Sunday Reading — March 24, 2019
Faster AI: Neural networks are a crucial component to automatically design machine-learning systems for artificial intelligence as they are often more efficient than those developed by human engineers and data scientists. They are also time consuming and expensive… until now. MIT researchers have developed a neural architecture search (NAS) algorithm that “automatically learns a convolution neural network in a fraction of the time — just 200 GPU hours.”
Passion for efficiency: The value of almost any technology advancement is often based on driving efficiency. As the debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence heat up, it’s important to remember this isn’t unusual even if the fear of disruption is real. From Wired:
This passion for efficiency isn’t unique to software developers. Engineers and inventors have long been motivated by it. During the early years of industrialization, engineers elevated the automation of everyday tasks to a moral good. The engineer was humanity’s “redeemer from despairing drudgery and burdensome labor,” as Charles Hermany, an engineer himself, wrote in 1904.
Ripped: Evaldas Rimasauskas of Lithuania plead guilty last week to US wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering charges stemming from $122 million in fake invoices sent to Facebook and Google between 2013 and 2015. The scam included fake invoices from Taiwanese hardware manufacturer Quanta Computer.
It’s in the DNA: Microsoft has helped build the first device that automatically encodes digital information into synthetic DNA. Just one gram of DNA capable of storing 215 petabytes of data for up to 2,000 years. From Microsoft:
In a simple proof-of-concept test, the team successfully encoded the word “hello” in snippets of fabricated DNA and converted it back to digital data using a fully automated end-to-end system, which is described in a new paper published March 21 in Nature Scientific Reports.
Storage Review: The NetApp Data Fabric and Hybrid Cloud In A Nutshell
NetApp announced their “Data Fabric” idea back in 2015, during Insight Las Vegas. The idea of NetApp’s “Data Fabric” is a simple concept; your data where you want it, when you want it. Whether you want to run 100% On-Prem or 100% Cloud (even multi-cloud), the Data Fabric gives you the ability to shift workloads wherever you and the business would like.
Since the introduction of the NetApp Data Fabric concept, NetApp has rolled out a number of various products and additions that extend ONTAP to public and private clouds as they are making strides to become more of a data management company (that just happens to manufacture storage systems). While the flexibility of all of these services is great, with so many options customers sometimes get confused about the myriad offerings. To better understand NetApp’s Cloud offerings, I break down the capabilities of the following core services. Read more…
Events
Apr 30-May 1 F8 San Jose
Apr 30 — May 3 ODCS East Boston
May 6–8 Microsoft Build Seattle
May 7–9 Google I/O Mountain View
May 13–15 Consensus New York
One last thing…
