Above the Trend Line: machine learning industry rumor central, is a recurring feature of insideBIGDATA. In this column, we present a variety of short time-critical news items such as people movements, funding news, financial results, industry alignments, rumors and general scuttlebutt floating around the big data, data science and machine learning industries including behind-the-scenes anecdotes and curious buzz. Our intent is to provide our readers a one-stop source of late-breaking news to help keep you abreast of this fast-paced ecosystem. We’re working hard on your behalf with our extensive vendor network to give you all the latest happenings. Heard of something yourself? Tell us! Just e-mail me at: daniel
Heard on the street, BlueData, provider of a leading infrastructure software platform for Big Data, revealed that it has joined the Nutanix Elevate Technology Alliance Program, earning the select “Nutanix Ready” validation. BlueData’s EPIC software platform passed rigorous certification by Nutanix to achieve this validation, ensuring compatibility and interoperability for joint customers … To see where the bucks are, PayScale.com, an online salary database, released a report focused on the skills economy. The report aimed to understand which job skills are worth the most, which ones are worth the least, and which ones provide the biggest jump in salary. After surveying over 40 million people for this report, the data revealed that almost all of the top-paying and best emerging skills fall into the tech category, featuring skills like: Scala – 22% pay boost, Hadoop – 12.5% pay boost, Cloud computing – 10.4% pay boost, Android SDK – 9.3% pay boost, and iOS SDK – 11.4% pay boost … And speaking of bucks, we hear that ThoughtSpot, a leader in search-driven analytics in the enterprise, announced a $50 million investment, bringing its total capital raised to over $90 million. ThoughtSpot’s disruptive technology has garnered new attention from customers and investors, including lead investor General Catalyst Partners, and Geodesic Capital. Existing investors Lightspeed Ventures and Khosla Ventures continue to support ThoughtSpot’s success through additional investments in this Series C round … Machine learning and fraud detection are going hand-in-hand with Argyle Data’s VP of engineering Padraig Stapleton offering how mobile operators are using big data and machine learning technologies (AI) for real time fraud detection, prevention and profit. Last year, mobile operators lost $38bn of their revenue to fraud. Backed by Acero Capital, ATA Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, SK Telecom Ventures, Argyle Data helps dozens of telcos predict, visualize, zero-in on and shut down revenue attacks using analytics and machine learning techniques with its big data analytics platform. It is one of the first instances of how telecoms are making big data useful. In fact, a Cloudera and Argyle Data Survey shows 90% of service providers believe Hadoop is the most effective platform to combat US $38B revenue fraud … DATA SOURCE ALERT! Neo Technology announced that the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) has just released the Panama Papers offshore data on a Neo4j powered application. They’ve also made available a download of the Neo4j database HERE … The Force obviously is with this company, as DriveScale, the company that is pioneering flexible, scale-out computing for the enterprise using standard servers and commodity storage, emerged from a three-year stealth development effort and announced $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Pelion Venture Partners with participation from Nautilus Venture Partners and Foxconn’s Ingrasys. Carl Ledbetter, Managing Director at Pelion Venture Partners, and Connie Sheng, Founding Managing Director at Nautilus Venture Partners, join the Board of Directors as the first outside members, and the company named Scott McNealy, James Gosling, Phil Roussey and Ameet Patel as advisors … And to every data scientist’s delight, we found out that on the heels of Apple’s $1B investment in the Chinese ridesharing company, Didi Chuxing and Udacity have kicked off a global machine learning competition in which contestants are challenged to wrangle a better ride matching algorithm out of Didi’s published data sets. The grand prize winner gets $100,000 prize and worldwide acclaim, not to mention a chance to work at Didi in China or Silicon Valley. The judging panel includes Udacity founder and president Sebastian Thrun. The deadline to register and submit a new ride-matching algorithm for the first round of judging is June 17th at 8:30 PM PT … With more and more industry hookups happening these days, you’d think there was a big data version of Tinder at work — Logi Analytics, a leader in self-service analytics and 1010data, the only integrated platform that combines self-service data management and analytics at scale with ready-to-use data sets, unveiled the release of a connector as part of their certified partnership. With the connector, customers are able to run complex SQL and native 1010data queries on massive data sets in a fraction of the time it would take with other BI platforms. Logi uniquely translates queries to access the 1010data database engine directly for optimal performance across the full range of analytical capabilities. For existing 1010data customers, Logi Analytics can reuse queries already written and optimized for 1010data, use stored procedures, or invoke custom defined functions. Now, 1010data customers can easily use Logi’s self-service analytic capabilities to explore and visualize complex data sets on 1010data’s cloud-based analytical platform … Speaking of big data hookups, we learned that WANdisco (LSE: WAND), a leading provider of software that enables global enterprises to meet today’s data challenges of secure storage, scalability and availability, lifted the covers on a new partnership with WAN acceleration vendor Bridgeworks, recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Enterprise Networking for 2016. Bridgeworks PORTrockIT software will now be available for WANdisco Fusion’s patented active-transactional replication technology, that was built to move transactional data to the cloud, at Petabyte scale, without downtime or data loss. PORTrockIT’s patented technology supports businesses that rely on fast movement of large volumes of data and increases performance by up to 100 times faster. This addition of speed delivers enterprise data resilience and security for critical applications such as backup, replication, disaster recovery and cloud migration … A big Gold Star for Cambridge Semantics, a leading provider of Smart Data analytic and data management solutions driven by semantic web technology, who announced that it has been named a “strong performer” and has achieved the highest rating in the current offering category in Big Data Text Analytics Platforms by Forrester Research, Inc., in The Forrester Wave™: Big Data Text Analytics Platforms, Q2 2016 (May 2016) … And for those of us who engage in an adult beverage from time to time, here is an infographic from our friends at Cautoh, an app that allows people to track data about their drinks and get approximations of their alcohol levels …
Let’s all sing happy birthday for MapR Technologies, Inc., provider of the converged data platform, that announced the one year anniversary of Apache Drill on the MapR Platform. Since its general availability last year, Drill has helped hundreds of organizations worldwide rapidly analyze trillions of records and millions of files, and has fundamentally changed the way businesses actively engage with their data. Drill’s self-describing schema support eases ad-hoc queries in order to help analysts and business users leverage big data. Momentum driving Drill adoption is highlighted by customer success, superior product and strong community involvement … Insilico Medicine, Inc. announced that a paper titled “Deep Biomarkers of Human Aging: Application of Deep Neural Networks to Biomarker Development” by Putin, et al, was accepted for publication by Aging, one of the highest-impact journals in aging research on 9th of May, 2016 and will soon be published in the journal. The team built a reasonably accurate predictor of human chronological age, which may in theory be used as a biomarker of biological age. The beauty of this system is that it is a “polyglot ensemble”, which can incorporate predictors trained on other possible markers of human aging and can evaluate the importance of these markers. The website www.Aging.AI was built at the request of reviewers of the paper, who wanted to test the algorithm, so we are much more advanced in development of other biomarkers.
Inspired by Microsoft’s How-old.net, which can recognize your age using a photograph, an approach we also employ in projects with skincare collaborators, we decided to train an ensemble of deep neural networks on a very large number of simple inexpensive historical blood tests linked to age and sex and built a predictor, which is scalable and can include many other data types to build more comprehensive biomarkers of aging. Aging.AI can in principle be extended as a biomarker of biological aging that can be used to assess the efficacy of various therapies”, said Poly Mamoshina, research scientist at the Pharma.AI department of Insilico Medicine, Inc.
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