Sunday Reading — June 2, 2019
Image recognition: The Lockport City School District in New York plans to install facial recognition software in schools to improve security while the New York State Department of Education and advocacy groups are concerned about how that would affect the privacy of students, parents and teachers. From the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal:
The district’s system will rely on the Aegis software suite, created by Canadian-based SN Technologies. The software works by using a database of individuals and sending an alert to district personnel when a flagged person is detected on school property. The software reportedly also will detect 10 types of guns.
The New York Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to the New York State Education Department last year that asked officials to stop the project.
While concerns will persist on the ethical use of facial recognition systems, image recognition itself does have a promising future, particularly with healthcare:
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) -based systems proving their worth in various research trials, their potential impact in healthcare is profound particularly in areas such as pathology and radiology. Less than two weeks ago, news broke of Google’s AI system that detected lung cancers with higher accuracy than human doctors. The FDA has already approved IDx-DR, an AI-tool that analyzes images of the eye to diagnose disease and University of Michigan researchers have recently created a similar AI-software for smartphones.
Multicloud swing: The use of multiple cloud providers is on the rise and a recent survey from Datamation validates how enterprises are diversifying their cloud resources. From the survey, 43 percent use a single cloud provider while 35 percent, use two cloud providers. Why?
The increase in multicloud usage is driven by:
•Diverse set of advanced, high end services offered by the various cloud providers.
•Even though all the cloud providers offer support across almost all the categories, considerable difference exists between the services in terms of feature set, pricing, and availability.
•Portability concerns push organizations to embrace multicloud strategy. With the increased adoption of containers, the portability across cloud is seamless. With Kubernetes emerging as a standard for container orchestration and with every cloud provider supporting Kubernetes, multicloud is offering the alluring promise of portability with no vendor lock-in.
The Book of Why: Legendary computer scientist Judea Pearl, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks, is challenging the current state of artificial intelligence. In his latest book, “The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect,” he argues that “artificial intelligence today is merely a souped-up version of what machines could already do a generation ago”. From Quanta Magazine:
In his new book, Pearl, now 81, elaborates a vision for how truly intelligent machines would think. The key, he argues, is to replace reasoning by association with causal reasoning. Instead of the mere ability to correlate fever and malaria, machines need the capacity to reason that malaria causes fever. Once this kind of causal framework is in place, it becomes possible for machines to ask counterfactual questions — to inquire how the causal relationships would change given some kind of intervention — which Pearl views as the cornerstone of scientific thought. Pearl also proposes a formal language in which to make this kind of thinking possible — a 21st-century version of the Bayesian framework that allowed machines to think probabilistically.
Another first: Microsoft this week announced the general availability (GA) of Azure NetApp Files, the industry’s first bare-metal cloud file storage and data management service. Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed cloud service with full Azure portal integration and access via REST API and Azure SDKs, and soon via Azure CLI and PowerShell. It’s sold and supported exclusively by Microsoft. Customers can seamlessly migrate and run applications in the cloud without worrying about procuring or managing storage infrastructure. Additionally, customers can purchase Azure NetApp Files and get support through existing Azure agreements, with no up-front or separate term agreement. From Computer Business Review:
Azure NetApp Files is, essentially, a managed, first-party Azure service for migrating and running demanding enterprise file-workloads in the cloud including databases, SAP, and High Performance Computing applications, without code changes.
Events
June 3–7 Apple WWDC San Jose
June 11–13 E3 Los Angeles
July 15–17 Fortune Brainstorm Tech Aspen
Aug 25–29 VMworld San Francisco
Oct 2–4 TechCrunch Disrupt SF San Francisco
One last thing…
