DataStax announced the DataStax Fast 100 program to quickly align Apache Cassandra experts to enterprise projects. Cassandra is an open-source, NoSQL database. The partners currently on-board, with more to come, include: Deloitte, Expero Inc, and Anant Corporation. The program enables swift enablement for partners with consultants certified and ready to deliver on Cassandra engagements within 30-days.
Practitioners cite a lack of skilled staff as the top obstacle to Cassandra adoption. When asked what it would take for practitioners to use Cassandra for more applications and features in production, they said “easier to migrate” and “easier to integrate.” The DataStax Fast 100 aligns prequalified partners to enterprises to help ensure their success. The program will help enterprises with business modernization, technical migrations, cloud-native data platforms, and various mission-critical use cases.
Alfresco Software, an open source, content management platform and solutions provider, announced the availability of Alfresco Process Automation, an offering that enables organizations to build content-centric process applications in the Cloud. Alfresco Process Automation is a core part of Alfresco’s Digital Business Platform as a Service (DBPaaS). Business applications are often built for a specific need or to solve a discrete task, however these applications can create silos of important information that ultimately become barriers to change, obstructing innovation and organizational growth. Alfresco Process Automation enables the building of content-centric applications that enable teams to work more effectively together, share important information, improve knowledge, better manage collaborative processes and projects, and respond to opportunities.
As part of Alfresco’s DBPaaS, Alfresco Process Automation offers organizations open, secure content services coupled with governance services leverages a range of Cloud native capabilities such as AI, ML, recognition & business Intelligence services. It provides auditable and compliant visibility of content throughout workflows from creation to policy-controlled destruction.
Cloudflare, Inc. launched Cloudflare Web Analytics to provide accurate, clear, and free analytics for anyone who cares about how their site is performing and doesn’t want to sacrifice their visitors’ privacy. Cloudflare Web Analytics is built on top of Cloudflare’s existing network, giving site owners insight into key traffic metrics at the edge. Now site owners have control over their own site data, eliminating the need for third-party scripts that can track their users and help retarget them with advertising. Cloudflare Web Analytics will be available, for free, to any website owner, whether they are an existing Cloudflare customer or not.
Unlike ad-supporting analytics companies, Cloudflare’s business model has never been about tracking individual users across the web. Cloudflare does not track where visitors are going online, and can help web owners get clear and accurate information about how their sites are performing without the need to profile users. Cloudflare already processes the requests for sites on its network and can collect analytics at the edge without adding third-party analytics scripts to a website. This privacy-friendly approach measures a ‘visit’ by looking at the source of each request, rather than tracking individual user behavior. Cloudflare Web Analytics also does not conflict with ad blockers, which frequently block third-party analytics tools from measuring anything at all. When combined with Cloudflare’s Bot Management tool, automated bot traffic that could skew analytics is also filtered out for improved accuracy.
Cloudflare paid customers can enjoy Web Analytics today. In the coming months, Cloudflare Web Analytics will be available to any website owner including those not on Cloudflare’s network. If you are not an existing Cloudflare customer on a paid plan, you can add your name to the waitlist.
Colligo announced the launch of Colligo Content Manager for Microsoft 365, expanding the email capture and SharePoint collaboration capabilities it delivers to organizations using Microsoft 365 Outlook and SharePoint Online. When organizations combine Email Manager and Content Manager for Microsoft 365, the add-ins enable workers to achieve more productivity from Outlook: filing emails and attachments to SharePoint Online from their inbox including on mobile devices, and browsing and sharing any SharePoint file for collaboration.
Colligo’s Email Manager and Content Manager add-ins work in conjunction with Colligo Cloud Admin Console, the Azure-based administration and configuration platform that enables administrators to add-in users, deploy policies, ensure compliance and report analytics. Once Colligo Microsoft 365 solutions are deployed, users will see the same interface wherever they access Outlook online. The new Colligo Email Manager and Content Manager for Microsoft 365 solutions are available for customers to trial today.
Northern Light announced its SinglePoint knowledge management platform now contains a search index of reports published by “thought leaders” from more than 15 business strategy consulting firms, “think tanks” and non-governmental research organizations. Northern Light’s new Thought Leaders content collection features insights across a range of industries and strategy topics from firms such as Accenture, API, Bain, BCG, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, IBM Institute for Business Value, KPMG, MITRE, Pew Research Center, PwC, Tata Consultancy Services, World Economic Forum (WEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO). Initially, the collection contains approximately 20,000 market and technology reports; Northern Light expects to add an additional 1,000 new reports per month to the search index. The reports in the collection contain analysis, commentary, and forecasts of the trends in industries such as life sciences, healthcare, information technology, financial services, and consumer products.
Key topics, such as marketing to Millennials and post-Millennials, are covered in depth. The search index includes links to the reports on the thought leaders’ websites, and all of the reports in the collection are available to users. In addition to the new thought leaders content set, other content collections that can be accessed within SinglePoint include an organization’s own primary research, licensed secondary research, industry news, technology vendor white papers, conference abstracts, and various government and industry databases.
Vectorspace AI and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the largest particle physics laboratory in the world, are creating datasets used to detect hidden relationships between particles which have broad implications across multiple industries. These datasets can provide a significant increase in precision, accuracy, signal or alpha and for any company in any industry. Datasets are algorithmically generated based on formal Natural Language Processing/Understanding (NLP/NLU) models including OpenAI’s GPT-3, Google’s BERT along with word2vec and other models which were built on top of vector space applications at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the US Dept. of Energy (DOE). Over 100 billion different datasets are available based on customized data sources, rows, columns or language models.
For commercial use, datasets are $0.99c per minute/update and $0.99c per data source, row, column and context with additional configurations and options available on a case by case SaaS/DaaS based monthly subscription. Over 100 billion unique and powerful datasets are available based on customized data sources, rows, columns or language models.
While data can be viewed as unrefined crude oil, Vectorspace AI produces datasets which are the refined ‘gasoline’ powering all Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) systems. Datasets are real-time and designed to augment or append to existing proprietary datasets such as gene expression datasets in life sciences or time-series datasets in the financial markets. Example customer and industry use cases include:
Particle Physics: Rows are particles. Columns are properties. Used to predict hidden relationships between particles.
Life Sciences: Rows are infectious diseases. Columns are approved drug compounds. Used to predict which approved drug compounds might be repurposed to fight an infectious disease such as COVID19. Applications include processing 1500 peer reviewed scientific papers every 24hrs for real-time dataset production.
Financial Markets: Rows are equities. Columns are themes or global events. Used to predict hidden relationships between equities and global events. Applications include thematic investing and smart basket generation and visualization.
Data provenance, governance and security are addressed via the Dataset Pipeline Processing (DPP) hash blockchain and VXV utility token integration. Datasets are accessed via the VXV wallet-enable API where VXV is acquired and used as a utility token credit which trades on a cryptocurrency exchange.
Serviceaide announced Luma 2.5. Luma Knowledge is integral to Luma Virtual Agent 2.5. Luma 2.5 leverages knowledge and information by unifying Serviceaide’s AI-powered virtual agent with an enterprise knowledge repository, the Luma Enterprise Knowledge Hub. The combination accelerates and elevates the self-service experience.
The Luma Virtual Agent leverages natural language processing and machine learning to create a conversational interface via voice, email, chat and other channels that understands and proactively guides users to the answers they seek or fulfills their requests through automated services. Luma’s automation and workflow engine can automate a wide range of IT and Enterprise Service Management tasks as diverse as provisioning a virtual machine, onboarding new employees, and handling facilities requests and HR changes. Among the knowledge-centered capabilities of the Luma Virtual Agent 2.5:
Serves up knowledge by forging an understanding between the data and the end requester.
Differentiates between user needs by disambiguating requests for service and knowledge and delivering the information or services that best fits the request. This can be done by exploring knowledge articles or reviewing actionable skills.
Closes the loop by leveraging machine learning to continuously improve knowledge delivery by providing feedback from its usefulness back into the knowledge base
Provides better answers by offering contextual suggestions for new content and more effective/timely responses.
Builds Knowledge by gathering existing knowledge, highlighting gaps, and spotlighting where knowledge needs to be created or improved.
Microsoft announced SharePoint Syntex, the first product from Project Cortex. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge, and will be available to purchase for all Microsoft 365 commercial customers on October 1, 2020.
Machine teaching accelerates the creation of AI models by acquiring knowledge from people rather than from large datasets alone. Any information processing skill, that an expert can teach a human, should be easily teachable to a machine. SharePoint Syntex mainstreams machine teaching, enabling your experts to capture their knowledge about content in AI models they can build with no code. Your experts train SharePoint Syntex to understand content like they do, to recognize key information, and to tag content automatically. For example, a contract processing expert can teach SharePoint Syntex to extract the contract’s value, along with the expiration date and key terms and conditions.
SharePoint Syntex then uses your models to automate the capture, ingestion, and categorization of content, extracting valuable information as metadata. Metadata is critical to managing content, and seamless integration with Microsoft Search, Power Automate, and Microsoft Information Protection enable you to improve knowledge discovery and reuse, accelerate processes, and dynamically apply information protection and compliance policies.
SharePoint Syntex content center Syntex introduces a new experience for managing content at scale, integrating metadata and workflow, and delivering compliance automation – the content center. Content centers supply capabilities to teach the cloud how to read and process documents the same way you would manually. SharePoint Syntex uses those insights to automatically recognize content, extract important information, and apply metadata tags. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI to automate the capture, ingestion, and categorization of content, to accelerate processes, improve compliance, and facilitate knowledge discovery and reuse. SharePoint Syntex mainstreams AI to process three major types of content: digital images, structured or semi-structured forms, and unstructured documents.
Digital image processing SharePoint Syntex can automatically tag images using a new visual dictionary with thousands of commonly recognized objects. In addition, SharePoint Syntex can recognize convert extracted handwritten text into tags for search and further processing.
Document understanding Most organizations generate vast amounts of unstructured documents such as manuals, contracts, or resumes. You can teach SharePoint Syntex to read your content the way you would using machine teaching to build AI models with no code. SharePoint Syntex can automatically suggest or create metadata, invoke custom Power Automate workflows, and attach compliance labels to enforce retention or record management policies. Document understanding models are based on Language Understanding models in Azure Cognitive Services.
Form processing SharePoint Syntex includes a powerful form processing engine, based on AI Builder, that lets you automatically recognize and extract common values from semi structured or structured documents, such as dates, figures, names, or addresses. These models are built with no code and only require a small number of documents for reliable results.
