This post is about Dashify, the Cisco Observability Platform’s dashboarding framework. We are going to describe how AppDynamics, and partners, use Dashify to build custom product screens, and then we … Read more on Cisco Blogs

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This post is about Dashify, the Cisco Observability Platform’s dashboarding framework. We are going to describe how AppDynamics, and partners, use Dashify to build custom product screens, and then we are going to dive into details of the framework itself. We will describe its specific features that make it the most powerful and flexible dashboard framework in the industry.

What are dashboards?

Dashboards are data-driven user interfaces that are designed to be viewed, edited, and even created by product users. Product screens themselves are also built with dashboards. For this reason, a complete dashboard framework provides leverage for both the end users looking to share dashboards with their teams, and the product-engineers of COP solutions like Cisco Cloud Observability.

In the observability space most dashboards are focused on charts and tables for rendering time series data, for example “average response time” or “errors per minute”. The image below shows the COP EBS Volumes Overview Dashboard, which is used to understand the performance of Elastic Block Storage (EBS) on Amazon Web Services. The dashboard features interactive controls (dropdowns) that are used to further-refine the scenario from all EBS volumes to, for example unhealthy EBS volumes in US-WEST-1.

Several other dashboards are provided by our Cisco Cloud Observability app for monitoring other AWS systems. Here are just a few examples of the rapidly expanding use of Dashify dashboards across the Cisco Observability Platform.

EFS Volumes
Elastic Load Balancers
S3 Buckets
EC2 Instances

Why Dashboards

No observability product can “pre-imagine” every way that customers want to observe their systems. Dashboards allow end-users to create custom experiences, building on existing in-product dashboards, or creating them from scratch. I have seen large organizations with more than 10,000 dashboards across dozens of teams.

Dashboards are a cornerstone of observability, forming a bridge between a remote data source, and local display of data in the user’s browser. Dashboards are used to capture “scenarios” or “lenses” on a particular problem. They can serve a relatively fixed use case, or they can be ad-hoc creations for a troubleshooting “war room.” A dashboard performs many steps and queries to derive the data needed to address the observability scenario, and to render the data into visualizations. Dashboards can be authored once, and used by many different users, leveraging the know-how of the author to enlighten the audience. Dashboards play a critical role in low-level troubleshooting and in rolling up high-level business KPIs to executives.

The goal of dashboard frameworks has always been to provide a way for users, as opposed to ‘developers’, to build useful visualizations. Inherent to this “democratization” of visualizations is the notion that building a dashboard must somehow be easier than a pure JavaScript app development approach. Afterall, dashboards cater to users, not hardcore developers.

The problem with dashboard frameworks

The diagram below illustrates how a traditional dashboard framework allows the author to configure and arrange components but does not allow the author to create new components or data sources. The dashboard author is stuck with whatever components, layouts, and data sources are made available. This is because the areas shown in red are developed in JavaScript and are provided by the framework. JavaScript is neither a secure, nor easy technology to learn, therefore it is rarely exposed directly to authors. Instead, dashboards expose a JSON or YAML based DSL. This typically leaves field teams, SEs, and power users in the position of waiting for the engineering team to release new components, and there is almost a deep feature backlog.

I have personally seen this scenario play out many times. To take a real example, a team building dashboards for IT services wanted rows in a table to be colored according to a “heat map”. This required a feature request to be logged with engineering, and the core JavaScript-based Table component had to be changed to support heat maps. It became typical for the core JS components to become a mishmash of domain-driven spaghetti code. Eventually the code for Table itself was hard to find amidst the dozens of props and hidden behaviors like “heat maps”. Nobody was happy with the situation, but it was typical, and core component teams mostly spent their sprint cycles building domain behaviors and trying to understand the spaghetti. What if dashboard authors themselves on the power-user end of the spectrum could be empowered to create components themselves?

Enter Dashify

Dashify’s mission is to remove the barrier of “you can’t do that” and “we don’t have a component for that”. To accomplish this, Dashify rethinks some of the foundations of traditional dashboard frameworks. The diagram below shows that Dashify shifts the boundaries around what is “built in” and what is made completely accessible to the Author. This radical shift allows the core framework team to focus on “pure” visualizations, and empowers domain teams, who author dashboards, to build domain specific behaviors like “IT heat maps” without being blocked by the framework team.

To accomplish this breakthrough, Dashify had to solve the key challenge of how to simplify and expose reactive behavior and composition without cracking open the proverbial can of JavaScript worms. To do this, Dashify leveraged a new JSON/YAML meta-language, created at Cisco in the open source, for the purpose of declarative, reactive state management. This new meta-language is called “Stated,” and it is being used to drive dashboards, as well as many other JSON/YAML configurations within the Cisco Observability Platform. Let’s take a simple example to show how Stated enables a dashboard author to insert logic directly into a dashboard JSON/YAML.

Suppose we receive data from a data source that provides “health” about AWS availability zones. Assume the health data is updated asynchronously. Now suppose we wish to bind the changing health data to a table of “alerts” according to some business rules:

only show alerts if the percentage of unhealthy instances is greater than 10%
show alerts in descending order based on percentage of unhealthy instances
update the alerts every time the health data is updated (in other words declare a reactive dependency between alerts and health).

This snippet illustrates a desired state, that adheres to the rules.

But how can we build a dashboard that continuously adheres to the three rules? If the health data changes, how can we be sure the alerts will be updated? These questions get to the heart of what it means for a system to be Reactive. This Reactive scenario is at best difficult to accomplish in today’s popular dashboard frameworks.

Notice we have framed this problem in terms of the data and relationships between different data items (health and alerts), without mentioning the user interface yet. In the diagram above, note the “data manipulation” layer. This layer allows us to create exactly these kinds of reactive (change driven) relationships between data, decoupling the data from the visual components.

Let’s look at how easy it is in Dashify to create a reactive data rule that captures our three requirements. Dashify allows us to replace *any* piece of a dashboard with a reactive rule, so we simply write a reactive rule that generates the alerts from the health. The Stated rule, beginning on line 12 is a JSONata expression. Feel free to try it yourself here.

One of the most interesting things is that it appears you don’t have to “tell” Dashify what data your rule depends on. You just write your rule. This simplicity is enabled by Stated’s compiler, which analyzes all the rules in the template and produces a Reactive change graph. If you change anything that the ‘alerts’ rule is looking at, the ‘alerts’ rule will fire, and recompute the alerts. Let’s quickly prove this out using the stated REPL which lets us run and interact with Stated templates like Dashify dashboards. Let’s see what happens if we use Stated to change the first zone’s unhealthy count to 200. The screenshot below shows execution of the command “.set /health/0/unhealthy 200” in the Stated JSON/YAML REPL. Dissecting this command, it says “set the value at json pointer /health/0/unhealthy to value 200”. We see that the alerts are immediately recomputed, and that us-east-1a is now present in the alerts with 99% unhealthy.

By recasting much of dashboarding as a reactive data problem, and by providing a robust in-dashboard expression language, Dashify allows authors to do both traditional dashboard creation, advanced data bindings, and reusable component creation. Although quite trivial, this example clearly shows how Dashify differentiates its core technology from other frameworks that lack reactive, declarative, data bindings. In fact, Dashify is the first, and only framework to feature declarative, reactive, data bindings.

Let’s take another example, this time fetching data from a remote API. Let’s say we want to fetch data from the Star Wars REST api. Business requirements:

Developer can set how many pages of planets to return
Planet details are fetched from star wars api (https://swapi.dev)
List of planet names is extracted from returned planet details
User should be able to select a planet from the list of planets
 ‘residents’ URLs are extracted from planet info (that we got in step 2), and resident details are fetched for each URL
Full names of inhabitants are extracted from resident details and presented as list

Again, we see that before we even consider the user interface, we can cast this problem as a data fetching and reactive binding problem. The dashboard snippet below shows how a value like “residents” is reactively bound to selectedPlanet and how map/reduce style set operators are applied to entire results of a REST query. Again, all the expressions are written in the grammar of JSONata.

To demonstrate how you can interact with and test such a snippet, checkout This github gist shows a REPL session where we:

load the JSON file and observe the default output for Tatooine
Display the reactive change-plan for planetName
Set the planet name to “Coruscant”
Call the onSelect() function with “Naboo” (this demonstrates that we can create functions accessible from JavaScript, for use as click handlers, but produces the same result as directly setting planetName)

From this concise example, we can see that dashboard authors can easily handle fetching data from remote APIs, and perform extractions and transformations, as well as establish click handlers. All these artifacts can be tested from the Stated REPL before we load them into a dashboard. This remarkable economy of code and ease of development cannot be achieved with any other dashboard framework.
If you are curious, these are the inhabitants of Naboo:

What’s next?

We have shown a lot of “data code” in this post. This is not meant to imply that building Dashify dashboards requires “coding”. Rather, it is to show that the foundational layer, which supports our Dashboard building GUIs is built on very solid foundation. Dashify recently made its debut in the CCO product with the introduction of AWS monitoring dashboards, and Data Security Posture Management screens. Dashify dashboards are now a core component of the Cisco Observability Platform and have been proven out over many complex use cases. In calendar Q2 2024, COP will introduce the dashboard editing experience which provides authors with built in visual drag-n-drop style editing of dashboards. Also in calendar Q2, COP introduces the ability to bundle dashify dashboards into COP solutions allowing third party developers to unleash their dashboarding skills. So, weather you skew to the “give me a gui” end of the spectrum or the “let me code” lifestyle, Dashify is designed to meet your needs.

Summing it up

Dashboards are a key, perhaps THE key technology in an observability platform. Existing dashboarding frameworks present unwelcome limits on what authors can do. Dashify is a new dashboarding framework born from many collective years of experience building both dashboard frameworks and their visual components. Dashify brings declarative, reactive state management into the hands of dashboard authors by incorporating the Stated meta-language into the JSON and YAML of dashboards. By rethinking the fundamentals of data management in the user interface, Dashify allows authors unprecedented freedom. Using Dashify, domain teams can ship complex components and behaviors without getting bogged down in the underlying JavaScript frameworks. Stay tuned for more posts where we dig into the exciting capabilities of Dashify: Custom Dashboard Editor, Widget Playground, and Scalable Vector Graphics.

Related resources

Learn more about Cisco Observability Platform
Find COP code examples on GitHub

"}]]  See how Dashify, the Cisco Observability Platform dashboarding framework, helps you build data-driven user interfaces that are designed to be viewed, edited, and even created by end users looking to share dashboards with their teams, and product-engineers of COP solutions like Cisco Cloud Observability.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

When you think about Real Madrid, you instantly think about legends, greatness, and iconic moments. When you think about their home, the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, you immediately think about the … Read more on Cisco Blogs

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When you think about Real Madrid, you instantly think about legends, greatness, and iconic moments. When you think about their home, the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, you immediately think about the 80,000+ fans, electrifying atmosphere, and sheer presence of the unique structure.

In the early 2000’s, Real Madrid, and it’s CIO Enrique Uriel, had a vision of creating the “Ultimate Bernabéu,” which would deliver a fan experience unlike any other at the time, essentially transforming the club’s home stadium into one of the safest, most connected venues in all of sports. The plan was audacious because video distribution and Wi-Fi technology were still in the early adoption phase, but Real Madrid turned to Cisco and over the course of a few years, the venue had unequivocally transformed into one of the most connected in the sports industry.

Fast-forward to present day and that boundary-pushing mentality remains, as the club sits on the verge of another major stadium renovation that will feature key Cisco technology, including a Software Defined-Access (SDA) network, Wi-Fi 6 and IP Fabric for Media.

What does that mean for the club, its fans, and key stakeholders? Let’s take a streamlined look:

Seamless Network

The core of the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium network refresh starts with Cisco’s single, converged Software Defined Access (SDA) network, which is the first of its kind to appear at a sports venue in Europe. This SDA network carries all services needed to drive the Bernabéu’s vast operation, from software policies that determine the right application to the right user or device securely, to managing the Building Management System (BMS) and retractable pitch that turns the stadium into a multi-purpose venue. This network has been designed with capacity and flexibility in mind for future demands and is responsible for powering the venue’s elevated fan experience through Vision Edge digital signage, real-time app interaction, 4K video and much, much more.

Wi-Fi for the Future

Iconic stadiums, arenas and venues equipped with Cisco’s Wi-Fi 6 technology have seen record-breaking levels of data traffic and fan engagement. Take SoFi Stadium for example, the site of Super Bowl LVI, or BottleRock Music Festival, held in California each year.

The Bernabéu’s network will now use 1,500 Cisco Wi-Fi 6 access points, all focused on delivering blistering speeds to fans and stakeholders regardless of seat position, allowing for true, uninterrupted connectivity during every live event.

Cloud-Based Broadcast & Digital Signage

Thanks to Cisco’s cloud-based IP Fabric for Media solution, Real Madrid will benefit from automation, analytics, and security (with the help of proven partners) which are part of this powerful broadcast solution. The dynamic all-IP production environment at the new Bernabéu will allow Real Madrid to efficiently produce and distribute content to more than 2,500 screens and 80,000+ fans’ mobile devices in the venue, while also delivering the action to fans via broadcasts around the world.

In Conclusion

For decades, the legendary club has shown a steadfast commitment to not only fielding one of the best teams in the world on the pitch, but also to leveraging the very best and most advanced technology to bring the beautiful game to its millions of fans off the pitch.

“More and more, it’s not just excellence in IT, it’s about thinking outside the box, reinventing yourself and your products to maintain a leadership position in the market,” remarked Real Madrid CIO Enrique Uriel, when asked about the future of the club and their iconic venue.

That pursuit of excellence is the reason one of the most storied and celebrated clubs in the world is widely recognized as a global leader of sports innovation. And we are proud to be their partner.

"}]]  Thanks to Cisco’s cloud-based IP Fabric for Media solution, Real Madrid will benefit from automation, analytics, and security (with the help of proven partners) which are part of this powerful broadcast solution. The dynamic all-IP production environment at the new Bernabéu will allow Real Madrid to efficiently produce and distribute content to more than 2,500 screens and 80,000+ fans’ mobile devices in the venue, while also delivering the action to fans via broadcasts around the world.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Cisco Customer Experience Healthcare Practice helps customers leverage the use of Cisco technology to increase business value, remove burdens and move healthcare forward faster.

Health systems face… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Cisco Customer Experience Healthcare Practice helps customers leverage the use of Cisco technology to increase business value, remove burdens and move healthcare forward faster.

Health systems face several challenges, including mountains of technical debt, staffing issues and resource constraints, manual and fragmented workflows, and often, a lack of access to holistic, real-time data insights. They need to address short-term burdens while thinking about long-term strategic changes to find clinical and operational efficiencies through new technology.  In short, technological improvement can’t wait for a slow week.

That’s why our Practice leverages Cisco’s strengths in security, network infrastructure and collaboration to improve health and business outcomes in hospitals, clinics, labs, and patient care settings. We know that you need change that is well thought out, well implemented, and well adopted. This year we will be back at HIMSS.

Here are 3 Reasons to meet with our Customer Experience healthcare team at HIMSS24:

Learn how you can leverage our cutting-edge services in Zero Trust, Agile infrastructure, and Automation, enabling digital transformation.
Discuss and view our latest AI Readiness Service which utilizes a structured framework to help healthcare organizations adapt and adopt AI capabilities in alignment with their organizational and technological goals.
Learn how we utilized HIMSS INFRAM to help your peers accelerate decision-making, reshape how they plan, and build their future vision and evolve the use of INFRAM to inform technology roadmap to gain deeper insights into their technology application and how to put their future-facing infrastructure to enabling award-winning care.

I hope to see you there, for more information on Cisco’s presence at the show, click here.

"}]]  If you are attending HIMSS24 stop by booth 3951 to learn how we have delivered innovative healthcare to our clients.   Read More Cisco Blogs 

Join us as we dive deeper into Cisco and Cisco partner technology deployed at the Cisco Store! We asked Shashank Nalla (Product Manager, Meraki MV Smart Cameras) to discuss how the cameras are used… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Join us as we dive deeper into Cisco and Cisco partner technology deployed at the Cisco Store! We asked Shashank Nalla (Product Manager, Meraki MV Smart Cameras) to discuss how the cameras are used in the Cisco Store and the larger retail industry.

How do Meraki cameras improve a retailer and shopper’s in-store and/or virtual shopping experience? What problem are they solving?

MV Smart Cameras aren’t just cameras — they’re like a virtual assistant to make a shopper’s experience safe, easy, and tailored to them, and to help retailers around the world provide the best shopping experience possible. We see our smart cameras help in three ways:

Deterring theft and bad actors: With real-time monitoring, high-quality video, and a variety of lens and mounting options, our cameras ensure that no corner goes undetected. Shoppers and retailers can feel safe knowing that every part of the store is being actively monitored.
Optimizing the shopper experience: There’s a lot that goes into the entirety of a shopper’s experience, and it starts from the moment they walk in the door to the minute they purchase and leave. Our cameras offer real-time analytics and heat maps–that can easily be viewed within our dashboard–so retailers can analyze traffic patterns and optimize their store layouts. Retailers can figure out what flow works best or where they should place certain products for special promotions or sales. And let’s not forget about the check-out lines: with real-time insights, our cameras can help retailers understand and manage their queues to reduce crowding and wait times.
Better personalized offering and marketing: Retailers not only want their customers to enjoy shopping in-store, but they also want to make sure they offer the products their customers actually want. By analyzing video recordings, retailers can better understand customer behavior such as dwell time, popular areas of the store, and conversion rates. They’ll get to know their customers’ preferences and tailor their offerings accordingly. But it doesn’t stop there. They can also better tailor their marketing to each specific customer through footage and snapshot analysis. For example, if a customer spends a lot of time in the electronics section, the retailer can send them promotions or recommendations related to electronics.

What would you like people to know about Meraki cameras when they see them in action at the Cisco Store Tech Lab?

Out of the box, they’re smart, powerful, and easy to use and manage. Beyond our high-quality video, sleek design, and AI capabilities, they’re all cloud-managed and easy to set up. Whether you’re putting up 1 camera or 100 cameras, our cameras are designed to get up and running fast. And with the power of cloud, you can quickly and easily see your footage in the Meraki dashboard. But what makes our cameras even more powerful is the ability to connect to our ecosystem of partners to build custom integrations around computer vision, physical access control, and more. It truly becomes whatever you want it to be.

How do you envision Meraki cameras being used in retail environments in the future?

We’re already seeing these trends, but we envision our cameras being used in 3 major ways:

Customer analytics: Our cameras can capture a lot and, with more data, the more insights retailers can grab. We know how important it is for retailers to really know their customers and we know that the more personalized a shopping experience, the more likely it is that customers will make purchases. We see our cameras really helping to provide retailers with valuable information to create those personalized experiences. Analyzing demographics, dwell time, check-out lanes, foot traffic — this is all data that can provide retailers with a lot of insight into what goes on in their stores.
Inventory management: Cameras don’t always have to be used for tracking people; they can and should be used to track physical assets. Utilizing a lot of the same monitoring, alerts, and analytics, we see our cameras being used to provide real-time visibility on shelves and warehouse inventory so they can alert when things are low or where things are moving to and from.
Loss prevention: Cameras are key to providing a safe environment, especially in retail. We know our cameras will continue to be the core piece of store safety. High-quality video, 24/7 footage, video retention — these are all things that our cameras can provide and what we see retailers using every day to help prevent theft of all kinds.

What do you think will be a priority for shoppers in the next 5 years?

I think there are 4 main areas shoppers will care about:

Convenience: Whether you’re shopping online or in-store, shoppers want it to be quick and easy to find and buy what they want.
Personalization: Along the lines of convenience, I think shoppers will want to cut out the noise. It can feel overwhelming to wade through all the options, so providing them with a narrow scope that we know is within their preference will make an easier and better experience.
Seamless experience across online and brick and mortar: A lot of shopping is done online nowadays, but brick and mortar stores still offer something online stores cannot: the ability to physically see, touch, and experience whatever it is you want to buy. But they must go together. Shoppers might go online first and then decide to stop by in-store, or maybe they stop by a store and then go check online if what they’re looking for isn’t in stock. That should all feel like it’s part of one journey. Not two different experiences.
Value for their money: With rising costs, shoppers continue to look for the “best deal.” This doesn’t mean that they’re looking for cheap options. It means they’re doing their research on the best option they can afford.

Likewise, what do you think will be a priority for retailers in the next 5 years?

With the continued innovation around AI, we believe retailers will focus on providing smarter, more immersive shopper experiences while also continuing to optimize their operations, especially with the rising costs of theft and inventory. They may also be relying more on data and AI to optimize day-to-day operations and better understand customer behavior to enhance and personalize their experiences.

Interested in learning more about Meraki MV Smart Cameras? Visit our page or request a demo now.

"}]]  Product manager Shashank Nalla dives into the Meraki MV smart cameras and how they create better shopping experiences at the Cisco Store.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

LinkedIn workforce data shows that women are still significantly underrepresented in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM). Despite making up almost half (49.3%) of total employment across… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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LinkedIn workforce data shows that women are still significantly underrepresented in the Science Technology Engineering Math (STEM). Despite making up almost half (49.3%) of total employment across non-STEM occupations, women represent just 29.2% of all STEM workers.

As technology moves quickly, that underrepresentation shapes the technology of tomorrow as well as amplifies existing gender bias in technology. As Cisco’s corporate purpose is to power an inclusive future for all, Cisco Networking Academy chooses to take action to address gender parity in tech by encouraging young girls and women to consider STEM as a career option.

AI is not new

The idea of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new. Metropolis, the classic Fritz Lang film featured a humanoid robot in 1927. Even in academia the interest in AI and machine learning dates back more than half a century. Alan Turing wrote a paper on Computing Machinery and Intelligence in 1950.

Despite what seems like a long history, it took the confluence of increased computational capacity, big data, and years of research and training before AI genuinely burst into the mainstream in 2023. One third of respondents to McKinsey’s Global Survey last year said their organizations are using generative AI regularly in at least one business function. This is less than a year after many of these tools debuted.

The AI revolution

AI is now seen as a revolution with organizations and people working diligently to understand opportunities and implications.

Along with revolutions come challenges, however. Cisco’s position on AI is that while there is enormous positive potential for humanity, we must deploy the technology responsibly. Cisco research reveals there are gaps in preparedness for the AI revolution in 86 percent of global organizations.

In our recent Quarterly Student Outcome Survey,* 63 percent of Cisco Networking Academy students tell us they are using AI today and 17 percent already have advanced skills in this area. We are proud our students are at the leading edge of technology learning. In fact, 88 percent of our students believe Cisco Networking Academy is at the forefront of this rapidly evolving tech world.

Unfortunately, we are already seeing a gender gap in AI.

According to the World Economic Forum (WEF), women comprise only 22 percent of AI professionals globally, only 18 percent of authors at leading AI conferences are women, and only 2 percent of venture capital flowed to start-ups founded by women in 2019.

Equally troubling, the WEF believes this gender gap in AI is self-perpetuating.

“There is an urgent need to rebalance the situation for women in AI to avoid biased analyzes and to build technologies that take into account the expectations and needs of all of humanity,” says Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO Director-General.

Are you AI-ready?

Celebrating its 10th year in 2024, Cisco Networking Academy’s Women Rock-IT program is a global initiative aimed at closing the gender gap in the technology industry by encouraging young women to pursue careers in tech.

The program highlights successful women in tech as role models and provides free introductory tech courses through Cisco Networking Academy. Since its inception, Women Rock-IT has seen more than two million participants and 870,000 course enrolments.​

On International Girls in ICT Day on April 25, 2024, Women Rock-IT will host a special event that aims to empower our audience by providing immediate, actionable steps to become AI-ready. We underscore the need to develop skills to harness the vast potential of AI and machine learning for businesses, public services, and society at large.

Cisco supports Girls in ICT Day 2024

Cisco office hosts Girls in ICT Day

This year more than 240 Cisco volunteers are organizing events and inviting local schools to visit Cisco offices to see what types of careers are available in the world of tech.

Over 250 Cisco Networking instructors have registered to run classes in Introduction to Cybersecurity and Introduction to Data Science as part of a Global Learn-A-Thon to introduce new students to the world of tech and to consider technology as a career pathway.

And a worldwide virtual broadcast in multiple time-zones will feature speakers with expertise in AI. These speakers are using artificial intelligence to forward developments in areas such as nature conservation and human development.

Meet the speakers

We are thrilled to announce our two speakers who are women at the cutting edge of the AI revolution:

Nadin Kokciyan

Nadin Kokciyan — Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh.

Nadine is deeply involved in ethical and future-oriented studies of technology as a Senior Research Affiliate at the Centre for Technomoral Futures, Edinburgh Futures Institute.

As the director of the Human-Centered AI Lab (CHAI Lab), Nadin’s work emphasizes the development and study of AI systems that prioritize human needs and values. Additionally, her affiliations with the Artificial Intelligence and its Applications Institute (AIAI), the Security and Privacy group, and the Technology Usability Lab In Privacy and Security (TULiPS) underline her multifaceted approach to AI research.

Nadin aims to bridge the gap between technical AI advancements and their societal implications, ensuring that AI development aligns with ethical standards and contributes positively to human welfare.

Tanya Berger-Wolf

Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf — Director of the Translational Data Analytics Institute, Ohio State University

Tanya is a professor of Computer Science Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, as well as Evolution, Ecology, and Organismal Biology at the Ohio State University. As a computational ecologist, her research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences.

Tanya is a member of the US National Academies Board on Life Sciences and CNRS International Scientific Advisory Board, Artificial Intelligence for Science, Science for Artificial Intelligence (AISSA) Centre. She also sits on advisory boards for Conservation X Labs and the Ocean Vision AI (OVAI) project.

She is also co-founder of the AI for wildlife conservation software non-profit Wild Me, home of the Wildbook project, which has been chosen by UNSECO as one of the top AI 100 projects worldwide supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Recently, Tanya was awarded a US National Science Foundation grant to establish a new field of study: Imageomics.

As a computational ecologist, her research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences.

AI everywhere

Artificial Intelligence will affect everyone and every business. From nature conservation, to the fashion industry, and education, AI will have an impact.

Join us for Women Rock-IT on April 25. Start exploring how you can use AI for an AI-fueled career boost. Hear from real-time innovators and leaders in their fields. Ask your questions and access free entry-level courses from Cisco Networking Academy to get started right away.

Register now for the Women Rock-IT virtual event on April 25!

Are You AI-Ready? Unlocking nature’s secrets: how AI & Data save wildlife

Check registration page for your local broadcast time.

*Based on Q2 FY24 Cisco Networking Academy survey responses of 1400 students

"}]]  Join us for Women Rock-IT on April 25. Start exploring how you can use AI for an AI-fueled career boost. Hear from real-time innovators and leaders in their fields. Ask your questions and access free entry-level courses from Cisco Networking Academy to get started right away.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

The Social Impact Partner Spotlight series highlights various Cisco non-profit organization partners that are helping transform the lives of individuals and communities. This blog features Cisco’s par… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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The Social Impact Partner Spotlight series highlights various Cisco non-profit organization partners that are helping transform the lives of individuals and communities. This blog features Cisco’s partnership with Living Goods, One Acre Fund, Solar Sister, and Trickle Up, highlighting the amazing work these organizations are doing to advance economic empowerment, especially for women, globally.

International Women’s Day is celebrated around the world on March 8. This year’s theme, Inspire Inclusion, is a bedrock of Cisco’s Social Impact partnerships where we aim to support an inclusive future for all — and recently exceeded our ten-year goal to positively impact one billion people by 2025. As a technology company, we believe in the power of technology to connect the unconnected, and to have impact at scale.  We support our non-profit partners to ideate, iterate, and launch tech-enabled solutions.  We provide ongoing support to help our partners validate the impact of these solutions, and then take these solutions to scale. Our financial support is complemented with donations of our technology to help our partners securely and efficiently deliver their programs and services. We also tap into our global employee community to provide strategic guidance and technical expertise as needed.

Learn more about four of Cisco’s partners – Living Goods, One Acre Fund, Solar Sister, and Trickle Up – who helped us reach our goal by providing people, especially women, with equitable access to the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to support themselves and their families toward long-term independence, resilience, and economic security.

Living Goods

“When I started… as a community health worker, I saw that women – including teens and underage girls – needed better support to reverse the high maternal and child death rates and to escape generational cycles of dependency and poverty,” says Miriam. “It struck me how enhancing women’s access to information, healthcare, education, and capacity to meaningfully participate in economic activities not only changed their lives but transformed their entire families as well. When women succeed, the whole community thrives.”
—Miriam Mbithe, Community Health Worker, Living Goods

Over 5 million children die each year due to preventable and treatable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, and malaria. Sub-Saharan Africa has one of the highest child and maternal mortality rates.

Community health workers (CHWs) are a low-cost and high-impact health solution. Living Goods supports more than 11,400 digitally empowered community health workers in Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Uganda to deliver life-saving care to more than 6 million people each year.  External studies have validated that they are reducing child mortality by 27% and child stunting by 7% at a cost of around $2 per person per year. In 2023, CHWs also ensured that 95% of pregnant women supported gave birth at a health facility, and that 95% of children under the age of two were fully immunized.

Miriam Mbithe, Community Health Worker, Kenya, Living Goods

Living Goods ensures CHWs have the digital tools, training, medicine, supervision, and compensation they need to cost-effectively save lives at scale; and they partner with governments to sustainably transform how healthcare is delivered. Investing in CHWs not only improves health outcomes, but also creates opportunities for the primarily female CHWs to contribute to their households, local economies, and the overall development of their communities.

With Cisco’s support over the last several years, Living Goods has enhanced their digital tools to improve the quality and scale of community health. Cisco has provided support for their mobile technology platform, data warehouse creation, predictive algorithms to target interventions to at-risk families, performance management, and interoperability with government systems. Most recently, Cisco is supporting Living Goods to enhance their data infrastructure and tools, transform the current data architecture to an improved self-service data stack, and strengthen their ability to generate insights from data.

Get involved:

You can support community health workers to save lives and improve livelihoods by giving a tax-deductible donation
Follow Living Goods on social media to stay up to date on their work: Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook

One Acre Fund

“If I hadn’t started this program, years from now there would be a difference in how my children would be able to use this land.” —Trina Mwiinga, farmer, Zambia, One Acre Fund

One Acre Fund was founded in 2006 with a simple mission: in everything we do, we place farmers first, and we measure success in our ability to make more farmers more prosperous. While others may see poverty in rural Africa as an enduring, intractable problem, One Acre Fund sees a powerful chance to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty by making one profession radically more productive: farming. They designed an integrated solution that enables smallholder farmers to dramatically increase their productivity within one planting season through training, financing, and delivery of high quality-farming inputs. They have spent the past decade working to scale as quickly as possible; today, supporting more than 4 million farmers.

One Acre Fund and Cisco began our work together in 2021, when Cisco provided the early-stage funding that enabled them to launch their farmer-facing app Tupande Online. This app offers farmers in Kenya a flexible new tech-enabled channel through which they can access the One Acre Fund program. Cisco’s early support helped them to grow this initiative  from the concept stage all the way to a scaled product that has now been downloaded over 125 thousand times and won the Vibrant Digital Africa Award for the Best Agri App in Kenya. One Acre Fund has big plans for this app in the coming years: they intend to scale it to even more farmers in Kenya, and to add additional farmer-facing services such as linkages to commercial value chains that will offer farmers even higher prices for their crops.

Trina Mwiinga, farmer, Zambia, One Acre Fund

Today, One Acre Fund is the world’s leading organization serving African smallholders. Crucially, they carefully tailor their core program to ensure services are accessible to women, who make up over two thirds of the farmers with whom they work:

For instance, half of all our field staff are women. This staffing choice builds distinctive gender sensitivity into all client interactions and mitigates inherent bias.
To overcome cultural norms that may impede women’s employment and role in financial decision-making, they typically deliver loans and trainings to farmer groups rather than individuals, leveraging and reinforcing positive, community-centric relationships.
To account for women’s lower average literacy rates across program areas, their trainings center on easy-to-understand hands-on demonstrations and oral and pictorial-based lessons (such approaches are also central to  expanding digital training offerings).
To accommodate the significant time constraints typically faced by rural women, the primary focus of their program is on improving farm yields and incomes through time and labor-saving tools, farming methods, and crops. As a result, women consistently achieve the same transformative productivity and income gains as male farmers in the program, in stark contrast to widespread disparities across the region.

Get involved:

Invest in small-scale farms in sub-Saharan Africa.
Learn more about One Acre Fund’s partnership with Cisco on the Tupande farmer app in this blog post.

Solar Sister

“On this Women’s International Day, we celebrate the resilience of our Solar Sister Entrepreneurs and the several underserved communities these women transform across Africa. By fostering inclusion and providing opportunities, we unlock the potential of women everywhere to build a brighter future. Solar Sister believes that energy access is a critical catalyst for women’s economic empowerment.”
—Olasimbo Sojinrin, COO, Solar Sister

The communities where Solar Sister works in sub-Saharan Africa have some of the greatest gender equity disparities in the world. They also have some of the lowest global electrification rates and are also bearing the brunt of a changing climate – 774 million people globally lack access to energy, with 597 million of those individuals living in sub-Saharan Africa.

When women in these last-mile communities are connected to Solar Sister’s unique community-driven model, they become the infrastructure needed to electrify communities left behind by top-down energy investment. Solar Sister provides business coaching, mentorship, a tested product pipeline, warranty support and access to local Solar Sister Sisterhood groups for networking, support, and encouragement.

Solar Sister participants network together

Solar Sister Entrepreneurs use existing woman-to-woman social networks to build their businesses and provide their communities access to affordable, clean energy. These products mitigate the negative local and global effects of traditional energy sources and climate change. Along the way they elevate their own standing, invest in their families and neighborhoods, and help usher their communities into an electrified future.

To date, Solar Sister has provided more than 4.5 million people with clean energy by training and supporting more than 10,000 women entrepreneurs who have gone on to mitigate 1.4M CO2e emissions. across Nigeria, Tanzania, and Kenya.

Women in sub-Saharan Africa are 30% less likely to own a smartphone than men in the region. Addressing these gender gaps is important to deliver the significant benefits of digital tools and the internet to women, their families, communities, and the economy.

A Solar Sister participant checks out digital tools on their mobile phone

Solar Sister is committed to empowering women and meeting our entrepreneurs where they are by finding new and innovative ways to support them as the world becomes more and more digitized. With Cisco’s support, Solar Sister launched a new digital literacy curriculum, consisting of multiple modules on topics related to social media marketing and digital business tools. To date, they have delivered this initial training to over 400 entrepreneurs and developed additional modules on customer data collection and other marketing topics which will be rolled out in 2024.

Over the next five years, Solar Sister aims to scale their model across Africa to empower more than 30,000 women to start clean energy businesses and create meaningful impact in their communities and provide more than 30,000,000 people with access to clean energy solutions.

Get involved:

Join Solar Sister’s journey by donating today
Sign up for Solar Sister’s weekly newsletter

Trickle Up

“Cisco’s support is allowing us to develop a high-quality coaching app that is adapted and responsive to the local environment and ensures access to consistent, low-cost coaching for all Trickle Up’s participants, allowing them to forge sustainable pathways out of poverty.” —Nathalie Laidler-Kylander, President & CEO, Trickle Up

650 million people globally survive on less than $2.15/day and do not have access to the basic services that enable equal progress toward better lives. Trickle Up’s mission is to partner with women in extreme poverty to build economic opportunity and drive inclusion. In Trickle Up’s programs, women and highly vulnerable populations forge resilient pathways out of poverty by starting microenterprises and building livelihoods. Individual and group coaching are core components of success in economic inclusion programming.

A family reviews the Echb’enink coaching app together

Cisco’s support has enabled the creation and testing of Trickle Up’s open-source Echb’enink coaching app with 12 modules, available for anyone to use. The partnership with Cisco to create train-the-trainer resources and videos supports women’s financial inclusion and agency through improved digital and financial literacy.

Using the app in program delivery is an innovative solution to scaling Trickle Up’s work through NGO partners, allowing them to reduce coaching costs, and maintain consistently high-quality coaching. The app reduces barriers to program adoption and delivery while enhancing the effectiveness of coaching to improve participant outcomes and support Trickle Up’s goal to reach 1 million participants by 2030.

Trickle Up’s impact:

82% of Trickle Up’s participants experienced increased agency and decision-making power.
86% of Trickle Up’s participants continue to save for their business, childcare, education, and an improved quality of life.
82% of Trickle Up’s participants attain food security for themselves and their families.

Get involved:

Join Trickle Up’s email list and learn more about how to support and follow their work.
Give today: Your gift has an outsized impact on people living in extreme poverty. It only takes $250 to provide a woman the critical seed capital she needs to jumpstart her microenterprise.
Follow Trickle Up on social media: Join their online community to keep learning more about Trickle Up’s work, hear from the women with whom they work, and follow their journey.

"}]]  Learn more about four of Cisco’s partners - Living Goods, One Acre Fund, Solar Sister, and Trickle Up - who helped us exceed our One Billion Lives Impacted goal by providing people, especially women, with equitable access to the knowledge, skills, and resources needed to support themselves and their families toward long-term independence, resilience, and economic security.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

This year, International Women’s Day and the Oscars are within two days of each other. Which is a happy accident, since 2023 saw the release of many films featuring incredible actresses in strong f… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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This year, International Women’s Day and the Oscars are within two days of each other. Which is a happy accident, since 2023 saw the release of many films featuring incredible actresses in strong female lead roles. Among the nominees for Best Actress is a movie that speaks directly to IWD’s 2024 theme, #InspireInclusion. In fact, I think it speaks to all women of the channel. I’m talking about Nyad, the account of long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s successful 2013 swim from Cuba to Florida.

Some back story. Nyad was a champion swimmer her whole life. She set impressive records in her 20s, then didn’t swim at all for thirty years. At 60, she resurrected her dream of swimming from Havana to Key West. She trained intensively to get back in shape, then made four harrowing, unsuccessful attempts over several years. In 2013, at 64 years old, she finally achieved her goal. She swam nonstop for 110 miles. For 53 hours—that’s more than two days straight! She is still the first and only person in the world to have performed this feat without a shark cage.

Nyad is about adversity, adventure, and triumph. It’s about inspiring inclusion: what you can accomplish regardless of your age, your gender, or your sexuality (Nyad came out when she was 21). But more than anything, it’s about a triumph of mindset, of vision, of a belief in yourself. As Nyad (played by Annette Bening) puts it, “I don’t believe in imposed limitations. I don’t believe in any limitations.”

That’s why Nyad’s story is so important for women, especially in our industry. We’ve all got obstacles and challenges, some smaller and some bigger. Our work in the channel is intense and fast-paced. It’s perpetually changing and evolving, as inevitably as the ocean currents and storms continually disrupted Nyad’s course. Not to mention the challenges we may carry in our personal lives. So we can use some inspiration!

Though I recommend the whole movie, let’s fast-forward to the end. (No worries about spoilers—the event was captured on video and widely covered by the press.) Nyad stumbles onto the shore after those 53 hours of swimming and is led to the recovery gurney. Before she lies down, she shares some powerful words through swollen lips: “I want to say three things. One, never, ever give up. Two, you’re never too old to chase your dreams. And three, it may look like a solitary sport…but it takes a team.”

These are straightforward statements; their meaning is clear. But when you know what she had just gone through, it gets really inspirational. Here’s what I mean:

Never give up

Nyad’s historic swim was years in the making—35 years if you count her first attempt when she was younger. But “never give up” is about more than endurance over time. It’s about overcoming serious obstacles too. Hers came in the form of sharks, toxic jellyfish and serious storms. But we’ve all got them, and they can feel every bit as large and overwhelming: market forces that force big changes or layoffs, impossible deadlines or revenue goals, a health scare, a child’s troubles in school.

You’re never too old to chase your dreams

Age gives you an important new asset: wisdom. Nyad understood that her wisdom more than made up for any athletic prowess she’d lost over the decades. Age is another important element of diversity in the workplace and all our communities: women of all ages have so much to offer each other in terms of expertise, mentoring, and experience. (For more on this, I recommend Arthur Brooks’ From Strength to Strength, an exploration of the specific strengths of different ages.)

It takes a team

Nyad was far from alone in her journey. She did all the swimming, yes, but she had a team of 40 experts keeping her safe, fed, and on course. Most of us know that community is central to success and fulfillment throughout our multi-faceted lives. No one woman can do it alone, professionally or personally. We rely on each other for expertise, validation, resources, and sometimes a good laugh or cry.

Speaking of teams, I have an announcement. It’s a concept I’ve been noodling on for some time, and this blog is its official launch.

Welcome to #ChannelHER!

It’s a platform for you, for us, for the women of the channel! It’s a space to celebrate and inspire.

A bit about the name #ChannelHER. At its core, it refers to our workscape: this virtual thoroughfare where vendors, distributors and partners connect to serve our customers’ IT needs. But there’s so much more! In essence, a channel is a passageway, a way to get from here to there. It’s a body of water connecting two seas (Nyad makes even more sense now, right?). As a verb, we “channel” when we direct resources, energy or attention into something specific, as in supporting other women. And when we’re guided by or inspired by someone, as in “wow, you’re so unstoppable it’s like you’re channeling Diana Nyad!”

But let’s not stop there. To truly support each other, we also need to be real. To connect the dots between inspiration and application, between vision and reality. We need to get down and dirty with our own sharks and jellyfish, our own turbulent waters. Because we all have them—none of us is alone.

So look for more from #ChannelHER in the months ahead! You’ll find my hand-picked stories, resources, and advice for navigating life as women of the channel.

I began this piece by mentioning the Oscars. In the spirit of recognizing women’s achievements, I want to give a shout out to Nyad actress Annette Bening, nominated for Best Actress! At 64, she’s the same age as Nyad was when she completed the swim. The swimming in this movie is all her—they used no body doubles. During filming, she regularly swam for 3-6 hours per day.

Like Nyad, Bening truly went the distance. Let’s #ChannelHER!

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"}]]  To truly support each other, we also need to be real. To connect the dots between inspiration and application, between vision and reality. We need to get down and dirty with our own sharks and jellyfish, our own turbulent waters. Because we all have them—none of us is alone.  Read More Cisco Blogs 

Data is the new fuel for business growth

Data is at the heart of seemingly everything these days, from the smart devices in our homes to the mobile apps we use on the go every day. This wealth of… Read more on Cisco Blogs

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Data is the new fuel for business growth

Data is at the heart of seemingly everything these days, from the smart devices in our homes to the mobile apps we use on the go every day. This wealth of information at our fingertips allows us to correlate data points and determine patterns and outcomes faster than humanly possible — enabling us to predict and quickly thwart adverse events on the horizon. We know that the volume of data collected by organizations is a goldmine of information that, when leveraged correctly, can empower growth. We also know that clean data, free of sensitive information, is critical for fueling GenAI initiatives across the globe. However, this uptick in data creation and usage also amplifies the need for organizations to ensure that they handle data responsibly and adhere to increasingly stringent data regulatory standards.

With astronomical amounts of data constantly being generated, tracked, and stored – it’s become more important than ever to secure it and be able to answer several key questions: Where is my data? Who is accessing my data? And is my data secure?

Introducing Observability for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)

The new Data Security module announced at Cisco Live 2024 Amsterdam is now generally available. It expands our business risk observability capabilities for cloud environments and delivers automated data discovery and classification in data stores like Snowflake and AWS S3. The new module provides real-time data insights that help visualize, prioritize, and act on security issues before they become revenue-impacting.

A quick look at the new data security capabilities:

Discovery and classification of sensitive data: Easily identify all data stores and data entities, to quickly focus on securing sensitive data.
Data access control: Understand which users, roles, and applications are accessing your data and who have access to personally identifiable information. Seamlessly adopt a least privilege approach by detecting unused privileges and locking down access to your data stores.
Exfiltration attempt detection: Unlock GenAI-based detection and remediation guidance for data exfiltration attempts to stop attackers in their tracks.
Identify security risks: Efficiently detect unencrypted buckets, dormant risky users and siloed unused data entities to reduce your overall security risk posture.

The future of data security

With data being created and moving at the speed of light every day, it can be overwhelming to keep track of exactly where the data is and how it’s being stored – let alone comprehensively securing it. Automation is imperative to keep up, and choosing the right tool will enable you to continue leveraging data and innovating while knowing your data is secure. The Data Security module provides teams with deep visibility and actionable insights to effortlessly protect data at scale. The future of data security relies on our ability to put adequate security controls in place now, so we can embrace the full potential of data and the unlimited capabilities that it unlocks.

Learn More

For more information, check out the resources below:

Cisco Unveils New Innovations on the Cisco Observability Platform

Bringing our Industry-Leading Innovation to Cisco Live EMEA!

"}]]  Cisco Observability for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) expands business risk observability capabilities for cloud environments and delivers automated data discovery and classification in data stores like Snowflake and AWS S3.  Read More Cisco Blogs