The alliance will roll out an IoT and Cybersecurity Training Programme for Human Workforce Development and Vocational Workforce Development. The programme will train 250 professionals in the two sectors with a specific aim to train 50 teachers. Teachers who get trained under this programme will obtain a co-certification from the DEPA and the Cisco Networking Academy.

It will also run a Professional Training Development Programme that will deliver the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) curriculum to 150 professionals in Thailand. The CCNA is a foundational certificate for professionals seeking a career in networking and is one of the most sought after certifications in the industry.

In addition, the alliance will deliver the CCNA Security curriculum to 15 professionals. With a CCNA Security certification, a network professional demonstrates the skills required to develop security infrastructure, recognise threats and vulnerabilities to networks and mitigate security threats. The CCNA Security curriculum emphasises core security technologies, installation, troubleshooting and monitoring of network devices to maintain integrity, confidentiality and availability of data and devices, and competency in the technologies that Cisco uses in its security structure.

Nuttapon Nimmanphatcharin, the president and CEO of DEPA, said: “Digital innovation and adoption are key pillars of Thailand’s economic growth. The emergence of new technologies like IoT and cybersecurity are playing a key role in the government’s development strategy for Thailand 4.0. The collaboration between DEPA and Cisco focuses on training a competent workforce to drive the country’s digital economy agenda. Students will gain hands-on experiences through real-world scenarios with the help of highly qualified teachers. They also have the flexibility to access training anywhere, anytime and do not need to pay the exam fee if they pass the course.”

Vatsun Thirapatarapong, managing director for Cisco in Thailand and Indochina, said: “Thailand needs to invest in readying an IT-savvy workforce that can help it unlock the full potential of its digital economy. As a leader in Internet and security technologies, Cisco is an ideal partner to train IoT and cybersecurity professionals to address the workforce shortage and bridge the skills gap in the industry.”

He said Cisco Networking Academy was committed to supporting the development of digital skills. Since its inception, the Networking Academy has trained more than 45,000 students in Thailand. “We are excited by the opportunity to collaborate with DEPA and train the next generation of IT professionals in the country.”

Some 70,000 people are expected to take part in the four-day Web Summit, dubbed “the Davos for geeks”, including speakers from leading global tech companies, politicians and start-ups hoping to attract attention from the over 1,500 investors who are scheduled to attend.

Tech firms now find themselves on the defensive, with critics accusing them of not doing enough to curb the spread of “fake news” which has helped polarise election campaigns around the world and of maximising profits by harvesting data on consumers’ browsing habits.

British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who in 1989 invented the worldwide web as a way to exchange information, said the internet had deviated from the goals its founders had envisaged.

“All kinds of things have things have gone wrong. We have fake news, we have problems with privacy, we have people being profiled and manipulated,” he said in an opening address.

Berners-Lee, 63, called on governments, companies and citizens to iron out a “complete contract” for the web that will make the internet “safe and accessible” for all by May 2019, the date by which 50 percent of the world will be online for the first time.

‘Going through a funk’

He has just launched Inrupt, a start-up which is building an open source platform called “Solid” which will decentralise the web and allow users to choose where their data is kept, along with who can see and access it.

Solid intends to allow users to bypass tech giants such as Google and Facebook. The two tech giants now have direct influence over nearly three quarters of all internet traffic thanks to the vast amounts of apps and services they own such as YouTube, WhatsApp and Instagram.

Employees of Google, Facebook and other tech giants have in recent months gone public with their regrets, calling the products they helped build harmful to society and overly addictive.

Tech giants are also under fire for having built up virtual monopolies in their areas.

Amazon accounts for 93 percent of all e-book sales while Google swallows up 92 percent of all European internet-search ad spending.

“I think technology is going through a funk… it’s a period of reflection,” Web Summit founder and CEO Paddy Cosgrave told AFP.

“With every new technology you go through these cycles. The initial excitement of the printed press was replaced in time by a great fear that it was actually a bad thing. Over time it has actually worked out OK.”

Violent voices magnified

Among those scheduled to speak at the event is Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower who earlier this year said users’ data from Facebook was used by British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to help elect US President Donald Trump — a claim denied by the company.

Another tech veteran who has become critical of the sector, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, will on Thursday deliver the closing address.

He left Twitter in 2011 and went on to co-found online publishing platform Mash, which is subscription based and unlike Twitter favours in-depth writing about issues.

The problem with the current internet model is that negative content gets more attention online, and thus gain more advertisers, according to Mitchell Baker, the president of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organisation which promotes Internet innovation.

“Today everyone has a voice but the problem is… the loudest and often most violent voices get magnified because the most negative, scariest things attract our attention,” she told AFP in a recent interview.

The Web Summit was launched in Dublin in 2010 and moved to Lisbon six years later. The Portuguese government estimates the event will generate 300 million euros ($347 million) for Lisbon in hotel and other revenues.

There are now hundreds of virtual currencies and an unknown number of server farms around the world running around the clock to unearth them, more than half of them in China, according to a recent report from the University of Cambridge.

Mining virtual currencies with a real-world value, in other words, carries a hidden environmental cost that is rarely measured or taken into account.

“We now have an entirely new industry that is consuming more energy per year than many countries,” said Max Krause, a researcher at the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education and lead author of a study in the journal Nature Sustainability.

“In 2018, bitcoin is on track to consume more energy than Denmark,” he told AFP.

Denmark consumed 31.4 billion kilowatt hours in electricity in 2015. As of July 1 of this year, Bitcoin mining used up approximately 30.1 billion kilowatt hours, according to the study.

The highly competitive practice of mining cryptocurrencies requires hundreds, even tens of thousands, of linked computers running intensive calculations in search of the Internet equivalent of precious metals.

New coins are awarded to those who complete calculations first, with the transaction confirmed and entered into the currency’s shared public ledger, known as the “blockchain”.

The top 100 cryptocurrencies have a current market value of about $200 billion (175 billion euros), according to the website coinmarketcap.com.

Bitcoin accounts for more than half of that amount.

“We wanted to spread awareness about the potential environmental costs for mining cryptocurrencies,” Krause said.

Digital is not cost-free

“Just because you are creating a digital product, that doesn’t mean it does not consume a large amount of energy to make it.”

The movies, music and videos that billions of people stream every day all have measurable environmental costs, earlier research has shown.

For the study, Krause and Thabet Tolaymat, an environmental engineer based in Cincinnati, Ohio, calculated the average energy consumed to create one US dollar’s worth of four top virtual currencies — bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and monero — over the 30-month period up to June 2018.

That amount was 17, 7, 7 and 14 million joules, or megajoules (MJ), respectively.

A joule is a unit of energy equivalent to the work required to produce one watt of power for one second.

That is up to three times the energy needed to excavate gold, platinum or copper, they found. Of the metals examined, only aluminium — at 122 MJ per dollar’s worth — was more energy intensive.

A complete calculation of the environmental cost of virtual currencies would take into account the banks of computers used to mine them.

“The computers are made with gold and other precious metals,” said Krause.

“They are run aggressively, which means the hardware is destroyed much quicker than you or I would expect for regular use — maybe a year instead of five or ten.”

Computing power in data centers and devices from televisions to smartphones has surged and streaming technology has advanced, providing tools to break blockbuster titles from confines of consoles or personal computers.

During a recent Microsoft earnings call, chief executive Satya Nadella said a keenly anticipated “X Cloud” video game streaming service is in “early days” but he is excited by the prospect of giving players access console-quality titles on all kinds of internet-linked devices.

“Most critical is having a platform where gamers are already there,” Nadella said, noting booming revenue from its Xbox console unit.

“I am most excited about the core (Xbox) community and content we have; I think that is what even gives us permission to think about streaming.”

Video game titan Electronic Arts (EA) this week laid out a vision of streaming video games enhanced with artificial intelligence to create “living, breathing worlds that constantly evolve.”

EA, maker of the popular Battlefield and FIFA game franchises, has more than 1,000 employees working on a platform to harness the power of cloud computing and artificial intelligence in a game service hosted on the California-based company’s servers, according to chief technology officer Ken Moss.

The effort is called “Project Atlas.”

“I strongly believe that what’s on the horizon will bring greater changes than anything gaming has ever seen,” Moss said in a blog post disclosing Atlas.

“You will be able to play games with your friends anytime, anywhere and on any device.”

– ‘Assassin’s Creed’ in the cloud –

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter saw Amazon, Apple and Google as potential big players in the space given huge investments they have made in data centers that already provide cloud services to millions of people.

Amazon, a major cloud operator through its Amazon Web Services, also owns popular game play-streaming service Twitch.

Google is collaborating with French video game colossus Ubisoft to use the latest addition to the hit “Assassin’s Creed” franchise to test “Project Stream” technology for hosting the kind of quick, seamless play powered by in-home consoles as an online service.

“We’re going to push the limits with one of the most demanding applications for streaming — a blockbuster video game,” Google product manager Catherine Hsiao said in a blog post.

A select number of people in the US can play “Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” streamed to Chrome browsers on desktop or laptop computers.

Console quality video game play streamed online as a service, hosted on servers in the internet cloud, faces challenges including moving data quickly enough to avoid lags in action or imagery.

Improvements in internet bandwidth, computing power and data storage capabilities are enabling “disruptive technologies” such as streaming that can change the way games are created as well as played, according to Ubisoft.

– Consoles in crosshairs? –

Companies interested in cloud gaming see it as a way to reach broader audiences.

Microsoft has built a powerful platform for hosting computing in the internet cloud, making such service a thriving part of its business.

The Redmond, Washington-based technology veteran has also invested heavily in machine learning.

“If you agree that the eventual future of games consumption is through cloud gaming services, then those companies with a strong position in cloud are likely to be best placed to benefit from the transition,” said IHS Markit games technology research director Piers Harding-Rolls at an industry event earlier this year.

Sony offers more limited cloud service through its Playstation Now, keeping game play within the confines of the console.

While streaming game services might nibble at consoles sales, they are more likely to broaden the audience of players to anyone with an internet connection, according to analysts.

“I don’t think this means the death of the console,” Pachter said.

“Publishers need consoles the same way movie studios need theaters.”

A question unanswered what business model will prove optimal for game streaming services.

“It seems to me that the right business model is iTunes rather than Spotify,” Pachter said.

“Let people ‘buy’ a game and stream it for as long as they want instead of forcing them to sign up for a subscription.”

The event will be held alongside the Lighting Fair and Thailand Building Fair under the “Smart City Safe City” concept.

Learn more at https://bit.ly/2Dif3kU.

These new data services and solutions further extend the NetApp Data Fabric across edge, core, and cloud and enable organizations to fully realize the promise of artificial intelligence,NetApp said in a press statement said.

Global business value derived from AI is projected to total $1.2 trillion in 2018, an increase of 70 percent from 2017, according to Gartner, Inc.1, and IDC predicts that nearly 75 percent of commercial enterprise applications will use AI by 20212. However, even though businesses plan to use AI to create new and innovative business opportunities fueled by diverse, distributed, and dynamic data, they often find that their most valuable data is trapped in siloes, hampered by complexity and too costly to harness for resource-intensive AI applications, the statement added.

“With the speed and volume of data now generated and managed across IoT devices and sensors, on-premises data centers, and in hybrid cloud environments, having a Data Fabric that spans edge, core, and cloud is essential to AI success,” said Joel Reich, EVP, Storage Systems & Software, NetApp. “With today’s new data services and solutions, integrated through the NetApp Data Fabric, organizations can accelerate data pipelines across an entire enterprise to train deep learning models and power AI applications with the simplicity, choice, and scale necessary to achieve real impact.

Modernize Storage to Enable Data Management for AI

NetApp ONTAP 9.5 software helps companies modernize their data services with solutions that deliver leading cloud integration, the highest all-flash performance, and greater efficiency and simplicity.

The statement said NetApp ONTAP 9.5 software has following features:

– Delivers unmatched versatility that offers high performance and consistent low latency, accelerating critical workloads with industry-leading end-to-end NVMe capabilities.

– Unifies data management across storage environments — flash, disk, and cloud.

– Automates tiering of petabyte-scale datasets to object stores in the cloud or on the premises.

– Reduces deployment costs for multisite business continuity solutions.

– Accelerates read performance with cached data sets within a cluster and at remote sites.

– Increases storage efficiency savings by up to 15% for relational database applications.

– Radically increases performance by auto-tiering data between AFF systems and NetApp MAX Data on servers.

MAX Data allows customers to turbo charge their application performance without rewrites to application code. MAX Data is the industry’s first solution to leverage persistent memory in servers to deliver memory-like ultra-low latency and flash-like capacity.

The statemetn said MAX Data has following features:

– Accelerates performance of application-level data, enabling faster processing of data for AI applications and real-time data analytics.

– Speeds application data recovery with data protection services for persistent memory in servers.

– Improves efficiency by using fewerservers to achieve similar or better performance.

– Leverages all the data management capabilities of NetApp ONTAP.

Flash Performance Guarantee:

NetApp offers the industry’s first latency guarantee that allows customers to consume AI applications with the confidence of predictable low latency. Unparalleled in the industry, the performance guarantee offers consistent latency of .5 ms or less and enables businesses to reduce cost and risk by deploying flash with confidence.

Build a Hybrid Cloud Architecture for IoT​

NetApp provides industry-leading data management capabilities and solution support to tap into growing data sources with virtuallyunlimited scalability and performance to feed, train, and operate data-hungry AI, machine learning, and deep learning applications.

The statement said NetApp StorageGRID SG6060 has following features:

– Flash-accelerated object storage addresses the needs of high-performance, high-concurrency workloads for IoT, big data analytics, and machine learning environments.

Combined with ONTAP FabricPool capabilities, customers now have best-in-class data management capabilities while harnessing the value of object storage economics.

According the the statement, NetApp Solution Support for FlexPod has following features:

– The single-point-of-contact support team has expertise across the key components of the entire solution —storage, storage network, compute, compute OS, LAN networking, and hypervisor.

– NetApp Solution Support also includes NetApp Converged System Advisor(CSA) software, which simplifies the customer’s operations and lifecycle management of FlexPod. The CSA superior monitoring and management with a single-pane view of the system’s health helps reduce time toresolution for support incidents.

Oracle’s strategy is to make emerging technologies pervasive throughout its cloud offerings. To help customers more easily take advantage of these technologies as part of their digital transformation, Oracle has embedded innovative technologies into its business applications and extended these new capabilities into the platform so customers can build upon them. Additionally, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure serves as the foundational enabler for Oracle’s AI and Autonomous capabilities, Oracle said in a press statement.

“The real opportunity with emerging technologies is enabling our customers to embrace innovation on a scale we’ve never seen before,” said Amit Zavery, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Platform. “Oracle’s technologies provide the building blocks for customers to pioneer new innovations, create new opportunities, and drive amazing breakthroughs.”

Machine learning and advanced AI are woven into Oracle Cloud services. For example, Oracle CX applications include built-in AI tools that better predict account health, deliver next-best service actions, automate answers and provide more personalized services.Oracle also embeds machine learning into its security offerings in order to help detect security threats. Most importantly, Oracle also combines machine learning with decades of database optimization to deliver the world’s first and only self-driving database.

Continued emerging tech advancements across Oracle’s portfolio include:

– Digital Assistant for Personalized Interactions: The next evolution of Oracle’s chatbot functionality, Oracle Digital Assistant enables companies to build personalized digital assistants to help employees work smarter and more productively. With this technology, employees can leverage one comprehensive digital assistant that can be trained to support domain skills from multiple applications such as HR, ERP, CRM and CX. Leveraging AI, Oracle Digital Assistant understands context, derives intent, and identifies and learns user behaviors and patterns to automate routine tasks proactively, such as expense approvals and meeting reschedules, on behalf of the user.

– Blockchain for Supply Chain Applications: Recently launched, Oracle Blockchain has already seen global adoption spanning multiple industries. Now, Oracle is expanding its blockchain service offering to include new business applications built on its own blockchain developmentplatform to support new use cases, such as track and trace for supply chain and logistics. New Oracle Blockchain Applications enhance traceability and transparency throughout the supply chain and include Intelligent Track and Trace, Lot Lineage and Provenance, Intelligent Cold Chain, and Warranty and Usage Tracking.

– Automation for Security Services:Oracle offers new cloud security services that use machine learning and intelligent automation to help prevent, detect, and respond to security threats. The new cloud services include a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to help protect against attacks on web traffic; Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection to stop outside parties from disrupting running applications; an integrated Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB)which monitors and enforces secure configurations; and a Key Management Service (KMS) that allows customers to control the encryption of their data.-

– Intelligent Apps with Built-in AI:To help enable faster and easier adoption, Oracle Cloud Applications weave AI features seamlessly into the existing tasks and processes to reduce the learning curve for end users. For example, the applications send users subtle cues – slide outs and alerts – to let them know about new AI features within the familiar user interface of the application. New interaction models, such as voice recognition and chat bots, are built into applications to create a more intuitive and personalized user experience.