NEC Asia Pacific, the regional headquarters for Tokyo head quartered information and communications technology provider NEC Corporation, has been recognised as one of the Singapore Computer Society’s (SCS) inaugural top ten champions in “AI Ethics & Governance Certification” during the 2022 Tech3 Forum, an annual business & technology event organised and run by SCS in partnership with Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA).

This certification recognises efforts to encourage professional development in AI Ethics & Governance in the workplace, and commitment towards building an effective and trusted AI ecosystem.

As a result of the pace at which AI adoption across all facets of society is increasing, there is a very real need to foster public trust in AI, to allow organisations to unlock its full potential.

All nations governments and societies have of late engaged in broad discussion and global debate pertaining to the topics surrounding Artificial Intelligence, none more so that those relating to data privacy and how privacy as a whole plays a role in relation to AI utilisation and advancement of related technologies and services.

In response to the need to address such challenges, in particular those which may arise from the rapid developments and advancement in AI and technology taking place in today’s world, NEC established a Data Distribution Strategy Office in April 2017.

This was closely followed the following year by the establishment of NEC’s Digital Trust Business Strategy Division in October 2018, and in 2019, NEC also unveiled the formation of the NEC Group AI and Human Rights Principles. NEC has since developed business activities based on those principles.

As a leading tech society for industry professionals in Singapore, the SCS received support from IMDA in in 2020 to develop the world’s first AI Ethics Body of Knowledge in anticipation of the wider use of AI.

Following this, the SCS announced in 2021 a new joint AI Ethics & Governance Certification programme with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), with the aim of guiding and educating businesses and professionals on a wide range of topics relating to the development, deployment and use of responsible AI.

In relation to being awarded the SCS AI Ethics & Governance Certification, NEC APAC’s Managing Director, Teh Chong Mien stated, “NEC has aligned our mission based on Singapore’s Smart Nation vision. and we are committed to helping Singapore achieve its goals outlined in its National AI Strategy. We will do our best to realise a safer and brighter world by engaging the relevant stakeholders to build a robust digital trust framework based on ethics and human-centric technology.”

These principles will guide employees of NEC to prioritise privacy and human rights considerations in each and every stage of the NEC Group’s business operations along with compliance with all relevant laws and regulations globally.

In accordance with these principles, the NEC Group is committed to the three following initiatives:

1. Ensure that all products and services are implemented and utilised by NEC employees, customers and partners appropriately
2. Continue to develop advanced technology and talent to further promote AI utilisation
3. Engage with a range of stakeholders to build partnerships and collaborate with closely

NEC has in fact enrolled its Singapore-based leadership team and their team of developers in the SCS and NTU certification programme, to capitalise on the many synergies between NEC’s Group AI and Human Rights Principles which prioritise privacy and human rights in relation to the utilisation of AI and biometrics data.

SCS President, Sam Liew, was recently quoted to have said, “We are heartened to have partners such as NEC play a leading role in supporting Singapore’s AI ecosystem, and we welcome all organisations to join us in growing the pool of AI Ethics professionals in Singapore.”

NEC promotes its Social Solution Business through the utilisation of advanced AI solutions from “NEC the WISE” (refer to Note 2), IoT technologies, and “Bio-Idiom” (refer to Note 3), which enables instant authentication using face, iris, fingerprint, palm print, pulse, and acoustic data.

Further information available via the full NEC press release:

http://bit.ly/nec-scs-ai-ethics-award-2022

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation is a leader in the integration of IT and network technologies that benefit businesses and people around the world. The NEC Group globally provides “Solutions for Society” that promote the safety, security, efficiency and equality of society. Under the company’s corporate message of “Orchestrating a brighter world,” NEC aims to help solve a wide range of challenging issues and to create new social value for the changing world of tomorrow.

Data is now the new driving force of the modern world. How well your business performs or what its rank could be on the performance list entirely depends on how you leverage the data available, involving emerging tools such as ML, AI, and cloud! Such forces have, in turn, lit up a stand for Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). 

Lately, I have had a great fortune to sit down and have an in-depth discussion with Jim Dworkin, the senior director of the cloud business unit in the Programmable Solutions Group at Intel. During our discussion, even Jim asserted that in order to unlock the potential of data, we need to embrace the latest FPGA technology. 

Further, having the modern architecture out into the right place now could easily uncover the paths to get things right. Perhaps, we need to educate ourselves on the ‘hardwiring’ of data flow to ensure we can appropriately leverage the power of data, speed time to market, diminish the costs of ownership, and a lot more that could take the businesses to new heights. 

For example, the technology Intel has been offering has virtually evolved “off-the-shelf”, so competent than ever before that it can now solve specific infrastructure or business problems.

With the embracement of FPGA latest technology and eASICs(the Intel tech discussed above), there has been an acceleration in infrastructure use cases (SmartNICs). So, what is SmartNICs? Well, SmartNICs is a programmable accelerator. It holds the capability to centre all the networking data with the utmost security and proffering storage flexibility and efficiency at the same time. 

Having SmartNIC onboard businesses hold enough power to handle more refined infrastructure workloads using cloud hosts, churning of wastage of time, and saving more resources. Besides, SmartNICs also furnish great value towards nurturing virtualized assistance, such as multi-tenant shared cloud and more.

Perhaps with hyper-scalers’ mushrooming, the overhead of network infrastructure might turn daunting. But the applications of FPGA have helped manage that. 

Apart from this, Intel has also come up with FPGA cloud SmartNIC platforms that replicate the hyper-scalers’ used architectures. So, how does it operate? 

This platform integrates Intel high-performance Stratix 10 FPGA with an Intel Xeon D processor that works together on the SmartNIC card, enabling virtual switching by offering the Tier-2 data centres a mass-market solution. 

Intel has also been heavily sponsoring more efficient AI via recommender systems and natural language processing. It has even established a more robust form of FPGA, which is able to interpret voice coder inputs. 

Jim contends that the enactment of a GPU manages to be modal and established on the micro-architecture constructed around it, irrespective of their power. Therefore if it shifts from an optimization point, latencies might rise, negatively impacting the performance of speech processing. 

FPGA applications are virtually inexhaustible, particularly with FPGA transition reaching up to par with software programming in ease of usage. 

Jim is optimistic about exploding evolution. He believes people wouldn’t be asking what SmartNIC platforms are. Instead would be keener towards knowing how transformative it could be. But if you ask me, I would still say the real excitement lies in accessing Intel’s technology and then jumping to Microsoft Azure to revise and enjoy leaner and faster service completely.

With his extensive product knowledge of large-scale integration work, Jim puts it; we must decode problems at a strategic level and not in a microcosm.

Further Reading

• Tune into the full podcast of my conversation with Jim Dworkin
• Intel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products web portal
• Intel Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) products page
• Intel eASIC N5X Application Specific Integrated Circuit Devices web portal

It’s an exciting time to be involved in telecommunications. We have witnessed a major push towards remote work this year and telecom companies, both on the provider and supplier side, are scrambling to meet new demands. The growth is being driven by an exponential bump in traffic from both human and IoT footprints. To add to it all, many telcos are gearing up to launch 5G services as well – but, like all things in life, it’s a mixed bag.

The rise in digital activity across the globe has also been accompanied by a nearly unbelievable surge in cyberattacks, much of which is highly sophisticated and increasingly targeted at enterprise rather than individuals.

Many organisations and business leaders had a tough time in 2020 dealing with a relentless spate of virus, ransomware, phishing, and DDoS attacks. For their part, telecom providers have been forced to reconsider the limitations that come with legacy infrastructure, especially when it comes to ensuring the security of mission-critical data.

Also consider the sheer scope of change in business models for carriers and providers, if they could finally move away from their pitched battle around pricing. By offering high-value, premium security solutions that guarantee peace of mind, the telecom industry can create something customers will be willing to pay a higher price for: reliability.

The need to rethink security from an infrastructure perspective

The complexity of security issues has moved beyond ‘gatekeeping’ firewall solutions in the core. Think about it. Legacy security solutions are largely based on sampled traffic. The traditional firewall sits in the core network and is generally too busy dealing with high traffic volumes to do much beyond a basic source-destination check – leaving the network vulnerable to malicious content housed undetected in particular packets of communication.

These solutions are typically slow to detect and mitigate the kind of advanced attacks that are increasingly prevalent in 4G networks and will be “de rigour” in 5G. While enterprise networks can be enmeshed in multiple layers of security, that technique is simply not tenable for telecom networks that have too many connections going in every possible direction to be effectively protected.

The problem gets magnified and compounded for 5G. Picture the huge variety of devices feeding into the networks, ranging from very high-speed mobile broadband to numerous complex and connected IoT devices, vehicles, autonomous drones and more. To put this in perspective, each of these devices is estimated to generate 20-gigabits of traffic per second that all needs to be routed and checked for security. In the case of an attack, the volume of data generated can increase manifold and significantly stress system resilience.

Telco Security Innovations initiative takes security to the next level

Telcos understand this only too well. And it’s not surprising that in recent surveys, the need for advanced security in the manufacturing of application delivery controllers trumped evergreen asks from telecom providers like lower latency, higher capacity, and throughput.

This is why I was so excited to talk with Folke Anger, Head of Solution Line Packet Core, Ericsson Digital Services and Yasir Liaqatullah, Vice President Product Management, A10 Networks to discuss an interesting innovation around the security of 5G Core technologies – the Packet Core – a high-performance cloud-native firewall.

Building security into the DNA of 5G Core infrastructure

With CSPs moving from centralised data centres to edge cloud, the threat landscape has evolved to a point where attacks need to be mitigated as they arise. This means bringing down the scale of response time from minutes or seconds to milliseconds. That’s physically impossible to achieve on legacy infrastructure, so Ericsson thought about the problem differently.

They combined their cloud-native principles with the design of the user plane and built-in its Packet Core Firewall, powered by A10 Networks’ security capabilities, by adding micro-services into the user plane in Packet Core Gateway. The result is a fully integrated security solution that eliminates the need for additional cloud-native functions, separate management or multiple instances.

The Packet Core solution is completely unique in terms of embedding security within the data plane. It’s fully automated and backed by ML in the form of artificial intelligence. It also requires minimal human intervention – all of which result in millisecond level mitigation of even advanced threats.

Opening up a new horizon for telecoms and carriers

The implication of security built into the DNA of the 5G infrastructure is huge for the telecommunication industry.

For one, the resiliency brought in by an integrated security solution ensures that the infrastructure is strong enough to reconfigure and re-spawn itself in case of an attack and continue to function with minimal impact on latency.

It also offers granular security by monitoring all connections with full visibility and can detect threats as they appear and take corrective action – ensuring minimal human intervention and mitigation of attacks in milliseconds. It’s integrated with automation systems and can easily scale to keep pace with higher traffic volumes.

Implementing an integrated security solution will result in lower TCOs for service providers. That, by itself, should be a huge benefit for companies negotiating various partnerships to negotiate the high costs of implementing 5G infrastructure. But it holds out scope for something much more important.

In effect, this innovation can finally offer what telecoms and carriers have been craving for years – a solid differentiator in terms of the value they offer to customers. The pricing battle that telecoms and carriers have been stuck in for years can finally end as they choose to evolve to offer more premium offerings to meet the core demand of many customers on faster networks – complete, reliable security in mission-critical applications.

Eventually, we might see security-as-a-service being bundled as a value add-on to service packages, but given the current threat landscape, security can be the differentiator that sets apart exceptional enterprise service providers from the rest.

I want to thank Folke Anger and Yasir Liaqatullah, and all the wonderful people at Ericsson Digital Services for making this interview possible. Please tune in to the conversation at the link below, and use the other resources to learn more about the technology and innovations we discussed.