Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new cloud computing specialisation degree created in collaboration with Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA).

The program will be one of the first cloud computing degrees in the US offered by a community college and will be part of its Information Systems Technology (IST) Associate of Applied Science degree starting towards the end of 2018.

AWS said the two-year degree program is built to address the high concentration of tech employers in the Northern Virginia region and the demand for employees with cloud computing skills.

“A key part of the new Virginia economy is building up our talent pipeline to match our education system, and aligning our training programs around the skills needed, such as cloud computing, for 21st-century jobs,” said Ralph Northam, Governor of Virginia.

“Community colleges like NOVA are important engines for workforce development, and this collaboration with Amazon Web Services marks an exciting first step in a broader plan to bring cloud computing education to students across the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

The 63-credit associate degree program is mapped to skills and competency-based credentials required by AWS and other employers who leverage cloud-based services. All students will receive membership in the AWS Educate program and gain hands-on experience with leading cloud technology and tools.

This degree program is the first step in a much broader plan by AWS to bring cloud computing education to students throughout the state of Virginia and potentially to other educational institutes around the world.

“We’re thrilled to collaborate with NOVA on this degree program, as they break new ground to open up opportunities to careers in cloud computing for students in the state of Virginia and around the globe,” said Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at AWS.

“We believe that this degree offering, and our collaboration with community and vocational programs around the world, can fundamentally alter the role that these institutions play in helping to build and diversify the pipeline of new, exceptional talent in the tech community.”

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged to create 1,000 technology jobs in Ireland over the next two years after opening a new office in Dublin yesterday.

The new 170,000 square foot building will offer highly skilled roles for software development, network development, data centre and systems engineers and security and big data specialists for AWS.

There will also be tech job openings at the company’s other sites in north county Dublin, Blanchardstown, and Tallaght, as AWS looks to utilise the talent in the country.

“Today, we have more than 2,500 Amazon employees in Ireland supporting customers from Ireland and around the world,” said Mike Beary, AWS Ireland country manager.

“There is an abundance of talent in Ireland which helped us to exceed our talent growth targets ahead of schedule. Ireland is a great place to do business, the country’s creative culture and diverse pool of technical skills make it an ideal location for our rapidly expanding business.”

AWS has a long history with Ireland, having first set up an office in the country in September 2004. Today more than 1,000 of AWS’s Ireland empoyees are engaged in data centre operations.

In addition to creating new jobs, AWS has collaborated with the Institute of Technology Tallaght (IT Tallaght) to fund a bursary programme for 20 students to study to become data centre technicians.

“Amazon has a long history of success in Ireland and today’s announcement is a testament to Ireland’s highly-skilled, diverse workforce,” Martin Shanahan, CEO of IDA Ireland, a government body designed to encourage foreign private investment in the country, added.

“Tech talent and investment are fundamental to our country’s continued growth, and companies like Amazon are bringing even more energy, vision, innovation and good jobs to Ireland. We are proud to support these companies, who invest in our talent and the future of our economy, and create new opportunities for the country to succeed.”

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Microsoft has leveraged the technologies of submarines and renewable energy to plunge a 40ft-long datacentre into the sea near Scotland’s Orkney Islands.

The experimental shipping container-sized prototype, called “Project Natick”, is currently in operation on the seafloor next to the European Marine Energy Centre, just off the Northern Isles.

This Davy Jones’ datacentre is the result of a year’s worth of research into environmentally sustainable data storage technology that Redmond hopes could one day be ordered to size, rapidly deployed and left to operate at the bottom of the sea for years.

“That is kind of a crazy set of demands to make,” admitted Peter Lee, corporate vice president of Microsoft AI and research, who leads the NEXT group, a Microsoft research program for pioneering new technologies, which is overseeing the experiment. “Natick is trying to get there.”

Microsoft is pursuing what it calls a “relevant moonshot”; projects the company believes have the potential to transform the core of its business and the wider cloud computing industry.

The cylindrical storage container is loaded with 12 racks containing a total of 864 servers and has a self-sustaining cooling system that Microsoft has adapted from the heat-exchange process used in submarines. It works by piping seawater through radiators on the back of each rack to cool them down, before the now-heated water is expelled back into the ocean where it mixes with the surrounding currents.

An underwater cable from the European Marine Energy Centre on the Orkney Islands will power the datacentre. The energy centre is a test site for experimental tidal turbines and wave energy converters that generate electricity from the movement of seawater.

By plunging datacentres in bodies of water near coastal cities, data would have short distances to travel to reach coastal communities. It’s estimated that half of the world’s population live within 120 miles of a coast, so off-shore datacentres could lead to faster web browsing, streaming and a boost for AI-driven technologies.

“For true delivery of AI, we are really cloud-dependent today,” added Lee. “If we can be within one internet hop of everyone, then it not only benefits our products but also the products our customers serve.”

Microsoft hopes to leave the datacentre in place for five years without having to intervene – once submerged, it’s impossible for engineers to gain access to the facility. It will monitor its performance for 12 months to see if such an idea is practical.

Pictures: Microsoft

Microsoft Azure is soon to offer virtual machines with 12TB of RAM for developers looking to run workloads that require lots of memory.

The company made the announcement along with the launch of a number of other VM types that are specifically geared towards running high-memory workloads, such as those running in SAP’s HANA in-memory database service, that need to process huge chunks of data extremely quickly.

Along with the new 12TB VM, Microsoft now also offers a newer M-series range of VMs stretching between 192GB and 4TB capacities certified for HANA, with Microsoft pushing its cloud infrastructure as the ideal place to run your SAP workloads. They are all based on Intel Xeon Scalable (Skylake) processors.

Microsoft will reveal more details on the new VM capacities in the coming months.

They come as Microsoft extends its private cloud, Azure Stack, around the world, doubling the number of countries in which its cloud-in-your-datacentre will operate to 92.

Initially, Azure Stack was launched in 46 countries, but its expansion has been put down to customer demand, spreading to a number of African countries, China and across Europe.

“When I talk with many of our customers about their cloud strategy, there is a clear need for choice and flexibility on where to run workloads and applications,” said Corey Sanders, corporate VP of Azure. “Like most customers, you want to be able to bridge your on-premises and cloud investments.”

“The inclusion of Microsoft Azure Stack services into our portfolio enhances our value proposition in a number of ways, from DevOps tools, a true hybrid cloud offering, access for customers to Azure services like business intelligence and AI, to fully managed service for any customer who wants it,” said Tiberiu Croitoru, CEO of BinBox a Romanian startup telecom service provider.

“Microsoft Azure Stack will bring us customers’ who want to exploit public cloud but were holding back due to data location concerns, In fact, our pipeline already includes about 60 customers we couldn’t have targeted pre-Azure Stack.”

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Amazon is launching a new app store for professional sellers with tools specifically created to help manage pricing, inventory, advertising and a range of other features.

The Marketplace Appstore will feature apps made using the Amazon Market Web Service (Amazon MWS) that have been developed by third-parties and given a seal of approval by Amazon.

The new app store will be available in North America through Amazon’s Seller Central hub and will be deployed slowly to ensure a smooth rollout.

As reported by Cnet, the new app store will operate behind the scenes and offer a way for more sellers to grown on Amazon and provide greater retail opportunities.

For developers, the new app store could potentially put their tools in front of an audience of over one million US small and medium-sized businesses that sell on Amazon.

“Many developers have innovated and created applications that complement our tools and integrate with our service,” Amazon said in a statement.

“We created the Marketplace Appstore to help businesses more easily discover these applications, streamline their business operations and ultimately create a better experience for our customers.”

News of the new seller’s app store came via a press release from Seller Labs, which is a creator of cloud-based e-commerce applications and offers two tools in the Marketplace Appstore.

Ignite, which is for advertising management, such as sponsored products Ads and Feedback Genius for customer communication.

Seller Labs have also been selected as a member of Amazon Marketplace Development Council.

“The open communication with Amazon and the new Developer Council helps Seller Labs ensure it’s developing the right features for our customers and provides the best experience for the seller,” said Hank Harris, CEO of Seller Labs.

“The Marketplace Appstore is simply the beginning of bringing more effective tools to Amazon Sellers.”

Microsoft has acquired machine learning startup Semantic Machines to push conversational AI into Cortana and its Azure Bot Service.

California-based Semantic Machines uses machine learning and adds context to conversations with chatbots, taking information received by the AI and applying it to future dialogue.

The company is run by a mix of conversational AI pioneers, including entrepreneur Dan Roth, UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and Stanford University professor Percy Liang, as well as former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick. Its speech recognition team previously led automatic speech recognition for Apple’s personal assistant Siri.

Microsoft hopes to add Semantic Machines into its current work in conversational AI, improving speech recognition and natural language understanding. Today, it reports that one million developers use its Cognitive Services and 30,000 developers use Azure Bot Services.

“With the acquisition of Semantic Machines, we will establish a conversational AI centre of excellence in Berkeley to push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces,” said David Ku, chief technology officer at Microsoft AI and research.

“Combining Semantic Machines’ technology with Microsoft’s own AI advances, we aim to deliver powerful, natural and more productive user experiences that will take conversational computing to a new level.”

Like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have take steps to improve voice assistants and conversational AI. Earlier this month Google showed off its own human-sounding virtual assistant Google Duplex, which booked a hair appointment over the phone by mimicking human speech.

Amazon has also looked into improving conversational capabilities with Alexa and have said it is developing a ‘memory’ for it, which will enable it to remember bits of information it is given by users while in a conversation.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) and ConsenSys have come together to provide a speedy blockchain template for enterprises, running it on ConsenSys’s Ethereum-based blockcgain platform.

ConsenSys’s Kaleido Blockchain Business Cloud platform aims to allow businesses to use blockchain without the need to start one from scratch.

Ethereum and ConsenSys co-founder, Joseph Lubin, said that the collaboration with AWS marks a turning point for Ethereum and for blockchain technology.

“This is a heavy-duty, full-stack way of getting the company into blockchain solutions,” he said.

“We have been on a mission to accelerate the adoption of Ethereum and all the benefits that decentralisation can bring. We believe Kaleido will become a de-facto standard and a global blockchain platform for business.”

AWS already announced its own blockchain-as-a-service last month, joining the likes of IBM, Accenture, JP Morgan, HSBC and even Facebook that are exploring uses cases for blockchain, which was originally designed to support the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.

Consensys said the Kaleido platform is different, however, in that it provides the underlying technology that records transactions on a public, distributed ledger, but also allows enterprises to customise it to their specific needs.

“We assembled a team to build a platform that pulls together – in a simple, cohesive, and unified way – the right experiences and tools,” said Steve Cerveny, Consensys’s enterprise lead and founder of the platform.

“We knew we needed to design a platform from the business problems down, since that is where the enduring problems are that companies face in the blockchain space.”

Consensys claimed Kaleido is the first example of a “dual mode” use of Ethereum that allows private blockchains to link to public blockchains – essentially recording private transactions on them to achieve more transparency.

The platform will go on AWS Marketplace despite recent research from Gartner that highlighted a lack of interest in the technology from CIOs, with only 1% of organisations having fully deployed a form of it.

In its 2018 CIO survey, the research firm revealed that only 8% of organisations had looked at short-term plans to implement or experiment with the technology and 34% having expressed no interest at all.

However, there are use cases for the technology in the financial sector and supply chains, and last month IBM demonstrated how the digitally distributed ledger tech could be used to track the jewellery industry’s supply chains.

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Kaspersky will relocate some of its infrastructure in Moscow to Switzerland and open a Swiss data centre to address concerns that its software is being used by the Kremlin to gather intelligence.

The Moscow-based anti-virus company announced it is moving its data storage and processing facilities for users in Europe, North America, Singapore, Australia, Japan and South Korea to Zurich towards the end of 2019.

The cyber security company is also opening a transparency centre to enable international regulators to review products and an independent third-party organisation will be established to also review its new processes. 

The move is a direct response to growing concerns from Western nations over mass hostile cyber activity being carried out by Kremlin-backed Russian hackers and that Kaspersky could be linked to them. 

Kaspersky has denied that Russian intelligence services have any access to its user’s data, but the company is concerned with the potential loss of trust posed by the allegations.

“The world is changing and changing really fast. The world in which we worked two or three years ago is different,” said Anton Shingarev, vice president of public affairs at Kaspersky Lab.

“The company needs to address that. The allegations we faced are wrong and there is no evidence. Still the allegations are there. We need to show customers we are taking them seriously and address them.”

At the end of 2017 the US government signed into law a government-wide ban on Kaspersky Lab software after months of suspicion the Russian-based cybersecurity company could spy on other countries through its products.

Twitter also banned Kaspersky from advertising on its platform based on US government’s allegations.

On Monday the Dutch government also moved to phase out Kaspersky anti-virus software for precautionary measures.

In a letter to parliament, Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus said the decision was made because the Russian Government had an “offensive cyber programme that targets among others the Netherlands and Dutch interests”.

Image credit: Shutterstock 

Kaspersky will relocate some of its infrastructure in Moscow to Switzerland and open a Swiss data centre to address concerns that its software is being used by the Kremlin to gather intelligence.

The Moscow-based anti-virus company announced it is moving its data storage and processing facilities for users in Europe, North America, Singapore, Australia, Japan and South Korea to Zurich towards the end of 2019.

The cyber security company is also opening a transparency centre to enable international regulators to review products and an independent third-party organisation will be established to also review its new processes. 

The move is a direct response to growing concerns from Western nations over mass hostile cyber activity being carried out by Kremlin-backed Russian hackers and that Kaspersky could be linked to them. 

Kaspersky has denied that Russian intelligence services have any access to its user’s data, but the company is concerned with the potential loss of trust posed by the allegations.

“The world is changing and changing really fast. The world in which we worked two or three years ago is different,” said Anton Shingarev, vice president of public affairs at Kaspersky Lab.

“The company needs to address that. The allegations we faced are wrong and there is no evidence. Still the allegations are there. We need to show customers we are taking them seriously and address them.”

At the end of 2017 the US government signed into law a government-wide ban on Kaspersky Lab software after months of suspicion the Russian-based cybersecurity company could spy on other countries through its products.

Twitter also banned Kaspersky from advertising on its platform based on US government’s allegations.

On Monday the Dutch government also moved to phase out Kaspersky anti-virus software for precautionary measures.

In a letter to parliament, Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus said the decision was made because the Russian Government had an “offensive cyber programme that targets among others the Netherlands and Dutch interests”.

Image credit: Shutterstock 

Saturday will see Prince Harry marry Meghan Markle at a celebrity-packed St. George’s Chapel in Windsor – and thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), no famous face will go unrecognised.

The cloud giant is using the live broadcast of the royal wedding to showcase its facial recognition technology, working with Sky News to provide viewers with a detailed explanation of who each famous person is and how they know the royal couple.

Rekognition will power the Sky News app’s ‘Who’s Who Live’ feature that will automatically highlight celebrities as they appear on screen.

Users of the Sky News app will be able to immediately see onscreen captions and graphics for each recognised famous guest and navigate the data without leaving the app, while keeping the livestream of the wedding on their screen.

AWS powers Sky News app’s ‘Who’s Who Live’ feature/Credit: AWS Elemental

“We’re excited to have helped Sky News successfully build and deploy the Royal Wedding: Who’s Who Live app,” said ALex Dunlap, general manager of AWS Elemental, which is AWS’s division that specialises in creating videos at scale.

“The high visibility and unpredictable audience size for this type of event made AWS cloud services, including those for media, a great solution by giving the ability to test quickly, only pay for what was used, and produce a reliable, high-quality experience in a matter of weeks.”

A video feed from an outside broadcast van located near the chapel will capture the faces of the rich and famous as they arrive, feeding the information to an AWS Elemental live small form factor appliance, located nearby, and ingest this real-time data into an entirely cloud-based workflow.

Sky News is also using data analysis platform GrayMeta, which has combined with Amazon Rekognition video and image analysis service, to provide the app with a tag of each celebrity.

It’s the ideal opportunity for AWS to showcase its technology – hopefully it performs better than the police’s own systems, which managed to incorrectly match faces in crowds with those from a criminal database 95% of the time, according to a privacy organisation’s report.

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