Monthly Archives: February 2022

After much deliberation, Kevin James Comerford was announced to be NMSUs new library dean on Jan. 14, 2022.

As library dean, Comerford will take on many responsibilities regarding the structure, operation, funding and direction of the library.

In academic environment, saying youre in charge of something means that you are leading with a shared team and that you are governed by a larger set of authorities, Comerford said. The [library] dean is part of a larger team of professional librarians and library staff who make sure the library is a valuable resource for students and faculty.

Comerford is currently finishing his position at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) where he works as associate university librarian. There, he manages research services and digital services for the library. This includes digitalization of rare paper collections, promoting availability of digital resources for researchers and developing services that help with research literacy.

For example, mapping in GI (geographical indications) geography, research data management,an innovation space at the library that provides students access to 3D printing and scanning and virtual realities. said Comerford.

Before working at UCR, Comerford worked at the University of New Mexico and was in charge of digital initiatives such as New Mexico Digital Collections which is used to digitize special collections of historic New Mexican artifacts. Comerford also spent a few years at Microsoft.

According to Comerford, A lot of my career experience has been managing libraries that are providing both core important services [like] access books, etc., but also providing access to high technology.

This high technology and digitization are somethings Comerford hopes to further pursue at NMSUs library. One specific aspect of this digitization includes the Rio Grande Historical Collection.

The library has a lot of unique materials about Southern New Mexico and the borderlands that help with researchers who are interested in those particular study areas hand and they are actively involved in digitizing the collection, Comerford said.

For Comerford, it is important that the library provides every student and faculty member with the needs suitable for their position. According to him, it is much more than a place to check out books. The library is a place equipped to teach about information and research literacy, store research information, provide technology workshops and help faculty get government grants.

The library is a multifaceted resource, so it means different things to people throughout their academic career as a student and then it means different things to faculty and so forth, Comerford said.

Comerford is excited to begin his work here on NMSUs campus starting Mar. 15, 2022

What excites me about libraries in the future and the power of the academic libraries is that were a resource thats available to everybody across the university regardless of what major youre inwhether youre an undergraduate or graduate, or a faculty member. Comerford said. Im excited about developing new services and new collection resources that meet everybodys needs across the campus and I think the library has done an excellent job theretofore,

Read the original here:

New NMSU library dean wants to pursue technology and digitization - The Round Up

DENVER & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ: VERI), creator of aiWARE, a hyper-expansive enterprise AI platform, and iHeartMedia (NASDAQ: IHRT), the number one podcast publisher globally according to Podtrac, today announced iHeartMedias planned use of Veritones synthetic voice solution that allows celebrities, athletes, influencers, broadcasters, podcasters and other talent across numerous industries to securely create and monetize verified synthetic voices that can be transformed into different languages, dialects, accents and more. iHeartMedia will leverage Veritones AI platform to make more shows across the iHeart Podcast Network available in multiple languages, helping to expand their podcast market. The first use case is to translate iHearts marquee podcasts for Spanish-speaking audiences.

We have worked with the iHeartMedia team for more than four years in various aspects of their business, and we are very excited to collaborate on expanding their podcast audience and unlocking new revenue streams for the broadcast industry leader, said Ryan Steelberg, president of Veritone. iHeartMedia has always been a pioneer of innovation, and now with the power of Veritones synthetic voice solution, iHeartMedia will not only be able to scale to new markets with localized language translations but retain the brand value of their top talents voicewhich is fundamental in podcasting. We are also partnering to develop synthetic voices for advertising and engaging content while reducing time-to-market and production costs for radio, podcasting and the metaverse.

In addition to a self-serve application for voice projects leveraging stock voices, Veritones synthetic voice solution offers custom synthetic voice cloning that takes a professional approach and works with clients to acquire the necessary training data to create hyper-realistic custom voice clones. The solution can also secure the approvals necessary to create the cloned voice as well as approvals required to use the voice appropriately. Additionally, this new technology will offer increased revenue streams for the branded synthetic voice.

With the hyper-growth of our podcast network over the past decade, we are always looking for what is new and next in the medium, too and Veritones synthetic voice solution is a great example of that, said Conal Byrne, chief executive officer at iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group. Being able to easily offer our podcasts in other languages, in the talents unique style, will be an awesome and innovative way to grow market share in the global marketplace.

Veritones synthetic voice solution allows iHeartMedia the opportunity to reach new audiences at scale with their current top podcast talent. With no additional studio time, voice talent can authorize Veritones synthetic voice solution to automatically produce more podcasts, advertisements, and additional audio in multiple languages with the same energy, cadence and uniqueness of top talent.

To learn more about Veritones synthetic voice solution, visit https://www.veritone.com/solutions/voice-cloning/ and sign up for a free trial to explore stock voices.

About iHeartMedia

iHeartMedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: IHRT) is the leading audio media company in America, reaching over 90% of Americans every month. iHearts broadcast radio assets alone have more consumer reach in the U.S. than any other media outlet; twice the reach of the next largest broadcast radio company; and over four times the ad-enabled reach of the largest digital-only audio service. iHeart is the largest podcast publisher according to Podtrac, with more downloads than the next four podcast publishers combined, and has the number one social footprint among audio players, with seven times more followers than the next audio media brand, and the only fully integrated audio ad tech solution across broadcast, streaming and podcasts. The company continues to leverage its strong audience connection and unparalleled consumer reach to build new platforms, products and services. Visit iHeartMedia.com for more company information.

About Veritone

Veritone (NASDAQ: VERI) is a leader in enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) software and solutions. Serving organizations in both commercial and regulated sectors, Veritones software, services, and industry applications accelerate and maximize digital migration, empowering the largest and most recognizable brands in the world to run more efficiently, accelerate decision making and increase profitability. Veritones hyper-expansive Enterprise AI platform, aiWARE, orchestrates an ever-growing ecosystem of machine learning models to transform audio, video and other data sources into actionable intelligence. Through professional and managed services, as well as its robust partner ecosystem, Veritone develops and builds AI solutions that solve the problems of today and tomorrow.

To learn more, visit Veritone.com.

Safe Harbor Statement

This news release contains forward-looking statements. Without limiting the generality of the foregoing, words such as may, will, expect, believe, anticipate, intend, could, estimate or continue or the negative or other variations thereof or comparable terminology are intended to identify forward-looking statements. In addition, any statements that refer to expectations, projections or other characterizations of future events or circumstances are forward-looking statements. Assumptions relating to the foregoing involve judgments and risks with respect to various matters which are difficult or impossible to predict accurately and many of which are beyond the control of Veritone. Certain of such judgments and risks are discussed in Veritones SEC filings. Although Veritone believes that the assumptions underlying the forward-looking statements are reasonable, any of the assumptions could prove inaccurate and, therefore, there can be no assurance that the results contemplated in forward-looking statements will be realized. In light of the significant uncertainties inherent in the forward-looking information included herein, the inclusion of such information should not be regarded as a representation by Veritone or any other person that their objectives or plans will be achieved. Veritone undertakes no obligation to revise the forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

Excerpt from:

iHeartMedia to Utilize Veritone's Synthetic Voice Technology to Translate and Produce Podcasts for New Markets - Business Wire

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SimpleHealth, one of the nations fastest-growing reproductive healthcare companies, today announced the acquisition of Emme, a healthcare technology company focused on women's health. The acquisition expands SimpleHealth's birth control prescription delivery and telehealth services while addressing unmet needs in reproductive healthcare through a patient-centered approach.

SimpleHealth provides convenient affordable access to birth control, and, with the addition of Emmes proprietary, technology-driven system, expects to improve medication adherence for its patients. The Emme Smart Birth Control System is an integrated solution designed to lower the national 9% failure rate of birth control pills to reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies.

As SimpleHealth expands its focus to reach patients throughout the full reproductive life cycle, we are thrilled to join forces with Emme and offer their innovative technology solutions," said Carrie SiuButt, Chief Executive Officer, SimpleHealth. "Both Emme and SimpleHealth are pioneers in contraceptive care, and we are excited to bring in a company that has a strong position in healthcare technology. This acquisition will further solidify SimpleHealth's position as a vital platform for connected, personalized reproductive care."

The transaction will accelerate SimpleHealths digital offerings, supporting rapid technology innovation expansion into key reproductive care categories to gain market share in a highly scalable way. Emme's connected Smart Birth Control System streamlines a patient's ability to receive, track, and manage birth control pills, safeguarding the process. The acquisition will empower SimpleHealth patients to control their health through access to a fully integrated and connected care experience that utilizes personalized data to improve outcomes and satisfaction.

We created the Emme Smart Birth Control System to provide a digital support system for patients and help reduce the rate of missed pills, which historically accounts for nearly one million unplanned pregnancies in the United States annually, said Amanda French, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Emme. SimpleHealth stands out unequivocally as the best company to partner with as we scale our offering thanks to their unparalleled commitment to healthcare accessibility, innovation, and our shared dedication to improving the standard of care in reproductive health.

French will join the SimpleHealth executive team as Chief Innovation Officer, leading the acceleration of SimpleHealths product offerings to patients. With this fusion of two women-led companies, SimpleHealth will deliver a new standard in connected care, leveraging its existing strength in reproductive and behavioral health to expand into fertility preparedness, perimenopause and other transitional life phases.

Kluk Farber Law served as legal counsel to SimpleHealth, and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati served as legal counsel to Emme.

About SimpleHealth

SimpleHealth is a nationally recognized telehealth and wellness provider offering convenient, simple and affordable access to birth control in the US. With a mission to break down the accessibility barriers in reproductive care, SimpleHealth offers fully integrated guidance through a network of medical experts and technology. From click to consult, SimpleHealth empowers everyone to control their healthcare experience at all stages of their life. For more information, please visit http://www.simplehealth.com.

About Emme

Emme is the first company to offer a fully integrated birth control system for pill management. The Emme Smart Case and app is an integrated technology-enabled solution designed to safeguard the birth control experience and help reduce the rate of missed pills. The Emme Smart Case uses patented, multi-sensor technology to track when pills are taken, syncing with the app to send customized reminders and contraceptive information. Emme was founded at the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign and named to 2021 lists for Fast Company's World's Most Innovative Companies and TIMEs Best Inventions. For more information, visit http://www.emme.com.

Read more:

SimpleHealth Acquires Emme, Accelerating Its Digital Technology Innovation in Reproductive Healthcare - Business Wire

Having your software on the desks of more than 300,000 finance professionals brings both opportunity and obligation. In the multi-year project to decommission Libor the markets most popular interest rate benchmark the obligation came first.

Bloomberg customers who were using the platform for a varied range of pricing and other functions wanted to continue doing so as new risk-free rates (RFRs) were introduced, as fallbacks were signed allowing firms to automatically re-hitch instruments to new rates following Libors demise and as spreads were set between Libor and its replacements.

Delivering these things was not optional, says Jose Ribas, global head of risk and pricing solutions at Bloomberg in London. We have major banks in the US and Europe that use us for structured notes and exotics, for example, and they needed their front-office trader workflow updating, their price verification workflow updating. Counterparty and market risk all these models had to be updated at the same time so firms could keep running the books, keep running the business.

Other customers and use-cases varied from insurance companies calculating margin requirements, to non-financial corporates that use Bloomberg for hedge accounting or asset/liability management.

This work was non-negotiable, but required a huge effort on the vendors part. Ribas estimates the transition project occupied between a fifth and a third of his team globally over the past couple of years. He adds that tens of this team had little or no holiday over the 2021 year-end period, as they were on call to help clients with any problems as publication ended for the bulk of Libor fixings, and fallbacks took effect.

In this respect, Bloomberg was in the same boat as other fixed-income pricing and analytics vendors. The firm wins this years technology vendor of the year category for demonstrating that it is not just another pricing and analytics firm or, for that matter, just a market data vendor or benchmark administrator. It is all three and, at times, the firms complementary businesses amount to much more than the sum of those parts.

The opportunity that arose from the Libor transition is one illustration, as clients grappled with one of the projects thornier challenges: the fact that RFRs are overnight rates, lacking the bank credit risk component that was embedded in Libor. For many market participants, this was not a problem; they were content to compound the overnight rate to generate term versions of the RFRs. Others wanted not just a term benchmark, but one that would move in line with the credit cycle.

Some of these latter firms turned to Bloomberg for help, says Umesh Gajria, the firms global head of index-linked products. He describes Libor as being so deeply integrated into client systems and products that removing and replacing it was like an archaeological dig the old artefacts had to be carefully exhumed, rather than gouged out of the earth.

Going back to my archaeological site example, when we dug into a certain area the cash market clients would ask us, Hey, can you provide a solution for a rate that has credit sensitivity built into it? So that caused us to go back to the drawing board, and we realised there was a decent-sized set of clients that were facing an important problem, says Gajria.

The size of that problem was a point of heated debate during transition. Regulators wanted liquidity to build quickly in the RFRs, and only reluctantly endorsed work that would create offshoots or separate benchmarks. In some markets, the issue barely raised its head; in others it sparked a mini-revolt.

Lenders were seen as most reluctant to give up Libors credit-sensitivity, warning that in periods of financial stress, bank funding rates and RFRs would decouple and move in opposite directions. To compensate themselves for this risk, bank lenders using the RFRs today tack on an additional spread.

Gajria insists credit-sensitivity isnt just a benefit for lenders, though.

I think a number of borrowers want a simple solution in terms of understanding what the cost of their loan is. If youre borrowing against an RFR benchmark today, your all-in cost consists of a rate a base rate plus an add-on spread that covers the potential cost of funding for the bank, and a credit spread that is based on the clients own risk profile. So now youve got three components something the market wasnt necessarily used to, he says.

Bloombergs alternative is BSBY, short for Bloomberg Short-Term Bank Yield Index. The benchmark now approaching its first birthday is based on wholesale funding transactions on the companys electronic platforms, plus firm quotes from banks. Regulators have insisted that any Libor replacement is grounded in real-world transactions so BSBYs quote data is scaled down and capped to avoid drowning out the trade data.

Umesh Gajria, Bloomberg

This is a simpler benchmark for borrowers, Gajria argues theres no need for banks to tack on a funding spread, because the rate should rise or fall in line with their cost of funds. As a result, he claims, it should also be cheaper.

If banks know their cost of funding is covered, then they can give the best price. If they dont know what theyll be paying for funding three months from now, 12 months from now, then the add-on spread will obviously need to cover it. That spread may be needed in a crisis, but why would the borrower want to pay for it upfront and throughout the duration of the loan? he asks.

BSBY has generated a lot of controversy during its short life. Just months after its launch, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Gary Gensler, warned the trading volumes that underpin the benchmark are a fraction of those behind SOFR, the official replacement for US dollar Libor. Then, last September, Gensler renewed his attack, claiming BSBY did not comply with global benchmark standards. The UKs Financial Conduct Authority followed up by warning that the rates contractual fallbacks a waterfall of measures that lay out what will happen to the benchmark if underlying transaction volumes dwindle were not sufficiently robust to satisfy local benchmark rules.

In November, Bloomberg amended the fallbacks. Gajria says this was not a response to regulatory criticism: It was not a response to anything or anyone. One of the drivers was essentially to make the fallbacks more resilient, but that was always part of our plan.

The regulatory broadsides now seem to have abated. Gajria says he hasnt heard anything recently, and suggests the initial opposition to BSBY may have had more to do with regulators desire to build liquidity in the RFRs than any fundamental opposition to the arrival of credit-sensitive alternatives such as BSBY.

I think a multi-rate environment is not necessarily something they were against. In SOFR adoption, we were coming down to the wire it was not where it could have been or should have been. But now were in a good spot as a market, the world has moved on with SOFR and I think thats a positive for the market, he says.

BSBYs initial role has been as a benchmark in bilateral commercial lending, where public data is scarce Gajria says only that some banks are using the rate in these transactions but it has also been used in some larger, public deals, including a $2.3 billion loan in September to trucking firm Knight-Swift Transportation. BSBY swap volumes are also growing, with roughly $20 billion notional traded so far this year a fivefold jump on 2021 volumes, Gajria says.

The benchmark may add more strings to its bow. Gajria says about a dozen different use-cases have come to light for example, some asset managers have enquired about using BSBY to benchmark the returns they get from cash investment, instead of Libor. Insurers have also asked about using BSBY to discount their liabilities, he adds.

Beyond Libor, Bloomberg has also been prominent in a host of other pressing issues. The firm was considered for this award, after winning three categories in Risk.nets separate awards for technology vendors, including one for Libor support, and another for its market liquidity risk software, LQA.

Brad Foster, Bloomberg

The latter was initially embraced as funds sought to comply with the SECs new rules on liquidity classification of their holdings, says Bradley Foster, head of enterprise content at Bloomberg. Usage has since shifted from mostly regulatory compliance to include a broader set of risk measurement and management challenges a development that augurs well for the industry, given the general consensus that markets will be choppier this year and liquidity may be thinner.

If you had asked me 18 months or two years ago how well-equipped the industry was, then I might have had a different response, but I think today, they are very aware of it. Weve had a multi-year regulatory push on the topic, as well as these companies with very public liquidity issues, he says an apparent reference to blow-ups at the Woodford Equity Income Fund and a range of bond funds at Swiss manager, GAM.

So, many firms have moved away from a subjective assessment of liquidity to taking a data-driven approach to assessing what liquidity risk is, adds Foster.

That data-driven approach is woven into other important regulatory initiatives, such as the Fundamental Review of the Trading Book, which ties capital relief directly to the depth of data underpinning bank models, and the extent to which modelling results are consistent between the front office and the risk function. This context is pushing more customers in Bloombergs direction, Foster claims, although the firm offers no numbers to back this up, citing company policy.

People are realising its extremely expensive to acquire, ingest and normalise data, then to build interoperability between different data sets, and finally to apply analytics on top of it all. Theyre also realising that, even when you incur that cost, youre not certain that you have a best-in-class product. Weve built a vast stable of regulatory products, weve done this so many times before. We understand the pain points, and we can bring product to market pretty quickly, he says.

More here:

Technology vendor of the year: Bloomberg - Risk.net

Nothing has changed the face of modern war so much as technological innovation, military and otherwise. Martin Van Creveld, a brilliant Israeli historian, tells us that technology affects warfare like waves of a stone thrown into a pond. The disturbance is strongest at the point of impact; the further the ripples spread, the weaker and less noticeable they become. And the further they go, the more likely they are to lose their identity by becoming intermixed with ripples thrown up by other stones.

The most revolutionary technologies to affect warfare emerged between the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and the end of World War II in 1945, according to leading military historians. The rifled musket of the 1830s spelled the beginning of the end for tight tactical formations, such as the Roman wedge and the Napoleonic column, as well as the brightly colored uniforms that had defined Western warfare since the rise of nation states. By the 1860s, the repeating rifle made bayonet charges obsolete, but American Civil War generals failed to recognize this fact, and the result was catastrophic losses in combat.

The widespread use of explosive artillery shells in the 1850s ensured the demise of two ancient and venerable military institutions, the masonry fort and the wooden-hulled sailing ship. Yet, it took more than 20 years and several other non-military technological innovations before modern steel-hulled navies could emerge. These were all products of Englands Industrial Revolution: the steam engine, the screw propeller, and large-scale steel production.

Two other innovations of the Industrial Revolution vastly expanded both the scale and scope of warfare. The railroad and the telegraph permitted commanders to move vast quantities of troops and materiel to the battlefield, and to keep track of widely dispersed regiments and divisions for the first time. At Gettysburg, Generals Meade and Lee presided over some 200,000 fighting men. At the Somme on the Western Front in 1916, more than 3 million soldiers squared off against one another. One million became casualties over the battles 140 days, and the outcome was a draw.

According to a fascinating new history of weapons technology, Firepower by Paul D. Lockhart, in the half-century between the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 and the end of World War I in 1918, weapons technology advanced further and faster than it ever had before... It was a period of profound, rapid, even violent change in the killing potential of weaponry, made possible by the confluence of brilliant engineers, great leaps forward in the disciplines of chemistry and physics, and--perhaps most importantlyan arms race propelled by governments aggressively seeking out every possible advantage they could steal on their enemies, neighbors, and rivals.

By the end of the war to end all wars, three transformative new weapons had emerged: the tank, the warplane, and the torpedo-bearing submarine. Senior strategists and commanders now had to deal with campaigns on land, sea, and air simultaneously. But the military capabilities of the tank and the airplane were not at all clear by the time the guns fell silent in 1918. General Heinz Guderian of the Wehrmacht in World War II was the driving force behind the emergence of combined arms mobile warfare, integrating Panzer tank divisions with motorized infantry and concentrated air cover. It was called Blitzkrieg. The Germans were able to run roughshod over most of the armies in Western Europe in a mere nine months. The campaign against its powerful adversary, France, took only six weeks, despite the presence in France of almost 400,000 British soldiers.

In the Allies struggle to defeat the Axis powers, the United States rapidly emerged as the arsenal of democracy, producing more ships, planes, and tanks than any other allied nation by far, and the war was brought to an end through the use of atomic weapons, which possessed unimaginable destructive potential. The United States had spent billions to develop the bomb. It wasnt long after the war that an international consensus emerged: Atomic weapons must not be used again, for the simple reason that an atomic exchange could rather quickly bring an end to all of history.

As the Cold War began to take shape in the mid-1940s, the U.S. military was universally recognized as the most powerful and technologically sophisticated force in the world by far. This remains true today, even granting Chinas remarkable military rise. The Pentagon spends billions each year on technological research and development to defeat adversaries while suffering as few friendly casualties as possible. The U.S. military establishment and the policymakers who have presided over it since the beginning of the Cold War have exhibited a strong and abiding inclination to seek technological solutions to new challenges of the battlefield, rather than through tactical or strategic innovations with existing technology, or through in-depth study of the culture and way of war of its potential adversaries.

Ironically, Washingtons penchant for seeking technological solutions to military problems goes far toward explaining why the United States has such a lousy track record in fighting wars since the searing catastrophe of Vietnam. Our failures there, and in Lebanon (1983), Somalia (1993), and Afghanistan and Iraq stem largely from ignorance on the part of both policy makers and generals of our adversaries political dynamics, cultures, and ways of fighting.

The story of American military deployments to foreign shores since Vietnam, more often than not, is largely a story of wishful thinking.

In civil wars, insurgencies, and anarchic failing nation states, raw firepower and a technologically driven approach to warfare have often proved to be more of a problem than a solution, because such wars are primarily about gaining and maintaining control of the local population, not destroying the armed forces of the adversary. What distinguishes these conflicts from conventional fighting between national armies, wisely observes Professor Carnes Lord of the U.S. Naval War College, is not the scale of violence as such but the fact that the violence is embedded in a political context that directly shapes and constrains it Low intensity warfare is distinguished from other warfare by the extent to which politics dictates not merely strategy but military operations and even tactics.

Senior U.S. political and military officials have entered these conflicts convinced that superior technology and firepower will win out. It hasn't. Indeed, candid, realistic thinking about the nature of these conflicts, both before the commitment of forces, and then during the actual fighting, has been a scarce commodity. All of which lends credence to historian Max Boots contention in War Made New that technology alone rarely confers an insurmountable military edge. Even if a country figures out how to harness military power, it still needs the wisdom to know the capabilities and limitations of its war machine.

The story of American military deployments to foreign shores since Vietnam, more often than not, is largely a story of wishful thinking, in which the extraordinary capabilities of our technology have blinded overconfident presidents, national security advisers, and generals to the limitations of military force in effecting political change in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

In short, for the last half a century, the United States extraordinary military power has been badly squandered fighting the wrong wars in the wrong places at the wrong times.

Read the original here:

How Technology Made the US Military Its Own Worst Enemy - The Daily Beast