Amazon Neptune, the managed graph database service by AWS, makes analytics faster and more agile while introducing a vision aiming to simplify graph databases. It's not every day that you hear product leads questioning the utility of their own products. Brad Beebe, the general manager of Amazon Neptune, was all serious when he said that most customers don't actually want a graph database. However, that statement needs contextualization. If Bebee had meant that in the literal sense, the team himself and Amazon Neptune Principal Product Manager Denise Gosnell lead would not have bothered developing and releasing a brand new analytics engine for their customers. We caught up with Bebee and Gosnell to discuss Amazon Neptune new features and the broader vision.  We cover where Amazon Neptune fits in the AWS vision of data management, and how the new analytics engine provides a single service for graph workloads, high performance for graph analytic queries and graph algorithms, and vector store and search capabilities for Generative AI applications. We also share insights on the One Graph vision, the road from serverless to One Graph via HPC, as well as vectors and Graph AI. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things: https://linkeddataorchestration.com/2023/11/29/amazon-neptune-introduces-a-new-analytics-engine-and-the-one-graph-vision/ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:44 Amazon Neptune & AWS vision of data management 00:05:35 The Importance of Graph Databases   00:08:55 Amazon Neptune Use Cases 00:13:13 Introduction to Amazon Neptune Analytics   00:15:20 Key Features of Neptune Analytics   00:17:40 Use Cases for Neptune Analytics  00:21:10 Preparing Data for Generative AI Applications 00:23:37 Neptune Analytics Use Cases and Deployment 00:26:43 Pricing and Roadmap Q&A 00:48:46 Conclusion

“Graph database growth is going strong through the Trough of Disillusionment.” And “Graph Analytics go big and real-time.” These were two of the headlines of the Spring 2023 update of the Year of the Graph newsletter. In combination, they seem like an appropriate summary of the reasoning behind a new entry in the graph database market: Aerospike Graph, which Aerospike officially unveiled in June 2023. We caught up with the company’s Chief Product Officer Lenley Hensarling to discuss this long journey that started about three years ago, as well as Aerospike's differentiation in a very densely populated market. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things.

LinkedIn is a case study in terms of how its newsfeed has evolved over the years. LinkedIn's feed has come a long way since the early days of assembling the machine learning infrastructure that powers it. Recently, a major update to this infrastructure was released. We caught up with the people behind it to discuss how the principle of being people-centric translates to technical terms and implementation. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things

Would you leave a Google Staff Research Engineer role just because you want your TV to automatically pause when you get up to get a cup of tea? Actually, how is that even relevant, you might ask. Let's see what Pete Warden, former Google Staff Research Engineer and now CEO and Founder of Useful Sensors, has to say about that. Although naturally much of what he did was based off things others were already working on, Warden is sometimes credited as having kickstarted the TinyML subdomain of machine learning. Either way TinyML is getting big, and Warden is a big part of it. Useful Sensors is Warden's latest venture. They just launched a product called AI in a Box, which they dubs an "offline, private, open source LLM for conversations and more". Even though it's not the first product Useful Sensors has created, it's the first one that's officially launched. That was a good opportunity to catch up with Warden and talk about what they are working on. Article published on Linked Data Orchestration

Neo4j recently announced new product features in collaboration with Google, as well as a new Chief Product Officer coming from Google: Sudhir Hasbe. We caught up to discuss what the future holds for Neo4j as well as the broader graph database space. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things.

In an era of dried-up funding and Data Lakehouse vendor supremacy, Redpanda is going against the grain. The company just secured a $100 million Series C funding round to execute on an unconventional strategy. Redpanda Founder and CEO Alex Gallego explains how things work for the company. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things

The EU Parliament just voted to bring the EU AI Act regulation into effect. If GDPR is anything to go by, that's a big deal. Here's what and how it's likely to effect, its blind spots, what happens next, and how you can prepare for it based on what we know. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things

From a consumer-oriented application, Foursquare has evolved to a data and product provider for enterprises. The next steps in its evolution will be powered by the Foursquare Graph If the name Foursquare rings a bell, it means you were around in the 2010s. Your only resort to plausible deniability would be if you are a data professional - although that's not an either/or proposition. In the 2010s, Foursquare was a consumer-oriented mobile application. The premise was simple: people would check in at different locations and get gamified rewards. Their location data would be shared with Foursquare and used for services such as recommendations. Facebook and Yelp got the lion's share of that market, but Foursquare is still around. In addition to having 9 billion-plus visits monthly from 500 million unique devices, Foursquare's data is used to power the likes of Apple, Uber and Coca-Cola. Today the company announced Foursquare Graph, what it dubs the industry’s first application of graph technology to geospatial data. I caught up with Vikram Gundeti, Distinguished Engineer at Foursquare, to learn more about what kind of data Foursquare deals with, what it does with that data, and how using graph is going to help. Article published on Orchestrate all the Things

On AI-generated content, writing, new, old, and broken media, platforms, models, audiences, and body parts. An update from the host on launching the Orchestrate All The Things Newsletter, and some insights on Technology, Data, Media, AI, Writing, and Content. A new type of podcast episode: AI-generated article narrations. Article published on Orchestrate All The Things.

Is incremental change a bad thing? The answer, as with most things in life, is "it depends". In the world of technology specifically, the balance between innovation and tried and true concepts and solutions seems to have tipped in favor of the former. Or at least, that's the impression reading the headlines gives. Good thing there's more to life than headlines. The ScyllaDB team is one of those who work with their garage doors up and are not necessarily after making headlines. They believe that incremental change is nothing to shun if it leads to steady progress. Compared to the release of ScyllaDB 5.0 in ScyllaDB Summit 2022, what ScyllaDB Summit 2023 brought could be labeled “incremental change.” But this is just the tip of the iceberg, as there's more than meets the eye here. We caught up with ScyllaDB CEO and co-founder Dor Laor to discuss what kept the team busy in 2022, how people are using ScyllaDB, as well as trends and tradeoffs in the world of high performance compute and storage. Article published on The New Stack

The last couple of years have been an AI model arms race. The assumption is that the larger the model the better it will perform. But that may not always be the case. FAR AI Research Scientist Ian McKenzie is a key member of the team organizing the Inverse Scaling Challenge, an initiative set up to investigate scaling laws. We discuss: Large Language Models and how they are trainedThe scaling laws and how they are being revised as research and development progressesThe Inverse Scaling Challenge and its findings Article published on Orchestrate all the Things.

Can technology, and real-time technology in particular, help companies achieve savings during economic hardship? Alok Pareek thinks it can. Pareek is the Co-founder and EVP of products of Striim, a vendor whose goal and motto is to "help companies make data useful the instant it’s born". Depending on which angle you look at it, you could say that Pareek is either biased or in the know. Either way, it was not so long ago that real-time data, or streaming data as this market is also called, was estimated to be worth billions. But then again, as the recent wave of layoffs and market capitalization losses goes to show, many projections around technology are off the mark. Could real-time data be different? Where does cloud modernization come into play and how does Striim's offering relate to that? As Striim today announced the availability of its fully managed Striim Cloud service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), we connected with Pareek to discuss.

Retail is big business. But like many other sectors it's undergoing a transformation, largely affected by the shift of consumer behavior from physical to digital. Many retailers are looking to analytics and AI to help them cope with the challenges. Andrew Ng, among the most prominent figures in AI, is now turning his sights to doing precisely that with his new venture Netail Founded in 2022 as part of Landing AI, Netail, a technology that enables retailers to auto-identify competitors across the internet and track their assortments, availability and optimize prices in real-time, today announced the closing of $5M in seed funding. We connected with retail veteran Mark Chrystal who is Netail's CEO to discuss the changing landscape in retail and Netail's offering.

Quantum computing could be a disruptive technology. It's founded on exotic-sounding physics and it bears the promise of solving certain classes of problems with unprecedented speed and efficiency. The problem, however, is that to this day there's been too much promise and not enough delivery. D-Wave is the company that pioneered quantum computing. In this exclusive interview, D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz talks about about quantum computing fundamentals and how this is related to the market’s current state, real-world clients and use cases, and what the future holds for this space. Article published on VentureBeat

Graph database Neo4j has just released version 5, which promises better ease of use and performance through improvements in its query language and engine, as well as automated scale-out and convergence across deployments. We caught up with Jim Webber, Chief Scientist at Neo4j, to discuss Neo4j 5 as well as the bigger picture in the graph market. Article published on VentureBeat

AIOps is what you get when you combine big data and machine learning to automate IT operations processes, including event correlation, anomaly detection and causality determination. At least, that's how Gartner defines AIOps. Based on this definition, as well as coverage of vendors that have products they label with the AIOps moniker, you'd be inclined to think that AIOps is mostly about anomaly detection and remediation. But what about provisioning, configuration, deployment and orchestration? These are all essential parts of IT operations which have not received as much AIOps attention. They also happen to be at the core of Ansible, Red Hat's open source IT automation tool.  Now Red Hat is embarking on a new direction for Ansible with Project Wisdom, aiming to take automation to the next level in collaboration with IBM Research. Red Hat refers to Project Wisdom as the first community project to create an intelligent, natural language processing capability for Ansible and the IT automation industry. We connected with Red Hat Vice President & General Manager for the Ansible Business Unit Tom Anderson to discuss Project Wisdom's premises, status and trajectory.  Article published on VentureBeat

Shining light on AI research and applications in a conversation with the curators of the most comprehensive report on all things AI. If you think AI is moving at a breakneck speed and it's almost impossible to keep up, you are not alone. Even if being on top of all things AI is part of your job, it's getting increasingly hard to do that. Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth know this all too well, yet somehow they manage. Benaich and Hogarth have solid backgrounds in AI as well as tons of experience and involvement in research, community- and market-driven initiatives. AI is their both their job and their passion and being on top of all things AI comes with the territory. Nathan Benaich is the General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in Al-first technology and life science companies. lan Hogarth is a co-founder at Plural, an investment platform for experienced founders to help the most ambitious European startups. Since 2018 Benaich and Hogarth have been publishing their yearly State of AI report, aiming to summarize and share their knowledge with the world. This ever-growing and evolving work covers all the latest and greatest across industry, research and politics. Over time, new sections are added, with this year featuring AI Safety for the first time. Traditionally, Benaich and Hogarth have also been venturing on predictions, with remarkable success. Equally traditionally, we have been connecting with them to discuss their findings every year upon release of the report. This year was no exception, so buckle up and let the ride begin. Article published on VentureBeat.

Economic theory is known to be constrained by a number of inefficiencies in its modeling. Salesforce researchers claim AI can help address that, leading to more robust economic policies. Article published on ZDNet

As Ben Lorica will readily admit, at the risk of dating himself, he belongs to the first generation of data scientists. In addition to having served as Chief Data Scientist for the likes of Databricks and O'Reilly, Lorica advises and works with a number of venture capitals, startups and enterprises, conducts surveys, and chairs some of the top data and AI events in the world. That gives him a unique vantage point to identify developments in this space. Having worked in academia teaching applied mathematics and statistics for years, at some point Lorica realized that he wanted his work to have more practical implications. At that point the term "data science" was not yet coined, and Lorica's exit strategy was to become a quant. Fast forwarding to today, Lorica still has friends in the venture capital world. That includes Intel Capital's Assaf Araki, with whom Lorica co-authored two recent posts on data management and AI trends. We caught up with Lorica to discuss those, as well as new areas for growth and the trouble with unicorns and what to do about it.

What's a good enough weather prediction? That's a question most people probably don't give much thought to, as the answer seems obvious -- an accurate one. But then again, most people are not CTOs at DTN. Lars Ewe is, and his answer may be different than most people's. With 180 meteorologists on staff providing weather predictions worldwide, DTN​ is the largest weather company you've probably never heard of. Weather forecast, too, is all about data and models these days. But balancing accuracy and viability is a fine act, especially at global scale and when the stakes are high. Article published on ZDNet