Fusion by J.P. Morgan platform expands to provide cloud-native custody, fund accounting and middle office data capabilities to institutional investors

J.P. Morgan today announced the launch of its Securities Services Data Mesh for institutional investors, available through Fusion by J.P. Morgan (Fusion). The solution enables investors to retrieve critical investment data held by J.P. Morgan’s Custody, Fund Accounting and Middle Office services, using cloud-native channels including REST APIs, Jupyter notebooks and the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud.

Organizations aiming to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity and tap into the accelerated growth and rapid development in analytics, AI and machine learning require data within a modern technology stack that is ready to use and analyze. Fusion supports investors in this journey with the release of the Data Mesh, which now includes Securities Services data for the first time. By providing a range of cloud-native channels, Fusion is addressing long-experienced pain points in integrating asset servicing data including the challenges to ingest data at scale, especially as portfolios and investments grow in size and complexity.

Gerard Francis, Head of Data Solutions, J.P. Morgan said, “Institutional investors continue to leverage data at an increasing rate to maximize alpha and operational efficiency. Having easy access to that data is paramount. With Fusion’s new Data Mesh, we meet our clients where they are, delivering data directly to their Snowflake instances and Python notebooks. Clients can now access data directly from applications running in the cloud and on-premise through Fusion APIs and other modern delivery channels. This launch is the latest example of Fusion helping clients to overcome their data challenges.”

Fusion is collaborating with leading cloud providers, including Snowflake, as part of this new offering to deliver Securities Services data directly into investors’ workflows.

“J.P. Morgan’s Fusion platform is transforming the client experience by modernizing how their clients access Securities Services data and analytics, fueled by the power, scale and secure data sharing of the Snowflake Financial Services Data Cloud,” said Benoit Dageville, Snowflake Co-Founder and President of Products.

Tim Fitzgerald, Global Head of Securities Services, J.P. Morgan said, “The Securities Services industry has become increasingly data-driven. Fusion is a central tenet of our offering, and its expansion to cloud-native delivery of custody, fund accounting and middle office data gives our clients the tools to focus on the evolution and growth of their businesses.”

Julia Hegelstad, Digital Product Manager at Storebrand Asset Management, said, “We have found the Fusion platform to provide a stable, modern and reliable way to connect into the J.P. Morgan’s Securities Services data universe. We were able to establish secure connectivity between Fusion and our proprietary code base within hours. Storebrand is looking forward to expanding the use of Fusion as the platform extends to new areas.”

New cloud-native capabilities and channels:

1. Fusion is Snowflake compatible with Securities Services datasets ready to be extracted directly from Snowflake tables. Investors using cloud services such as Snowflake as an integration layer can directly access J.P. Morgan data regardless of their cloud provider.
2. The new REST API, Python and Java SDKs enable investors to easily integrate their data into their workflows or existing applications and develop advanced analytics for a wide range of use cases, from automated reconciliation to investment analysis and reporting.
3. Investors can access data directly in their Jupyter notebooks using the Fusion Python library, allowing them to jump straight into analysis and work with the data to solve a vast spectrum of use cases with minimal effort.
4. The Data Mesh is optimized for developers with a notifications service that informs applications when key data events occur, self-service tools for application management and data delivery, and access to data catalogs and data dictionaries through the API and the Fusion UI.

James M. Whitehurst Appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer and President

Company Reaffirms Third Quarter 2023 Guidance

Company to Release Third Quarter 2023 Financial Results on November 9, 2023

Unity (the “Company”), the world’s leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, today announced that John Riccitiello will retire as President, Chief Executive Officer, Chairman and a member of the Company’s Board of Directors, effective immediately. James M. Whitehurst has been appointed Interim Chief Executive Officer, President and a member of the Board. Roelof Botha, Lead Independent Director of the Unity Board, has been appointed Chairman. Mr. Riccitiello will continue to advise Unity to ensure a smooth transition.

The Board will initiate a comprehensive search process, with the assistance of a leading executive search firm, to identify a permanent CEO.

“Working with Unity under John's leadership has been one of the highlights of my career. John joined the Unity Board in 2013 and stepped in to lead the Company in 2014, at a time when we faced significant challenges,” Mr. Botha said. “John has led Unity through incredible growth over the last nearly 10 years, helping us transition from a perpetual license to a subscription model, enabling developers to monetize, building other game services to serve our creator community, leading us through an IPO and positioning us as a pioneer in the developer community. Unity would not be where it is today without the impact of his contributions. I remain excited for the future of Unity.”

“It’s been a privilege to lead Unity for nearly a decade and serve our employees, customers, developers and partners, all of whom have been instrumental to the Company’s growth,” Mr. Riccitiello said. “I look forward to supporting Unity through this transition and following the Company’s future success.”

Mr. Whitehurst is a seasoned technology and public company executive. He previously served as Senior Advisor and President at IBM, after joining through IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, a leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and services, where he served as President and Chief Executive Officer from 2008 to 2020.

“I am honored to join Unity as Interim CEO and President at this important time in its evolution,” Mr. Whitehurst said. “With the Company’s experienced leadership and passionate employees, I am confident that Unity is well-positioned to continue enhancing its platform, strengthening its community of customers, developers and partners, and focusing on its growth and profitability goals. I look forward to working closely with the Board and our talented global team to execute on our strategy, and I anticipate a seamless transition.”

Unity reaffirms its previously announced third quarter 2023 guidance. The Company’s expectations regarding its third quarter 2023 financial results are preliminary and are subject to revision in connection with Unity’s financial closing procedures and finalization of the Company’s condensed consolidated financial statements for the third quarter 2023. Actual results may differ from these preliminary expectations.

New offering arms life sciences with novel clinical AI to democratize analytics across the organization and drive insights at an unprecedented speed

Mendel, a clinical artificial intelligence technology leader, today announced the launch of Hypercube, an AI-copilot that enables life sciences and healthcare enterprises to interrogate their troves of patient data in everyday language through a chat-like experience. Using Hypercube, organizations can now command the full spectrum of their data, structured and unstructured alike, to deliver blazing-fast insights and answer previously unanswerable questions.

The current approach of leveraging AI in health data relies solely on machine learning techniques like neural networks and large language models (LLMs). However, this approach is inadequate for clinical applications because of its inability to discern the nuances of clinical language and susceptibility to hallucinations (unpredictable errors or inaccuracies). Hypercube fills this void and can clinically reason through a proprietary hybrid approach that combines large language modeling with symbolic AI. The solution opens complex cohort analysis to the business user through plain English questions, while providing advanced users like data scientists query visualization and programmatic access to run analyses – enabling a broad variety of use cases across the organization.

“After six years of R&D, Hypercube is not a step forward for real-world data applications, it is a leap to RWD 2.0,” said Dr. Karim Galil, co-founder and CEO of Mendel. “We are freeing life sciences from both the brute force measures previously needed to unlock unstructured data, and the limitations of standard data querying methods like SaaS and structured query language (SQL).”

To test Hypercube’s technology against other LLMs, including GPT-4 and Llama2-7b, Mendel has partnered with a team of oncologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “AI and large language models have the potential to identify patients who are eligible for clinical trials. The problem is that we don’t know which LLMs do best. The results here suggest that domain-specific models can outperform generic LLMs at a scalable cost,” said Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, Vice Provost for Global Initiatives, University of Pennsylvania. “With further validation, Hypercube could become a critical step in making tasks like our clinical trial screening process and answering questions from patient data much more efficient."

“Mendel is ahead of the game – they recruited a world-class team to develop a novel AI technology, six years before it became a trend,” said Billy Deitch, Partner at Oak HC/FT, a lead investor in Mendel. “We are thrilled to see Mendel’s efforts come to fruition with this launch and are excited for the impact Hypercube will have on healthcare at large.”

Gen AI solutions designed for enterprises to accelerate AI-led innovation and adoption

STL Digital, an  IT services and consulting company, today announced the launch of 'AInnov', a solutioning fabric of powerful Generative AI Services, frameworks, methodologies and solutions designed for enterprises to accelerate Generative AI-led innovation and adoption. AInnov enables development of embedded AI applications for multi stakeholder experiences. STL Digital's expertise in Data Engineering and Generative AI has culminated in the development of these cutting-edge solutions, aimed at empowering businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences by harnessing advanced natural language understanding and response generation across various domains.

While enterprises are increasingly employing generative AI to analyse complex data sets, discern patterns, and process multi-faceted variables, the path to integrating these advanced systems is riddled with challenges. Some of the most significant hurdles include training Generative AI for specific enterprise use cases, fine-tuning algorithms for greater accuracy, ensuring data security, handling multi-modal inputs, and improving the quality of trained data. 

STL Digital has successfully cultivated robust capabilities in designing and training AI models to produce novel, context-aware outputs and has honed its proficiency in refining and testing these models in real-world scenarios.

STL Digital's AInnov empowers enterprises to innovate with AI and realize business value. 

The components of AInnov include:

1. AI services, frameworks, methodologies, and solutions: These form the core components of AInnov, which offers tailored solutions for document summarization, data augmentation, custom Q&A dialogue, and experience reimagination.
   
   
2. Model fine-tuning and implementations for specific use cases, public and proprietary enterprise data. AInnov allows for the customisation ('fine-tuning') of existing AI models to better suit specific applications ('use cases'), ensuring flexibility and adaptability.
   
   
3. Integration with industry-leading AI platforms - AInnov seamlessly integrates with existing AI platforms and algorithms, including hyperscalers and open-source ecosystem. It enhances their capabilities and enables enterprises to customise them to their unique needs, thereby expediting the path to contextualization and adoption.
   
   
4. Consumer experience engineering  - STL Digital has created an innovative Experience Commerce solution that combines Gen AI, mobile features, mixed reality, and APIs to facilitate decision-making for reimagining, comparing, and actualizing new experiences. This solution leverages AInnov's patent-pending technology, integrating commercial Gen AI components and open-source innovation. 
   
   
5. Industry value realization - STL Digital's Alnnov solution on Gen AI and Digital Twin modeling, have the potential to increase productivity, improve predictive maintenance and enhance security for multiple industries like energy, resources, life sciences, manufacturing & consumer goods.

Commenting on the launch of STL Digital's Generative AI solution, Spandan Mahapatra, CTO & Head of Services & Alliances, STL Digital, said: "We are thrilled by the possibilities that Generative AI can create for enterprises. Through AInnov, STL Digital is simplifying the approach to continuously exploring, evaluating, and enabling the Gen AI components as they evolve along the maturity curve. To accelerate Gen AI journeys anchored in trust and safety, we are adopting a solution-led and cross-platform approach. We have incorporated proprietary, partner-led and open-source services to drive sustainable innovation and business value realization."

Opera One now lets you do much more with AI with less time, fewer technical skills, and less effort. The improved native browser AI, Aria, comes with a set of tools that allow you to easily refine your queries down to the sentence, create content with a set of predefined prompts, and even train the browser AI to write like you.

Being able to effectively interact with AI is quickly becoming an essential skill in life. With this update to Opera One, the native browser AI, Aria, lets people more easily and quickly get to the results they are looking for: whether it's a piece of content they are looking to create or a query they need help with.

"This year, we redesigned our browser to make Opera users' interaction with AI better. With this release, we are improving their experience in places where it matters the most: queries and content creation," said Joanna Czajka, product director at Opera. "What people want is to create the content they need or get the best possible query results as fast, as accurately, and with as little effort as possible. With this update, we are making that happen."

Whether you need to compare various manufacturers of Star Wars figurines or want to start a travel blog for vegan travelers with dogs – Aria can save you a lot of time and effort as it just got much better at refining queries and generating creative output.

Refine the browser AI's output without having to provide context

The new "Refiner" tool in Aria has two main features: "Reuse" and "Rephrase". Let us first explain "Reuse".

To refine the replies you get from a traditional AI chatbot, you often need to retype the entire context in your every query. But what if the AI could create the perfect response based on selected elements from several of its previous answers? The "Reuse" feature allows you to do just that. Simply select the parts of previous responses you want to reuse, then click on "Reuse", and they will be added to the input field in Aria. Once you have collected all the elements you need, you can type in a new prompt that will use the elements you selected to generate a new reply.

To give you an example: Let's say you are using Aria to brainstorm ideas for a getaway to the Kingdom of Bhutan. You can now select a couple of the proposals that interest you among the AI's responses, and ask it to combine them into a trip plan for two.

Make the AI rephrase a specific part of its answer

Let's say you are happy with the blog post the AI generated, but would just like to change one small bit. With most solutions, all you can do is ask them to regenerate the whole thing. Aria is different as it allows you to rephrase a selected fragment of its output: you simply need to select the part you would like it to change and click "Rephrase". The new response will keep the bulk of the previous one and only rework the element you chose.

And if you feel like you want to get back to a part of Aria's responses later, you can highlight the elements you need, just like you would with highlighters in a book or notepad; the new "Highlighter" feature will take care of it.

Compose with ease

Generative AI is also there to help you compose new content and be creative. With this update to Opera One, you can get creative faster than ever. Simply click the magic pen icon next to the input field - this will take you to the Aria Compose feature. Whether it's a personal blog post, a social post, an important email, presentation deck, or a speech, all you need to do is:

1. Select the type of content you want to write from the TASK section.
2. Provide a topic and little more context in the DESCRIPTION field.
3. Choose the length, as well as tone: formal, informal, neutral, academic, business or funny.

Your text will be ready in no time and you didn't even have to come up with a prompt.

Training Aria to write like you

You can further personalize Aria with the "My Style" feature that lets you train the browser AI to write like you. It's never been easier to write long pieces of text, from insightful reviews to eloquent emails or stern complaints, all in your unique style of writing.

To make Aria write like you, you need to provide a few samples of your writing for it to learn from. Simply click the magic pen icon next to the AI input field, then go to "Define my style". You will then be asked to provide samples of your writing in a formal, neutral, and informal tone. After that, you're all set. Aria will be able to generate messages in your style.

Opera's innovations in the AI space include the command line

Opera One was the first browser to come with an integrated browser AI, Aria. Since June 2023, Opera users can also use the command line (Ctrl+/ or cmd+/) to interact with Aria. Whenever a question comes to mind, they can use the command line to ask Aria a question and either interact with the browser AI's response immediately in the sidebar or go back to browsing.

The browser AI offers free access to a leading GPT-based solution along with up-to-date information from the web.

Since early 2023, Opera has been adding AI capabilities to all of its flagship browsers on Win, MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. Aria is built on Opera's own Composer architecture, which allows it to tap into various language models – like OpenAI's GPT models – and to gather live information from the web. This makes its results more up to date and accurate. To use Aria, you need to log in into your Opera account or create one free of charge. Opera's browser AI is an opt-in feature.

MediaGo, a deep learning-based intelligent advertising platform from Baidu Global Business Unit, today announced a partnership and integration with TheOptimizer.io, a leading campaign management platform (CMP) in the native and social advertising markets. This collaboration provides advertisers with a unified solution to streamline the oversight and management of all accounts and campaigns within a single platform.

With this integration, TheOptimizer.io users can now access to MediaGo's high quality ad inventory on major media outlets and platforms such as MSN, Xandr, Yahoo, etc. Powered by deep learning technology, the MediaGo platform provides companies with optimal bidding solutions and creates maximum performance.

In the same way, MediaGo users can optimize campaign performance and scale profitability, while significantly reducing the time spent on campaign management thanks to the platform's automation engine. Key features include Automation, Report Generation, Trend Identification, Campaign Creation and Creative Hub.

"Our collaboration delivers significant benefits to advertisers, as it brings together MediaGo's deep learning capabilities and premium ad inventory with TheOptimizer.io's exceptional CMP features," said Rena Ren, Americas Regional Director of Baidu Global Business Unit. "This integration empowers advertisers with a unified solution that allows them to effortlessly oversee and manage their campaigns and accounts all in one place."

"We are excited to join forces with MediaGo to further enhance the capabilities and efficiencies advertisers can achieve," said Ervin Hoxha, CEO of TheOptimizer. "This collaboration is a testament to our shared commitment to empowering advertisers with creative solutions that maximize results."

AppcastOne harnesses programmatic job ad tech, search, social and traditional media to fully optimize candidate acquisition.

Appcast, the award winning, global leader in programmatic job advertising technology, today announced the launch of AppcastOne, a solution that transforms candidate acquisition by harnessing the power of programmatic, search, social and traditional media into a single enterprise offering.

"Hiring and recruitment marketing are becoming increasingly complex, and the tight labor market compounds the challenges our clients face when it comes to attracting top talent," said Chris Forman, founder and CEO of Appcast. "AppcastOne significantly expands the recruitment marketing capabilities, data and tools available to our clients, simplifying the intricacies of recruitment marketing and enabling them to evolve with a rapidly changing talent acquisition landscape. More than a technology platform, AppcastOne features world-class partnership from an outstanding delivery team as well as integrated reporting and insights providing a holistic view into performance."

AppcastOne's omni-channel offering fuses the power of all recruitment media channels into one streamlined solution:

• Programmatic: Appcast's award-winning programmatic recruitment advertising technology optimizes job ad distribution across the industry-leading network of thousands of job sites.
  
  
• Search and Display: Top of funnel search and display advertising attracts active and passive candidates and improves the talent pool for even the hardest-to-fill markets and roles. 
  
  
• Social: Our social media experts help employers improve job seekers' awareness of their brands and career opportunities on the platforms where job seekers spend much of their time online. Appcast uses proprietary targeting matrixes that outperform platform benchmarks across 90% of campaigns.
   
•  Traditional Media: To round out the full-funnel support, Appcast leverages its deep partnerships and position as the largest global buyer of recruitment media to optimize all other forms of online and offline recruitment media for employers, delivering confidence in how budgets are spent and driving optimal outcomes. 

"At Appcast, we embody the essence of both a cutting-edge technology company and a dedicated professional services firm," said Suet Yin Chow, senior director of product at Appcast. "By blending the advantages of these two facets, we provide a tech-enabled recruiting solution that revolutionizes outcomes for our clients. The beta launch of our AppcastOne dashboard across multiple industries has been truly remarkable. Among my personal favorite comments from our customers: 'You are a 100-year-old start-up,' and 'Incredible technology complemented by generations of wisdom.'"

AppcastOne is the first new product launched by Appcast leveraging its July 2023 acquisition of recruitment marketing pioneer, Bayard Advertising.

Analysys Mason Cites Completeness of Offerings, Cloud-Native Support and Extensive Customer Deployments for Market Leadership Rankings

Netcracker Technology announced today that it has been named a global market leader in the monetization platform and service design and orchestration (SDO) markets by industry analyst firm Analysys Mason. Netcracker’s proven track record of successful implementations and comprehensive suite of cloud-native BSS and OSS solutions were cited as factors for its leadership positions in these two critical market segments.

Analysys Mason indicated that Netcracker’s broad BSS portfolio and focus on 5G revenue opportunities, including charging for any service, partner or business in real time, such as network-as-a-service and SLA-based charging for B2B customers, were key strengths for the leadership ranking in monetization platforms.

For the SDO market assessment, Analysys Mason highlighted Netcracker’s early success in porting its solutions to a cloud-native framework. Netcracker Intelligent Operations Automation uses a cloud-native microservices architecture with open APIs, allowing it to interface with a variety of vendors, solutions and technologies. Through this approach, CSPs can quickly implement new upgrades and services.

“Netcracker’s comprehensive portfolio of BSS/OSS solutions, expertise in emerging technologies and global deployments continue to show its leadership in both the SDO and monetization platform markets,” said Justin van der Lande, Research Director at Analysys Mason. “Netcracker has proven that it is well prepared to guide its customers into the new digital era, including with cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI.”

“We are honored to receive these leadership rankings from Analysys Mason in the SDO and monetization markets,” said Ari Banerjee, SVP of Strategy at Netcracker. “Our products are designed to provide a seamless transition into new technologies, and this recognition is a great validation of our work on large-scale digital transformations with operators around the world.”