Absorb Software, provider of the Absorb Learning Management System (LMS) and Absorb Infuse, announced the acquisition of Koantic, a cloud-based course authoring tool. The demand for engaging, interactive eLearning content that can be created quickly continues to grow. Unlike complicated desktop solutions or overly simplified cloud-based solutions, Koantic is a combination of a web-based interface and full-featured course authoring. Absorb plans to integrate the course builder with its LMS while continuing to offer it as stand-alone product—which will soon be renamed Absorb Create.
Category: Content technology news (Page 129 of 637)
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Intelligent Integration Platform provider SnapLogic announced new enterprise automation capabilities that help employees across the business easily connect applications and data, streamline workflows and processes. The new capabilities include prebuilt, end-to-end process automations; ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) features and a quick-start solution for faster data warehousing; with a visual interface powered by machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). With SnapLogic’s self-service, AI-powered integration platform, IT teams as well as business users across functions can use the low-code solution to connect apps and data and automate workflows and processes.
- New Prebuilt Automation Journeys: Prebuilt automation journeys unify all the applications and data that make up a complete business process, such as hire-to-retire, quote-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and customer 360. The SnapLogic platform learns, understands, and connects to all of an organization’s underlying systems, streamlining flows and processes, automated in their construction, with rich AI and machine learning (ML) capabilities layered on top, for faster, data-enriched outcomes.
- New NLP-powered Flow Interface: The visual flow interface guides non-technical business users through the integration and automation of business processes.
- New ELT Snaps: ELT Snaps accelerate the integration and movement of large volumes of complex data, whether in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments, into a cloud data warehouse and provide flexibility to leverage compute power for data transformations.
- New ‘Fast Loader’ Solution: The new quick-start solution helps enterprises load data from multiple cloud and on-premises applications and data sources into their cloud data warehouse faster with a new wizard-based interface and parallel loading.
Cloudera announced the general availability of Cloudera Data Platform Private Cloud (CDP Private Cloud). CDP Private Cloud extends cloud-native speed, simplicity, and economics for the connected data lifecycle to the data center. Operating CDP Private Cloud is simple for IT, with container-based management tools that reduce the time to deliver analytics and machine learning. Container-based analytics and machine learning help reduce data center costs by increasing server utilization and reducing storage and data center overhead. With CDP Private Cloud, IT can now meet the exponential demand for data analytics and machine learning services, with a petabyte-scale hybrid data architecture that can flex to use private and public clouds. CDP Private Cloud runs the same analytic experiences in the data center that are used in CDP Public Cloud on AWS and Azure.
CDP Private Cloud is available in Base and Plus editions. The Base edition includes SDX, storage management and traditional bare metal data lifecycle analytics. It is equivalent to CDP Data Center, which it replaces. It is the foundation of CDP Private Cloud. The Plus edition includes Base and adds container-based analytic experiences for Data Warehousing and Machine Learning, and container-based management and control plane services. CDP Private Cloud Plus pricing is based on compute and storage and is available as an annual subscription. An annual subscription of the Plus edition is $400 per compute unit (one physical core and 8 GB RAM) and $25 per TB of addressed storage.
Alfresco Software announced the immediate availability of Alfresco Content Connector for SAP, a collaboration and integration tool that can connect up to 100 different SAP systems or content repositories to Alfresco Digital Business Platform or Alfresco Cloud, and enable users to share their SAP-stored, important information easily. Additionally, by offloading their unstructured content (e.g., invoices, employee documents, technical drawings, image files etc.) from SAP to Alfresco, organizations can benefit from savings in storage costs. Users can take advantage of these capabilities without leaving the applications with which they are familiar, easing user adoption. SAP certification provides Alfresco customers with fully-certified, native integration with line-of-business SAP applications and ensures that Alfresco Digital Business Platform or Alfresco Cloud can be used seamlessly with SAP ERP (ECC6) and SAP S/4 HANA on either traditional relational database management systems (RDBMSs) or the SAP HANA database. On the front end, a number of SAP technologies are supported including SAP GUI, SAP WebGUI and SAP Fiori.
Google-affiliated researchers released the Language Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open source, framework-agnostic platform and API for visualizing, understanding, and auditing natural language processing models. It focuses on questions about AI model behavior, like why models made certain predictions and why they’re performing poorly with input corpora. LIT incorporates aggregate analysis into a browser-based interface that’s designed to enable explorations of text generation behavior. The tool set is architected so that users can hop between visualizations and analysis to test hypotheses and validate those hypotheses over a data set. New data points can be added on the fly and their effect on the model visualized immediately, while side-by-side comparison allows for two models or two data points to be visualized simultaneously. And LIT calculates and displays metrics for entire data sets to spotlight patterns in model performance, including the current selection, manually generated subsets, and automatically generated subsets.
LIT works with any model that can run from Python, the Google researchers say, including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and remote models on a server. And it has a low barrier to entry, with only a small amount of code needed to add models and data. The team cautions that LIT doesn’t scale well to large corpora and that it’s not “directly” useful for training-time model monitoring. But they say that in the near future, the tool set will gain features like counterfactual generation plugins, additional metrics and visualizations for sequence and structured output types, and a greater ability to customize the UI for different applications.
H/T VentureBeat: https://venturebeat.com/2020/08/14/google-open-sources-lit-a-toolset-for-evaluating-natural-language-models/
Savan Group announced that it has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to establish a cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) platform. Savan Group applies AI solutions to address the data and information challenges of the Federal Government. Much of this data is is unstructured data locked away in documents, videos, audio, images, and paper. Using ML and natural language processing (NLP), Savan Group is analyzing and extracting untapped potential, turning data into information and information into knowledge to help government agencies increase the value of data for mission, service, and public good. Savan Group is now developing ML models with near unlimited scale using distributed cloud storage and GPU compute within a FedRAMP-authorized environment.
Filecamp AG announced that its digital asset management software is now available to businesses of all sizes. The media library software allows for all of the various formats and file types to be organized and metadata assigned. The library can include videos, logos, documents, design files, creative files, stock photos, presentations, and images, as well as other brand assets and is easy to search. The organization makes it convenient for creative collaborations. Filecamp’s lightweight DAM system has an initial price offering of USD29/mo. plus unlimited users in all plans.
Automattic released WordPress 5.5, “Eckstine”, in honor of jazz musician Billy Eckstine. This latest version focuses on three major areas: speed, search, and security, as well as block editor enhancements, accessibility, and developer features:
Speed. In WordPress 5.5, images wait to load until they’re just about to scroll into view. The technical term is ‘lazy loading.’ On mobile, lazy loading can also keep browsers from loading files meant for other devices. That can save your readers money on data — and help preserve battery life.
Search. Now, by default, WordPress 5.5 includes an XML sitemap that helps search engines discover your most important pages from the very minute you go live.
Security. Now you can set plugins and themes to update automatically, or not, in the WordPress admin. So you always know your site is running the latest code available. You can also turn auto-updates on or off for each plugin or theme you have installed on the same screens you’ve always used.
Block patterns. New block patterns make it simple to create complex layouts, using combinations of text and media that you can mix and match to fit your story. You will also find block patterns in a wide variety of plugins and themes, with more added all the time.
The new block directory. The new block directory is built right into the block editor, so you can install new block types to your site without ever leaving the editor.
Inline image editing. Crop, rotate, and zoom your photos right from the image block.
Accessibility. Now you can copy links in media screens and modal dialogs with a button, instead of trying to highlight a line of text. You can also move meta boxes with the keyboard, and edit images in WordPress with your assistive device, as it can read you the instructions in the image editor.
Server-side registered blocks in the REST API. The addition of block types endpoints means that JavaScript apps (like the block editor) can retrieve definitions for any blocks registered on the server.
Defining environments. WordPress now has a standardized way to define a site’s environment type (staging, production, etc). Retrieve that type with wp_get_environment_type() and execute only the appropriate code.
Dashicons. The Dashicons library has received its final update in 5.5. It adds 39 block editor icons along with 26 others.
Passing data to template files. The template loading functions (get_header(), get_template_part(), etc.) have a new $args argument. So now you can pass an entire array’s worth of data to those templates.
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