Following are a few additional documents to study markets, products, and technologies organized in three sections:

• Presentations
• White papers
• Technical book

Presentations

Exploring Causal Inference for Business Decisions

While A/B testing aims to establish any difference between two randomized groups “A” and “B”, and the causal effect of changing “x” on the outcome “y” on group “A” versus group “B”, causal inference technique attempts to discover and mitigate the cofounding factors “c” (called also omitted variable bias in statistics) that affect the input of interests “x” with the outcome of interest “y”.
Knowing the relationships between “x” and “y” enables to generate actionable insights in order to make the right course of actions to move from “x” to “y”.

Read more: Causal_Inference

How to Learn Faster? Multi-Task and Meta-Learning to the Rescue

One of the key goals of many data scientist teams is to develop models faster for new use cases and new applications. To that end, “transfer learning” which aims to train on one task, and to transfer that learning to a new task has been widely used in particular in computer vision, and language models.
However, two new techniques have emerged recently: “multi-task learning” which aims to train a system on many tasks, and transfer that learning to the system for a new task, and “meta-learning” which empowers a system to learn to learn from many tasks, and transfer that learning to the system for similar tasks.

Read more: Multi-Task_&_Meta_Learning

Machine Learning for the Internet of Things (IoT)

The Internet of Things (IoT) is all about machine learning at scale. The value of an IoT solution is in its machine learning applications. Those applications are what will motivate the IoT users to be more engaged with their devices. And, the more devices are connected to the IoT platform, the more the machine learning applications will provide value to the users of the IoT devices.

Read more: IoT_Machine_Learning

Cross Platform Mobile Development Tools

Every mobile platform has its own development environment: BlackBerry (Java and C/C++), iOS (Objective C), and Android (Dalvik Java). Fortunately for developers, there are a few alternatives. Some tools can wrap existing HTML into native libraries such as PhoneGap or even generate native code from existing HTML such as Appcelerator.

Read more: XMobileDevelopment

IP Security (IPSec)

IDS is dead. Welcome IDP. IPSec is dead. Welcome SSL. Well, history repeats itself. IDS and IDP are two different technologies for two different applications. The same is true for IPSec and SSL. IPSec provides data privacy at the network layer. SSL provides data privacy at the application layer. There will always be the need for an enterprise network to have IPSec and SSL to co-exist like there is for IDS and IDP.

Read more: IPSec

Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)

MPLS emerged as a traffic engineering technology to optimize traffic loads on the Internet backbone by distributed loads evenly in the backbone. An ingress system shares its transit load across multiple paths. With more and more functions, features and applications being developed by the IETF and the MPLS forum, MPLS is enabling a new range of applications beyond traffic engineering: Differentiated Services, Layer 2 VPNs/VPLS, Layer 3 VPNs/BGP MPLS, Multi-Service transport for Ethernet/Frame/ATM.

Read more: MigratingtoMPLS

Generalized MPLS (G-MPLS)

G-MPLS initial goal was to facilitate the required interaction between the IP and optical domains by extending MPLS traffic engineering for optical networks. Now, G-MPLS aims to create a universal control plane for dynamic provisioning and restoration of optical transport networks and will be key for the architecture of future core optical networks evolving towards meshes of DWDM transport systems connecting Optical and Photonic Switches (OXC/PXC).

Read more: GMPLS

The Communication Industry

The communication industry is moving to a horizontal integration like the computing industry did in the early 90s. The impact of the 1996 Telecom Act and the Internet are causing a destruction of the overall market value of the industry. Traditional Telecom Services are competing with the Internet, and Wireline Services are competing with Wireless Services.

Read more: CommunicationIndustry

The Internet Security and Intrusion Detection System Markets

Although corporations agree that Internet security should be one of the enabling technologies for the business use of the Net, the market has still not taken off. Why? What are the market dynamics in Intrusion Detection, the latest Internet security market segment after the explosion of the firewall market?

Read more: InternetSecurityIDSMarket

White papers

Machine Learning Algorithms

The goal of Machine Learning (ML) is to develop algorithms for making predictions from an existing data set. First, you start by collecting the data and analyzing it. Second, you build a model for it and select an ML algorithm. Third, you evaluate and tune the model and the algorithm. Last, you deploy it and make live predictions. There are three major approaches to ML:

• Regression finds a function to which a new instance belongs to;
• Classification establishes the category (or class) to which a new instance belongs to;
• And clustering groups/clusters the instances into categories (or classes).

Read more: Machine_Learning

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6)

The Internet is running out of addresses! Depending on how long the present pool of IPv4 addresses can be preserved, the exhaustion could begin as soon as Spring 2011.

IPv6 is the “only” solution to the exhaustion of Internet addresses. Unfortunately, there is little worldwide network deployment of IPv6. And, without any migration from IPv4 to IPv6, the Internet will run out of addresses. IPv6 introduces a number of features and benefits to the Internet Protocol for mobility, routing, QoS, and security.

Read more: IPv6

IP Security (IPSec)

IP packets have no inherent security. To that end, IPSec was designed to provide network-layer security services for IP upper-layer protocols (TCP and UDP). It guarantees that the message actually was sent by the apparent originator of the message; that the message that is received is the exact one that was sent; that the message cannot be read by a third-party.

Read more: IPSecurity

Network Security Overlay

While IPSec secures IP traffic, the management, and scale of security policies and the encryption key exchange mechanisms using IKE create a number of practical limitations. By dividing policy and key generation into separate logical components and combining them in new ways, a network security overlay can be deployed to protect data from end-to-end without any impact on the network architecture and performance.

Read more: Overlay Network for Security Policies

Voice Encoding/Decoding over IP

VoIP needs to be encoded and decoded. To that end, many codecs have been proposed by vendors and standardized. VoIP quality is affected both by the conditions of the network and the user at each end-point.

Read more: Voice_Encoding

MPLS VPNs

Organizations have been demanding virtual private networks (VPNs) instead of costly leased lines and, Ethernet and IP services instead of DS1 and DS3 services from their service providers.

MPLS is now the best way for service providers to respond to those customer demands by providing Pseudo Wires (PW) services, Virtual Private LAN Services (VPLS) or Layer 2 MPLS VPNs and IP VPNs or Layer 3 MPLS VPNs.

Read more: MPLSVPNServices

Ethernet Transport

For existing access networks, Ethernet can be transported over SONET (EoS) using three new emerging technologies: the Generic Framing Protocol (GFP), Virtual Concatenation (VCAT) and Link Capacity Adjustment Scheme (LCAS). GFP defines an Ethernet client signal mapping into SONET payloads. VCAT and LCAS provide the concatenation and the sizing of the SONET frames. The result is a much more efficient use of the SONET bandwidth.

Read more: Ethernet

The Java Telephony API (JTAPI)

Released in 1996, the Java Telephony (JTAPI) was the first application programming interface to support both first-party (desktop telephony) and third-party (server telephony) applications. The core of the API provides a basic call control model for rudimentary telephony features such as Internet telephony. The standard extensions of the API provide advanced functionality for various telephony capabilities such as media streams or telephony applications such as call centers.

Read more: The Java Telephony API

Technical Book

This book about “IP/MPLS over optical networks” is for any networking professional, who is working in the communication industry, and has already acquired a great knowledge of computer networking technologies.

It aims, when we need it, to refresh our memories from time to time about the very essentials of optical and Internet technologies which are becoming fundamental to our communication systems.

You can download it here: A Gentle Introduction to IP and MPLS over Optical Networks

As the architecture of the Internet has evolved, I will update that book in the future in particular with a section on Software Defined Networks (SDN).

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