IBM has unveiled its first quantum computer outside the US, bringing the Quantum System One to Germany.
Quantum computing is considered the next big evolution of computing, capable of achieving things modern computers can’t. Everything from artificial intelligence to financial markets to encryption algorithms will be impacted by quantum computing. As a result, countries around the world are racing to advance the technology.
IBM unveiled the new computer in partnership with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, Europe’s largest application-oriented research organization.
“Quantum computing opens up new possibilities for industry and society,” says Hannah Venzl, the coordinator of Fraunhofer Competence Network Quantum Computing. “Drugs and vaccines could be developed more quickly, climate models improved, logistics and transport systems optimized, or new materials better simulated. To make it all happen, to actively shape the rapid development in quantum computing, we need to build up expertise in Europe.”
The new computer is already hard at work, testing simulations for new materials for energy storage systems, analyzing energy supply infrastructures, financial asset portfolios and improved deep learning for machine learning applications.
“I am very pleased about the launch of the IBM Quantum System One in Germany, the most powerful quantum computer in Europe,” said Arvind Krishna, IBM CEO (translated from German.) “This is a turning point from which the German economy, industry and society will benefit greatly. Quantum computers promise to solve completely new categories of problems that are unattainable even for today’s most powerful conventional computers.”
AI-driven drones appear to have attacked humans without authorization, according to a new report by the U.N.
Many critics view AI technology as an existential threat to humanity, seeing some variation of the Terminator franchise’s Skynet wiping humanity out. Those critics may have just been given the strongest support yet for their fears, with AI drones attacking retreating soldiers without being instructed to.
According to the U.N. report, via The Independent, Libyan government forces were fighting Haftar Affiliated Forces (HAF) forces.
“Logistics convoys and retreating HAF were subsequently hunted down and remotely engaged by the unmanned combat aerial vehicles or the lethal autonomous weapons systems such as the STM Kargu-2,” read the UN report.
What makes the Kargu so dangerous is that it’s a “loitering” drone, designed to autonomously pick its own targets based on machine learning. If one such drone isn’t dangerous enough, the Kargu has swarming abilities, enabling 20 such drones to work together in a coordinated swarm.
“The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability,” wrote the report’s experts.
The incident is sure to raise questions about the ongoing safety issues surrounding AI drone use, especially in the context of military applications.
Artificial intelligence (AI) may be taking the business world by storm, but that doesn’t mean companies understand it.
A new report by Corinium and FICO indicates that some 65% of respondent companies cannot explain how the AI they utilize makes decisions or predictions. Unfortunately, the lack of knowledge leaves companies open to AI being misused.
“Over the past 15 months, more and more businesses have been investing in AI tools, but have not elevated the importance of AI governance and responsible AI to the boardroom level,” said Scott Zoldi, Chief Analytics Officer at FICO. “Organizations are increasingly leveraging AI to automate key processes that – in some cases – are making life-altering decisions for their customers and stakeholders. Senior leadership and boards must understand and enforce auditable, immutable AI model governance and product model monitoring to ensure that the decisions are accountable, fair, transparent, and responsible.”
The issue is further exacerbated by a lack of agreement about what ethical standards AI must meet. While some 55% agree that AI systems should meet basic ethical standards, 43% believe they have no responsibility beyond the most basic regulatory compliance, even if the AI systems in question will impact people’s livelihoods.
“AI will only become more pervasive within the digital economy as enterprises integrate it at the operational level across their businesses,” said Cortnie Abercrombie, Founder and CEO, AI Truth. “Key stakeholders, such as senior decision makers, board members, customers, etc. need to have a clear understanding on how AI is being used within their business, the potential risks involved and the systems put in place to help govern and monitor it. AI developers can play a major role in helping educate key stakeholders by inviting them to the vetting process of AI models.”
The report shows how far industries have to go before AI can be trusted to handle the kinds of decisions many tech leaders are eager to thrust upon it.
Zoom is releasing a major update to its iPad client, adding support for the iPad Pro’s Center Stage, as well as 48-person Gallery View.
While the move to the M1 processor and mini-LED display stole the show when Apple introduced the new iPad Pro, it was the Center Stage announcement that had many professionals ready to upgrade.
For individuals using an iPad Pro as their primary machine (such as yours truly) the offset camera is a constant irritation. It’s impossible to look at the camera without appearing to the other participants as if you’re staring offscreen.
Center Stage solves that problem, using a wide angle camera and machine learning, to keep you centered onscreen. Apple quickly announced the feature would not only work with FaceTime, but with third-party video apps as well.
Zoom’s latest release adopts the feature, bringing a welcome improvement to company meetings.
With support for Center Stage, you can participate more naturally in our Zoom video calls. Never again worry about whether you’re out of frame during a workout, teaching a class, or celebrating with friends and family over Zoom.
Another major new addition to this release is expanded Gallery View, with support for 48 video tiles, up from 25 in the previous version. While only the 2021 iPad Pro will increase to 48 tiles, Zoom says previous models will get an expanded Gallery View as well, although the number of added tiles will depend on the device and screen size.
IBM has announced it is bringing Python data science platform Anaconda to Linux on IBM Z & LinuxONE.
Anaconda is the leading Python data science platform, with some 25 million users relying on the platform for machine learning, data science, predictive analytics and more.
IBM is bringing Anaconda to IBM Z and LinuxONE, making it easy for programmers and data scientist to build and run their AI and analytics apps where their data already resides. According to research commissioned by IBM, 90% of respondents cited this as an important factor.
Barry Baker, VP of Product Management for IBM Z & LinuxONE, made the announcement in a blog post.
Data scientists who already know and love Anaconda can now expand their open-source data science experience to include IBM Z & LinuxONE, while continuing to work with their favorite tools and frameworks like conda, XGBoost and SciKit-Learn. This expands and enables choice in AI frameworks and tooling for end-to-end data science directly on the platform, including development, training, testing and production. Data scientists can benefit from the security capabilities, high availability and scalability of the IBM Z & LinuxONE platforms when implementing AI deployments targeting time-sensitive workloads or transactions when they are taking place. Anaconda runs natively on Linux on IBM Z, and through z/OS Container Extensions (zCX) on z/OS, the solution brings open-source data science tools close to key workloads, leveraging the data gravity of the Z and LinuxONE platforms.
Combine Skynet from Terminator and the Borg from Star Trek and you have Skyborg, also known as the latest Air Force AI that has successfully flown a drone.
As any avid science fiction fan can attest, there are some things that are just not a good idea. Creating an AI designed to autonomously fly fighter drones seems like one of them, but naming it after a combination of two of the most terrifying technological villains in moviedom takes the cake.
The Air Force developed two flavors of Skyborg. The first flavor — which we covered here — is an R2-D2 inspired copilot AI. The second is a fully autonomous system that can fly a pilotless drone.
The Air Force’s goal is to eventually have the Skyborg Autonomy Core System (ACS) fly dangerous missions that currently require putting a pilot in harm’s way. The latest test, over Florida and the Gulf of Mexico, was a big step in that direction.
“We’re extremely excited for the successful flight of an early version of the ’brain‘ of the Skyborg system,” said Brig. Gen. Dale White. “It is the first step in a marathon of progressive growth for Skyborg technology,” White said. “These initial flights kick off the experimentation campaign that will continue to mature the ACS and build trust in the system.”
“This test is a significant step toward teaming manned and unmanned aircraft in combat in the not-too-distant future,” said Maj. Nathan McCaskey, 40th Flight Test Squadron Test Pilot and AAAx Project Pilot. “Unmanned aircraft using the autonomy system developed for this experiment could go places where manned fighters can’t go, providing sensor information back to manned teammates, increasing the power projection capability of the Air Force.”
The Air Force hopes to have fully operational Skyborg craft flying missions around 2023. If science fiction is any guide, humanity should be fighting for its life shortly thereafter.
Apple has scored a big win, hiring Samy Bengio after he resigned from Google following the firing of Google’s AI ethics team leaders.
Google landed in hot water after the controversial firings of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell. Google was accused of interfering with academic integrity and criticized for its treatment of women and Black employees.
In the wake of the incidents, some engineers departed the company, citing its handling of the entire situation. Sammy Bengio, however, was the most high-profile departure. As a 14-year veteran of the company, and one of the earliest involved in Google Brain, his departure was seen as a real blow to the company, according to Reuters.
Google’s loss is Apple gain, as the Cupertino company has hired Bengio. Reuters reports Bengio will be leading a new AI research unit under John Giannandrea, senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy.
Despite being first to the market with its Siri virtual assistant, Apple has fallen behind Google and Amazon. It’s a safe bet Bengio’s new role will lead to significant, and much-needed, improvements for Siri. His work may also contribute to Apple’s other projects, including the AI component in the upcoming Apple Car.
Microsoft is deepening its support for the Python programming language and its ecosystem, making a significant investment.
Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world. Its extensible nature makes it a powerful language that is widely used across industry and academia. The language is also thepreferred language for machine learning applications, increasing its popularity even more.
Microsoft has invested $150,000 in the Python Software Foundation, boosting support that goes back to 2006. The company’s increased commitment make it a Visionary Sponsor. In addition, Python’s creator has joined Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer.
Microsoft has been a long-time supporter of the Python Software Foundation, starting in 2006. Today, Microsoft employs several core developers working part-time on CPython and the Python Steering Council, making significant contributions as PEP authors. We are also excited that Guido van Rossum has recently joined Microsoft as a Distinguished Engineer and is exploring performance improvements to CPython.
Aside from helping advance the Python tooling and ecosystem, Microsoft has shown strong involvement with the Python community and has been a long-time sponsor of PyCon US, including four years at the top tier Keystone level. Microsoft’s support for the community extends to sponsorships of regional and international Python events including in emerging regions.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sent a stark warning for companies to ensure their AI algorithms are unbiased…or else.
AI is being adopted across a wide spectrum of industries. Unfortunately, studies repeatedly demonstrate the propensity for AI algorithms to be biased. In many cases, this is the result of the datasets used to train AIs not reflecting the necessary diversity.
Watch out for discriminatory outcomes. Every year, the FTC holds PrivacyCon, a showcase for cutting-edge developments in privacy, data security, and artificial intelligence. During PrivacyCon 2020, researchers presented work showing that algorithms developed for benign purposes like healthcare resource allocation and advertising actually resulted in racial bias. How can you reduce the risk of your company becoming the example of a business whose well-intentioned algorithm perpetuates racial inequity? It’s essential to test your algorithm – both before you use it and periodically after that – to make sure that it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or other protected class.
The FTC also warns companies to be careful not to overpromise what their AI can do, such as advertising a product that delivers “100% unbiased hiring decisions,” yet was created with data that wasn’t truly diverse. The FTC advises companies to be transparent, use independent standards and be truthful about how they will use customer data.
The FTC warns that companies failing to follow its advice will deal with the consequences:
Hold yourself accountable – or be ready for the FTC to do it for you. As we’ve noted, it’s important to hold yourself accountable for your algorithm’s performance. Our recommendations for transparency and independence can help you do just that. But keep in mind that if you don’t hold yourself accountable, the FTC may do it for you. For example, if your algorithm results in credit discrimination against a protected class, you could find yourself facing a complaint alleging violations of the FTC Act and ECOA. Whether caused by a biased algorithm or by human misconduct of the more prosaic variety, the FTC takes allegations of credit discrimination very seriously, as its recent action against Bronx Honda demonstrates.
Microsoft is acquiring Nuance in a deal worth some $19.7 billion, Microsoft’s second-largest acquisition, in a bid for the healthcare cloud market.
Microsoft has been working for some time to provide industry-specific cloud options. Healthcare is a one of the big industries the companies is focusing on, with its Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare that was introduced last year.
Nuance is a company specializing in “conversational AI and cloud-based ambient clinical intelligence for healthcare providers.” The company’s PowerScribe One and Dragon line of software is used by a majority of US hospitals, doctors and radiologists.
“Nuance provides the AI layer at the healthcare point of delivery and is a pioneer in the real-world application of enterprise AI,” said Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft. “AI is technology’s most important priority, and healthcare is its most urgent application. Together, with our partner ecosystem, we will put advanced AI solutions into the hands of professionals everywhere to drive better decision-making and create more meaningful connections, as we accelerate growth of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and Nuance.”
“Over the past three years, Nuance has streamlined its portfolio to focus on the healthcare and enterprise AI segments, where there has been accelerated demand for advanced conversational AI and ambient solutions,” said Mark Benjamin, CEO, Nuance. “To seize this opportunity, we need the right platform to bring focus and global scale to our customers and partners to enable more personal, affordable and effective connections to people and care. The path forward is clearly with Microsoft — who brings intelligent cloud-based services at scale and who shares our passion for the ways technology can make a difference. At the same time, this combination offers a critical opportunity to deliver meaningful and certain value to our shareholders who have driven and supported us on this journey.”
The acquisition is an all-cash deal, has been unanimously approved by both companies’ boards and is expected to close by the end of the year.
Google has announced it is open sourcing its Lyra audio codec, a codec that uses machine learning to compress the audio and preserve quality.
As voice and videoconferencing has become more ubiquitous, audio codecs haven’t done a very good job of keeping up. As Google points out in blog post, many modern video codecs have better compression than audio ones.
To solve this problem, we have created Lyra, a high-quality, very low-bitrate speech codec that makes voice communication available even on the slowest networks. To do this, we’ve applied traditional codec techniques while leveraging advances in machine learning (ML) with models trained on thousands of hours of data to create a novel method for compressing and transmitting voice signals.
Google is now open sourcing Lyra in an effort to help it gain widespread acceptance.
As part of our efforts to make the best codecs universally available, we are open sourcing Lyra, allowing other developers to power their communications apps and take Lyra in powerful new directions. This release provides the tools needed for developers to encode and decode audio with Lyra, optimized for the 64-bit ARM android platform, with development on Linux. We hope to expand this codebase and develop improvements and support for additional platforms in tandem with the community.
Lyra is currently in beta, with Google wanting feedback from developers as soon as possible.
We are releasing Lyra as a beta version today because we wanted to enable developers and get feedback as soon as possible. As a result, we expect the API and bitstream to change as it is developed. All of the code for running Lyra is open sourced under the Apache license, except for a math kernel, for which a shared library is provided until we can implement a fully open solution over more platforms. We look forward to seeing what people do with Lyra now that it is open sourced. Check out the code and demo on GitHub, let us know what you think, and how you plan to use it!
“Digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic,” says Workday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri. “What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities.”
Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO of Workday, discusses how the pandemic will drive digital transformation forward at an even faster pace:
Digital Transformation To Be Faster Trend Out Of Pandemic
The first three quarters during the pandemic were challenging. The vagaries of subscription accounting models are such that it is a lag indicator. We expect new bookings growth to accelerate this year and that is our primary indicator and the way we run the business. We’re very excited about where we’re headed. That acceleration will probably take at least a year to show up in subscription accounting numbers just because of the way the model works.
What’s been interesting about the pandemic is that for companies that were in the cloud they figured out how to how to thrive and adjust to the new world. Companies that weren’t in the cloud realized that they needed the flexibility, agility, and ability to plan instantaneously. They needed those capabilities. In many ways, companies like Nike that are just such great market-leading companies, recognize that they needed to move this capability to the cloud. So I think actually digital transformation will come out as a faster trend out of the pandemic.
Employee Engagement Rose To The Top Of The List
It comes back to the flexibility and agility that that cloud solutions like Workday provide. We’ve been very fortunate. We’re so happy to have Laboratory Corporation of America become a customer. J&J is a customer. Visor’s a customer. AstraZeneca is a customer. I just feel honored to be able to support these companies who are doing the best they can to save our lives and are just doing amazing work with the vaccines and testing. We’ve always had a strength in the pharmaceuticals and diagnostics role. We’re going to do everything we can to make sure that they’re successful because they’re taking care of all of us.
Coming back to what we learned during the pandemic, employee engagement just rose to the top of every CEO’s list and every head of HR’s list. In a remote work orientation, it was harder to really understand how do employees think about the company they work at, their engagement level, their comfort with their manager, and if they are feeling fulfilled at work. We were already down the path at Workday with something called Pulse Surveys. We recognized that this emerging trend was going to be critical going forward.
We Fell In Love With Peakon So We Acquired Them
We concluded that we had to get in this market now, the market’s happening now, and Peakon is the well-known leader in this category. Peakon is a UK-based company with an amazing management team. We fell in love with the product and the management team so we made them part of Workday. They’re one of the new generations of companies that’s machine learning first.
They really use machine learning in the right way to guide decisions and really give you insight into how employees are thinking about the company that they’re working for and how engaged are they. That is a supercritical set of information that’s going to drive companies going forward.
Digital Transformation To Be Faster Trend Out Of Pandemic, Says Worday co-CEO Aneel Bhusri
A new report sheds light on the AI industry, with Apple the top company for acquiring AI startups.
According to GlobalData, Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft bought 60 AI companies between 2016 and 2020, 25 of those purchases by Apple. Improving Siri is likely a driving motivator behind the purchases.
“The US is the leader in AI, and the dominance of US tech giants in the list of top acquirers also indicate that these companies have some defined AI objectives,” said Nicklas Nilsson, Senior Analyst on the Thematic Research Team at GlobalData. “For instance, Apple has been ramping up its acquisition of AI companies, with several deals aimed at improving Siri or creating new features on its iPhones. Machine learning start-up Inductiv was acquired to improve Siri’s data, Irish voice tech start-up Voysis was bought to improve Siri’s understanding of natural language, and PullString should make Siri easier for iOS developers to use.
“Apple has gone on a shopping spree in efforts to catch up with Google (Google Assistant) and Amazon (Alexa). Siri was first on the market, but it consistently ranks below the two in terms of ‘smartness’, which is partly why Apple is far behind in smart speaker sales. Apple also want to make sure to keep its strong position within wearables. It is the dominant player in smartwatches. The acquisition of Xnor.ai last year was made to improve its on-edge processing capabilities, which has become important as it eliminates the need for data to be sent to the cloud, thereby improving data privacy.”
Apple has rolled Siri out across its lineup of devices, making it more important than ever for the virtual assistant to be as good, or better, than its rivals.
The rumored Apple Car is likely another reason why the company is investing so heavily in AI. With self-driving cars viewed as the next evolution of the automobile, Apple needs to ensure its AI technology is up to whatever plans it has.
Amazon has made Lookout for Metrics available to all its customers, providing a way to monitor and diagnose business anomalies.
A preview version of Lookout for Metrics was first launched at re:Invent 2020. The service uses machine learning to analyze a business’ operations and automatically detect and diagnose anomalies. It could be a potential business opportunity, a technical issue or any one of the myriad challenges a data-driven business faces.
“We’re excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Lookout for Metrics, a new service that uses machine learning (ML) to automatically monitor the metrics that are most important to businesses with greater speed and accuracy,” write Ankita Verma and Chris King for AWS. “The service also makes it easier to diagnose the root cause of anomalies like unexpected dips in revenue, high rates of abandoned shopping carts, spikes in payment transaction failures, increases in new user sign-ups, and many more. Lookout for Metrics goes beyond simple anomaly detection. It allows developers to set up autonomous monitoring for important metrics to detect anomalies and identify their root cause in a matter of few clicks, using the same technology used by Amazon internally to detect anomalies in its metrics—all with no ML experience required.”
Lookout for Metrics connects to 19 of the most popular data sources, including Amazon Simple Storage Solution (Amazon S3), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Redshift, Amazon CloudWatch, Salesforce, Marketo and Zendesk.
Adobe is bringing Super Resolution to Photoshop, using artificial intelligence to increase an image’s pixels by four times.
Everyone has seen a TV show where the character says those two infamous words: “Zoom in.” As anyone who’s actually worked with digital photos can attest, any photo magnifying is limited by the size and quality of the image. If a picture doesn’t have the necessary pixel density, it can only be enlarged so much before it becomes pixilated and loses its clarity.
Beyond being an inaccurate staple of virtually every police procedural, there are a number of practical situations where this can be a limitation. Printing a photo taken with a low-resolution camera is a perfect example, as it takes a higher resolution photo to look good when printed.
“Super Resolution is also a pixels project, but of a different kind,” writes Adobe’s Eric Chan. “Imagine turning a 10-megapixel photo into a 40-megapixel photo. Imagine upsizing an old photo taken with a low-res camera for a large print. Imagine having an advanced ‘digital zoom’ feature to enlarge your subject. There’s more goodness to imagine, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To understand Super Resolution properly, we must first talk about Enhance Details.”
Super Resolution uses AI to intelligently expand a photo, keeping it crisp with minimal artifacts.
“The term ‘Super Resolution’ refers to the process of improving the quality of a photo by boosting its apparent resolution,” continues Chan. “Enlarging a photo often produces blurry details, but Super Resolution has an ace up its sleeve — an advanced machine learning model trained on millions of photos. Backed by this vast training set, Super Resolution can intelligently enlarge photos while maintaining clean edges and preserving important details.”
Super Resolution is now available in Camera Raw 13.2 and will soon be included in Lightroom and Lightroom Classic.
Gartner predicts that artificial intelligence (AI) will replace “gut feel” in influencing investment decisions by venture capitalists and early-stage investors.
Venture capitalists have long relied on a mysterious combination of data, KPIs and gut feeling to select which companies to invest in. According to Gartner, however, AI is poised to replace the ever-elusive gut feeling some 75% of investors.
“Successful investors are purported to have a good ‘gut feel’ — the ability to make sound financial decisions from mostly qualitative information alongside the quantitative data provided by the technology company,” said Patrick Stakenas, senior research director at Gartner. “However, this ‘impossible to quantify inner voice’ grown from personal experience is decreasingly playing a role in investment decision making. The traditional pitch experience will significantly shift by 2025 and tech CEOs will need to face investors with AI-enabled models and simulations as traditional pitch decks and financials will be insufficient.”
By 2025, AI will help investors transition to a quantitative process based on advanced analytics. Information will be gathered from a variety of sources, including Crunchbase, LinkedIn, Owler, PitchBook and others. This data can then be used by AI to assess a company’s viability.
“This data is increasingly being used to build sophisticated models that can better determine the viability, strategy and potential outcome of an investment in a short amount of time. Questions such as when to invest, where to invest and how much to invest are becoming almost automated,” said Mr. Stakenas.
IBM is investigating the possibility of selling IBM Watson Health, its attempt to use artificial intelligence (AI) in the medical field.
IBM is moving swiftly toward its goal of splitting the company and focusing the core business on cloud computing. As a result, IBM has purchased a number of smaller startups aligned with that goal. Its latest move, however, appears to be an effort to trim dead weight, or a portion of the business that doesn’t line up with its long-term plans.
IBM had high hopes for IBM Watson Health and the promise of AI revolutionizing the medical profession. The company invested billions building out the solution, but it has ultimately proved a cautionary tale for companies investing in AI. Despite all of IBM’s efforts, the company had difficulty getting doctors and medical professionals to adopt it.
According to insiders who spoke with The Wall Street Journal, IBM is looking to sell the business to an industry player, private-equity firm or merge it with a blank-check company. The common theme is deep pockets.
IBM Watson Health clearly has potential, but it may have been a good idea before its time. It may take deep pockets to keep it going until the medical community warms to the idea of AI managing its data.
Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have partnered to bring AI and edge computing to the International Space Station (ISS).
HPE has been working with NASA to create a commercial, off-the-shelf supercomputer for use on the ISS. The Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) is specifically built on the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge system, designed for the harshest edge environments — which space certainly qualifies as.
Microsoft and HPE are working to connect the SBC-2 to Azure, to enable cloud computing, along with AI and machine learning development in the ultimate edge environment.
“HPE and Microsoft are collaborating to further accelerate space exploration by delivering state-of-the art technologies to tackle a range of data processing needs while in orbit. By bringing together HPE’s Spaceborne Computer-2, which is based on the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge system for advanced edge computing and AI capabilities, with Microsoft Azure to connect to the cloud, we are enabling space explorers to seamlessly transmit large data sets to and from Earth and benefit from an edge-to-cloud experience. We look forward to collaborating with Microsoft on their Azure Space efforts, which share our vision to accelerate discovery and help make breakthroughs to support life and sustainability in future, extended human missions to space.” —Dr. Mark Fernandez, Solutions Architect of Converged Edge Systems at HPE and Principal Investigator for Spaceborne Computer-2
Microsoft first announced its Azure Space program in October, as a concerted effort to bring cloud computing to space.
“Today’s announcement advances Azure Space in bringing Azure AI and machine learning to new space missions and emphasizes the true power of hyperscale computing in support of edge scenarios—connecting anyone, anywhere to the cloud,” writesTom Keane Corporate Vice President, Azure Global, Microsoft Azure. “Our collaboration with HPE is just the first step in an incredible journey and will provide researchers and students access to these insights and technologies, inspiring the next generation of those who wish to invent with purpose, on and off the planet.”
Dell Technologies CTO John Roese says 2021 will be a big year for 5G, as it moves beyond the consumer and begins to reach its full potential.
When many people think of 5G, their first thought is how fast the service will be on their phone, tablet or computer. More than any previous generation of wireless tech, however, 5G is on the threshold of revolutionizing multiple industries. The speed 5G offers promises to help advance artificial intelligence, edge computing, autonomous driving, Internet of Things (IoT) and much more.
Roese believes 2021 is the year 5G will finally start delivering on its promises, beyond what it offers to consumers.
5G “hasn’t really transformed much because the first wave of 5G was really an extension of 4G, it wasn’t the real 5G,” Roese said, speaking with media, via ZDNet. “But in 2021 with what’s called release 16 and release 17 of the 5G standards, we will now have true standalone 5G materialise and it will include advanced features…[that will]…make 5G interesting.”
“Building a smart city, or smart factory, or smart hospital, or a logistics system, or a transportation network needs these advanced features and as they materialise, the 5G ecosystem will shift from being very consumer focused to really being dominated by enterprise use cases,” Roese added. “Revolutionising transportation, or healthcare, or logistics will become more and more of the dominant thread of why we’re doing 5G.”
As automakers around the world partner up with leading tech companies, Volkswagen is taking a different approach, developing its autonomous software in-house.
Autonomous driving and connected vehicles are one of the next big steps for the automotive industry. Many automakers are paring up with leading tech companies, such as Ford partnering with Google.
Volkswagen, on the other hand, is planning to develop its software in-house, according to U.S. News & World Report. The company is not ruling out collaboration with outside companies on some aspects, but clearly wants to develop the bulk on its its own.
“We have a size that makes us want to cooperate with ourselves initially,” said Markus Duesmann, CEO of Audi (Volkswagen’s luxury brand). Duesmann also indicated his confidence that Volkswagen is in a position to create new standards for automotive software development, and is open to other companies joining those efforts.
Volkswagen certainly has the size and scale to tackle a project of this size. It should be interesting to see how its software stacks up with those of its rivals.
Ford has named Google its preferred partner in its connected vehicle efforts, also naming Google Cloud as its preferred cloud platform.
Like virtually every other traditional automaker, Ford is under increased pressure to focus on the next generation of data-driven, connected vehicles — an area where Tesla is seen as having a commanding lead. As a result, many automakers are turning to the world’s leading cloud platforms to help them make the transformation.
Ford and Google are forming a new collaborate group, Team Upshift, “that will push the boundaries of Ford’s transformation, unlock personalized consumer experiences, and drive disruptive, data-driven opportunities.”
As part of the partnership, Ford will rely on Google Cloud, and Google’s expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and data. Millions of Ford and Lincoln vehicles across all price points will provide an Android-powered digital experience, along with Google apps and services. Google Assistant, Google Maps and Google Play will all be available, with Android making it possible for developers to build additional apps.
“As Ford continues the most profound transformation in our history with electrification, connectivity and self-driving, Google and Ford coming together establishes an innovation powerhouse truly able to deliver a superior experience for our customers and modernize our business,” said Jim Farley, President and CEO of Ford.
“From the first moving assembly line to the latest driver-assist technology, Ford has set the pace of innovation for the automotive industry for nearly 120 years,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “We’re proud to partner to apply the best of Google’s AI, data analytics, compute and cloud platforms to help transform Ford’s business and build automotive technologies that keep people safe and connected on the road.”
