All posts by myorbitx

10 Famous Lighthouses around the World

Here are ten famous lighthouses from around the world:

  1. The Pharos of Alexandria – Egypt: Built in the 3rd century BCE, this ancient lighthouse was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It stood over 130 meters tall and used a mirror to reflect sunlight during the day and a fire at night to guide ships into the harbor.
  2. Eddystone Lighthouse – United Kingdom: Located off the coast of Cornwall, England, the Eddystone Lighthouse has been rebuilt several times since its original construction in 1698. The current tower, which was built in 1882, stands over 50 meters tall and is made of granite.
  3. Heceta Head Lighthouse – United States: This lighthouse, located in Oregon, is famous for its beautiful setting on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was built in 1894 and is still in use today.
  4. Peggy’s Cove Lighthouse – Canada: Located in Nova Scotia, Canada, Peggy’s Cove Lighthouse is a popular tourist destination known for its picturesque setting on a rocky shore. It was built in 1915 and is still in use today.
  5. Lindau Lighthouse – Germany: This lighthouse, located on Lake Constance in southern Germany, is famous for its unusual design. It was built in 1856 and features a circular tower with a small house attached.
  6. Portland Head Light – United States: Located in Maine, this lighthouse was first built in 1791 and is one of the oldest lighthouses in the United States. It is known for its beautiful setting on a rocky point overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
  7. Cape Byron Lighthouse – Australia: Located in New South Wales, Australia, this lighthouse is known for its beautiful setting on a headland overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was built in 1901 and is still in use today.
  8. Hook Head Lighthouse – Ireland: Located in County Wexford, Ireland, Hook Head Lighthouse is one of the oldest lighthouses in Europe, dating back to the 13th century. The current tower was built in the 19th century and is still in use today.
  9. Montauk Point Lighthouse – United States: Located on the eastern tip of Long Island, New York, this lighthouse was built in 1796 and is the oldest lighthouse in New York State. It is known for its beautiful setting on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
  10. Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse – Australia: Located in Western Australia, Cape Leeuwin Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse on mainland Australia, standing over 39 meters tall. It was built in 1895 and is still in use today.

Five Pillars of Marketing Success

Does the following give a pretty good picture of your current marketing activity?

You have a website but you’re not really satisfied with it. You go to networking events once in awhile. If someone asks you to give a talk, you’re happy to do it. You post on Facebook and/or LinkedIn semi-regularly. When you find the time, you send an article to those on your relatively small email list. You occasionally set up meetings with colleagues to explore opportunities.

Now there’s nothing wrong with any of those marketing activities. And usually, they will result in landing some new clients. But this is not the approach that works to get a steady, predictable stream of new clients.

Please don’t tune me out here, thinking, “Well, I really can’t do more than this. I’m already stretched thin. If you give me too much to do I’ll get overwhelmed.”

I agree. It’s not that you need to do more marketing, it’s that you need to shift your marketing paradigm from one of “Randomness” to one that is “Focused.” Continue reading

BFSI moving to a Cloud-first paradigm

Cloud migration is an integral part of the digital transformation journey of banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) firms. Many BFSI firms are adopting cloud-first strategies to realize the benefits of business excellence, innovation, speed-to-market, and operational and infrastructure savings. BFSI organizations tend to initiate the cloud migration journey by adopting infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models and evolve to embracing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) models as cloud solutions and products mature. Successful migration will, however, depend on choosing the right cloud deployment models as well as cloud service models. BFSI firms must consider some crucial factors while choosing the cloud migration model:

  • Business value and technology
  • Functional uniqueness and product maturity
  • Privacy, security, and regulatory requirements
  • Costs, scalability, and performance

Aparna Jiddu
Platform Architect, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, TCS

Sripada Sarma
Solution Architect, Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance, TCS

Explainable AI (XAI) to understand ML Models

AI systems are increasingly being entrusted with making critical decisions. Many of these decisions might have a considerable impact on businesses and even our lives. Machine learning (ML) is at the core of these decision systems.

The evolution of deep learning has resulted in a tremendous increase in the accuracy of these decisions, but the machine learning models that these AI systems are based on are mostly ‘black boxes’. The human mind, however, is not comfortable with trusting a system that makes a decision without letting it into the rationale behind this. And where trust is in deficit, acceptance is difficult.

Explainable AI (XAI) refers to a set of tools and techniques that help us humans interpret and trust the decisions made by ML models.

https://www.tcs.com/content/dam/tcs/pdf/discover-tcs/Research-and-Innovation/explainable-ai-machine-learning-models.pdf

– by Jayashree Arunkumar
Technical Architect, Incubation, Research and Innovation, TCS