Analytics India Magazine brings to you top trending news that has happened over the past week. Let’s take a look.

Marriott Hotel Sued For Mega Data Breach

Source: Marriott

Following an extensive investigation the Information Commissioner’s Office(ICO) of the UK, has issued a notice to fine Marriott International £99,200,396 for infringements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This fine comes as a result of a data breach putting approximately 339 million guest records at risk globally.

According to an official statement by ICO, the vulnerability began when the systems of the Starwood hotels group were compromised in 2014. Marriott subsequently acquired Starwood in 2016, but the exposure of customer information was not discovered until 2018. The ICO’s investigation found that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood and should also have done more to secure its systems.

China To Take On Github With Gitee

According to reports, China is making moves to localise their open source developers community. With regards to ongoing tensions with the US, China is now promoting Gitee – Github’s Chinese counterpart. The Chinese government has  picked Gitee to construct an independent, open-source code hosting platform for the country. This announcement comes after Github’s recent compliance to US sanctions law. 

According to the website, Gitee has a community of more than 5 million developers and over 10 million repos. Now the question is whether the Chinese developers will migrate from Github to Gitee in anticipation of a conflict. 

Wall Street’s First $2 Trillion Company

On Wednesday, Apple became the first US $2tn company. The Palo Alto tech powerhouse, had also been the first $1tn company to be valued by Wall Street back in 2018. Apple is the second company in the world to hit the trillion dollar milestone. Saudi Aramco was the first company to be valued at $2tn. Apple’s gains so far have been pandemic proof  thanks to its brand value and consistent innovations with machine learning. Know more about Apple’s recent announcements at WWDC here.

New Initiative To Standardise Python Development

On Monday, Apache MXNet and Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) launched the Consortium for Python Data API Standards. According to the official statement, the objective of this consortium is to tackle this fragmentation by developing API standards for arrays (a.k.a. tensors) and dataframes. For instance, an API standard can be used to specify function presence with signature, and semantics. Quansight Labs started this initiative to tackle the problem of fragmentation of data structures. 

Quansight Labs is a public benefit division of Quansight, with a focus on the core of the PyData stack. The founding sponsors of this initiative include Intel, Microsoft, the D. E. Shaw group, Google Research and Quansight. Know more about API standards here.

Intel And Accenture Team Up To Develop Robotic Wheel Chair

Source: Intel

Intel and Accenture have joined hands to support an Intel Neuromorphic Research Community (INRC) project led by the Neuro-Biomorphic Engineering Lab at the Open University of Israel in collaboration with ALYN Hospital. With the support from Intel and Accenture, the research team from Israeli will develop a wheelchair-mounted robotic arm to assist patients with spinal injuries in performing daily tasks. 

Once the algorithmic work is complete, the research team will deploy the new model on Intel’s neuromorphic hardware and test the capabilities of the arm. Know more about this project here.

Cerebras Deploys World’s Largest Chip 

Source: Cerebras

Cerebras Systems announced the integration of their 1.2-trillion Cerebras’ Wafer Scale Engine chip, known as the world’s largest chip, into the 23-petaflop Lassen supercomputer. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) becomes the first institution to integrate the AI platform with a large-scale supercomputer and creates a radically new type of computing solution, enabling researchers to investigate novel approaches to predictive modeling. Know more about Cerebras WSE here.

MRI Scans Get Better

Facebook’s AI team and NYU Langone have collaborated to make MRI scanning processes faster and more accurate than ever before. Clinicians spend up to an hour gathering sufficient data for a diagnostic MRI examination, which eats into a hospital’s demanding schedule.

To make the scanning process quicker for the patients, the team announced FastMRI -a major research milestone that could significantly improve the patient experience, expand access to MRIs, and potentially enable new use-cases for MRIs. This technology was carefully reviewed by expert radiologists. The AI generated MRI reports were on par with the scans generated by these traditional methods; sometimes even better. 

This open research from Facebook AI and NYU Langone’s fastMRI initiative is a 2-year long collaborative effort to improve medical imaging technology and advance research on using AI to generate images from limited data.

NVIDIA Reports Massive Gains 

Source: NVIDIA

On Wednesday, NVIDIA reported record revenue of $3.87 billion for the second quarter, which is up 26 percent from $3.08 billion in the previous quarter. This kind of growth during these testing times is a testimony to NVIDIA’s state of the art iproducts and strategic collaborations. NVIDIA’s technologies are driving innovation in many advanced domains such as deep learning and cloud services. They even recently broke records with their new Selene supercomputer. When it comes to gaming, NVIDIA’s GeForce enabled realistic virtual worlds thanks to RTX ray tracing and AI.

“Despite the pandemic’s impact on our professional visualisation and automotive platforms, we are well positioned to grow, as gaming, AI, cloud computing and autonomous machines drive the next industrial revolution around the world,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA

NVIDIA has also partnered with Mercedes-Benz to power its next-generation fleet of luxury cars. Earlier this year, NVIDIA had also completed its acquisition of Mellanox Technologies to offer high-speed networking in cloud data centers and to scale-out AI services.Know more here.

Google Launches Kormo For Indian Job Seekers

Google extended its Kormo Jobs app for its Indian users.  Kormo is a jobs and careers app that connects job seekers to businesses that are looking to hire and allows job seekers to create and maintain a digital CV, all in one app. Kormo is currently available in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and India. Download Kormo here.