That was Then... This is Now

Facebook is already conducting research in computer vision, language understanding, machine learning, connectivity, and virtual reality, as well as on other frontiers. “Facebook’s long-term road map is focused on building foundational technologies in three areas: connectivity, artificial intelligence and virtual reality,” wrote Mike Schroepfer, CTO of Facebook, in a release. “We believe that major research and engineering breakthroughs in each of these areas will help us make more progress toward opening the world to everyone over the next decade.” Recently, the company announced a new deep learning platform, Caffe2Go. The platform is designed to bring real-time AI to a user’s fingertips. The company is also using artificial intelligence to provide stabilization in 360-degree videos. It is also working on speech recognition to improve avatars and UI tools, and to help users interact with their VR environment with hands-free voice commands. Finally, it can use computer vision software...

As the technology industry continues to grow, SD Times is again presenting its annual “Companies to Watch” list. Many of the companies on this list are startups that will have to find ways to take root in an already competitive market. Others have been around for years and are looking for ways to gain new customers. Nevertheless, these are the companies expected to do well next year and think you should be watching. View the complete list here:  http://sdtimes.com/companies-watch-2017/ .

According to Andrew Komarov, CIO of InfoArmor, Inc. Today’s cyber landscape is more sophisticated than ever before. To navigate it safely and ensure your business and customers are properly protected, you need to understand what type of threats are out there and what risks they pose to you. This is where threat intelligence comes into play. Despite the millions of attacks that happen each day, not all threats are created equal. But it is this overwhelming number of attacks that bad actors count on to cause confusion and paranoia. Putting this into perspective, for its 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report, Verizon used a dataset of 64,199 security incidents and 2,260 data breaches. Determining which threats are relevant and aligning resources to focus on those attack vectors is where the real value in threat intelligence takes shape. To get the most out of threat intelligence, organizations must be able to customize and shape the information they collect and analyze, and compare tha...

The need for speed in application development is driving business today more than ever. Agile is the engine powering app development as user expectations increase. Whether creating mobile apps or high performance websites, businesses are being forced to rethink the way their entire software development process operates. The methodologies and tools that help development and delivery of quality software fast are more important than ever before. A great article by Christina Mulligan from SD Times, “ Driving a Digital Transformation ” discusses the forces driving agile business application development today.

According to a recently published Gartner report, by 2018: Most business users and analysts in organizations will have access to self-service tools to prepare data for analysis as part of the shift to deploying modern BI platforms. Most stand-alone self-service data preparation offerings will either have expanded into end-to-end analytical platforms or been integrated as features of existing analytics platforms. Smart, governed, Hadoop-based, search-based and visual-based data discovery will converge in a single form of next-generation data discovery that will include self-service data preparation and natural-language generation. During the past several years, the balance of power for business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform buying decisions has gradually shifted from IT to the business as the long-standing BI requirement for centrally provisioned, highly governed and scalable system-of-record reporting has been counterbalanced by the need for analytical agility and b...

Marian University will be offering a degree program in Business Analytics starting Fall 2016. Many of our new courses draw heavily from Data Science. In the domain of Data Science, solving problems and answering questions through data analysis is standard practice. Often, data scientists construct a model to predict outcomes or discover underlying patterns, with the goal of gaining insights. Organizations can then use these insights to take actions that ideally improve future outcomes. The flow of methodology illustrates the iterative nature of the problem-solving process. As data scientists learn more about the data and the modeling, they frequently return to a previous stage to make adjustments, iterate quickly and provide continuous value to the organization. Models are not created once, deployed and left in place as is; instead, are continually improved and adapted to evolving conditions. You can download the White Paper here:  https://form.jotformeu.com/61126366826357 ...

According to “Digital Disruption: How digital technology is transforming our world” (SAP, 2016). Hyperconnectivity describes the rapid growth of interconnectedness between people, objects, and technology. People have access to more data and information than ever before, and they have the ability to develop and maintain more social and business connections across the globe than at any other time in history. Hyperconnectivity has come about thanks to three phases of technological advancement: 1. The Internet enables all computers to connect on a single platform. Without the Internet, we wouldn’t be digitally connected. 2. Mobile Technology continues to grow exponentially, which accelerates hyperconnectivity worldwide. 3. The Internet of Things is the next wave of advancement, and will take interconnectedness to an unprecedented level. Within the next three years, the data created by IoT devices will reach 403 trillion gigabytes annually. With mobile technology at an all-...

According to an article in eWeek , Seagate recently unveiled its highest capacity ever enterprise hard drive, a 10TB helium-filled design, that competes directly with similar drives manufactured by HGST and Samsung. Because it is filled with helium instead of air, the 3.5-inch Seagate Enterprise Capacity HDD has less drag on its internal components, enabling them to run cooler and with less power than standard HDDs. Samsung currently owns the capacity record with a 16TB hard disk it introduced last fall, but it lists for $7,000 and probably isn't going to be high on many wish lists until the price comes down by at least 50 percent. HGST may be the furthest ahead of the group, since its 10TB helium drive came out in September 2014. Seagate is aiming the new drive at cloud-based data storage needs. The 10TB HDD uses the standard 3.5-inch disk design and incorporates seven platters and 14 heads. Seagate said the drive features the industry's lowest power/TB ratio and weig...