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Category: CTOUpdate

CTOUpdate

  • Will the New iPhone Come With Facial Recognition Technology?

    Will the New iPhone Come With Facial Recognition Technology?

    There are several ways to unlock and secure your mobile phone. When it comes to the iPhone, the fingerprint scanner is one of the most popular options available. However, this method has its limitations, which is why Apple has been considering facial recognition for more than a year now.

    This feature would not only be convenient but also more secure than the fingerprint scanner, possibly overshadowing it. The Apple facial scanner would be able to scan a face from a distance using a depth sensor, making it faster and safer to unlock the phone rather than using the fingerprint scanner, a pattern, or a number code.

    Apple is apparently testing out frontal 3D facial scanning, retinal scanning, and depth recognition. They are also focusing on a high level of speed and comprehensive accuracy with the new technology. The aim is to give the iPhone owner the ability to unlock the device, within a few milliseconds at the most, just by glancing at it. It could even work if the phone is lying flat on a table.

    The security of the face recognition feature would not only exceed that of the Touch ID sensor, but also the iris scanner found on the Samsung Galaxy S8. Upon release of the Galaxy S8, hackers were able to unlock the phone with an easy-to-execute tactic that involved holding a photo image of the iris in front of the phone’s sensor. Sensing depth, the 3D feature on the new iPhone would be able to collect more biometric data to reduce the possibility of being deceived by a photo. 

    An added bonus of the new feature is that your face will not only be able to unlock your phone, but also make payments, launch apps, log into social media accounts, and much more. It is not clear if the 3D scanner will replace the Touch ID as Apple’s representatives have yet to respond to the rumor.

  • Facebook Successfully Lands Aquila Drone, Aims to Provide Global Internet Access

    Facebook Successfully Lands Aquila Drone, Aims to Provide Global Internet Access

    In May, Facebook’s Aquila program reached an important milestone. The solar-powered drone, which was developed last year, finally completed a second full-scale test flight without crashing. The testing happened just after sunrise at around 5:15 am in a remote part of Arizona.

    The Aquila program is guided by the vision to make internet connectivity available to over four billion people across the globe who still don’t have access. To date, Facebook is facing competition over aerial internet from Google’s Project Loon, OneWeb’s satellite constellation, as well as projects by SpaceX, and Boeing.

    Last year, Aquila’s first test flight ended in a crash due to a gust of wind affecting its landing configuration. This led the team to fine-tune the drone’s design. Facebook’s director of aeronautical platforms Martin Luis Gomez shared in his blog, “The improvements we implemented based on Aquila’s performance during its first test flight made a significant difference in this flight.”

    Facebook’s engineering team has enumerated a number of modifications. To support a successful landing, they added spoilers to the aircraft’s wings, along with a horizontal propeller. They also incorporated hundreds of sensors to gather new data as well as new radios for the communication subsystem.

    The upgrades they applied were all worth it, as it resulted in Aquila’s triumph. “The climb rate was nearly twice as fast as on our first flight. The aircraft smoothly slid to a stop. The entire team was thrilled with these results,” Gomez added.

    Their job doesn’t end there, however. They have to solve some difficult engineering challenges to make the aircraft stay aloft in the same area for months at a time. This is in accordance with the Aquila program’s main goal, which is to have a fleet of drones soar together at 60,000 feet, communicating with each other with lasers.

    We can only hope that these concepts for aerial access get off the ground soon. And maybe, in the not-so-distant future, it might just help bring the world closer through internet connectivity.

  • Amazon May Block In-Store Price Comparisons With New Patented Technology

    Amazon May Block In-Store Price Comparisons With New Patented Technology

    A patent purchased by Amazon may pose potential privacy issues. Named, “Physical Store Online Shopping Control,” this technology has the capability to track shoppers within their brick-and-mortar stores.

    If shoppers connect through the store’s wifi networks, this new system can track their online activity and interfere with it. This prevents shoppers from what has been labeled as “mobile window shopping,” where customers use their smartphones to compare product prices as they walk around the store. The system is also able to track and monitor the shopper’s network and detect their location within the establishment.

    If a shopper decides to search online for similar products, an algorithm would detect the traffic and attempt to override the results. One of the following could be executed: it could block access to a competitor’s websites, which prevents customers from viewing similar products; redirect customers back to Amazon’s own website or other Amazon-approved websites; send a notification to a salesperson to approach the customer; or it could send customers’ smartphones a text message or other notifications designed to entice them back.

    This new patent becomes even more significant when you consider that Amazon has been expanding its physical presence. With over half a dozen brick-and-mortar bookstores and their recent purchase of supermarket chain Whole Foods, the company will eventually end up controlling over 470 retail establishments. This gives Amazon enormous incentive in ensuring that their customers won’t be looking elsewhere while inside their stores.

     

    Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said that regulators should be on the lookout for potentially anti-competitive behavior. “Amazon has created a largely stealth Big Data digital apparatus that has not gotten the scrutiny it requires,” he added.

    Amazon has not yet responded on whether they will implement this initiative. Holding a patent does not necessarily mean the company will use it. Some file for patents to reserve the right to use it later on, while others do so to prevent competitors from using it.

    However, if such a technology is implemented, companies will be able to direct and manipulate consumers’ purchasing behaviors, which causes privacy issues for the customers. The online retail giant has shown support for a free and open internet when they signed on for a July 12 protest against the FCC’s initiative to roll back rules regarding net neutrality.

    Product—and price—comparison was one of the main selling points for Amazon when it first launched in 1994. Mobile window shopping enables consumers to “get a feel” of physical products before purchasing them online. This new technology suggests that “the company’s new patent is aimed to protect it from just such behavior as it enters the storefront arena.”

    For now, it seems like one way to bypass this system is for consumers to use their own cellular data when browsing within Amazon-owned shops. According to Gizmodo, however, ” that’s a scenario that the average consumer would revolt against, for now. But it’s an example of how tricky a truly dominant corporation could be if it runs rampant.”

  • Instagram CEO Denies Company Copied Snapchat, Says They Were ‘Building Upon the Technology’

    Instagram CEO Denies Company Copied Snapchat, Says They Were ‘Building Upon the Technology’

    For some time now, Instagram has been accused of stealing ideas from Snapchat. Now, the social media company’s CEO has broken his silence to put a stop to all the talk.

    One of the glaring copying offenses that Instagram has been accused of concerns its Stories feature, which is reportedly a virtual reproduction of Snapchat’s own version. It’s a new feature introduced last year, which allows users to post photos or videos that will be expunged forever after just 24 hours.

    However, Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said in an interview that, while there are similarities, it certainly “doesn’t mean that you’re copying.” He insisted that what they are doing instead is “building upon the technology” that Snapchat started.

    Systrom then harkened back to the old days when the only car was the Ford Model T. Pointing out that countless vehicle manufacturers have come up with different models since then, but they still all have wheels and windows like the first car.

    “The first time you see a product show up somewhere else it feels a lot like copying, but imagine a world where the only car was the Ford Model T,” he explained.

    This is a sensitive issue for Snapchat, considering that Instagram managed to flip more people into using the feature compared to them. There are reportedly 200 million users who are active customers of Intagram Stories daily compared to Snap’s 166 million.

    Rubbing salt to Snapchat’s wound is Facebook’s own decision to roll out a similar feature on its platform, as well as on Messenger and WhatsApp.

    Nevertheless, Systrom appears to be skirting the issue since he was quoted once before about Snap’s direct influence on Instagram Stories. In an interview with reporters in August of last year, he was asked point-blank about Snapchat’s similar concept, and he conceded that “they deserve all the credit.”

    “This isn’t about who invented something,” he said. “This is about a format, and how you take it to a network and put your own spin on it.”  

    Systrom said the practice of building on the technology is not exclusive to Instagram. For instance, Snapchat copied face filters and slideshows from somewhere else. Twitter started hashtags, then Facebook copied it. Similarly, Pixar and Dreamworks are the leaders in computer animation but they are not the same.

    While he said Instagram Stories might be similar to Snapchat, they definitely add more value to this sharing feature, which is the reason why more people are actively using it on their platform compared to the competition.

  • Echo Show Highlights Amazon’s Dominance in Home AI Technology

    Echo Show Highlights Amazon’s Dominance in Home AI Technology

    Amazon further distanced itself from Google with the launch of Echo Show, a voice-activated home smart assistant with a 7-inch touchscreen display.

    With the 7-inch screen, homeowners will be able to sing along through the lyrics on display, monitor security cameras, read shopping lists, keep up with the news, or view photos and videos. They can also make hands-free video calls with paired devices.

    Smart home devices are geared to become the next battleground for tech companies, with the industry estimated to hit almost $200 billion by 2021. But while Google, Apple, and the rest of the pack are still trying to catch up, Amazon has seemingly asserted its dominance with the announcement of its latest product.

    Google’s answer to Alexa, dubbed as Home, was released a full two years after Amazon introduced its smart home devices. Microsoft’s own version was only released this week, while Apple has no timetable for their release.

    Martin Utreras, vice president of forecasting at business digital data miner eMarketer, said that Alexa-powered Echo devices already corner 70% of the market compared to Google’s Home, which controls 23.8%. Amazon managed to do this by opening the ecosystem to third-party developers such as Ford, GE, and LG with their smart cars and appliances being able to link up with Alexa.

    “Consumers are becoming increasingly comfortable with the technology, which is driving engagement,” the forecaster said. “As prices decrease and functionality increases, consumers are finding more reasons to adopt these devices.”

    The Amazon Echo Show is seen to address previous gripes about its functionality. Pictures really do paint a thousand words, as users found it difficult to receive information provided by Alexa. Search results, for instance, are much easier to absorb when you read them instead of listening to each one being dictated to you.

    However, surveys have shown that customers are under no illusion about the capacity of the smart home AI assistants to replace PCs, tablets, or mobile phones. In fact, according to the survey, homeowners don’t really want to see a web browser in the Amazon Echo Show or any other similar devices with a touchscreen display.

    Instead, they want easy access to the clock, calendar, news headlines, weather, music, or entertainment, which only serves to affirm that homeowners want the innovation to enhance their experience in performing any voice-activated task.

    Amazon’s Echo Show will be released in the U.S. on June 28, 2017, with a price tag of $229.99. Shipping will be free.

  • Google Creates a Technical Guide for Moving to the Cloud

    Google Creates a Technical Guide for Moving to the Cloud

    Google has created a guide in the form of a website for companies that are considering a move to their cloud called Google Cloud Platform for Data Center Professionals.

    “We recognize that a migration of any size can be a challenging project, so today we’re happy to announce the first part of a new resource to help our customers as they migrate,” said Peter-Mark Verwoerd,a Solutions Architect at Google who previously worked for Amazon Web Services. “This is a guide for customers who are looking to move to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and are coming from non-cloud environments.”

    The guide focuses on the basics of running IT — Compute, Networking, Storage, and Management. “We’ve tried to write this from the point of view of someone with minimal cloud experience, so we hope you find this guide a useful starting point,” said Verwoerd.

  • Government Can Speed Up Implementation of IoT Technology

    Government Can Speed Up Implementation of IoT Technology

    Government around the world play a key role in whether IoT becomes a mainstream technology sooner rather than later according to Cisco IoT expert Maciej Kranz. Kranz recently posted an excerpt of his book Building the Internet of Things on the Cisco Innovation blog.

    IoT Adoption is Key to Regional Competitiveness

    “Governments around the world are beginning to realize that IoT adoption will be one of the key factors defining the competitiveness of their cities, provinces, countries, or regions and that IoT can help solve many of the chronic problems plaguing their economies and their environments,” says Kranz. “Thus, governments at various levels have a number of key roles to play.”

    “There will be competition for bandwidth and other resources; there will be ideas that may conflict with public policy; and there will be IoT-based ideas that need to be regulated to ensure public safety and privacy,” noted Kranz. “Think drones. In these and other ways, government regulations can help direct and align the industry.”

    Kranz offered a few examples of U.S. legislations and related impact:

    • The Energy Act drove the need for energy monitoring, including smart meters.
    • The Rail Safety Improvement Act specified the requirements and the deadline (since extended) for adoption of Positive Train Control on main U.S. railways.
    • The Food Safety Modernization Act drove the requirements for IoT-based systems, including quality control and source tracking, across the food supply chain to prevent food safety issues.
    • Most recently, the Drug Quality and Security Act requires the adoption of a system to identify and trace prescription drugs.

    Kranz believes that government funding priorities may drive the future of IoT. “Through their spending power, governments can drive the focus and accelerate the adoption of IoT technologies and solutions. In aggregate, governments represent a huge global market. Their priorities, what they choose to buy, and what problems they choose to address can drive the roadmaps of IoT technology and solution providers.”

    He lists these additional government roles:

    • Supporting training and education
    • Supporting development of startup ecosystems
    • Supporting standards efforts
    • Supporting basic research and development
    • Enabling competitiveness and openness of the country’s markets
    • Promoting best practices and modern business models
    Why the IoT is Important to Our Future

    Kranz’ promo video for his book says this about the amazing future predicted for IoT technology, impacting not just consumers but manufacturers and really… everybody.

    “The wheel, printing press, the airplane. It’s impossible to imagine life without them and soon it will be just as impossible to imagine life before the Internet of Things! IoT is already happening and the growth and opportunity it provides isn’t just big, it’s huge. Wheel, printing press and airplane huge. Billions of connected devices, trillions in revenue.”

    At its core, Kranz said on his website, “it’s about business outcomes and people; it is about new ways of doing business, talent and change management; it is about migration to open technologies and open business structures based on co-development and ecosystems of partnerships; it is a multi-year, multi-phase journey.”

    Here’s a recent interview that Maciej Kranz gave explaining IoT to investors:

  • Twas the Night Before Christmas and All Through the Cloud…

    Twas the Night Before Christmas and All Through the Cloud…

    The Google Cloud Team posted a fun poem for all of us techno nerds. “2016 is winding down, and we wanted to take this chance to thank you, our loyal readers, and wish you happy holidays,” wrote Alex Barrett, Editor of the Google Cloud Platform Blog. “As a little gift to you, here’s a poem, courtesy of Mary Koes, a product manager on the Stackdriver team channeling the Clement Clarke Moore classic.”

    Twas the night before Christmas and all through the Cloud
    Not a creature was deploying; it wasn’t allowed.
    The servers were all hosted in GCP or AWS
    And Stackdriver was monitoring them so no one was stressed.

    The engineers were nestled all snug in their beds
    While visions of dashboards danced in their heads.
    When then from my nightstand, there arose such a clatter,
    I silenced my phone and checked what was the matter.

    Elevated error rates and latency through the roof?
    At this rate our error budget soon would go poof!
    The Director OOO, the CTO on vacation,
    Who would I find still manning their workstation?

    Dutifully, I opened the incident channel on Slack
    And couldn’t believe when someone answered back.
    SClaus was the user name of this tireless engineer.
    I wasn’t aware that this guy even worked here.

    He wrote, “Wait while I check your Stackdriver yule Logs . . .
    Yep, it seems the errors are all coming from your blogs.”
    Then in Error Reporting, he found the root cause
    “Quota is updated. All fixed. :-)” typed SClaus.

    Who this merry DevOps elf was, I never shall know.
    For before we did our postmortem, away did he go.
    Just before vanishing, he took time to write,
    “Merry monitoring to all and to all a silent night!”
    Happy holidays everyone, and see you in 2017!

  • Microsoft Ends Moore’s Law, Builds a Supercomputer in the Cloud

    Microsoft Ends Moore’s Law, Builds a Supercomputer in the Cloud

    A group of Microsoft engineers have built an artificial intelligence technique called deep neural networks that will be deployed on Catapult by the end of 2016 to power Bing search results. They say that this AI supercomputer in the cloud will increase the speed and efficiency of Microsoft’s data centers and that their will be a noticeable difference obvious to Bing search engine users. They say that this is the “The slow but eventual end of Moore’s Law.”

    “Utilizing the FPGA chips, Microsoft engineering (Sitaram Lanka and Derek Chiou) teams can write their algorithms directly onto the hardware they are using, instead of using potentially less efficient software as the middle man,” notes Microsoft blogger Allison Linn. “What’s more, an FPGA can be reprogrammed at a moment’s notice to respond to new advances in artificial intelligence or meet another type of unexpected need in a datacenter.”

    The team created this system that uses a reprogrammable computer chip called a field programmable gate array (FPGA) that will significantly improve the speed of Bing and Azure queries. “This was a moonshot project that succeeded,” said Lanka.

    What they did was insert an FPGA directly between the network and the servers, which in bypassing the traditional software approach speeds up computation. “What we’ve done now is we’ve made the FPGA the front door,” said Derek Chiou, one of the Microsoft engineers who created the system. ““I think a lot of people don’t know what FPGAs are capable of.”

    Here is how the team described the technology:

    HyThe Cataputl Gen2 Card showing FPGA and Network ports enabling the Configurable Cloudperscale datacenter providers have struggled to balance the growing need for specialized hardware (efficiency) with the economic benefits of homogeneity (manageability).  In this paper we propose a new cloud architecture that uses reconfigurable logic to accelerate both network plane functions and applications.  This Configurable Cloud architecture places a layer of reconfigurable logic (FPGAs) between the network switches and the servers, enabling network flows to be programmably transformed at line rate, enabling acceleration of local applications running on the server, and enabling the FPGAs to communicate directly, at datacenter scale, to harvest remote FPGAs unused by their local servers.

    We deployed this design over a production server bed, and show how it can be used for both service acceleration (Web search ranking) and Hardware and Software compute planes in the Configurable Cloudnetwork acceleration (encryption of data in transit at high-speeds).  This architecture is much more scalable than prior work which used secondary rack-scale networks for inter-FPGA communication.  By coupling to the network plane, direct FPGA-to-FPGA messages can be achieved at comparable latency to previous work, without the secondary network.  Additionally, the scale of direct inter-FPGA messaging is much larger.  The average round-trip latencies observed in our measurements among 24, 1000, and 250,000 machines are under 3, 9, and 20 microseconds, respectively.   The Configurable Cloud architecture has been deployed at hyperscale in Microsoft’s production datacenters worldwide.

  • RankBrain Third Most Important Factor Determining Google Search Results

    RankBrain Third Most Important Factor Determining Google Search Results

    Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report on BackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:

    Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.

    “It was significant to the company that we were successful in making search better with machine learning,” says John Giannandrea. “That caused a lot of people to pay attention.” Pedro Domingos, the University of Washington professor who wrote The Master Algorithm, puts it a different way: “There was always this battle between the retrievers and the machine learning people,” he says. “The machine learners have finally won the battle.”

    RankBrain announced in October 2015 in a Bloomberg article and video (below) is a machine learning algorithm that uses big data from billions of search queries, who’s searching, who clicks what, geolocation, etc. to better determine what a user expects to see in the search results.

    Google has been very secretive about RankBrain since October but did references it recently in a post on their Google Cloud Platform Blog. The post, by Google Hardware Engineer Norm Jouppi, was about how machine learning is now powering most of Google’s applications including Street View, Inbox Smart Reply, voice search and Google Search. Norm commented about a “stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications.” This “stealthy project” resulted in Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) which is now powering machine learning features at Google.

    Screen Shot 2016-06-23 at 4.58.39 PM

    It’s fascinating how fast Google implements new technology in its applications:

    TPU is an example of how fast we turn research into practice — from first tested silicon, the team had them up and running applications at speed in our data centers within 22 days.

    TPUs already power many applications at Google, including RankBrain, used to improve the relevancy of search results and Street View, to improve the accuracy and quality of our maps and navigation. AlphaGo was powered by TPUs in the matches against Go world champion, Lee Sedol, enabling it to “think” much faster and look farther ahead between moves.

  • Facebook Study Looks At Technology’s Role in Personal Health

    Facebook Study Looks At Technology’s Role in Personal Health

    Facebook IQ, Facebook’s research wing, which uses Facebook Insights along with work from researchers, with the goal of helping marketers better understand people and their habits, has the results of a new study out looking at health in the digital age.

    Findings include data on how people are leveraging health-related technology, such as fitness trackers, and their views on how tech can help improve their health in general.

    Facebook IQ worked with Crowd DNA, surveying people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and South Korea. They looked at Facebook data to analyze how people are talking about their wellbeing.

    A Facebook spokesperson shared the key findings from the research in an email to WebProNews. These are as follows:

    • Tech helps inspire youthful feelings, especially among Boomers; people are feeling “old” a lot later in life thanks to products & services that help their mind and body stay healthy longer:
      • 71% of Boomers
      • 67% of parents
      • 66% of Gen Xers
      • 62% of Millennials
    • Using health-related tech helps people feel empowered:
      • 57% say it helps them keep track of their goals
      • 55% say it gives them a sense of control over their life and health
      • 52% say it tells them more about themselves
      • 40% say they like to try new gadgets
      • 37% say it makes them a better person
    • What does the future hold? Interest in leveraging tech for personal sustainability and future well-being will continue to grow:
      • 44% are interested in swallowing a pill-sized digestible sensor that can monitor and transmit health information to a mobile phone or computer
      • 53% are interested in wearing a device that can track their brain activity to make recommendations for improving their emotions and behavior
      • 63% are interested in finding out more about what their genetic makeup/DNA can tell them about how to live a healthy life
      • 67% say that everyone five years from now will continuously track their health and fitness using technology
      • In the future, health-related device adoption could grow by…
        • 3.5X for devices that monitor heart rate
        • 1.8X for devices that track steps
        • 2.7X for devices that track sporting activities
        • 5.5X for devices that monitor sleep
        • 5.2X for devices that track diets
        • 6.4X for devices that track medications/health supplements

    Facebook has a blog post about its findings available here. This includes a short video on the subject.

    Key takeaways for marketers (via the post) are to create memorable experiences, consider how your brand can contribute to the phenomenon of people feeling younger for longer, and keeping a pulse on consumer behavior while following people’s expectations when it comes to using technology.

    Image via Facebook

  • Oracle Linux And Oracle VM Get OpenStack Support

    Oracle Linux And Oracle VM Get OpenStack Support

    Oracle announced OpenStack support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM. The company introduced a preview of an OpenStack distribution that allows users of either to work with the open source cloud software.

    Oracle says it provides customers with more choices and interoperability while taking advantage of “efficiency, performance, scalability, and security” of its offerings.

    At no extra cost, the distribution comes as part of the Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Premiere Support offerings. Users can install the preview in their test environments with the latest version of Oracle Linux and he beta release of Oracle VM 3.3.

    “Oracle is working closely with the OpenStack community across many areas,” said Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president, Linux and Virtualization Engineering, Oracle. “Oracle will continue to help deliver OpenStack capabilities to enable our customers to more efficiently deploy, manage and support their large Oracle data center deployments.”

    “We are excited to see the OpenStack eco-system growing,” said Mark Collier, chief operating officer, OpenStack Foundation. “As Oracle and others integrate OpenStack into enterprise IT environments, users will have new choices for deploying OpenStack in their data centers.”

    Oracle says customers can use Oracle Linux as the base OS for OpenStack deployments where they can take advantage of Oracle Ksplice’s patching capabilities.

    OpenStack’s compute, network and storage management services can be downloaded from the Oracle Public Yum Server and Unbreakable Linux Network.

    Those who deploy the OpenStack distribution can get Oracle’s enterprise-class support.

    Image via Oracle