can only provide excellent customer care by assessing clients’ experiences and requirements. For instance, if a consumer expects his/her query to get solved after 24 hours, then he/she should receive a response within that time frame. The only problem comes when the issue is urgent. Fortunately, we’ve compiled some useful tips on how to get the most value from a help desk management system.

  • Establish Smarter Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Help desk managers should agree and clearly define the services to employees and clients to provide quality responses to consumers’ concerns. That not only makes it easy to measure service excellence but also enables you to have informed expectations. Help desk management tools that have an SLA feature makes it easy to include SLA specifications into your business operations.

  • Promote Customer Self-Service

According to statistics, 72% of consumers would love to use self-service help desk tools. Therefore, businesses need to have user-friendly management software. For example, you can have a consumer self-service portal and Q&A forums where consumers can find solutions to their problems.

  • Establish a Helpful Culture

Most businesses’ help desks focus on reducing costs, which compromises quality of service delivery. Nonetheless, if your goal is consumer-oriented, you’ll not only offer useful help to clients but you’ll also cut down the costs. Additionally, it boosts the accuracy of your expectations on consumer’s needs, letting you have solutions before problems erupt.

Feel free to contact us if you think your business needs a revamped help desk management system. …

5 Common Cybersecurity Myths That Endanger Small Businesses

Because it’s so complicated, cybersecurity is a difficult topic for small and midsized businesses to engage in. There are many things that go into good cybersecurity, like malware protection, network, and server security, application security, and the management of mobile and IoT devices. For small and midsized companies that don’t have access to an in-house cybersecurity team, this complexity can easily become overwhelming.

SMB owner frustrated

Another of the major reasons that it’s hard for SMBs to get a grasp on cybersecurity is that there is a lot of conflicting, outdated, and inaccurate information surrounding the topic. While Google can be a great resource for basic research, it fails to provide in-depth information, and very often leads people in entirely the wrong direction.

Without a true sense of what a strong cybersecurity solution does and doesn’t entail, most businesses will suffer. Let’s look at some of the most common cybersecurity myths and set the record straight.

Myth 1: Cybersecurity is Only Necessary for Large Companies

With the nation’s attention on large-scale hacks, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that hackers are only targeting major corporations. But those spectacular attacks, like the Equifax breach, the Yahoo attacks, or the Sony Pictures hack, are just the tip of the iceberg.

The reality is that you don’t hear about the thousands of smaller cyberattacks that happen every year, because either the companies are too small to make the news, or else the organization getting hacked doesn’t want to admit that they’ve been compromised. Here are the facts:

In many cases, small and midsized businesses might not even know that they’ve been attacked. According to ZDNet, it takes an average of …

CommScope Innovation Center, Silicon Valley is Open for Business

A few weeks ago, we passed a milestone at CommScope with the first-ever innovation center for product and solution excellence in the San Francisco Bay area. Hosted in our Sunnyvale, CA office, this represents the first formal executive briefing center designed by Ruckus and showcasing its technology and solutions. As an official CommScope Innovation Center, it also establishes a major presence for CommScope in Silicon Valley.

Visitors to the Innovation Center are treated to a fully built out and functional infrastructure that showcases the best of the combined companies. The facility runs as its own standalone production network with a fully redundant ICX wired and wireless core managed by SmartZone network controllers.

Ruckus Cloudpath®, a secure device onboarding solution, is used for guest access and by the Innovation Center administrators and staff for onboarding of all other devices in the center.

Other demonstrations of technology abound within the Innovation
Center including:

  • IoT demonstrations within different
    function domains
  • OnGo (CBRS) private LTE
  • Analytics
  • Location Tracking
  • Virtual reality classroom
  • And much more

The Innovation Center is an interactive experience that
allows visitors to talk to some of the best minds in the industry as well as experience
the possibilities that a world-class suite of network solutions opens.

If you are traveling in the Bay area and have time, we’d
love to have you stop by and say hello.

The post CommScope Innovation Center, Silicon Valley is Open for Business appeared first on The Ruckus Room.

from The Ruckus Room https://theruckusroom.ruckuswireless.com/wired-wireless/company-news/commscope-innovation-center-silicon-valley-is-open-for-business/…

4 Laptops You Can Get For Less Than $300

Are you looking for a laptop? You have a lot of options out there but if you’re on a budget, your options maybe limited. Nonetheless, you’d still be able to one. That’s for sure.

If you’re looking for a laptop under $300, you’re going to have to make some sacrifices, but that doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with a bad notebook. There are laptops under $300 that offer 1080p displays, long battery life and even 2-in-1 functionality. If you’re against getting a Chromebook, you might want to reconsider, especially because that device will most likely run a lot smoother with a weaker processor compared to a Windows 10 machine.

(Via: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/best-laptops-under-300)

Here are the 4 options you can look into. You can start with HP Stream 11.

The HP Stream 11 is one of the best Windows 10 laptops you can find at this price. The Stream’s cute, 11-inch chassis is packed with all-day battery life and relatively strong performance. This laptop is also incredibly portable, weighing in at 2.5 pounds and measuring just 0.7 inches thick. And even though its keyboard can be a little cramped, it offers decent key travel. You won’t find a better Windows laptop for under $200.

(Via: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/best-laptops-under-300)

The HP Chromebook 14 is also worth looking into.

The Intel version of the HP Chromebook 14 is a solid improvement over its AMD counterpart. For just under $300, you get an attractive laptop with a 14-inch, 1920 x 1080 display, which is an incredibly rare combination at this price point. To top it all off, HP’s Chromebook 14 features a comfortable keyboard and a battery that can last an entire workday and then some. If you’re looking for a Chromebook that doesn’t scream elementary school, then the HP Chromebook 14 is the one to get.

(Via: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/best-laptops-under-300)

The Lenovo IdealPad 330 is packed with a lot of features for a very affordable price.

We wouldn’t call the Lenovo IdeaPad 330 one of the best laptops around, but for under $300,

…