Category Archives: Technology

Upon the closing of the proposed merger between Computer Sciences Corp (CSC) and the Enterprise Services business of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the new organisation will be renamed to DXC Technology before it begins its journey as a $26 billion IT services giant.

The completion of the merger is slated for April 3, 2017, which will see DXC Technology list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol DXC, subject to final approvals.

10 types of enterprise deployments

As businesses continue to experiment with the Internet of Things, interesting use cases are emerging. Here are some of the most common ways IoT is deployed in the enterprise.

Current CSC chairman, president, and CEO Mike Lawrie will serve as DXC Technology chairman, president, and CEO upon the close of the impending merger.

"With a mission of leading clients on their digital transformation journeys, DXC Technology will be recognised globally as a force multiplier, enabling clients to seize the opportunities presented by today's rapidly changing technologies," Lawrie said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The DXC Technology brand will be built on a foundation of trust and transformation, and a relentless drive to help clients thrive on change. We will focus on producing greater value for clients, partners and shareholders, along with growth opportunities for our people."

Until the completion of the merger -- which has received all necessary regulatory clearances, with SEC registration still ongoing -- CSC and HPE ES will continue to operate under current leadership structures as two separate organisations.

With the enterprise services unit spun out of HPE, CEO Meg Whitman will take a board seat at DXC Technology. As a result, it is expected the pared down HPE will focus on cloud and datacentre infrastructure.

At the time the merger was announced, Lawrie said the merger would provide opportunities to both companies, which only have a 15 percent overlap in accounts.

"Our two companies have embarked on broad-based turnarounds," he said.

"The new company will be a global top three leader in IT services to lead our customers in their digital transformations. We will win against both merged and established players."

In addition to DXC Technology expecting to produce $26 billion in annual revenue, the company will boast nearly 6,000 clients in more than 70 countries.

Hewlett Packard split its business into two entities in November 2015, with HP Inc focused on PCs and printers and the other, HPE, concerned with commercial technology.

HP announced its plan to split almost a year prior, with Whitman saying at the time that separating into two companies would give each the independence, focus, financial resources, and flexibility needed to adapt quickly to changing market and customer dynamics.

Similarly, CSC underwent its own split in 2015, which resulted in two separate publicly traded companies -- one focused on commercial businesses and the other on the public sector.

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DXC Technology to emerge from CSC and HPE Enterprise Services merger - ZDNet

Science Daily

Technology helps older adults living with congestive heart failure Science Daily Marjorie Skubic, a professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, and Marilyn Rantz, Curators' Professor Emerita in the Sinclair School of Nursing, believe this technology can help older adults living with congestive ... and more »

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Technology helps older adults living with congestive heart failure - Science Daily

Tech Trends

Even as technology proliferates in education at unprecedented rates, new hurdles including limitations of the human mind to keep up with technological advances are throwing themselves in the way of effective implementation.

Each year, the New Media Consortium, in collaboration with the Educause Learning Initiative, pulls together a panel of experts to settle on a list of 18 issues that the experts contend will have a major impact on education practice and policy in the near term, mid-term and long term six significant trends, six significant developments and six barriers. The experts (79 this year, including 75 panelists and four project leaders) range from NMC and Educause staff to prominent figures in academia and policy from around the world. The process is accessible to the public through the Horizon Project wiki at horizon.wiki.nmc.org, and the complete list of participants can be found at horizon.wiki.nmc.org/Panel+of+Experts.

Here's a word you don't hear much anymore: obsolescence. But it's a word that's making a comeback in 2017 in a new and distressing way. Popularly used in a business context (e.g. the planned obsolescence of consumer devices that are designed to fall apart in a few years, like cars and laptops), it's now being used to describe the human mind. It's no longer the technology that's becoming obsolete too quickly; it's the knowledge of technology that's rapidly falling behind advances or changes in technologies. And that obsolescence, according to the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report: 2017 Higher Education Edition, is just one of the six major challenges facing technology in higher ed in the coming years.

The Horizon Report is NMC's annual research project that, with a panel of higher education experts, attempts to identify significant and not necessarily obvious technology trends that will impact education in the coming years. Among those trends are those accelerating adoption of technology, those impeding technology and those that are simply educationally significant technology-based developments.

This year's report identified six major roadblocks to education technology, either in its adoption or in its implementation. The report divided the roadblocks into three categories: those that pose challenges but that are solvable in the near term, those that are more difficult to solve but are still understandable and those that are "wicked difficult" nigh impossible even to define, let alone solve.

Falling into the wicked difficult category in this year's report are two issues that did not make last year's list: managing the obsolescence of human knowledge and, perhaps even more difficult, grappling with the changing role of the educator.

On the human obsolescence front, the report explained: "Staying organized and current presents a challenge to academics in a world where educational needs, software, and devices advance at a strenuous rate. New developments in technology hold great potential for improving the quality of learning and operations. However, just as faculty and staff are able to master one technology, it seems a new version launches. Institutions must grapple with the longevity of technologies and devise back-up plans before making large investments. There is added pressure to ensure that any tools selected are in service of deepening learning outcomes in ways that are measurable."

Professional development can only go so far to alleviating this problem, though the report did note a few exemplars. One of those is the Houston Community College system, which provides both technical and pedagogical assistance to adjuncts. As the report described: "Eight Curriculum Innovation Centers work with instructors to integrate the latest technologies into their courses and facilitate engaging learning experiences. Adjuncts receive training on special projects, such as digital storytelling and designing online courses, as well as basic assistance with LMS and grade entry software. The centers are accessible during set hours or by appointment, providing flexibility for adjuncts to visit the location nearest their home, place of employment, or teaching campus."

Another exemplar noted in the report was Penn State University, which "employs a three-pronged approach for managing knowledge obsolescence among faculty and staff: providing them with emerging technologies for freeform experimentation, bringing together instructional designers and programmers to reimagine how technology can transform classroom activities, and establishing long-term bonds between leadership and faculty to engage in creative problem-solving."

According to Samantha Becker, co-principal investigator for the Horizon Project and NMC's senior director of communications, this particular challenge "converges with integrating formal and informal learning. Not only is keeping up with new educational trends and technologies an important part of formal PD, but educators and staff must (somehow) find the time in the limited free time they have to pursue external learning pathways. I've heard educators, for example, refer to their social media as personal learning networks."

Link:

The 6 Major Barriers to Technology Adoption in Higher Ed - Campus Technology

Forbes

Warren Buffett's Increasing Passion For Apple And Technology Forbes After the close of trading last night, Apple investors received news via 13F filings from the likes of Berkshire Hathaway and Elliott Management, among others, that showed that holdings of Apple among the biggest institutions had increased ... and more »

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Warren Buffett's Increasing Passion For Apple And Technology - Forbes

Canadian researchers are using new technology to enhance relationship satisfaction when couples confront geographic barriers.

Devices being developed at Simon Fraser University (SFU) allow couples to remotely share a walk, watch movies together, and even give each other a massage.

Its all about feeling connected, said Dr. Carman Neustaedter, an associate professor in SFUs School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT).

Technology is enhancingconnectivity in distance relationships in a variety of ways.

Among them, researchers have designed a pair of interconnected gloves called Flex-N-Feel. When fingers flex in one glove, the actions are transmitted to a remote partner wearing the other.

The gloves tactile sensors allow the wearer to feel the movements.

To capture the flex actions, the sensors are attached to a microcontroller. The sensors provide a value for each bend, and are transmitted to the feel glove using a WiFi module.

The sensors are also placed strategically on the palm side of the fingers in order to better feel the touch. A soft-switch on both gloves also allows either partner to initiate the touch.

Users can make intimate gestures such as touching the face, holding hands, and giving a hug, said Neustaedter. The act of bending or flexing ones finger is a gentle and subtle way to mimic touch.

The gloves are currently a prototype and testing continues. While one set of gloves enables one-way remote touch between partners, Neustaedter says a second set could allow both to share touches at the same time.

Other projects also focus on shared experiences, including a virtual reality video conferencing system that lets one see through the eyes of a remote partner, and another that enables users to video-stream a remote partners activities to a long-distance partner at home (called Be With Me).

Meanwhile the researchers are also studying how next-generation telepresence robots can help unite couples and participate in activities together.

In this case, investigators have embedded a robot, designed by Suitable Technologies, into several Vancouver homes. There, it connects to countries around the world, including India and Singapore.

Researchers continue to monitor how the robot is used. One long-distance couple planned a Valentines Day date while one partner is in Vancouver, and the other, on Vancouver Island.

The focus here is providing that connection, and in this case, a kind of physical body, said Neustaedter, who has designed and built eight next-generation telepresence systems for families.

Neustaedter has spent more than a decade studying workplace collaborations over distance, including telepresence attendance at international conferences.

Long-distance relationships are more common today, but distance dont have to mean missing out on having a physical presence and sharing space, he said.If people cant physically be together, were hoping to create the next best technological solutions.

Source: Simon Fraser University

APA Reference Nauert PhD, R. (2017). New Technology Can Aid Long-Distance Relationships. Psych Central. Retrieved on February 15, 2017, from https://psychcentral.com/news/2017/02/15/new-technology-can-aid-long-distance-realtionships/116469.html

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New Technology Can Aid Long-Distance Relationships - PsychCentral.com

Apple is preparing to completely redevelop its fingerprint sensor to feature in a new iPhone, according to patent filings.

The rumoured development is probably a way of having the technology fit into its next handset, mostly referred to as the iPhone 8. Because that phone is likely to bring with it an entirely new design and a range of never-before-seen features some of the most central parts of the phone will have to be re-designed.

Apple is planning on making the display of the new phone reach all the way across the front of the handset, according to rumours, doing away with the black or white plastic that has surrounded the screen in some form since the very first iPhone.

If Apple does do that, it will have no space for the home button that has also been a central part of every iPhone. Until the new handset was released, every phone featured a button on the front with the iPhone 7, that stopped being an actual button but simulated one through vibrations, but kept its iconic place at the bottom of the phone.

For years, that button has also contained the fingerprint sensor that has let people get access to the phone quickly and securely. That sensor has become central to the entire operating system allowing people to authenticate payments and other things, as well as becoming the primary way of getting into the handset.

The home screen on the latest version of iOS was even entirely re-designed around the new button, with the expectation that people would use their fingerprint to get into it.

Instead of keeping that button, Apple is developing special technology that would allow it to be placed underneath the screen allowing the display to take up the whole front, but keeping the button that is so central to using iOS.

Some examples of how to do that "use a micro light emitting diode (LED) in an active matrix display to emit light and a sensing IR diode to sense light", according to the patent. That wold mean that the screen could actually see the finger that was being pressed onto it, reading the fingerprint as it did so and checking whether it was the right one.

That would work better than some other, similar features, the patent notes. Most require two separate pieces of technology the bit that displays light and the bit that looks out for it stuck together, adding extra space and constraining the design.

The patent actually renews a similar filing first submitted by micro-LED display company LuxVue in 2014. But the new filing re-assigns that to Apple apparently as part of work it is doing on that technology.

The new iPhone which is expected to be numbered 8 but might also be called X, and will probably launch alongside another, less premium handset has been rumoured to bring with it a range of features alongside its new display size. Those include special screen technologies, wireless chargingand sensors that might be able to see the face of the person using it and help with augmented reality.

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iPhone 8 could include special technology for hiding fingerprint sensor under display, patent suggests - The Independent

Japan is contributing US$ 725,200 towards a new IAEA initiative to use nuclear technology for the verification of the integrity of buildings following earthquakes and other natural disasters. The donation, made earlier this month, is channelled through the IAEA Peaceful Uses Initiative.

Following an earthquake or flood, critical civil structures, even when they remain standing, may have developed hidden flaws, which could pose further risks if not detected early and remediated quickly. Industrial testing using nuclear technology involves the use of ionizing radiation along with other methods to test the quality of materials, without causing any damage to them or leaving any radioactive residue. Such non-destructive testing (NDT) was successfully used in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Nepal in April 2015 to test the integrity of critical buildings such as hospitals, schools and historical attractions.

NDT technology allows countries to quickly and efficiently test structures using simple and easily portable equipment, said Joao Osso Junior, Head of the Radioisotope Products and Radiation Technology Section at the IAEA. It can help countries that are particularly prone to natural disasters.

The new activity will complement ongoing IAEA work under a technical cooperation project to support the preparation and recovery of civil infrastructures following natural disasters in Asia and the Pacific. Experts from countries in the region will be offered training and, when needed in the aftermath of a disaster, NDT equipment.

Japans contribution will include the organization of training courses and storage of equipment at the IAEA Response and Assistance Network (RANET)Capacity Building Centre (CBC) in Fukushima prefecture, which was opened in 2013. The IAEA has since conducted training activities at the RANET CBC for local, national and international participants to prepare for response to nuclear and radiological emergencies. Now the scope of training activities will be expanded to include NDT technology.

The Malaysian Government, which hosts an IAEA collaborating centre on NDT, has also offered to contribute towards this new initiative. Read more about the countrys success in introducing NDT technologies with the help of the IAEA in this article Non-Destructive Testing Helps Malaysias Competitiveness.

NDT methods include radiography, a type of radiation technology, and gamma tomography, which is based on the differential absorption in different materials of gamma rays emitted from a radioactive source. Through the measurement of the rays that pass through the material without being absorbed, its make-up and structure can be identified. These techniques are able to identify structural defects that cannot be discovered through traditional testing methods.

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Japan to Support Use of NDT Technology for Recovery from Earthquakes, Floods in Asia and the Pacific - International Atomic Energy Agency

In the next few years in the interior design industry is going in the direction of technology and beauty. We are looking at bathtubs that memorize settings of different people or showers that you can start and be just the right temperature with a touch of a button.

These are technology trends of the 21st century, they were to make your life easier and more convenient.

When is convenience a good thing in the interior design industry and when is it counted as lethargic or laziness? For example, people would use the microwave instead of the oven know it will taste better in the oven but it takes just a little bit longer. In order for people to buy these convenient technologies it has to look beautiful.

Can technology and beauty go together as one in a home? Everyone who is buying new homes these days are asking these same questions. The goal for all of these new technologies are to make them affordable for people with average income, everyone wants to have the new and improved technology.

Will these items in the technology trends be in your new home? This decision is in your near future or you are already making these decisions and dont know what to do.

Adrienne Reagan, Kenmore

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Technology is changing the home | Letter - Bothell-Kenmore Reporter

Forbes

Tinder's Sean Rad On How Technology And Artificial Intelligence Will Change Dating Forbes Listen to the full episode here: Tinder, the Match Group's popular dating app, has made more than 20 billion connections since Sean Rad launched the app in 2012. Back then the app, which lets you swipe through an endless flow of potential mates, was ... and more »

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Tinder's Sean Rad On How Technology And Artificial Intelligence Will Change Dating - Forbes

Rachel Botsman has spent over a decade thinking about the "sharing economy." As an an author and a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, Sad Business School, who researches how technology is transforming trust, shes an authority on the subject. She's also one of Fast Company's Most Creative People. She is currently writing a book, due out next fall, about the new decentralized economies and how that has changed trust.

I recently chatted with her about what this means for the future of leadership. What follows is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for space and clarity.

Can you talk a bit about your current project and its background?

In 2009, I wrote What's Mine Is Yours about the so-called sharing economy. And there were really two aspects that always interested me about it. One was how you can take these idle assets and unlock their value through technology, and then the second was trust. This notion that technology could breed familiarity and enable strangers to trust one another was fascinating, and the start of something much bigger.

I started to research things like the blockchain and our relationship to artificial intelligence, and all these other technologies that transformed how we trust people, ideas, things, companies. I felt that there was a paradigm shift happening.

At the same time, it's hard to ignore the headlines that trust is really imploding. So whether it's banks, the media, government, churches . . . this institutional trust that is really important to society is disintegrating at an alarming rate. And so how do we trust people enough to get in a car with a total stranger and yet we don't trust a banking executive? So that's essentially what the book unpacks.

Rachel Botsman

And what I've discovered through writing the book is that these systems aren't betterthey still bump against human error and greed and market forces. It is very hard to have a decentralized system because you always end up with a center or a monopoly of power. What I find really frightening is this denialand this is a leadership questionfirst of all [to accept] that trust is changing. And then the lack of organizations completely rethinking how you build trust, what you do with trust when it's destroyed, whether the basic principles are really changing.

Where did this new paradigm shift come from? Was it from these new companies creating different services? Or was it from more institutional distrust on the consumers part?

It's a transfer. So societies can't run without trust, which is a really basic point; it is social glue. If it disappears or dissipates in one way, it's going to rise up in another form. And this has really taken hold in financial services, in everything from peer-to-peer lending to crowdfunding to Bitcoin. The system breaks down and it makes people open to alternatives. If trust disappears or dissipates in one way, it's going to rise up in another form.

And then the second part is the technology. This technology to transfer assets without intermediaries, to build familiarity, to find social connections with people. This brings us together in ways that have never been possible before.

When you see banks like Goldman Sachs investing in blockchain technology or other similar corporate moves, is that an example of companies trying to keep up with paradigm shifts or institutions trying to cloak themselves in the popular nomenclature to stay relevant?

It comes from a place of fear. It comes from an understandable place, of not wanting to be disintermediated. It's like, Can we embrace the technology that could be our greatest threat? Goldman Sachs is a really good example because the cryptocurrency they're developing, the blockchain, is private. It's inside their walls.

They're trying to take a culturethis institutional idea that you can control trust, that it can be top-down and be linearand apply it to this distributive ledger. And that's where we're going to run into a lot of problems: The architecture doesn't match with the ideology.

You said that despite the distributed model, there is still centralization. What do you mean by that? Could that change business models in the coming years?

There are two very different examples that illustrate the same problem. One example is that you start off with networks and marketplaces like Airbnb, where it's meant to be a distribution of powerlet's empower people to make money off their homes. And then a network monopoly results, where Airbnb controls that market. And then commercial landlords become the dominant players on the platform, and rent is driven up as an unintended consequence. So that's an example of a marketplace that results in a network monopoly.

A second example is the collapse of the DAO fund, the crowdfunding experiment they did on the blockchain with Ethereum. [Botsman is referring to the Ethereum project, which created a peer-to-peer blockchain digital contracts platform. It was hacked in 2016 to the tune of $50 million. To fix that, its creator, Vitalik Buterin, decided to do whats called a "hard fork," which solved the hack by moving the funds, but it ostensibly went against the basic tenets the platform had originally created, which was being a decentralized platform where power lie exclusively with its users.]

And that's really interesting, because, what did they do? It ran into human problems, and Buterin decided on this hard fork. People had to make a choice: Do they stick with the original fund, or do they follow this new thing? And so even in these supposedly decentralized control systems, when something goes wrong, we still look for leadership. If you look at those 24 hours [when the hack first occurred], and everyone was saying Where's Vitalik? What's Vitalik going to do? that's human nature.

So it's lovely to believe this libertarian ideal that you don't need a leader, you need a center, but it just doesn't work.

Do you think, organizationally and in a hierarchical sense, things will remain the same down the line, despite these new distributed economies?

This is where it ties to leadership. It really requires a different type of leadership where you understand how to get people to collaborate with different and sometimes misaligned interests. A good example of this is Gerard Ryle and his work with the ICIJ. He's the guy that got the 300 or so reporters to collaborate around the Panama Papers. They all work for their own media organizations; journalists like scoops. And yet he figured out how to get them to all work together. And he used complicated technology, but it was his leadership that meant everyone published on the same day.

What is frightening to me is I can count on my hand the number of people that really understand how to lead these types of systems.

In essence, does it take a new, very different kind of leadership in order to succeed with these decentralized systems?

That's exactly right. And many entrepreneurs I've met they think their role is playing digital God. And it's not. Yet that's what I find.

And then the other end of the spectrum is you speak to leaders at traditional brandsit's not a criticism, but I don't even know where to beginwho sort of form a blockchain team, and then they form a peer-to-peer marketplace team. Yet that's not changing the culturethat's not changing the way you interact with your customers.

If I were an entrepreneur looking to become a leader in this burgeoning sector, and I picked up your book and came upon your research, what is the biggest lesson youd want me to learn?

As messy as humans are, technology cannot replace the role of humans in relationships. It's thinking about how you inject that humanness into the technology. You put people at the center; [understand] what that means without it being lip service. People are at the center of what you're doing, not the technology. What are the implications of that?

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How Has Technology Changed The Way We Trust? - Fast Company