Today – World Humanitarian Day – is dedicated to recognizing the work and sacrifices of humanitarian personnel. It is also a day to create awareness for the people and organizations that save lives, reduce suffering, and respect human dignity – to recognize those who are working to solve some of our most pressing global challenges.
Since 1945, CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) has been doing just that. The organization delivers emergency relief that helps people withstand and overcome disasters such as the 30-year drought in Ethiopia and last year’s earthquakes in Nepal, or the plight of refugees. It also seeks long-term improvements in the world’s poorest communities by advancing educational opportunities for girls, improving health for mothers and their babies, and economically empowering women through CARE Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLA). This U.S.-based, non-profit organization is one of the largest and oldest humanitarian aid organizations focused on fighting global poverty. Last year, CARE worked in 95 countries and reached more than 65 million people.
We wanted to take this day to consider, how can technology help accelerate this work? How can it help better even more lives?
Continue reading “Digitization Can Create a More Humane World”
of interviews on enterprise innovation with corporate intrapreneurs, technology enthusiasts and visionaries within some of the world’s largest companies.
Cisco ‘alpha projects’ are a great example of valuing and generating innovation from within. Over the last two years, there are many alpha success stories. My team’s project focused on innovating and building products for hyper-scale infrastructure. This meant combining deep customer listening, cross-company collaboration, busting silos and bottlenecks with a team that represented the best networking talent, all at a tire burning and gravity-defying speed. Thus, our internal code name for this project was xSpeed.
As a freshman in college, I was young and clueless. I was busy partying, and staying up late. I always got A’s in high school, and severely underestimated the work-load of Boston University Engineering.
Arielle Sumits, Senior Analyst at Cisco. My own answer to the question was that traffic growth will likely taper slightly, but the Internet is not saturated and growth will hold steady in the long-run. At the end of my presentation, I mentioned that in the 12 minutes I had been speaking, 15 million gigabytes had crossed the network, but 4 billion gigabytes of data had been created. Less than 1% of data created today is transmitted onto the Internet, partly because we do not currently have the analytical capabilities to process this much data. AI is entering a period of exponential progress, and as it does, it will make sense to move more data onto the network where it can be accessible for analysis. We are nowhere near a saturation point. That’s the long-term view, but in the short-term we are also seeing persistent growth. There is a slight tapering in year-over-year growth rates, but much lower than we’d expect given the high volumes of traffic the network carries today. Even without substantial data from machines, there are substantial broadcast viewing hours and offline gaming hours that will make their way onto the Internet in the next five years. Regional and country level details are available on the 
Damian Poltz, Director of Technology Strategy at Shaw Communications. Damian’s answer to the question was an enthusiastic affirmation that peak traffic growth will hold at historical rates. He pointed out that historical forecasts of Internet growth have almost always turned out to be low, and if one had simply projected constant growth over the past 15 years, their forecast would have been right on target. “Don’t bet against the Internet” was Damian’s theme and rightly so. Damian added that predicting constant growth is the more conservative option for service providers, because it’s a lot easier to dial down infrastructure investment than it is to dial it up. As a side note, Damian mentioned that his recent numbers show a dip in traffic due to Netflix’s re-encoding of their video assets.