● Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World
Cade Metz
Q&A with author via The News & Observer
With his new book, “Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World,” Metz is sharing the stories of the individuals whose breakthroughs in the past decades have pushed forward the limits of artificial intelligence.
As a reporter for Wired Magazine and now the Times, Metz has had a front row seat to the incredible strides made in deep learning, a process in which a computer learns from absorbing large amounts of data. That has helped computer programs make huge leaps in things like facial recognition and self-driving cars, and fueled intense competition between companies, like Google, Microsoft, Facebook and multiple Chinese firms.

● Punching the Clock: Adapting to the New Future of Work
Joe Ungemah
Summary via publisher (Oxford U. Press)
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, trends already underway towards the Future of Work and the gig economy rapidly and unexpectantly accelerated. Physical isolation, travel restrictions, and social distancing challenged organizations to rethink how work gets done and by whom, with ramifications that will stretch beyond the pandemic. Punching the Clock explores how well workers are likely to both navigate and adapt to this new Future of Work, using the best of psychological science as a guide.

● The Future of the Global Order: The Six Paradigm Changes That Will Define 2050
Vincent Petit
Summary via publisher (World Scientific Publishing)
Where is the world heading? What choices need to be made to help humanity to thrive? These questions are more acute than ever in a context of growing inequalities, populism, social disorder, environmental challenges, and global health threats. The Future of the Global Order explores the six fundamental transformations ahead that will define the future of the world in the next three decades. Each chapter provides a unique and fact-based analysis of the situation at hand, reviews underlying uncertainties, and studies their inter-dependencies. As a tool to trigger debate, the book provides possible evolutions in global activity with four baseline scenarios, grasping the key issues which will shape the global order to 2050.

● Cybersecurity in the COVID-19 Pandemic
Kenneth Okereafor
Summary via publisher (CRC Press)
As the 2020 global lockdown became a universal strategy to control the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing triggered a massive reliance on online and cyberspace alternatives and switched the world to the digital economy. Despite their effectiveness for remote work and online interactions, cyberspace alternatives ignited several Cybersecurity challenges. Malicious hackers capitalized on global anxiety and launched cyberattacks against unsuspecting victims. Internet fraudsters exploited human and system vulnerabilities and impacted data integrity, privacy, and digital behavior.

● The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street
Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap
Summary via Fortune
Financial journalists Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap serve up an investigative deep-dive into an old-fashioned casino heist, which includes a $31 billion leveraged buyout and a string of financial engineering transactions by Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital—all in the midst of the post–Great Recession slump, pitting private equity firms and distressed-debt hedge funds against each other in an ultimate poker match.

● Explanatory Model Analysis: Explore, Explain, and Examine Predictive Models
Przemyslaw Biecek and Tomasz Burzykowski
Summary via publisher (Chapman and Hall/CRC)
Explanatory Model Analysis Explore, Explain and Examine Predictive Models is a set of methods and tools designed to build better predictive models and to monitor their behaviour in a changing environment. Today, the true bottleneck in predictive modelling is neither the lack of data, nor the lack of computational power, nor inadequate algorithms, nor the lack of flexible models. It is the lack of tools for model exploration (extraction of relationships learned by the model), model explanation (understanding the key factors influencing model decisions) and model examination (identification of model weaknesses and evaluation of model’s performance). This book presents a collection of model agnostic methods that may be used for any black-box model together with real-world applications to classification and regression problems.

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