Friday, October 7, 2022

A Raffles Dialogue instead -Shangri La owner Robert Kuok holds the British responsible for the death of his brother William who served in the China backed Malayan Communist Party, says it’s in the marrow of his bones to help China

by Ganesh Sahathevan

The following was reported by Malaysiakini and attributed to Shangri La Hotel Group owner Robert Kuok:

"Here was my own brother (William Kuok), one of the finest human beings I have known, risking his own life to help the downtrodden.

"When mother learnt about William (joining the communist terrorist), she never uttered a word; but I think she must have felt the terrible sacrifice of her own flesh and blood," said Kuok.

Kuok said the British ambushed William and his two bodyguards in the jungle along the border of Negeri Sembilan and Pahang in August 1953, killing them. William was 30 years old.

The above, and what has been reported previously on this blog (see below) ought to have excluded the Shangri La hotels from consideration as venues for any kind of gathering of defence and security personnel. Why they were not needs investigation.It is also a matter of public record that Kuok has said that it’s in the marrow of his bones to help China. He has also said that politics and business are indivisible and that understanding that fact is what made him who he is; one of Asia's richest and most influential men.

Needless to say, the fate of the Shangri La Dialogues needs to be reconsidered and if they are to be held in Singapore then some other venue should be found. The Raffles seems to a sensible choice, given the ready association of the name and hotel with Singapore.

TO BE READ WITH

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

Defence Department Shangri-La data breach - Why is Defence silent about Shangri-La's Hong Kong base, China connections

by Ganesh Sahathevan

The ABC has reported:

Between May and July this year, customer data was stolen from eight Shangri-La hotels across Asia, including the luxury Singapore venue where Defence Minister Richard Marles held top-level security talks with China shortly after Labor's election win.

The Defence Department confirmed it was aware of a data breach affecting Shangri-La hotels and said it was "working with the company to understand the impact on Australian Defence attendees at the Shangri-La Dialogue".

Despite the now normal concerns about Chinese Government linked hacking, Defence has remained silent, or prefers to left unsaid the fact that the company is headquartered in Hong Kong:

Shangri-La Asia Ltd. is an investment holding company, which engages in the ownership and operation of hotels and real estate properties. The company was founded on August 14, 1992 and is headquartered in Hong Kon.

In fact, the Shangri-La Singapore was the first in the chain, and was established by billionaire Robert Kuok who remains very much in control of the company.

Kuok's Communist Party China connections and his loyalty to what he describes as his motherland are well known. In his words:

Shangri-La Beijing, my first major hotel project in China, was granted only a 13-year cooperation period. “I do it for the love of my motherland, the birthplace of my parents. It’s in the marrow of my bones to help the country.

(“Robert Kuok—A Memoir” written by Robert Kuok with Andrew Tanzer,2017)

TO BE READ WITH

Kuok tells of his communist brother and role in ending the MCP

Published: Nov 27, 2017 3:14 PM

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Updated: 7:11 PM

Tycoon Robert Kuok does not speak about communism with contempt, despite being a capitalist.

In his latest memoir, Kuok revealed that his brother William rose to become the propaganda chief of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP).

Despite their diverging paths, Kuok spoke kindly about his brother, describing him as one who stood up against injustice and for the poor. He had one other brother, Philip.

Kuok said William had dabbled with the idea of joining the MCP to fight the Japanese occupiers, having witnessed the atrocities by them, particularly against the Chinese in Malaya due to the Sino-Japanese War.

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However, Kuok said his brother did not join the MCP then as there was fear that being found out would lead to retribution on the entire family.

"I believe William joined the MCP in late 1945 or 1946. He never let on. I think his reason for keeping it close to his chest was not to implicate his family, because the British were hounding and persecuting the Communists who were literally driven into the jungle," he said in his memoir, a copy of which was obtained by Malaysiakini.

Before the British crackdown, Kuok said William moved to Kuala Lumpur and ran a tabloid newspaper as a mouthpiece for the left wing and after it was shut down by the colonial government, William became active in the militant Singapore Harbour Board Union.

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"I was never derisive about William's activities of helping the poor and championing the cause of the labour unions. However, I didn't think that business and politics needed to go together.

"He, on the other hand, felt that I was only keen on making money. One day in 1948, he sat me down and told me I was wrong, and that sooner or later I would recognise the worth of his advise - that politics and economics, and politics and business were intertwined," he said.

Kuok said William entered the jungle in 1948 and it was then he realised life was not only about making money.

"Here was my own brother, one of the finest human beings I have known, risking his own life to help the downtrodden.

"When mother learnt about William, she never uttered a word; but I think she must have felt the terrible sacrifice of her own flesh and blood," said Kuok.

Kuok said the British ambushed William and his two bodyguards in the jungle along the border of Negeri Sembilan and Pahang in August 1953, killing them. William was 30 years old.

Role in ending MCP

Despite relocating to Hong Kong, Kuok said he was still dragged back into Malaysian politics and one such instance was then inspector-general of police Rahim Noor seeking his help to convey messages to the Communist government of China.

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"The special branch of the Malaysian police contacted me often to say: 'Can you pass this message to China?' They asked China to silence the MCP radio, which was making broadcasts hostile to the Malaysian government.

"I passed the word and the radio was silenced," he said.

Kuok said he later sought a written commitment from China that it would no longer support the MCP, at the request of Rahim.

The tycoon said he was brought to an undisclosed location in Guangzhou, China, where a Chinese operative consulted him on the wording of the statement.

Kuok advised that the statement was what Kuala Lumpur wanted to hear but there were two paragraphs that could negate the statement and advised for them to be removed.

The operative agreed, but said the statement had been approved by a senior leader and asked Kuok to propose a solution.

With the operative's permission, Kuok whited out the undesired paragraphs and faxed the message back to Rahim.

"A few months later, the Malaysian government and Chin Peng signed a truce agreement. His people came out of the jungle, symbolically laid down their arms, pledged allegiance to Malaysia and the Malaysian Communist Party was no more," he said.

Wednesday, October 5, 2022

How hot is AirAsia’s data -AirAsia's " hot data" future in the light of the Optus data breach

by Ganesh Sahathevan

AirAsia has over the past two years sought to remodel and rebrand itself as a data driven company. It has made no secret of the fact that it seeks to harvest customer data to build new businesses.

AirAsia operates in Australia via its subsidiary AirAsia X. The Australian Government is being confronted with the biggest ever data breach in its history, the Optus data breach which has affected close to 9 million Optus customers.

To be seen to be addressing the problem the Australian Government has introduced new regulations and more are likely to follow. It will be interesting to see how these regulations affect AirAsia's "hot data" plans.

TO BE READ WITH

How hot is AirAsia’s data?

Evidently, sizzling.

In the commercial world, data is king. It allows businesses to understand its customers, the market, business trends, and helps them make important decisions based on these understandings.

Contrary to common belief, ‘customer data’ here is not merely contact details to be used as business leads, but is most valuable when it becomes ‘rich data’ that has been built over time for a business to understand and predict their customer behaviour better, such as their preferences, spending habits and more, making it an indispensable internal digital asset by offering the right things to the right customers at the right place at the right time.

As one of the largest airlines in Asia, AirAsia sits on a wealth of big and rich data, given it has always been a digitally driven business since day one. The airline was the first in the region to sell tickets directly online and flights using Short-Messaging Service (SMS) through mobile phones when it first started 19 years ago. What was once an airline, has now transformed into a digital travel and lifestyle company, which is fast becoming Asean’s super app.

Data is especially valuable for a group such as AirAsia, with a continuously growing ecosystem anchored on travel. The super app - airasia.com - now offers something for everyone from flights, accommodation, holidays, hotels, car rentals, food deliveries, online shopping, groceries, mobility services, activities, insurance, Muslim-friendly services, health deals and much more. All from the convenience of one platform.

Then how hot is the data team at AirAsia?

Understanding the value of data, some of the hottest jobs in the world right now include ‘Data Engineer’, ‘Data Analyst’, and ‘Data Scientist’, especially with the boom of digital businesses globally.

Managing the massive amount of data at AirAsia is of course no mean feat, but it also allows new opportunities which include:

Reducing costs by improving operational efficiency, productivity, and enhancing resource utilisation in our airline business.
To provide a seamless end-to-end journey for our passengers, from the moment they book, fly and return. A user can book a flight, hotel, itinerary, transport and much more with a minimal number of clicks.
Improve customer experience through personalizing our app and other online services for them.
Increase revenue for existing products and creating more businesses opportunities through leveraging synergies in the ecosystem
Increase loyalty on the ecosystem of travel, lifestyle, e-commerce and other associated businesses

AirAsia’s Data department is made up of professionals in various fields such as science & engineering and big data analytics. The three largest data teams currently are within the airasia.com data team, Airline data team and airasia Digital’s Group Data Centre of Excellence team, with a total of 90 Allstars.

The data teams work closely together to provide infrastructure support, insights for businesses, as well as developing and deploying data science algorithms and models to improve various key business metrics.

Led by Lye Kong Wei, Chief Data Scientist for AirAsia Group, the data team is divided into units, each with an appointed head. Units include airasia.com responsible for the Asean super app business, Airline operations including all things that make a flight possible, and AirAsia Digital Group data.

How AirAsia uses Data?

It varies depending on the product, operational or business requirements. For the airline, the data team led by Dr. Omid Geramifard focuses on providing tools and systems that augment and enhance the airline team’s decision making processes by automating certain processes with data-driven strategies where applicable. Part of the initiatives include predictive analytics such as predictive maintenance (auxiliary power units, hydraulic, landing gear, etc), inventory forecasting, AMOS analytics, real time delay prediction, flight impact and overflight fee estimation, operations research efforts in optimising aircraft assignment, automated long-term and short-term manpower planning with stand-by prediction functionality, providing flight duty period limit forewarning, crew unavailability prediction, crew fatigue monitoring and prediction to enhance crew rostering, airport and aircraft profiling and pattern mining, and machine learning for Net Promoter Score (NPS) that enables topic modelling and natural language summarisation on customer feedback tags. The team also provides analytics solutions for the airline's Operational Departments (Ops) and enhances Ops decision making through timely visualisation of data and metrics in the areas of schedule management, crew management, ground resource management, fleet monitoring, supply chain management, security management, customer happiness and many more.

To support all of these functions, from data analysis and extraction to model deployment and data visualisation by data scientists,an internal airline Data Pipeline & Model Serving team is focused on developing, building, and maintaining data pipelines to perform data ingestion and ensure data integrity.

Dr. Warren R. Scott leads the airasia.com data team, consisting of data scientists, analysts and engineers, the team designs models that provide tools and insights for airasia.com’s various lines of businesses, which includes supporting the commercial department for flights, hotels, and e-commerce analytics. Working closely with Route Revenue managers, the team innovates with cutting-edge statistics and ML models focused on forecasting and optimising the airline’s revenue management and pricing strategies. By integrating with Kambr’s revenue management solutions, the airasia.com data team delivers in-house data science technologies into the workflow of the Route Revenue system. The team is also responsible for delivering a personalised homepage experience, driven by collaborative filtering and user behaviour data. Understanding our users’ behaviours also allows us to develop various prediction models to help them explore and discover highly relevant and best-priced products and bundles. In addition, the team works closely with management to develop and maintain dashboards which track and inform automatically for airasia.com’s lines of businesses. Overall, the team plays an integral part in driving revenue growth for the Asean super app businesses.

Within airasia Digital Group Data, a team led by Dr. Roman Atachiants is democratising online controlled experimentation by building a state of the art Experimentation Platform. This platform includes segmentation and configuration management which accelerates innovation by allowing the product, engineering and data teams to design experiments, rollout, measure, evaluate, and then optimise product features and services. Hundreds or even more experiments can be run concurrently and safely, to allow teams to improve their products and services rapidly. The experimentation platform also serves as the underlying framework to enable adaptive “explore and exploit” of multiple machine learning models to ensure a good balance of allowing models to self-improve and using best performing models. The experimentation platform will also be extended to other relevant machine learning and optimization applications in other AirAsia businesses.

With data, AirAsia has created an ecosystem of businesses that touch consumers in their everyday life, transforming AirAsia to become a fully fledged digital travel and lifestyle company, now much more than just an airline. Through in-depth analysis of the data, airasia Digital was established in 2018 and includes airasia.com, Teleport, BigPay, BIG Rewards and Santan.

Not forgetting our internal customers, a team led by Kong Siong Lin, is working closely with the Finance department to modernise the financial software systems, by migrating and automating movement of data from on-premise and other sources to our own cloud. Budgeting, forecasting, and planning functionalities are re-engineered using the new cloud-based data. This allows our finance department to greatly reduce the time taken for their various important but previously highly manual workload. The new cloud-based financial system also allows the department to simulate and analyse business scenarios quickly and accurately, thus making important top-level decisions more data-driven and at least an order faster. The success of this project has also encouraged other finance teams to embark on similar digitalisation projects with Siong Lin’s help.

Upcoming projects

Digitalisation is now more crucial than ever, and our data team has been working hard on many initiatives to further enhance and improve the group businesses and services.

Sadesh Manikam, Head of Data said, “One project recently launched is Project CIRO, which will deliver a step change in understanding our customers using advanced data mining techniques.

CIRO draws upon data from all of our business entities, to create a more than 360 degree view of our customers. This helps AirAsia to understand its customer base better and to improve the consumer experience, enabling other data teams to provide highly personalised information to better targeted segments for any given campaign, relieving journey bottle-necks, along with a host of other benefits.”

“Data is one of the most valuable assets AirAsia has today and is mainly consumed internally with initiatives such as analytics, machine learning and other decision science solutions including business insights. Data security is always a top priority and is never compromised. airasia Digital complies with all regulations and standards on personal data protection . New technologies and processes are implemented to continuously improve our commitment to full compliance of data governance principles.”

“Another interesting project that the team will embark on in 2021, is Voice Analytics, an analysis of spoken conversations to better understand customer sentiment. Through this, the team can analyse huge volumes of customer conversation data and identify vital and often-times overlooked information. Voice Analytics will help the various teams to boost sales agents, customer services, cabin crew and call centre performance levels by automatically identifying deeper insights resulting in improved customer satisfaction, competitor intelligence, agent performance, etc.” Sadesh added.

“AirAsia is constantly embracing innovation and digitalisation and will continue to focus on improving and enhancing its products and services through the use of data, technologies, and translating applied research to production use. We would also like to record our sincere appreciation to the Singapore Economic Development Board for supporting airasia data projects through its grant to AirAsia Technology Centre Singapore.” Kong Wei added.

And for the public as well as tech-enthusiasts, the company will be launching a tech blog to be hosted on redbeatacademy.com. The blog will curate the best content along with highlights of insights, tech knowledge and initiatives taking place across the airasia group.

We’re getting it ready so stay tuned on the launch date!