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Data volumes are exploding across organizations of all types. Research firm IDC projects the amount of global data to more than double between now and 2026, with enterprise data leading that growth — increasing twice as fast as consumer data. Accordingly, it is a business imperative to store, protect, and provide access to this growing volume of data, while finding new ways to derive value from it.

The surge in data volumes is driven by multiple factors: Historical data that companies have been collecting for years continues to pile up. New data types are proliferating, such as IoT (Internet of Things) sensor data, operational technology (OT) data, and customer experience data. Core business functions, such as supply chain, are becoming increasingly more data driven.

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As organizations transition to data-driven business models, they become keepers of immense and ever-growing amounts of data, which they must store, protect, and analyze. For many this is a sizable challenge: 80% of respondents to a survey by 451 Research said they work with more than 100 data sources. Their existing systems also struggle to keep pace: 30% of respondents said it takes their organization more than a week to go from data to insights.

Consequently, most organizations face a long list of data-related challenges. They must get their arms around a massive volume of data, ranging from historical to real-time. They need to determine what type of infrastructure modernization is required to process all that data, and then how to integrate that storage infrastructure with data services, workloads, and applications. And the questions continue: How do we apply automation, AI, and machine learning to data sets? How should we think about the cloud? And how do we take advantage of as-a-service models to deliver data-driven value to the business?

And above all, today’s economic conditions call for doing more with less. How can IT teams meet the business need for advanced data analytics when their budget growth is not keeping pace?

First steps toward data intelligence

Bharti Patel, senior vice president of product engineering at Hitachi Vantara, says businesses should aspire to offer seamless access to data and insights, what she calls “universal data intelligence.” That journey starts with getting a handle on the basics of data discovery and data classification and creating policies for how the organization handles different types of data.

“Thoughtfulness at the beginning of the journey is very important,” says Patel. To derive insights with business value, organizations first must get a handle on the data they have and are collecting. “People really don’t fully understand what value lies in their data; they don’t know where it resides or how to make the best use of it,” she says. “Your strategy about what data goes where—what goes to tape, what stays on-prem, what goes to cloud—is very important.”

To create that strategy, organizations need to define the purpose of their data: Is this data we’re storing simply for compliance purposes, with a low probability that we will ever need to retrieve it? Is this confidential data that must be stored on-premises, with multiple backups? Or is this data that needs to be accessed frequently and should be stored on high-performance NVMe (non-volatile memory express) systems?

Organizations must also prioritize data analytics initiatives to find the right balance between quick-hit projects that deliver limited benefit against more ambitious endeavors that could take longer but deliver more value in the long run.

Patel says it’s vitally important that organizations establish clear lines of communication between business and IT leaders. Everyone should be on the same page when it comes to identifying the most pressing business needs, agreeing on a priority list, and making sure that deliverables from the data analytics teams are presented in a way the business can put to use.

Infrastructure modernization

As data growth accelerates and data strategies are refined, organizations are under pressure to modernize their data infrastructure in a way that is cost-effective, secure, scalable, socially responsible, and compliant with regulations.

Organizations with legacy infrastructures often own hardware from multiple vendors,

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By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Effective infrastructure enables universal data intelligence
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/06/08/1072685/effective-infrastructure-enables-universal-data-intelligence/
Published Date: Thu, 08 Jun 2023 14:00:00 +0000

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These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth

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10 hours ago

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September 22, 2023

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This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In January 2023, Tara Sweeney’s plane landed on Thwaites Glacier, a 74,000-square-mile mass of frozen water in West Antarctica. She arrived with an international research team to study the glacier’s geology and ice fabric, and how its ice melt might contribute to sea level rise. But while near Earth’s southernmost point, Sweeney kept thinking about the moon.

“It felt every bit of what I think it will feel like being a space explorer,” said Sweeney, a former Air Force officer who’s now working on a doctorate in lunar geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. “You have all of these resources, and you get to be the one to go out and do the exploring and do the science. And that was really spectacular.”

That similarity is why space scientists study the physiology and psychology of people living in Antarctic and other remote outposts: For around 25 years, people have played out what existence might be like on, or en route to, another world. Polar explorers are, in a way, analogous to astronauts who land on alien planets. And while Sweeney wasn’t technically on an “analog astronaut” mission — her primary objective being the geological exploration of Earth — her days played out much the same as a space explorer’s might.

For 16 days, Sweeney and her colleagues lived in tents on the ice, spending half their time trapped inside as storms blew snow against their tents. When the weather permitted, Sweeney snowmobiled to and from seismometer sites, once getting caught in a whiteout that, she said, felt like zooming inside a ping-pong ball.

On the glacier, Sweeney was always cold, sometimes bored, often frustrated. But she was also alive, elated. And she felt a form of focus that eluded her on her home continent. “I had three objectives: to be a good crewmate, to do good science, and to stay alive,” she said. “That’s all I had to do.”

None of that was easy, of course. But it may have been easier than landing back on the earth of El Paso. “My mission ended, and it’s over,” she said. “And how do I process through all these things that I’m feeling?”

Then, in May, she attended the 2023 Analog Astronaut Conference, a gathering of people who simulate long-term space travel from the relative safety and comfort of Earth. Sweeney had learned about the event when she visited an analog facility in the country of Jordan. There, she’d met one of the conference’s founders, Jas Purewal, who invited her to the gathering.

The meeting was held, appropriately, at Biosphere 2, a glass-paneled, self-contained habitat in the Arizona desert that resembles a 1980s sci-fi vision of a space settlement — one of the first facilities built, in part, to understand whether humans could create a habitable environment on a hostile planet.

wide view of the Biosphere 2 facilities
The 40-acre Biosphere 2 campus in Oracle, Arizona. It was one of the first facilities built for analog astronaut missions. UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

A speaker at the conference had spent eight months locked inside a simulated space habitat in Moscow, Russia, and she talked about how the post-mission period had been hard for her. The psychological toll of reintegration became a chattering theme throughout the whole meeting. Sweeney, it turned out, wasn’t alone.

Across the world, around 20 analog space facilities host people who volunteer to be study subjects, isolating themselves for weeks or months in polar stations, desert outposts, or even sealed habitats inside NASA centers. These places are intended to mimic how people might fare on Mars or the moon, or on long-term orbital stations. Such research, scientists say, can help test out medical and software tools, enhance indoor agriculture, and address the difficulties analog astronauts face, including, like Sweeney’s, those that come when their “missions” are over.

Lately, a community of researchers has started to make the field more formalized: laying out standards so that results are comparable; gathering research papers into a single database so investigators can

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By: Sarah Scoles
Title: These scientists live like astronauts without leaving Earth
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/22/1080035/scientists-live-like-astronauts-without-leaving-earth/
Published Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2023 15:38:48 +0000

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Making sense of sensor data

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12 hours ago

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September 22, 2023

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Consider a supply chain where delivery vehicles, shipping containers, and individual products are sensor-equipped. Real-time insights enable workers to optimize routes, reduce delays, and efficiently manage inventory. This smart orchestration boosts efficiency, minimizes waste, and lowers costs.

Many industries are rapidly integrating sensors, creating vast data streams that can be leveraged to open profound business possibilities. In energy management, growing use of sensors and drone footage promises to enable efficient energy distribution, lower costs, and reduced environmental impact. In smart cities, sensor networks can enhance urban life by monitoring traffic flow, energy consumption, safety concerns, and waste management.

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These aren’t glimpses of a distant future, but realities made possible today by the increasingly digitally instrumented world. Internet of Things (IoT) sensors have been rapidly integrated across industries, and now constantly track and measure properties like temperature, pressure, humidity, motion, light levels, signal strength, speed, weather events, inventory, heart rate and traffic.

The information these devices collect—sensor and machine data—provides insight into the real-time status and trends of these physical parameters. This data can then be used to make informed decisions and take action—capabilities that unlock transformative business opportunities, from streamlined supply chains to futuristic smart cities.

John Rydning, research vice president at IDC, projects that sensor and machine data volumes will soar over the next five years, achieving a greater than 40% compound annual growth rate through 2027. He attributes that not primarily to an increasing number of devices, as IoT devices are already quite prevalent, but rather due to more data being generated by each one as businesses learn to make use of their ability to produce real-time streaming data.

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Meanwhile, sensors are growing more interconnected and sophisticated, while the data they generate increasingly includes a location in addition to a timestamp. These spatial and temporal features not only capture data changes over time, but also create intricate maps of how these shifts unfold across locations—facilitating more comprehensive insights and predictions.

But as sensor data grows more complex and voluminous, legacy data infrastructure struggles to keep pace. Continuous readings over time and space captured by sensor devices now require a new set of design patterns to unlock maximum value. While businesses have capitalized on spatial and time-series data independently for over a decade, its true potential is only realized when considered in tandem, in context, and with the capacity for real-time insights.

Download the report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff.

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By: MIT Technology Review Insights
Title: Making sense of sensor data
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/21/1079924/making-sense-of-sensor-data/
Published Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2023 17:00:00 +0000

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The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal

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14 hours ago

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September 22, 2023

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This is today’s edition of The Download our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.

How inverse vaccines might tackle diseases like multiple sclerosis

On the whole, typical vaccines prime the immune system to respond. But scientists are also working on “inverse vaccines” that teach the immune system to stand down.

Last week Jeffrey Hubbell and his colleagues at the University of Chicago reported that an inverse vaccine they developed had successfully reversed a disease similar to multiple sclerosis in mice. Hubbell has tested this approach before, but only as a way of preventing the disease—not curing it.

These immune-dampening shots could lead to a whole host of therapies to treat autoimmune diseases. And in fact, Anokion, a company Hubbell cofounded, has already launched clinical trials to test whether this type of inverse vaccine might help people with multiple sclerosis and celiac disease. Read the full story.

—Cassandra Willyard

This story is from The Checkup, our weekly biotech and health newsletter. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Thursday.

To learn more about vaccines, why not check out:

+ What to know about this autumn’s covid vaccines. New variants will pose a challenge, but early signs suggest the shots will still boost antibody responses. Read the full story.

+ Who benefits most from the new covid vaccines? Data show that older adults and people with underlying illnesses need the vaccine most. Read the full story.

+ What’s next for mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines helped us through the covid-19 pandemic—but they could also help defend against many other infectious diseases, offer universal protection against flu, and even treat cancer. Read the full story.

The must-reads

I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.

1 The UK is revisiting Microsoft’s offer to acquire Activision
But it’s not a done deal yet. (WSJ $)
UK regulators have accepted Microsoft’s tweaks to the deal, in principle. (FT $)

2 The US has granted Ukraine a lot more military hardware
But long-range missiles, which Ukraine covets, won’t be included in the package. (ABC News)
The US equipment will plug the gap now Poland has ceased sending weapons. (Economist $)+ Decoy weapons are successfully fooling Russian troops. (FT $)
Inside the messy ethics of making war with machines. (MIT Technology Review)

3 The blockchain’s future looks surprisingly crypto-free
Startups have more modest goals now, ideally without legal complications. (Rest of World)+ Crypto parties are still raging if you know where to look, though. (Bloomberg $)

4 These law geeks are taking us inside Google’s antitrust trial
Google may have stopped the trial from being live streamed, but it can’t prevent members of the public from sitting in. (Wired $)

5 People are still queuing to buy the new iPhone
Lines of eager customers in China, the UK, Dubai and Australia suggest Apple’s appeal is as strong as ever. (Bloomberg $)

6 A man-made organism defies the rules of biology
In theory, using unnatural amino acids could make organisms less prone to viral infections. (Proto.Life)

7 Your intimate health information is just data to Big Tech
Data that can generally be sold onto willing advertisers. (The Atlantic $)
How your brain data could be used against you. (MIT Technology Review)

8 Gen Z isn’t immune to online scams
In fact, in many cases, they fall for them more than boomers. (Vox)

9 Absolutely nobody loves PowerPoint
Nonetheless, it persists. (FT $)
Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation. (MIT Technology Review)

10 Don’t throw out your used coffee grounds
They can become the foundation for all sorts of 3D-printing projects instead. (Ars Technica)
Watch this team of drones 3D-print a tower. (MIT Technology Review)

Quote of the day

“It feels bad, you feel hurt. Then you give yourself time to grieve, you find someone else and you get excited again.”

—Rowan Rosenthal, a former principal product designer for Grindr, likens the decision to leave the company because of its strict return-to-office mandate to the end of a relationship, they tell the Washington Post.

The big story

California’s coming offshore wind boom faces big engineering hurdles

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December 2022

Last December, dozens of companies fought for the right to lease the first commercial wind power sites off the coast of California in an auction

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By: Rhiannon Williams
Title: The Download: inverse vaccines, and Microsoft’s big deal
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/22/1080043/the-download-inverse-vaccines-and-microsofts-big-deal/
Published Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:10:00 +0000

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