The year 2020 will go down as the period when organizations responded to new risks, pivoted to new business models and accelerated their digital transformation programs in an effort to weather a lethal pandemic. In the 2020 COVID-19 epoch, going digital was no longer a business luxury but a matter of survival. Digital transformation was crucial to enabling remote working, transitioning to collaboration workflows, and to realigning operations from supply chain management through customer experiences. CIO and IT leaders no longer have to sell the business on how critical technology is to all aspects of operations. In 2020, the question was how fast could IT partner with business leaders to deliver collaboration, workflow and analytics capabilities in the cloud.

International Business Machines Corporation IBM recently announced that it will be leveraging its artificial intelligence ("AI") capabilities of Watson as well as open hybrid cloud architecture, to provide tennis fans with enriched experiences. United States Tennis Association ("USTA") is conducting this year's US Open without fans present at the stadium due to the coronavirus outbreak. Markedly, the US Open 2020 will be held from Aug 31 to Sep 13. Nevertheless, USTA, with IBM's help, will provide fans with an interactive and engaging digital experience to enjoy the tournament. IBM has been USTA's technology partner for almost three decades.

The unprecedented growth of mobile devices, applications and services have placed the utmost demand on mobile and wireless networking infrastructure. Rapid research and development of 5G systems have found ways to support mobile traffic volumes, real-time extraction of fine-grained analytics, and agile management of network resources, so as to maximize user experience. Moreover, inference from heterogeneous mobile data from distributed devices experiences challenges due to computational and battery power limitations. As a result, models employed in the edge-based scenario are constrained to light-weight to achieve a trade-off between model complexity and accuracy. Also, model compression, pruning, and quantization are largely in place.

Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy isn't ready to invest in the hype around artificial intelligence just yet. Rather, he's set the Army's focus for the next two years on acquiring the cloud architecture that can serve as the foundation for AI in the future. Expect to see more action and discussion around cloud than on AI in the Army "because you've got to put the horse in front of the cart in order to pull it," McCarthy said Thursday at an AEI event. "Cloud has to happen to maximize AI," he said. But if you talk to the people in the financial industry who basically did it first, the online trading with writing in an algorithm that helps you make a decision on whether to buy a barrel of oil or not -- that's from cloud architecture.

As cities deploy Internet of Things sensors and IP-connected surveillance cameras to help with everything from easing traffic congestion to improving air quality and public safety, they are also increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks. To help smooth adoption of smart city technologies while maintaining security, the Smart City and Community Challenge cloud privacy security rights inclusive architecture (SC3-cpSriA) action cluster last month released a blueprint for smart cities. Specifically, the blueprint outlines how cities can create a secure, hybrid cloud architecture, including multicloud, intercloud and federated cloud (to edge) service designs. It is aimed at supporting "security, confidentiality, access control, least privileges and safeguarding" personally identifiable information across the IoT and beyond. "You know about the Baltimore ransomware attacks, you know about the Atlanta one, you know about the two Florida cities that just paid off in bitcoin their ransomware attackers," Lee McKnight, a professor at Syracuse University who oversees the SC3-cpSriA action cluster's work on secure cloud architecture, tells GCN. "All that is a result of essentially a combination of legacy systems from cities with limited budgets.

Microsoft is jumping on the artificial intelligence bandwagon with the formation of a new research group that will seek to make the technology more accessible via its Azure cloud while helping to deliver new capabilities across applications, services and infrastructure. The infrastructure portion of the effort focuses on combining the processing engines like GPUs and FPGAs designed to improve network connectivity as ways to boost AI performance running on Microsoft's Azure Cloud. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) said last week Harry Shum, a 20-year company veteran who worked on the Bing search and Cortana intelligence personal assistant projects, would head the AI initiative. More than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers work for Microsoft's AI and Research Group. Microsoft's AI initiative seeks to "democratize" AI technology through a focus on agents, applications, services and infrastructure.