Tag: Big Data

Categories
GeekWire

There’s a new name in the location intelligence biz

Locana office
Locana’s staff fills the company’s Seattle office in pre-pandemic times, when it was known as Critigen. (Locana Photo)

Thanks to a flood of satellite data and the rise of artificial intelligence tools, the market for location intelligence services is growing — and one of the pioneers in the field is changing its name from Critigen to Locana to reflect that growth.

“What happened was, we had such a successful year with all these new businesses, and we saw this move in the marketplace, and that inspired us to chart out a new vision,” Locana CEO Jeff Haight told GeekWire. “Actually, changing the name of the company was the very last step in this process.”

Locana is officially headquartered in Denver, but Haight and much of his executive team are based in Seattle.

About 50 of Locana’s hundreds of employees live in the Seattle area, with the region’s main office in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The company third major office is in London, but the workforce is distributed far wider than those three offices.

“We have a lot of clients in the Northeast, so we’ve got a large crew in Boston,” Haight said. In fact, Haight’s favorite explanation of what Locana does draws on the Northeast U.S. market.

“When my kids ask me, ‘Hey, Dad, what is it that you do?’ I tell ’em that we help New York track their snowplows,” he said.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

New centers will enlist software engineers for science

Data science program
Researchers say there's pent-up demand for data scientists. (University of Washington via YouTube)

The University of Washington and three other universities have kicked off an effort to beef up the software engineering resources available to researchers, backed by a $40 million commitment from Schmidt Futures.

The philanthropic organization founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, announced the establishment of the Virtual Institute for Scientific Software this week. The institute’s four inaugural centers will be housed at UW, the University of Cambridge, Georgia Tech and Johns Hopkins University.

Each of the centers will be awarded $2 million a year for the next five years to bring on software engineers and computational scientists who can help address the increasingly complex, data-centric challenges that face researchers today.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

How a hockey team uses data to shoot for business goals

Kendall Tyson
The Seattle Kraken's Kendall Tyson discusses how the hockey team uses data analytics. (GeekWire Photo / Dan DeLong)

When it comes to sports data, most people think about RBIs, third-down conversions or shots on goal — but Kendall Tyson, the Seattle Kraken hockey team’s vice president for strategy and business intelligence, has a completely different kind of statistics in mind.

Which videos do you watch on the Kraken’s website? Are you going to the big game on your birthday or anniversary? What kind of wine will you be ordering at Climate Pledge Arena?

“We’re bringing together ticket purchases to hockey games, ticket purchases to concerts, food and beverage data, retail data and membership data across all of the people who come to Climate Pledge Arena — and not just our fans,” Tyson said today at the GeekWire Summit. “We take that information, and we pull it into a database, and we’re creating Customer 360 profiles.”

If you’re partial to a particular video series about the Kraken, you might see a link to the latest installment at the top of your membership email. If it’s your birthday, the Kraken might offer you a deal on a private suite for the game.

And then there’s the wine.

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
GeekWire

Space: The final frontier for data security

Axiom space station
An artist’s conception shows Axiom Space’s proposed space station. (Axiom Space Illustration)

What will commercial space stations be good for? The application that typically comes up would be their use as space hotels, or maybe zero-gravity research labs and factories.

But space industry veteran Rob Meyerson has a different idea in mind — and in his role as operating partner at C5 Capital USA, he’s able to put some money behind it.

“Looking for new markets is something we’re highly motivated to do,” Meyerson told GeekWire. “Data storage and compute is one market. Cybersecurity is another.”

The possibilities for providing data and security services on the final frontier played a big role in C5 Capital’s decision to lead a $130 million funding round for Texas-based Axiom Space, which is due to send citizen astronauts to the International Space Station next year and could start laying the groundwork for its own space station in 2024.

“We have a lot of data that’s created in space, but how valuable would it be to actually do compute and storage in space?” Meyerson asked. “We’ve been talking with Axiom about that and helping them to form partnerships. How do we use the C5 portfolio in cybersecurity and threat protection to assist Axiom with their supply chain and their partners, to bring the most advanced technologies to that critically important area?”

Get the full story on GeekWire
Categories
Fiction Science Club

How technology can keep democracy from dying

Queen Amidala in the Galactic Senate
Queen Amidala addresses the Galactic Senate in a scene from "Star Wars." (Lucasfilm Photo)

Between the voting-machine failures, the cyberattacks and the social-media shenanigans, technology hasn’t had a great record when it comes to fostering and protecting democracy in the 21st century. But George Zarkadakis says the technology — and democracy — can be fixed.

In his new book, “Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines,” the Greek-born tech expert, writer and management consultant offers a repair manual that takes advantage of innovations ranging from artificial intelligence and expert systems, to blockchain, to data trusts that are personalized and monetized.

According to Zarkadakis, one of the most important fixes will be for governments to earn back the trust of the people they govern.

“We should have a more participatory form of government, rather than the one we have now,” Zarkadakis told me from his home base in London. “A mixture, if you like, of more direct democracy and representational democracy. And that’s where this idea of citizen assemblies comes about.”

He delves into his prescription for curing liberal democracy — and the precedents that can be drawn from science fiction — in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. Check out the entire show via your favorite podcast channel, whether that’s Anchor, Apple, Spotify, Google,  Breaker, Overcast, Pocket Casts or RadioPublic.

Continue reading “How technology can keep democracy from dying”
Categories
GeekWire

Microsoft gives a boost to COVID-19 data analysis

Coronavirus data chart
Microsoft’s Power BI data visualization tool tracks statistics relating to the coronavirus epidemic. Click on the graphic for an interactive version. (Microsoft Graphic)

Microsoft says it’s immediately putting $20 million from its AI for Health program toward analytical tools that can help researchers and public health officials get a handle on the coronavirus pandemic.

John Kahan, Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer, said AI for Health “will collaborate with nonprofits, governments, and academic researchers on solutions, and bring our experience to the table, providing access to Microsoft AI, technical experts, data scientists and other resources.”

“We’re focusing our efforts in five specific areas where we think data, analysis and the skills of our data scientists can have the biggest impact,” Kahan wrote today in a blog post about the effort.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Orrery.ai aims to spin data into gold

Chipsats
Chipsats like the ones shown here could provide streams of radar data for processing by Orrery.ai’s algorithms. (Photo courtesy of Orrery.ai)

Satellites, sensors, social media and purchasing data provide terabytes’ worth of information about how the global economy is working — and the insights gleaned from that data can be more precious than gold.

But what’s the best way to extract the gold from the dross? That’s where longtime space entrepreneur Dick Rocket intends to step in with a stealthy venture called Orrery.ai.

“There’s a gap between the data analysis firms and the financial sector,” Rocket told GeekWire this week. “That is our gap.”

Rocket launched Orrery.ai about a year ago, with backing from angel investors, but he and a small executive team are just now ramping up a more ambitious private funding campaign. They’re also mulling over where to put their headquarters. (The Seattle area is in the mix, along with sites in Florida, Texas, New York and Georgia.)

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Number crunchers are on the trail of dark energy

Saul Perlmutter
Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter discusses the implications of the universe’s accelerating expansion at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Big data just might give astronomers a better grip on the answer to one of the biggest questions in physics: Exactly what’s behind the mysterious acceleration in the expansion rate of the universe, also known as dark energy?

And that means the number crunchers at the University of Washington’s DIRAC Institute have their work cut out for them.

The role of data analysis in resolving the mystery came to the fore on May 14 during a talk given at the DIRAC Institute’s first-ever open house on the UW campus. The speaker was none other than Berkeley astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter, who won a share of the Nobel Prize in physics in 2011 for finding the first evidence of dark energy.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How families will help shape the future of health

Future of Health panel
Panelists discuss the future of health during a Town Hall Seattle forum at the Institute for Systems Biology. From left: GeekWire’s Clare McGrane, the panel’s moderator; Leroy Hood of Providence St. Joseph Health; Howard Frumkin of the University of Washington School of Public Health; and John Aitchison of the Center for Infectious Disease Research. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

It’s no secret that a rising flood of data, from the results of sophisticated genetic tests to the vital signs recorded by your smartphone, is transforming the way we approach health and wellness. But one of the pioneers of that trend says big data could well shift the focus of the quest for wellness from the hospital to the home.

“I think the most powerful unit for scientific wellness is the family,” Leroy Hood, co-founder of Seattle’s Institute for Systems Biology and chief science officer at Providence St. Joseph Health, said during a March 7 forum on the future of health.

The forum was hosted by the Institute for System Biology’s headquarters as part of Town Hall Seattle’s science lecture series.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Numbers tell tales on ‘Game of Thrones’

"Game of Thrones" title

“Game of Thrones,” the HBO sword-sorcery-and-sex series that begins its seventh season tonight, has spawned a geekier kind of game: doing data analytics to study who’s on top and who’ll get the ax (figuratively and literally).

The Wall Street Journal delved deeply into the data geekery last week, noting that fans have recorded the screen time and other statistics for nearly 200 notable characters over the course of the past 60 episodes. Intricate algorithms seek to correlate the characters’ characteristics with their chances of surviving the poison pens wielded by book author George R.R. Martin and the series’ screenwriters.

Indian data scientist Shail Deliwala ran the numbers and came up with several correlations. Some mesh with common sense (for example, characters with lots of dead relatives are less likely to survive), while others mesh more with literary sense (for example, the larger the attacking force, the higher the chances that the defenders will prevail).

Get the full story on GeekWire.