advertising 29 Aug 2023
The American Advertising Federation (AAF) announced today the launch of an all-new charitable arm – the AAF Foundation. The 501(c)(3) was created to help AAF deliver on its mission to prepare and connect diverse talent to the advertising, media and marketing industries via a focus on education and lifelong learning, and diversity, equity and inclusion. Through the Foundation, new revenue streams, such as event-driven donations, public and non-profit grants, employee matching funds and honorariums, will now become available.
"For more than 100 years, the AAF has served as the only organization that includes members across all disciplines and career levels. We are the 'unifying voice for advertising,'" said Steve Pacheco, President and CEO, American Advertising Federation. He continued, "Over the years, a major focus of our efforts has been education and diversity – driven largely via our Mosaic Center multicultural and diversity initiatives. Now, with the launch of our AAF Foundation, we will be able to build and expand upon these efforts."
Some of the current Mosaic Center programs that will now fall under the auspices of the AAF Foundation include:
In addition, one of the AAF's student-focused education programs – the Student Advertising Career Conference (SACC) – will now reside under the AAF Foundation. The SACC provides students with an opportunity to learn about the field of advertising and help ignite careers.
"In a climate where the implementation of diversity, equity and inclusion practices are more needed than ever, the philanthropic efforts of the AAF Foundation will act as a necessary conduit of change for the individuals and communities that we serve through our programs," said Candace Queen, VP of AAF's Mosaic Center who will oversee the diversity initiatives of the AAF Foundation. "We'll continue our commitment to being on the right side of history and challenging each other towards continued growth and advancement in creating a more inclusive society."
Added Dawn Reeves, EVP Member Services and Programs and head of the AAF's education activities, "The AAF Foundation is a way to ensure that our investments in people and programs can prepare the next generation of leaders for the advertising, media and marketing landscapes. These are programs that can help them be better equipped to make a meaningful difference in our world – a sentiment echoed by the AAF Board, which granted their full and unanimous support for the Foundation."
cloud technology 29 Aug 2023
Google Cloud announced a series of new customers, partners, and product innovations to help every business, government, and user benefit from generative AI and leading cloud technologies.
"We are in an entirely new era of cloud, fueled by generative AI," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "Our focus is on putting gen AI tools into the hands of everyone across the organization—from IT, to operations, to security, to the board room. As the industry's most open cloud, our goal is to help companies use AI and other cloud technologies to streamline their operations, increase productivity, and create entirely new lines of business."
Customer momentum around the world
Organizations across industries and around the world are choosing Google Cloud to digitally transform, and this year we've shared stories from Culture Amp, Deutsche Borse, eDreams ODIGEO, Government of Singapore, HSBC, IHOP, IPG Mediabrands, John Lewis Partnership, The Knot Worldwide, Macquarie Bank, Mayo Clinic, Priceline, Shopify, U.S. Steel, and Wendy's. Today, we are announcing new or expanded relationships with The Estée Lauder Companies, FOX Sports, GE Appliances, General Motors, HCA Healthcare, and more.
Innovative gen AI startups, like Replit, Typeface, Jasper, and more, are increasingly choosing to build on Google Cloud. In fact, today more than half of all funded gen AI startups – including companies like Contextual, CoRover, Elemental Cognition, Fiddler, and Quora are Google Cloud customers. This includes 70% of gen AI unicorns, like AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, Runway, and others.
New infrastructure and tools to help customers
The advanced capabilities and broad applications that make gen AI so revolutionary demand the most sophisticated and capable infrastructure. Today, Google Cloud announced key infrastructure advancements to help customers, including:
Vertex AI platform gets even better
On top of Google Cloud's world-class infrastructure, the company delivers a comprehensive AI platform—Vertex AI—that enables customers to build, deploy, and scale machine learning models. Customers have access to more than 100 foundation models, including third-party and popular open-source versions, as well as industry-specific models like Sec-PaLM 2 for cybersecurity and Med-PaLM 2 for healthcare and life sciences. New innovations announced today include:
From the beginning, Google Cloud designed Vertex AI to give users full control and segregation of their data, code and IP. User prompts and data, as well as user inputs at inference time, are not used to improve our models and are not accessible to other customers.
Duet AI in Workspace and Google Cloud
Google Cloud unveiled Duet AI at I/O in May, introducing powerful new features across Workspace and showcasing developer features such as code and chat assistance in Google Cloud. Today, Google Cloud is making Duet AI in Google Workspace generally available, while expanding the preview capabilities of Duet AI in Google Cloud, with general availability coming later this year.
Workspace is the world's most popular productivity tool, with more than 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done. With the introduction of Duet AI just a few months ago, Workspace delivered a number of features to make users more productive, like helping write and refine content in Gmail and Google Docs, create original images in Google Slides, turn ideas into action and data into insights with Google Sheets, foster more meaningful connections in Google Meet, and more. New enhancements announced today include:
Beyond Workspace, Duet AI can now provide AI assistance across a wide range of Google Cloud products and services—as a coding assistant to help developers code faster, as an expert adviser to help operators quickly troubleshoot application and infrastructure issues, as a data analyst to provide quick and better insights, and as a security adviser to recommend best practices to help prevent cyber threats. Duet AI in Google Cloud announcements include advancements for:
Duet AI was designed using Google's comprehensive approach to help protect customers' security and privacy, as well as Google's AI principles. With Duet AI, your data is your data. User code, user inputs to Duet AI, and recommendations generated by Duet AI will not be used to train any shared models nor used to develop any products.
Simplify analytics at scale with a unified data and AI foundation
Data sits at the center of gen AI, which is why Google Cloud is bringing new capabilities to Google's Data and AI Cloud that will help unlock new insights and boost productivity for data teams. In addition to the launch of Duet AI, which assists data engineers and data analysts across BigQuery, Looker, Spanner, Dataplex, and Google Cloud's database migration tools, other important announcements include:
Addressing top security challenges
Google Cloud is the only leading security provider that brings together the essential combination of frontline intelligence and expertise, a modern security operations platform, and a trusted cloud foundation, all infused with the power of gen AI, to help drive the security outcomes customers are looking to achieve. Today, Google Cloud announced:
Expanding our ecosystem
Google Cloud's ecosystem is already delivering real-world value for businesses with gen AI, and bringing new capabilities, powered by Google Cloud, to millions of users worldwide. Partners are also using Vertex AI to build their own features for customers – including Box, Canva, Salesforce, UKG, and many others. New partner announcements include:
technology 29 Aug 2023
Onto Innovation Inc. today announced finalizing over $100 million in orders for the Dragonfly® G3 inspection system with deliveries scheduled through the first quarter of 2024, plus new orders now extending into the second half of 2024. This represents an increase from the previously estimated customer demand reflecting the critical role the Dragonfly G3 system plays in support of advanced packaging for the expanding AI device market. The orders are from leading logic and memory manufacturers for heterogeneous integrated (HI) packages that combine a graphics processor (GPU) and numerous high bandwidth memory (HBM) devices to create an AI GPU in a single package. The Company expects additional orders in 2024 to support expansions in the AI GPU market, which is estimated to grow at an annual average rate of 40% over the next four years, according to International Data Corporation and JP Morgan.
This year, several companies have announced accelerated demand for AI GPUs to supply both hyperscalers and corporate enterprises with specialized parallel computing platforms to meet the growing demand for large language model applications. “The Dragonfly G3 system is a versatile integrated inspection and metrology solution that supports manufacturers with their goal of using only known good die to create both HBM and chip-on-wafer GPU packages,” says Mayson Brooks, vice president and general manager of Onto’s inspection business. “The system’s range of high-performance optical capabilities enables it to monitor multiple parameters at high throughput. Specifically, our unique Clearfind® technology is in demand by several customers to detect non-visual organic residue on chip-to-chip connections to ensure long-term package reliability and to maintain integrity of the power and data lines.”
In addition to Clearfind technology, the Dragonfly G3 system offers sub-micron 2D defect detection and metrology, measuring the depth of through silicon vias and height of redistribution layers with a visible thickness and shape sensor while infrared (IR) technology detects edge cracks that also can adversely affect device reliability. The system is tightly integrated with control and leading automated defect classification software for real-time analysis and review.
technology 29 Aug 2023
Workspot, the Enterprise VDI platform built for the multi-cloud and hybrid era, announced today that the Workspot Enterprise VDI Platform is Chrome Enterprise Recommended (CER). The partnership between Workspot and Google ChromeOS delivers enterprise-proven Windows 10 and 11 desktops and apps from the customer’s cloud of choice, including Google Cloud, as well as from on-premises data centers, to ChromeOS devices, bringing new levels of security, flexibility and agility to organizations as they deploy, manage and standardize end-user computing.
Enterprise organizations are exploring the most secure way to deliver applications and data to an often remote workforce, across many types of enterprise use cases. At the same time, end-users require the best possible performance for anywhere, anytime productivity - there can be no compromises. Workspot Client for Web, a Progressive Web Application (PWA), enables high-performance delivery of Windows 10/11 desktops and legacy applications on Google ChromeOS. ChromeOS enables IT and security teams to keep corporate data protected with fully-customizable, enterprise-grade security controls. Using the combination of ChromeOS and Workspot, customers now have access to a zero-trust security model, high-performance Windows workloads and legacy applications via the safest browser accessible from anywhere in the world.
Security and app delivery models that rely on employees working within a corporate perimeter are obsolete. The combination of Workspot’s cloud-native, enterprise-proven virtual desktop solution and ChromeOS-enabled devices reduces the management and security challenges associated with traditional VDI solutions and physical PCs, enabling IT teams to more easily support a global workforce while lowering overall costs for EUC.
"From the start of our cloud journey with Workspot, my vision has been to find a highly secure and cost-efficient endpoint that would enable the entire Southland team - including our power users who rely on graphics-intensive applications - to be productive wherever they need to work,” said Israel Sumano, Senior Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Services at Southland Industries. “After extensive testing of Workspot virtual desktops on ChromeOS, we’ve validated that even our most demanding users are happy with the performance, our sensitive IP is more secure than ever, and we’ve simplified end user computing too, without having to make any compromises.”
“Working closely with the Google ChromeOS team, Workspot transforms ChromeOS and Chromebooks into high-performance and highly secure IT assets for accessing Windows 10/11 virtual desktops and applications,” said Jimmy Chang, Chief Product Officer of Workspot. “By using this best-of-breed solution, organizations gain the flexibility of a multi-cloud yet standardized approach to end user computing that features high-performance, reduced costs, and anywhere-productivity, while also benefiting from multi-billion-dollar investments in security that major hyperscalers such as Google Cloud bring to the solution.”
Workspot Client runs on any standard browser, including Chrome. End users can access their Workspot virtual desktops and applications from anywhere at any time. Workspot Client was designed for exceptional performance, including for graphics-intensive applications, such as those used by computer-aided design (CAD) engineers and designers.
artificial intelligence 28 Aug 2023
Predibase, the first commercially available declarative AI platform for engineers, today released a new report, “Beyond the Buzz: A Look at Large Language Models in Production.” Based on survey data from organizations experimenting with LLMs, the report offers insight into real-world concerns, opportunities, and priorities for organizations as they embrace AI and LLMs. Among the key findings: enterprises are looking for ways to customize and deploy open-source LLMs without giving commercial vendors access to proprietary data, and they are exploring other use cases beyond generative AI capabilities. “It is now open season for Large Language Models (LLMs). Thanks to the widespread recognition of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, businesses are in an arms race to gain a competitive edge using the latest AI capabilities. Still, they require more customized LLMs to meet domain-specific use cases,” said Piero Molino, co-founder and CEO of Predibase. “This report highlights the need for the industry to focus on the real opportunities and challenges as opposed to blindly following the hype.” The report highlights emerging trends from LLMs in production using responses from 150 executives, data scientists, machine learning engineers, developers, and product managers at both large and small enterprises across 29 countries. Key findings include: “We see clear potential to improve the outcomes of our conservation efforts using customized open-source LLMs to help our teams generate insights and learnings from our large corpus of project reports," said Dave Thau, Global Data and Technology Lead Scientist, World Wildlife Fund. “Clearly, companies are investing in the personnel and technologies necessary to work with emerging generative AI technologies to support production-scale outcomes,” added Bradley Shimmin, Chief Analyst AI platforms, analytics, and data management at Omdia. “The trick, of course, will rest not in building these outcomes but in ensuring that they deliver consistent, secure, responsible outcomes. With an increasing desire to customize and deploy open-source models, enterprises will need to invest in operational tooling and infrastructure capable of keeping up with the rapid pace of innovation in the open-source community.”A new report from Predibase highlights emerging use cases among organizations with LLMs in production and the growing demand for customizable, open-source LLMs
data security 28 Aug 2023
ServeManager, the leading software solution for process servers, proudly stands as the first and only process server software to achieve SOC 2 compliance. This distinguished accomplishment highlights the platform's unwavering dedication to upholding the highest standards of data security and operational excellence in the legal support sector.
SOC 2, a prestigious auditing standard established by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), stands as a beacon of ServeManager's enduring dedication to rigorous security protocols. This compliance ensures that our security measures align seamlessly with the best contemporary practices in the IT and tech sectors.
This achievement holds significant importance for law firms, especially those operating in the financial, foreclosure, debt, and healthcare domains. Given the stringent data security requirements of these sectors, law firms can be confident that process servers using ServeManager are aligned with the highest security standards, further enhancing the trustworthiness of their engagements.
ServeManager subscribers and their clients will benefit from:
Trent Carlyle, CTO of ServeManager, remarked, "Your trust is our most valued asset. This SOC 2 compliance is more than a certification: it's our renewed promise to safeguard the data you entrust us with, every single day."
technology 28 Aug 2023
WiMi Hologram Cloud Inc., a leading global Hologram Augmented Reality ("AR") Technology provider, today announced that it developed DPCEngine, an efficient density-peak clustering algorithm for improving the performance of policy evaluation. It reduces the complexity of policy evaluation by identifying the clustering structure in the policy sets. The structure and algorithmic process of WiMi's DPCEngine, which includes key steps such as data pre-processing, density-peak clustering, strategy matching and evaluation.
To evaluate the performance and effectiveness of DPCEngine, experiments were conducted using a real dataset containing a large and complex set of policies. This dataset contains policies from different domains and covers a wide range of access control scenarios. This dataset is divided into a training set and a test set, where the training set is used to build the model of DPCEngine and the test set is used to evaluate its performance.
WiMi's researchers compared DPCEngine with those traditional policy evaluation methods, including linear search-based and tree structure-based methods. Two aspects of performance metrics were evaluated: policy evaluation time and matching accuracy. Policy evaluation time is the time required to evaluate an access request, while matching accuracy is the consistency between DPCEngine's matching results and traditional methods.
DPCEngine offers significant performance advantages in terms of policy evaluation time. Compared to traditional methods, DPCEngine is able to significantly reduce the policy evaluation time, especially when the policy set is large and complex. This is attributed to the density-peak-based clustering algorithm used by DPCEngine, which is able to cluster the policy set into smaller subsets, thus reducing the search space for evaluation.
The experimental results of WiMi's DPCEngine in terms of matching accuracy show that there is a high degree of consistency between DPCEngine's matching results and traditional methods. This indicates that DPCEngine does not sacrifice accuracy while improving the performance of strategy evaluation. In addition, we conducted scalability experiments to evaluate the performance of DPCEngine under different sizes of policy sets. The results show that DPCEngine can effectively cope with large-scale policy sets and has good scalability.
WiMi's DPCEngine, a policy evaluation engine based on a density-peak clustering algorithm, has three main functions: preprocessing policy sets, clustered policy sets, and matching policies. The combined use of these functions can significantly improve the effectiveness and accuracy of strategy evaluation.
Preprocessing the policy sets: before strategy evaluation, DPCEngine prepares the data by preprocessing the policy set to make it more suitable for density peak clustering. The preprocessing process includes steps such as data cleaning, feature extraction and data transformation. By cleaning the data, redundant, incomplete or incorrect strategy information is removed to ensure the accuracy and consistency of the data. Avoid negative impact on the evaluation results. The feature extraction process, on the other hand, extracts key features from the policy set, such as user roles, resource types, and operation privileges, for subsequent clustering operations. Data transformation converts the policy set into a data representation, such as a vector or matrix, suitable for density-peaked clustering algorithms for clustering analysis.
Clustered policy sets: DPCEngine utilizes the DPC algorithm to perform clustering operations on policy sets. The Density Peak Clustering Algorithm(DPCA) identifies the clustering structure in a set of strategies by evaluating the density and distance between strategies. The algorithm identifies peak points based on the density and distance between strategies and divides the strategies between peak points into different clusters. This reduces the time and complexity of policy evaluation by clustering a large and complex set of policies into smaller subsets, where each cluster represents a set of policies with similar characteristics and behavioral patterns. The result of a clustered policy set is a set of policy clusters with similar characteristics and behavioral patterns, and this clustered policy set approach reduces the time and computational complexity of policy evaluation and improves the performance and efficiency of the system.
Matching policies: DPCEngine utilizes the clustering results for policy matching. When an access request arrives, DPCEngine compares and matches it with pre-generated policy clusters. By searching for the most similar policies in each cluster, DPCEngine is able to quickly determine the set of policies that match the access request. This clustering-based matching approach can significantly speed up policy matching and provide accurate matching results. In addition, DPCEngine can be combined with other access control technologies and rules engines to further optimize the policy matching process and ensure system security and compliance.
Through the combined use of these three functions, DPCEngine is able to provide companies with efficient and accurate policy evaluation.
This DPCEngine's preprocessing policy sets, clustered policy sets, and matching policy capabilities work in tandem to provide companies with an efficient, accurate, and scalable policy evaluation performance. By utilizing a density-peaked clustering algorithm and the clustering structure of policy sets, DPCEngine enables fast policy matching in the presence of large and complex policy sets. This clustering-based approach reduces the time and computational complexity of policy evaluation and improves system performance and efficiency.
The three main functions of DPCEngine have a wide range of applications. First, the preprocessing policy set function helps companies process and prepare huge amounts of strategy data to ensure data quality and consistency. This is critical for cleaning and transforming data before policy evaluation to improve the accuracy of subsequent clustering and matching. Second, the clustered policy set function enables companies to divide large and complex policy sets into relatively small clusters of policies with similar characteristics. This clustering operation reduces the size and complexity of policy evaluation and improves system performance and efficiency. By clustering similar policies together, companies can more quickly match access requests and provide fine-grained management and control of policies. Finally, the Matching policies function allows companies to compare and match access requests against pre-generated clusters of policies. This clustering-based matching method can quickly locate the set of policies that match an access request, improving the speed and accuracy of policy matching. At the same time, DPCEngine can be used in conjunction with other access control technologies and rules engines to further optimize policy matching results and ensure system security and compliance.
The three functions of WiMi's DPCEngine enable companies to efficiently evaluate access control policies. This policy evaluation engine based on the DPCA has a wide range of applications in various industries and domains, and can help companies build robust security protection systems and meet growing security challenges. With the continuous development and improvement of the technology, DPCEngine will further enhance the performance and accuracy of policy evaluation, providing reliable support for enterprises to secure their data and resources.
blockchain 28 Aug 2023
Corent Technology Inc. and EverythingBlockchain Inc. announced the release of BuildDB blockchain-enabled fiscally sustainable NoSQL database as a fully managed SaaS offering on AWS Cloud and AWS Cloud Marketplace, powered by SaaSOps™.
Corent’s SaaSOps™ instantly provides the SaaS operations and management capabilities needed by modern SaaS Providers to implement and manage sophisticated applications including Kubernetes applications on the cloud, saving years of development and an average of 90% savings on SaaS OpEx - the cost of operating a SaaS solution through its AI-driven automation.
Scott Chate, Vice President of Partner and Market Development at Corent Technology commented that “This example of rapid SaaSification and publishing of a modern application as SaaS on a cloud marketplace is exactly the type of scenario that SaaSOps™ with its Marketizer™ capabilities is designed to do. Enabling an ISV to become a SaaS Provider with all the capabilities needed to operate and manage SaaS offerings, without requiring the ISV to invest the time and effort into developing the ‘as a Service’ capabilities for their Software, is the breakthrough proposition of SaaSOps™.”
Working to a tight timeline for a major airline customer, Corent enabled a complete SaaS implementation of BuildDB on AWS Marketplace with flexible usage-based metering and billing.
Cedric Harris, Chief Solutions Architect of Everything Blockchain said, “We needed a fast and capable solution to get our product onto AWS Marketplace in a tight timeframe. We were pleasantly surprised to find out that it did much more than that, enabling us to implement geo-local customer deployment options and usage-based metered billing with virtually no changes to our application. Corent’s support throughout the project was first-rate.”
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