I did a startup in 1998 by applying AI to the lead generation and qualification problem. It was early. The data was not yet rich enough. Now, the data is there. Can the problem finally be solved at the right level of sophistication? Sramana Mitra: Let's go to the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born and raised? Jonathan Spier: I'm a California guy raised in San Diego. I came up here to go to school at Berkeley. I was never able to escape again. Sramana Mitra: What did you do after Berkeley? Jonathan Spier: I went briefly into consulting and then I landed at a company called Ariba. I was the number 85 employee. Within a few years, we were 3,500 people. It was a fun place to be. Sramana Mitra: We have the Ariba case study. Keith Krach was on the series. Jonathan Spier: He was a great leader. That whole team was amazing. I was the youngest person they hired. It was a really senior team they had by the time I joined. I got pretty much hooked on growth

The distributed nature and privacy-preserving characteristics of federated learning make it prone to the threat of poisoning attacks, especially backdoor attacks, where the adversary implants backdoors to misguide the model on certain attacker-chosen sub-tasks. In this paper, we present a novel method ARIBA to accurately and robustly identify backdoor attacks in federated learning. By empirical study, we observe that backdoor attacks are discernible by the filters of CNN layers. Based on this finding, we employ unsupervised anomaly detection to evaluate the pre-processed filters and calculate an anomaly score for each client. We then identify the most suspicious clients according to their anomaly scores. Extensive experiments are conducted, which show that our method ARIBA can effectively and robustly defend against multiple state-of-the-art attacks without degrading model performance.

Author Rory McDonald spent several years studying companies pioneering new categories in several fields, most notably software and fintech. He interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, corporate innovation chiefs, market analysts, and journalists. Author Keith Krach built and led four category-creating enterprises in industrial robotics, mechanical design automation, B2B ecommerce, and digital signature. Using multiple-case methods, and melding their analysis with personal experience, the authors compared the emerging insights to develop a theory of the category creation process. They also reviewed prior research on category creation and market formation in organization theory and strategy.

This year's SAP SAPPHIRE conference was not an occasion of major announcements. When you have such a wide and deep installed base, the last thing you want to do is blindside your clients. But with the clock ticking on the sunset of standard support for SAP Business Suite -- currently eight years and counting -- SAP chairman Hasso Plattner claims that its replacement, S/4HANA, is now essentially feature-complete. Like Oracle, SAP is also promoting cloud as the logical destination for new adoption and for new features is going cloud-first. But that's where the similarities end.

SAP acquired procurement software vendor Ariba in 2011, but the company's history dates back two decades. This week, SAP Ariba executives briefed analysts in Boston, giving an overview of recent roadmap milestones as well as a look ahead at what's yet to come. Growth markers: There are now 2.4 million suppliers on Ariba's business network, with more than $1 trillion in commerce transactions each year. In addition, Ariba has a presence in 190 countries. Yet Ariba has set some lofty goals for additional growth.