Covering Scientific & Technical AI | Tuesday, June 30, 2026
A ‘Deliberate Data Strategy’ for Today’s Attention-Deficit Economy
 In our attention-deficit economy, organizations able to grab our attention end up winning. Companies that stand out are those that embrace an insight-driven ethos and build data-competent organizations. They do this by adopting a "deliberate data strategy" that follows these key principles: Love the problem, not the solution Inject intelligence into operations What Is the ... Full article
Microsoft to Buy Mellanox?
Networking equipment powerhouse Mellanox could be an acquisition target by Microsoft, according to a published report in the Israeli financial publication TheMarker. Microsoft has reportedly gone so far as to engage Goldman Sachs to handle negotiations with Mellanox. The maker of InfiniBand and Ethernet interconnect and other equipment for servers and storage reported record revenues ... Full article
Crystal Ball 2019: ‘AI Transformation Poised to Begin in Earnest’
Years ago, the future was much more opaque. Now, it’s tangible, visible, it’s rising up all around us. A favorite quote from 2018: “I don’t predict the future, I observe it” (futurist Gerd Leonhard). That’s the thing: you can see it taking shape, seemingly in real time. The future, of course, is AI in all ... Full article
AI Chip Startup Graphcore Rings Up $200M in Funding
Graphcore, the U.K. AI chip developer, has attracted more investors as it rolls out its intelligent processing unit to enterprise datacenters and cloud services providers. The GPU rival reported this week it has closed a $200 million funding round led by the London-based venture firm Atomico and other existing investors. New investors included automaker BMW ... Full article
Cumulus Networks Partners with Datacenter Switcher
The unclogging of datacenter networks is taking a decidedly open approach that is permeating down to the level of network operating systems and high-capacity optical switches. The latest example of this trend is a deal between networking software specialist Cumulus Networks and FS.COM Inc., a datacenter communications integrator. The partners said this week that FS ... Full article
Six Skills Separating Intelligent AI from Basic Automation
Managing the modern customer experience today means most businesses are implementing, or at least investigating, an automated, digital, workforce. Since coming to market almost a decade ago, RPA (robotic process automation) has become more than just the automation of repetitive tasks and legacy applications. An enterprise-level RPA platform supercharges digital transformation by acting as the ... Full article
Oracle Lawsuit Clouds DoD’s IT Strategy
Just in time for the holidays, cloud rivals are fighting like cats and dogs over one of the biggest ever federal IT contracts. The battle lines for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract shifted to federal court with Oracle’s early December lawsuit and JEDI frontrunner Amazon Web Services’ countermove to join the Defense Department as ... Full article
Cloud Comfort Level is Growing, Survey Finds
The majority of enterprise applications are developed and deployed in the cloud, concludes a semi-annual survey on cloud adoption. Cloud Foundry Foundation reported that more than 50 percent of companies it surveyed are developing at least 60 percent of their applications on cloud platform. That total is up sharply—13 percent—from the group’s last survey released ... Full article
IBM Seeks Transparency into AI Decision Making
Among the stumbling blocks to AI adoption is lack of transparency, understanding, and therefore trust in how machines actually make decisions. How and why AI arrived at an answer or recommendation is something that, as of today, machine learning models can’t provide, researchers say. IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced this week it is addressing that and ... Full article
CFD on ORNL’s Titan Models Cleaner, High-Mileage ‘Opposed Piston’ Engine
Pinnacle Engines is out to substantially improve vehicle gasoline efficiency and cut greenhouse gas emissions with a new motor based on an “opposed piston” design that the company hopes will be widely adopted while the global small vehicle industry transitions to a non-fossil fuel future, decades away. To speed up work on its design – ... Full article
Nvidia Leads Alpha MLPerf AI Benchmarking Round
Seven months after the launch of its AI benchmarking suite, the MLPerf consortium is releasing the first round of results based on submissions from Nvidia, Google and Intel. Of the seven benchmarks encompassed in version v0.5 of the would-be benchmarking standard, Nvidia announced that it captured the lead spot in six. Separately, Google (which led ... Full article
Supermicro: Investigation Shows No Motherboard Hack
Supermicro, the subject of media reports (including ours) two months ago alleging that spies in China hacked Supermicro servers widely distributed throughout the U.S. technology supply chain, has followed up its initial vehement denials with a letter sent yesterday to customers stating a third party investigations firm had “found absolutely no evidence of malicious hardware ... Full article
Is Amazon’s Plunge into Server Chips a Watershed Moment?
For several years now the big cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Google, et al – have been transforming from technology consumers into technology creators in hardware and software. The most recent example being Amazon’s announcement two weeks ago that it had developed its own Arm-based chips (Graviton) and was using them in select instances. ... Full article
Oracle Takes Gloves Off in JEDI Lawsuit
Large government contract awards invariably draw protests from losing bidders hoping to gum up the works and perhaps gain a piece of the action on appeal. The Defense Department’s huge cloud contract has taken these legal maneuverings to a new level with several pre-award protests and now a federal lawsuit filed by Oracle alleging that ... Full article
IBM and Nvidia in AI Data Pipeline, Processing, Storage Union
IBM and Nvidia today announced a new turnkey AI solution that combines IBM Spectrum Scale scale-out file storage with Nvidia’s GPU-based DGX-1 AI server to provide what the companies call “the highest performance in any tested converged system” while supporting data science practices and AI data pipelines (data prep- training- inference- archive) in which data ... Full article
Knative Meshes Kubernetes with Serverless Workloads
Google Cloud’s Knative initiative launched in July is expanding to include an updated version of Google’s first commercial Knative offering along with a batch of new distributions based on serverless computing framework. Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform for building and managing serverless workloads in which cloud infrastructure acts as a server for managing the allocation of ... Full article
Using Data Patterns in a Retail Culture of Immediacy
Retailers who have embraced digital disruption and transformed their businesses know two hard truths: consumer expectations can rise quickly; and no seller is safe. Thanks to the “Amazon Effect,” consumers now believe that benefits like expedited, on-demand deliveries are the baseline for any online retailer. Consumers want more product choices, at a lower cost, delivered ... Full article
No Waiting: Mellanox Uses Univa to Extend Silicon Design HPC Operation to Azure
Call it a corollary to Murphy’s Law: When a system is most in demand, when end users are most dependent on the system performing as required, when it’s crunch time – that’s when the system is most likely to blow up. Or make you wait in line to use it. They know this at Mellanox ... Full article
Software Licensing Effort Focuses on Compliance Tools
A new project launched this week by the Linux Foundation is designed to provide standard tools for complying with the terms of open-source code licenses. The goal of the Automated Compliance Tooling (ACT) initiative is “to consolidate investment in, and increase interoperability and usability of, open source compliance tooling, which helps organizations manage compliance obligations,” ... Full article
Intel 7nm May Arrive Sooner than Expected; Moore’s Law Cadence to Follow?
2018 has been a rough one for Intel, abuse has been heaped on the company for its dilatory delivery of a 10nm process technology – first slated for 2016, now for late 2019. This writer and fellow “knights of the keyboard” (as baseball immortal Ted Williams referred to the press), along with Wall Street analysts, ... Full article