I had the opportunity to attend the White House Science Fair last week, and I was blown away by the creativity and curiosity of the young men and women who presented their inventions.
The team that really stole the show was a group of 6-year-old Girl Scouts called the ‘“Super Girls” Junior FIRST Lego League Team,’ who showed off a battery-powered robot made of Legos that can turn pages for people who are disabled.
What a truly amazing group of girls! They’re a real inspiration and role model to girls around the country and the world who want to grow up to be the next great entrepreneur or inventor.
But all too often, these girls are the exception, when they should be the rule. Today, simply put, not enough girls and young women are choosing to go into the fields that make up STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the number of computer science degrees awarded to women peaked at 37 percent between 1984 and 1985. Compare this to only 18 percent of the degrees awarded to women in the period between 2008 and 2011, and it is easy to see the dilemma STEM employers are facing today.
We are looking forward to participating in the HIMSS15 Annual Conference & Exhibition from April 13-15 in Chicago, IL. If you are planning to attend HIMSS15, be sure to visit the Cisco booth (#2002) to discover solutions for mobility, collaboration, telehealth, and patient engagement designed to help your organization deliver safe and affordable care. Highlights include:
Cisco Mobility and Integration Platform: Mobile patient check in and comprehensive web portal.
Mobile Heartbeat: Clinical Communications.
Virtual Patient Observation: A centralized approach to patient sitting that can help improve the workflow for care providers, resulting in increased efficiency, staff satisfaction, and staff safety. Nexus will display their new mobile version.
Location-Aware Alerts: Partners STANLEY and Extension will show their solution to trigger location-aware alerts in a hospital.
Cisco Extended Care: Browser–based health and wellness collaboration solution platform that features ad hoc and scheduled video consults, secure messaging, customizable pre–appointment questionnaires, a video library and the ability to capture readings from mobile devices.
Telepresence endpoints: DX Series (Android-based touchscreens), MX Series, Jabber.
Ask the Architect: Booth visitors can get their security, mobility, and UCS questions answered by a Cisco Healthcare architect.
In the booth, you can meet with Cisco Healthcare specialists, experience hands-on demos, and watch the in-booth theater presentation highlighting Cisco Connected Health solutions.
Learn more about the Cisco booth, the Connected Health Summit on April 13, and the other exciting activities we have planned for you at HIMSS15.
In our consumer-centric society, product recall announcements grab headlines and attention. As their costs continue to climb, enterprises have weathered recent recalls with record-breaking costs that have soared into the billions. Beyond the bottom-line, product recalls can also be costly to people’s quality of life – an outcome that both companies and consumers are motivated to avoid.
Thankfully, the Internet of Everything (IoE) is on track to make the last product recall a reality.
Imagine a world where organizations can predict failures, patch code and remove parts from the supply chain before defective products reach consumers, completely preventing product recalls. What if issues could be fixed with wireless software updates so that consumers didn’t have to physically return and replace products?
Recently, I had the chance to discuss these ideas and more in a new Future of IT podcast episode with Matt Littlefield, president and principal analyst at LNS Research where we discussed how IoE is making the last product recall a reality.
Location, location, location. We so often hear the axiom that location is what drives the value of real estate. But location is also key to extracting context from on-site data for analytics and business outcomes. And, the value generated is directly related to the quality of the underlying location data.
So how can you get the best indoor location accuracy? You’re invited to find out. At 10:00 am PST on April 2, 2015, Cisco will host a webinar showcasing our new Hyperlocation Solution. This solution combines an access point module, an antenna, and four Cisco technologies to deliver indoor location accuracy to as close as one meter.Continue reading “The Value of Location”
Protecting data, maintaining compliance, and enabling the business is a balancing act. Put too many controls in place and you inhibit workflow. Rely exclusively on traditional security tools and you lack the visibility to detect and respond to advanced attacks quickly.
The industrialization of hacking has created an effective and efficient criminal economy. Attackers are fast and the malware they write and resell is smart, able to evade traditional defenses and quick to do damage. If attackers get through – and they will since there is no such thing as 100% breach prevention – IT security professionals need to be able to detect potential malicious activity as it happens, analyze it, and take action. And, increasingly, network-centric detection is not enough.
An explosion of new, untethered devices means that endpoints extend everywhere and so does the workplace you need to protect. Windows and Mac desktops and laptops, tablets and smartphones, and even smart watches make it possible to connect back to the corporate network anytime from anywhere. Attackers are taking advantage of this proliferation of endpoints and using gaps in security to drive their attacks home. Endpoint visibility is becoming a must-have.
To combat these more frequent and destructive attacks, you need to see beyond traditional indicators of a breach, like a signature or a hash or an IP address, to identify behavior-based activities that may point to malicious activities. This visibility must be on workstations so that you can track executables and processes across your environment and cut detection time down to minutes or seconds. You also need to maintain that visibility on devices connected to a protected network or roaming on public or personal in-home wi-fi.
Cisco Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints gives you the visibility and control you need to protect data, maintain compliance, and enable the business – everywhere workers may be. For example, the Prevalence capability in Cisco AMP displays files that have been executed across the organization ordered from lowest to highest number of instances. Files with low prevalence likely indicate a malicious executable you need to investigate. And because AMP is cloud-based you can continue to track devices and deliver the same level of protection whether devices are on or off the network.
Customers across a broad range of industries are using Cisco AMP for Endpoints to increase protection against today’s elusive attacks. Listen to Tim McGuffin, Information Security Officer at Sam Houston State University, describe how his team used Cisco AMP for Endpoints to detect and respond to a malware attack disguised as bad user behavior, and how they maintain a secure infrastructure while ensuring academic freedom and research.
Historically, networks have always been at risk for new, undiscovered threats. The risk of state sponsored hackers or criminal organizations utilizing 0-day was a constant, and the best defense was simply to keep adding on technologies to maximize the odds of detecting the new threat – like adding more locks to the door if you will. Here at Cisco Talos we’re constantly pushing the envelope. Recently after some thinking juice we started brainstorming ways to better address the constant threat of attacker utilizing unknown 0-day. Today, we’re happy to inform our customer base about our new inspection technology code name project Faster Than Realtime, or FTR. Project FTR is the next generation of detection technology, that which will truly revolutionize the industry.
Project FTR
To mitigate the ever-growing threat of new and unknown attacks we simply decided to add a few options to our existing inspection infrastructure. Snort’s new Quantum Pre-Detection (QPD) leverages Predictive Attack Detection (PAD) by putting packets into an Ethereally-Buffered Capture (EBC) file. Snort then reads the .ebc via PAD so that QPD can tell you that you are under attack before you’re even under attack.
With agility and automation as persistent drivers for IT teams, the need to simplify application deployment and build the cloud is crucial for the data center.
Today, Cisco is pleased to announce its intent to acquire Embrane, a provider of a lifecycle management platform for application-centric network services.
As we continue to drive virtualization and automation, the unique skillset and talent of the Embrane team will allow us to move more quickly to meet customer demands. Together with Cisco’s engineering expertise, the Embrane team will help to expand our strategy of offering freedom of choice to our customers through the Nexus product portfolio and enhance the capabilities of Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI).
With this acquisition, we continue our commitment to open standards through programmable APIs and multi-vendor environments. More importantly, we remain committed to the rich ecosystem of partners and customers in production through the automation of network services, cloud and system management orchestration and automation stacks.
The Embrane team will be joining the Insieme Business Unit. We expect the acquisition to be complete before the end of the current quarter. Financial terms are not disclosed.
Cisco is pleased to announce the “Supercomputer in your browser” (SiYB) project, designed to bring the rich High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem to the world’s most popular software: web browsers.
The free SiYB software is a web browser plugin that is easily installed on any desktop or laptop computer running Windows, OS X, or Linux.
“I’ve been working in the HPC ecosystem for over 25 years, ” says Rich Brueckner, president of insideHPC Media, “This is the most innovative, wide-reaching initiative I’ve seen in a long time. It has the potential to completely revolutionize the HPC industry.”
There’s no doubt that the Internet of Everything will have profound implications for all of the world’s industries. However, the vast majority of these industries are located on land, leaving the two-thirds of the Earth covered in water with minimal Internet connectivity.
With that, no greater opportunity exists to “connect the unconnected” than in the geographic area that has largely been untapped: the world’s bodies of water.
That’s where Cisco comes in.
Today, Cisco is announcing a new global initiative that will provide the infrastructure necessary that will allow consistent Internet connectivity from sea to shining sea:
The Internet of Fish.
With an estimated 32,000 species of fish capable of connectivity around the globe, the possibilities when connecting millions of fish to the Internet become staggering. By attaching WiFi sensors and RFID tags to fish, Cisco is beginning the journey to create one enormous mesh network that provides solid connectivity all the way around the globe.
Initially, the project will be used to monitor and regulate some of the world’s largest and most distressed fisheries for sustainability reasons. From there, the program will be extended to more species with the ultimate goal of creating one giant Wi-Fi network – the more connected fish, the stronger the Wi-Fi signal becomes.
Select Engineers Kick Off the Tagging
Beginning today, Cisco employees will start the historic task of placing sensors on fish. Dubbed “Fish and Chips,” this is an exciting opportunity for select engineers around the country, who will begin tagging fish in their nearest oceans, lakes, rivers, and bays.
The specialized sensors—designed over the past two years—are non-lethal, biodegradable, and otherwise non-harmful. Specially trained fish engineers will manually tag the first wave of fish. Depending on the success of the signals, Cisco plans to “feed” the additional sensors and RFID tags to fish via extremely tiny sensors that will become ingested and then embedded in their intestines.
And although technically a mammal and not a fish, whales are part of the Internet of Fish initiative as well, as they will be tagged with larger Wi-Fi routers that connect all of the sensor-embedded fish.
Cisco’s fish-tagging efforts will begin in some of the world’s largest bodies of water, then continue in global streams, straits, gulfs, wetlands, inlets, sloughs, ponds, canals, harbors, gullies, channels, deltas, lagoons, hatcheries, bayous, bogs, lochs, brooks, waterfalls, tributaries, marshes, reservoirs, swamps, creeks, moats, puddles of water and kiddie pools.
Internet of Everything Value at Stake Skyrockets to $22.5 Trillion
The Internet of Fish (IoF) creates an even bigger financial opportunity that currently exists. Cisco currently estimates the Internet of Everything is poised to generate $19.9T in potential economic ‘value at stake’ exists over the next 10 years for private and public sectors.
However, when factoring in all the connected opportunities enabled by the Internet of Fish, new estimates released today calculate that the IoF will increase the financial opportunities by an additional $3,302,822,708.77 over that same time.
Many industries are expected to benefit tremendously from Cisco’s Internet of Fish initiative. Sailors and ocean-faring vessels will now be able to conduct Internet commerce and easily communicate with anyone around the world – let alone watch the latest movie hits – without any interruption. Scientists and researchers will be able to better conduct research in undersea stations and submarines for biological and environmental studies. And, most importantly, private watercraft will have more reliable means of sending distress signals and being located in the event of an emergency.
Initially, the project will monitor some of the world’s largest fish species such as tuna and salmon. Cisco engineers will then monitor crustaceans like scallops and shrimp, keeping an eye on the health of the Connected Fish so that fishermen can avoid catching unhealthy fish.
FishTime Initiative Makes the Internet of Fish Fun for Families
What’s most exciting is what will happen at Cisco. Engineers will equip about 10 percent of the fish with chips that also include mini cameras. From your desktop, you’ll be able to enjoy your own live aquarium, beginning in FY16.
Cisco plans to sell this Internet of Fish solution—called FishTime—to consumers around the world beginning in Q3 FY16. This will be an excellent way for schoolchildren to experience the underwater world without leaving their desks, and a new way for families to bond over screen time.
You can also help. Once we’ve equipped the first wave of fish with sensors—and have conducted testing—Cisco volunteers can take part with this massive global undertaking. This will likely be the sensor “feeding” portion of the initiative.
Cisco is currently looking for volunteers to help with this massive global undertaking. Anyone interested in helping tag fish can do so by contacting aprilfools@cisco.com.
Location, location, location. We so often hear the axiom that location is what drives the value of real estate. But location is also key to extracting context from on-site data for analytics and business outcomes. And, the value generated is directly related to the quality of the underlying location data.
Cisco is pleased to announce the “Supercomputer in your browser” (SiYB) project, designed to bring the rich High Performance Computing (HPC) ecosystem to the world’s most popular software: web browsers.
harbors, gullies, channels, deltas, lagoons, hatcheries, bayous, bogs, lochs, brooks, waterfalls, tributaries, marshes, reservoirs, swamps, creeks, moats, puddles of water and kiddie pools.