Alphabet-owned Waymo unveiled its sixth-generation Driver system on Monday with a more efficient sensor setup. Despite having a reduced camera and LiDAR sensor count from the current platform, the self-driving ride's new setup allegedly maintains safety levels. CNBC reports that the new system is built into Geely Zeekr electric vehicles. Waymo first said it would work with the Chinese EV maker in late 2021. The new platform's rides are boxier than the current-gen lineup, built on Jaguar I-PACE SUVs.

It's good to have friends. They come to your birthday party, offer a shoulder to cry on when things are hard and spend precious corporate resources developing apps for your nascent virtual reality platform despite little direct return. It can be tempting to believe that a pile of cash worth 30bn, and a single product line that brings in more than 200bn a year, is an acceptable substitute. But Apple is learning that money can't buy you everything. Last week, pre-orders opened for the company's Vision Pro headset, the 3,500 "spatial computing" platform CEO Tim Cook has positioned as the successor to the Mac and iPhone and the launch of the third major era in Apple's history.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference regularly sets the tone for the company's future, and that may be truer than ever for 2023. Many expect the company to introduce its first mixed reality headset at the event, with a new platform to match. However, the wearable is far from the only major announcement believed to be coming at WWDC this year. Rumors have included a larger MacBook Air, a major watchOS update and even app sideloading on iOS. Here's what you're likely to see when executives take to the digital stage on June 5th.

Researchers across the 10-campus University of Hawaiʻi system will be able to process larger datasets and models and accelerate existing workflows with a new intercampus data-storage platform called KoaStore. The platform is being established with a $500,000 National Science Foundation grant. "KoaStore will help support and power UH investigators' research through its high-performance, large size and fast connection to the rest of the world. Further, KoaStore will help enable analysis of data at a scale not previously possible on the Mana high performance computing cluster, allowing larger simulations and discovery," said Sean Cleveland, principal investigator and associate director of cyberinfrastructure at UH Information Technology Services. KoaStore will be integrated into the UH high performance computing cluster Mana and focus on supporting research in the areas of astronomy, atmospheric science, climate science, microbiome and computer and data science.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Ironclad yesterday unveiled a new version of its contract platform embedded with an AI layer in an effort to improve business workflows throughout the lifecycle of a contract. Organizations can create contracts 60% faster by automating the contract creation process, according to Jason Boehmig, the company's CEO and co-founder. They will also have the capability to "slice and dice" all the operational data in previously executed contracts, he said.

Broadcom Inc. has announced expanding opportunities for organizations to gain greater value from the company's advanced AI, security, and hybrid cloud solutions with "Day One" support for IBM's new z16. Broadcom's suite of software solutions, services, and unique "beyond code" programs provide clients an advantage to succeed in an increasingly challenging business environment. "Our strategic investments position clients to exploit the z16 along with advances in AI, cybersecurity, cloud integration, and agility," said Greg Lotko, senior VP and GM, Mainframe Software Division, Broadcom. What distinguishes Broadcom is our deep investment in technology and how we work side-by-side in partnership with our clients to overcome their unique challenges and create new opportunities." As a member of the z16 Early Ship Program, Broadcom collaborated with IBM to ensure clients can capitalize on the full range of our mainframe software solutions on the new platform to drive progress toward their innovation and business goals. "Nothing can match the transaction performance of a mainframe, and the way that we manage the platform using Broadcom technology is a real differentiator for us," said Johan Bosch, executive director for iOCO Infrastructure Services. "We can deliver our services at 25 percent of the cost when measured against standalone banking environments.

Across the enterprise ecosystem, employees are building a bottomless data lake, premised on the corporate mantra to "save everything, just in case," according to an article published in Gartner. Alan Dayley, a former research director at Gartner, notes that increased data growth over the past decade has created an unstructured data nightmare. "It's not just the cost to store it. Huge volumes of dark data make it harder to find what is useful and may mean we miss business opportunities," says Dayley. Mike Gualtieri, VP and principal analyst at Forrester notes in an article that between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics.

At Taiho Oncology, we work with multiple CROs across our spectrum of clinical trials – a common scenario for many pharma companies. As a result, in 2019 we also had multiple sources of clinical data, including electronic data capture (EDC), clinical trial management system (CTMS), lab data, etc., that were siloed, difficult to access, and not being leveraged to their fullest potential. This scenario was unsustainable and suboptimal for our company, customers, and patients. Aggregating that complex and voluminous data into a single source of truth at the right frequency to better inform business decision-making and collaboration was a clear priority for us. We tried multiple single-point solutions, none of which yielded the results we required.

We all know about the paradigm-changing use of AI for Netflix recommendations, chatbots that impersonate customer service agents online, and the dynamic pricing of hotel rooms. Such efforts are the value creation engines of countless large, successful companies. But organisations can also adopt a decidedly less splashy and, at face value, more pedestrian use of AI--to process documents faster and simplify operational procedures. Although this use is aimed at reducing costs rather than transforming industries, 'boring AI' is actually quite exciting--because it confronts issues that all companies wrestle with, and because the gains in productivity are real. Recent research by PwC on automating analytics found that even the most rudimentary AI-based extraction techniques can save businesses 30–40% of the hours typically spent on such processes.

The game's ambitions, even in its (technical) infancy, are evident. Riot's biggest title, "League of Legends," is undeniably the premier esport, and the company aspires to a similar trajectory for "Valorant." Updates are released at a steady clip, often dramatically changing how the game is played and drip-feeding snippets of lore that hint at a broader universe and underlying narrative. With just one global competition in the books, story lines have emerged around players, teams and regions. And coinciding with the game's first anniversary, Riot announced that a long-rumored mobile port of the game was in development.