May 26, 2016

Augmented Reality’s Plan to Change Everything About Computing

“My vision is to build an OS that’s 100 times easier to use than a Macintosh,” Gribetz said. "We’re excited to remove the start menu—all of these metaphors and buttons and icons that take your brain extra steps to decode, and that are making my grandmother’s job of using computers much harder.” Gribetz, 30, founded Meta in 2012 after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University and working in the Israeli intelligence corps. He built the first Meta prototype with an oven-heated knife and hot glue gun the same year he founded the startup, and in 2013 debuted its first augmented reality headset after raising funds through Kickstarter. Mann, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been inventing wearable devices for more than three decades, including his EyeTap augmented reality glasses in the late 1990s. 


New IT roles to put on your hiring radar

A close cousin of big data analytics roles is the machine learning expert or cognitive systems expert. These roles include the ability to sift through and process huge amounts of data, and then use the results to model and drive evolving machine knowledge and responses. For example, a machine learning expert might help a company use big data analytics and behavioral models to identify weather patterns or cyberattacks. This is a sophisticated role, and so new that it's difficult to identify a typical skill set. Of course, using data implies that you have that data in the first place. While there's no shortage of data, the Internet of Things (IoT) promises to connect billions of new devices to the Internet over the next few years.


Blockchain Startup Develops Identity App with Major Airline IT Firm

Using a blend of blockchain-based data and facial recognition techniques, the app is aimed at both streamlining how airlines verify passenger identities as well as facilitating real-time data flows at the airport. With the app, a passenger uploads their travel documents, which are then encrypted and hashed on the bitcoin blockchain. The system provides the passenger with what is called a "Single Travel Token", which can be presented to the airline in order to call up those documents using a public key. Any airline terminal connected to this system could then verify the identity of that passenger wherever they present this token. Though the app is in the early stages, in remarks, representatives for SITA pointed to the project as a means to allow the company test the use of blockchain.


IT Innovators: Developing a Data Exit Strategy—What’s Your Next Move in the Cloud?

When you have confirmed that data is securely operational in the new location, you must remember to take care of your previous location. That’s where data erasure often comes in as a mandatory requirement. Today, you have specific known malware that can penetrate networks and get access to different hosting environments. As an attack, the malware will start recovering previously left behind data that has just been deleted, which is not the same thing as securely erased. ... It’s hyper-converged, so you have tools in place to manage everything at your fingertips. You are managing everything from a control center. Following virtualization as a trend in the market is something that all of us security suppliers must do and, in the end, that makes life easier for the enterprise administrator who needs to actually perform these exercises.


5 active mobile threats spoofing enterprise apps

Enterprise employees use mobile apps every day to get their jobs done, but when malicious actors start impersonating those apps, it spells trouble for IT departments.  David Richardson, director of product at Lookout, and his team recently researched five families of malware doing just that: spoofing real enterprise apps to lure people to download their malware. The dataset of mobile code shows that these five, active mobile malware families often impersonate enterprise apps by ripping off the legitimate app’s name and package name. These apps include Cisco’s Business Class Email app, ADP, Dropbox, FedEx Mobile, Zendesk, VMware’s Horizon Client, Blackboard’s Mobile Learn app, and others.


Effective design thinking

Innovation involves making multiple judgment calls about what to express and how, from a project’s big strategic idea to the fine details of implementation. Sensibilities not only guide these decisions, they also ultimately influence how people experience the resulting product, service or brand ... Designers use observation and prototyping methods of different kinds to help them figure out the best ways to express certain sensibilities. With sketches and models, they try things out to explore their effects, experimenting with physical elements (finishes, forms, fonts, materials) and control sensory inputs (contrast, rhythm, sound, space, pattern, pace) to determine what works and what doesn’t. And, ultimately, they discover how to deliberately evoke particular feelings to support the desired experience.


IT Assurance in the Cloud–A Journey Between Trust and Obligation

As the risks are better understood, businesses rely less on trust and put information security obligations on their cloud providers. Where security had been one of the main obstacles for cloud adoption in the past, vendors now understand the security and privacy concerns of their global customers and have adopted a business model built on enhanced security features such as encryption, and identity and access management, to name two examples. The result: cloud services are heading to the next level of maturity. A 2015 cloud survey conducted by ISACA Germany and PwC (in German) found about one-third of organizations expected to achieve a better security risk profile by adopting cloud computing.


APM strategy should focus on user experience, not just IT metrics

"It's not just an issue of maintaining an adequate infrastructure. Now it's essential to the business," said Forrester Research Inc. analyst Milan Hanson. Indeed, it's hard to imagine any company that isn't heavily reliant on applications to connect with its customers, communicate with partners and enable employees. So how those applications perform is vitally important, Hanson and others said -- much more so today in this "application economy" than it was in past decades when computerized work processes were in their infancy. Yet application performance management, although of strategic importance for most businesses, is an IT discipline in urgent need of an update at many companies.


Bloomberg and “the magic” of machine learning

Machine learning is an increasingly important area at Bloomberg, a company that manages massive amounts of data in a real-time environment. While machine learning is generally about giving computers the ability to learn by using algorithms to analyze data, find patterns or predict outcomes, much of Bloomberg’s efforts today in this area are focused on helping the company’s customers to pluck intelligence and insight from the financial information and data coursing through its network that feeds the Bloomberg Terminal. Fresh off of his presentations at two key industry events, Gary explains what he and his team are doing and how that is helping investors and Bloomberg customers make better, more informed decisions.


Faception can allegedly tell if you're a terrorist just by analyzing your face

An unnamed homeland security agency has signed a contract with a company that claims it can “reveal” your personality “with a high level of accuracy” just by analyzing your face, be that facial image captured via photo, live-streamed video, or stored in a database. It then sorts people into categories; with some labels as potentially dangerous such as terrorist or pedophile, it is disturbing that some experts believe the science behind it is antiquated, has previously been discredited, and the results are inaccurate. Israeli start-up Faception, a facial personality profiling company, told The Washington Post that “a homeland security agency” has signed a contract to use Faception to help spot terrorists.



Quote for the day:


"Your success will be the degree to which you build up others who work with you. While building up others, you build up yourself." -- James Casey


No comments:

Post a Comment