Writing on AI
While I wrote on AI for SDxCentral and Data Center Knowledge in the Year 2024 — for the former in terms of data engineering and infrastructure observability changes and the latter in data lake analytics evolution — I also featured briefs on the topic on the Progressive Gauge blog.
Overall, we see correspondents in a shift to the kinds of questions that may lead to a more mature understanding of today’s AI’s practical implications. It’s still summer for AI, but it’s a “Summer of Plateauing,” suggesting a slowing of the initial rapid acceleration of expectations. Will we see focused attention on infrastructure and societal implications of AI adoption, or the sloppy refuse accompanying overflowing greed in a Klondike mining camp? Don’t know. What we have seen this year follows.
Generative AI circa 2025 – “When AI will happen” is a general press question. We hope our gentle, continual prodding helps bring the issues Ai face into focus more specifically. This is a barnstormer of a technology, which ended the year disclosing new obstacles in the form of “local and national power grid dynamics, industrial-scale cooling, AI use in healthcare insurance decisions, and geopolitical strategy.” These point to coverage areas of 2025.
Neural Nobels Nabbed – The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that neural network science pioneers John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2024. Something of a defining moment, as these things go.
Random Notes: Pining for Blackwell – This history of semiconductors is full of delays and failures. Intel sunk nearly into oblivion this year, it’s parade of process failures prominent. Can Nvidia redefine design with Blackwell without a misstep? Most observers do not contemplate that outcome. With briefs.
DIY AI chip design futures? – The big players have ready mass markets that can justify big expenses in IC design staff and resources as well. A company like Cadence has to create a middleman conduit and aggressive pricing to build out the new in-house AI chip design industry. There is branding there for the right price. RadioShack? You-Build-It? Lafayette Electrics?
AI’s Summer of Plateauing
I am going to have to retire that word ‘hype’ from my iPad. Keeps repeating! This brief of briefs does what so many stories do these days: Points to other people’s stories!
IP stones in AI’s Pathway – The new paradigm for Web activity threatens beleaguered publishers. They are not on a roll. The 4th estate is now painted as an unwanted gate keeper of opinion. Publishers that saw an advertising market pulverized by Google Search results now see an AI wunderkind about to drain publishing’s last pennies.
Writing on cloud
Arrcus raises $50M to pursue multicloud networking, data center markets – Clouds and on-premises data centers have been in a type of waltz for a number of years. Or a tango, as there is some aggressive give and take at times. Now that cloud is settled in, after it has perhaps lost the distinct price advantage it once had, we may find ourselves in a new stage of development. Let’s put the latency needs of tomorrow’s metaverse aside for now, and just think about the lot of multiple partners all partnering with multiple cloud service providers, and rolling out new connections at a bloody fast pace. The focus on network connections will be more pronounced, I’d wager. The thought arose in my noggin as I spoke recently with Arrcus, and one of their customer/partners, CoreSite. Arrcus discussed a new funding round, as they continue to probe the technology called software-defined networking, looking for the best fit thereto for today’s enterprises’ actual problems.
Writing on data
AWS data tool moves point in up-stack direction – At most yearly re:Invent conferences, AWS has rolled out a shiny new database that affirms the company’s presence amid cloud-based databases. This year was different. Under relatively new CEO Adam Selipsky, data integration and governance are getting attention. Introductions of DataZone and Zero-ETL cloud services could point to a new direction at the cloud giant. – Dec. 12, 2022
Built-for-purpose databases – VentureBeat – Among purpose-built databases that have breached DB-Engines’ top 10 rankings to join Oracle, Microsoft and IBM in popularity, are MongoDB (#5), which began life as a document-oriented database; Redis (#6), originally an in-memory key-value store; and Elasticsearch (#7), a search engine that has taken on many database stylings. Many more databases continue to bubble under the top 10. This story looks at three of them. – Nov. 28, 2022
Writing on quantum field
Sensors play role in quantum future – VentureBeat – VC monies still flow in the quantum field. Japanese Mega Conglomerate Sumitomo has joined a funding round for ColdQuanta, and quantum sensors are in the mix. – Nov 7, 2022
Technology and Society
China Moon Race – Medium – The reality of a moon race between China and the US is just beginning to dawn on people. We check in on a China expert’s view. – Jan 2025
Outlook for internet data policy: Still not so rosy – Medium – Shifts in internet policy lurk as a new presidential administration takes hold. Likely FCC and FTC leaders are taking test-spins. – Jan 2024
Net neutrality is on the books again … well – The stars and planets may seem in their usual places this morning, but change came overnight, as Net Neutrality returned to America. If you blink you missed it, and it’s not guaranteed to stick. – April 2024 [Update: Was not to be.]
A Personal History of Technologies
“Mythical Man-Month” Author Frederick Brooks, at 91 – Noting here the passing at 91 last month of Frederick Brooks, director of some of IBM’s most important mainframe-era programming projects. He was a key figure in establishing the idea that software projects should be intelligently engineered and organized. – Dec 20, 2022
User voices – Key to trustworthy content
On IoT database design – Frederik Van Leeckwyck, the business development manager at Factry.IO told us that data is different in Industrial IoT. Van Leeckwyck said Maarkedal, Belgium-based Factry.IO grew out of engineers’ interest in bringing a more open approach to handling industrial manufacturing data.
Van Leeckwyck advises that comprehensive approaches that engage both operations-side engineers and IT-side software developers are the best way to go about Industrial IoT projects. That can help free data so that it has uses beyond just the factory floor.
Challenges are found throughout the life cycle of IoT data, and range from high-level architecture to implementation details. For example, Van Leeckwyck said, it is important for front-line naming protocols and basic configurations to mesh with back-end data handling.
Overall a team must understand what its technology of choice is capable of, and what the business is trying to achieve. He said: “and the database developer should be responsible for making sure that the data can actually be collected and stored with the resolution and frequency needed.”
This need to deeply understand what a technology is capable of is a point I hear again and again, as I speak with end-users. What a technology can deliver, and in what kind of time frame — those are keys across the landscapes. Read more.
eCommerce Phenom Wayfair CTO View – In a low lit operations room in the upscale Back Bay neighborhood, technical teams watch monitors that show the electronic heartbeat of Wayfair.com’s data flow. Read more.
Head of data and knowledge management at the German Center for Diabetes Research – After more than 10 years of working in bioinformatics, Alexander Jarasch developed an aversion to relational databases — or at least the data joins that so often are central to relational queries. “I hate joins,” he said. “When you have data scattered over tables and you look for insights, it gets complicated.” Read more.
Esri user helps Syrian war refugees – Andrew Schroeder and his colleagues first implemented Survey123 in alpha form as part of a program to deliver medical aid to Syrian civil war refugees located in Jordan. The specific mission focused on skin problems, which can be a serious issue for refugees in arid climates with limited resources. Medical workers had to work quickly with a population in flux, while identifying conditions that required referral. Read more.
Talking Data Podcast (2013 – 2018)
Among the most exciting media developments in recent years have been podcasts. The podcast is an expansive medium, and – particularly — it’s given voice to a new generation of communicators. Over five years beginning in 2013 I had a chance to work on what came to be known as the Talking Data podcast with co-hosts Mark Brunelli and Ed Burns and with features editors and writers like Nicole Laskowski, Scot Petersen, and Ed Scannell. This sojourn roughly mapped to the initial ascent and eventual comeuppance of Big Data, a set of software technologies possessing what an old trade press writer would call “a slew” of “bells and whistles.”
Auld Lang Syne for Hadoop – 2018
It’s a Planet and a Database: Just Back from MongoDB World – 2014
2014 Strata Stroll – 2014
Remembering Nate Silver Day at Gartner’s Grapevine Texas conference – 2013
Conferences: XML/Web Services One Conference
A formative experience in my career was the work I did on Web Services conferences for 101 Communications (now, 1105 Communications). A lot of the basic infrastructure for the conference came by way of the company’s acquisition of the SIGS Conference Group, but my colleagues and I had a lot to do with creating the program – I was a conference co-chair — for XML One and its later incarnation: XML Web Services One. XML was a very interesting moment in the evolution of software, although, these days, if it is remembered at all, it is with some disaffection – XML was not a developer favorite. It did pave the way for Service Oriented Architecture, the Semantic Web and JSON technology sub-unit trends, the latter as a straight-out “Storm the XML barricades” opponent. Today, the only evidence of “Web services” is a little cloud operation that uses the name as part of its moniker. As people involved with planning these types of conferences know well, there comes a time when you have to have sit-down brain-storming rap sessions where you try to predict “the next big thing.” XML and Web services set the stage for RSS, a mechanism that some would place as crucial in the ascendance of social media. That ascendance was so incandescent that it altered computing’s role in society to an astounding degree, and has yet to play out completely.
Finding “the next thing” will continue to drive most technology assessments. The lesson from the XML – Web services – SOA – and so forth experience is that sub-units of bounded technologies don’t really point successfully to the future. The trends of technology, just like real life, have an overlapping nature and the triggers for progress come from the surprising Connections* that transpire. READ MORE
The agendas for long ago events are a bit hard to find these days. But I’m including a link here to my coverage of a Michael Cusumano keynote and interview. His musings on programming team organization show where DevOps and DataOps in businesses were about 15 years ago. At that time, the morays of cloud development were just beginning to swirl in Google data centers.
At the XML Web Services One Conference – Cusumano on teams – 2003
Cusumano says the business of software is … software – 2004
XML: The last silver bullet – 2001
* Credit James Burke, author.