Cleveland Clinic and IBM have commenced the installation of the IBM Quantum System, the United States’ first private sector onsite, IBM-managed quantum computer.
IBM said the first quantum computer in healthcare, expected to be finished in early 2023, is a significant component of the two institutions’ ten-year collaboration aimed at radically increasing the pace of biological research through high-performance computing.
The Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator, which was announced in 2021, is a cooperative centre that combines Cleveland Clinic’s medical expertise with IBM’s technical skills, particularly its leadership in quantum computing.
“The current pace of scientific discovery is unacceptably slow, while our research needs are growing exponentially. We cannot afford to continue to spend a decade or more going from a research idea in a lab to therapies on the market. Quantum offers a future to transform this pace, particularly in drug discovery and machine learning,” Cleveland Clinic’s Chief Research Information Officer Lara Jehi, M.D. said.
IBM Research-Cleveland Clinic Partnership Director Dr Ruoyi Zhou stated that a paradigm shift in how scientific challenges are handled is on the horizon.
“At IBM, we’re more motivated than ever to create with Cleveland Clinic and others lasting communities of discovery and harness the power of quantum computing, AI and hybrid cloud to usher in a new era of accelerated discovery in healthcare and life sciences,” Dr Zhou added.
The Cleveland Clinic Discovery Accelerator is based on several of IBM’s most recent advances in high-performance computing, including:
Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery, as well as other generative modelling capabilities that use AI to detect knowledge gaps and develop hypotheses, with the ultimate goal of speeding up the research process in medicines and biomarker discovery;
RXN is a cloud-based platform that combines AI models with the ability to run robotic labs directly to enable end-to-end design and synthesis of new chemical substances;
Deep Search, a next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) technique for extracting insights from enormous amounts of structured and unstructured technical literature; and
High-Performance Hybrid Cloud Computing solutions that allow researchers to “burst” their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they require on a large scale.
The Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, which is part of the Cleveland Innovation District, is also supported by the Discovery Accelerator. The centre, funded by the state of Ohio, Jobs Ohio, and the Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team dedicated to investigating, preparing for, and guarding against new pathogens and virus-related disorders. Researchers use modern computational technology through Discovery Accelerator to accelerate essential research on medicines and vaccines.
According to IBM, the teams have already initiated several collaborative initiatives that will benefit from the increased computational capabilities. A research study developing a quantum computing method to screen and optimise drugs that target particular proteins; enhancing a prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery; and using AI to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases for efficient, existing drugs that could assist patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases are among the Discovery Accelerator projects.
A vital component of the relationship is focusing on educating tomorrow’s workforce and creating jobs to help the economy flourish. An innovative educational curriculum has been developed for participants ranging from high school to professional level, providing training and certification programs in data science, machine learning, and quantum computing to develop the skilled workforce required for future cutting-edge computational research.
Shutterstock, Inc., the leading global creative platform for transformative brands and media companies, today announced its partnership with FILMPAC, a premium footage boutique, to bring FILMPAC’s premium cinema-quality video collection to Pond5 and Shutterstock.
Founded by filmmakers for filmmakers, FILMPAC’s creative platform features 4K video content produced by world-class cinematographers and artists. It boasts a library of approximately 100,000 video assets across 15 curated collections, capturing powerful, raw and authentic moments that enable marketers and filmmakers to maximize their creative storytelling potential and create with confidence. As global distribution partners for FILMPAC, Shutterstock and Pond5 have unlocked access to unique, unparalleled video content, ranging from clips of cutting-edge technology and breakthroughs in healthcare to snippets of bustling cityscapes and breathtaking natural scenery.
“Video creators today are looking to bring their stories to life with unique and diverse cinema quality content,” said Tom Crary, Pond5’s CEO. “By partnering with FILMPAC, Shutterstock and Pond5 will provide our customers exclusive access to video content unsurpassed in its ability to inspire the creative storytelling process.”
Caleb Rexius, FILMPAC’s founder, added, “Our goal with FILMPAC footage is to produce a library that fits seamlessly into storytelling and meets the highest demands of creative quality. With our meticulously curated, yet practical collection, and Pond5 and Shutterstock’s vast distribution capabilities, we’re excited for this one-of-a-kind partnership, which will accelerate our mission of helping creatives win.”
FILMPAC’s exclusive content will be made available to both Enterprise and E-commerce customers across both Shutterstock and Pond5, initially as part of Shutterstock’s Select collection and as part of Pond5’s Marquee collection, which will be sold on an à-la-carte basis to allow customers to buy what they need, when they need it.
On Thursday, UBS and Microsoft Corp. announced a landmark expansion of their partnership to accelerate UBS’s public cloud footprint over the next five years. Through this transformational initiative, UBS plans to have more than 50% of its applications, including critical workloads, running on Microsoft Azure, now UBS’s primary cloud platform. The partnership furthers UBS’s “cloud-first” strategy and the modernization of its global technology estate.
Through this partnership, UBS will have access to the most comprehensive cloud platform, trusted by more than 95% of Fortune 500 companies, with a rich set of productivity and collaboration tools, enabling the firm to increase the speed at which it can deliver and improve upon its digital experiences for clients and employees. At the same time, Azure will help advance UBS’s sustainability initiatives, drive operational efficiencies, and maintain its standards for compliance and security — providing strong foundations on which to scale UBS’s rate of cloud adoption.
“Our cloud strategy has fundamentally changed the way we operate, allowing us to reinvigorate our technology estate and reimagine how we build applications for our clients,” said Mike Dargan, UBS Group chief digital and information officer. “Closely partnering and collaborating with Microsoft has and will continue to create tremendous value for our clients, our employees, the firm and our shareholders. The developments and learnings that stem from this partnership will benefit the financial services industry and beyond.”
In 2018, when UBS announced its cloud strategy, leveraging its strategic partnership with Microsoft, it planned to move one-third of its applications to public cloud within four years, but accomplished this goal early in February 2021. Now, the partnership goes beyond just consuming cloud services to include the co-development of innovations and greater collaboration in areas like carbon reduction.
“UBS is a forward-thinking leader in the financial services industry, and Microsoft has been fortunate to co-develop innovative applications that meet complex, regulatory requirements with their engineering teams over the past several years,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, Cloud + AI, Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership will continue to accelerate the organization’s ambitious digital transformation plans, applying the power of the Microsoft Cloud to equip UBS with the agility and reliability to deliver for their clients.”
Advancing digital sustainability
In line with the firm’s sustainability goals, UBS continues to move certain technology platform workloads from its on-premises and private cloud servers to Azure. In some use cases, this has resulted in the energy consumption of these workloads to be reduced by up to 30% to date.
Together, UBS and Microsoft also co-developed a Carbon Aware API, an open-source solution that provides recommendations on how to schedule workloads that require heavy compute power during times when clean, renewable or low-carbon sources of electricity are most available. They then provided their solution to the Green Software Foundation so it could be shared with large and small companies around the world.
Enhancing client and employee experiences with artificial intelligence
UBS and Microsoft are implementing and further exploring ways in which artificial intelligence and data can be used to enhance services for clients and employees. For example, in Switzerland, UBS is currently operating two applications that utilize conversational AI capabilities to respond to client e-mail inquiries.
Unleashing innovation and driving greater business insights on a trusted platform
To support UBS’s “cloud-first” strategy and further drive innovation, Microsoft actively brought its Azure confidential computing services to Switzerland. This provided UBS with a new functionality to protect and secure data sharing internally across all of UBS’s business divisions, while maintaining the bank’s compliance and security standards. As a result, UBS can now develop additional business insights and uncover new opportunities for innovation for its clients and employees.
In addition, UBS will leverage Microsoft Power Platform — including Power Apps and Power Automate — which will provide employees with the ability to quickly build professional-grade applications, create automated workflows and connect disparate data sources.
AI-powered speech translation has mainly focused on written languages, yet nearly 3,500 living languages are primarily spoken and don’t have a widely used writing system. This makes it impossible to build machine translation tools using standard techniques, which require large amounts of written text in order to train an AI model.
To address this challenge, we’ve built the first AI-powered speech-to-speech translation system for Hokkien, a primarily oral language that’s widely spoken within the Chinese diaspora but lacks a standard written form. We’re open-sourcing our Hokkien translation models, evaluation datasets and research papers so that others can reproduce and build on our work.
The translation system is part of our Universal Speech Translator project, which is developing new AI methods that we hope will eventually allow real-time speech-to-speech translation across many languages. We believe spoken communication can bring people together wherever they are located — even in the metaverse.
A New Modeling Approach
Many speech translation systems rely on transcriptions. However, since primarily oral languages don’t have standard written forms, producing transcribed text as the translation output doesn’t work. So, we focused on speech-to-speech translation.
To do this, we developed a variety of methods, such as using speech-to-unit translation to translate input speech to a sequence of acoustic sounds, and generated waveforms from them or rely on text from a related language, in this case Mandarin.
Looking to the Future of Translation
While the Hokkien translation model is still a work in progress and can translate only one full sentence at a time, it’s a step toward a future where simultaneous translation between languages is possible. The techniques we pioneered can be extended to many other written and unwritten languages.
We’re also releasing SpeechMatrix, which is a large collection of speech-to-speech translations developed through our innovative natural language processing toolkit called LASER. These tools will enable other researchers to create their own speech-to-speech translation systems and build on our work. And our progress in what researchers refer to as unsupervised learning demonstrates the feasibility of building high-quality speech-to-speech translation models without any human annotations. This will help extend those models to work for languages where there isn’t any labeled training data available to train the system.
Our AI research is helping break down language barriers in both the physical world and the metaverse to encourage connection and mutual understanding. We look forward to expanding our research and bringing this technology to more people in the future.
RMIT University researchers are using the RACE AWS Cloud Supercomputing facility, and external research partners can also use the technology following its public launch.
Launched in July 2022, the RACE AWS Supercomputing facility is used to develop battery technology, photonics, and geospatial science.
RACE provides fast, secure, and private connections powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and AARNet, making them perfect for workloads requiring faster speeds and fewer delays than the internet.
RACE Director Dr Robert Shen said the enhanced bandwidth enables researchers, students, and industry partners to make discoveries faster and RMIT to shorten the period between initial concepts and commercial launch.
“RACE will enable researchers to test out ideas and solutions up to 80 times faster compared to the existing on-premises servers. Research typically involves many failures before success: this facility lets researchers fail quickly so they can fine-tune their solutions and improve them,” Dr Shen stated.
According to Chief Technologist for Australia and New Zealand Simon Elisha, high-performance computing is critical to tackling the most complicated issues in various businesses.
“AWS’s portfolio of cloud services allows researchers at RMIT to focus on ground-breaking research, across a broad range of sectors, and innovate faster. Using AWS, RMIT can securely deliver advanced computer performance, memory capacity, and scalability,” Elisha said.
AARNet CEO Chris Hancock stated that RACE’s high-speed internet and communication services were built to meet current and future demands.
“The network AARNet has deployed for RACE is high capacity and engineered to scale to 400Gbps to provide RMIT researchers with plenty of headroom for transferring massive amounts of data to AWS on demand, now and into the future,” Hancock said.
The new service is already impacting RMIT research groups that have been using it since July of this year, before its public availability.
Professor Michelle Spencer utilised it to analyse data and convey a new ultra-fast method for screening hundreds of candidate compounds that could make appropriate electrolytes for lithium-metal batteries, potentially increasing storage capacity by a factor of ten.
“We are using RACE to analyse our data and produce high-resolution animations that help us to interpret our data and communicate our research findings,” Spencer stated.
Professor Matt Duckham’s team is leveraging computer power to develop new methods for automatically determining a person’s exact location based on a verbal description of the elements around them.
If satellite location fails, this strategy could be beneficial in an emergency.
Duckham claims his team can now process enormous data streams such as drone photography, satellite data, sensor network data, and crowd-sourced data that would otherwise overload conventional computing capabilities.
“Enabling us to analyse these huge volumes of data from new sources can help better inform evidence-based policy decisions to improve public transport, traffic, infrastructure and many other aspects of quality of life,” Duckham said.
Associate Professor Thach Nguyen and his team at the Integrated Photonics and Applications Centre rely heavily on high-performance computing to create fingernail-sized photonic chips that can be plugged into optical fibre networks to speed up the internet or into medical diagnostic tools to assess how cancer cells spread in real-time.
RACE is now being used to undertake previously unfeasible research with standard computing capability.
“Direct access to RACE means that when designing and simulating brain-like chips or creating a chip which could break the record for the world’s fastest internet, the team can run multiple processes at once with computing capability that expands and scales as needed,” said Nguyen.
Nguyen added that RACE had enabled his team with on-demand computing power anywhere, at any time, allowing them to simulate their photonic devices 10 times faster than before.
This breakthrough opens the door to new opportunities, such as the construction of semiconductors that could speed up our internet, help drones inspect railway infrastructure more correctly, and build handheld devices to accurately detect ovarian cancer.
The Victorian Government backs RACE through the Victorian Higher Education State Investment Fund. It marks a paradigm shift in how institutions and companies gain access to high-performance computing capabilities for sophisticated data processing.
RACE is now available to industry partners who want to drive digital innovation in research and education.
Lenovo today held its annual global innovation event, Tech World, sharing its vision for the evolution of collaboration across users, spaces, and devices to unlock unlimited possibilities in both real-world applications and the Metaverse. Lenovo unveiled new concepts, solutions, and emerging innovations that will define the way we work, learn, and engage in the digital world. The company also announced its vision for net-zero emissions, honing in on a credible and collaborative blueprint to addressing one of humanity’s greatest challenges.
Lenovo unveiled innovations including the first public showing of rollable proof of conceptsfor smartphones and laptop PCs. Infusing computing into rollable screens provides productivity, entertainment, and connectivity on a dynamic, adjustable, and larger screen, but on smaller device – addressing customer pain points and improving hybrid working productivity.
Also unveiled was the compelling interactive and physical holographic solution for immersive telepresence communication and teamwork, called Cyber Spaces. As data proliferation continues, Lenovo also showcased how its innovations, empowered by AI with edge computing, are enabling faster data processing at the source of its creation, transforming city streets, precision medicine, and shopping markets.
“Technology is transforming our future workspace and living space into a combination of virtual and physical worlds, enabled by the power of new IT infrastructure which is prevalent, expected and on demand,” said Lenovo Chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang. “The power of innovation is not only digitalizing and smartifying all industries but also helping solve humanity’s greatest challenges. For that purpose, Lenovo is doubling our investment in R&D to use smarter technology to empower a rapidly changing world.”
At Tech World ‘22, Lenovo unveiled:
Rollable Form Factor Innovations
Lenovo and Motorola unveiled rollable proof of concepts for smartphones and laptop PCs, ushering in a new potential era where this unique form factor enables more content and offers huge possibilities for the future to improve hybrid work and life. Designed to elevate multi-tasking, browsing, and mobile use cases, the new rollable proof of concepts are compact, yet don’t sacrifice screen size – enabling content on screen to be dynamically adjusted to the device as the expandable screen rolls inward into the base of the laptop, and smartphone.
Innovations for Productivity
Lenovo Freestyle app enables universal control and collaboration between a tablet and PC, allowing users to seamlessly pair and transform their tablet into a portable second screen to extend desktop space or a wireless touchscreen for their laptop.
motorola edge smartphones include Ready For Platform, which extends smartphone capabilities to bigger screens and allows for a mobile desktop experience, console-like gaming, content streaming and video chats
Lenovo revealed its Remote Work Enablement solution, which delivers hardware, software, and premium services straight to employees, and allows remote workers to get set up quickly.
Lenovo also presented a future concept called Cyber Spaces, which replicate an immersive face-to-face experience by providing an interactive, physical holographic solution for telepresence communication and teamwork.
Additionally, the event saw new advancements in “virtual personas” or “digital humans,” to address challenges posed by traditional video conferencing, including bandwidth, quality, and privacy.
AI Solutions
Lenovo showcased its Production Decision Engine, which uses AI and big data to address digitalization pain points. Its Supplier 360 identifies, analyzes and mitigates supply chain risks to help plan for ‘what if’ scenarios.
The company also presented its Smart Services solution, which forecasts repair needs and optimizes the network of parts, service engineers and logistics support.
Lenovo demonstrated how its Virtual Classroom solution offers virtual teachers to students, providing personalized tests and recommendations.
The new remote video collaboration solution connects frontline workers with remote experts to perform repair jobs through real time marks.
Vision for Net-Zero by 2050
Lenovo shared its vision for net-zero emissions, and its first step toward that vision with near-term 2030 emissions reduction goals. Lenovo is aligning its emissions reduction goals to the Science Based Targets initiative in both the near and long-term to contribute to the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Lenovo highlighted the innovations that will help it realize its vision for net-zero, and the actions the company is taking across products and manufacturing to lower its carbon footprint.
Guest experts clarified the need for credible standards and collaboration between public and private entities in order to make progress toward a smarter, more sustainable future while clarifying the meaning and importance of net-zero commitments.
Edge and AI technologies Enabling Next-gen Data Processing
Lenovo and VMware announced an MOU for joint Edge and Cloud Innovation Labs, with plans underway to develop co-engineered edge, AI and multi-cloud solutions that will help accelerate business transformation across manufacturing and retail environments.
Lenovo showcased its ThinkEdge series of servers – including SE350 and SE450 – to show how the servers perform well under extreme conditions, with top-performance GPUs to support heavy AI.
Lenovo also presented XClarity, a unified, open cloud software management platform that simplifies IT orchestration, deployment, automation, metering, and support from edge to cloud. The company also showcased its Edge Cloud Platform, which enables various applications across vertical industries as well as its Hybrid Cloud Solution, which covers the full lifecycle of building, migrating, using and managing hybrid cloud.
Additionally, TruScale, an all-inclusive, subscription-based model, has expanded to more customers.
Lenovo also unveiled the findings of its global multi-industry research study of 500 chief technology officers (CTOs). The study uncovered CTO’s viewpoints on how traditional IT will continue to evolve into a ‘New IT’ architecture where client devices, edge computing, cloud computing, network and AI all work together to address common pain points and provide solutions that drive further global digitalization across all industries.
Tech World ‘22 coincides with Lenovo’s global Think30 celebration, honoring 30 years of ThinkPad’s and ThinkSystem’s purposeful design and engineering innovation. Building on this legacy, the company unveiled the broadest enterprise portfolio enhancement in its history, designed to accelerate global IT modernization with the new Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions V3, and celebrated over 200 million ThinkPad devices sold. Lenovo continues to redefine device innovations, including with the recent launch of the new ThinkPad X1 Fold, the next generation of the world’s first foldable PC.
Lenovo Chairman and CEO, Yuanqing Yang delivered the Tech World ‘22 keynote speech and shared insight into how Lenovo’s smarter technology is empowering people everywhere to change their world for the better.
In the keynote, Yang was joined by Lenovo business leaders and leading global CEOs, including Cristiano Amon, President and CEO of Qualcomm; Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel; Julie Sweet, Chair and CEO of Accenture; as well as Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, and Arvind Krishna, Chairman and CEO of IBM. Customers and partners including Stefano Domenicali, President and CEO from Formula 1® and Panos Panay, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer from Microsoft also discussed the role of Lenovo’s smarter technology in empowering intelligent transformation.
Dr Yong Rui, Lenovo’s Chief Technology Officer, discussed how Lenovo will develop Metaverse tech solutions to empower intelligent transformation. He highlighted how Lenovo’s core technology and innovations across devices, servers, software, and solutions will connect the virtual and physical worlds.
During the main keynote session, Luca Rossi, President of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group, presented new future concepts. From consumer innovations that improve life to productivity and collaboration solutions, new form factors like the rollable laptop PC and smartphone proof of concepts, and even emerging AI and Metaverse solutions like the new Lenovo ThinkReality VRX virtual reality solution will empower future generations as they navigate the digital transformation of our evolving world.
Kirk Skaugen, President of Lenovo’s Infrastructure Solutions Group, presented the evolution of computing everywhere. Kirk discussed the need to immediately harness data across all industries to intelligently transform. Lenovo’s smarter infrastructure is enabling this transformation, via servers, storage, and services. Kirk was joined by leaders from VMware and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center as he showcased how Lenovo is leading AI at the edge to help customers harness the power of the global data growth (expected to double by 2025) happening across today’s changing IT landscape.
Ken Wong, Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo’s Solutions & Services Group, discussed how the role of a CIO has expanded as the world digitizes. Ken also highlighted the value of industrial Metaverse solutions, the importance of digital workspace solutions and how optimizing track management for engineers can improve infrastructure such as public transportation, in real time. Claudia Contreras, Executive Director of Lenovo’s Global Sustainability Services also highlights that Lenovo’s services can help customers work toward their own sustainability goals, no matter where they are in their journey.
Laura Quatela, Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer at Lenovo highlighted the ways Lenovo is working toward enhanced sustainability across its product offerings on its journey to net-zero. In addition to sustainable product innovations, Laura shares sustainable improvements Lenovo is making to lead the way in low-emissions manufacturing, as well as Lenovo’s intentions to share and report its progress for a credible, collaborative approach to emissions reduction. These sustainability efforts were bolstered by Yang’s closing announcement of Lenovo’s commitment to a vision for net-zero by 2050.
Adobe has announced new Photoshop enhancements that will make the world’s most powerful picture editing tool smarter, more collaborative, and easier to use across multiple platforms.
In a statement, Adobe said Share for Review (beta) allows users to collaborate on projects without leaving Photoshop, and new features make browser-based image editing significantly more powerful. Furthermore, the flagship Photoshop desktop software now includes groundbreaking capabilities driven by Adobe Sensei AI, such as selection improvements that improve the precision and quality of selections, and a one-click Delete and Fill tool that removes and replaces objects in photos with a single operation.
“In a world where everyone can be a creator, Adobe is ensuring that Photoshop evolves to serve all creators across platforms and devices. This year, we’ve made Photoshop smarter and more collaborative so you can easily get feedback and create spectacular images even faster,” Adobe Creative Cloud chief product officer and executive vice president Scott Belsky said.
In today’s increasingly digital economy, Adobe added seamless communication has become vital for creative operations. The new version of Photoshop adds Share for Review, which enables convenient cooperation between creators and stakeholders: all input is managed and incorporated immediately within the Photoshop software.
This new tool allows designers to simply share a prefered version of their work as a web link. Even if they do not have a Creative Cloud subscription, collaborators can evaluate and comment on the project immediately in their browser. Share for Evaluation syncs comments across devices and works everywhere users go – at the office, at home, or on the go – whether creators are sharing work for stakeholder review or working with their coworkers.
Selection improvements that hover over, detect, and make detailed selections of complicated objects with a single click, resulting in greater quality and more precise selections of features such as skies, foregrounds, subjects, and hair while keeping detailed edges.
One-Click Delete and Fill selects and eliminates objects from photos with a single action in Photoshop on the web, then fills the deleted area with content-aware fill.
Photo Restoration Neural Filter (beta) lets Photoshop on the web users bring old or damaged photos back to life by intelligently removing scratches and other minor flaws on vintage photographs using machine learning.
Remove Background is now available in Photoshop on the web (beta), allowing one-click background removal.
Masking and Brushing are also now accessible in the beta version of Photoshop on the web, making precise alterations quicker and simpler via a web browser.
Creators can work wherever and whenever inspiration strikes thanks to Photoshop’s friendly and straightforward interface on computers, iPads, and browsers. Photoshop for iPad keeps improving to make creation on tablets easier. Users on the iPad have access to Photoshop’s potent one-tap Content-Aware Fill and Remove Background capabilities, which use artificial intelligence to precisely replace undesired elements in photographs so that artists and editors may work more quickly.
The market for quantum technology is expected to exceed $6 billion and generate over 19,000 jobs in Australia, according to updated projections released by CSIRO.
The CSIRO’s Growing Australia’s Quantum Technology Industry Roadmap was updated two years after it was first published and now takes into account the development of quantum technology in all three of the report’s major areas: quantum computing, sensing and measurement, and communications.
The current research confirms the economic findings from the earlier analysis while offering cautious projections, improving the original modelling, and extending the forecast from 2040 to 2045.
CSIRO Senior Economist Mingji Liu said the most recent domestic and international advances in quantum technology potential were reflected in the updated statistics.
“Our updated modelling reaffirms that quantum technology continues to be a significant opportunity for Australia in the years to come. Although there is still uncertainty as to how quantum technology will be commercialised both around the world and domestically, the start-up funding and investment in quantum is encouraging,” Liu stated.
CSIRO Quantum Technologies Director Jim Rabeau said Australia is at a crossroads in quantum technologies.
“In the last 18 months alone we’ve seen a significant increase in focus to strengthen our position in the emerging global quantum industry,” Rabeau added.
According to Rabeau, CSIRO has established its Future Science Platform, a number of new firms have received funding or passed critical milestones, a tech industry association has been formed, and there is a strong national emphasis.
CSIRO Chief Executive Larry Marshall said Australia is now at a critical juncture in the development of its quantum sector, with a crossroads between research and commercialisation.
Key economic modelling statistics that have been updated:
In terms of revenue, Australia’s quantum technology opportunity might reach $2.2 billion by 2030, creating 8,700 jobs.
In five years, this may grow to $3.3 billion by 2035, then $4.6 billion by 2040, creating 16,100 employment (the same as original projections in 2020).
By 2045, Australia’s quantum technology opportunity might be worth roughly $6 billion and create 19,400 employment.
Dialpad, Inc., the industry leader in AI-powered communication and collaboration, today announced that its AI Contact Center offering, complete with new digital channel and AI virtual agent support, is now available throughout Australia and New Zealand. Dialpad’s no-code approach to conversational AI will empower Australian and New Zealand businesses to meet today’s customer expectations with support across channels and real-time customer intelligence.
“Dialpad invests an unprecedented 40% of our revenue back into our proprietary AI and MLP engines as well as extensive AI research and development, and we are thrilled to continue to evolve with our Australian and New Zealand partners to better support their customer service needs,” said Craig Walker, founder and CEO of Dialpad. “Dialpad’s wholly-owned and truly unified communications as a service (TrueCaaS™) platform will aid Australian and New Zealand businesses in realizing their full potential by better supporting their customer service needs and providing AI-generated insights into any sales, service or product initiative.”
McKinsey estimates companies can increase topline revenues by up to 20% by maximizing remote customer interactions through a combination of voice and digital channels within the contact center. Powered by AI, Dialpad’s digital channels drive smarter omnichannel engagement with customers across the most widely-used digital and social media channels, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and messaging platforms WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Twitter Direct Messages (DMs). Australian and New Zealand businesses can easily engage, share information, and respond to questions using any messaging service or channel their customers choose to deliver a consistently excellent customer experience.
“Dialpad’s unified platform and unique AI capabilities are exactly what Australia and New Zealand businesses need to provide an exceptional experience and insights to their customers,” said Sachin Verma, co-founder and managing director at Oreta based in Melbourne, Australia. “Dialpad’s cutting-edge technology ensures that you get end-to-end view of the customer experience especially in the contact center offering.”
According to the 2022 State of AI in Customer Service Report, the implementation of AI enables contact centers to handle twice as many calls and improves ASA, ACD and abandon rate performance, leading to saved time and higher-quality customer service. By leveraging virtual agents to absorb some inbound call volume, Dialpad’s self-service capabilities help to unlock the full potential of service and sales teams by enabling quick and easy support through digital self-service options. With novel, intent-free searchability across company knowledge bases and websites, no-code workflows and active-learning conversational AI, Dialpad AI virtual agents offer customers the unique combination of a personalized, yet automated experience to address their needs.
“Dialpad’s AI Contact Center humanizes digital interactions in a streamlined, easy-to-use manner,” said Mike Kane, SVP of global channel sales at Dialpad. “Customer satisfaction and loyalty should remain top of mind for companies as they continue to grow, and the omnichannel support and AI virtual agent capabilities that Dialpad offers ensure that the customer remains at the center of the experience throughout their entire journey.”
Over the last 12 months, Dialpad has grown its channel in Australia and New Zealand by 137% in the region. Dialpad is proud to partner with top Australian and New Zealand brands and organizations such as Cricket Australia, Nick Scali Furniture, Bepoz and Nextt.
Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced that its latest LPDDR5X DRAM with the industry’s fastest speed of 8.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) was validated for use on Snapdragon® mobile platforms. By optimizing a high-speed signal environment between application processor and memory, Samsung has surpassed the previous maximum speed of 7.5Gbps achieved in March, reaffirming its leadership in the memory market.
As a global leader in the mobile DRAM market for more than a decade, Samsung has been driving mainstream adoption of high-end smartphones, enabling many more consumers to experience powerful computing performance on their mobile devices.
Thanks to its low-power and high-performance characteristics, LPDDR DRAM is quickly becoming pervasive in modern computing systems, expanding beyond smartphones and into PCs, high-performance computing (HPC), servers and automobiles, where it has enjoyed robust growth in the last few years.
Recently, LPDDR DRAM has seen especially high demand from the PC market, where its ability to combine high performance and low-power consumption in a small form factor is helping PC makers build smaller, lighter and more powerful laptops.
LPDDR memory is also an increasingly important component in modern vehicles. As more and more data is generated through autonomous driving features, high-bandwidth memory like LPDDR DRAM is needed to process massive amounts of vehicle data at much faster speeds.
For data centers and edge servers, LPDDR DRAM’s low-power characteristics can help reduce power consumption levels, resulting in an improved total cost of ownership (TCO) for data center managers, while cutting down on heat and carbon emissions to ultimately lower their impact on climate change.
As the need for faster, smaller and more power-efficient memory increases across various fields, LPDDR DRAM is expected to also extend its presence in emerging markets driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse.
“The joint validation of 8.5Gbps LPDDR5X DRAM has enabled us to accelerate market-wide availability of this high-speed memory interface by more than a year, which is a tremendous accomplishment made possible through our long-standing collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies,” said Daniel Lee, Executive Vice President of the Memory Product Planning Team at Samsung Electronics. “As LPDDR memory continues to broaden its usage beyond smartphones into AI and data center applications, strong collaboration between memory and SoC vendors is becoming all the more important. Samsung will continue to actively engage with innovators like Qualcomm Technologies to enhance ecosystem readiness for future LPDDR standards.”
“At Qualcomm Technologies, we strive to be at the forefront of enabling and adopting the latest memory specifications on our Snapdragon mobile platforms. We’re the first in the mobile industry to enable the latest LPDDR5X at 8.5Gbps on Snapdragon mobile platforms, which will enhance user experiences with new features and improved performance for mobile, gaming, camera and AI applications,” said Ziad Asghar, Vice President of Product Management, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
