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Day: September 23, 2020

Ahana releases managed Cloud for Presto service

Data analytics startup Ahana released its new Ahana Cloud for Presto system, providing a managed service for organizations using Presto.

The new managed Presto service is now in preview and is set to be generally available by the end of 2020. Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine that competes against Apache Spark.

Ahana, based in San Mateo, Calif., emerged from stealth mode on June 2 and revealed its first offering on June 30 with the availability of the open source PrestoDB in the AWS Marketplace. While the initial Ahana product provides support for the open source Presto project, Ahana Cloud for Presto is a managed service that goes beyond the open source project.

“Managing Presto environments can be a bit daunting for many, especially as clusters grow to meet the speed, size and scale of data,” said Mike Leone, senior analyst at ESG.

Leone said Ahana’s managed service has the potential to address the perceived challenges of getting started with Presto. He noted that Ahana has a slick user interface that can be used to ramp up deployments quickly as well as help with ongoing management. As Ahana’s engineering team grows, continuing to infuse automation and

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Scientists Combat Anti-Semitism With Artificial Intelligence

An international team of scientists said Monday it had joined forces to combat the spread of anti-Semitism online with the help of artificial intelligence.

The project Decoding Anti-Semitism includes discourse analysts, computational linguists and historians who will develop a “highly complex, AI-driven approach to identifying online anti-Semitism,” the Alfred Landecker Foundation, which supports the project, said in a statement Monday.

“In order to prevent more and more users from becoming radicalised on the web, it is important to identify the real dimensions of anti-Semitism, also taking into account the implicit forms that might become more explicit over time,” said Matthias Becker, a linguist and project leader from the Technical University of Berlin.

The team also includes researchers from King’s College in London and other scientific institutions in Europe and Israel.

Computers will help run through vast amounts of data and images that humans wouldn’t be able to assess because of their sheer quantity, the foundation said.

“Studies have also shown that the majority of anti-Semitic defamation is expressed in implicit ways, for example through the use of codes (“juice” instead of “Jews”) and allusions to certain conspiracy narratives or the reproduction of stereotypes, especially through images,” the statement

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NIST Scientists Get Soft on 3D Printing

New method could jump-start creation of tiny medical devices for the body.

Illustration of a prospective biocompatible interface shows that hydrogels (green tubing), which can be generated by an electron or X-ray beam 3D printing process, act as artificial synapses or junctions, connecting neurons (brown) to electrodes (yellow). Image credit: A. Strelcov/NIST

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new method of 3D-printing gels and other soft materials. Published in a new paper, it has the potential to create complex structures with nanometer-scale precision. Because many gels are compatible with living cells, the new method could jump-start the production of soft tiny medical devices such as drug delivery systems or flexible electrodes that can be inserted into the human body.

A standard 3D printer makes solid structures by creating sheets of material — typically plastic or rubber — and building them up layer by layer, like a lasagna, until the entire object is created.

Using a 3D printer to fabricate an object made of gel is a “bit more of a delicate cooking process,” said NIST researcher Andrei Kolmakov. In the standard method, the 3D printer chamber is filled with a soup of long-chain

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