In 2018 we are all living in a world where almost everything is becoming connected, whether it’s the power grid, network, phone system, our cars, or the appliances that heat our home or chill our food. As this Internet of Things (IoT) continues to proliferate. This growing class of cloud-connected devices – 9 billion of which ship every year – run tiny MCU chips that will power everything from kitchen appliances and toys to industrial equipment on factory floors. This next wave of connected devices is in increasingly intelligent and connected. They will improve daily life in countless ways, but if they’re not secure, they will make people, communities and countries vulnerable to attack in more ways than ever before.
As s result of this the Threat and security risks expand exponentially. At this year RSA conference in San Francisco, Microsoft announced new offerings to take security more squarely to where it needs to go and where it has not effectively gone before – the edge.
The Azure Sphere Services are a new services and features that will better harden not only our intelligent cloud but also the billions of connected devices that live on its edge.
Univerity of California, Berkeley logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
It’s worth passing along a message from UC Berkeley. According to its news service, the “fastest-growing course in UC Berkeley’s history — Foundations of Data Science [aka Data 8X] — is being offered free online this spring for the first time through the campus’s online education hub, edX.” More than 1,000 students are now taking the course each semester at the university.
Designed for students who have not previously taken statistics or computer science courses, Foundations of Data Science will teach you in a three-course sequence “how to combine data with Python programming skills to ask questions and explore problems that you encounter in any field of study, in a future job, and even in everyday life.”
Announcing the Windows Azure for Research LinkedIn discussion group!
The group will serve as an opportunity to connect and engage with researchers and domain experts to drive awareness of Microsoft Research and Windows Azure for Research. We’d like for you to be part of the community and discussions.
What is the Windows Azure for Research initiative?
This is a program designed to help the research community use cloud computing to handle the challenges of data-intensive science. The culmination of more than three years of experimentation with using Windows Azure for scientific research, the Windows Azure for Research Initiative will help scientists accelerate the speed and dissemination of scientific discoveries.
The Windows family tree. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Windows Azure for Research project facilitates and accelerates scholarly and scientific research by enabling researchers to use the power of Windows Azure to perform big data computations in the cloud.
Windows Azure Research Award Program
Microsoft Research is soliciting proposals for the use of Windows Azure in research. We welcome research proposals from any branch of scholarly activity. To qualify, applicants must be affiliated with an academic institution or non-profit research laboratory. In addition to individual investigator projects, we are interested in projects that will support access to services and data of value to a collaboration or community. Winning proposals will be awarded large allocations of Windows Azure storage and compute resources for a period of one year.
We will periodically announce additional special-opportunity RFPs on specific cloud research topics. These topics will include community research data services, streaming instrument data to the cloud, machine learning in the cloud, large-scale image analysis, environmental science, astronomy, genomics, and urban science.
Your proposal should not exceed three pages in length. It should include resource requirement estimates (number of core, storage requirements, and so forth) for your project.
English: Diagram showing overview of cloud computing including Google, Salesforce, Amazon, Axios Systems, Microsoft, Yahoo & Zoho (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Last September, as part of our global Windows Azure for Research program, we announced our cloud training classes that we designed to show academics how Windows Azure can accelerate their research. Now that we’re almost a month into the new year, we would like to let you know what we have planned for 2014—including some new resources that you can use and share with your colleagues and contacts.
Tim O’Reilly 2005 Where 2.0 Conference1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“Data is here, it’s growing, and it’s powerful.”
Author Cathy O’Neil argues that the right approach to data is skeptical, not cynical––it understands that, while powerful, data science tools often fail.
Data is nuanced, and “a really excellent skeptic puts the term ‘science’ into ‘data science.'” The big data revolution shouldn’t be dismissed as hype, but current data science tools and models shouldn’t be hailed as the end-all-be-all, either.
OK, perhaps our fire-and-brimstone headline goes a bit overboard. Then again, maybe it is time for a dose of data science atonement, particularly if youre guilty of any of the five deadly sins summarized below.
Not all big-data professionals are guilty of the five deadly sins, of course, which Walker summarized in a phone interview withInformationWeek. So here they are. Do any of these data-science transgressions hit home?
Tony Gurney 