CloudComputing: April 2015

Toward the Open European Science Cloud

"On the 23rd of April 2015, Bob Jones, CERN & HNI Co-Coordinator, was invited by the European Commission to present the ‘European Open Science Cloud’ at the 3rd Digital European Research Area (ERA) Forum meeting.

The concept of open science and a European open science cloud seems to be widely accepted, but how to implement it remains largely unknown and Helix Nebula and the European Science cloud are examples that can be used to define the future structure.

European open science cloud is now one of the ERA’s priorities as part of the EC’s strategy for the single digital market.

The audience enquired about the amount of funding needed to get from 5% to 100% scale and how to encourage the adoption of commercial cloud services by research organisations.

The ERA conference to be held in Brussels on 22-23 June will conclude the outcome of the ‘science 2.0’ consultation."

Toward the Open European Science Cloud

"The objective of this paper is to propose the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud that will

enable digital science by introducing IT as a Service to the public research sector in Europe. The rationale calls

for a hybrid model that brings together public research organisations and e‐Infrastructures with commercial

suppliers to build a common platform offering a range of services to Europe’s research communities. The

exploitation platform will make use of, and cooperate with, existing European e‐infrastructures by jointly

offering integrated services to the end‐user. This hybrid public‐commercial cloud model represents a

significant change from the status‐quo and will bring benefits for the stakeholders: end‐users, research

organisations, service providers (public and commercial) and funding agencies. A time‐line for a pilot and its

subsequent expansion together with a funding model engaging all stakeholder groups is described."

Adobe Claims its Adobe Document Cloud will revolutionize the way the world works with documents.

Adobe Document Cloud combines a completely re imagined Adobe Acrobat with the power of e-signatures. Now, you can edit, sign, send and track documents wherever you are — across desktops, mobile and web.

Acrobat DC with Document Cloud services is packed with all the tools you need to convert, edit and sign PDFs. It’s just as mobile as you are. So you can start a document at work, tweak it on the train and send it for approval from your living room — seamlessly, simply, without missing a beat.

From now on, you don’t have to spend valuable hours creating new documents from scratch. Instead, use existing content in paper or PDF files as your starting point. Make changes right in your PDF or export to a Microsoft Office format. And do it naturally on your computer, browser, or mobile device.

Acrobat DC brings e-signing to more than one billion devices around the world. Now anyone can legally sign documents with a finger on a touch-enabled device — or with a few quick clicks in a browser.More than just a signing app, Acrobat DC makes it easy to send, track and store signed documents, too.

Touch-enabled and totally mobile, with a brilliant new UI that keeps all the tools you need at your fingertips — Acrobat DC is so amazing, you’re going to wonder how you ever managed to get work done without it.

Wath the video and decide:

As you float into the clouds talent management has a paramount importance.

The talent management issues created by cloud computing can be formidable. Indeed, I have seen the introduction of cloud computing result in displaced workers, internal IT reorganisations, technological ‘haves’ and ‘have notes’, training challenges, and resource shortages as staff are spread too thin trying to maintain existing production systems while they focus on building the next-generation computing platform.

Fortunately, however, as daunting as these challenges may at first appear, they are also perfectly manageable. But for organisations to succeed in this regard, they must engage in proper forethought and planning and never, ever lose sight of their most important asset — their people.

IBM has taken an interest on Numenta

For more than a decade Jeff Hawkins, founder of mobile computing company Palm, has dedicated his time and fortune to a theory meant to explain the workings of the human brain, and provide a blueprint for a powerful new kind of artificial intelligence software. But Hawkins’s company, Numenta, has made little impact on the tech industry, even as machine learning has become central to companies such as Google. Now, one tech giant is finally taking an interest. IBM has established a research group to work on Numenta’s learning algorithms at its Almaden research lab in San Jose, California. The algorithms are being tested for tasks including interpreting satellite imagery, and the group is working on designs for computers that would implement Hawkins’s ideas in hardware. Hawkins says that around 100 people are working on the project, known internally as the Cortical Learning Center.

IBM Tries an Unproven Brain-Inspired Approach to Machine Learning from Palm Founder, Jeff Hawkins | MIT Technology Review

Google Cloud Platform is asking feedback for Cloud Console for Android

Google Cloud Platform, is asking feedback from clients who start using Cloud Console for Android currently released as Beta version. Later this year Google is to release iOS application.

Here is what Google says in in their blog:

"Cloud Console for Android is currently in beta, and an iOS app is expected to launch later this year. Over the coming months, we’ll continue to add new features and resolve issues. To influence our future work, please send your feedback, ideas and suggestions to android-cloud-console@google.com!"

With this new application on your phone, you can be away of your desk or computer or laptop, but you will still be able to access and monitor your application engine from your phone. You can quickly glance at the status of your solution, set up alerts, manage your Cloud Platform resources and access Google Cloud Monitoring performance and health graphs.

These are what you can do: