Tom Ayres
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Articles by Tom Ayres
Brazil’s Accession to the OECD – This is where the serious things begin | JD Supra
In June 2022, Brazil hosted a set of meetings between Latin American and OECD countries, during which economic policies, education, and productivity matters were discussed. Brazilian President Mr. Jair Bolsonaro and OECD Secretary-General Mr. Mathias Cormann headed the opening ceremony of the event in Brasília. Nevertheless, equally important, if not more, Brazil’s plan to join the OECD has also been the subject of several bilateral discussions.
Op-ed | Russia’s war could spread to space; the U.S. should be prepared
The satellites on which the data for the blue dot on your phone are not beyond Russian reach. In both cyber and space, nefarious and destructive actions can be difficult to attribute to a specific actor or sponsoring nation-state. In the cyber realm, experts puzzle that we haven’t yet experienced a Russian cyber attack given the capability displayed during the Colonial Pipeline ransomware disruption. So far, Western banks and corporations’ defensive measures may account for the success.
An experimental test of resource recovery from physical and relaxation work break activities
RESEARCH ARTICLE Coty S. Hoover, Jennifer M. Ragsdale, Corresponding Author jen-ragsdale@utulsa.edu orcid.org/0000-0001-7290-1180 University of Tulsa Correspondence Jennifer M. Ragsdale, Psychology Department, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Dr., Tulsa, OK 74104. E-mail: jen-ragsdale@utulsa.edu. Search for more papers by this author Thomas B.
Opinion | A Maritime Solution for Cyber Piracy
Photo: David Klein After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the Goodyear blimp Resolute was put into service spotting enemy submarines. There’s a lesson for 21st-century cyberwarfare. The Constitution gives Congress the power to issue “letters of marque and reprisal”—essentially licenses authorizing private parties to wage war on the government’s behalf.
Op-ed | China’s Arctic gambit a concern for U.S. air and space forces
by Thomas Ayres — October 5, 2020 Sunset over Kotzebue, Alaska. Credit: Joel Casto/ DoD The United States must work with long-time Arctic partners to increase vigilance in this increasingly vital region. China has published an Arctic strategy making clear the government’s desire to control infrastructure along Arctic routes.
The US needs to rethink its overseas supply chain
As Americans respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become acutely aware of the outsized impact of our dependence on China in the supply chain. Pharmaceutical companies learned key chemicals and minerals are exclusively made or mined in China. For instance, reports show China produces 97 percent of the antibiotics, 95 percent of ibuprofen and 91 percent of hydrocortisone consumed in the U.S. market.
The Reason Why Do Athletes Run Around the Track Counter-Clockwise?
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Tom Ayres: Here's why Space Force is key to maintaining America's edge in the 21st Century
China has criticized the creation of the United States Space Force as “a serious violation of the international consensus on the peaceful use of outer space ... a direct threat to outer space peace and security.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Like Russia, China is waging a propaganda war to deny, distract and blame. We must be clear-eyed and punctiliously truthful in response to such baseless accusations and fear-mongering.
Changing how we buy weapons will benefit industry, government and taxpayers
The new U.S. National Defense Strategy is a road map for our military’s new focus on Russia and China, who are challenging the United States military’s primacy by rapidly leveraging emerging technologies. In the Air Force, we are meeting that challenge in many ways, to include shortening the timeline to develop new technologies, rekindling a culture of innovation and rethinking how we approach future conflict.
Opinion | How to Pre-Empt the Huawei Threat
The armed forces know that a technological edge is the key to dominance—in industry as well as battle. After launching the first Global Positioning System satellites in 1978, the U.S. Air Force today controls the more than 30 GPS satellites that keep precise time world-wide, enable navigation, and guide the “blue dot” on your phone.
How Hollywood can really help the U.S. military
The U.S. military has a problem. It can defeat ISIS’ physical caliphate, decimate Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and keep the international order we have enjoyed since the end of World War II, but when it comes to eradicating a certain problem within our force, we haven’t cracked the code. What is this problem? Sexual assault. Military sexual assault has arguably always been a problem.
How Hollywood can really help the U.S. military
The U.S. military has a problem. It can defeat ISIS’ physical caliphate, decimate Al Qaida in Afghanistan, and keep the international order we have enjoyed since the end of World War II, but when it comes to eradicating a certain problem within our force, we haven’t cracked the code. What is this problem? Sexual assault. Military sexual assault has arguably always been a problem.
Podcast: Why HPC is Absolutely Ready for the Cloud
Not surprisingly, Tim Carroll is unambiguous about whether HPC is ready for the cloud. It absolutely is, says Carroll. He is, after all, VP of Sales and Ecosystem, for cloud computing specialist, Cycle Computing. Forget the past, he argues. Not only has the technology landscape changed and the problem set expanded (think big data), but so has the recognition by users in both traditional HPC and emerging enterprise HPC communities that cloud computing has an important, perhaps critical, role to play.
Four Common Mistakes in Machine Learning Projects
As machine learning and data analytics experts, we have considerable experience in developing and implementing machine learning projects with businesses across different industries, including manufacturing, telecoms, financial services and retail. As such, we’re all too familiar with the types of mistakes that are typically made during machine learning projects – and not only by beginners.
Storage Security Emerges Along With Flash
The vibrant storage sector is churning out a steady stream of products, tools and network platforms as datacenter operators struggle to keep up with and secure torrents of terabytes. Much of the focus in storage technology development focuses on hyper-converged infrastructure as datacenter operators look to cut costs while boosting performance. Baked-in security and new management tools also are emerging as storage volumes soar. Claiming to address these requirements is VMware, Inc.
Nvidia Responds to Google TPU Benchmarking
Last week, Google reported that its custom ASIC Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) was 15-30x faster for inferencing workloads than Nvidia’s K80 GPU (see our coverage, Google Pulls Back the Covers on Its First Machine Learning Chip), and it didn’t take Nvidia long to respond. Unlike the semi-contentious back-and-forth between Nvidia and Intel over benchmarking methodology (see Nvidia Cries Foul on Intel Phi AI Benchmarks), Nvidia took a decidedly more friendly approach in responding to Google.
Your competitors are paying attention to Apache Spark - Are you?
Webcast: Your competitors are paying attention to Apache Spark – Are you?
Cloud Shift, Strong Dollar Slow IT Revenues
Global IT spending faces "headwinds" that include a rising U.S. dollar and a continuing slowdown in the server market as potential customers flock to the cloud. All this is reflected in anemic forecast for datacenter and over IT spending by market analyst Gartner Inc. In its quarterly forecast, Garter (NYSE: IT) pegged global IT spending at $3.46 billion this year, a 1.4 percent increase over last year.
The Next Data Revolution: Intelligent Real-Time Decisions
Over the past decade, big data analysis and applications have revolutionized practices in business and science. They enabled new businesses (e.g., Facebook, Netflix), to disrupt existing industries (e.g., Airbnb, Uber), and accelerated scientific discovery (genomics, astronomy, biology). Today, we are seeing glimpses of the next revolution in data and computation, driven by three trends.
Coveo, Microsoft, Sinequa Lead Insight Engine Market
Among the areas where natural language processing is making inroads is so-called “insight engines” that are projected to account for half of analytic queries by 2019. Indeed, enterprise search is being supplanted by voice and automated voice commands, according to Gartner Inc. (NYSE: IT).
New Malware 'Bricks' IoT Devices
Despite repeated assurances that Internet of Things security issues are being addressed, so-called "in-the-wild" attacks on poorly secured devices reveal that securing the IoT still has a long way to go. The latest threat comes from a new malware strain known as BrickerBot that, according to security experts, intentionally "bricks" IoT devices, meaning the malware renders the computer's motherboard permanently inoperable.
Google Pulls Back the Covers on Its First Machine Learning Chip
This week Google released a report detailing the design and performance characteristics of the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), its custom ASIC for the inference phase of neural networks (NN). Google has been using the machine learning accelerator in its datacenters since 2015, but hasn’t said much about the hardware until now.
'Narrative Analytics' Targets Consumer Beliefs
In the latest attempt to figure out what consumers want and how much they are willing to pay to get it, a “narrative analysis” platform launched this week crunches “cross-platform data sets” to divine consumer “beliefs and motivations.” San Francisco-based Protagonist (formerly Monitor 360) said this week its platform leverages machine learning and natural language processing to gauge the “narratives that impact a given market.” Narratives are defined as “consumer beliefs that drive...
Elastifile’s ‘Cross-Cloud Fabric’: Flash-Native Distributed File System for Hybrid IT
The tidal movement toward hybrid on- and off-prem IT is well underway and well understood. But the data management challenges of multi-site implementations, with data and applications straddling multiple storage and compute environments on-site and in a public cloud, can be highly complex.
AWS Lead Slips as Multi-Cloud Advances
New market intelligence emerges each week about the steady enterprise shift to the cloud as companies conclude they must upgrade their IT infrastructure to compete. A "cloud transformation" study released this week by market analyst 451 Research found that 80 percent of the organizations it surveyed expect to overhaul IT operations over the next five years. Of those, 22 percent said they are adopting a "cloud first" approach as most consider their options for moving workloads to the public cloud.
IBM Bare Metal Cloud Targets AI with New P100 GPUs
BM announced today that it will be adding Nvidia P100 graphics processors to its Bluemix cloud later this month, becoming the “first major global cloud vendor” to provide the high-end “Pascal” GPUs. Big Blue is targeting the new hardware at customers who run compute-heavy workloads, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, data analytics and high-performance computing.
Cognitive Push: Progress Software Buys DataRPM
The acquisition of a cognitive-based predictive maintenance specialist by application developer Progress Software Corp. may signal the beginning of a long-awaited big data consolidation, perhaps driven by emerging deployments such as the industrial Internet of Things.
IBM Bare Metal Cloud Targets AI with New P100 GPUs
IBM announced today that it will add Nvidia P100 graphics processors to its Bluemix cloud later this month, becoming the “first major global cloud vendor” to provide the high-end “Pascal” GPUs. Big Blue is targeting the new hardware at customers who run compute-heavy workloads, such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, data analytics and high-performance computing.
How Agile Teams Make Digital Transformation Happen
Digital Transformation — the use of such technologies as mobility, analytics, social media and Internet of Things (IoT) devices to improve enterprise effectiveness — is revolutionizing how businesses operate and the ways project teams do their work. In order to keep up with and get closer to a new generation of digitally empowered customers, companies need to deliver new IT services faster than ever in a more entrepreneurial mode. Technology, of course, is a big part of this.
Q&A with C3 IoT's Tom Siebel
Tom Siebel, who literally created the CRM market back in the 1990s, is now setting out to shake up the Internet of Things world with his latest endeavor, C3 IoT. Datanami recently caught up with the Silicon Valley legend to chat about technology trends, big data analytics, the potential of the IoT, and whether all the hype is justified. Datanami: Tom, thanks for agreeing to the interview today. As the CEO and founder of C3 IoT, please tell us a bit about the company and what it does.
Datacenter Giant Acquires VMware vCloud
VMware is selling its cloud operations to a European cloud-hosting provider that is aggressively expanding its U.S. operations. French cloud provider OVH will acquire VMware's vCloud Air business in a deal expected to close by the end of June. Details of the transaction were not disclosed. After completion of the acquisiton, OVH said it would operate the service as "vCloud Air Powered by OVH," a platform based on VMware's hybrid cloud technology.
Seagate Seeks to Drive Down Flash Costs
The number of all-flash storage options continues to grow as datacenters burst at the seams and operators look for ways to connect legacy and flash storage while reducing cost. The latest entry comes from Seagate Technology (NASDAQ: STX), which like other purveyors of all-flash arrays claims to have made the performance gains of all-flash storage arrays more affordable.
Hortonworks Touts Hive Speedup, ACID to Prevent 'Dirty Reads'
If you’re considering using Hadoop for SQL-based analytics and BI, you’ll be interested in the latest news out of Hortonworks, which today unveiled a new release of its flagship data platform that boasts a fast new release of Apache Hive, as well as a new ACID merge function that can prevent “dirty reads.” Apache Hive was the main focus of the version 2.6 release of the Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP), which the Santa Clara, California company unveiled today from its Dataworks Summit/Hadoop...
Speed of the Essence for 'Machine Data' Analytics
The ability to automate the analysis of “machine data” is most widely leveraged to speed IT operations along with use cases such as data security, a new industry survey finds, while accelerating the analysis of ephemeral machine data is emerging as a priority. The market survey on the impact of machine data analytics conducted by 451 Research was commissioned by data-in-motion specialist Logtrust.
Flink Aims to Simplify Stream Processing
Apache Flink has emerged as a powerful framework for building real-time stream processing applications that has gained traction by some of the most progressive tech companies in the world, including at Netflix, Uber, and Alibaba. But with the latest version 1.2 release of Flink, the framework developers have delivered a new functions and API that offer a simpler path to streaming productivity.
Cloudera IPO Reflects Hadoop Shifts
Cloudera Inc. joins a growing list of data analytics and platform vendors going public with a highly anticipated initial stock offering expected to raise an estimated $200 million. The big data analytics and Hadoop software specialist based in Palo Alto, Calif., filed regulatory paperwork on Friday (March 31) to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “CLDR.” The startup was recently valued at more than $4 billion.
EMC Storage Driving Dell Revenues
Dell Technologies, the computer hardware and storage giant, reported brisk fourth-quarter hardware sales fueled by its acquisition of storage leader EMC. For its full fiscal year, however, the company reported a sizeable operating loss tied to the EMC deal. The holding company (NYSE: DVMT) that owns Dell and EMC along with majority ownership of VMware, also claimed leadership in global server shipments along with the fiercely competitive all-flash storage array market.
Bringing Big Data and HPC Together
What does the intersection of big data and high performance computing look like? About 50 technology leaders from across industries got an exclusive glimpse during Tabor Communications’ inaugural LBD + EHPC event at the Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in Florida last week. Readers of Datanami and EnterpriseTech will recall that Leverage Big Data and Enterprise HPC used to be separate events focused on their respective audiences.
IBM Jumps on Bandwagon for Cloud Databases
Responding to what it says is growing demand for deploying SQL databases in the cloud, IBM this week rolled out a transactional database as a service on its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure. The move reflects the steady advance of cloud-native data platforms along with a growing number of analytics and transaction databases provisioned in the cloud.
Toyota Enlists AI for Development of Emissions-free Cars
More than 90 percent of the fuel used for transportation (cars, trucks, trains, ships, planes) is petroleum-based (gasoline and diesel), and those vehicles account for 26 percent of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, as of 2014, according to the U.S. EPA. The Toyota Research Institute (TRI), with the adoption of AI, wants to do something about this.
Biomedical Text Mining Tool Gets the Lead Out
Approximately 100 lines of Python code serve as the basis of a new predictive text-mining tool designed to accelerate the scanning online biomedical research papers for clues on everything from repurposing existing drugs to advancing stem cell treatment. Coders from the Morgridge Institute for Research working in partnership with the University of Wisconsin at Madison reported on their “KinderMiner” algorithm during a bioinformatics conference in San Francisco this week.
Welcome to the Open Analytics Era
The explosion in enterprise data is paving the way for expanding analytics strategies in business applications. The embedded analytics market is estimated to nearly double to 46 billion between 2016 and 2021, according to Markets and Markets. The same research firm also estimates the advanced analytics market will be worth close to 30 billion by 2019. Demand for ‘open analytics’ strategies for business applications is fueled by the growth in embedded and advanced analytics markets.
Alteryx Goes Public as Data Prep Market Heats Up
Alteryx Inc., the self-service data analytics software specialist, has joined a growing list of business software vendors launching initial stock offerings as the big data market continues to mature. Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE: AYX), Irvine, Calif., announced last week it would begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange at a share price of $14. Trading opened last Friday (April 24).
AI in HPC on Wall Street: Getting Going Is the Hard Part
IT managers in the financial services industry are fully aware that high performance data analytics, AI and deep learning technologies are plentiful and available, and they know that some FSI companies are already deriving advantage from them. But they hesitate to take the plunge into AI/DL themselves because of sticker shock ($200,000 for an initial implementation?), technology unfamiliarity, dearth of trained staff and lack of appropriate server infrastructure.
IoT Deployments Fuel 'Chaotic' Cloud Security
Cloud security remains "complex and chaotic" and the Internet of Things threatens to increase cloud security risks, warns a survey of IT security managers conducted during last month's RSA security conference.
Investors Bullish on GPU-Based Database Startup
MapD Technologies, the big data analytics platform startup developing a parallel SQL database that runs on GPUs, has more than doubled its venture-funding total with the close of its latest investment round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA). San Francisco-based MapD, which leverages GPU technology to speed its SQL query engine, said Wednesday (March 29) it latest funding round garnered $25 million from NEA and existing investors Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), Vanedge Capital and Verizon Ventures.
Brocade Upgrades Storage Switch for All-Flash Datacenters
As all-flash arrays make inroads in the datacenter, switch makers are coming up with new access approaches leveraging all-flash storage as a way to break through network bottlenecks while adapting to data-driven workloads. With that in mind, networking switch specialist Brocade has upgraded its Fibre Channel switch technology to 32 gigabits per second performance while adding a monitoring feature designed to track and optimize the performance of individual virtual machines.
Meet Ray, the Real-Time Machine-Learning Replacement for Spark
Researchers at UC Berkeley’s RISELab have developed a new distributed framework designed to enable Python-based machine learning and deep learning workloads to execute in real-time with MPI-like power and granularity. Called Ray, the framework is ostensibly a replacement for Spark, which is seen as too slow for some real-world AI applications, and should be ready for production use in less than a year.
Oracle Cloud Plugs Into Smart Grid
In an ongoing effort to boost its share of the public cloud market, Oracle rolled out a cloud service geared toward the smart grid and Internet of Things device management. The Oracle Utilities Operational Device Cloud Service announced at a company event last week looks to boost automation of smart grid infrastructure and IoT device management.
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