Emerging Technology
Databricks | October 17, 2022
Databricks, the lakehouse company, today announced that it has received a FedRAMP® Authorized status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program's Program Management Office (FedRAMP® PMO) for its Cloud Service Offering (CSO) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) at a Moderate impact level, strengthening the Databricks Lakehouse capabilities for the U.S. federal government. This further validates the use of Databricks by federal agencies and contractors, who can now consolidate their data, analytics, and AI with the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to improve the business of the government.
FedRAMP® program was created to accelerate the U.S. federal government's adoption of secure cloud solutions and includes an independent third-party assessment organization (3PAO) performing an assessment of the following:
Implementation of the 325 FedRAMP® Moderate NIST SP 800-53 controls to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer data
Vulnerability management practices by conducting independent vulnerability scans
Cloud service security by performing independent penetration testing
"We're excited to see Databricks' Lakehouse Platform achieve this authorization, reinforcing our commitment to cloud security and the public sector, It has been a pleasure to partner closely with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) team on this endeavor. With this FedRAMP® authorization, CMS and other federal customers have the ability to replace legacy data islands with the market leading federated lakehouse, accelerating digital transformation, and driving strategic initiatives. In addition, we're looking forward to continuing to build upon our partnership with AWS as Databricks' presence in the public sector accelerates with this important milestone."
-Jude Boyle, Vice President of Public Sector at Databricks.
AWS is committed to working with partners to help customers operate more predictably, securely, and efficiently, said Jeff Kratz, General Manager of AWS Worldwide Public Sector Partners. We are pleased Databricks achieved the FedRAMP® authorization. This will help ensure U.S. federal, state, and local government agencies can more securely run their mission critical applications to take full advantage of the cloud's agility and cost savings.
About Databricks:
Databricks is the lakehouse company. More than 7,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, and over 50% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics, and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.
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Emerging Technology
Hayden AI Technologies | July 01, 2022
Hayden AI Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of smart traffic enforcement solutions powered by artificial intelligence, has been awarded a patent for technology that automatically manages and analyzes traffic rules for violation enforcement and enables data-informed operational improvements for government agencies. The patent was awarded on May 3, 2022 and is labeled U.S. Patent number 11,322,017 B1.
The new patented technology facilitates the management of complex traffic rules using a traffic enforcement layer situated on top of a semantic map layer. The map layer, which consists of street elements such as intersections and stop signs, is continuously updated with data captured by Hayden AI edge devices already installed on municipal vehicles for automated enforcement. The enforcement layer consists of traffic rules that can be adjusted directly by the user or automatically via a traffic insight layer, which is generated based on traffic violations and traffic conditions. By analyzing the impact of traffic rules, the insight layer also provides suggestions for adjustments.
We devised this method because defining and managing traffic rules digitally hasn't been done successfully before. Our pilot programs consistently show that using AI to manage traffic rules is significantly more efficient and flexible than the traditional logic-based approach. We've also built in mechanisms that enable municipalities to gauge the effectiveness of particular traffic rules or lane restrictions in reducing traffic congestion as well as keeping buses on schedule."
Bo Shen, CTO and Co-Founder of Hayden AI
In addition to using artificial intelligence to automatically learn and manage traffic rules, the new system allows municipalities to directly update these rules via an interactive map editor. Government entities can also import raw traffic rule data from a transportation department database and generate a heat map of traffic violations detected by edge devices to update the insight layer.
By providing several methods to add and modify enforcement rules, the system helps government entities to update ineffective restrictions and ensure that enforcement results in a reduction in traffic congestion and crashes and an improvement in travel times and safety.
About Hayden AI
Hayden AI is pioneering smart traffic enforcement with its mobile platform to increase the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of municipal fleet vehicles. Our platform allows government agencies to enforce traffic laws, while harnessing AIoT data to gain actionable insights that help enhance the quality of life of their communities. Developed by a team of experts in machine learning, data science, transportation, and government technology, our flagship product, Automated Bus Lane Enforcement, enforces dedicated bus lanes, delivery zones, and intersections to reduce traffic congestion, improve bus speeds, and increase transit ridership.
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Emerging Technology
Defined.ai | June 21, 2022
Defined.ai (formerly DefinedCrowd), the leading provider of data, models and tools for Artificial Intelligence, announced its role in Accelerat.ai, which the Portuguese government fully approved it. Portugal is one of the first European Union countries to implement the Covid 2019 Recovery and Resilience Plan and the Digital Transformation Mandate by the European Union, which Accelerat.ai is a part of.
Accelerat.ai is a consortium of Portuguese companies backed by the government, with an investment of €48 million (~$51 million) to speed up the digital transformation of Portugal's public and private sectors.
The project, born from the EU Digital Compass 2030 initiative, is financed partly through a €16 billion ($17 billion) award granted to Portugal as part of the initiative. It is also the first of many projects from Portugal's Center of Excellence for AI.
The mandate of the consortium is to make it easier to develop trustworthy AI apps and use unbiased data in European Portuguese. Accelerat.ai works on the European Portuguese language problem, which has yet to be effectively addressed well in the field of Conversational AI, especially in the public sector and industry-specific domains as the big tech companies usually focus on other markets. If a developer wants to use voice interfaces in the Portuguese market, they have to use APIs in English or Brazilian Portuguese, which is not what the Portuguese people prefer.
Today, António Costa Silva, Minister of Economy and Sea, Sir John O'Reilly, President of the Jury, Thierry Breton, European Commissioner, and António Costa, Prime Minister of Portugal, will officially announce the winners of the public audit and contest, including Accelerat.ai as the winner of a process that began exactly one year ago.
Defined.ai will play a leading role in Accelerat.ai, a consortium of companies that includes Talkdesk, Devscope, Instituto Superior Tecnico de Lisboa (Inesc id), Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Clarin, NOS, IBM, Microsoft, and KPMG. Interested clients include Caixa Geral de Depositos, Novo Banco, Santander, SPMS/SNS (Healthcare Ministry), AMA (Digital Transformation), Social Security Ministry, EDP (electricity and gas), the Telco NOS, the popular Retail provider Worten, and the Insurance company Fidelidade.
Dr. Daniela Braga, Founder and CEO of Defined.ai, was a key player in proposing the creation of a Center of Excellence in AI in Europe and starting the Accelerat.ai consortium and project. (Defined.ai gives AI builders the data they need to train their models.)
This ambitious project is aimed at dramatically improving private and public customer service through virtual assistants paired with contact centers as a service in European Portuguese. In its early stages, Accelerat.ai’s goal is to improve customer service in Portugal's private and public sectors and speed up the country's digital transformation. It will develop proprietary technology that can easily scale up to other EU markets since what changes after that is the data.
Accelerat.ai will work on a conversational AI framework for modern contact centers that can handle multiple languages. This will improve customer service and cut costs by automating 80 percent of customer support resolutions. It will give customers access to the latest technology in a way that doesn't depend on the cloud provider, infrastructure, or technology. Customers will be able to choose which ASR, NLU, or TTS works best for them. The business model will be based on subscriptions that are flexible and easy to set up. This will make it possible to create 200 highly skilled AI jobs in Portugal.
Some of the applications will have a voice and video-enabled avatars that will speak to people when they call the Portuguese Healthcare system to schedule a Covid booster or call Social Security to check on the status of a maternity leave pension.
Customer service in the top European languages will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and at a lower cost. Initially designed to help the Portuguese, it will impact all EU citizens in the future because of its multi-language modularity.
About Defined.ai
Defined.ai is on a mission to enable the creators of the future.
At Defined.ai, we believe AI should be created as we raise our children, with the responsibility to make it the best version possible, to be fair, kind, inclusive and to strive for a better world.
That’s why we provide high-quality AI training data, tools, and models to the creators of the future. We offer data scientists the solutions to get it just right, from datasets to bootstrap their models which keep their projects moving, to the final tuning in domains and perfection in accents and phonetics. We host the leading AI marketplace, where data scientists can buy and sell off-the-shelf datasets, tools and models, and we provide customizable workflows that can be used to generate datasets tuned to their needs. And, because the future of AI is complicated, Defined.ai can also offer professional services to help deliver success in complex machine learning projects.
Defined.ai has offices in Seattle, USA, Lisbon and Porto, Portugal, and Tokyo, Japan, and has raised more than $80 million in investment.
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