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University and college students get a leg up thanks to IBM Canada’s upskilling curriculum

How Lila Adamec and IBM Canada have worked with higher education to deliver 3,000 microcredentials since 2018.

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Lila Adamec
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Everywhere you turn, in nearly every industry, there are labour challenges. 

In manufacturing 82% of businesses are looking for help, and for the first time since 2015 there are more jobs available than there are people.

In Ontario the Chamber of Commerce reports that 60% of its members are having trouble filling roles in health care, retail, construction, tourism, and financial services.

And despite recent layoffs with technology companies, a 2021 Information and Communications Technology Council report forecasts 11% of all employment in Canada will be in the digital economy by 2025, requiring 250,000 more people to fill roles.

Labour shortages are being fuelled by a growing number of people retiring, combined with a decline in immigration during the pandemic. The problem is exacerbated by a mismatch between available jobs and skills. Digital transformation — especially the rush to digital-first initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic — has meant that technology and related jobs are in high-demand. A whopping 80% of businesses surveyed by KPMG say they need more workers with digital skills. 

So where does one look to help fix the talent shortage and skills gap? 

Education.

“Upskilling, reskilling, and teaching students digital and technical skills is going to be a critical step in meeting growing demand in Canada,” says Lila Adamec, Leader of Academic Integration and Innovation at IBM Canada Lab. “Young students have a huge opportunity to help lead a new digital generation, and many skilled people already in the workforce can look to have their skills upgraded to learn more about cloud, or AI, or analytics, for example.”

Adamec has been working on this problem for years. 

In 2017 she developed a program at IBM to address this skills gap. The approach her team took was to deliver turnkey curriculum solutions to universities across Canada. Essentially a “complete curriculum solution” as Adamec calls it, IBM provides higher-ed institutions with a complete toolkit, including curriculum material, access to IBM’s enterprise software, tests, and microcredentials. The curriculum is designed to address skills gaps commonly found in the tech sector by delivering and providing learners with “skill security.”

“With the gig economy, skill security is important, so that you can move from one gig to the next,” Adamec says. “Or if you need to upskill in an area or level up your education, and quickly get the skills you need. So much of this is becoming an agile service offering.”

With this solution, everyone wins: students get upskilling potential, and colleges and universities meet academic criteria with a curriculum that’s approved by government ministries and professional associations.

Adamec rolled out the Learn@IBM program in 2018, and since then it’s been adopted by dozens of institutions including York University, Mohawk College, Bow Valley College, SAIT, NAIT, Holland College, and Vanier College, to name a few. Classes are often filled to capacity or over-subscribed, and students credit the courses for helping them land their dream jobs.

Since its rollout, Adamec says IBM Canada has delivered more than 3,000 microcredentials to students who have taken their courses.

Meeting the needs of higher education

The education space has undergone a radical transformation in the last five years. First because of evolving student needs and increased demand for newer tech-focused curriculum, then because the pandemic forced a rethink of how and where people attend post-secondary institutions.

While the hybrid classroom is now more commonplace, colleges and universities still face pressure to deliver curriculum that is in line with what students need in today’s workforce, and that is a real challenge.

This stems from the fact that a university or college course needs to be approved by a government ministry, which can take years. The process typically requires at least one full-time person to prepare a curriculum for ministry approval, and it can cost more than $1 million per course when all is said and done. As a result, some colleges and university programs opt for a standardized approach so students achieve a minimum set of skills that correspond to the industry or sector. 

It’s no wonder that many professors will teach the same material, without extensive updates, for 5-7 years.

When Adamec designed the Learn@IBM program, she knew it had to meet ministry approval, it needed to provide students with real-world skills that are current, and it had to be done faster and cheaper than traditional means.

Adamec and her team positioned IBM to be more of a business partner than just a solutions provider. With on-staff personnel who develop course curriculum for higher ed, academic partners don’t need to bear the cost or burden of full-time staff to manage curriculum development. And because IBM has a team of technical experts, the enterprise-level software offering can be paired with curriculum to deliver a cutting-edge, up-to-date learning experience.

These academic solutions are updated frequently, and delivered to universities at a huge cost savings, functioning more like a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering. By flipping the standard, slower model of curriculum development on its head, Adamec and her team deliver subscription-based, digital solutions that’ll help schools and learners better access tech skills to fill a desperate workforce need.

Bringing the classroom to WeaveSphere

With huge success across the Canadian academic landscape, Adamec will bring the Learn@IBM experience to the WeaveSphere technology conference happening in November.

Attracting industry leaders, academics and developers, WeaveSphere is an innovation event taking place Nov 15-17 in Toronto. 

As part of the conference’s Education Day, developed by Adamec, high school, undergraduate, and graduate students will have the opportunity to participate in a full day bootcamp on Design Thinking, a problem-solving methodology that first identifies the end result and stakeholders. Even more, students will earn an IBM MyLearning microcredential at the end of the course. The course will be open twice, with 80 spots each session.

“We are excited about giving students and academics the opportunity to weave ideas and research with challenges of the business world,” says Adamec. “With Enterprise Design Thinking, everyone is welcome to the problem-solving table and we find these moments are incredible opportunities for young people to engage with, and learn from people in the workforce.”

The WeaveSphere Education Day and IBM’s Design Thinking course allows students to leverage a valuable learning experience that’ll give them a leg up in both their professional and personal lives. 

“It’s the type of course that is open to all learning disciplines,” she elaborates. “Whether you’re in finance, liberal arts, tech, engineering, medicine — whatever you’re studying, you don’t have to be an IT guru to do Design Thinking.”

And it’s these opportunities that make WeaveSphere an impactful experience for students. The opportunity to ‘weave’ with and learn from experts and industry leaders is, simply put, unforgettable. 

As student and passionate “weaver” Ali Hamdy explained, “it was cool having a voice among people who are way more experienced than me and way more educated than me. And it was cool for them to actually sit down and listen to me and respond.”

Interested in earning a Design Thinking microcredential? Visit WeaveSphere for more information and to register for Education Day.


DX Journal is an official media partner for WeaveSphere. We will share updates leading up to the event, and we’ll be live on location from November 15-17,2022. Join us and get your tickets at weavesphere.co.

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How businesses can protect themselves from the rising threat of deepfakes

Dive into the world of deepfakes and explore the risks, strategies and insights to fortify your organization’s defences

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In Billy Joel’s latest video for the just-released song Turn the Lights Back On, it features him in several deepfakes, singing the tune as himself, but decades younger. The technology has advanced to the extent that it’s difficult to distinguish between that of a fake 30-year-old Joel, and the real 75-year-old today.

This is where tech is being used for good. But when it’s used with bad intent, it can spell disaster. In mid-February, a report showed a clerk at a Hong Kong multinational who was hoodwinked by a deepfake impersonating senior executives in a video, resulting in a $35 million theft.

Deepfake technology, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), is capable of creating highly realistic fake videos, images, or audio recordings. In just a few years, these digital manipulations have become so sophisticated that they can convincingly depict people saying or doing things that they never actually did. In little time, the tech will become readily available to the layperson, who’ll require few programming skills.

Legislators are taking note

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission proposed a ban on those who impersonate others using deepfakes — the greatest concern being how it can be used to fool consumers. The Feb. 16 ban further noted that an increasing number of complaints have been filed from “impersonation-based fraud.”

A Financial Post article outlined that Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner, Patricia Kosseim, says she feels “a sense of urgency” to act on artificial intelligence as the technology improves. “Malicious actors have found ways to synthetically mimic executive’s voices down to their exact tone and accent, duping employees into thinking their boss is asking them to transfer funds to a perpetrator’s account,” the report said. Ontario’s Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence Framework, for which she consults, aims to set guides on the public sector use of AI.

In a recent Microsoft blog, the company stated their plan is to work with the tech industry and government to foster a safer digital ecosystem and tackle the challenges posed by AI abuse collectively. The company also said it’s already taking preventative steps, such as “ongoing red team analysis, preemptive classifiers, the blocking of abusive prompts, automated testing, and rapid bans of users who abuse the system” as well as using watermarks and metadata.

That prevention will also include enhancing public understanding of the risks associated with deepfakes and how to distinguish between legitimate and manipulated content.

Cybercriminals are also using deepfakes to apply for remote jobs. The scam starts by posting fake job listings to collect information from the candidates, then uses deepfake video technology during remote interviews to steal data or unleash ransomware. More than 16,000 people reported that they were victims of this scam to the FBI in 2020. In the US, this kind of fraud has resulted in a loss of more than $3 billion USD. Where possible, they recommend job interviews should be in person to avoid these threats.

Catching fakes in the workplace

There are detector programs, but they’re not flawless. 

When engineers at the Canadian company Dessa first tested a deepfake detector that was built using Google’s synthetic videos, they found it failed more than 40% of the time. The Seattle Times noted that the problem in question was eventually fixed, and it comes down to the fact that “a detector is only as good as the data used to train it.” But, because the tech is advancing so rapidly, detection will require constant reinvention.

There are other detection services, often tracing blood flow in the face, or errant eye movements, but these might lose steam once the hackers figure out what sends up red flags.

“As deepfake technology becomes more widespread and accessible, it will become increasingly difficult to trust the authenticity of digital content,” noted Javed Khan, owner of Ontario-based marketing firm EMpression. He said a focus of the business is to monitor upcoming trends in tech and share the ideas in a simple way to entrepreneurs and small business owners.

To preempt deepfake problems in the workplace, he recommended regular training sessions for employees. A good starting point, he said, would be to test them on MIT’s eight ways the layperson can try to discern a deepfake on their own, ranging from unusual blinking, smooth skin, and lighting.

Businesses should proactively communicate through newsletters, social media posts, industry forums, and workshops, about the risks associated with deepfake manipulation, he told DX Journal, to “stay updated on emerging threats and best practices.”

To keep ahead of any possible attacks, he said companies should establish protocols for “responding swiftly” to potential deepfake attacks, including issuing public statements or corrective actions.

How can a deepfake attack impact business?

The potential to malign a company’s reputation with a single deepfake should not be underestimated.

“Deepfakes could be racist. It could be sexist. It doesn’t matter — by the time it gets known that it’s fake, the damage could be already done. And this is the problem,” said Alan Smithson, co-founder of Mississauga-based MetaVRse and investor at Your Director AI.

“Building a brand is hard, and then it can be destroyed in a second,” Smithson told DX Journal. “The technology is getting so good, so cheap, so fast, that the power of this is in everybody’s hands now.”

One of the possible solutions is for businesses to have a code word when communicating over video as a way to determine who’s real and who’s not. But Smithson cautioned that the word shouldn’t be shared around cell phones or computers because “we don’t know what devices are listening to us.”

He said governments and companies will need to employ blockchain or watermarks to identify fraudulent messages. “Otherwise, this is gonna get crazy,” he added, noting that Sora — the new AI text to video program — is “mind-blowingly good” and in another two years could be “indistinguishable from anything we create as humans.”

“Maybe the governments will step in and punish them harshly enough that it will just be so unreasonable to use these technologies for bad,” he continued. And yet, he lamented that many foreign actors in enemy countries would not be deterred by one country’s law. It’s one downside he said will always be a sticking point.

It would appear that for now, two defence mechanisms are the saving grace to the growing threat posed by deepfakes: legal and regulatory responses, and continuous vigilance and adaptation to mitigate risks. The question remains, however, whether safety will keep up with the speed of innovation.

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Small banks emerge as the top source for small business financing

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Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed's Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing options.
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When it comes to borrowing money, small businesses are most likely to apply at large banks. But they often find success with their counterparts in the finance world: small banks.

Small banks—or those with less than $10 billion in total assets—comprise most of the banks in the U.S., much like small businesses account for nearly all U.S. businesses. More than 80% of small businesses that applied for financing at small banks were at least partially approved in 2022, according to data from the Fed’s most recent survey of small business employers. However, only 30% of small businesses applied at small banks when they sought financing.

About 2 in 5 small business employers applied for some traditional financing in 2022. Most needed the money to meet operating expenses, while a little over half sought cash to expand their operations.

Findbusinesses4sale used the Fed’s Small Business Credit Survey data to compare approval rates among small business financing sources, taking a closer look at their differences. Approval rates are based on applications for loans, credit, and cash advances at the various institution types. The Fed report was released in March 2023 based on a 2022 survey of nearly 8,000 small businesses with employees.


A bar chart shows the share of small business applicants at least partially approved for loan requests, separated by the type of source applied to.

Findbusinesses4sale

Small banks surpass online lenders, finance companies in approval rates for small business applicants

Also known as community banks, small banks are well-equipped to lend to small businesses because of their intimate knowledge of local economies. Small businesses are often young, with short histories, small operations, little collateral, and unproven financial success. These factors can make it difficult for founders to qualify for credit and loans—they’re simply a riskier investment for a funder to take on.

Small banks’ decision-makers live within the same areas where they grant loans, and they have insight into how certain businesses could fare within their neighborhoods. That makes it easier for them to analyze the risk of lending to small businesses and, in turn, decide whether to approve their applications. At least 3 in 5 (61%) applicants considered to be a medium or high credit risk were approved for financing at small banks; at large banks, not even half (45%) of these riskier applicants were approved.

By operating across smaller locales, community bank operators also have the opportunity to forge stronger relationships with business founders. The Fed survey shows that about 2 in 3 small businesses that applied for financing with these banks did so because of an existing relationship. Many of these relationships were forged in the heat of the COVID-19 pandemic, when community banks came through for small businesses with relief funds, including more intensive support in understanding and completing complex applications.

Small firms applying to other sources, such as online lenders and finance companies, are most often motivated by making quick decisions and perceiving that they have a higher chance of being approved. That was the case five years ago, but approval rates for both sources lagged behind small banks in 2022. Indeed, approval rates at both have fallen significantly since 2019, while approvals at small banks have grown.

Both online lenders and finance companies still approve slightly higher shares of applicants with medium to high credit risks compared to small banks, but only by a few percentage points. At the same time, many more borrowers reported dissatisfaction and challenges working with these lenders, including high interest rates and unfavorable repayment terms.

On the other hand, the vast majority of borrowers from small banks were happy with their experience—much more than those who borrowed from any other type of lender.

Story editing by Ashleigh Graf. Copy editing by Paris Close. Photo selection by Ania Antecka.

This story originally appeared on Findbusinesses4sale and was produced and
distributed in partnership with Stacker Studio.

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The new reality of how VR can change how we work

It’s not just for gaming — from saving lives to training remote staff, here’s how virtual reality is changing the game for businesses

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Until a few weeks ago, you might have thought that “virtual reality” and its cousin “augmented reality” were fads that had come and gone. At the peak of the last frenzy around the technology, the company formerly known as Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021, as a sign of how determined founder Mark Zuckerberg was to create a VR “metaverse,” complete with cartoon avatars (who for some reason had no legs — they’ve got legs now, but there are some restrictions on how they work).

Meta has since spent more than $36 billion on metaverse research and development, but so far has relatively little to show for it. Meta has sold about 20 million of its Quest VR headsets so far, but according to some reports, not many people are spending a lot of time in the metaverse. And a lack of legs for your avatar probably isn’t the main reason. No doubt many were wondering: What are we supposed to be doing in here?

The evolution of virtual reality

Things changed fairly dramatically in June, however, when Apple demoed its Vision Pro headset, and then in early February when they were finally available for sale. At $3,499 US, the device is definitely not for the average consumer, but using it has changed the way some think about virtual reality, or the “metaverse,” or whatever we choose to call it.

Some of the enhancements that Apple has come up with for the VR headset experience have convinced Vision Pro true believers that we are either at or close to the same kind of inflection point that we saw after the release of the original iPhone in 2007.Others, however, aren’t so sure we are there yet.

The metaverse sounds like a place where you bump into giant dinosaur avatars or play virtual tennis, but ‘spatial computing’ puts the focus on using a VR headset to enhance what users already do on their computers. Some users generate multiple virtual screens that hang in the air in front of them, allowing them to walk around their homes or offices and always have their virtual desktop in front of them.

VR fans are excited about the prospect of watching a movie on what looks like a 100-foot-wide TV screen hanging in the air in front of them, or playing a video game. But what about work-related uses of a headset like the Vision Pro? 

Innovating health care with VR technology

One of the most obvious applications is in medicine, where doctors are already using remote viewing software to perform checkups or even operations. At Cambridge University, game designers and cancer researchers have teamed up to make it easier to see cancer cells and distinguish between different kinds.

Heads-up displays and other similar kinds of technology are already in use in aerospace engineering and other fields, because they allow workers to see a wiring diagram or schematic while working to repair it. VR headsets could make such tasks even easier, by making those diagrams or schematics even larger, and superimposing them on the real thing. The same kind of process could work for digital scans of a patient during an operation.

Using virtual reality, patients and doctors could also do remote consultations more easily, allowing patients to describe visually what is happening with them, and giving health professionals the ability to offer tips and direct recommendations in a visual way. 

This would not only help with providing care to people who live in remote areas, but could also help when there is a language barrier between doctor and patient. 

Impacting industry worldwide

One technology consulting firm writes that using a Vision Pro or other VR headset to streamline assembly and quality control in maintenance tasks. Overlaying diagrams, 3D models, and other digital information onto an object in real time could enable “more efficient and error-free assembly processes,” by providing visual cues, step-by-step guidance, and real-time feedback. 

In addition to these kinds of uses, virtual reality could also be used for remote onboarding for new staff in a variety of different roles, by allowing them to move around and practice training tasks in a virtual environment.

Some technology watchers believe that the retail industry could be transformed by virtual reality as well. Millions of consumers have become used to buying online, but some categories such as clothing and furniture have lagged, in part because it is difficult to tell what a piece of clothing might look like once you are wearing it, or what that chair will look like in your home. But VR promises the kind of immersive experience where that becomes possible.

While many consumers may see this technology only as an avenue for gaming and entertainment, it’s already being leveraged by businesses in manufacturing, health care and workforce development. Even in 2020, 91 per cent of businesses surveyed by TechRepublic either used or planned to adopt VR or AR technology — and as these technological advances continue, adoption is likely to keep ramping up.

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