Author Archives: George Leopold

George Leopold

George Leopold has written about science and technology for more than 30 years, focusing on electronics and aerospace technology. He previously served as executive editor of Electronic Engineering Times. Leopold is the author of "Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom" (Purdue University Press, 2016).

Chips Hit a New Low with ‘Valleytronics’

October 29th, 2019 (0)

A potential interim step between conventional semiconductors and quantum devices has emerged, promising improved information processing schemes that outperform current electronic charge- and spin-based chip architectures. The emerging quantum process dubbed “valleytronics” focuses on low energy “valleys” or extremes ...

Security Scanner Doesn’t Need Source-Code Access

October 28th, 2019 (0)

Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute have come up with a new way to scan software for costly errors and vulnerabilities, and do so without access to source code. The tool is also being touted as a way to evaluate ...

Open Compute Switches Flood Datacenters

October 25th, 2019 (0)

Datacenter operators increasingly turning to commodity hardware are embracing bare-metal provisioning of switching gear certified by the Open Compute Project, according to a quarterly market survey. IHS Markit reported this week that bare-metal switching gear based on OCP specifications ...

IBM Watson Targets AI’s Data Snags

October 22nd, 2019 (0)

IBM continues to ramp up its Watson AI offerings as adoption of automation technology remains limited, in part due to what company executives say is a lack of data integrity, trust and the skills needed to implement AI platforms. ...

Gartner: As AI Goes Mainstream, So Do New Security Threats

October 21st, 2019 (0)

As if there weren’t enough security challenges, a forecast for the coming year warns the brave new world of AI and machine learning brings with it a whole new set of threats as microservices, the Internet of Things and ...

Updated: Worm Hits Docker Containers

October 18th, 2019 (0)

A crypto-jacking worm, so-called because it spreads in spurts among unsecured images on servers, is said to be the first detected using Docker application containers. Palo Alto Network’s (NYSE: PANW) threat intelligence team known as Unit 42 reported the ...

Amazon Pulls Plug on Oracle Databases

October 17th, 2019 (0)

Amazon Web Services declared victory in its latest skirmish with cloud rival and database leader Oracle, announcing this week it has completed the migration of its consumer business to its internal database services while pulling the plug on its ...

Hot Demand for Hyperscale Data Centers Hampered by Skills Gap

October 17th, 2019 (0)

Soaring demand for hyperscale data centers and colocation services is having a ripple effect within the value chain that builds and integrates those services, a new survey finds. As edge deployments and software-defined infrastructure drove overall hyperscale data center ...

AI Aimed at Bridging Infrastructure Maintenance Gap

October 16th, 2019 (0)

Crumbling infrastructure is getting a closer look with a new deep learning tool billed as providing live, 3D views of bridges and tunnels along with automatic alerts that would allow maintenance managers to identify and fix faults before they ...

Federated Learning Applied to Cancer Research

October 15th, 2019 (0)

The ability to share and analyze data while protecting patient privacy is giving medical researchers a new tool in their efforts to use what one vendor calls “federated learning” to train models based on diverse data sets. To that ...