Taming the AI Wild West

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

In 1848, James W. Marshall allegedly exclaimed, “there is gold in ‘dem hills!” when he spotted precious flakes of the material as he worked on the water wheel of John Sutter’s Mill on the American River in what is now Sacramento, California. The discovery sparked what is known today as The California Gold Rush, comprising an estimated 300,000 “forty-niners” that flocked to the West Coast to strike it rich between 1848 and 1855.Yet, despite the widespread excitement, very few actually struck it rich, or even found gold at all…

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Powering the Autonomous 5G Core

By: Shirin Esfandiari

To compete in the 5G marketplace, communications service providers are moving beyond consumers and on to enterprise customers as their target audience. In order to deliver services and experiences tailored to enterprises, however, providers are challenged to glean even more from their 5G networks. We are beginning to reach a point in the communications industry where the fabric of the network is not just programmable, but intelligent. Today, we are partnering with communications service providers (CSPs) to transform data center strategies and ultimately automate operations across the core…

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Accelerating Network Automation
and Innovation with Middleware

By: Tim Masse

Today's optical transport networks continue to grow in bandwidth, spectral efficiency, and with greater frequency, and are more commonly constructed out of purpose-built disaggregated devices. Additionally, the disaggregation of functions, from amplification and flexible ROADM to traditional transponding—and more recently, pluggable coherent optics—has accelerated the need for communications service providers to develop automation tools for the operation and maintenance of their networks. The result is a win-win for both network administration as well as the business it serves, creating more efficient operations that also eliminate costly human performance of repetitive functions…

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Unlocking Blockchain Data For Enterprises

By: Jan-Jaap Jager

How can enterprises access blockchain data? Since the inception of Bitcoin in 2009 and the subsequent proliferation of cryptocurrencies, blockchain has become a huge network and resource for businesses. The data that a blockchain records contains valuable information regarding tasks and transactions. All transactions are sent to pools where they are stored, until a validator picks them up. This means that the history of transactions are transparent and irreversible. But are enterprises using this data sufficiently? And what benefits can be found by engaging with this huge, potentially untapped data set? Why would enterprises be interested in this data? This huge ledger of information relating to both prices and product movement can be useful to enterprises in a number of ways…

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AI for Converged Networks

By: Bart Giordano

Demand on enterprise IT has experienced the kind of growth that would put any hockey stick graph to shame. This is because enterprise business is getting more complex and to keep business humming, they count on their IT resources to leverage technology at every available opportunity. Today, we have arrived at the point where IT is expected to not just support but to drive business value from their enterprise networks. It is also true that for any enterprise, however, IT is still a support function at its core…

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Unleashing Industry 4.0: How Programmable
Media Analytics Empowers Innovation

By: Al Balasco

Industry 4.0 automation powered by AI and Machine Learning is reshaping numerous aspects of business operations, driving a profound transformation across today’s enterprises. The adoption of automation technologies, like video-based analytics and robotic systems, has made it evident that better communication infrastructure is necessary to support these advanced applications. The complexity lies in integrating media analytics and real-time communications into new and existing business applications, however, to drive efficient processes…

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AI in Cybersecurity: The Good News and the Bad News

By: Jacob Ukelson, D.Sc.

The impact of AI on our way of life is accelerating and to no one’s surprise, AI has become prominent in the opposing realms of cybercrime and cybersecurity. From the beginning of our digital age, the dynamic between these opposing sides has not changed. Each side has always used the capabilities of emerging technologies to achieve their goals. The role of AI in both cyber offense and defense is being played out now. Those responsible for the security of their organizations, from technologists to executives, should stay informed on how AI is being used by their adversaries and how AI can counter these threats…

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AI and Analytics for IoT

By: Ken Figueredo

The rapid adoption rate for generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as Bard and ChatGPT, has astonished industry analysts while galvanizing business interest and public awareness. Grandparents are experimenting with research tasks and creative writing, while young students are using these tools as study aids and to create art. In the business sector, the OECD’s latest outlook on employment anticipates significant job impacts with finance and manufacturing industries highlighted as priority areas…

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The Ethical Use of Generative AI

By: Mark Cummings, Ph.D., Zoya Slavina, William Yeack, CSE

Generative AI promises profound benefits for society. Unfortunately it comes with some nasty side effects, including serious cybersecurity threats. Taking an approach of identifying the bad side effects and then developing ways to mitigate them, may make the ethical use of Generative AI possible across a wide application area. In the cybersecurity space, there is potential to use Generative AI systems in an ethical fashion to test defensive systems and train staff. Given that, professional ethics in this field require us to do so…

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The Need for an Agile Services-Driven Network

By: Jonathan Homa

The telecommunications industry is quickly reaching an inflection point that is forcing communications service providers to rethink their approach to network architectures. First and foremost, 5G and fiber-to-the-premise buildouts are fueling massive increases in access and transport bandwidth. On the consumer side, there is rising demand for increasingly sophisticated services with defined performance characteristics such as high capacity and guaranteed ultra-low latency performance. These services include cloud gaming, telemedicine, and symmetrical home working, which in turn are fueling even more bandwidth demand…

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Letter from the Editor

By: Scott St. John, Pipeline

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is nothing new. It’s hard to be precise, but I believe Pipeline published its first article on AI for smarter communications in 2016. In the article, we explored how AI was being used by service providers such as AT&T and BT to improve the Customer Experience (CX), by major tech players like HPE, IBM, NVIDIA, and Microsoft, and to potentially create new use cases for IoT, SDN, and NFV. At the time, AI was viewed as a bit of a novelty, with a good measure of skepticism…

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Telecom and Technology Industry News

By: Thomas Board, Pipeline

September has brought us a real mix of innovative and exciting news stories from across the globe here at Pipeline. This issue’s theme is AI, Automation, and Advanced Analytics, but we are providing you with a variety of stories from all areas of the technology industry including Cloud, IoT, cybersecurity reports, 5G networks, and more.This month’s top industry news stories are summarized below. To view current breaking news in real time, visit Pipeline’s News Center, follow Pipeline on social media, or subscribe to receive our weekly telecom industry news summary…

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