Women are underrepresented at the top. What can your organization do to change this? Melinda Gates once said that “a woman with a voice is by definition a strong woman. But the search to find that voice can be remarkably difficult.” While considerable progress has been made in recent years on gender inclusivity and diversity in the business world and most countries have in place rules and guidelines for increasing the representation of women in the boardroom, a stark divide still exists at the top of the corporate pyramid. The sixth edition of “Women in the Boardroom,” a study conducted by Deloitte in 2018, revealed that women hold only 16.9% of board seats worldwide. Of the 2,765 MSCI ACWI Index companies, only one in five directors were women in 2019, up a marginal 2.1% from the year before. There is no dearth of inspirational women who have been a role model for millions of aspiring women entrepreneurs in the world. Women in leadership positions are hardly viewed as an anomaly, and yet the male-dominated boardroom still lacks the diversity that is advocated and expected. Diversity is so much more than just an organizational goal. Studies have long shown that there are tangible benefits of diversity in an organization. If the organization chooses to look beyond discriminating factors like gender, they will be able to recruit from a larger talent pool. By embracing diversity, they can attract and retain the best talent. And when a diverse, talented group of people work together, there is a better exchange of ideas, viewpoints, market insights, and problem-solving skills. This results in a high level of employee engagement and improved financial performance. A diverse organization not only signals an attractive working environment for talent but also a promising opportunity for investors. Diversity Affects Performance Vinita Shrivastava, Chief Human Resources Officer at Syngene International Ltd., says that boards will a greater gender balance “bring a lot of finesse, sophistication, and human touch to the boardroom,” which creates an “objective and unbiased environment.” It also allows for a variety of perspectives, which can boost both strategy and execution. Because of Boards’ pivotal role in company growth and decision-making on behalf of shareholders, both of which involve considerations of economic, social, and political realities, diversity on the Board is a crucial element in its ability to successfully perform. And the number of qualified women out there means that there is little reason for any Board to not be enhancing diversity – and performing successfully. According to Arun Balakrishnan, Honorary Chairman Bengaluru at the Institute of Directors, the different perspective that women can offer is an indispensable tool in a male-dominated world. “The key to success is always intelligence and hard work, with an eye on results,” he said. “A woman also often finds herself faced with the need to keep abreast of new paradigms in management and technology to boost her value among peers.” Empowering Women To Make The Leap Women tend to have an edge over men when it comes to emotional intelligence, which can be leveraged in managing shareholders and employees more efficiently. Shrivastava maintains that if women have confidence in themselves, are well-versed in their subject, and have a good balance of IQ, the emotional quotient, the adaptability quotient, and the sociability quotient, then “there is nothing that can stop us.” “It is very important to be aware of the world around us and also try and network to the best of our ability,” she added. “In order to be a part of the boardroom, one needs to have a holistic view of things around us and be able to articulate that well.” Shrivastava advises aspiring women leaders to have a 360-degree view of topics around them in addition to their specialization, network strategically, and make their presence felt. “Move ahead with grit and passion,” she said. “Don’t feel challenged at any time because you are a woman but feel empowered that you bring a different set of skills and perspective to the table. Articulate your views clearly and don’t feel intimidated.” First and foremost, women must believe in themselves and be willing to negotiate for themselves without compromise and build on their successes. Facing the steep uphill climb to the top of the corporate ladder means using all the tools in one’s arsenal and not being afraid to tout one’s accomplishments. Beating The Status Quo According to a Credit Suisse Research Institute report published in 2019, female representation on boards increased just 4.3 percentage points to 15.2% in 2019 since 2014 in India, which is significantly lower than the global average of 20.6% for the same period. India saw a slight improvement in the representation of women in senior management, rising from 6.9% in 2016 to 8.5% in 2019. A recent study of “Women on Boards 2020” ranked India 12th globally in female representation on company boards. Among the 628 listed companies who took part in the survey, 55% have women as directors of their Boards, which is 14% higher than last year. The increase in the number of female directors over the past year is an encouraging sign that organizations are starting to prioritize gender diversity in the boardroom. This positive upward trend is in part due to regulations that have been put in place to encourage gender diversity of Boards. In response to the struggles women face in making their mark in the boardroom, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in compliance with the Companies Act 2013, made it compulsory to have at least one woman on the board from October 2014. In addition, SEBI mandated that vacant board seats previously held by women are required to be filled by other women. This regulatory nudge has paved the way toward better gender diversity in the boardroom to 17% year-on-year in March 2020 from just 6% in March 2014. Balakrishnan says the appreciable increase in gender diversity on Indian Boards reflects the fact that more qualified and competent women are coming up the corporate ladder and their presence goes beyond just a statutory requirement. But a lack of enforcement and Board accountability mean that in practice, the regulations can sometimes be bent or ignored. Smaller and family-run organizations, for example, tend to appoint their female relatives to the Board — women who are often neither qualified nor have participatory powers on the Board and whose presence simply marks compliance with the SEBI rules. Larger organizations, on the other hand, might favor the same handful of known names already serving on Boards elsewhere to fill the slot. This approach overburdens women who are already serving on various boards and discourages a new set of aspiring leaders at the same time. The reasons that organizations cite for their lack of active diversity are a Catch-22. The most common is reportedly fewer women at the senior management and C-suite level who are “board ready” – which begs the question of why these organizations are not taking steps to help prepare women for Board positions. Another reason seems to be the patriarchal mindset of organizations that are reluctant to adapt to change and want to stick to their old methods. But organizations have the power to rectify these perceived obstacles by adopting the right mindset and taking the right measures. Women’s presence on Boards needs to reach a certain critical mass for it to have a real impact. The end goal for organizations should not be just getting more female representation on their Boards but ensuring it as a step toward gender parity. To achieve this, the industry as a whole needs to take concrete action. Legislation does play a part, but it is only a part of the equation. Here are a few ways that organizations can move in the right direction for better representation of women on Boards. Reducing Bias And Casting A Wider Net Bias poses a huge constraint on diversity, and organizations must aim to reduce bias during the recruitment process and cast a wider net while looking for talent within and outside the company. “In India, organizations have limited their search to the more experienced women leaders,” said Pranab Barua, Chairman of Loyal Hospitality. “One way of overcoming this is to take some risks and broaden the net covering bright young leaders from the next rung. This will not only bring youth to some of the Boards but will also create a huge future pipeline of women leaders for Board positions.” Making A Commitment Gender diversity and representation in the organization must not be just a goal but must become part of the organizational culture. The decision to hire more women at the C-suite level and appoint a certain number of female directors needs to come after taking into view the many benefits rather than looking at it narrowly through the lens of compliance. Once there is a commitment from the top, finding the right candidates becomes much easier. Organizations should develop standard procedures and processes that will enable them to stick to the commitment. Mandatory disclosures about diversity, well-defined diversity criteria, measurable targets, periodic refreshment of the board, investor engagement, and voting are some of the ways through which organizations can convert their gender diversity commitment into a measurable achievement. Sponsoring And Mentoring Offering sponsorship and mentorship programs to support, groom, empower, and prepare women for board positions is an important step toward ensuring that there is a pool of qualified candidates for the present as well as the future. The companies can introduce campaigns for their women employees to create awareness on how they can climb the corporate ladders. Regular guidance and mentorship programs dedicated to encouraging women at workplace to take up the senior positions will generate a good pipeline of boardroom ready women leaders. Creating Role Models Creating strong female role models within the organization encourages other women to aspire for leadership positions and establishes a precedent. These women can also become facilitators to guide and support other aspiring women. When a woman holds a position at the C-suite or board level, it often makes it easier to increase the representation over time. The Mid-Level Management Hitch A woman’s career usually stalls at middle management because of a lack of opportunities and support. To encourage retention and growth of women in the workplace, organizations should provide more flexibility for working parents and facilitate easy transitions for those returning from a career gap. In addition, the organization should provide professional development opportunities, challenging roles, and elevated responsibilities for women at the mid-management level so that they feel empowered and stand out for that next step. Are You Board Ready? Organizations have a responsibility to come up with initiatives promoting gender equality at the board level. But women leaders also need to be introspective and analyze situations themselves. They should volunteer and seek guidance from their mentors and ask themselves whether their existing skill set is enough to become a board member. Women leaders should consider undergoing new training to upgrade their talents, which will distinguish them from others in the organization. Corporations thrive on networks, and women leaders should endeavor to develop their contacts among industry leaders to climb up the corporate ladder. Fortune favors the brave, and women should be bold about asking more questions to establish their position in senior leadership instead of waiting for organizations to create a conducive ecosystem. For women to enter the boardroom, they must first ask themselves whether they are boardroom ready. The benefits of a diverse board cannot be realized without an unbiased and liberal organizational culture. Diversity spurs more diversity. Any approach for diversity in the boardroom must be synchronous with broader diversity in the organization. One without the other is simply ineffective. Organizations should reflect the diverse world we live in, and organizational heads should be responsible for executing this vision. They should set the tone at the top and make a case for diversity and gender parity in the organization as a priority. Unless this becomes the norm, women will continue to be underrepresented in the C-suite and boardroom. Now is the time for change. At Stanton Chase, we advocate for diversity and inclusion at the workplace. Stanton Chase is a proud member of the 30% Club and has established itself as a leader in promoting gender-diversity on boards. To find out how Stanton Chase can help your organization diversify its boardroom, please contact Veena Pandey. About Authors: Ashwini Prakash is a Managing Partner for Stanton Chase’s India offices. She has over 18 years’ experience in executive search consulting and specializes in the consumer products, retail, life sciences, and healthcare sectors. She is a Certified Assessment Consultant (Psychometric Assessments) and a Certified Organisation Culture Expert. Veena Pandey heads the editorial and content function for the Stanton Chase India offices. She has an extensive background in both qualitative and quantitative research.

From autonomous vehicles to virtual assistants, artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly present in our daily lives, and yet we are really just at the beginning of the curve. A powerful, transformative technology though it is, dealing with vast amounts of data, applications are already triggering unease in the public and the continued adoption of the game-changing technology must be balanced with heightened scrutiny towards policy, regulation, and ethics. The need for more stringent oversight is demonstrated by the increasing reliance we place on this technology in our daily lives -- in the case of driverless cars, we'd be placing our lives in the hands of AI. But it's also demonstrated in use by businesses and organizations. In the case of law enforcement, Flaws, or incompleteness in the data used by facial recognition systems in law enforcement, for example, can lead to racial profiling or misidentification of suspects, or add to the sense of an invasive surveillance culture at best.

Narratives are fundamental to our perception of the world and are pervasive in all activities that involve the representation of events in time. Yet, modern online information systems do not incorporate narratives in their representation of events occurring over time. This article aims to bridge this gap, combining the theory of narrative representations with the data from modern online systems. We make three key contributions: a theory-driven computational representation of narratives, a novel extraction algorithm to obtain these representations from data, and an evaluation of our approach. In particular, given the effectiveness of visual metaphors, we employ a route map metaphor to design a narrative map representation. The narrative map representation illustrates the events and stories in the narrative as a series of landmarks and routes on the map. Each element of our representation is backed by a corresponding element from formal narrative theory, thus providing a solid theoretical background to our method. Our approach extracts the underlying graph structure of the narrative map using a novel optimization technique focused on maximizing coherence while respecting structural and coverage constraints. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach by performing a user evaluation to assess the quality of the representation, metaphor, and visualization. Evaluation results indicate that the Narrative Map representation is a powerful method to communicate complex narratives to individuals. Our findings have implications for intelligence analysts, computational journalists, and misinformation researchers.

Business processes evolve over time to adapt to changing business environments. This requires continuous monitoring of business processes to gain insights into whether they conform to the intended design or deviate from it. The situation when a business process changes while being analysed is denoted as Concept Drift. Its analysis is concerned with studying how a business process changes, in terms of detecting and localising changes and studying the effects of the latter. Concept drift analysis is crucial to enable early detection and management of changes, that is, whether to promote a change to become part of an improved process, or to reject the change and make decisions to mitigate its effects. Despite its importance, there exists no comprehensive framework for analysing concept drift types, affected process perspectives, and granularity levels of a business process. This article proposes the CONcept Drift Analysis in Process Mining (CONDA-PM) framework describing phases and requirements of a concept drift analysis approach. CONDA-PM was derived from a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of current approaches analysing concept drift. We apply the CONDA-PM framework on current approaches to concept drift analysis and evaluate their maturity. Applying CONDA-PM framework highlights areas where research is needed to complement existing efforts.

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are being increasingly deployed for commercial, civilian, and military applications. The current UAS state-of-the-art still depends on a remote human controller with robust wireless links to perform several of these applications. The lack of autonomy restricts the domains of application and tasks for which a UAS can be deployed. Enabling autonomy and intelligence to the UAS will help overcome this hurdle and expand its use improving safety and efficiency. The exponential increase in computing resources and the availability of large amount of data in this digital era has led to the resurgence of machine learning from its last winter. Therefore, in this chapter, we discuss how some of the advances in machine learning, specifically deep learning and reinforcement learning can be leveraged to develop next-generation autonomous UAS. We first begin motivating this chapter by discussing the application, challenges, and opportunities of the current UAS in the introductory section. We then provide an overview of some of the key deep learning and reinforcement learning techniques discussed throughout this chapter. A key area of focus that will be essential to enable autonomy to UAS is computer vision. Accordingly, we discuss how deep learning approaches have been used to accomplish some of the basic tasks that contribute to providing UAS autonomy. Then we discuss how reinforcement learning is explored for using this information to provide autonomous control and navigation for UAS. Next, we provide the reader with directions to choose appropriate simulation suites and hardware platforms that will help to rapidly prototype novel machine learning based solutions for UAS. We additionally discuss the open problems and challenges pertaining to each aspect of developing autonomous UAS solutions to shine light on potential research areas.

SUNNY is an Algorithm Selection (AS) technique originally tailored for Constraint Programming (CP). SUNNY enables to schedule, from a portfolio of solvers, a subset of solvers to be run on a given CP problem. This approach has proved to be effective for CP problems, and its parallel version won many gold medals in the Open category of the MiniZinc Challenge -- the yearly international competition for CP solvers. In 2015, the ASlib benchmarks were released for comparing AS systems coming from disparate fields (e.g., ASP, QBF, and SAT) and SUNNY was extended to deal with generic AS problems. This led to the development of sunny-as2, an algorithm selector based on SUNNY for ASlib scenarios. A preliminary version of sunny-as2 was submitted to the Open Algorithm Selection Challenge (OASC) in 2017, where it turned out to be the best approach for the runtime minimization of decision problems. In this work, we present the technical advancements of sunny-as2, including: (i) wrapper-based feature selection; (ii) a training approach combining feature selection and neighbourhood size configuration; (iii) the application of nested cross-validation. We show how sunny-as2 performance varies depending on the considered AS scenarios, and we discuss its strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we also show how sunny-as2 improves on its preliminary version submitted to OASC.

This article presents a hybrid approach based on a Grounded Text Generation (GTG) model to building robust task bots at scale. GTG is a hybrid model which uses a large-scale Transformer neural network as its backbone, combined with symbol-manipulation modules for knowledge base inference and prior knowledge encoding, to generate responses grounded in dialog belief state and real-world knowledge for task completion. GTG is pre-trained on large amounts of raw text and human conversational data, and can be fine-tuned to complete a wide range of tasks. The hybrid approach and its variants are being developed simultaneously by multiple research teams. The primary results reported on task-oriented dialog benchmarks are very promising, demonstrating the big potential of this approach. This article provides an overview of this progress and discusses related methods and technologies that can be incorporated for building robust conversational AI systems.

  Introduction Software testing is a phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and it is a process used to identify the precision, integrity and quality of developed computer software service/ product. It is a systematic process carried out with the aim of identifying mistakes or bugs in code so that it could be …

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and AI company Cerebras Systems today announced the integration of the 1.2-trillion Cerebras' Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) chip into the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) 23-petaflop Lassen supercomputer. The pairing of Lassen's simulation capability with Cerebras' machine learning compute system, along with the CS-1 accelerator system that houses the chip, makes LLNL "the first institution to integrate the AI platform with a large-scale supercomputer and creates a radically new type of computing solution, enabling researchers to investigate novel approaches to predictive modeling," according to the lab. Work on initial AI models began last month. Lassen is the "unclassified companion," according to LLNL, to the IBM/Nvidia system Sierra (ranked no. 3 on the Top500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputer) and is no. Funded by the NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program, the platform aims to accelerate solutions for Department of Energy and NNSA national security mission applications.

Visual odometry (VO) is a prevalent way to deal with the relative localization problem, which is becoming increasingly mature and accurate, but it tends to be fragile under challenging environments. Comparing with classical geometry-based methods, deep learning-based methods can automatically learn effective and robust representations, such as depth, optical flow, feature, ego-motion, etc., from data without explicit computation. Nevertheless, there still lacks a thorough review of the recent advances of deep learning-based VO (Deep VO). Therefore, this paper aims to gain a deep insight on how deep learning can profit and optimize the VO systems. We first screen out a number of qualifications including accuracy, efficiency, scalability, dynamicity, practicability, and extensibility, and employ them as the criteria. Then, using the offered criteria as the uniform measurements, we detailedly evaluate and discuss how deep learning improves the performance of VO from the aspects of depth estimation, feature extraction and matching, pose estimation. We also summarize the complicated and emerging areas of Deep VO, such as mobile robots, medical robots, augmented reality and virtual reality, etc. Through the literature decomposition, analysis, and comparison, we finally put forward a number of open issues and raise some future research directions in this field.