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Wednesday, April 26th, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 12:00p | IBM Launches Four Cloud Data Centers in US IBM is continuing to expand its global network of cloud data centers, the latest addition being four data centers in the US – two each in Washington, D.C., and Dallas. Cloud has been one of the few bright spots in the company’s overall picture of declining revenue in recent years as it struggles to adjust to the new world where enterprises are not signing nearly as many big data center hardware and services contracts as they used to, opting instead for cloud services by the likes of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. IBM’s cloud revenue grew 33 percent in the first quarter, while the business as a whole saw its revenue decline for the 20th consecutive quarter. Its cloud revenue over the last 12 months was $14.6 billion. Also growing are IBM’s analytics and cognitive solutions businesses, which are closely integrated with cloud, sold as services running on the company’s cloud platform. Expanding data centers that host this platform is strategically important as the company faces stiff competition from the cloud giants, who have been investing tens of billions of dollars in data center infrastructure annually. With the four new facilities online, IBM has more than 55 cloud data centers in 19 countries, 22 of them in the US. The company has not disclosed the capacity of the new server farms, saying only that each of them can support “thousands of physical servers.” Read more: Cloud by the Megawatt: Inside IBM’s Cloud Data Center Strategy |
| 4:56p | Scientists Say Brexit May End UK’s Lead in AI Jeremy Kahn (Bloomberg) — A group of prominent academics and tech executives fear that the U.K.’s exit from the European Union could jeopardize the U.K.’s lead in the development of machine learning technologies. British researchers have played a critical role in advances in machine learning -– a kind of artificial intelligence in which software learns from experience or data. But as demand for related expertise proliferates across industries, the country faces a “substantial skill shortage in this area,” concluded a report published by Tuesday by The Royal Society, one of the world’s oldest and most well-known scientific organizations. Although the report doesn’t mention Brexit specifically, it implies that the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union could exacerbate this skills gap. “As it considers its future approach to immigration policy, the U.K. must ensure that research and innovation systems continue to be able to access the skills they need,” the report said. See also: Deep Learning Driving Up Data Center Power Density The U.K. has hosted a batch of high-profile tech startups that have incorporated aspects of AI, and have gone on to be acquired by U.S. tech firms, including Twitter Inc.’s purchase of London-based artificial intelligence startup Magic Pony Technology in June, language processing company SwiftKey’s sale to Microsoft Corp.’s in February 2016, and Alphabet Inc.’s £400 million acquisition of London AI startup DeepMind in 2014. SoftBank Group Corp. is close to an investment in Improbable Worlds Ltd., a London-based virtual reality startup backed by U.S. venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz, people familiar with the matter said. Peter Donnelly, professor of genetics and statistical science at the University of Oxford, and chair of the report, said that U.K. startup companies involved in machine learning applications see continued access to expertise as “fundamental.” The working group comprised fourteen researchers, a number of whom work for leading technology companies, such as Demis Hassabis, the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of DeepMind, Neil Lawrence, a professor at the University of Sheffield who is currently working as director of machine learning for Amazon Inc., and Zoubin Ghahramani, a University of Cambridge professor who is also chief scientist at Uber. See also: This Data Center is Designed for Deep Learning The working group also expressed concerns that improved economic productivity resulting from machine learning could lead to increased inequality. “Much of the benefit may go to a small number of individuals or companies, with others losing jobs or facing reduced living standards,” the report said. “Society needs to give urgent consideration to the ways in which benefits from machine learning can be shared.” The report recommended more government funding for both doctoral candidates and master’s level courses, and that machine learning is incorporated into the U.K.’s school curriculum, including an emphasis on the ethical and social implications of machine learning and big data. The group spent 18 months studying issues facing the field, including sampling public attitudes toward machine learning applications through surveys and small group discussions. While it was concluded that only 9 percent of the British public understood the term “machine learning,” most were aware of applications based on its underlying principles, such as speech recognition, which is used by digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, and automatic photo tagging on social media sites like Facebook. The group found that the public was broadly enthusiastic about machine learning being used to improve healthcare or the delivery of social services and in situations where robots could save humans from having to perform hazardous tasks. They expressed concerns, however, about the potential for AI-enabled robots to cause either direct physical harm to people -– for instance, if a self-driving car made a mistake and crashed, the report said. They also worried about machines replacing humans, both because of the potential for large-scale job losses and also because of fears that people would become too reliant on the technologies and lose critical cognitive skills. To help overcome fears about machine learning, the working group also recommended that the U.K. update and improve its rules about privacy and data governance. It also recommended the government fund research into ways to make machine learning algorithms less like black boxes, enabling people to determine – or at least infer — why the algorithms reach certain conclusions. |
| 5:02p | Stolen Laptop Leads to $2.5M HIPAA Breach Penalty  Brought to you by MSPmentor The theft of a laptop computer containing information of nearly 1,400 patients was among two HIPAA breaches that led a Pennsylvania provider of remote heart monitoring to pay $2.5 million, federal authorities said this week. Malvern-based CardioNet, Inc., essentially had no process at all for securely managing electronic protected health information (ePHI) of the patients it was hired to monitor, at the time the breaches occurred in early 2012, according to investigators from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights (OCR). CardioNet – a covered entity – was found to have insufficient risk analysis and risk management processes, in violation of the security and privacy rules of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). “CardioNet’s policies and procedures implementing the standards of the HIPAA Security Rule were in draft form and had not been implemented,” OCR officials said in a statement. “Further, the Pennsylvania–based organization was unable to produce any final policies or procedures regarding the implementation of safeguards for ePHI, including those for mobile devices.” On its website, CardioNet is described as the world’s leading supplier of mobile cardiac outpatient telemetry. “CardioNet provides the next-generation ambulatory cardiac monitoring service with beat-to-beat, real time analysis, automatic arrhythmia detection and wireless ECG transmission,” the website says. “CardioNet prides itself with helping clinicians prevent morbidity, mortality and disability with rapid diagnosis and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease.” The first reported breach occurred on Jan. 10, 2012, when a laptop containing the ePHI of 1,391 people was stolen from a car parked outside of a CardioNet employee’s home. “Mobile devices in the health care sector remain particularly vulnerable to theft and loss,” OCR director Roger Severino said in a statement. “Failure to implement mobile device security by Covered Entities and Business Associates puts individuals’ sensitive health information at risk,” the statement continued. “This disregard for security can result in a serious breach, which affects each individual whose information is left unprotected.” OCR did not provide details of the second – larger – breach, which occurred on Feb. 27, 2012, and compromised the ePHI of 2,219 individuals. An email sent to the OCR press office was not immediately returned. CardioNet’s settlement brings the amount of HIPAA breach payments collected by OCR thus far this year to $14.3 million. Last year, the agency collected a record $23.5 million, up from $6.2 million in all of 2015. This article originally appeared on MSPmentor. |
| 5:53p | Watch Now: First Live 4K Video from Space, Streamed by AWS NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson is now broadcasting live from the International Space Station, 250 miles off the Earth in what the space agency says is the “highest-resolution video ever broadcast live from space.” The live stream is enabled partly by Amazon Web Services’ Elemental, using AWS CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53, and Amazon CloudFront. These services are providing public access to the stream in both 4K and HD, according to Amazon. The stream is taking place in conjunction with the 2017 National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas. The broadcast started at 10:30 am Pacific and will end at 11:30 am. Take a look here: |
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