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High-performance Spark: Improving on big data’s swiss army knife to enable AI

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In their widely followed 2017 Hype Cycle for Data Management, Gartner’s declaration that Hadoop was “obsolete before plateau” marked a fascinating milestone in the evolution of big data. Big data hasn’t gone away of course. In fact, according to Dresner Advisory Services’ 2018 Big Data Analytics Market study, it is more relevant than ever with enterprise adoption growing at a CAGR of 36% since 2015. If anything, Hadoop’s premature demise reflects the availability of newer and better tools to manage and analyze big data.

Top Features

What Will IBM’s AI Debater Learn from Its Loss?

The utility of IBM’s latest man-versus-machine gambit is debatable. At the very least its Project Debater got us thinking about the potential uses of artificial intelligence as a way of helping humans sift through all the noise, to make sense of information, misinformation and, increasingly via the hijacking of social media, disinformation. There have been other (fictional) debates between humans ... Full article

DARPA Upgrades Battlefield Simulations

The demands of training soldiers and pilots, a domain that is gradually incorporating AI-enabled technologies, has heightened the U.S. military’s need for far greater computing power. Hence, the Pentagon’s top research office is turning to HPC technologies to power souped-up simulators that could provide a far more realistic view of an increasingly electronic battlefield. The Defense Advanced Research Projects ... Full article

IBM Extends $3B Cloud Streak, Signs Santander to 5-Year Deal

IBM continued to make inroads into the big bank sector, announcing this morning at its annual Think conference in San Francisco that Banco Santander, the fifth largest bank in Europe with approximately US$1.4 trillion in total assets (as of 2017), has signed a $700 million, five-year global technology digital transformation agreement focused around implementing the bank’s hybrid cloud strategy. ... Full article

Power Couple: IBM Joins PowerAI Hardware with Watson; Launches Multi-Hybrid AI Services

As IBM kicked off its annual Think conference, a high-production extravaganza this week in San Francisco, the company this morning made a series of AI-related announcements, including the merging of its PowerAI integrated CPU-GPU server line with its cognitive computing flagship IBM Watson, to create what it calls the Watson Machine Learning Accelerator (WML Accelerator), which Big Blue claims ... Full article

White House Launches AI Initiative

A Trump administration AI initiative would prioritize federal R&D investments in machine intelligence as a way boosting U.S. economic and national security. The “American AI Initiative” launched via executive order on Monday (Feb. 11) seeks to align early AI investments by science and technology agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), ... Full article

NSF Explores Risks, Rewards of Automation

Addressing the growing unease over the prospect of AI taking jobs from humans, the National Science Foundation is soliciting proposals for how machines and workers can collaborate in ways that allow technology to augment the human workforce and ultimately boost productivity. The NSF program, “Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier,” is part of broader agency effort launched in ... Full article

5G Readiness Lags — Here’s What to Do Now

The coming of 5G was one of the main themes at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Computerworld went so far as to say CES 2019 was “all about 5G,” reporting that every industry vertical was there to demonstrate how cloud, machine learning and IoT would combine use 5G to revolutionize operations. But because it’s a mobile network technology, 5G ... Full article

IBM Bets $2B Seeking 1000X AI Hardware Performance Boost

For now, AI systems are mostly machine learning-based and “narrow” – powerful as they are by today's standards, they're limited to performing a few, narrowly-defined tasks. AI of the next decade will leverage the greater power of deep learning and become broader, solving a greater array of more complex problems. In addition, the general-purpose technologies used today for AI ... Full article

Banking Sector Embraces Multi-Cloud

The financial services sector tends to be a bellwether for early adoption of disruptive technologies. For example, financial services giant Goldman Sachs played a key role in forging an application container specification in 2015 as the transformative framework was just gathering momentum. A new study commissioned by software vendor Canonical and released this week finds that the financial services sector ... Full article

Machine Learning on 50 Million Smart Meters: Utility Powerhouse Extends C3 Platform Europe-wide

In enterprise AI, C3 (formerly C3 IoT) is amassing an impressive and seemingly unmatched record, one that the company has extended with its latest win, the expansion of a five-year engagement with Enel, Europe’s largest power utility, to encompass nearly 50 million smart meters in homes and businesses. This follows C3 contract wins last year with Royal Dutch Shell, ... Full article

Survey: Developers Want API Standards

APIs, application programming interfaces, have emerged as the mortar that binds the bricks of enterprise IT. Hence, calls for greater API standardization grow louder as companies step up development of agile microservices. The latest evidence comes from a survey of software developers released this week by software development tool vendor SmartBear. The survey of more than 3,000 software developers ... Full article

How to Avoid the Downside of a Cloud-First Strategy

Cloud computing has evolved to the point where most enterprises have, to one degree or another, deployed cloud workloads. Our 2018 Cloud Survey found 70 percent of over 900 IT professionals use cloud services. But as enterprises see the benefits – namely business continuity, IT efficiency, elasticity and the pay-as-you-go billing model – business challenges remain. According to the ... Full article

Kubernetes Goes Native for Developers

Among the leading “cloud-native” technologies is the Kubernetes container scheduler. Red Hat said this week it has gone a step further down the cloud-native path with the release of a “Kubernetes-native” development environment designed to make collaboration easier for cloud application developers. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said its Kubernetes-native, browser-based development environment dubbed CodeReady Workspaces would allow enterprise development ... Full article

Tool Helps Automate Code Reviews

Among the IT plumbing being automated is the painstaking review of software code via machine learning tools designed to scan source code for inconsistencies while suggesting fixes that promise to speed the review process, thereby getting software updates out the door faster. The Lookout tool released by code analysis specialist source{d} leverages machine learning to model coding “style” based on reviews ... Full article

Nvidia Aligns with Colo Partners in AI Democratization Push

AI is all the rage and so is AI democratization. Having developed an AI stack only science-level technologists could love, vendors are now courting customers with integrated hardware that would otherwise require a computer scientist and enormous data center investment, and with software that automates data science tasks. In the thick of AI democratization is GPU leader and AI ... Full article

Chip Startup Accelerates AI with MRAM

The AI chip market continues to heat up with the recent release of a series of AI accelerators with embedded memory that target the booming edge computing sector. Gyrfalcon Technology Inc. (GTI) said its “production-ready” ASIC, dubbed the Lightspeeur 2802M, incorporates low-power embedded MRAM as the Silicon Valley startup zeroes in on what it calls “Edge AI.” Taiwanese chip foundry TSMC ... Full article

Intel Promotes Former CFO Swan to CEO

Intel today announced the promotion of former CFO Robert Swan to CEO, a post he had held on an interim basis for seven months after the forced resignation in June of former CEO Brian Krzanich. Swan, 58, who joined Intel as CFO in October 2016, becomes Intel’s seventh CEO. The Financial Times reported that Swan will receive a base salary ... Full article

Intel Reportedly in $6B Bid for Mellanox

The latest rumors and reports around an acquisition of Mellanox focus on Intel, which has reportedly offered a $6 billion bid for the high performance interconnect company, according to Israeli publication Calcalist, a potential deal that industry analysts say could profoundly impact Intel's high performance interconnect strategies for both systems and storage. Mellanox stock initially shot up nearly 15 ... Full article

Google Predicts Big Year for ‘API-ification’

Google Cloud introduced an API platform last July designed in part to give developers better visibility into the interconnections between, and the inner workings among, enterprise applications and data hosted in hybrid and multi-cloud deployments. The Apigee platform developed with partner Informatica, an integration services specialist, is billed as a “cross-cloud API management platform.” Among other goals, Apigee seeks to ... Full article

Data Center Sales Help AMD Buck Intel, Nvidia Stock Drops

Editor's note: this story was updated on January 29 to reflect AMD's earnings announcement. Insurgent chip maker Advanced Micro Devices defied the recent stock drops of rivals Intel and Nvidia with a year-end and quarterly earnings after-market announcement that sent AMD stock up more than 10 percent in extended market trading. Meanwhile, Nvidia on January 28 saw its shares ... Full article

DARPA Upgrades Battlefield Simulations

IBM Extends $3B Cloud Streak, Signs Santander to 5-Year Deal

Power Couple: IBM Joins PowerAI Hardware with Watson; Launches Multi-Hybrid...

5G Readiness Lags — Here’s What to Do Now

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