AI Magazine - October 2021

Rubrik: Securing data, the 21st century’s strategic asset Event Review: Technology, AI and Cyber Live

October 2021 | aimagazine.com

AI Strategy: The growing cognitive computing market AI Applications: Cybersecurity insurance and the rise of ransomware

UNLIMITED POTENTIAL

BACKED

by the

PLANET

By leveraging the natural powers of the planet, Verne Global offers high intensity, low cost computer that doesn’t cost the Earth

Digital Technology Brands

Never miss an issue!

+ Discover the latest news and insights about Global AI...

JOIN THE COMMUNITY

The AI Team EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

LAURA BERRILL DEPUTY EDITOR

CATHERINE GRAY

PRODUCTION DIRECTORS

GEORGIA ALLEN DANIELA KIANICKOVÁ PRODUCTION MANAGERS

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

SCOTT BIRCH

OWEN MARTIN PHILLINE VICENTE JACK THOMPSON

CREATIVE TEAM

PRODUCTION EDITOR

OSCAR HATHAWAY SOPHIE-ANN PINNELL HECTOR PENROSE SAM HUBBARD MIMI GUNN JUSTIN SMITH REBEKAHBIRLESON DUKE WEATHERILL JORDAN WOOD

JANET BRICE

VIDEO PRODUCTION MANAGER

KIERAN WAITE

MOTION DESIGNER

TYLER LIVINGSTONE

DIGITAL VIDEO PRODUCERS

SAM KEMP EVELYN HUANG HABBIE AMOS JACK NICHOLLS MARTA EUGENIO ERNEST DE NEVE

MARKETING MANAGER

ANDREW STUBBINGS PROJECT DIRECTORS

KRIS PALMER MIKE SADR BEN MALTBY TOM VENTURO CRAIG KILLINGBACK

MEDIA SALES DIRECTOR

JAMES WHITE

SALES AND MARKETING DIRECTOR

JASON WESTGATE MANAGING DIRECTOR

LEWIS VAUGHAN

CHIEF OPERATIONS OFFICER

STACY NORMAN PRESIDENT & CEO

GLEN WHITE

FOREWORD

Is AI scary?

Are you scared of AI? Probably not if you work in the sector. But there’s a chasm between what we know – that AI is currently a bit of a misnomer and not nearly as capable or autonomous as it might be – and what Joe Public assumes, which is largely a potential that exists in dystopian sci-fi.

“AI is exciting and has lots of potential to do lots of good things but we must measure the hyperbolic slant we use to sell the idea of AI”

AI MAGAZINE IS PUBLISHED BY

To some extent, overbeefing the abilities of AI is a nice sales tactic. It may even be good for the morale and ambitions of the sector at large. It could certainly put a few cents on your share price. But those ends are short sighted. Eventually, we are going to have to convince the world that AI is a force for good, not some gigantic conspiracy to take someone’s job away or mine their inner soul in the name of better targeted marketing.

At that point, we will all be asking ourselves how to roll back the rhetoric to a manageable level, at which point the industry will be accused of charlatanism. Or, worse, fraud. Getting scared yet?

These are problems of our own making. AI is exciting and has lots of potential to do lots of good things – curing disease, cutting crime and, yes, adding value to companies – but we must measure the hyperbolic slant we use to sell the idea of AI, or those benefits will disappear into a legislatory quagmire and the reality will land even further away from the pitch. Where’s the added value in that?

LAURA BERRILL laura.berrill@bizclikmedia.com

© 2021 | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

aimagazine.com

3

The World’s Biggest Sustainability Event February

23rd - 24th 2022 REGISTER FOR TICKETS

STREAMED LIVE FROM TOBACCO DOCK LONDON A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

CONTENTS

Our Regular Upfront Section: 8

Big Picture

10 The Brief 12 Timeline:

DeepMind 14 Trailblazer:

Dr Rana el Kaliouby 18 Five Mins With:

Lynette Ousby

24

Verne Global

Unlimited potential backed by the planet

46

AI Strategy

The growing cognitive computing market

70

Rubrik

Securing data, the 21st century’s strategic asset

54

AI Applications

Cybersecurity insurance and the rise of ransomware

82

Event Review

BizClik Media Group: Hosting Technology, AI & Cyber

62

94

Data Intelligence

AI Brands

Data & Analytics

Top 10

BIG PICTURE

8

October 2021

Zuckerberg’s Metaverse

PICTURE: OCULUS

California, USA

Mark Zuckerberg has announced his vision to turn Facebook into a ‘metaverse’. This initiative could mean big things for other businesses. At some point, we may see a metaverse evolve that creates a new community with enhanced presence, a forum and marketplace for content creators of various stripes, and new forms of digital commerce.

aimagazine.com

9

THE BRIEF “Cognitive technologies form a large part of the next industrial revolution, alongside other technologies such as blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics” Kasia Borowska

Managing Director, Brainpool AI 

BY THE NUMBERS What are the top two most significant challenges companies face when considering the implementation of AI?

42%

56% Staff skills

The fear of the unknown

READ MORE

“When people start moving around between environments seamlessly there are a lot of security problems we will encounter” Professor Rajarajan Muttukrishnan Professor of Security Engineering & Director Institute for Cyber Security, City, University of London 

Healthcare Augmented & Virtual Reality Market revenue to cross US$16.2bn by 2027 Healthcare augmented & virtual reality market is projected to expand at a CAGR of more than 32% CAGR through 2027 impelled by the increasing acceptance of the latest technologies.

READ MORE

READ MORE

AI could diagnose dementia in a day

“AI and ML have great potential for driving use of data analytics across a business.”

Chris Stephenson

Scientists are testing an artificial-intelligence system thought to be capable of diagnosing dementia after a single brain scan. Earlier diagnoses with this system could greatly improve patient outcomes.

READ MORE

Can AI improve your pickup lines?

Technical Director, Sagacity 

A team at Medzino, a digital health and wellness clinic, had some fun prompting OpenAI's GPT-3 language prediction model to generate dating advice for different situations.

READ MORE

READ MORE

10

October 2021

Study by Chartered Institute for IT finds UK can set “gold standard” in ethical AI How can the UK do this?

The UK houses companies including DeepMind, Graphcore, Darktrace, BenevolentAI as well as others and is Europe’s AI leader.

Experts have suggested the UK should tap its strengths in universities, diplomacy and democracy to become a world leader in AI that ‘cares about humanity’.

Dr Bill Mitchell OBE, Director of Policy at BCS, said creating the gold standard would be critical for our economic recovery. He added everyone deserved to have confidence in AI as it will affect our lives and the technology should reflect everyone’s needs.

What are the challenges?

It’s feared biases in AI could lead to increasing societal problems, including the wealth gap and other discrimination.

Public trust in AI has been damaged through missteps including algorithms used to estimate student grades.

The report also found disparities in competence and ethical practices. The government’s National Data Strategy states: “Used badly, data could harm people or communities and its overwhelming benefits overshadowed by public mistrust.”

 MEDICAL IMAGING There has been a rise in AI solutions for medical imaging, particularly with x-rays. Lunit is focused on looking at ways it can combat cancer with AI-powered x-rays and its solution is expanding globally.  AUGMENTED REALITY According to eMarketer, 59 million people in the U.S. will use virtual reality at least once per month in 2021, and 93 million will use augmented reality – a 28% increase from 2019.  AI AND GENDER There is a risk that, instead of solving the problem of gender bias, AI will only exacerbate it further.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, 85% of AI projects will deliver erroneous outcomes due to bias in data or algorithms.  SONATIC The company was able to clone Val Kilmer voice after throat surgery in 2015. But the technology also sparks legal, ethical, and economic concerns, particularly among voice actors who are concerned about their livelihood drying up.

W A Y U P

OCT21

W A Y D O W N

aimagazine.com

11

TIMELINE DeepMind’s pioneering work with artificial intelligence DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence (AI) company that is dedicated to accelerating the industry with an interdisciplinary approach. It brings together new ideas and advances in machine learning,

20122014 Early investment and progress 2013 saw DeepMind publish research on an AI system that could surpass human abilities in games such as Pong, Breakout and Enduro.

At the start of 2014, Google announced the company had acquired DeepMind for $500 million and agreed to take over DeepMind technologies.

With Google, DeepMind established an artificial intelligence ethics board.

12

October 2021

neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, simulation and computing infrastructure.

The company was founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Leg and Mustafa Suleyman in 2010.

2016 Working with big partners and supporting the healthcare industry With Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft, in 2016 DeepMind became a founding member of Partnership on AI, an organisation dedicated to the society-AI interface.

In 2016, the company launched a new division called DeepMind Health and acquired a university spinout company with a healthcare app called Hark.

2017

2018

2020present

Focusing on healthcare and ethics

AI improving healthcare apps

Continued work with AI solutions

DeepMind Health continued its work in 2017 partnering with the Cancer Research UK Centre at Imperial College London. This was to improve breast cancer detection by applying machine learning to mammography.

The company opened a new unit called DeepMind Ethics and Society in the same year.

To support doctors, DeepMind developed an app called Streams in 2018. The app sends alerts to doctors about patients at risk of injury.

Towards the end of the same year, DeepMind announced that its health division and the Streams app would be absorbed into Google Health.

Deepmind published Agent57 in 2020. Agent57 is an AI Agent which surpasses human-level performance on all 57 games of the Atari2600 suite.

In partnership with The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), DeepMind launched its AlphaFold Protein Structure Database in 2021. This database more than doubled humanity’s accumulated knowledge of high-accuracy protein structures.

aimagazine.com

13

TRAILBLAZER

Dr Rana el Kaliouby

Job Title: Deputy CEO Company: Smart Eye

R

ana el Kaliouby is an Egyptian-American Scientist who co-founded Affectiva, a software company that builds AI that understands human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use. Having spun out of MIT Media Labs, Affectiva created the new technology category of Artificial Emotion.

helped the institute found its Autism and Communication Technology Initiative. Here she became interested in the possibility of applying artificial intelligence (AI) to improve human to human communication, especially for autistic people who may struggle with emotional communication.

As part of a team that pioneered the development of an ‘emotional hearing aid’. This ‘hearing aid’ was a set of emotion reading wearable glasses that the New York Times included in their Top 100 innovations of 2006.

Early education and work with emotion-sensing El Kaliouby studied at the American University in Cairo between 1993 to 2000 where she earned a Bachelors and Master of Science degree in Computer Science. In 2001 she then went on to study for a PhD in Computer Science at Newnham College, at the University of Cambridge in England.

It was at the University of Cambridge that el Kaliouby developed a real-time facial emotion-sensing system.

Working with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), el Kaliouby worked as a research scientist and 14

October 2021

Amount raised to create Emotion AI

$50mn+

Pushing the boundaries with Affectiva In 2009, el Kaliouby co-founded Affectiva with Rosalind Picard. The company builds AI that understands human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use.

Its platform does this by analysing facial and vocal expressions.

While working at Affectiva, el Kaliouby raised USD$50m+ in capital from top-tier investors and non-dilutive funding to bring Affectiva’s Emotion AI to over 90 countries and several industries, including the automotive and media analytics industries.

TRAILBLAZER

To push for success, el Kaliouby’s Affectiva was acquired by Smart Eye. Now the Deputy CEO of Smart Eye, el Kaliouby has teamed up with Martin Krantz, CEO of Smart Eye, to scale the company to a global AI powerhouse.

Breaking the mould within the AI industry Dedicated to the ethical development and deployment of AI, el Kaliouby is part of different industry organisations to establish best practices and guidelines for AI ethics. She is part of Partnership of AI and the World Economic Forum’s Council of Young Global Leaders, this is driven by her passion to advocate for standards to ensure data privacy, mitigate data and algorithmic bias.

In her industry, el Kaliouby is one of few women leading an AI company.

Caring deeply about her role as an advocate for diversity and inclusion in tech and leadership, el Kaliouby is determined to help catalyse change and improve equality, she is a member of the Boston Steering Committee for All Raise and a member of the Young Presidents’ Organisation (YPO).

To share her story as a Muslim leader and CEO, el Kaliouby published her memoir in 2020, Girl Decoded. In her book, she shares her story as a rarity in the tech world and in her personal world as a MiddleEastern, Muslim woman.

Girl Decoded demonstrates how el Kaliouby had to break the rules of what it meant to be an obedient daughter and wife to pursue career 16

October 2021

“The way to solve problems in the world is to become scientists and technologists and build things that haven't been built before and discover things that people really don't know about” goals in AI and computer science, it follows her journey from a “nice Egyptian girl” to a woman carving her own path as she revolutionises technology. It also emphasises her mission to humanise technology before it dehumanises us.

Recognition for her pioneering work For her work in tech and AI, el Kaliouby has received many awards and recognitions. Her awards include Forbes World’s Top 50 Women in Tech 2018 and BBC 100 Women in 2019.

Now, el Kaliouby looks to continue

her work as Deputy CEO at Smart Eye. A key priority will be to drive AI innovation with a focus on ethics, diversity, equity and inclusion. She will continue to evangelise Emotion AI and its applications in automotive Interior Sensing, Media Analytics and beyond. aimagazine.com

17

FIVE MINS WITH...

Lynette Ousby Lynette Ousby is the UK managing director for Alcidion, a global smart health tech company aiming to modernise and accelerate digital strategies with systems that proactively help healthcare professionals and that embrace automation and functionality such as AI

Q. WHAT DOES YOUR POSITION ENTAIL?

» I get to work alongside a great team in the UK as we collaborate with the NHS to deliver technology that can improve the lives of busy clinicians and their patients. I also get to work with some inspiring colleagues internationally, including some great minds who have developed amazing technology that is disrupting older approaches in the health tech space.

As a leader in the sector, it’s also important to put forward new ideas, to be disruptive to the market and to stand by those ideas when they provoke debate. We are seeing the benefits of that now, as emerging market requirements and policy resonate with the provocative ideas that we championed 12 months ago.

Q. HOW HAVE YOU REACTED TO THE IMPACT OF THE LAST 18 MONTHS?

» We have continued to grow

rapidly as a business in the UK – and as some companies have moved away from sites, we have opened a new regional presence in the North West in addition to our existing UK offices. This has allowed us to continue to recruit new expertise that is boosting our ability to support customers and colleagues.

We have acquired new expertise in other ways too – with Alcidion’s 18

October 2021

“ The pandemic has shown an urgent need for smart technologies in the NHS” acquisition of NHS patient flow technology supplier ExtraMed earlier this year being one example, and the development of partnerships with other tech vendors to create a modular electronic patient record approach, being another.

We have worked hard to make sure we support our NHS customers wherever they need it. In the

immediacy of the pandemic, I was proud with how the team here in the UK worked to develop new functionality to help hospitals manage.

We have also been bold in positioning ideas about how the digital health market needs to change to meet modern needs of clinicians and patients – something that has become even more evident since the onset of the pandemic.

Q. TO WHAT EXTENT HAS IT IMPACTED ON YOUR WORK?

» The pandemic has shown an

urgent need for smart technologies in the NHS, and to move beyond aimagazine.com

19

FIVE MINS WITH...

static record systems, something our chief medical officer describes as ‘electronic filing cabinets’, that still place burdens on clinicians to remember 1001 things.

We have responded to this need swiftly and many NHS trusts and boards have been turning to Alcidion as a means to modernise and accelerate digital strategies with systems that proactively help healthcare professionals and that embrace automation such as AI. Clinicians have needed modern 20

October 2021

“ Clinicians have needed modern approaches for some time – the pandemic has just highlighted that requirement”

approaches for some time – the pandemic has just highlighted that requirement.

Q. WHAT ARE YOUR PRIORITIES GOING FORWARDS?

» There are some exciting sounds

from within the NHS that we are responding to – including a vision from the health secretary and from organisations like NHSX to separate data from its application, thereby unlocking its value, to allow a more innovative marketplace.

In terms of our business focus – we remain committed to listening to the NHS and developing our technologies to suit the needs of people on the frontline. And we are continuing to build an ecosystem of technology suppliers.

In the next 12 months we will also see some big ‘go lives’ with our Miya Precision smart clinical asset platform that we anticipate will help to drive some significant developments for our customers. aimagazine.com

21

Meet the Top 100 Leaders in Technology

OUT NOW A BizClik Media Group Brand

techno

logym

agazine

.com

TOP LEAD ERS 2021

NOMINATE

SHARE

CELEBRATE

Creating Digital Communities aimagazine.com

23

24

October 2021

VERNE GLOBAL

UNLIMITED

POTENTIAL, BACKED BY THE

PLANET WRITTEN BY: LAURA V. GARCIA PRODUCED BY: LEWIS VAUGHAN

aimagazine.com

25

VERNE GLOBAL

By leveraging the natural powers of the planet, Verne Global offers high intensity, low cost compute that doesn’t cost the Earth

T

he saying ‘location is everything’ has never been more suitable.

Iceland is especially well placed to supercharge high intensity compute and meet the increasing demands of today’s and tomorrow’s data centres requirements.

Advantageously situated near Keflavik, Iceland, with its 40-acre data centre campus Verne Global has created the perfect environment to help both the planet and its people thrive. “The land of fire and ice” delivers on two critical aspects for data centres, cooling and power, in the form of its abundant renewable energy and perennially temperate climate. Today, Iceland’s grid is powered completely by renewable sources.

Geothermal and hydroelectric are highly stable sources of renewable energy. This stability also translates into predictable, long term pricing for Verne Global and its customers.

Dominic Ward, CEO at Verne Global, sums it up nicely, “At Verne Global, we are able to provide enough natural differentiation between us and our competitors because of the sustainable power availability, that is driven by 100% renewable energy from geothermal and hydroelectric power, and the natural climate, which enables us to provide the lowest cost, most stable and efficient power equation for our customers to run their high intensity and high performance compute from our campus in Iceland.”

26

October 2021

aimagazine.com

27

VERNE GLOBAL

Unlimited Potential, Backed by the Planet

“These two sources are renewable, stable and predictable, they don’t experience the fluctuations of solar, wind, or other renewable sources, and they come with considerably higher efficiency attached to them. This gives the data centre operators located in Iceland, such as Verne Global, a huge cost and efficiency advantage, which we're able to pass on to our customers.

And we're able to do that with natural, renewable power and the lowest possible environmental impact.”

“The contracts that we have with our power companies enable us to provide power pricing to our customers ten years into the future at a fixed price. And that is not just unusual; it is unheard of and actually impossible anywhere else,” explains Ward.

He continues, “In certain countries, you can fix the price looking ahead for a couple of years, but in Iceland, as a result of the stable energy sources, you are able to have this fixed pricing availability. Furthermore, 28

October 2021

“ We do stand in a fantastic position, frankly, a unique position, being able to provide our customers with 100% renewable power generation capability that they are now seeking more than ever” DOMINIC WARD CEO, VERNE GLOBAL

the cost is the lowest that you can find even in other Nordic locations for the distribution of power that has been made available to us. So we have this competitive advantage on power costs, which is fundamental as to why our customers decide to choose us to provide them with data centre services.

We're able to give them the predictability over a decade if they want it. ”

VERNE GLOBAL

DOMINIC WARD TITLE: CEO INDUSTRY: INFO TECH & SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: LONDON Dominic has been involved with technology and digital infrastructure companies for most of his career. He joined the management team in 2015 but has been involved with the company for over ten years. He previously ran direct investments at the Wellcome Trust, one of our shareholders, where he was responsible for a substantial portfolio of private equity investments, including Verne Global. He began his career at Jones Lang LaSalle Corporate Finance and later co-founded Lepe Partners, a technology investment and advisory firm.

aimagazine.com

29

Corporate Responsibility, and the Cloud In the land of fire and ice, Intel and Verne Global have partnered to provide clients with sustainable, high-intensity computing

Intel and Verne Global: Sustainable, HighIntensity Computing In Keflavik, Iceland, Intel, and Verne Global aim to advance the future of highperformance computing (HPC). ‘One of Intel’s key goals is for us to be using 100% renewable energy by 2030’, Chris Feltham, Technical Sales at Intel, says. ‘Artificial intelligence has the power to do a lot of good. But it’s extremely computationally intensive. By running their intense workloads with renewable energy, companies can do good while protecting the planet’.

The Tech Intel’s vision is to build the right combination of technologies for each client. Its latest, 3rd-gen Xeon Scalable processors will power the next generation of supercomputers, delivering scale and performance for compute, storage, memory, network, and security. ‘Our

hardware is impressive. Combined with our software, it’s completely unique’, Chris says. ‘That’s where the real magic starts to happen’.

The Partnership High-intensity workloads consume huge amounts of energy—but Verne Global’s Iceland centre will combine Intel’s tech with Verne’s renewable operating model. ‘We can take these intense workloads and bring them to a location where we’re guaranteed renewable energy’, Chris says. ‘If the planet is something you care about, we help you operate with a clear conscience’.

The Future Going forward, Intel will continue to combine its tech with Verne Global’s agility. ‘Their operations are nimble’, Chris says. ‘They’ve got a will to adopt fast’.

As for the future? He sees no such end in sight. ‘As long as we can continue to help our clients operate more sustainably’, he concludes, ‘Intel and Verne Global will continue to collaborate’.

Learn more © Intel Corporation

VERNE GLOBAL

TATE CANTRELL TITLE: CIO INDUSTRY: INFO TECH & SERVICES

EXECUTIVE BIO

LOCATION: RESTON

32

Tate has been responsible for the technical direction of the company since day one. He oversees all aspects of design and construction and is responsible for operational and security strategies. A seasoned industry speaker, Tate is an expert in data high-density data centre environments and works hand-in-hand with customers to ensure all their specialist technical needs are met. He started his career in data centre development and operations at Dupont Fabros Technology in 2003, where he rose through the ranks to be VP of Technology.

October 2021

VERNE GLOBAL

“As a result, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can be reduced significantly because of that certainty, because of the ability to look longer-term. And that's really important for the type of customers that we cater to and the type of products and services that we're able to provide to them, whether they are focused on financial services, engineering, research or any other industry.

Besides the abundance of low-cost renewable energy available in Iceland, located on the edge of the Arctic Circle, the country also helps to deliver on the necessary cooling required for data centre hardware — again, playing into Verne Global’s ability to lower the TCO for its customers.

“Because there's also a naturally stable temperature in Iceland that doesn't get too hot or too cold, with our ability to engineer and take advantage of that efficiency, we're able to achieve significant cost savings on our capital expenditure that then results in lower operating expenses for our customers in the short, medium and long-term. This means a significantly lower TCO, particularly for our customers who are able to think and act in the longer term,” says Ward.

The Power of Selective Partnerships Tate Cantrell, Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global, says, “One of the important aspects to the success of Verne Global and our ability to drive sustainability through the entire stack of high-performance computing is our effort to work closely with partners.

We're really excited with the advancements that we've been able to make, in particular with companies like Dell and NVIDIA, who are hardware partners that allow us to provide not only sustainable colocation services but the latest in high-performance hardware for our customers. Plus, because of the local partner ecosystem we have in Iceland, we're able to support any one of those provider’s hardware solutions all the way from the processing of an order aimagazine.com

33

INTEGRA MISSION CRITICAL DESIGNS AND DELIVERS INDUSTRY-LEADING TURNKEY DATA CENTERS. Integra Mission Critical leverages our innovative designs and integrated approach, which have been honed over the past decade, and combine them with our relentless passion to mitigate risk, compress the schedule, reduce costs, and close the gap between capex and revenue generation. And we do it all for you as if we are building our own data center.

Learn More

Matt Koerner, Co-founder, and John Kolar, Principal at Integra MC talk about their strategic partnership with data centre innovator Verne Global Verne Global believes Iceland, home to its

40-acre data centre near Keflavik, is the best place in the world to locate high intensity computers. The available infrastructure allows it to power its data centre with 100% renewable energy, and its commitment to clean grid and stable climate drive it to select only the most exacting partners when building out new capacity.

Integra Mission Critical, co-founded by Matthew Koerner in 2015, typifies the level of excellence needed by Verne Global and the most demanding data centre users worldwide.

“From the outset we at Integra focused on solving some problems we saw in the industry such as skilled labour shortages. Figuring out how to implement change and get it globally accepted is a challenge we rise to every day!”

John Kolar heads Integra Mission Critical’s design, engineering and manufacturing functions from its Akron, Ohio factory. The partnership with Verne Global is based on shared values, he says. “We quickly found that their goals and their values matched our own very closely.”

Reusing existing buildings on Verne’s site, a former NATO airbase, built a cooling facility that beat ASHRAE recommended standards and a PUE better than level 1, without using any kind of mechanical refrigeration, at the same time saving cost and speeding up the schedule. The partners’ teams worked together as one, with Verne’s group providing local knowledge on-site, while Integra Mission Critical brought its specialised knowledge of the hyperscale data centre market, the equipment and how to bring resilience and flexibility into the future-proofed system design.

Matthew Koerner commented: “One thing that attracted us to Verne Global was their drive toward innovation and environmental sustainability. Integra Mission Critical is part of our Critical Project Services group of companies. Verne’s drive to innovation and sustainability has really exercised all of those companies within our portfolio: and its participation in innovation has truly made this an outstanding partnership.”

Learn More

VERNE GLOBAL

36

October 2021

VERNE GLOBAL

to the installation within our high-density colocation environments, through to the operations of that infrastructure and ensuring that our customers can manage that equipment effectively, wherever they are in the world.”

Verne Global believes in working hand-in-hand with its carefully selected partners to ensure excellent customer success. Ward underscores the importance of partner selection. “We have long standing relationships with a fantastic number of partners, but we're very careful about selecting those partners. It's essential for us to get that right. We work with customers who are harnessing advanced technology, and we, therefore, have

“The contracts that we have with our power companies enable us to provide power pricing to our customers ten years into the future at a fixed price. And that is not just unusual, It is unheard of and actually impossible anywhere else” DOMINIC WARD

CEO, VERNE GLOBAL

to be very selective because they'll be supporting our customers as closely as we are. Most importantly, we expect our partners to provide the same level of support to our customers — we see them almost as an extension of our service, and vice versa.”

Dell: Delivering Competitive Advantage In providing colocation services, Verne Global believes it’s essential to allow customers to be creative and help them achieve whatever it is they would like to achieve. “And so we like to choose partners aimagazine.com

37

VERNE GLOBAL

Scan AI Solutions The Scan AI ecosystem has been created so you have a trusted partner at every stage of the AI journey.

Our in-house AI experts are able to offer optimised solutions that solve your AI challenges.

Scan AI solutions can be hosted at Verne Global Find out more >

Contact us to start your AI journey

scan.co.uk/ai • 01204 47 47 47

VERNE GLOBAL

“ We're really excited with the advancements that we've been able to make, in particular with companies like Dell and NVIDIA, who are hardware partners that allow us to provide not only sustainable colocation services but the latest in high-performance hardware for our customers” TATE CANTRELL CIO, VERNE GLOBAL

partnerships, we are enabling our customers to be at the forefront of the competitive landscape and to maximise their returns.” that allow our customers to be creative and be flexible. An example of that would be working with Dell,” says Tate.

He continues, “Dell is often one of the first OEM providers to take on new products. For example, we had a customer who is at the forefront of using GPU's to power the latest in financial services applications. And this customer wanted to be the first in Europe to take advantage of the new A100 chipsets that NVIDIA released over the last year. And Dell was one of the first OEMs that was able to provide a solution to them, and it came months earlier than some of the other products that were next available in the market.

“That's really important for our customers.

They're focused on high-intensity computing, and they're focused on it because having a competitive edge in their industry is what allows them to have an increased turnover and increased productivity. And so, through our

NVIDIA: High-Intensity Computing of the Highest Level Verne Global’s partnership with NVIDIA is yet another differentiator that provides its clients with a competitive advantage.

Verne Global was the first data centre in Europe to be approved to house NVIDIA’s DGX product, a line of servers and workstations specialised in using GPGPUs to advance deep learning applications. Tate puts it more simply, “DGX is NVIDIA compressing all of its technology into a single box that's super high intensity.

“You talk about high-intensity computing.

This is the epitome of that,” Tate claims.

However, putting that much horsepower into a single box means that it’s not just any data centre that has the ability to provide the environmental conditions necessary to be able to run the equipment. aimagazine.com

39

VERNE GLOBAL

High intensity compute that’s customisable, scalable and sustainable Dell Technologies is on a mission to make high intensity compute accessible to organisations of all sizes, so everyone can push the boundaries of innovation.

And with Verne Global, your ideas won’t cost the Earth.

High intensity compute as-a-Service

Learn more

VERNE GLOBAL

That opened the door for Verne Global to provide what others couldn’t. Tate explains, “And so, establishing ourselves as a leader in technology innovation allowed NVIDIA to partner with us and allowed us to become a viable location where NVIDIA’s customers can deploy its DGX equipment. And not only a viable location, but one that can fuel the compute with 100% sustainable power.”

Ward jumps in to emphasise the point, “This is a really perfect example of what sets us apart because the horsepower behind this box makes it very different from a lot of other servers that you might see in a data centre.

It is effectively what would be regarded as a supercomputer in one small box, around

25cm high. It draws a huge amount of power, and because it's so dense, highly capable and in such a small form, there are only a few data centres in the world that are capable of housing even just a few of these.”

High density, high-performance computing requires the right infrastructure, which is exactly what Verne Global has done, designing the necessary environment from the ground up to ensure it can cater for all its customers’ needs and scale their compute on demand.

Its capability to handle high density compute capability at scale is what secured Verne Global its preferred partner status with NVIDIA. Intel: Bringing Forward-Looking Intelligence Over the course of the last two decades or so, Intel has found its way into most computers.

Although, as of late, the company has begun seeing increasing competition, it very much remains highly dominant in the industry, and as such, makes for an integral partner and valued trusted advisor. “Intel caters to the vast majority of server chip technology and architecture that sits inside most data centres’ compute capability. As a result, we naturally have a very close relationship with the company because so much of that hardware aimagazine.com

41

VERNE GLOBAL

also sits in our own data centre,” said Ward.

“Intel is very interested in the movement and the trends of high-intensity computing.

We work closely together with Intel to provide solutions to a number of large customers.”

This leads us nicely into Verne Global’s ability to cater for new technology as it develops. As Ward explains, “We certainly see a huge prevalence of new hardware in our data centre that is GPU, the dominance there naturally being NVIDIA, but we have the ability to provide infrastructure for any new hardware that might appear going forward − at really significant densities. And so, whether that be FPGAs or ASIC devices, or newer technologies that are focused on AI and machine learning and AI chips, for example, they will inevitably be dense and power-hungry. And there are certainly some that are just starting to

The future of data centers is Iceland For today’s data centers, location is everything.

By choosing Iceland, you can combine performance and stability with the most sustainable data center hub possible.

Power the future in Iceland

42

October 2021

The Data Centre Challenge: Optimising for Future Growth Looking forward, high-density data centres will be critical. To support the next-generation cloud, enterprise, and IT infrastructure for high-performance computing, data centres of the future mustbe built for purpose and sustainability while optimising footprint and costs for organisations.

Ward highlights the need for the data centre industry to plan and perhaps, to re-engineer to meet the oncoming challenges.

“One of the major challenges that we face broadly as an industry is looking forward to the enormous growth that has been created by this explosion in compute requirements.

That's putting huge amounts of pressure on power capacity, particularly in cities and other metropolitan areas where you've got immense amounts of congestion from data centres.

“Looking forward over the course of the next decade, the power equation for data centres is definitely going to be a challenge in certain cities.

We've certainly seen cities suffering, such as in Dublin and Frankfurt, where power availability has come up against supply constraints. At the same time, we're seeing huge growth in compute requirements, and therefore power requirements, from data centre usage. It is a real challenge for the industry. And I think it’s one that Iceland and Verne Global can help solve.”

How do you solve that challenge?

“Not all compute needs to sit in those metropolitan, congested locations.

Applications and compute hardware are not homogenous. Hardware is specifically chosen to run a certain type of application to maximise performance, efficiency and cost. However, very little attention has been paid to the infrastructure on which the hardware, and by virtue of this, the applications rely. So we must look at the evolution, or perhaps some would call it a revolution, that's being driven by the adoption of cloud, that has proven that applications can be made more efficient by optimising their environment and the infrastructure upon which they rely.”

“One of the greatest challenges that we face as an industry going forward is desegregating those applications and thinking about where applications should sit in the world most effectively and most efficiently for both the applications and the end-user. That's why at Verne Global, we've seen a huge number of our customers focusing on high or high-performance compute and taking advantage of the efficiency of our infrastructure that was built for purpose; infrastructure built from the ground up to serve that kind of need.” aimagazine.com

43

VERNE GLOBAL

appear on the market more recently, such as IPU technology. And we'll see plenty more appearing going forward into the next couple of years.

“Because we have the ability to provide for density and our data centre has been built from the ground up, it is a natural home for high density compute infrastructure even as it continues to develop. And as we see the use of machine learning starting to become prevalent across all industries, we are also going to recognise much more scope for these higher intensity and denser chip and server 44

October 2021

“ Through our partnerships, we are enabling our customers to be at the forefront of the competitive landscape to be able to maximise their returns” TATE CANTRELL CIO, VERNE GLOBAL

VERNE GLOBAL

types. And organisations will be looking for a home that can cater to that kind of density.

“At Verne Global, we are very much positioned for the future. We are certainly capable of looking forward and seeing what's coming; we know that we're able to cater for the higher density end of applications and the type of compute that is going to support that in the hardware that's coming down the line. But we're also − perhaps more importantly − able to cater for those other two major challenges organisations face. One of which is power availability, and Iceland has this massive

natural abundance of power, the vast majority of which arguably remains untapped, meaning it has huge amounts of scalability and is sustainable. And lastly, the world is finally starting to realise the importance of sustainability. We stand in a fantastic position, and frankly, a unique position, through being able to provide our customers with that 100% renewable generation capability that organisations are now seeking more than ever.”

aimagazine.com

45

AI STRATEGY

THE GROWING COGNITIVE COMPUTING MARKET 46

October 2021

AI STRATEGY

The cognitive computing market is expected to grow in the coming years, the rise of technology domains such as cloud and edge are facilitating this growth WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

C

ognitive computing is, for many businesses, an important tool as it can help companies accomplish many goals ranging from communicating with stakeholders to executing critical research.

At their core, cognitive computing systems are adaptive and can quickly adjust to any company’s digital transformation strategy as it changes with new and innovative technologies.

Commonly associated with the phrase cognitive computing is IBM’s system, Watson, a portfolio of business-ready tools, applications and solutions designed to reduce the costs and hurdles of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption while optimising outcomes and responsible use of AI. IBM Cognitive looked into early adopters of cognitive computing. These companies that embraced the capabilities of cognitive computing saw a considerable return on investment: 5% of respondents said the technology became crucial to the overall success of the business; 58% said it was pivotal in the company-wide digital transformation, and 58% said it would remain an important competitive advantage in the future.

With many businesses utilising AI-powered technology, a lot of research is starting to show an expected significant growth in the cognitive computing global market. aimagazine.com

47

AI STRATEGY

Kuul Evolution FirePro® Evaporative Cooling Media Keeping data centers at optimal temperatures using U.S. sourced, inorganic materials with innovative technology. Durable and sustainable evaporative media designed to keep the cloud going.

POWERED BY

™

AI STRATEGY

The future of cloud AI

“MOVING THE TOOLS TO THE CLOUD HAS ALLOWED INNOVATION AND EXPERIMENTATION TO BE FASTER AND CHEAPER” DAVID WALKER

FIELD CTO, EMEA, YUGABYTE

The rise of cloud-based technology supporting market growth The demand for cognitive computing services is expected to skyrocket.

According to Grand View Research, the global market is expected to reach US$49.36bn by 2025.

Further research echoes these findings.

Data Bridge Market Research published a report titled, “Cognitive Computing Market Global Growth, Trends, Opportunities and COVID-19 Impacts”. According to the report,

the cognitive computing market is expected to witness growth during the forecast period due to growing demand at the enduser level.

Its report also says the global cognitive computing market is set to witness a healthy compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32.13% in the forecast period by 2026. This growth is expected to be driven by the rising adoption of cloud-based technology and technological advancement & development in cognitive computing. aimagazine.com

49

AI STRATEGY

“ THE RISE OF CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES IS A CATALYST FOR THE ADOPTION OF COGNITIVE COMPUTING TECHNOLOGIES” KASIA BOROWSKA

MANAGING DIRECTOR, BRAINPOOL AI

What is cognitive computing?

Enabling a widespread offers pre-trained intelligence revolution in cognitive tools for applications such as technology demand forecasting, fraud The rise of cloud Cognitive computing is prevention, image/video technology is serving as a the use of computerised analysis and text-to-speech.” catalyst for the adoption models to simulate the Amazon is not the only of cognitive computing human thought process in big tech company taking technologies. Kasia complex situations. this approach to cognitive Borowska, Managing computing and cloud Director and Brainpool technologies. Microsoft and AI, discussed the link between the two: “A Google offer Microsoft Azure and Google good example of the intrinsic link between Cloud Platform, respectively. Each of these cloud and cognitive technologies is to look platforms has its own portfolio of cognitive at Amazon Web Services (AWS), which capabilities.

50

October 2021

AI STRATEGY

With these large tech companies offering cloud services with cognitive capabilities, it highlights the significance of cloud technologies in cognitive computing’s market growth. Borowska expanded on this: “Cognitive technologies form a large part of the next industrial revolution, alongside other technologies such as blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics.”

“What is unique about Industry 4.0 is that the cloud enables this revolution to be more widespread and democratised than any of its predecessors,” she continued.

Cheaper and faster innovation facilitated by the cloud The adoption of cloud-based technologies has not only driven growth within the cognitive computing market, but it also makes cognitive computing platforms more accessible to businesses. Discussing this, David Walker, EMEA Technical Director at Yugabyte, said: “Cognitive computing is highly reliant on the signal data available to it. Traditional on-premise systems have relied on databases that are constrained by their size and location, and these bound the capabilities of the upstream analytical tools. aimagazine.com

51

AI STRATEGY

“ COGNITIVE TECHNOLOGIES FORM A LARGE PART OF THE NEXT INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION”

Moving the tools to the cloud has allowed innovation and experimentation to be faster and cheaper.”

With cheaper and faster innovation and experimentation, cognitive computing platforms, supported by cloud technologies, become a lot more attractive to businesses looking to utilise cognitive computing solutions in their operations. This is particularly significant as more businesses are turning to digital solutions as a way to improve as we emerge from the pandemic.

As organisations change and become KASIA BOROWSKA increasingly digitalised, they are using more MANAGING DIRECTOR, BRAINPOOL AI cloud-native distributed databases as an underpinning technology and microservices architectures. As these systems are typically Systems of Record or Systems of Engagement, they contain the data needed for cognitive computing.

Walker expanded: “There is now growing momentum behind developing modern application architectures with cloud-native databases Cognitive because they are more agile and cost-effective for computing & AI the business in its day to day work, but the underCognitive computing processes data at the source estimated benefit will overlaps with AI and of a network. be in making that signal involves many of the same By decentralising data data available to cognitive underlying technologies analysis, edge computing computing - and I believe to power cognitive provides businesses with a this will drive growth applications, including way to improve businesses even faster than most expert systems, neural cognitive computing expectations.” networks, robotics and capabilities. Discussing virtual reality (VR). this, Borowska said: “By Edge computing enabling analysing data, generating faster communication insights and storing them As businesses look to improve their locally using the processing and storage cognitive computing capabilities and cloud capability provisioned by the hardware, technology, edge computing can also be this can drastically reduce the amount of a valuable tool. Edge computing enables data flowing across the network thereby instant decision making as it stores and reducing latency and compute resources 52

October 2021

AI STRATEGY

required and their associated costs, enable faster communication between connected devices, and improve the user experience.”

The intrinsic link between technology domains and cognitive computing growth Although the rise of technology domains such as cloud and edge are distinct, they are also connected to the advancements in other disciplines such as cognitive computing setting a foundation for its market growth.

Borowska expanded on this: “The scene is now set so that anyone, anywhere, with sufficient data, technical knowledge, persistence, funds can create a prototype for

the next world-changing technology. With interest, demand and the business case for cognitive technologies at an all-time high as a way to accelerate recovery and growth post-COVID.” This rise in high-profile technology domains and the benefits it provides cognitive computing means that businesses cannot afford to be complacent with their adoption of these technologies.

“The potential spoils of the technological arms race are high, and competition will be fiercer than ever. Those that stumble and may well find themselves quickly overtaken by more agile and tech-centric competitors,” said Borowska. aimagazine.com

53

54

October 2021

AI APPLICATIONS

CYBERSECURITY INSURANCE AND THE RISE OF RANSOMWARE The last 18 months saw a surge in ransomware attacks and the rise of cyber security insurance.

We look at what this means for businesses of all sizes WRITTEN BY: LAURA BERRILL

H “ Cyber risk has undergone multiple episodes of change, but nothing quite so impactful as the last 18 months” HOWDEN’S GLOBAL HEAD OF CYBER, SHAY SIMKIN

ybrid working as one of the outcomes of the pandemic, along with the multitude of remote devices used by companies and their employees both in the office and at home, has seen a big surge in ransomware.

This is according to Professor Rajarajan Muttukrishnan, who heads up City University’s Institute of Cyber Security. He believes one of the biggest challenges in the field is now the expansion of the Internet of Things or IoT, and this, in turn, will mean cyber insurance will become a must-have for companies of all sizes and sectors.

Muttukrishnan explains: “Now, many companies are allowing their employees to work from home and pop into their offices.

So one of the main challenges is when aimagazine.com

55

Get reliable network coverage and security protection, fast.

A modern network must be able to respond easily, quickly and flexibly to the growing needs of today’s digital business. Must provide visibility & control of applications, users and devices on and off the network and Intelligently direct traffic across the WAN. Be scalable and automate the process to provide new innovative services.

Support IoT devices and utilize state-of-the-art technologies such as real-time analytics, ML and AI. And all these must be provided with maximum security and minimum cost.

This is the power that brings the integration of two cloud managed platforms, Cisco Meraki and Cisco Umbrella. This integration is binding together the best of breed in cloud-managed networking and Security.

cisco.com

cisco

CiscoSecure

CiscoSecure

AI APPLICATIONS

“ Companies are allowing employees to work from home as well as offices. A challenge is moving around with portable devices” PROF RAJ MUTTAKRISHNAN

Essential Plus. He offers an example that a company can’t tender for a government scheme without having the Cyber Essential Plus because, for many organisations, it is now a mandatory requirement.

you move around with portable devices.

We have been looking at the Internet of Things - devices like the smart speaker, smart Alexa, smart fitments and even smart coffee machines. When people start moving around between environments seamlessly and using devices for both corporate and personal use, there are a lot of security problems we will encounter.”

To this end, Muttukrishnan adds the UK government is pushing for everyone to have cyber insurance in what is known as Cyber

So what is cyber insurance, and are there any sticking points?

Cyber insurance is, by its very nature, designed to protect organisations against the clear fallout of attacks, including covering the financial costs of dealing with incidents.

However, there are critics who argue that insurance encourages victims to simply pay the ransom that will be covered by the insurers rather than have adequate security to deter hackers in the first instance.

Think Tank, Royal United Services Institute, according to its research, believes cyber aimagazine.com

57

AI APPLICATIONS

Dealing with a Ransomware Attack

security is encouraging criminals and is also unsustainable for the industry.

It said: “To date, cyber insurance has failed to live up to expectations as a tool for improving organisations’ cybersecurity practises” and warned: “Cyber insurers may be - unintentionally - facilitating the behaviour of cyber criminals by contributing to the growth of targeted ransomware operations.”

And there is some evidence that change is coming. According to stories in both the UK’s Financial Times and the US’ Washington Post, insurers are already increasing premiums and putting in place stricter demands in terms of cyber strategies used by companies that want to buy cyber insurance. The Washington Post also said insurers were demanding greater security and are cutting back the amounts of cover they are willing to offer.

58

October 2021

But what are the costs, and how will this affect SMEs and start-ups?

Muttukrishnan says there are alternatives, but not many and the largest one currently is known as ISO 27001, which is used by global companies such as IBM, Google and Microsoft and is very expensive.

The certification can cost between £60£200,000 for just SME organisations, so prohibitive in many cases.

Reinsurance brokerage, Howden, says the spiralling of double extortion ransomware attacks and the relative ease of their execution by criminal gangs has led to one of the largest medium-term rate increases across the insurance market. In a report called Cyber Insurance, A Hard Reset, it reported global pricing has increased by an average of 32%, year on year, in June 2021.

AI APPLICATIONS

Ransomware attacks are on the rise and continue to be a disruptive force in the cybersecurity industry, affecting everything from financial institutions to higher education. Due to the rise in remote work prompted by the pandemic, attacks are up 148%. (Varonis.com) A sizeable number of organisations that identify breaches report a specific negative outcome or impact. On average, for those that do, the costs are substantial. (Gov.uk, March 2021)

Howden’s global head deliberate focus on security “To date, cyber of cyber, Shay Simkin, said: behaviours like using insurance has “Cyber risk has undergone stronger passwords and failed to live up to multiple episodes of backing up data, are simple change and development expectations as a steps they should take to in its relatively short history, protect themselves and tool for improving but nothing quite so then ensure they can access organisations’ impactful and fundamental the appropriate insurance,” as the events of the last he advised. cybersecurity 18 months”.

“Many companies can’t practises” And Cybersafe founder afford to invest that much and CEO, Oz Alashe, said money, but we are trying, as ROYAL UNITED the rising costs of insurance part of London’s ‘Recover SERVICES INSTITUTE should be an added and Grow’ scheme to help incentive for organisations organisations to have the to take their cyber security seriously. “Getting government certification and become eligible the cyber security fundamentals right is for the insurance. However, if you flip the more important than ever before. Effective coin, the argument from the government is security awareness training, as well as that they say 79% of cyber attacks in the UK aimagazine.com

59

AI APPLICATIONS

“ Getting the cyber security fundamentals right is more important than ever before” CYBERSAFE’S OZ ALASHE

are happening in SMEs and start-ups because of that fact, they are not well known and therefore not as protected. For this reason, attackers tend to use them as the entry point to build a chain of hotspots.” he explains.

However, he does see many students who go on to launch start-ups who are worried about the cost because all insurance 60

October 2021

companies are now asking for Cyber Essentials Plus. Despite it being around since April 2020, it has become important because of the hefty fines that can be imposed if breaching GDPR, Muttukrishnan says.

“The minimum average fine is £150,000, so in this respect, it would be better to spend, say, £20,000 than lose customer data and pay much more in fines. On top of that, there is reputational damage to consider.

The importance of planning and risk assessment in digital transformation With digital transformation as it is right now and its implementation accelerating across

AI APPLICATIONS

all industries, companies need to start doing cyber security risk assessments, which are also important to plan.

These assessments help organisations understand, control and mitigate all forms of cyber risk. As organisations rely more and more on IT and their systems to do business, the digital risk landscape expands and, in turn, exposes ecosystems to new critical vulnerabilities.

Abi Tyas Upguard from Upguard explains the primary purpose is to help inform decision-makers and support proper risk responses. This is by asking questions and putting the answers into an executive

summary to help directors make informed decisions about what security measures to put in place.

“And ideally, organisations should have dedicated in-house teams processing these risk assessments, meaning they will need IT staff with an understanding of the businesses’ digital and network infrastructure, how its information flows and any proprietary organisational knowledge that may be useful during the assessment. Organisational transparency is key to a thorough cyber assessment risk,” he says.

When it comes to SMEs and start-ups, which are in many cases the foothold and way into cyber-attacks because by nature they are less protected, this planning is especially important, and its benefits could outweigh the costs in the long term.

The rapid and ongoing escalation in the range of threats has become almost overwhelming. SMEs who rarely have the internal resources to grapple with the challenge, are especially at risk.

A report by Forbes said 2020 broke all records when it came to data lost in breaches and the sheer numbers of cyber-attacks on companies, government, and individuals. In addition, it says, the sophistication of such threats with the application of technologies such as machine learning, AI and 5G. Meanwhile, according to ASPI, the reality is that most SMEs don’t understand the cybersecurity risks and how the risk can easily translate into a critical or even fatal business failure. On top of this, there is a massive knowledge gap, so the challenge SMEs face is the security landscape is rapidly changing. Old ways of tackling security, such as perimeter defences and security at the endpoint, are no longer effective when businesses are embracing the cloud and business-critical, internet-based applications. aimagazine.com

61

DATA AND ANALYTICS

At the intersection of data analytics and AI lies data intelligence, but what does it mean and how can it be applied?

WRITTEN BY: PADDY SMITH

B

ig data has a problem and it’s getting bigger: the sheer amount of it. Half of all the world’s electronic data was collected in the past three years, according to Statista (see box). And that growth is set to continue as new forms of data collection – particularly through natural language processing (NLP) – begin to have tangible effects.

An increasingly large slice of the data pie is now ‘unstructured’. It is not necessarily relational or contextual. And that means that, as things stand, whatever it can tell us

has to be put through a human brain, a capable calculator with a variety of processing flaws.

But those days are coming to an end as AI and machine learning become ever more capable at parsing the inner meaning of unstructured data.

AI potential Chris Stephenson, technical director at Sagacity, says, “AI and ML have great potential for driving use of data analytics across a business, for example identifying your most valuable customers, and those who are vulnerable and could require assistance. However, you can’t hit the ground running straight away.

“Before a business can successfully use AI for data analytics, it must first understand what data it has within the organisation, and to which situations it can be applied to. Many organisations mistakenly think AI is a ‘plug and play’ technology that delivers returns straight out of the box, but in fact, you will have to put a lot of work in before you see results.

AI and ML need to be given reliable, labelled training data before they can perform data analytics and draw valuable business insights.”

“ Many organisations mistakenly think AI is a ‘plug and play’ technology that delivers returns straight out of the box” CHRIS STEPHENSON

TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, SAGACITY

62

October 2021

DATA AND ANALYTICS

aimagazine.com

63

DATA AND ANALYTICS

ADVERT PAGE MEDIA SALE

DATA AND ANALYTICS

“ It’s not just artificial intelligence which matters – emotional intelligence will create empathy, conversational capabilities and the ability to balance the objectives of being datapowered and being human” ZHIWEI JIANG

CEO OF INSIGHTS AND DATA, CAPGEMINI

Death of the data scientist?

It’s an interesting view, and heads off the question of whether data scientists are going to be overthrown by our new robot overlords rather neatly. The idea that AI data solutions can be bought, plugged in and left to their own devices is, frankly, science fiction, as Zhiwei Jiang, CEO of Insights and Data at Capgemini, explains.

“AI and smart machines are doing more of the heavy lifting of data science and analytics,” he says. “But a deep affinity with algorithms and mathematical logic, even when technology evolves into new areas (like deep learning and reinforcement learning), is vital. Data masters need to understand what lies beneath the surface if they’re going to make informed decisions about which ways, approaches, and tools to use for the problem at hand.”

Jiang’s advice is to embrace the possibilities and explore the options, even as more become available, but always be able to explain what the data are saying in human terms. “A data team which can clearly comprehend the complex metrics, math and logic involved in an AI system is a no-brainer. But cold, hard data means nothing if it cannot be clearly articulated. aimagazine.com

65

DATA AND ANALYTICS

Why do Software Vendors love Panintelligence?

If you don’t understand your problem, you’ll never be able to solve it. It’s not just artificial intelligence which matters – emotional intelligence will create empathy, conversational capabilities and the ability to balance the objectives of being data-powered and being human.”

its complexity will continue to grow. Being able to manage and organise data will always require a certain level of skill, and so data scientists will continue to play a key role for businesses with the data management expertise they boast.

“However, the ZANDRA MOORE CEO, consumption of these PANINTELLIGENCE insights will become more Analytical skill accessible for non-data Surely, though, that’s where data experts as data visualisation and analytics visualisation steps in? Are we not drifting tools can be consumed and adapted easily. towards a world where machines harvest, Making large sets of data accessible and analyse and present data? Not according usable in a simplified way for the masses.” to Zandra Moore, CEO at Panintelligence.

Rich Pugh, chief data scientist at Mango “There will always be a need for people Solutions, has over 20 years’ experience with the skills to analyse complex data working with data. For him, business and manage evolving data modelling intelligence will be driven to data AI requirements,” she explains, “because as solutions in its quest to keep step with technology evolves, the volume of data and market competitors.

66

October 2021

“AS TECHNOLOGY EVOLVES, THE VOLUME OF DATA AND ITS COMPLEXITY WILL CONTINUE TO GROW”

DATA AND ANALYTICS

Supercharged interest “In recent years, the need to become more intelligent, relevant, efficient organisations has given rise to significant investment in data and advanced analytics,” he says.

“We understand that, if data is the raw ingredient, we need to dynamically turn this into insight and wisdom to support decision makers.

“This has supercharged interest in data science and AI and has led to an increase in organisations looking to create data strategies that deliver (and in some cases, define) their forward-looking business objectives. In practical terms, this is to create significant change programmes badged under anything from digital transformation to data-driven strategy, which are intended to create more dataenabled business models.

“The broadening of the remit of data and analytics is driving a growth in data science teams. However, there can be technical and cultural barriers that are hampering the ability for organisations to realise the value of data and analytics.

“Fundamentally, as a data scientist I can build the best model in the world – but if I can’t get someone in the business to change their behaviours to use the insight I’m generating, or if there are technical challenges that mean I can’t deploy my model in a repeatable way, then it stays as a beautifully crafted piece of code on a laptop.

“To overcome the cultural challenges, we’ve seen an increased focus on data literacy programmes and the design of analytic workflows that put value and change at the heart of analytic initiatives.

The need to deploy data and analytic outputs has seen significant increase in the need for data engineering teams who

Data boom Volume of data created, captured, copied and consumed worldwide from 2010 to 2025 in zettabytes.

Forecasts are estimated.

2010 2 2011 5 2012 6.5 2013 9 2014 12.5 2015 15.5 2016 18 2017 26 2018 33 2019 41 2020 64.2 2021 79 2022 97 2023 120 2024 147 2025 181 Source: Statista

aimagazine.com

67

DATA AND ANALYTICS

68

October 2021

DATA AND ANALYTICS

“The need for insights has supercharged interest in data science and AI and has led to an increase in organisations looking to create data strategies that deliver their forward-looking business objectives” RICH PUGH

CHIEF DATA SCIENTIST, MANGO SOLUTIONS

can build scalable and repeatable data pipelines, and can use DevOps approaches to put insight in the hands of the right decision-makers at the right time.”

It seems like we’ll have more data, more intelligence and more data scientists in future. So what can businesses do to give themselves the edge? Hire great data scientists and arm them with the best business intelligence solution you can find for your market. aimagazine.com

69

RUBRIK

SECURING DATA, THE 21ST CENTURY’S STRATEGIC ASSET WRITTEN BY: WILL GIRLING

70

October 2021

PRODUCED BY: TOM VENTURO

RUBRIK

aimagazine.com

71

RUBRIK

72

October 2021

RUBRIK

Jeffrey Phelan, CTO, explains why Rubrik strives to incorporate security into everything through modernisation, automation, harmonisation, and simplicity

F

ew today would contradict the notion business’ resiliency, and promoting a secure that COVID-19 has been a significant yet agile operating style. catalyst for digital innovation or that When Jeffrey Phelan, Chief Technology the value of data as an asset has never Officer for Rubrik Federal, joined Rubrik been higher. However, while ‘knowing’ is in September 2020, he was already very certainly an important part of enterprise familiar with the company from a customer transformation, actually putting together perspective. Having briefed Rubrik’s a plan and executing this new vision is technology to more than 450 different far more difficult. Moreover, how can organisations just across the Department of companies do so in a way Defence while still working that saves time, money and at General Dynamics “PART OF WHAT WE DO boosts security? The answer Information Technology, IS TO HELP OPERATORS lies with Rubrik.

Phelan eventually reached UNDERSTAND WHAT THE Founded in 2014 out to Bipul Sinha, Rubrik’s ‘ART OF THE POSSIBLE IS.’ and based in Palo Alto, CEO, to discuss how the California, with offices in company could continue to COMPLEXITY IS EASY, BUT Europe and India, Rubrik is scale its business across the SIMPLE IS HARD” a cloud data management public sector. Recognising specialist that’s focused an opportunity that would on bringing control back to allow him to combine JEFFREY PHELAN CTO, RUBRIK customers, boosting their his long-term focuses of aimagazine.com

73

RUBRIK

Rubrik: Securing data, the 21st century’s strategic asset

digital transformation, up,” Phelan explains.

“YOU PICK UP YOUR PHONE, infrastructure modernFeaturing an “allAND YOU JUST EXPECT THE isation, and data star cast” of leaders DIAL TONE TO BE THERE. protection strategies, from high-profile WELL, IN THE SAME WAY, Phelan decided to join tech companies like and help realise Rubrik’s Google, Oracle, Nutanix, OUR CUSTOMERS EXPECT vision. He brought with Cisco, ServiceNow, THEIR DATA TO HAVE THE him over a decade of and Microsoft, among SAME RELIABILITY” cyber security industry others, Rubrik is wellexperience, a passion for informed on the JEFFREY PHELAN building resiliency across procedures necessary CTO, RUBRIK the entire organisation, for managing, scaling, and a practical mentality and securing data on that prioritises the elimination of complexity. a 24x7, global basis. Accounting for all of “At the beginning, as the company the nuances and challenges of managing started looking at managing the world's data across different security, regional, data, the founders really decided to build and sovereign regulatory requirements is a proprietary hyperscale file system – non-trivial, and as such, Phelan compares which is now the industry’s only patented the company’s as being akin to telephone immutable file system - from the ground dial tone: “You pick up your phone, and you 74

October 2021

RUBRIK

just expect the dial tone to be there. Well, in the same way, our customers expect their data to have the same reliability – to always be safe and immediately available.”

The aforementioned hyperscale file system is a key enabler of this, as it allows data to be moved anywhere, whether in the cloud, in a data centre, or at the edge. Also, he adds, “our file system is unique – it’s immutable; it was built so that someone couldn't come in and change, delete, or encrypt the data and hold it ransom.”

The pandemic was a wake-up call for many organisations regarding the utility of migrating to the cloud. Capable of being faster, cheaper, and more agile than legacy data management solutions, it matched the challenging circumstances of the global crisis perfectly, and its appeal is unlikely to waver. However, when asked what advice he and Rubrik could offer to companies just beginning their cloud adoption journey, Phelan says, “It’s always harder than the consultant they've hired has told them it's going to be; it's messy because there's just so much data across so many parts of

JEFFREY PHELAN TITLE: CTO INDUSTRY: DATA MANAGEMENT LOCATION: ATLANTA Jeffrey Phelan is Public Sector CTO for Rubrik where his main responsibilities are assisting organizations across the DoD, Intel Community, Federal Civilian, and State & Local governments with their Digital Transformation efforts, Cloud Migration, Data Management, and Infrastructure Automation requirements. He joined Rubrik from GDIT where he was the Portfolio Lead on DISA’s milCloud 2.0 program where he was responsible for developing the Cloud Services catalogue, developing the technology stack & capabilities roadmap, and managing professional services delivery.

Prior to GDIT, Phelan was Chief Product Evangelist and Director of Strategic Growth for Northrop Grumman Information Systems where he focused on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques for network defense & cybersecurity, cloud applications, and IT automation. Earlier, at SRA International he was director of Products and Offerings focused on Cyber Security capabilities and services, Public Safety, Data

Jeffrey Phelan

Analytics, and overall product development.

EXECUTIVE BIO

Jeffrey is a Mach 37 Mentor, an AFCEA DC Board Member, and part of the ATARC Cloud Working Group. He's studied engineering at Boston University, L’Universite Stendahl in Grenoble, France, and holds a Bachelor’s Degree from George Mason University and completed the Executive Program at MIT with an emphasis on Complex Systems Design, Technology Strategy, and Innovation.

aimagazine.com

75

RUBRIK

the organisation.” Every organisation we work with today has some documented modernisation strategy, and we see them focusing on (4) main transformation areas: Modernisation (reducing complexity and cost), Automation (both onsite and in the cloud), Security (Resiliency everywhere), and Harmonisation (One pane of glass).

“Those four pillars are where we see the potential for active innovation and operational disruption,” he states.

To assist these modernisation efforts, Rubrik favours a ‘crawl, walk, run’ strategy that helps customers understand exactly how much data they have, what systems and applications depend on that data, and what the organisation’s desired data protection is and data strategy end state looks like. From here, Rubrik works closely with customers to help modernise their infrastructures, reducing complexity and costs, and to take advantage of automation to drive security, compliance, and 76

October 2021

governance across their entire on-premises and hybrid cloud enterprise environments.

Often during this process, a company might not have good fidelity on how much data they really have, and they rarely have consistent data protection policies across hybrid clouds, meaning that budgets for cloud migration can quickly become more expensive than they anticipated. “To prepare teams for this, we help customers dig a little deeper into what they really want to get out of their data, bearing in mind all of the data access, egress, and storage cost implications of managing and securing their data. We also sometimes get folks who are a little too ambitious: they pick the biggest, oldest, gnarliest system -and it's just too hard. Therefore, we frequently share lots of lessons learned, and we do plenty of handholding and provide candid counselling to help them through that.”

Another essential component of quality data management today is automation

RUBRIK

MAKING THE OPERATOR SMARTER

DID YOU KNOW...

technologies, including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Central to its implementation, however, is the resolution of a cultural challenge. “We have to meet customers where they are today, and then we have to help move them along that continuum,” states Phelan. “Part of what we do is to help operators understand what the ‘art of the possible is.’ Complexity is easy, but simple is hard.” He is conscious that anxiety about automation often conflates it with job losses, yet he counters that this isn’t the case. “There's a lot of tribal knowledge and tradecraft involved in the industry, and that’s going to remain intact. The difference is instead of them taking eight hours to run a task, maybe it could only take eight minutes.” Therefore, in Phelan’s view, automation should be considered an opportunity to upskill, increase efficiency, and reduce complexity.

It’s increasingly clear that companies will need every advantage they can get; at a time when instances of large-scale cybersecurity breaches are rarely out of the headlines, customers need to bolster their enterprise resiliency. Phelan states that Rubrik’s data security and ransomware recovery solutions are the tonic that’s required. “Most network security tools have what we refer to as ‘a priori’ or prior knowledge dependency.

Basically, they need to know something about that threat, such as a signature, hash, IP address, domain, or behaviour.” However, the unfortunate reality is that circumventing these tools is as simple as creating a custom threat that isn’t recognisable a priori. With this weakness subsequently exposing critical backup infrastructure to attack, incidences of ransomware have increased. However, Rubrik has a solution to this problem.

“I mentioned earlier the immutable aspect of our file system, and it's that capability

In early 2020, Rubrik announced its acquisition of Opas AI - a move that the company made in order to achieve the following benefits: • Optimised cloud costs • Outage predictions • System breach detection • Privacy issue notification • Resource hotspot resolution Opas AI’s ‘Causation Engine’ incorporates several statistical and machine learning (ML) models to build a more comprehensive understanding of applications. Going forwards, Rubrik anticipates shorter problem resolution cycles, which will, in turn, enable the increased availability of data across any cloud or data infrastructure.

aimagazine.com

77

The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider Carahsoft is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, supporting Federal, State and Local Government and Education and Healthcare organizations with IT products, services and training through our partners and contracts.

LEARN MORE

RUBRIK

Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack in May 2021, has rapidly increased the market’s focus on Rubrik’s security and resiliency value. As such, Rubrik’s ransomware capabilities are fostering stronger bonds between historically disparate enterprise teams, particularly the network security teams and infrastructure teams. With reliability, resilience, and accessibility standing as common goals for both, Phelan anticipates that Rubrik will be increasingly included in security conversations to help reconcile what are sometimes competing priorities. “Our capability is really about providing a great rally point for CISOs, CIOs, management and the Board to find common ground. We can add resilience, and we can work to create what I would refer to as a ‘moving defence’ at the infrastructure level so that customers can adapt much more rapidly to attacks.”

Looking ahead, “WE'RE ABLE TO HELP CUSTOMERS Phelan anticipates that continued RECOVER VERY QUICKLY AND GET THEM migration of data BACK ONLINE IN MINUTES, HOURS, OR from physical DAYS WHEN HISTORICALLY THEY'VE BEEN locations to the cloud will prompt DOWN FOR WEEKS AND MONTHS” stakeholders and regulators JEFFREY PHELAN to demand CTO, RUBRIK that important information is meeting more stringent security that's really protecting organisations against requirements than is natively provided by these breaches,” says Phelan. “We're able to commercial clouds, and as such, demand help customers recover very quickly and get for a ‘single pane of glass’ to manage data them back online in minutes, hours, or days when historically they've been down for globally will quickly become the norm.

In fact, current trends suggest that weeks and months.” operational change following COVID-19 According to Phelan, data protection has is no longer an option. It’s the only option. always been Rubrik’s “bread and butter,” but The strategic value of data and the security an ongoing attentiveness to organisations’ resiliency needs, particularly in light of the required to safeguard it have become aimagazine.com

79

RUBRIK

DID YOU KNOW...

PARTNERING FOR SUCCESS: CARAHSOFT

80

One of Rubrik’s key partners is Virginia-based IT hardware, software, and consultancy services provider Carahsoft. Specialising in supporting important US institutions at a federal, state, and local government level, the company delivers cybersecurity, multi-cloud, and DevSecOps solutions, as well as others in Big Data, AI, Open Source, CX, and more.

“What Carahsoft does for both Rubrik and the buyer is to help streamline the acquisition process. It has very sophisticated contracting, inside sales, and marketing groups that fully understand the buying cycle of different customers across the public sector,” says Phelan. “In many ways, they act a bit like a Rosetta Stone: Carahsoft understands

October 2021

all the latest and emerging acquisition policies and purchasing options clauses, and so, when we have to go compete for business, the company works hand in glove to help.

“It operates very quickly and understands the nuances and the subtleties that the Government requires to make a purchasing decision. Instead of an acquisition taking 18 months or longer, the Government can come in quickly, buy the latest technology, and then change its mind without penalty if requirements change later.” The historically slow acquisition process working against the fast iterations of technology has been, explains Phelan, a long-standing issue.

Carahsoft is at the forefront of solving this problem.

RUBRIK

“ OUR CAPABILITY IS REALLY ABOUT PROVIDING A GREAT RALLY POINT FOR CISOS, CIOS, AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE TEAMS TO FIND COMMON GROUND” JEFFREY PHELAN CTO, RUBRIK

paramount in today’s world, and customers must choose their partners wisely.

“Scientists and students at MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon are being asked to work on data, but perhaps they don’t have security clearances or access to secure environments,” Phelan ponders. “They may be our best and brightest, but invariably they haven't been asked to think about the

security and ethical issues around data access.” As organisations begin to aggregate voluminous quantities of data, the understanding that our mission and corporate data has become an integral strategic asset is practically beyond dispute. Rubrik has the ability to manage, secure, and move it at high levels of both reliability and resiliency. As the world settles into the ‘new normal’ of operations, Rubrik’s ability to secure, manage, and move that data whenever and wherever it’s needed will give any customer the advantage it needs to succeed.

aimagazine.com

81

EVENT REVIEW

Speaker: Kamran Khan (NTT), on The Future of the Hybrid Workplace

82

October 2021

BIZCLIK MEDIA GROUP:

Hosting Technology, AI & Cyber WRITTEN BY: TOM SWALLOW

LIVE

A new venture for BizClik Media Group, the Technology, AI & Cyber LIVE show brings global technology leaders together for a hybrid digital event

T

o understand the potential of technology in the future, it’s imperative that we analyse the current application of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, data analytics, and other new digital solutions. The coronavirus pandemic has somewhat heightened our awareness of the capabilities of technology, from its use in the supply chain and other private sectors to supporting the healthcare services and even warfighting efforts.

Digital transformation has allowed organisations to keep pushing for more and tackle some serious issues along the way.

aimagazine.com

83

EVENT PREVIEW

84

October 2021

EVENT PREVIEW

“Employees are not going to let go of the tools that allow them to work so seamlessly.

They love it and it was a lot simpler compared to some of the technology sitting in the office” KAMRAN KHAN

GO TO MARKET LEADER, CX AND INTELLIGENT WORKSPACE, NTT LTD.

At Tobacco Dock, London, the Technology, AI & Cyber LIVE show brought together technology professionals and thought leaders to present company successes from the past 18 months, and provided valuable insights into future applications of technology. As a hybrid event, the show was made available to a global audience with a comprehensive virtual platform, encouraging viewers to network with industry leaders from around the world.

DAY ONE Communications, artificial intelligence and women in technology Throughout the first day of the event, the speakers touched on some very prominent topics on the current business agenda. With

Covid-19 presenting many struggles as well as some possibilities, one of the most significant changes to technology adoption was the switch to working from home.

During a high-level technology discussion, Kamran Khan, Go to Market Leader at NTT Ltd, discussed the current findings since the change to remote working, as he believes that hybrid working is here to stay. ‘Employees are not going to let go of the tools that allow them to work so seamlessly. They love it and it was a lot simpler compared to some of the technology sitting in the office’, says Khan.

Part of Khan’s talk referred to his own personal experience of remote working and the benefits that organisations should take into consideration as their employees strive for more flexibility at work. “It’s aimagazine.com

85

The World’s Biggest Sustainability Event February

23rd - 24th 2022 REGISTER FOR TICKETS

STREAMED LIVE FROM TOBACCO DOCK LONDON

A BizClik Media Group Brand

Creating Digital Communities

EVENT PREVIEW

“There are so many opportunities, including the use of technology for Covid and solving world problems around climate change” RICHARD BENJAMINS HEAD OF AI & DATA, TELEFONICA

about how organisations come to grips with that changing technology map and the changing way of decision making and architecture. Employees are a lot more empowered, they are a lot more demanding and I don’t think they will go back”.

Following the morning’s networking session, viewers were invited back into the main stage for talks that touched on cybersecurity and some AI development risks. Technological change will always present some vulnerabilities. With AI working around the clock to manage new systems, it can quite easily be applied in the wrong way. Chief Data and AI Strategist at Telefonica, Richard Benjamins, explained how AI has developed over the years and some of the risks involved in its application.

“It is true that in the media, there is more attention on negative uses, even though there are so many opportunities, including the use of technology for Covid and solving world problems around climate change, the headlines are negative and that’s a problem”, says Benjamins.

Diversity and supporting women in technology The afternoon at Tobacco Dock consisted of some talented female leaders in technology and their outlook on the current adoption of diversity in the industry. Vicky Sleight, Global Director of Human Factor, Diversity and Inclusion at TM Forum, joined Keri Gilder, Chief Executive Officer of Colt Technologies, to talk about some of the key issues that remain in the industry and how leaders and employees can play important roles in encouraging diversity.

“We can do more and I think that organisations and we as individuals need to find out what their needs are, and also make sure our organisations are running programmes like mentorships and going into schools”, says Sleight. aimagazine.com

87

In Association With:

THE ULTIMATE FINTECH & INSURTECH EVENT OCTOBER

12th - 14th STREAMED LIVE FROM TOBACCO DOCK LONDON A BizClik Media Group Brand

Confirmed Speakers Include: Jonathan Holman

Head of Digital Transformation: Corporate & Commercial Banking Santander UK

Scott Abrahams

SVP Business Development and Fintech Mastercard

Bryan Carroll CEO TNEX

Rafa Plantier

Head of UK & Ireland Tink

Lee Sarkin

Head: Data Analytics Munich Re

GET TICKETS HERE

Creating Digital Communities

EVENT PREVIEW Women in Tech Panel: Keri Gilder (Colt), Vicky Sleight (TMForum), Ash Finnegan (Conga).

90

October 2021

EVENT PREVIEW

Gilder says, “one of the aspects of inclusion is inclusive leadership and that comes with an element of empathy.

In order to enable empathy in your organisation, you have to listen to your employees”.

DAY TWO Technology and AI applications Day two of Technology, AI & Cyber LIVE brought together some interesting examples of how digital transformation impacts various sectors, including discussions on applications in the online vehicle auction business, uses for clinical research, and data management in the British Army.

Brigadier Stefan Crossfields, Chief Data Officer for the British Army, entered the stage and divulged some of the ways the Army is actively transforming the organisation’s legacy systems to take on challenges specific to the modern era of the military. He also explains how technology has helped the Army to manage a reduced level of recruitment and encourage partnerships with small-tomedium enterprises.

Meanwhile in the second stage, Rajiv Peter, Director Of Digital Technology at Notting Hill Genesis (NHG), delves into the application of its operations system, which has been custom-built specifically for the social landlord. “Our main mission is to house low-income families”, says Peter.

He discusses how the company invested in technology to improve its operations, by creating a single system that is optimised for its employees. “At that time, the view was that technology was a cost centre, similar to electricity or gas, where you go for the cheapest vendor or provider to aimagazine.com

91

EVENT PREVIEW

“ Technology facilitated an acceleration in decision making that I have never seen in my career” SAMANTHA LISCIO

CHIEF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, NIHR CLINICAL RESEARCH

supply you that technology. The roll out of this seamless experience completely changed the mindset of our employees and our executives. After that roll out, the next thing to do was to increase that capability”, says Peter.

Samantha Liscio, Chief Information Technology Officer at National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Clinical Research Network, goes into some detail about an important area of AI application, which has supported the healthcare services throughout one of the most difficult global situations. The company funds and manages large-scale research projects and digital transformation played a critical role in continued medical research. Creating a 92

October 2021

The Future of Cyber Security Panel: Richard Jones (Leidos), Simon Chassar (Claroty), Ross Garrigan (Host)

secure network for healthcare teams and providing them with equipment were a couple of the ways the NIHR supported organisations during the coronavirus pandemic. “Technology facilitated an acceleration in decision making that I have never seen in my career”, says Liscio.

“Technology and the creation of digital services were helping that. It was showing the art of the possible and that these things could be delivered in days or weeks”.

Needless to say, the Technology, AI & Cyber LIVE event was a huge success. It showed us how technology has allowed various industries to meet specific demands during a significant period of change for both businesses and

individuals. In hosting the event—and thanks to technology—individuals were able to attend from across the globe and allowed them to experience the past 18 months from the perspectives of other organisations. However, those who couldn’t make it to the show can view the whole thing online and watch it on-demand.

To find out how to register for the Technology, AI & Cyber LIVE recording go to www.technologymagazine.com.

aimagazine.com

93

TOP 10

Artificial Intelligence

BRANDS

Artificial intelligence (AI) firms are expanding their technological reach.

Our list looks at important pioneers who push the boundary in the AI industry 94

October 2021

TOP 10

T

he uptake of AI in business is accelerating at pace. Through business acquisitions, in-house AI development and the creation of new AI brands, companies have access to a multitude of AI applications.

With this rapid uptake of artificial intelligence comes innovation. Entrepreneurs, experts and business leaders are pushing the boundaries and developing new and innovative ways to utilise AI. These companies are taking an innovative approach to machine learning and AI; their forward-thinking approach has resulted in unique ways to utilise artificial intelligence.

WRITTEN BY: CATHERINE GRAY

aimagazine.com

95

TOP 10

10 AIBrain

AIBrain builds AI solutions for smartphones and robotics applications. With the goal of building fully autonomous AI, AIBrain unifies the three essential aspects of intelligence, namely Problem Solving, Learning, and Memory. AIBrain delivers full autonomy based on its breakthrough technologies: AICoRe (Adaptive Interactive Cognitive Reasoner), a fully autonomous cognitive AI; and Memory Graph, an AI memory encompassing both episodic and semantic knowledge.

AIBrain has been frequently recognised as one of the top AI companies alongside Big Tech

by Market Research firms. The company leads technology development in the areas of entertainment and education.

96

October 2021

09 Domino Data Lab Domino Data Lab is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that helps tech and data professionals program and test AI models. Its enterprise machine learning operations (MLOps) platform accelerates research, speeds model deployment and increases collaboration for codefirst data science teams at scale.

According to the company, Domino’s products enable thousands of data scientists to develop better medicines, grow more productive crops, adapt risk models to major economic shifts, build better cars, improve customer support or simply recommend the best purchase to make at the right time.

TOP 10

08 Narrative Science Based in Chicago, Narrative Science specialises in data storytelling. It has two products, Quill and Lexio, which both aim to help businesses understand their data and the story behind it.

The products do this by creating a natural language generation technology to translate data from multiple silos into what it calls stories. The AI platform highlights the most relevant and interesting information, then turns data into easy-to-understand reports. By transforming statistics into stories Narrative Science supports its customers by converting numbers into knowledge.

07

Vicarious With the mission to develop intelligent robots for a new golden age, Vicarious is backed by over US$250m from investors.

This investment comes from big names in the technology and AI industry like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Samsung. Its technology has been published in peer-reviewed journals like Science and Science Robotics. AGI is the finish line on the company’s journey toward progressively more capable robots. Vicarious’ approach leverages deep expertise in neuroscience and is shaped by a decade of research. With its extended team of customers, investors, advisors and industry partners, Vicarious is working hard to bring intelligent automation to businesses everywhere. aimagazine.com

97

Enabling educators.

Empowering students.

Explore how we accelerate student discovery, learning and innovation with our Digital Education 3D Experience.

EXPLORE THE 3D EXPERIENCE

TOP 10

05

CloudMinds

06 Ubiquity6 Ubiquity6 has built a mobile app that enables augmented reality for several people at once. Its mission is to unlock new ways for people to connect through shared experiences. Through its platform, users see and interact with objects presented by the fully dimensioned visual world of the Ubiquity6 app, immersing themselves in a creative or educational environment. The company pioneers multiplayer technology and infrastructure for new kinds of shared experiences.

Ubiquity6 was acquired by Discord in June 2021, allowing the company to accelerate its mission.

CloudMinds is a world-leading cloud robot and services company that develops the Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence (HARI) platform for robots. As one of the few players that offer an end-to-end cloud robot system in the global robotics industry, CloudMinds are the first to commercialise related products and services. The company aims to make helpful humanoid robots affordable for homes by 2025, and it will achieve this through cloudconnected robots. Essentially, cloud-connected robots are where diverse models of robots share a brain hosted on a cloud platform giving it access to an ever-growing number of skills.

TOP 10

04

DataRobot The DataRobot enterprise AI platform accelerates and democratises data science by automating the end-to-end journey from data to value. It provides data scientists with a platform for building and deploying machine learning models. The software helps business analysts build predictive analytics with no knowledge of Machine Learning (ML) or programming and uses automated ML to quickly build and deploy accurate predictive models. Allowing customers to deploy trusted AI applications at scale, DataRobot’s platform is centrally governed and gives customers the power of AI to drive better business outcomes.

03 OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and development company founded in 2015. Its mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. To do this, the company aims to directly build safe and beneficial AGI. Its director, Ilya Sutskever, is one of the world experts in machine learning. The founders are motivated by their personal concerns about the existential risk from AGI. As a nonprofit, the company wants to freely collaborate with others across many institutions and aims to work with other companies to research and deploy new technologies.

TOP 10

Affectiva Affectiva is a software company that builds AI that understands human emotions, cognitive states, activities and the objects people use. Its platform does this by analysing facial and vocal expressions. The company spun out of MIT Media Lab and created the new Artificial Emotional Intelligence (Emotion AI) technology category. Affectiva’s Emotion AI is

used in gaming, automotive, robotics, education, healthcare, experiential marketing, retail, human resources and video communication. The company was founded by Rosalind Picard and Rana el Kaliouby and has venture backing by leading investors including Kleiner Perkins, Caufield Byers, Horizon Ventures, Fenox Venture Capital and WPP.

02

aimagazine.com

101

Meet the Top 100 Leaders in SupplyChain

OUT NOW A BizClik Media Group Brand

supplyc

haind

igital.c om

TOP LEAD ERS 2021

NOMINATE

SHARE

CELEBRATE

Creating Digital Communities

TOP 10

AlphaFold Protein Structure Database

“We’re a team of scientists, engineers, ethicists and more, committed to solving intelligence, to advance science and humanity” 104

October 2021

TOP 10

Deepmind DeepMind is a British artificial intelligence company that is dedicated to accelerating the industry with an interdisciplinary approach. It brings together new ideas and advances in machine learning, neuroscience, engineering, mathematics, simulation and computing infrastructure.

DeepMind’s founders began working on AI technology by teaching it how to play old video games from the seventies and

eighties. Acquired by Google in 2014, Deepmind’s research covers everything from climate change to healthcare and finance. In partnership with The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBLEBI), DeepMind launched its AlphaFold Protein Structure Database in 2021. This database more than doubled humanity’s accumulated knowledge of high-accuracy protein structures. aimagazine.com

105

Fusionex Augmented Analytics

GROW YOUR BUSINESS BY HARNESSING THE NEXT DISRUPTOR IN ANALYTICS Explore all the ways digital transformation can help you make future-proof decisions based on existing data. Fusionex Augmented Analytics generates insights using the power of machine learning to accelerate the discovery of new growth areas and revenue streams for your business.

Learn more

www.fusionex-international.com