Guest Written by Jeff Silverman Cross-queueing data is a simple concept that has profound impacts. Do your “eyes” confirm what your “ears” heard? The art of pairing diverse intelligence platforms or methods of analysis can fill knowledge gaps, and thus paint a synergistic picture that is greater than its parts. Such methodology is a foundational element to how intelligence is conducted. I’d love to tell you a few war stories that demonstrate that pairing the right nuggets of data can make all the difference in saving innocent lives — but as the saying goes, “that's classified.” So instead of swimming...

Get Tony Liano talking about flavor for long enough, and he might urge you to conduct an experiment. “Buy some jelly beans, plug your nose and tell me what you taste." Whether the bean flavor is cherry or rotten eggs, the result will be the same: utter tastelessness. The same can be said of bland, uninspired cooking—which Tony and his wife, Jodi Liano, sought to combat when they opened the San Francisco Cooking School (SFCS) in 2012. In just six years, the school has rooted itself in San Francisco's food world, supplying some of the city's most acclaimed restaurants with...

Bionics, Autonomous Vehicles, and Augmented Reality? Company President and Futurist on the Future World of Data. Autonomous cars, biotechnology and more. We asked two people intimately familiar with data and its impact on tomorrow about the possibilities that excite them—Mike Cordano, President and Chief Operating Officer of Western Digital, and Jason Silva, futurist, acclaimed TV host and data personality. Mike and Jason sat down and were tasked to blindly select provocative questions from a bowl of data-related queries. Read on to see their surprising reactions and answers! The First Hello and Talking Data 1) Mike meet Jason, Jason meet Mike. ...

Guest Written by Rob Callaghan While many adults have fond memories of playing video games as children, cloud gaming is for more than just kids. Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) gaming—a type of online game where large groups of people play on the same server—is big business. How big? In 2017, an estimated $30 billion USD was spent on MMO gaming. That number is projected to grow even further. From players using their own computers and game consoles in the United States, to internet cafes in Seoul, South Korea filled with die-hard players playing around-the-clock, to friends gathered around their television sets...

Could we use the power of technology to reverse engineer love? So says renowned futurist Jason Silva. In our humble beginnings, our ancestors left behind drawings on cave walls that displayed the objects of their affection. Now, tools such as social media and online dating hope to reverse engineer how people find their perfect match. We are known to share what we care about online and, with better analysis, Jason sees new ways that technology can better bring people together to find love. Keep your heart open while listening to Jason’s thoughts! Want to watch more of Jason in action? Check...

Greg Simon's wallet looks a lot like yours. Stuffed between the cash and the credit cards are a handful of loyalty cards he barely uses—if at all. According to some estimates, the average U.S. household participates in 30 different loyalty programs. But that doesn't mean they're utilizing the programs. Another report found that only half of loyalty program members are active in them, and of that half, 20 percent have never redeemed any rewards at all. But why? Simply put, loyalty programs are antiquated: It's difficult to redeem points across different offerings (between, say, an airline and a car rental company) and it takes...

What does the state of autonomous vehicles look like right now? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous vehicle industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. How do all the sensors, cameras, and other hardware on autonomous vehicles communicate to react to real-world driving conditions? The glue that might hold all of these automotive pieces...

On a recent inspection out at sea, Frankie Suarez examined the gaskets on his oil rig's exhaust system. But he didn't check each gasket personally. Instead, Suarez maneuvered an unmanned aerial vehicle into position above the gaskets and used an attached thermal sensor to detect whether hot gases were escaping, which would indicate a leak. Keeping an oil rig in working order involves a slew of inspections typically carried out over several weeks by technicians. But, increasingly, the world's largest oil producers are using drones to supplement the work of their technicians. This new class of aerial workers has become...

What's the state of autonomous vehicles? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous vehicle industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. To build better public transportation systems, the time has come to rethink one of the oldest ways of getting around town, buses. But, we don’t just mean the use of electricity and hydrogen to...

 Do all data scientists think alike? Or are some of the world’s brightest data minds up for a bit of debate? To find out, we sat down with two leading figures in the data science industry: Chief Data Scientist, Janet George, and Principal Data Scientist, Dr. Kirk Borne. The topic of discussion? Popular questions about data science that have been searched online. Is data science a fad? Is data science computer science? Only a true data scientist would know. There was even a mention of one of the most unique job titles of all time, Chief Electricity Officer. We...

In April 2018, one of the top streaming services made its $30 billion debut on the stock exchange and resurrected a familiar debate in the music industry: While streaming services have become a de facto way for fans to discover and enjoy music, lesser-known entertainers are finding it difficult to make a living. While the "per stream" payout from a streaming service can vary, the average for one popular streaming service in 2016 was $0.0046524—and it’s trending downward. Additionally, that pay goes to all "rights holders," which includes labels and publishers, meaning that, at the end of the day, an artist will likely see...

What's the state of autonomous cars? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous cars industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. There’s a new way to look out for fractures and potholes in the road. And, it doesn’t need eyes to see them. But, it does need a camera mounted on its dashboard. It’s the...

What's the state of autonomous cars? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous cars industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. Does the future of driving mean groceries delivered autonomously to your driveway? Move over on-demand, food-delivery services. There’s a new delivery company in Silicon Valley. And it just might put an end to those...

What does the state of autonomous vehicles look like right now? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous vehicle industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. How can we learn from mistakes made by autonomous vehicles today to potentially create safer transportation in the future? Open roads are meant to be places of freedom and...

The ancient Chinese board game, Go has little to do with professional American football but they have one thing in common: predictive analytics. While football features 60 minutes of brute force and theatrics across a field, Go is a subdued dance of black and white stones around a square board. But if a computer model were to play each game, it would ask the same question: How do I maximize win probability? To Frank Frigo, co-founder of EdjSports and its parent company EdjAnalytics, the football-Go connection is obvious: Both are games of strategy and skill—and both can be modeled by a computer. Frigo, a...

What does the state of autonomous vehicles look like right now? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an industry gathering. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous vehicle industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Watch the latest expert interview here. There’s something missing from autonomous vehicles as they drive themselves down the road: a clear line of sight. It’s one scenario to be the only car driving on a...

In 2017, FIFA was the world's best-selling console game. It didn't happen by mistake. Find out how data creates virtual players that keep gamers hooked.

Today's smart homes are still a far cry from their sci-fi movie counterparts. They don't collect the newspaper from the front lawn or automatically clean up a mess. But with the rise of data-collecting IoT devices, that dream is closer to becoming a reality—particularly when it comes to home security. In-home cameras can now do more than simply record what's happening thanks to AI and machine-learning smarts that allow us to talk to our TVs or trust our heating system to self-regulate. Now, if you came home from work to find a broken vase on the floor, you can ask...

In the winter of 2016, an analyst at an Earth-monitoring company received an alert from one of its satellites photographing a forest in Primorsky Krai, eastern Russia. Upon closer inspection, the satellite had noticed that an area that should have been shrouded in forest, was now barren. Within hours, a call had been made to a global conservation group, who mounted a legal case against the logging companies operating in the area. That process, historically, could have taken months of observing and recording changes. What’s more, in remote areas such as the Ussuri Taiga in Russia’s Far East, policing illegal...

Can real-time analytics help professional football players get more wins? Smart sensors embedded in the uniforms of football players keep track of a slew of metrics. Direction, acceleration, deceleration, and more can be measured with pinpoint accuracy. Equipped with this new, real-time data, football coaches and scouts alike see value in the process to evaluate, recruit, and train professional football players. And, a surprising technology is being used to drive this technological innovation: Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. This RFID technology is at the heart of what Zebra Sports—a branch of Zebra Technologies, a leader in tracking and connected solutions—does...

Highlight videos are a perfect fit for our increasingly short attention spans. With new technology, we can now use dark data from longer videos to quickly create highlight clips. These clips show up everywhere, from our social media feeds to late-night TV. But nowhere are highlight reels more exciting than in sports—and not just because of the action that they capture. What is Dark Data? In the past, sports broadcasters were responsible for pulling together these post-action clips, but now they’re getting some digital assistance from dark data. Computers “watch” videos, analyzing unstructured data—data that isn’t easy to organize and...

Before you can be a data scientist, you have to be able to speak like a data scientist. Think of learning how to talk about data science like learning a new language. There are a few fundamental words to be learned and mastered. From there, it’s a matter of building out your data science vocabulary as you come across new ideas and concepts. Luckily, you can learn how to talk like a data scientist faster than you might have thought. We go over nine terms that every beginning data scientist should know. To make each data science term more relatable,...

You might say that Dr. Kirk Borne has always had his head in the stars. For nearly two decades, he worked as an astrophysicist at the most prestigious civilian space program in the United States. But, this work was just the start of Kirk’s career. He also taught astrophysics and computational science at a well-known university in Virginia for over ten years. Pair these experiences with his deep knowledge of data science and you can see why Kirk is known worldwide as a renowned data scientist. From artificial intelligence to machine learning and more, Kirk is excited to explore how...

What's the state of autonomous cars? To find out, the Autotech Council—a Silicon Valley-based ecosystem of automobile industry players—held an event on April 13th. The half-day event, hosted by Western Digital, brought together 300 leaders in the autonomous cars industry. We partnered with SiliconANGLE, a leading digital media platform, to spend a few minutes talking with a select group of these leaders. Autonomous vehicles may be able to sense what’s going on around them, but how will they store all of that data? This question is top of mind for Oded Sagee, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Western Digital....