In this regular column, we’ll bring you all the latest industry news centered around our main topics of focus: big data, data science, machine learning, AI, and deep learning. Our industry is constantly accelerating with new products and services being announced everyday. Fortunately, we’re in close touch with vendors from this vast ecosystem, so we’re in a unique position to inform you about all that’s new and exciting. Our massive industry database is growing all the time so stay tuned for the latest news items describing technology that may make you and your organization more competitive.
ZL Tech Introduces New Solution to Transform Out-of-Sight Corporate Knowledge to Business Insight
ZL Tech, a leader in unstructured information management, announced advancements to its SaaS platform that leapfrog today’s “sandbox” analytics paradigm by expanding the sandbox to the entire “beach.” The application enables organizations to extract insights buried in people data such as emails and documents, which embodies the human side of the organization.
“Analytics today is just a sandbox. The insights are only as good as the data you throw into the sandbox,” said Kon Leong, CEO and co-founder of ZL Tech. “But enterprises that seek to be liberated from the sandbox can now expand data-wrangling to the beach, while also ensuring that governance obligations are met.”
TigerGraph Launches Million-Dollar Challenge to Inspire Innovative Uses of Graph
TigerGraph, provider of a leading graph analytics platform, launched “Graph for All Million Dollar Challenge”, a global search for innovative ways to harness the power of graph technology and machine learning to solve real world problems. The challenge brings together brilliant minds to build innovative solutions to better our future with one question: How will you change the world with graph? Winners across four main categories will be announced this May at the 2022 Graph + AI Summit, the largest open industry event for graph and AI organized by TigerGraph.
“Every day, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are produced — that’s 18 zeroes,” said Dr. Yu Xu, founder and CEO of TigerGraph. “Within this data are answers to critical health, climate, and business-related questions, and graph technology identifies those patterns across and within the data to find the answers. We’re giving one million dollars to innovators who push the boundaries of graph and AI technology to uncover new, transformational ways to solve real world issues. The challenge is officially on and we look forward to seeing thousands of registrants, hundreds of mind-blowing entries, and countless new ideas and concepts.”
Signal AI Launches New Technology that Measures Shifts in Corporate Reputation and Launches Report on Reputation and Business Performance
Signal AI, the global decision augmentation company, today announced the launch of its new technology allowing users to measure shifts in corporate reputation. The new API Suite provides access to a new kind of quantifiable reputation data for the first time. This entirely new AI technology is built on knowledge graph principles that can map topics (e.g. Corporate Governance) to entities (e.g. a company, index of companies, or an individual) creating billions of connections, and showing how proximity between topics and entities is shifting in time. It provides a whole new lens on mapping shifting corporate reputation and provides entirely new quantifiable reputation data for the first time.
Armed with this data, organisations can now integrate Signal AI intelligence into their own workflows, combine with their own or third-party data from other sources to derive unique insights and visualise it through business intelligence interfaces like Tableau or Power BI. They will also be able to build custom reputation scoring methodologies that power confident reputation-based decisions that weren’t possible before.
“The global business environment is in the middle of a quiet revolution, fueled by the convergence of two trends: the explosion of data and the growing demands on reputation management in an increasingly complex environment, and the emergence of reputational ESG issues and their impact on corporate reputation and therefor business performance,” said David Benigson, CEO and co-founder of Signal AI. “From social unrest to the climate crisis to mandated transparency on corporate governance, to the inextricable link between trust and company performance, the need to understand the external ecosystem has changed forever.”
New Pega Voice AI and Messaging AI Solutions Give Service Agents an Intelligent Copilot for Better, Faster Service
Pegasystems Inc. (NASDAQ: PEGA), the software company that crushes business complexity, announced Pega Voice AI and Messaging AI, two new solutions that analyze live customer service conversations in real time to help agents quickly resolve service requests with reduced manual effort. These artificial intelligence (AI) solutions operate as copilots for agents, listening to live voice and chat conversations, recommending steps to resolution, off-loading tedious manual processes such as error-prone data entry or searches, and analyzing intent to guide them to provide the most efficient, empathetic service possible.
“As demands on customer service teams become increasingly complex and agents feel more burnout, organizations need to empower agents with high-productivity tools to ease some of the burden and enable them to effectively respond to customer needs,” said Sabrina Atienza, director of product management, speech, Pegasystems. “Pega Voice AI and Messaging AI helps agents by removing some of the biggest frustrations from their jobs and guiding them through live conversations every step of the way. This reduces tedious, error-prone work for faster service resolution while also empowering agents to focus on responding to customers effectively and with empathy. This helps create better employee engagement and ultimately, happier customers.”
Unacast Now Offers Aggregated Location Data from 80+ Countries
Unacast, a global location data and analytics firm, announced the expansion of its solution to include aggregated data sets for international markets in 80+ countries. With this launch, organizations have increased visibility across multiple regions through a consistent source of clean, aggregated data, allowing them to move beyond device level data and eliminate internal data processing efforts. Location and visitation activity data measures how and when places are visited, providing insights into what days/times a location sees foot traffic, how much and for how long. Traditionally, this type of international data wasn’t readily available and was harder to use to derive insights.
“Data is hard to get and use in countries outside of the United States, creating an obstacle for organizations looking to move into new regions,” said Rikard Bandebo, chief product officer, Unacast. “Unacast is making that data easier to use and more accessible by investing to source as much data as possible, then contextualizing it to provide value to customers. We’re excited to offer this vital information to our customers so they can make the best decisions for their organizations.”
InRule Technology Enhances Machine Learning Platform with Bias Detection to Reduce Risk and Deliver Fairness Through Awareness
InRule Technology®, provider of AI-enabled, end-to-end automation for the enterprise, introduced bias detection features within xAI Workbench, the company’s suite of machine learning modeling engines. The bias detection features within xAI Workbench support organizations whose machine learning models are associated with predictions that could contain bias toward a protected class (gender, race, age, etc.) or impact an individual’s well-being, such as clinical trials, population health management, incarceration recidivism, loan origination, insurance policy rating and more. Bias detection in xAI Workbench delivers “fairness through awareness” and minimizes risk for organizations that leverage machine learning predictions at scale within business operations. Augmenting xAI Workbench with bias detection allows enterprises to quantify and mitigate potential hazards when complying with federal, state and local regulations or corporate policies.
“Organizations leveraging machine learning need to be aware of the harmful ways that bias can creep into models, leaving them vulnerable to significant legal risk and reputational harm,” said David Jakopac, Ph.D., vice president, Engineering and Data Science, InRule Technology. “Our explainability and clustering engines provide unprecedented visibility that enables organizations to quantify and mitigate harmful bias through action in order to advance the ethical use of AI.”
Franz’s Gruff 8.1 Brings Visual Knowledge Graphs to Web Pages and Web Applications
Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and leading supplier of Graph Database technology for Entity-Event Knowledge Graph Solutions, announced Gruff 8.1, an advanced knowledge graph visualization software tool that can be embedded in any web page or web application. Users can now visually build queries and visualize connections between enterprise data directly within a web page or web application, enabling a simple and seamless knowledge discovery experience.
“The ability to visualize data has become essential to every organization, in every industry,” said Dr. Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc. “Gruff’s dynamic data visualizations enable a broad set of users to determine insights that would otherwise elude them by displaying data in a way that they can see the significance of the information relative to a business problem or solution. Gruff 8.1 makes it simple to weave these knowledge graph visualizations into web applications or web pages – further extending the power of the enterprise data fabric.”
Data Flex Release of Panzura CloudFS Empowers True Multi-Cloud Performance Across the Entire Storage Environment
Panzura has announced the release of Data Flex, a set of new hyper-converged cloud capabilities for users of the company’s flagship global file system Panzura CloudFS. The new features are designed to provide more flexible access, management, and visibility of unstructured data across an entire hybrid multi-cloud environment, under a single pane of glass using Panzura solutions. The Data Flex release combines upgrades to Panzura CloudFS for true multi-cloud performance with enterprise-class storage uptime, and multi-hypervisor usage at scale.
“If you want to build a truly data-driven organization, you have to expect the unexpected,” said chief innovation officer Edward M.L. Peters, Ph.D. “When you lose access to crucial data, financial losses mount with every minute that passes—and the reputational damage can be crippling. With the new failover capabilities of Panzura CloudFS, you will continue working as if an outage never happened.”
Founded by Ex-Uber Data Architect and Apache Hudi Creator, Onehouse Supercharges Data Lakes for AI and Machine Learning
Onehouse, the managed lakehouse company, emerged from stealth with its cloud-native managed service based on Apache Hudi that makes data lakes easier, faster and cheaper. Onehouse founder Vinoth Chandar faced challenges as he was building one of the largest data lakes in the world at Uber. A rapidly growing Uber needed the performance of a warehouse and the scale of a data lake, in near real-time to power AI/ML driven features like predicting ETAs, recommending eats and ensuring ride safety. He created Apache Hudi to implement a new path-breaking architecture where the core warehouse and database functionality was directly added to the data lake, today known as the “lakehouse”. Apache Hudi brings a state-of-the-art data lakehouse to life with advanced indexes, streaming ingestion services and data clustering/optimization techniques.
“While a warehouse can just be ‘used’, a lakehouse still needs to be ‘built’”, said Onehouse founder and CEO Vinoth Chandar. “Having worked with many organizations on that journey for four years in the Apache Hudi community, we believe Onehouse will enable easy adoption of data lakes and future-proof the data architecture for machine learning/data science down the line.”
DDN and Shakti Announce Record Breaking Results on the STAC-M3 Benchmark for Financial Trading Applications
DDN®, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and multicloud data management solutions, and Shakti Software, the provider of the next generation of ultra-high performance database analytics, announced record breaking STAC-M3™ Benchmark results with their integrated solution, which includes Shakti’s data platform running on a single client server combined with DDN’s SFA200NVX® storage appliance. Shakti’s data platform was created by world renowned computer scientist Arthur Whitney, who created the A+ programming language used by Morgan Stanley and founded the data analysis company KX. Shakti, Whitney’s latest database analytics platform, has been proven to deliver results faster and more efficiently than previous versions of his software. Coupled with DDN’s EXAScaler® appliances, the combined solution underscores the extreme efficiency and high performance that finance customers can achieve.
“DDN storage is built to deliver the utmost in performance and efficiency to meet the most challenging data-intensive applications, and Shakti’s innovative platform is ideal to demonstrate just how much analysis and insight finance customers can achieve with the right infrastructure,” Dr. James Coomer, senior vice president of products, DDN. “These STAC results, along with our partnership, underscore the commitment DDN and Shakti have to deliver flexible, scalable and blazingly fast solutions to the financial market.”
Findability Sciences Launches Findability.Inside to Help Traditional Enterprises Quickly Become AI-Powered
Findability Sciences, a global provider of enterprise AI solutions, announced the launch of Findability.Inside, a suite of easily embeddable, white-labeled, ready-made AI solutions that ensure agile and repeatable deployments. With Findability.Inside, traditional enterprise companies can easily integrate superior AI technology into their existing products and solutions, while unlocking new data-driven insights and business efficiencies.
“Our advancements in technology and partnerships with leading global brands puts us in a unique position to effectively address exponentially growing market and customer needs,” said Anand Mahurkar, Founder & CEO of Findability Sciences. “We look forward to what today’s enterprises will achieve tomorrow with AI powered by Findability.Inside. It’s a game changer for expanding digital transformation for companies large and small.”
Directus Launches Directus 9, Open Data Platform
Directus, a leading software company democratizing the future of data management, announced general availability of Directus 9, the world’s first Open Data Platform. With a new codebase built on Node.js and Vue.js 3, Directus 9 achieves 10X higher performance than previous versions for near-instant SQL query responses, whether browsing vast datasets in the Directus app or performing deeply nested relational API requests. The release of Directus 9 comes on the heels of the company achieving the notable milestone of 10+ million (now 15+ million) Docker installations of its open-source app, signifying widespread adoption among the container-native developer community.
“During the past two years, our 2-person project has grown into a passionate team of 20 engineers and hundreds of contributors, all working tirelessly to introduce Directus as the world’s first Open Data Platform,” said Ben Haynes, Co-founder and CEO of Directus. “We’re tremendously grateful for the ongoing support and contributions of our developer community. We will continue to enhance and improve the Directus platform, with a focus on stability, documentation and testing, to further optimize the developer experience.”
Sundial’s Custom Insights Creator Performs Row-Level Transaction Data Analysis, With No Coding Required
Sundial, a new data platform dedicated to providing the highest quality alternative data, launched today as a new medium for data-driven institutional investors. The new platform empowers organizations and data buyers to discover, compare, and connect with data providers and access alternative data in the most transparent, trusted, and efficient way.
“Sundial was created to empower our clients to find value in raw data,” said Spenser Marshall, Head of Sundial. “When offering raw data, we wanted our clients to be able to access sophisticated data quickly at their fingertips, while having the same level of service and support as traditional investment research. As such, we provide a curated selection of data that we have tested, diligenced, and are able to provide implementation support for, based on a clients individual needs through our CIC tool.”
Agnostiq Launches Covalent to Democratize Access to the World’s Most Advanced Cloud Computing Resources
Agnostiq, Inc., the quantum computing SaaS startup, announced the release of Covalent, an open-source workflow orchestration platform designed specifically for quantum computing and HPC technologies. Covalent aims to make quantum and high performance computing resources more accessible to practitioners and developers, including machine learning engineers and data scientists.
“Covalent started out as an internal tool for our quantum algorithm research team,” says Agnostiq’s head of R&D, Santosh Kumar Radha. “It was a tool designed to give my team the ability to prototype, calculate, and analyze reproducible experiments at scale right from the comfort of our laptops. We are very excited to share Covalent with the broader community.”
Netradyne Introduces Driver•iHub X
Netradyne, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and edge computing focusing on driver and fleet safety, announced the introduction of Driver•iHubX, the latest generation of its Driver•i® accessory that enables customers to add up to four external cameras to their existing installation for a complete 360 degree view around the vehicle. In addition to the new hardware, the company also announced a host of enhancements and new features to its vision-based safety platform.
“The release of Driver•iHubX and other enhancements are an example of how we are continuously improving our features and functionality to provide useful insights to our fleet customers,” said Avneesh Agrawal, chief executive officer, Netradyne. “As a result, fleets are better equipped to understand driving behavior and provide positive, corrective coaching to drivers while creating safer roads for all.”
Query.AI Launches Federated Search for Splunk to Drive Efficiencies in Cybersecurity Investigations
Siloed data is preventing organizations from gaining timely views into cybersecurity risks. To help Splunk® customers unlock access to and value from cybersecurity data wherever it’s stored, regardless of vendor or technology, and without requiring centralization, Query.AI announced Query.AI Federated Search for Splunk. This new app plugs into disparate security technologies quickly and easily using APIs and enables Splunk users to search for and display decentralized data without ever leaving their Splunk consoles. The app also allows organizations to automate previously manual and time-consuming processes that typically require pivoting across multiple security tools. With Query.AI Federated Search for Splunk, security operations teams can increase their productivity, and more quickly, accurately, and cost-effectively address security threats.
“The status quo is for companies to centralize all their cybersecurity data; however, in recent years the security environment has become more complex for running investigations, and data volume and distribution have made centralization impractical,” said Dhiraj Sharan, Query.AI founder and CEO. “Companies typically now have data silos residing in cloud, third-party SaaS, and on-prem environments with limited ability to access or use a good portion of the data. Query.AI Federated Search for Splunk provides security teams with centralized access to decentralized data across their cybersecurity ecosystems, which they can view within their current Splunk consoles. As a result, security operations teams are able to more rapidly understand the scope and impact of potential cybersecurity threats and respond accordingly.”
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