The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

When Sun Tzu wrote: “All warfare is based on deception," he probably wasn’t thinking of the SolarWinds attack. But it seems like we might learn something about that recent event by studying his legendary text, *The Art of War.* Or so says Alex Gounares, CEO of Polyverse Corporation and our guest on the latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* Sun Tzu and the military talk about using decoys, says Gounares, and "cyber attackers use decoys all the time. And it works. It fooled World War II Germany with the decoys for the Calais invasion, it fooled in Confucian times, and it fools today in 2020.” If you don’t want to be fooled, you’ll attend—carefully—to what Gounares and Sam Rehman say in this spirited conversation. Gounares—who in a previous life was Bill Gates’ technological advisor—zeroes in on the extremely topical theme of zero-trust software. Says Gounares: “Zero trust is this idea of saying: Assume the world around you is messy.” Listening to these two veterans talk about micro-segmentation, entropy, and repeatability is an educational experience you won’t want to miss. Trust us. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Robots are inching their way toward us. In the workplace. In hospitals. In grocery stores. This isn’t a necessarily alarming development. It's certainly not in the eyes of people like our guest, Marcio Macedo, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Ava Robotics. Macedo says it’s all about creating the right kind of human-to-robot partnerships: “To us, it comes to down to a focus on learning with the customer.” Luckily, Macedo’s interlocutor this episode, Toby Bottorf, is the author of a classic blog post called “Robots for People: A Humanist Reframing of Automated Labor.” Their conversation is anything but robotic. For instance, Macedo talks about how, during family visits to nursing facilities during COVID times, Ava’s telepresence robot is “a very physical way for family members to come in,” adding that it’s “much more immersive and engaging than an iPad being brought on a tripod.” Bottorf points out the “stalking pandemic of loneliness, which Zoom is no cure for” and Macedo says: “There’s a lot of promise in robotics for sure in helping address that.” Macedo talks about the hybrid office situation so many of us do, or will soon, face, and says that here robots will “not just deliver the productivity but some amount of accessibility and fairness as well, because there are populations that will not be able to be physically in the [workspace].” Can you see our robot avatars hanging out with each other? Bottorf can: “I have a mental image that makes me smile: The idea that in 2021 there will be workplaces where clusters of remote workers, or their robot physical presences, will be having a water cooler conversation.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas producer: Ken Gordon

Fast data is something else. The data from IoT, gaming, and media streaming needs to be collected and quickly analyzed by companies in order to make smart business decisions. Not every company understands how this works… though they all should learn. Fortunately, Mark Makary, CTO and Co-Founder of Logic Keepers—and our guest on *Silo Busting*—understands. The latest #CybersecurityByDesign episode of our podcast finds Makary and Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, burrowing deep and into this tricky subject. Makary says there are “a lot of business cases where you can use fast data to process events coming to you, including security” and that its predictive analytics are like a crystal ball. But Makary also warns: “This business advantage has also a window of opportunity,” and if you wait too long “you might actually lose the business benefits and that will diminish the return.” Note: This is a high-level and sometimes technical conversation. For those of you who are looking to learn more about how machine learning works here, for both the good guys and bad guys; the danger areas of fast data attacks; and the problems of model poisoning, the time has come to plug in your AirPods. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

No doubt about it: COVID has *educated* us. The pandemic has taught the education ecosystem—students, parents, teachers, administrators, publishers—to review our educational tools and systems and say, “These could be better!” The big question is: How? To begin answering it, we spoke with two men who are deeply enmeshed in questions of EdTech. Our latest episode of *Silo Busting* features Kevin Labick, our SVP of Digital Engagement, and Dmitry Krasovskiy, our Head of Education & Learning, who are both present and ready with some A+ answers to producer Ken Gordon’s queries. Together they talk about how education's traditional a B2B2C business model is no more. “That broke when learning [went] virtual, en masse,” says Labick. For educational publishers and content creators, this means a focus on the leaners, and when end users become buyers, Krasovskiy says, “You need to change the way you approach product building and product implementation.” Take a seat in the virtual classroom of this episode and you’ll learn about the part design thinking plays here, the competencies educational publishers must take on, and even the future roles educators might play in our digital future. Host: Alison Kotin Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Loneliness: It’s hurting us. Dr. Sachin Jain, President and CEO of SCAN Group and Health Plan, has been talking about and treating the scourge of loneliness for years. Now he discusses this with Gaurav Rohatgi on the latest episode of *The Resonance Test.* Jain reveals the roots of his obsession: It started with an undergraduate course with Robert Putnam and his book *Bowling Alone,* which “showed us all the importance of social connection to social outcomes.” The dialogue ventures into the world of social media (“We’ve substituted a lot of community participation with online connection”) and COVID (a friend of Jain’s said about the pandemic: "I’ve spent more time with my son in the last six months than I had in the previous five years of his life”). Jain recalls his Togetherness Program at CareMore, in which “small nudges ultimately translated into fewer admissions and better health outcomes for the people who were part of the program” and covers his recent work at SCAN: “We employ a number of our senior citizen members to make regular outreach phone calls to fellow members.” It’s a fascinating and occasionally paradoxical conversion. Jain says that loneliness “is not a complicated problem to solve,” while at the same time maintaining that “This isn’t simple work—it’s simple on the surface but it’s quite meaningful and quite emotionally complicated when you actually dig into it.” We suspect you’ll dig it a lot. Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Let’s talk about vulnerability, and not the Brené Brown sort. We mean software. Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, says in a new #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting:* “Software *will* have vulnerabilities… The only question is: Can they be used?” In an informative conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Rehman argues for reconfiguring software development lifecycle—or SDLC, as they say in the vernacular—“so that security is actually engrained into the process, not as a stop-and-go, stop-and-go method but it’s actually built in and is continuous.” Rehman believes in incessantly reassessing one’s organization’s threat profile, as inputs and outputs change over time. Why? The moment any organization, including yours, releases a piece of software—“That’s an entry point to the enterprise.” Rehman says that secure SDLC “is for everybody.” Question is: Is that a group to which you and your organization belong? You know the answer. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Peter Senge—the renowned architect of systems thinking and author of the 1990 classic, *The Fifth Discipline*—doesn’t love the word “system.” “I always try to kind of demystify the word ‘system,’ because that's a bit of a problem we've always had,” he says on the most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* “System is an off-putting word.” This is, in fact, one of many surprises nestled in his lively conversation with Rick Curtis, Senior Director of EPAM Continuum, and Paul McCormick, a Principal Consultant at EPAM. Senge’s holistic and humanistic worldview plays nicely off of Curtis-and-McCormick’s pleasantly British style of inquiry. He speaks in mini-lectures about systems thinking (of course), adaptivity, innovation, competition, collaboration, and data in a slightly hoarse but consistently positive voice. Senge is both informative—he teaches us that Latin root for the word “compete” means “striving or seeking together”—and a skilled, off-the-cuff aphorist. Press play and hear him say (among other things): “Deep change never starts with a majority. Revolutions always start with small numbers. The real changes always start on the periphery of the mainstream.” “Even direct competitors have to work together to create healthy market conditions, which in turn can allow them to compete.” “What we often call human nature, I would call habit—collective habits of thinking and acting. And that's culture.” “You can throw away the word ‘system’ entirely and just talk about [how] we live in webs of interdependence, where my wellbeing depends a lot on yours, and we're continually influencing each other.” “The basic element is awakening people's intuitive understanding that we always live in an interdependent interconnected reality.” “Competition and collaboration are natural sisters. They go together. And that's true in business just as well.” Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Dustin Boutet, our Travel and Hospitality Vertical Lead, thinks about seniors and their driving habits. A lot. Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab and author of *The Longevity Economy,* happens to share his obsession… and he’s been pondering it since before Boutet had a driver’s license. Which is we had the pair take *The Resonance Test* out for a spin together. Coughlin clears up some common misconceptions with his to-the-point pronouncements. On the topic of age and driver safety, he says, “Birthdays do not predict anything. In fact, birthdays do not kill; health conditions do,” adding sensibly: “I think that we really need to think about driving performance and wellbeing across the lifespan.” He talks about how today’s cars designed for a “pilot,” and a specific one at that: “about 5’10”, 27-year-old male, both in terms of the structure of the vehicle as well as the toys and the technologies behind the dash.” Together the pair circle around Silverkey, the EPAM Continuum concept project that aims to keep older drivers on the road safer and longer, the AgeLab’s work on BMW’s iDrive, and those tricky conversations (Coughlin calls them “exceedingly conflictual, emotional conversations”) families must sometimes have around senior driving. Things get philosophical, fast. “Driving is far more than getting from point A to B,” Coughlin tells Boutet. “That would be a nice, easy urban planning problem to solve. In fact, it’s about independence and security.“ Hop in, and get an earful about what it means to age in the passenger seat. Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

People, generally speaking, have the wrong idea about disability… or so says Sara Hendren, author of a sharp new book called *What Can a Body Do?* The Olin College professor insists on making us see disability in a more human light and learning from our improved sight. She writes, for instance, that “disability is not a fixed or permanent label that belongs only to some people; it arrives for each of us,” adding that while misfit situations—“a disharmony that runs both ways, body to world and back”—are inevitable, they should ideally be met with resilience and creativity. (Her book teems with story after story of such meetings.) In this *Resonance Test* conversation with producer Ken Gordon, Hendren expands on her book and explains, among other things, how misfit scenarios don’t have to be isolating but can, in fact, build community. She talks about aging—“In our own country old age is a really an under-imagined moment of life. We tend to make it super passive, and we tend to patronize older adults in a way that's pretty shameful”—and about the idea of incessant adaptation: “Adaptation is the fundamental state.” Above all, Hendren’s words enjoined us to pay attention—to our bodies, the bodies of others, and the environment in which they move about. The point of doing so: Striving to give everyone access to a more pleasurable life and even a richer language. “My hope is that by paying attention, we get better language, meaning, non-jargony, non-expert, non-technical language but just language that is ready to hand for the things in our lives.” Host: Kyle Wing Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The cloud is an opaque space. Few people know how to migrate safely upwards. Fortunately, in the first of our #CybersecurityByDesign episodes of *Silo Busting,* we talk with an expert who skillfully navigates the cloud: Sam Rehman, our Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. Rehman breaks through the nimbus surrounding the topic and explains to producer Ken Gordon the special nature of cloud security, the importance of data strategy, the smart way to fly through multiple clouds, the cloud’s agile dynamism and elasticity, and the cloud-based fear many people feel (and how to disarm it). Truth is, the cloud is complicated and organizations need to cultivate a more realistic understanding here. Says Rehman: “A lot of people move to the cloud not thinking about ‘What exactly is the boundary? What exactly is the protection?’” Pay attention, and you’ll be soon floating such essential questions yourself. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kip Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon