The New South Wales (NSW) Police Force is using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to speed up investigations by automating manual tasks.

The force’s AI-infused platform, called Insights, gives police access to a wide array of critical information and automates many tasks such as transcribing recordings of audio interviews or poring through petabytes of CCTV footage.

A 20-minute recording of a statement can take a police officer two to three hours to manually transcribe, but through the Insights platform, this is now completed in seconds or minutes, according to Gordon Dunsford, CITO and executive director of digital technology and innovation at the police force.

In one investigation, NSW Police collected 14,000 pieces of CCTV footage that would have previously taken detectives months to analyse. With the AI/ML technology, the platform ingested all the CCTV for the analysis in around five hours. 

Insights is currently hosted internally but is expected to migrate to the cloud soon. NSW Police is using a containerisation strategy to parcel up data that needs to be interpreted rapidly and sends it to Azure for processing. Dunsford said Microsoft Azure’s security credentials are highly valued by NSW Police, helping it to de-risk its modernisation program.

Microsoft and NSW Police claim the system has been designed with ethics front and centre, and in consultation with privacy experts with a particular focus on avoiding bias. In June 2020, Microsoft confirmed it would not sell or deploy facial recognition to police services, and stated that the Insights platform aligned with that commitment and brings significant value to the NSW Police in their pursuit of justice.

NSW has the largest police force in Australia, with over 22,000 members. Since 2017/18 it has been pursuing a new Digital IT Strategy, with one of the landmark programmes being the Integrated Policing Operating System (IPOS), a modern cloud-based platform replacing the force’s 27-year-old central database. The NSW Police is working with Microsoft Consulting Services on the build of the IPOS application with Protected level security in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Following a fortnight of Black Lives Matter protests, IBM decided to «sunset» its general-purpose facial recognition and analysis software over ethical concerns last June. The cloud giant declared it would no longer distribute these systems for fear it could be used for purposes that go against the company’s principles of trust and transparency. 

Microsoft followed in the footsteps of IBM and Amazon and declared it would not sell facial recognition technology to police departments in the US until a national law was in place that could govern the technology.

Half of UK businesses expect to reduce the size of their office space, with a third looking to cut it down by 30%, according to a new report. 

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) surveyed 258 C-Suite executives and over senior employees of the UK’s largest companies and their proposed cuts roughly equated to nine million square feet of space.

The finding indicates an appetite for ‘hybrid work‘ models in the UK, where employees mix remote and in-office shifts, with around 71% of the respondents planning to increase investment in technology to enable more agile work models over the next two years. 

As such, only 10% of those surveyed agreed that the level of employees working in the office will match that of pre-pandemic levels, despite taking into account the speed of the vaccine roll out. The consensus from the survey among the senior executives is that staff will continue working remotely for two or three days a week. 

«The figures couldn’t be more clear, the shift to hybrid working, with part of your time at home and part in the office, is pretty much embedded into the working culture of many organisations,» said Angus Johnson, the UK real estate leader for PwC UK. «So much so that a significant proportion of the businesses we spoke to are planning to reduce their office portfolio, which could lead to up to nine million square feet of vacant space. 

«However, it’s clear that the role of the office is not going to disappear. We may see an increased demand for flexible space as many businesses’ operating models may well need that option if holding dead space is to be avoided. It’s also clear that the nature and purpose of office space are going to change.»

Many of the respondents are said to be implementing ‘subleasing‘ models and exploring partnerships for shared office space. What’s more, 51% of the organisations with 100 employees or more already have a workplace strategy that considers the long-term impact of COVID. 

Video conferencing platform Zoom beat analysts’ expectations with sales more than doubling by 191% in its first-quarter earnings. 

Revenue for the quarter that ended 30 April jumped up to $956.2 million from $328.2 million in the same period of 2020. 

The company’s massive success in 2020, where it became a household name during the pandemic, has bled into 2021. The firm recorded revenue rising 369% in the previous quarter, with many analysts predicting a larger fall as more businesses bring employees back into the office. 

«Work is no longer a place,» said the company’s CEO, Eric S. Yuan. «It’s a space where Zoom serves to empower your teams to connect and bring their best ideas to life. We are energised to help lead the evolution to hybrid work that allows greater flexibility, productivity, and happiness to both in-person and virtual connections.»

The company’s profits also reached more than $227 million (£160m) in the first quarter, roughly ten times more than the $27 million it brought in over the first quarter of 2020. Paid users also increased with businesses with more than 10 employees jumping up 87% to 497,000 in the first quarter. 

Although it recorded enormous success in 2020, it wasn’t until the second quarter, which ended 31 July, that the firm really began to see huge usage spikes (355%). As the pandemic spread across Europe and the US, and lockdown restrictions started to be implemented, Zoom became bogged down by security issues. Users began reporting incidents of ‘Zoom bombing‘ and businesses questioned its lack of end-to-end encryption. 

As such, most analysts are estimating that Zoom’s growth will be lower in the second quarter compared to the year before. With the roll-out of the vaccine and more offices set to welcome workers back in again, there is a suggestion that Zoom will lose some relevance. 

Amazon’s catalogue of Internet of Things (IoT) devices will soon be able to create low-bandwidth shared networks with each other in an experiment to broaden smart home functionality.

Amazon Sidewalk will create networks between ‘bridge’ devices, such as Echo or Ring units, by pooling together small portions of bandwidth and sharing this capacity to offer better smart home services to users.

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From 8 June, devices will be instructed to search for similar units in order to form these networks, which Amazon claims will make it easier to maintain a consistent connection, even if your own network is knocked offline temporarily. The company also says connecting the devices will extend their effective working range.

For example, if a user’s Echo device were to lose connection, it would be able to make use of the Sidewalk network to borrow bandwidth and stay online. Smart lights, pet locators, and smart locks will also continue to work over longer distances when they’re tapped into these shared networks.

«Amazon Sidewalk is a shared network that helps devices work better,» the firm said in a series of FAQs. «Operated by Amazon at no charge to customers, Sidewalk can help simplify new device setup, extend the low-bandwidth working range of devices to help find pets or valuables with Tile trackers, and help devices stay online even if they are outside the range of their home Wi-Fi.

«In the future, Sidewalk will support a range of experiences from using Sidewalk-enabled devices, such as smart security and lighting and diagnostics for appliances and tools.»

Although users may be concerned about the potential privacy implications of participation in the experiment, Amazon claims in its security whitepaper that there are three layers of encryption applied to the data transmitted through the scheme.

Users have the option of turning off participation in any of their devices, although this will be turned on by default once it launches on 8 June.

The shared networks operate under a maximum bandwidth of 80Kbps, with the total monthly data used per account capped at 500 MB. The coverage will vary by location based on the number of participants in any given area, although Amazon claims the greater the number of people taking part, and devices in a network, the stronger it becomes.

Not all Amazon devices will be supported by the network, with the company setting out a full list of compatible devices in its FAQs. They generally include the third generation and above of several kinds of devices, as well as IoT devices released in 2019 or later.

Amazon has also launched the Sidewalk Developer Service (SDS) for device manufacturers to build and launch devices that are compatible with Sidewalk. These include silicon chipsets, development boards, software development kits (SDKs), device provisioning tools, technical documentation, and cloud integration.

Device manufacturers can get started on building proof-of-concept devices by reviewing a starting guide and technical documentation on the SDS console, before deciding which development board and Sidewalk Bridge to purchase and downloading an SDK.

Amazon had previously hinted that it would seek to create a Wi-Fi challenger network, with the firm discussing plans for Sidewalk in 2019. The service is currently only available in the US, with the company providing no details as to when it plans to extend the scheme.

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Electronic signature provider DocuSign has acquired one of its key partners, Clause, alongside its intellectual property assets and staff, in order to integrate its technology into a broader cloud-based smart contracts platform.

Clause, which was founded five years ago, develops systems to assist digital contractual agreements, such as user verification and industry-specific services such as real-time, data-driven insurance contracts.

DocuSign, which has previously collaborated with Clause on developing digital contract technologies, will integrate the startup’s broader technology portfolio into its own Agreement Cloud platform. This system aims to elevate digital contracts from photos of paper documents into ‘living documents’ with interactivity and digital functionality.

«It is a compelling and exciting frontier of technology, and it’s an important enabler of making our Agreement Cloud smart,» said DocuSign CTO, Kamal Hathi. «It’s against that backdrop that DocuSign has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire the IP rights and hire the team from one of the industry’s smart agreement pioneers, Clause.

«Its products already integrate tightly with DocuSign eSignature, and we’re exploring deeper connections to contract lifecycle management (CLM) too.»

The company is also keen on integrating Clause’s services for various industries, including financial services, health care, and insurance companies, into its Agreement Cloud.

Among the features included in the latest release of Agreement Cloud are eSignature compatibility with Microsoft Teams and an eWitness feature that allows contract signers to include up to two witnesses per signer in the signing process.

Clause has been working closely with DocuSign to develop «groundbreaking capabilities» in contracting technology for the past two years, its founder Peter Hunn, said. This led to the conclusion that the scale and distribution of DocuSign would complement the innovations developed by Clause, with the two companies being a perfect fit for one another.

«The opportunity in front of us is to deliver Smart Agreements to the world, leveraging best-in-class eSignature and CLM products, as part of one of the largest tech companies,» Hunn said.

«The Clause team will continue our work within DocuSign to deliver on our shared vision for smart agreements—a development that will fundamentally change the future of contracts, just like word processing and eSignature.»

DocuSign has also been a keen investor in the startup, having led Clause’s Series A funding round of $5.5 million in 2019. The financial details of this acquisition haven’t been disclosed publicly, however.

Nividia has reported revenues of $5.66 billion for the first fiscal quarter of 2021, with record growth in its gaming, professional visualisation, and data centre segments.

The overall revenue for the quarter ending 2 May is an increase of 84% year-on-year and a 13% rise from the previous quarter. It highlights the company’s stable growth at a time where global semiconductor shortages are hampering the wider industry.

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Its data centre revenue was up 79% year-on-year, bringing in a record $2.05 billion, with the rise attributed to Mellanox, a data centre firm acquired in 2019, specialising in end-to-end services for servers, storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure.

«Mellanox, one year in, has exceeded our expectations and transformed Nvidia into a data-centre-scale computing company,» said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. «We had a fantastic quarter, with strong demand for our products driving record revenue. Our data centre business continues to expand, as the world’s industries take up Nvidia AI to process computer vision, conversational AI, natural language understanding and recommender systems.»

The firm’s graphics segment, comprised mostly of graphics cards, was up 81% to $3.45 billion in revenue, and its gaming products were up 106%, year-on-year, to $2.76 billion in sales. This was mainly fuelled by the increase in gaming during the pandemic, but the GPUs Nvidia makes are also essential for AI and cryptocurrency mining.

Nvidia recently unveiled its first Arm-based data centre CPU, Nvidia Grace, which is designed for AI and high-performance computing, which currently powers the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre. Its impending takeover of Arm is currently under investigation by the UK’s Competition and Market’s Authority, though Huang said Nvidia was continuing to «make headway» with the deal.

«From gaming, cloud computing, AI, robotics, self-driving cars, to genomics and computational biology, Nvidia continues to do impactful work to invent a better future,» Huang said.

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Several major players in the tech industry have banded together to form a non-profit organisation directed at creating a trusted ecosystem of engineers, standards, tools and best practices for building green software. 

The Green Software Foundation sees Microsoft collaborating with the Linux Foundation, Joint Development Foundation Projects, Accenture, ThoughtWorks and GitHub to devise ways for making software development more sustainable.

The foundation aims to help the wider software industry contribute to the tech sector’s ambitions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% in 2030, in line with the Paris Climate Agreement. 

«As we think about the future of the software industry, we believe we have a responsibility to help build a better future – a more sustainable future – both internally at our organisations and in partnership with industry leaders around the globe,» said corporate vice president for developer relations, Jeff Sandquist.

«With data centres around the world accounting for 1% of global electricity demand, and projections to consume 3-8% in the next decade, it’s imperative we address this as an industry.»

The Green Software Foundation will focus on three key pillars of standards, innovation and community. More specifically, the organisation will agree standards and best practices for building green software, nurturing the creation of trusted open source and open data protects, and allowing the growth of a diverse international community of developers.

The members will also endeavour to drive awareness about ways to build greener applications, and encourage the adoption of green software across the industry through ambassador programmes. 

The foundation will also encourage voluntary adoption and help guide government policy towards those standards for a consistent approach for measuring and reporting green software emissions.

Alongside the founding members, Goldman Sachs, Leaders for Climate Action, the Green Web Foundation and WattTime will join the organisation as general members. The Linux Foundation will manage these collaborative efforts, and other organisations are invited to apply to join as a general member.

VMware is urging its customers to update vCenter Server versions 6.5, 6.7 and 7.0 immediately after fixing two vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to launch remote code execution attacks. 

The most severe bug is tracked as CVE-2021-21985 which lies in the vSphere Client. This flaw involves a lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN Health Check plugin, which is enabled by default in the system. 

The vSAN system is a software-defined storage platform that’s used to eliminate the need for additional storage boxes using the local server storage. The health check plugin enhances customer support and user experience by allowing customers to manage their virtual deployments, including dozens of automated health checks.

The vulnerability is rated 9.8 on the CVSS threat severity scale and could allow hackers with network access to port 443 to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the operating system that hosts vCenter Server. The high base score suggests the effects are particularly devastating, and the vulnerability is relatively easy to exploit.

The second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-21986, is less severe, but nonetheless would allow attackers with network access to port 443 on vCenter Server to perform actions allowed by the impacted plugins without authentication. 

This vulnerability concerns a vSphere authentication mechanism for the Virtual SAN Health Check, Site Recovery, vSphere Lifecycle Manager and VMware Cloud Director Availability plugins in the vSphere Client. 

The bugs are extremely serious, VMware has warned, and customers are being advised to patch immediately. 

«With the threat of ransomware looming nowadays the safest stance is to assume that an attacker may already have control of a desktop and a user account through the use of techniques like phishing or spearphishing, and act accordingly,» the firm says in its FAQs. 

«This means the attacker may already be able to reach vCenter Server from inside a corporate firewall, and time is of the essence.»

The issue affects all vCenter Server customers, not just those who use vSAN, because this plugin is shipped with all systems and is enabled by default. The company doesn’t advise disabling the vSAN plugin, because manageability and monitoring will not be possible, and customers using vSAN should only disable the plugin for short periods of time. 

Warning of the dangers, VMware said in its FAQs that customers without perimeter security controls on their virtualisation infrastructure may be in jeopardy. Ransomware gangs, particularly, have demonstrated they can compromise corporate networks and subsequently wait for new vulnerabilities in order to attack from inside a network.

The fear is very real given that ransomware operators had previously exploited critical ESXi and vSphere Client flaws, with Carbon Spider and Sprite Spider gangs exploiting the flaws to encrypt virtual machines (VMs).

Google Cloud is launching three database services across its analytical portfolio that aim to unify its data services. 

Dataplex, Analytics Hub and Datastream are all ‘previews’ that aim to reduce silos and securely predict business outcomes in ‘dynamic’ digital environments. 

Datastream is a serverless offering and replication service that enables customers to replicated data streams from Oracle and MySQL into Google Cloud products like BigQuery or Cloud Spanner.

The Analytics Hubs is a service where companies can create, curate and manage analytics tools. This includes sharing data insights, dynamic dashboards and machine learning models both internally and externally. Google said it builds on BigQuery’s existing sharing capabilities, which have already proven popular with organisations.

The third new service is called ‘Dataplex’ and is described as an ‘»intelligent data fabric». It meshes the best of Google Cloud with open source technology to enables secure and rapid curation, integration, and analysation of data at scale. 

«Data must be thought of as an ability that integrates all aspects of working with it,» said Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of Databases, Data Analytics and Looker, at Google Cloud. «Every industry is accelerating their shift of being digital-first as they recognise data is the essential ingredient for value creation and the key to advancing their digital transformation.»

«At Google Cloud, we’re committed to helping customers build the most powerful data cloud solution to unlock value and actionable, real-time insights, needed to future-proof their business.»

Equifax is an early user of the new previews, working with Google to incorporate Dataplex into the company’s core analytics platform. The firm is hoping to simplify its workloads and build a single interface for policy management and governance across all its analytics data offerings. 

«Google Cloud has been a critical part of the Equifax journey, helping us protect our customers’ sensitive and proprietary data,» said Bryson Koehler, Equifax CTO. «Google Cloud allows us to create a rich, unified and trusted data ecosystem between business units and partnerships – one in which everyone gains immediate value.»

Microsoft has been slowly making Teams a more collaborative environment, including the fall release of Teams Meetings and its subsequent upgrades. At Microsoft Build 2021, the tech giant announced a handful of Teams updates that’ll continue the path toward a more collaborative offering.

At Build 2021, Microsoft announced it’ll give developers significantly more liberty within the interface. This freedom will begin with Teams no longer relegating third-party apps to the sidebars. Instead, Teams is testing a main-stage collaboration tool that’ll allow these apps to live front and centre on the main screen.

This would be useful for a brainstorming session where there’s a whiteboard in the middle of the meeting for jotting down ideas and key points.

Teams will also allow developers to create custom scenes for company meetings. They can also use APIs that allow them to automate key tasks at specific times during a meeting. For example, reminding the host to start a wrap-up Q&A session with at least 15 minutes remaining.

Real-time transcription, translation, and note-taking during meetings are slated to arrive this summer. Of course, admins will have the ability to activate and deactivate these features with ease. This way, if there is a meeting that involves sensitive or confidential details, you can deactivate these services to keep the information secure.

Finally, using Fluid Framework components, Microsoft plans to allow users to work on tables, lists, and text fields in one Teams conversation and copy them into another conversion or into an Office 365 app. These files would also be editable by colleagues in real time.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, collaboration and video conferencing software providers have been booming. Teams has been among those seeing quite the boost, as the company now says it has over 145 million daily users. And with remote working here to stay for many companies, now’s the perfect time for Microsoft to show off the flexibility of Teams.