Enjoyment: Structure News: The golden age of artificial intelligence

Where Learning Is Deep, Man

February 26th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit

This week, we'll talk about mapping the sentiment of the world based on data, DDoSing for dollars (not exactly, but the alliteration worked), and three huge breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research.

STRUCTURE NEWS

HOW GDELT IS CATALOGING AND ANALYZING THE ENTIRE PLANET

One of the talks I'm most looking forward to at Structure Data is the one given by Kalev Leetaru, who is putting some amazing technology and data science behind a project to map the globe using a wide ranging of factors, from social media to news reports, in order to visualize the emotional status of a given country and help predict what might come next. He wrote a guest post for us this week about the effort required to keep this project up and running.

THE STRUCTURE SHOW: WHY AI IS THE FUTURE OF SOFTWARE

On this week’s show, Derrick Harris and I discuss IBM’s big event in the desert (more on that in a bit), Apple’s showdown with the FBI, and an excellent essay from Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon on the future of computing. Spoilers: we’re mixed on the value of developer/partner events, we’re sympathetic to Apple, and we’re big believers in the power of AI.

Structure Data 2016 is right around the corner! Don't miss you chance to see some of the sharpest minds in big data and artificial intelligence, including Jeff Dean of Google, Peter Lee of Microsoft, and many more on March 9th and 10th in San Francisco. Register here.

INDUSTRY NEWS

IBM INKS VMWARE, GITHUB, BITLY DEALS, EXPANDS APPLE SWIFT USE AS IT DOUBLES DOWN ON THE CLOUD

IBM invited several thousand of its closest friends to Las Vegas this week for a big conference during which it trotted out a bunch of news before Elton John took the stage. Techcrunch takes a look at some prominent announcements, including a deal in which VMware will run inside IBM's public cloud datacenters, and a rare public appearance by Apple engineers to discuss how IBM will expand its use of Apple's budding Swift programming language in enterprise app development services.

THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE WHEN SECURING DATA IN THE CLOUD

In a way, the public cloud lets CIOs breathe a little easier, in that basic security becomes the service provider's problem, but of course that's not entirely true. Silicon Angle uses the ongoing debate over the FBI's quest to get inside Apple's iPhone to look at how cloud security works in practice.

ORACLE BUYS CLOUD SOFTWARE STARTUP RAVELLO SYSTEMS FOR $500 MILLION, SOURCE SAYS

Oracle picked up another piece of the puzzle this week as it attempts to shift its business model toward the public cloud. Venturebeat reports that Ravello Systems will allow Oracle to improve its cloud infrastructure services, for the price of half a unicorn.

BUG BOUNTY HACKERS SCORE BIG DOLLARS AND THE BOOM'S ONLY JUST BEGUN

Software companies have been offering "bounties" to security experts for several years in hopes of providing a different kind of financial incentive to find weaknesses in software, and this is turning into a big business. The Register has a nice feature on the growth of bug bounties and the big money that can be made probing for weaknesses in software.

SPOTIFY NEXT MEDIA COMPANY TO MOVE TO THE CLOUD

Chalk up another win for Diane Greene: Google has convinced music streaming service Spotify to run the back-end infrastructure supporting its service on Google Compute Engine. Variety notes that Spotify had long been a roll-our-own infrastructure company, but hardly any company these days hasn't at least investigated the notion of running on the public cloud, and you have to figure Google made them a sweet deal to get a well-known customer win.

NETWORKING TECH INVENTOR CASADO LEAVES VMWARE FOR ANDREESSEN

We've been following the career of Martin Casado, the father of software-defined networking, for several years now, and it looks like it's time for him to take on a more expansive role. Bloomberg reports that Casado is leaving VMware -- which acquired his pioneering startup Nicira -- to become a venture capitalist, looking at enterprise and infrastructure investments.

BIG PICTURE

Usually in this section, I try to summarize the most noteworthy or important event in the Structure universe that surfaced during the past week. But this week, there were three very interesting developments in artificial intelligence research that so clearly supported the notion that we're turning a corner in this area, I couldn't help but include all three as we gear up for two days of AI discussion at Structure Data.

On Thursday, Google announced that it had developed a deep-learning machine that could actually tell you the location depicted in an image on the internet based on data. We're talking about famous locations, like the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge, but it's still another amazing example of the power of neural networks.

Not to be outdone, Facebook revealed that it was able to map 4 percent of the world's surface in a week using satellite photos. That might not sound like a lot, and we've had pretty good maps for a while now, but Facebook thinks it could map the entire earth in six days using these algorithms and its computing power, which could pay amazing dividends in an era of rising seas. (The picture above is a "DigitalGlobe satellite image of Naivasha, Kenya (left) and results of our analysis of the same area (right)," Facebook said.)

And finally, Google's DeepMind unit said it will tackle one of the biggest burdens of an aging population -- health care -- with the goal of improving the speed and accuracy of medical test results. As we continue to quantify ourselves with health data, helping medical organizations make sense of that data will not only make it possible to treat larger numbers of patients but could lead to additional breakthroughs in treatment.

Let's not succumb to horse-race treatment of these announcements: as I wrote earlier this year about the AI conference organized by Facebook's Yann LeCun earlier this year, this industry is still small enough and collaborative enough that we should celebrate all of these advances. Still, competition is a very healthy thing in technology, and Google and Facebook are showing us what can be possible when massive computer networks and some of the finest minds of our time set out to achieve results unfathomable even five years ago.