Next German Db2 User Group meeting in Munich on April 12th

The next German Db2 User Group (DeDUG) meeting is planned for April 12th and will be held at IBM in Munich. You can find more information on DeDUG's temporary homepage. The meeting will have a hybrid format, timely sign up required. That's already all for today.

Digital ethics, trusted AI and IBM

Last week I gave a talk followed by a discussion at a university. The presentation was about the current state of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and AI research topics. A good chunk of the discussion was dedicated to fairness, trust and digital ethics. In the following, I am sharing some of the related links.

IBM Research has a site dedicated to  AI. On that, a section provides insight into topics on what they call Trusted AI. On the main IBM site is also a portal Trusted AI for Business, providing an introduction and overview for the non-research crowd. If you are interested and want to try out and learn about few problems hands-on, I recommend these links:

• AI Fairness 360 Open Source Toolkit: http://aif360.mybluemix.net/
• Detect the bias - a game and survey: http://biasreduction.mybluemix.net/
• Old, but still great: MIT Moral Machine:  http://moralmachine.mit.edu/

IBM experts are part of many public panels, workgroups and commissions. In Germany, there is the Enquete-Kommission "Künstliche Intelligenz - Gesellschaftliche Verantwortung und wirtschafliche, soziale und ökologische Potenziale". On the European level, it is the EU High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence.

Finally, as a showcase of current AI capabilities, I recommend this video of IBM Project Debater and the live debate at Think 2019. A short video explains how Project Debater works:


If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.

Impressions from Zeppelin flight

Zeppelin flight

Recently, I had the opportunity to fly on a Zeppelin NT, the kind of Zeppelin I had blogged about before. The 6+ hour flight was a once in a lifetime opportunity because it could not be booked. It took as from Bonn Hangelar (EDKB) to Friedrichshafen (EDNY). Our journey started with a detour over Cologne, then following the Rhine up to Karlsruhe, taking a turn to Stuttgart and from there down south to Lake Constance (see the rough route we took on the right).

Learn about chatbots at upcoming IBM Cloud Meetup

Learn how to chat at the Meetup

Want to quickly and easily build a chatbot, integrate it with Slack, Facebook Messenger or other platforms? Connect the bot with a database? Join me at the IBM Cloud Developers in Stuttgart Meetup on July 17th for an introduction, hands-on session and discussion. And there are drinks, too (I have been promised).

If you followed my blog and the chatbot-related posts, you probably already know what to expect. First, I am going to introduce you to chat / conversation services and the standard terms. Then, we jointly will take a look at the IBM Cloud solution tutorials and the chatbot-related resources. I plan to finish with a demo showing how to build a chatbot from scratch in few minutes and to integrate it into Slack. If you are close to Stuttgart, join me on July 17th for the chatbot session.

If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.

DeDUG-Treffen in München / German Db2 User Group Meeting in Munich

It's already two months since the last Db2 User Group meeting, time to point you to the next one. The German Db2 user group, DeDUG (Deutsche Db2 User Group) is going to meet next month, April 20th, in Munich. Henrik Loeser has all the details.

DeDUG: Db2 User Group

If you clicked the previous link, you should have gotten back to this blog entry. At the meeting, I am going to present on SQL recursion. Certainly a fun topic because you can solve Sodukos with SQL, compute catalog (metadata) dependencies, or generate data and deeply nested SQL statements for testing software and system limits.

How can you sign up for this event? Here are a couple options:

• ARS: https://web.ars.de/dedug2018_18_muenchen/
• IDS System: http://www.ids-system.de/deutsche-db2-user-group
• Meetup.com: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/DeDUG-RUG/
• XING: https://www.xing.com/events/18-db2-regional-user-group-treffen-20-04-2018-munchen-1916936

See you at the DeDUG meeting at IBM Germany in Munich. If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.

EgoBot: Fun with a Slightly Mutating ChatBot

Fun with the Bluemix EgoBot

Over the past day and evening I had some fun with a slightly mutating chatbot. The API for the IBM Watson Conversation service offers REST calls to query and change the workspace, the parts that make up a chat. So why not try writing a chatbot that is egocentric? A chatbot that answers questions about itself, that is happy as long as everything is related to itself? Well, let me tell you about this fun project I call EgoBot.

The EgoBot is at an early stage right now. It supports queries about some of its metadata and adding new intents. And it has both an English and a German version (does language change its character...?). You can see a sample session below.

Chatting with the Bluemix EgoBot

To find out more about this chatbot head over to the EgoBot GitHub repository. The bot is written in Python and has everything to get you started with either an English or German conversation. Let me know about your Friday fun.

IBM Bluemix in Germany, includes dashDB and Cloudant

IBM Bluemix in Germany, in German

Today, I wanted to share some exciting news with you. Most of you know that I am German. Thus, it is terrific to have IBM Bluemix available from Frankfurt, Germany, today. As can be seen on the screenshot on the right, the new Bluemix region is labeled "eu-de".

Having Bluemix Public in Germany is a big step for the IBM Cloud and customers alike. Being located next to DE-CIX means low network latency for German and European customers. Utilizing Bluemix Public in London ("eu-gb") it is possible to deploy applications with high-availability requirements redundantly within Europe. The database-as-a-service offerings dashDB ("DB2") and Cloudant are already available in the Bluemix catalog. More database and analytics services are to follow. You can check out the list of initial services here in the Bluemix Catalog for Germany.

That's all for today. I am back to MY German Bluemix...

Combining data to find suspect in over 700 highway shootings

In Germany a 57-year-old trucker was arrested over the weekend. He is accused of shooting over 700 times at trucks (mostly car transporters) and cars over a span of several years. Only few people got injured as this were drive-by shootings on highways and he was aiming at the load, not the drivers. As the case couldn't be resolved for some years it eventually up with German federal police. They used new devices to automatically collect license plate information at central highway locations plus cell tower data from mobile phones to drill down on the suspect.

As soon as the arrest was reported, a discussion about data privacy started in Germany (again). Is it ok to store all the license plate information, even if it was deleted after 10 days? Does a case like this warrant to obtain cell tower information (who had their mobile phone turned on around possible shooting locations and traveling on the highway)? Was it ok to combine the data to find the suspect? There are pros and cons to it and I don't want to comment in either direction. When I teach data management at university I tell my students to be aware of the amount of data they produce, e.g., by having a mobile phone, by traveling, by using the Internet. Such data is stored for billing purposes and for legal reasons (laws that require companies to keep data for 30 or 90 days or even longer). And when there is data, there is always an opportunity to work with it, legally or illegally.

Are you in favor of using such data, maybe within certain limits? Are you always aware of what data you produce? Any opinions or thoughts?

How to start a blog...?

"It was a cold and icy night in southern Germany..." are good words to describe what's going on outside (-10 degrees Celsius). Inside our passive house it is relatively warm (21 degrees). Yesterday has been a sunny day, bringing up the indoor temperatures and our mood. Right now I am in my small home office, taking a break from looking over DB2 pureXML code and working on product improvements. The vacation has been shorter than expected, but it was good to relax a little bit from traveling Europe to bring pureXML to IBM customers. It was the first real time out after moving from the US to Germany in March.

I hope that moving forward I have enough time to write about work and life. Enjoy.

For the German audience:
Wie soll mein ein Blog beginnen? Schreibt man ueber die amerikanische Tastatur und die Probleme mit den deutschen Umlauten? Ueber das Klima im Passivhaus bei den gerade vorherrschenden eisigen Temperaturen in Deutschland (ja, ich vermisse Kalifornien ein wenig)? Oder wie DB2 pureXML bei Kunden eingesetzt wird und was es an Neuerungen gibt? Ich werde versuchen, von alldem in der Zukunft zu schreiben, nicht aber mit dem ersten Eintrag.

Fuer die Zukunft ein hoffentlich gutes Lesen.