“The enhanced capabilities of the on-demand storage services based on the NetApp’s ‘Solidfire’ platform will help our customers grow their storage infrastructure seamlessly and in a granular way both in terms of capacity as well as performance,” said Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director & CEO, Netmagic, in a statement.

NetApp’s ‘SolidFire’ enables businesses’ IT infrastructure quickly and seamlessly at scale, while enhancing developer productivity and improving time-to-market of new applications through simplified storage operations at the same time.

“Our SolidFire storage platform simplifies end-user cloud experiences, while reducing internal complexity with its unique QoS and scale-out architecture which helps realise business results faster,” added Anil Valluri, President, NetApp India & SAARC.

NTT Communications recently announced plans to invest more than $160 million for its data centre expansion in India.

To become operational by April 2018, two new data centres are located in Mumbai and Bengaluru, the construction of which was initiated by Netmagic.

”India has been a key strategic market for us with the accelerating shift of IT services from traditional enterprise data centres into the Cloud-based services,” said Tetsuya Shoji, President and CEO, NTT Communications, in July.

“With further expansion of data centre footprint and addition of international data network services to our service portfolio, we aim to meet the growing market needs for mobility, e-Commerce, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud and Big Data,” Shoji added.

The data centres in Mumbai and Bengaluru will add nearly 500,000 square feet of gross floor space, accommodating 2,750 racks per 22MW power and 1,500 racks per 15MW power respectively.

IANS

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It also seeks to reduce human error in identifying breast cancer of various levels of aggressiveness to assist in distinguishing normal and low and higher risk malignant tumours.

To do that, the team tapped into deep learning, a form of AI concerned with algorithms inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks.

“The idea is to assess and identify the cancer that’s of high risk. This software allows accurate identification of the aggressive cancers anywhere, even in the remotest part of the country, allowing faster referral and quicker treatment for patients, irrespective of their geographical location,” Sanjoy Chatterjee, senior clinical oncologist at TMC, told IANS.

Chandan Chakraborty and Monjoy Saha of IIT-Kgp and TMC’s Indu Arun and Rosina Ahmed are the co-authors of the study, published in Nature Scientific Reports in June.

They were driven by the fact that the precise grouping of aggressiveness (high or low rates of cell growth) of breast cancer remains a challenge at a time when the disease is the top cancer in women worldwide and is increasing, particularly in developing countries like India, where the majority of cases are diagnosed in their late stages.

“For best results, it is always desirable to have experienced pathologists in sophisticated laboratories, but it is also important that we recognise that this is not always feasible, especially outside large urban hospitals,” Ahmed pointed out.

The clinical decision on breast cancer aggressiveness is mostly made manually based on certain pathological markers as seen in examining a tissue or cell sample under a microscope (called biopsy), they said.

“The manual assessment is subjective, and could be error-prone with a steep learning curve and dependent on the intra and inter-observer ambiguities. The AI algorithm aids pathologists to identify aggressive forms accurately to allow quicker and faster referral and suitable treatment,” said Chakraborty, lead researcher and professor-in-charge of the Biomedical Imaging Informatics (BMI) Laboratory, School of Medical Science & Technology, IIT-Kgp.

The software showed over 90 per cent precision in the experimental set-up, he added.

The application revolves around a protein (or marker) called Ki-67 which is used to calculate an index that groups cancers in the “low” or “high” aggressiveness groups.

The Ki-67 globally-approved index is used to help predict outcome (prognosis) and help figure out what treatment might work best, they say. It is increasingly being used by doctors to reflect cancer behaviour.

“The proposed computerised recognition can precisely measure the Ki-67 score by detection of the faster-growing cancer cell percentage, called hotspots, from the biopsy tissue images.

“The software has been standardised. As soon as the pathologists get the biopsy, all they have to do is make a section, grab an image and put in the computer,” Chatterjee explained.

“To get the job done faster, a basic set up requires a GPU (graphical processing unit) to compute the images.

“There is no need for expensive infrastructure. Moreover, in the rural and urban areas with minimum or few advanced instrumentation, manual inspection of Ki-67 scoring may provide results which are error-prone,” Saha, research scholar, School of Medical Science and Technology, IIT-Kgp, told IANS.

The study notes: “Several machine learning approaches have been reported; nevertheless, none of them had worked on deep learning-based hotspots detection and proliferation scoring.”

“The next phase of the study is validation. The clinicians and the pathologists are going to recruit patients and we will treat them depending on what the pathologists say. We will tally the results from the software as well as from the pathologists, so the discordant rates are pretty low. Then we can release the process for clinical use,” added Chatterjee.

IANS

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“The next generation of changes (in lighting) that people will adopt will be intelligent, smart lights, which are IoT devices. Lights in the next 5-10 years will become one of the largest IoT-driven devices,” Chitale told IANS in an interview.

According to Chitale, intelligent lights, which is at a nascent stage now with nearly five per cent presence in the country’s lighting industry, is expected to be “the default” over the next 5-10 years.

Smart, connected lighting is the next-generation energy-efficient LED products with additional sensors to sense things such as occupancy and temperature.

According to a recent TechSci Research report titled “India LED Lighting Market Forecast & Opportunities, 2020”, the country’s LED lighting market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of over 32 per cent during 2015-20.

“Today, when we think of buying a phone, we don’t think of a landline phone. By default, we think of a mobile or a smartphone. We anticipate that over the next 5-10 years — closer to five years — potentially, when people think of upgrading their existing lights or installing new ones, they would install lights or lighting systems which are smart,” Chitale emphasised.

Chitale asserted that India is ready to adopt the smart lighting solutions on a larger scale.

“We are a very technically-aware economy. If you see penetration of smartphones in our country, we are now one of the largest markets in the world. Smart lighting essentially rides on the same technology backbone,” the executive told IANS.

“In terms of digital infrastructure, technology awareness and software progress to develop application which are India-specific, we have all of it. Hence what we have seen is when we introduced solutions in India, in each of the four-five verticals that I spoke about (homes, offices, street and retail chains, etc.), we have some very quick hits and there are many adopters who are lapping it up,” Chitale added.

Currently, in the overall lighting industry, smart lighting is still in single digits — less than 10 per cent — in the country.

“But it is growing very rapidly,” Chitale said, adding that “globally, and also in India, smart connected lighting for us is doubling every year. It is growing extremely rapidly, although starting at a very small pace right now”.

With the government’s recent “Smart Cities” initiative, Chitale expects that smart street lighting “will be one of the key pillars of the mission” in India.

Naya Raipur, the new capital city of Chhattisgarh, was one of the first cities to upgrade to the connected smart street lighting system.

Chitale said the company is also working with the Pune Municipal Corporation for smart street lighting project.—IANS

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In Pennsylvania, authorities dismissed rape charges after data from a woman’s Fitbit contradicted her version of her whereabouts during the 2015 alleged assault.

Vast amounts of data collected from our connected devices — fitness bands, smart refrigerators, thermostats and automobiles, among others — are increasingly being used in US legal proceedings to prove or disprove claims by people involved.

In a recent case that made headlines, authorities in Arkansas sought, and eventually obtained, data from a murder suspect’s Amazon Echo speaker to obtain evidence.

The US Federal Trade Commission in February fined television maker Vizio for secretly gathering data on viewers collected from its smart TVs and selling the information to marketers.

The maker of the smartphone-connected sex toy We-Vibe meanwhile agreed in March to a court settlement of a class-action suit from buyers who claimed “highly intimate and sensitive data” was uploaded to the cloud without permission — and shown last year to be vulnerable to hackers.

Trying to come to grips with data collected, stored and analyzed by all these devices can be daunting.

“When one looks at the expectation of privacy today it is radically different than it was a generation ago,” said Erik Laykin, a digital forensics specialist with the consultancy Duff & Phelps and author of a 2013 book on computer forensics. “Privacy is dead.”

Laykin has consulted or testified in cases of insurance fraud, divorce and other legal proceedings where digital evidence can be relevant.

He said the “always on” nature of “internet of Things” devices means huge amounts of personal information is circulating among companies, in the internet cloud and elsewhere, with few standards on how the data is protected or used.

“The net result of these technologies is that we are forgoing our personal privacy and our personal autonomy and even sovereignty as humans and relinquishing that to a combination of state, harvesters of big data, omnipresent institutions and systems.”

A report last year from Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for internet studies pointed out the range of new connected devices that can yield evidence for law enforcement, “ranging from televisions and toasters to bed sheets, light bulbs, cameras, toothbrushes, door locks, cars, watches and other wearables,” which “are being packed with sensors and wireless connectivity.”

“The audio and video sensors on IoT devices will open up numerous avenues for government actors to demand access to real-time and recorded communications,” the report said.

John Sammons, a Marshall University professor of digital forensics and a former police officer, said this new abundance of evidence can be good for law enforcement if investigators can find relevant data.

“You have to be aware it’s even there,” he said.

“Most police officers would not even think to look at a Fitbit or a thermostat.”

Another problem is the sheer volume of data and computing resources needed to obtain specific data, often requiring weeks of computing time.

Sammons presented research on use of connected cars this year at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, saying newer vehicles with improved connectivity offer “a significant new source of potential evidence” for both criminal and civil litigation.

Privacy activists meanwhile worry that these devices can unleash new kinds of surveillance without the knowledge of users, and that the legal system must define limits for constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said gathering data from connected speakers such as the Amazon Echo should face the same standard as wiretaps, which need a warrant from a judge based on probable cause of a crime, rather than a more streamlined law enforcement subpoena.

“In your house you should have absolute privacy,” Stanley said.

One gray area in the law is that conversations recorded on home speakers may be sent to the cloud; in that case the holding of the data by a “third party” may wipe away constitutional privacy protection.

“We think there needs to be jurisprudential and legislative means of addressing these issues,” Stanley said. “The privacy invasions are so significant.”

Jules Polonetsky, chief executive of the non-profit Future of Privacy Forum, said that while legal issues are still being debated, “you should always know if you have a device that is sending data elsewhere.”

Polonetsky said it’s important to set a legal and constitutional privacy framework to reassure consumers.

“It’s critical we get the balance between data utility and law enforcement access right,” he said, “or people won’t trust these devices.”

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This is just one application for French engineering giant Altran’s prototype ‘connected operator suit’ and a glimpse of the near future, when the Industrial Internet of Things transforms the way we work.

The IIoT is part of the larger Internet of Things, the network of computers and devices that will soon be sharing huge amounts of data. Some forecaster predict as many as fifty billion sensors mounted in anything from refrigerators to cars to MRI scanners will be online by the end of 2020.

Altran’s Internet of Things Solutions Director, Jean-Jacques Caraco, says his vision of the future is one where data saves the health of workers – and money.

“All workers that work in difficult environments either outside on construction or in a plant or wherever, all workers that are submitted to potential dangerous situations in the long run need to see their movement supervised so as to anticipate problems …[…]…but it’s also, let’s call a spade a spade, an important source of cost. So if we want to reduce those costs we can do that by preventing difficult postures,” Caraco said.

The connected suit’s sensors build up a log of its wearer’s body movements and allow real-time analysis of someone’s activity on an unprecedented scale.

Altran’s Chief Technology Officer Keith Williams said predictions that the IoT is driving a fourth Industrial revolution are accurate.

“There is definitely a revolution coming and there are four elements to that revolution. The first one is around product virtualisation. How you can make new products and design new products virtually. The second one is additive layer manufacturing or 3D printing. That’s being able to use radically different approaches and materials for developing your new products. The third element is collaborative robotics which changes the way workers on the manufacturing floor interact with machines and the final element, the fourth element is the Internet of Things and that the glue that enables you to move information from the way the product is designed, the way the product is manufactured and also the way the product is used to optimise the way you create new products,” Williams said.

Knowing exactly how to use your product is one direct way the IoT will bring businesses and their customers closer together offering huge opportunities, Williams added.

As manfacturers around the world try to harness the excitement surrounding the IIoT, preparations are well underway in Abu Dhabi for the first global gathering of manufacturers, the Global Manufacturing and Industrialisation Summit or GMIS, at the end of March. A perfectly timed event, according to the head of the GMIS organising committee, Badr Al-Olama, who is also CEO of Strata Manufacturing.

“The fourth industrial revolution is not something that is made up. It is happening today and it’s happening in the manufacturing environment, it’s happening all across us, all around us. The only thing that’s different is people are talking more about it. They are trying to showcase some of the results and it makes a fundamental change to the way that we do business. It changes the way that we look at things. It makes topics such as cyber-security come at the forefront of priorities and it’s just phenomenal what it’s doing to the manufacturing world,” said Mr Al-Olama.—Reuters

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But the WikiLeaks allegation that the CIA commandeered some Samsung smart TVs as listening devices is a reminder that inviting the “Internet of Things” into your home comes with some risk.

How safe are your connected devices? Tread carefully, but don’t freak out, experts say.

A GROWING INDUSTRY

Connected devices are unquestionably popular. Research firm Gartner expects there to be 8.4 billion connected “things” in use in 2017, up 31 percent from 2016. By 2020, this number could reach 20.4 billion, with smart TVs and digital set-top boxes serving as the most popular consumer gadgets.

For businesses, meanwhile, smart electric meters and commercial security cameras are expected to be the most popular “internet of things” products.

Such gadgets are convenient, but they can present easy targets for hackers. In October of 2016 hackers seized control of webcams and digital video recorders and recruited them into internet “botnets” that launched denial-of-service attacks against popular websites such as Netflix and Twitter, forcing them offline for some users.

LIMITED GOVERNMENT

There’s a growing call for regulation to secure connected devices, but it’s unclear whether this will happen. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a report describing runaway security problems with devices that recently gained internet capabilities, a collection that includes medical implants, surveillance cameras, home appliances and baby monitors.

“The growing dependency on network-connected technologies is outpacing the means to secure them,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said at the time. This, of course, was during the Obama administration; more regulation so far appears unlikely under President Donald Trump.

Forrester Research analyst Josh Zelonis said consumers can’t wait for the government to fix things. Instead, he said, people have to demand that manufacturers are accountable for the security of their products and that they support the products throughout the product’s lifetime, not just when it’s sold.

Which, of course, is far easier said than done.

BRAND APPEAL

One problem: Many people don’t realize they have to secure connected devices with passwords like they do with computers. “People don’t think of a TV or a camera as a computer and that’s all it is,” said Gartner analyst Avivah Litan.

If a device comes with a default password, it needs changing the moment you hook it up. Similarly, your Wi-Fi password shouldn’t still be the one it came out of the box; it needs a hard-to-guess passphrase to ensure that it can’t be easily hacked.

Another problem: Cheaper devices from no-name companies also pose more of a security risk. While big companies like Apple, Amazon or Samsung can patch up security holes as soon as they find them, smaller companies don’t have the resources — or, sometimes, the ability or willingness — to do so.

“Bigger companies typically have more resources and more to lose, so they are typically more secure,” said Patrick Moorhead, analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Password-protecting most connected devices, though, should go a long way toward ensuring they won’t be used to take down Netflix.

“Don’t buy from smaller vendors,” Moorhead said. “Don’t buy devices that don’t encrypt data everywhere.” And change the password if you can.

MEASURED CAUTION

Sydnee Thompson, a 24-year-old from Troy, Michigan, is cautious but ultimately sanguine about her connected devices. She has an internet-connected TV, but she’s been reluctant to get a “smart” device like Amazon’s Echo home assistant because of worries that it would always be listening — and that others might also.

But Thompson uses a smartphone and already assumes that if the government wants to track her, it can. “If the government wants to find out something about you, they will,” she said. “It’s just the world we live in.”

Cameron Matz from Stafford, Virginia, said he has several smart TVs and plans to keep using them. “We can’t be afraid to live our life because some person out in the world is listening in on your conversation about daily activities.”

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The software, known as Fault Slip Potential (FSP), will be available for free starting March 2, Xinhua news agency reported.

Acknowledging that “faults are everywhere in the Earth’s crust, so you can’t avoid them,” said Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences, who worked with his graduate student Rall Walsh on the project.

“Fortunately, the majority of them are not active and pose no hazard to the public. The trick is to identify which faults are likely to be problematic, and that’s what our tool does,” Zoback added.

Oil and gas operations can generate significant quantities of “produced water,” or brackish water that needs to be disposed of through deep injection to protect drinking water.

Energy companies also dispose of water that flows back after hydraulic fracturing in the same way.

This process can increase pore pressure, namely the pressure of groundwater trapped within the tiny spaces inside rocks in the subsurface, which in turn increases the pressure on nearby faults, causing them to slip and release seismic energy in the form of earthquakes.

The FSP tool uses three key pieces of information to help determine the probability of a fault being pushed to slip: the first is how much wastewater injection will increase pore pressure at a site; the second is knowledge of the stresses acting in the earth; the third is knowledge of pre-existing faults in the area.

Zoback and Walsh have started testing their FSP tool in Oklahoma, of mid-western US, which has experienced a sharp rise in the number of earthquakes since 2009, due largely to wastewater injection operations.

Their analysis suggests that some wastewater injection wells in Oklahoma were unwittingly placed near stressed faults already primed to slip.

The researchers believe regulators could use the tool to identify areas where proposed injection activities could prove problematic so that enhanced monitoring efforts can be implemented.

“Our tool provides a quantitative probabilistic approach for identifying at-risk faults so that they can be avoided,” Walsh was quoted as saying in a news release on Monday.

IANS

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Researchers at Google’s Project Loon—part of the company’s X research lab—said it was now able to use machine learning to predict weather systems, meaning the firm has a greater control over where its balloons go, making it possible to focus on a specific region, rather than circumnavigating the globe, BBC reported on Friday.

“We can now run an experiment and try to give service in a particular place in the world with ten, twenty or thirty balloons,” Astro Teller, head of Alphabet’s X unit (formerly Google X), was quoted as saying.

“Real users” will be able to use the system in the “coming months”, he added—but he did not specify where the initial roll out would take place.

Under the project, the firm will suspend a network of huge, tennis-court sized balloons that will beam down connectivity.

The balloons float in the stratosphere around 11 miles high. By raising or lowering altitude, the balloons can be caught in different weather streams, changing direction, the report said.

“By using machine-learning algorithms, Google might have cracked a way to predict weather with enough accuracy to make it possible to hover balloons over a relatively small area for a long period of time,” the report noted.

Teller said that Project Loon was one of the more “mature” moonshot ideas at the company and Google was in “no rush” to make Project Loon a stand-alone business.

Last year, Teller said the connection had advanced to deliver about 15mbps internet access.

IANS

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The new solutions are “SafeNet Luna HSM 7” and “SafeNet High Speed Encryptors”.

“As organisations increasingly embrace the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud-based applications, their requirements to cope with big data are intensifying,” said Todd Moore, Senior Vice President of Encryption Products at Gemalto, in a statement.

The “SafeNet Luna HSM 7” (Hardware Security Module) offers most scalable platform to perform the highest number of simultaneous cryptographic operations including encryption, decryption, authentication and digital signing while providing tamper-resistant protection for cryptographic keys.

The 100-Gbps “SafeNet High Speed Encryptor” provides unmatched performance and security to protect data and sensitive communications across large-scale, high-capacity networks.

“Streamlined management of data security controls have become vital in securing data as it moves between enterprises, multi-cloud environments, networks and devices,” Moore added.

IANS

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During the meeting, Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer highlighted the features of DEWA’s new headquarters named Al-Sheraa, which is Arabic for sail. The new building will be the tallest, largest, and smartest net Zero Energy Building (ZEB) in the world. The Al-Sheraa building will have over a million square feet, over 200,000 square feet of land. It is being built in the heart of the Cultural Village in Al Jadaf.

The RTA delegation included Maitha bin Udai, CEO of the Traffic and Roads Agency, Ahmed Bahrozyan, CEO of the Licensing Agency, Adel Al Marzouqi, Director of Parking, Mendana Al Obaidly, Deputy Director and Manager of Technical Support, Office of the Director-General and Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, and Roudha Al Mehrizi, Deputy Director of Marketing and Corporate Communications and Manager of National Identity and CSR.

“We work to achieve the vision of Vice President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, to make Dubai a global centre for clean energy and green economy. By building Al-Sheraa, we establish a role model in Dubai and the world to achieve a balance between development and the environment to protect the right of future generations to live in a clean, healthy and safe environment. This supports the UAE Vision 2021 to make the UAE one of the best countries in the world, and the Dubai Plan 2021, to make Dubai the preferred place to live, work, and visit,” said Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer.

“The total built-up area of Al-Sheraa will be over 1.5 million square feet. The building will have over 16,500 square metres of photovoltaic solar panels to produce over 3,500 kilowatt. There will be more than 2,000 square metres of Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV). Total renewable energy generated by the building will be over 5,400 megawatt hours (MW/h) annually. The building will have an Energy Utilization Intensity (EUI) of 60 kW/m2 per year. The building will be completed and inaugurated by the end of 2019,” added Al Tayer.

Mattar Al Tayer was impressed with the technical and architectural design of DEWA’s new headquarters, which will be a smart eco-friendly building that uses solar energy to meet the electricity needs of the building. He was also impressed with the main and necessary equipment that meet the highest levels and provide a suitable environment for employees and customers.

Al-Sheraa’s design was inspired by the traditional houses in the UAE, where enclosed spaces overlook an open courtyard. The courtyard will be the focal point and most prominent feature of the building. To reduce heat in the open courtyard, a sail design is used to provide shaded areas. Natural light during the day will stream through specific openings in the sail, giving sufficient light without the associated heat. The courtyard features trees and plants to give occupants an outdoor feel in an indoor setting, within a sustainable environment.

The building will use the latest technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), Big and Open Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Robots will be used for cleaning and to provide security services. A smart app will alert the employees about the time they should leave their homes based on the traffic. The same app can be used to book parking spaces and meeting rooms. Visitors can use the app to reach the building and the meeting rooms easily.—WAM

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