Pacific Northwest National Laboratory mathematician Bill Kay had been talking with a data scientist concerned about “cascading failures.”

Not to be confused with the compounded catastrophe of losing your MetroCard, missing your train, arriving late for work, and ultimately missing out on free office bagels, “cascading failure,” in this case, refers to critical infrastructure.

Downtime at a power station, for example, could cause failure at a water treatment plant, which could impact a hospital that can no longer operate without clean water.

This is a PageRank problem, Kay thought, referring to the tool known for ranking websites in order of importance.

Kay and his team used the computational library SciPy’s open-source version of the PageRank model to effectively identify key assets within a critical infrastructure system. Their work was published recently in the journal Homeland Security Affairs—a site that could be facing a PageRank challenge of its own, given its current lack of links.

“Your bias can color your feelings about which things are important to protect. And this just leans on the network structure and says, there’s no bias here. I just know what the dependencies are, and I’m going to rank importance from that,” Kay told IT Brew.

Read the rest here.—BH

Things you should consider spring-cleaning this season: your attic, your car, and your organization’s tech stack. Some CIOs are already trying to get a headstart with the latter.

Courtney Schuyler, co-founder and resident transformation consultant at SkyPhi Studios, a consulting firm that helps organizations “realize the full value of their digital investments,” told IT Brew that she has seen a 20% uptick from this period last year in CIOs interested in her services. She speculates this is due to the budding focus on AI in the industry and news around the Department of Government Efficiency’s alleged quest to modernize US government systems.

“It really just triggers…companies to say, ‘Should I be doing this for my organization?’” Schuyler said. “And my answer to that would be yes, always, yes. It’s always a good time to re-evaluate and look at what is and isn’t being used.”

Read more here.—BM

Deepfakes aren’t just something you have to worry about your uncle falling prey to while browsing his Facebook newsfeed.

As AI continues to evolve, recruiters now have to worry about candidates using deepfake AI filters during interviews. Just ask Bettina Liporazzi, recruiting lead at Make, a remote digital studio that hires internationally (Liporazzi, for one, lives in Argentina).

She was contacted in mid-March by someone claiming to be an out-of-work software engineer. Though Make wasn’t hiring for their skillset, they wanted to connect, in case any relevant roles turned up in the future. After taking a quick glance at their résumé, she invited them to an introductory call.

“I’ll be honest, their résumé looked okay. I didn’t look into it with much detail, especially with how legit the companies were,” Liporazzi told HR Brew. “They reached out to me saying, ‘I’m out of a job,’ and with the market as it is, you are a human being. You want to help people.”

But from that point on, something felt off. They never accepted the Google Meet invite, and though they joined the 10-minute interview, (possibly via a private browser like Incognito, leading Google to flag them as suspicious), they did not turn on their camera—declining Liporazzi’s repeated requests to do so, claiming it was broken. After Liporazzi suggested rescheduling, they offered to restart their computer to fix the issue.

Read more on HR Brew.—PM