AI, together with hybrid cloud and in the not so distant future quantum computing, will have a profound impact on every sector of society.
At the global level, AI will enthuse $15.7tr in productivity by 2030.
Bengaluru: IBM has announced that it is creating an AI Centre of excellence, in partnership with the Indian government’s e-marketplace (GeM), in an effort to increase usability, transparency, drive efficiency and cost savings in public procurement.
“We are only at about four per cent into the journey globally. At the global level, AI will enthuse $15.7.trillion in productivity by 2030,” Aravind Kirishna, CEO of IBM, said during the RAISE 2020 (Responsible AI for Social Empowerment), a virtual global artificial intelligence summit, on Monday evening.
Stating that India has the potential to lead the AI technology revolution, he called for greater emphasis and focus on three core elements – data, trust and skills.
“AI is one of the biggest technology revolutions of our time and I am convinced that India is uniquely positioned to lead the AI technology revolution. India has the world’s largest community of developers, a large startup ecosystem and a strong engineering and scientific culture” says Krishna.
“The premise is, to run AI we need good data. And like other sources of capital, the value comes from how you refine and apply it. There is a lot of data in India,” says Krishna, adding that it is also important to develop and instil trust.
Closing the skills shortage
“This is paramount, especially when you apply AI in highly regulated and safety-critical domains like healthcare. Installing trust in AI is avoiding bias, being explainable and being able to reproduce results.”
With regard to massive skill shortage in AI, he said IBM is working with various stakeholders to address the problem.
“I am really proud of the investments IBM is making in the future of Indian skills. Through the IBM Stem for Girls initiative, we are teaching 80,000 girls across India, how to code and build AI models and our goal is to reach 200,000 students by 2022,”
Earlier in July, IBM collaborated with India’s Central Board of Secondary Education ( CBSC) to integrate AI into the high school curriculum in 200 schools across India.
“All this will harness the immense energy of India’s youth and help the country apply the power of AI to solve deep societal problems. AI together with hybrid cloud and in the not so distant future quantum computing will have a profound impact on every sector of society,” adds Krishna.
IBM is working in coordination with both the central and state governments on various projects.
In India, IBM is collaborating with the State of Karnataka and Niti Aayog to deploy precision agriculture solutions, that combine AI and weather data to help farmers make better decisions.
Microsoft plans its first datacentre region in Greece
Software giant also plans to skill approximately 100,000 people in digital technologies by 2025.
Microsoft’s global footprint of cloud regions now totals 63.
Company aims to bring the Ancient City of Olympia to life using artificial intelligence and other technologies.
Bengaluru: Microsoft announces plans for first datacentre region in Greece as part of its “GR for GRowth” digital transformation initiative.
The Greece datacentre region will join Microsoft’s global footprint of cloud regions, now totalling 63 regions announced, with Microsoft Azure available in over 140 countries, and will provide companies local access to Microsoft’s full set of cloud services.
“By a substantial margin, this is the largest investment Microsoft has made in Greece in the 28 years we have been operating here. In part, this reflects the confidence that our world-leading datacentre technology can help enable innovation and growth across Greece’s economy,” Brad Smith, President, Microsoft, said.
Moreover, he said that this large investment reflects our optimism about Greece’s future, its forward-leaning government, and the country’s ongoing economic recovery.
To support citizens in both professional and personal ambitions, Microsoft also announced its plan to skill approximately 100,000 people in Greece in digital technologies by 2025.
“Our commitment is to be a technology ally in driving growth, now and for the generations to come for our country,” Theodosis Michalopoulos, General Manager of Microsoft Greece Cyprus and Malta, said.
As part of Microsoft’s AI for Cultural Heritage program, the company is collaborating with the Ministry of Culture and Sports to bring the Ancient City of Olympia to life using artificial intelligence and other technologies.
The immersive, 3D presentation of the monuments and artifacts will give people around the world the opportunity to experience them as they were nearly 3,000 years ago. The project has been approved by the Archaeological Council (KAS) and will be available in 2021.
New interconnection hub, in partnership with Omantel, will support content traffic growth in region.
Dubai: Colocation datacentre provider Equinix has opened its fourth International Business Exchange facility in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in Barka, Oman.
The new Equinix IBX in Oman will serve as a regional interconnection hub providing ultra-low latency connection points between key global business markets.
Oman Telecommunications Company (Omantel) is the joint venture and telecom partner.
“We are seeing an accelerated demand for digital transformation in MENA. Across different sectors, organisations are re-assessing their cloud adoption strategies and cloud readiness. In the digital age, companies need to reach all the right places and partners to seize opportunity, and they need to do it out at the edge,” Eugene Bergen Henegouwen, President, EMEA at Equinix, said.
The site, MC1, is operated by Equinix and includes more than 23,600 square feet of colocation space and 725 cabinets. The site has capacity to grow to more than 2,150 cabinets with future IBX builds.
With subsea cable systems terminating directly in MC1, the site benefits from continued investments by Omantel in multiple strategic subsea cable systems throughout the world, reaching over 50 countries globally.
Omantel currently has investments in more than 20 subsea cable systems and leverages six diverse landing stations in Oman and one in Marseille, France.
Cloud gathers in region
“Today, datacentre infrastructure sits at the heart of global ICT and enables all of us to enjoy the cloud-based apps and services we use every day. The new IBX in Oman represents a significant step forward for Oman and the Middle Eastern ICT markets,” Talal Al Mamari, CEO, Omantel, said.
Coupled with the majority of the GCC’s international submarine cables landing in Oman, all accessible from the Equinix datacentre, he believes this partnership will further enhance Oman’s competitiveness in the global digital economy.
According to the latest edition of the Global Interconnection Index (GXI), enterprise consumption of interconnection bandwidth is expected to grow at a 67 per cent annual growth rate in EMEA by 2022, outpacing other forms of business data exchange, as businesses respond to rapidly growing volumes of data.
The recent normalisation agreement provides both countries with the opportunity to collaborate in order to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.
Tel Aviv: There has been a lot written around the recent normalisation between the UAE and Israel with promises of enduring financial collaboration between both countries.
Israel, the startup nation, is strong in areas such as cybersecurity, AI and defence but has developed over the last few years verticals that do not just rely on the knowledge of deep technology, but seek to make a sustainable impact.
When exploring the impact, the three areas that present major global challenges include food security, water and education. This is the case in the UAE, Israel and the rest of the world.
Foodtech
One of the challenges that the UAE and other countries faced during the pandemic was a disruption of their supply chain, and the food insecurity that arose.
From a logistics perspective there are risks involved in the transportation of food but that brought into question the dependence on an unreliable supply chain. As the UAE brings up to 90 per cent of its food from the outside it is particularly susceptible to challenges such as a pandemic.
UAE-based entrepreneurs can collaborate with their Israeli counterparts around agritech in order to parlay technology to grow food locally.
The ability to grow food and feed local populations is key in helping create stability as our natural resources dwindle and our population numbers explode.
Omar Al Busaidy, a serial entrepreneur, states: “I think it’s extremely vital that the UAE invest in technologies to support the development of our agricultural sector, especially because if the pandemic were to last longer, there’s a big chance we would run out of stock of some of the food that we import. Plus, we have the means to acquire these technologies from anywhere and as rapidly as we invested in developing other sectors in the UAE.”
Examples of Israeli startups that are finding solutions to major agritech challenges include InnovoPro, a startup that creates dairy and meat alternatives made from chickpeas and Future Meat Technologies which is advancing a distributive manufacturing platform for the non-GMO production of meat directly from animal cells (without having to raise livestock).
There’s also Sufresca, a Jerusalem-based firm that creates edible coatings for fruits and vegetables to lengthen their shelf life.
Gilad Carni, CEO and Founder of the UAE Israeli Innovation Office, believes that “the UAE faces challenges that are similar to Israel in terms of agritech. We were able to work in cooperation with an Israeli Agro Tech company in developing a solution for growing crops in severe environmental conditions in order to meet the challenge of growing food demand and increase the capability of local food supply in the United Arab Emirates.”
DesertTech
If both regions share something in common it has been having to deal with the general lack of water, and the ecological erosion which the globe is facing and is making this resource even more precious.
According to the UN, by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in countries or regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world’s population could be living under water stressed conditions.
With growing populations, the heat, and general lack of resources, water, how to find it, how to maintain it, and how to secure it will be key for any nation. Aside from investment in watertech, startups in both regions can cooperate on learning best practices to preserve water, call it DesertTech.
Examples of places where Israel can cooperate with the UAE on water are technologies such as WaterGen, which provides an abundant, renewable source of fresh and clean drinking water by extracting it directly from the air. Another example, Lishtot, Hebrew for “to drink,” is a startup that develops products able to effectively and rapidly detect contaminants in drinking water, without ever touching it.
Edtech
Food and water for the coming years and future generations is vital, but if they are not educated, we are going to enter a world with a lower quality of life. Edtech is a vertical Israel has developed over the past few years, and while there has been a legacy of education in the startup nation its entrepreneurs are strong in video and data, two of the drivers of edtech.
There are major changes going on in education because of Covid, and that is impacting the UAE as well. Israeli edtech startups can work with local teachers in the UAE to help effectively educate students, many of whom are going to be learning from home.
Ari Zoldan, CEO of Quantum Media Group, LLC, a global media and marketing firm with offices in New York, Zurich and Dubai believes that “Education Technology will be one of the leading sectors that is set for incredible expansion. With the recent bridges built between the UAE and Israel, it will supercharge the sector, fueled with some incredible innovation.”
Jonathan ‘Yoni’ Frenkel has been involved in the US-Israeli tech community for many years, mentoring startups on marketing, hosting events connecting investors with startups, and publishing on the topics of tech and venture regularly. Professionally, he heads a content marketing agency, YKC Media, and works with VCs, corporates, and startups in creating written content, social, and advising on marketing strategy focused on engaging a US audience. He is currently in Israel working with the Tulsa-based fund Atento Capital.He can be reached on LinkedIn here.
Out of the 880m subscribers in India, only 70m or less than 10% are fixed-line subscribers.
Deployment of Wi-Fi 6 and 6GHz spectrum will be a credible alternative, Facebook says
Bengaluru: Enterprise Wi-Fi players have been urged to come up with open standards, in an effort to innovate and allow the implementation of more affordable solutions to enhance usability, scalability and security.
As more countries queue up to build-up their infrastructure, preparing themselves for the 5G era, there is an intense debate about how Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax), could bring in equally capable speeds, creating a much-needed fillip within the existing 4G infrastructure.
According to Dan Rabinovitsj, Vice-President of Facebook, the deployment of Wi-Fi 6 and 6GHz spectrum will be a credible alternative. Wi-Fi 6 offers much faster (almost closer to 5G) speeds and at much lower latency.
“We are actively working together with our team in spectrum policy to promote 6GHz all around the world. We just think this is an increasingly important tool in the toolbox to enhance connectivity in general. The faster we can move to deploy 6GHz, the better. We need to embrace it like our lives depend on it. This is a revolution,” he says.
5G expensive for some countries
“There are many markets in the world that are not thinking of 5G now. 5G is a really interesting evolution. There are some novel and interesting things that will come out of 5G. But the reality is there are many developing nations that simply won’t be able to afford to move to 5G any time soon,” says Rabinovitsj.
According to him, developing countries should roll out 6GHs even as they work towards building their 5G network. The majority of the developing countries are still rolling out 4G networks and are still in the process of testing 5G. In the majority of cases, even the 4G network is not fully deployed and network penetration has only managed to achieve 2G and 3G speeds in rural zones.
However, dependence on closed proprietary type of environment, especially by enterprise-class players, has made it difficult for the industry to come up with universal architecture, thereby preventing the widespread adoption of the latest technology innovations, says Rabinovitsj.
“There is really no standardisation. The proprietary drivers and systems actually slow things down in terms of being able to roll out networks with scale and at more affordable prices. There is a lot of technology and it is extremely difficult to come up with universal architecture,” says Rabinovitsj, speaking during a webinar organised by Wifi Now.
Digital divide
Urging players to start rethinking about what can be done to innovate more quickly, he says, “The next few years we will see significantly more work being done in the open-source community, they will start bringing enterprise-class Wi-Fi and enterprise-class switching,” he adds.
Explaining the problem further, he emphasised on the great disparity between the developed and developing world. The global average internet speed of the Wi-Fi network is 19Mbps, while the developed world is racing to reach 1Gbps.
“In the United States, 75 per cent of all internet traffic is on Wi-Fi, but it is only 42 per cent in the developing world. In 63 per cent of the countries, the internet is faster on LTE. In all of India where there are 800 million subscribers, there are only 70 million fixed-line subscribers,” he says, while stressing on making Wi-Fi affordable, easy to deploy, and available to everyone 24/7.
The key challenge, he says is about creating a sustainable high-performance public Wi-Fi network.
“The cellular industry is struggling. Even in a place like Japan, where fibre is much more penetrated and you can almost get it every 50 metres, it is still not available in every single place. The same is true for Wi-Fi. That is why we are working on alternatives to high-performance backhauls that can reduce the cost for everyone running those networks,” he said.
Emphasising Facebook’s initiatives, he says that connectivity is at the heart of their mission and they are working on developing the core technology, developing analytics tools and insights into how networks perform and also to create innovative business models to drive down the cost of internet access around the world.
“One of the reasons why we invested so heavily in 60GHz is because we fundamentally believe that if we do not have the ability to bring fibre into the network, the next best thing is millimetre wave wireless fibre,” he says adding that Wi-Fi is still the best tool to democratise internet access globally.
Like any new ecosystem, mass deployment of cheap satellites to bring new attack surfaces and challenges.
Strong collaboration between cyber threat research teams, government, commercial and academia is the way forward.
Dubai: When security experts are struggling to secure the data on the earth, how are they going to secure data on the earth as well as in space when Space 4.0 is gaining traction?
Space 4.0 represents the evolution of the space sector into a new era and is intertwined with Industry 4.0.
Christiaan Beek, Lead Scientist and Senior Principal Engineer at McAfee, told TechChannel Newsthat technology is getting cheaper to get into space and Ground station as a Service (GSaaS) is appearing in different flavours from different providers.
“We are putting a lot of technology into space and it is not proven to be secure. With a lower cost of launching, combined with public and private partnerships that open a whole new dimension of connectivity, satellites are more accessible from a cost perspective and which, in turn, will attract threat actors other than nation-states,” he said.
With the introduction of Ground Station as a Service (GSaaS) and Satellite as a Service (SataaS), he said that the satellite will become another device connecting to the cloud.
Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are popular for scientific usage and are being used across government, academic and commercial sectors for different use cases that require complex payloads and processing.
Mass deployment of cheap satellites
With the rapid adoption of nanosats, which can coexist on a single satellite, he said there is going to be a mass deployment of cheap satellites into space and the same satellite backbone circuit infrastructure can be shared, reducing build and launch costs and making space data more accessible.
As the data from space will have much value as the market evolves, he said that cybercriminals will certainly target that data with the intent to hold organisations to ransom or sell data/analytics innovation to competitors to avoid launch costs.
Christiaan Beek, Lead Scientist and Senior Principal Engineer at McAfee.
“We see a lot of opportunities for cybercriminals to accuse the data and with access to the ground station, they can set up an account in the cloud and sniff traffic from the sky and access the infrastructure,” Beek said.
With the convergence of information technology, operational technology and internet of things, cybercriminals are a constant challenge and they have much more capabilities than they did a few years ago.
Once a vulnerability has been developed, Beek said that it can then be weaponised into an exploit kit or ransomware worm, such as WannaCry, to make money and maximise profit by exploiting a combination of users and technology.
Even during Covid-19, they (hackers) moved quickly to cash in on the remote working workforce.
Targeting vulnerabilities
At Blackhat and Defcon conferences, security researchers have shown ways to hack every device across business verticals by discovering the vulnerabilities.
“Not all of the vulnerabilities and exploits have become weaponised by cybercriminals but it does highlight the fact that the potential exists. Some notable weaponised exploits are Stuxnet worm, WannCry worm, Triton malware, Mirai Botnet,” Eoin Carroll, Principal Engineer and Senior Vulnerability Researcher on the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team, said.
Eoin Carroll, Principal Engineer and Senior Vulnerability Researcher on the McAfee Advanced Threat Research team.
One of the key initiatives, and now industry benchmark, he said is the MITRE ATT&CK framework which enumerates the TTPs from real word incidents across enterprises (Endpoint and Cloud), mobile and ICS. “This framework has proved to be very valuable in enabling organisations to understand adversary TTPs and the corresponding protect, detect and response controls required in their overall defence security architecture. We may see a version of MITRE ATT&CK evolve for Space 4.0,” he said.
To date, no vulnerabilities have been disclosed on actual satellites but many vulnerability disclosures have taken place in VSAT terminal systems and intercepting communications.
McAfee has seen an increase in malicious cyber activity targeting the aerospace and defence industry to gather information on specific programs and technologies.
According to European Investment Bank, the global space industry grew at an average rate of 6.7 per cent per year between 2005 and 2017 and is projected to rise from its current value of $350 billion to $1.3 trillion per annum by 2030.
“The associated increase in data volume and complexity has resulted in increasing concerns over the security and integrity of data transfer and storage between satellites, and between ground stations and satellites,” Carroll said.
The McAfee Supernova report shows that data is exploding out of enterprises and into the cloud.
“We are now going to see the same explosion from Space 4.0 to the cloud as vendors race to innovate and monetise data from low-cost satellites in LEO as the data is going to be more accessible to commercial markets,” Beek said.
Security should be on agenda
So, with the introduction of cheap satellites using commercial off-the-shelf components and new cloud services, he said that is it just a matter of time before the industry could see mass satellite attacks and compromise?
“We need to think about a satellite as any other device which can be accessed either directly or indirectly over the internet. Also, if a device can be compromised in space remotely or through the supply chain, then that opens a new attack class of space to cloud/ground attacks,” he said.
“We need to make sure that security is on the agenda and that is why we put out this research, in collaborating with Cork Institute of Technology and its Blackrock Castle Observatory and the National Space Centre in Ireland, for a call of action.”
Beek said that establishing a trustworthy Space 4.0 ecosystem is going to require strong collaboration between cyber threat research teams, government, commercial and academia.
