Axalta receives 2019 Masters of Quality supplier award from Daimler Truck

2019 award marks Axalta’s 21st win, 10th consecutive

PR Newswire

PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Axalta (NYSE: AXTA), a leading global supplier of liquid and powder coatings, received the Daimler Trucks North America LLC (DTNA) 2019 Masters of Quality supplier award. The award honors top suppliers of components and services to Freightliner and Western Star brand trucks.

The annual award recognizes outstanding suppliers that have received high scores based on quality, delivery, technology and cost performance as measured on a balanced scorecard basis. Throughout the year, these suppliers demonstrated dedication to continuous improvement of the quality of their products, support to DTNA and overall performance.

“We are honored to receive this elite award from Daimler Trucks North America, and I am extremely proud of our entire team who is committed to providing best-in-class products for our customers,” said Joseph Wood, Vice President for Commercial Transportation Coatings at Axalta. “This award reflects our passion for providing our customers with exceptional service and support. We look forward to our continued relationship with Daimler Trucks North America.”

About Axalta

Axalta is a global leader in the coatings industry, providing customers with innovative, colorful, beautiful and sustainable coatings solutions. From light vehicles, commercial vehicles and refinish applications to electric motors, building facades and other industrial applications, our coatings are designed to prevent corrosion, increase productivity and enhance durability. With more than 150 years of experience in the coatings industry, the global team at Axalta continues to find ways to serve our more than 100,000 customers in over 130 countries better every day with the finest coatings, application systems and technology. For more information, visit axalta.com and follow us @axalta on Twitter.

Contact

Jessica Iben

M 267 398 8163
[email protected]
www.axalta.com

Cision View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/axalta-receives-2019-masters-of-quality-supplier-award-from-daimler-truck-301188627.html

SOURCE Axalta

United Launches Virtual, On Demand Customer Service at the Airport

New “Agent on Demand” platform gives customers live, fast, contactless access to information and assistance at all U.S. hubs;

Call, text or video chat on any mobile device or at select United kiosks

PR Newswire

CHICAGO, Dec. 8, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — United passengers will soon have access to virtual, on demand customer service at the airline’s hubs, giving people an easy, contact-free option to get real-time information and support. Customers can access “Agent on Demand” on any mobile device to call, text or video chat live with an agent and get answers on everything from seat assignments to boarding times. Agent on Demand is currently available at Chicago O’Hare and Houston’s George Bush International Airports and is rolling out to United’s hubs by end of year.

“We know how important it is for our customers to have more options for a contactless travel experience and this tool makes it easy to quickly receive personalized support directly from a live agent at the airport while maintaining social distancing,” said Linda Jojo, United’s Executive Vice President for Technology and Chief Digital Officer. “Agent on Demand allows customers to bypass waiting in line at the gate and seamlessly connect with customer service agents from their mobile device, ensuring they continue to receive the highest levels of service while also prioritizing their health and safety.”

Here’s how it works:

Customers can scan a QR code displayed on signage throughout United’s hub airports, or access the platform through self-service kiosks at select gate areas at Chicago O’Hare and Denver International Airports. From there, customers will be connected to an agent by phone, chat or video, based on their preference. Customers can ask any question they would typically direct to a gate agent, including questions on seat assignments, upgrades, standby list, flight status, rebooking and more. Agent on Demand provides an extra level of convenience to customers, who can now easily connect with an agent while anywhere in the airport instead of waiting in a line at the gate. Additionally, translation functionality is integrated in the chat function allowing customers to communicate with agents in more than 100 languages. Customers can type in their preferred language and the messages will be automatically transcribed in English for the agents and in the selected language for the customer. 

United was the first airline to debut this technology, which allows a variety of United agents to respond to inquiries, giving gate agents more time to provide caring service to customers, and complete other critical pre-departure tasks.

Agent on Demand is the latest of many new technologies the airline has introduced to create a safer and more seamless experience for customers. United recently redesigned its mobile app with new enhancements intended to make travel easier for people with visual disabilities, introduced text alerts for passengers on standby and upgrade lists to reduce person-to-person interaction, and debuted a new chat function to give customers a contactless option to receive immediate access to information about cleaning and safety procedures.

A safer travel experience: United CleanPlus
SM

Since the start of the pandemic, United has been a leader in enacting new policies and innovations designed to keep employees and passengers safer when traveling. It was the first U.S. airline to mandate masks for flight attendants, quickly following with all customers and employees. United was also among the first U.S. carriers to announce it wouldn’t permit customers who refused to comply with the airline’s mandatory mask policy to fly with them while the face mask policy is in place. United was also the first U.S. airline to roll out touchless check-in for customers with bags, and the first to require passengers take an online health assessment before traveling. United is applying Zoono Microbe Shield, an EPA-registered antimicrobial coating that forms a long-lasting bond with surfaces and inhibits the growth of microbes, to its entire mainline and express fleet before the end of the year.

The latest research, including a recent study conducted by the U.S. Department of Defense, shows COVID-19 exposure risk on board United aircraft is almost zero due to the airline’s advanced air filtration systems, mandated mask policy and diligent cleaning protocols.

For more details on all the ways United is helping keep customers safe during their journey, please visit united.com/cleanplus.

About United

United’s shared purpose is “Connecting People. Uniting the World.” For more information, visit united.com, follow @United on Twitter and Instagram or connect on Facebook. The common stock of United’s parent, United Airlines Holdings, Inc., is traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol “UAL”.

 

Cision View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/united-launches-virtual-on-demand-customer-service-at-the-airport-301188649.html

SOURCE United Airlines

Wells Fargo Investment Institute Releases ‘2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward’

Wells Fargo Investment Institute Releases ‘2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward’

U.S. equities could rebound to record highs, but uneven global economic growth lies ahead

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wells Fargo Investment Institute (WFII) today released its “2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward,” which examines how the markets could react to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics, how economic priorities may change under new leadership in Washington, D.C., and how a strengthening economic recovery helps Main Street catch up to Wall Street.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005929/en/

WFII 2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward (Graphic: Wells Fargo)

WFII 2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward (Graphic: Wells Fargo)

“This year has challenged investors’ fortitude and left them feeling a little exhausted,” said Darrell Cronk, president of WFII and chief investment officer of Wells Fargo Wealth & Investment Management. “As we turn the calendar into 2021 and simultaneously exhale (albeit through our masks), serious questions call for clarity and resolution.”

The report outlines each of the asset classes and risks to the outlook:

  1. Global equities: We expect the economic recovery to continue in 2021, which should support an earnings rebound, sending equity prices to record highs.
  2. Global fixed income: Low rates are likely to persist. While we may see some modest upward pressure on longer-term rates, we expect that any sell-off in rates will be contained.
  3. Global real assets: We expect that a 2021 rebound in demand and a delayed supply response will support a continued bounce in commodities. We remain favorable.
  4. Global alternative investments: Investors should gravitate toward hedge fund and private capital portfolios that are more focused on themes arising out of the COVID-19 crisis.

“Patience and perseverance have a magical way of encouraging progress. Almost always, economic recoveries have arisen from dark points in our history, and investors know well that some of the best investment opportunities often present themselves from nonconsensus ideas. These patterns are developing again,” Cronk said.

The outlook also provides five portfolio ideas for 2021:

  1. Hold the right amount of cash.
  2. Selectively increase risk.
  3. Consider exposure to higher-quality, growth-oriented sectors.
  4. Diversify income sources.
  5. Be proactive not reactive.

Download the “2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward” (PDF) and watch a Wells Fargo Stories video where strategists discuss what’s ahead for next year.

Join the WFII Outlook 2021 conference call on Wednesday, Dec. 9, from 4:15 – 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time. The U.S. number is 855-458-0619and international is 574-990-1270.

About the Wells Fargo Investment Institute

Wells Fargo Investment Institute is a registered investment adviser and wholly owned subsidiary of Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., a bank affiliate of Wells Fargo & Company, providing investment research, strategy, manager research, and thought leadership within the Wealth and Investment Management division, with the goal of supplying world-class advice to the company’s financial and wealth advisers. Wells Fargo Wealth and Investment Management, a division within the Wells Fargo & Company enterprise, provides financial products and services through bank and brokerage affiliates of Wells Fargo & Company.

About Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) is a diversified, community-based financial services company with $1.92 trillion in assets. Wells Fargo’s vision is to satisfy our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially. Founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco, Wells Fargo provides banking, investment, and mortgage products and services, as well as consumer and commercial finance, through 7,200 locations, more than 13,000 ATMs, the internet (wellsfargo.com), and mobile banking, and has offices in 31 countries and territories to support customers who conduct business in the global economy. Wells Fargo serves one in three households in the United States. Wells Fargo & Company was ranked No. 30 on Fortune’s 2020 rankings of America’s largest corporations. News, insights, and perspectives from Wells Fargo are also available at Wells Fargo Stories.

Additional information may be found at www.wellsfargo.com | Twitter: @WellsFargo.

News Release Category: WF-ERS

Allison Chin-Leong, 212-214-6674

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: United States North America California

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Banking Professional Services Finance

MEDIA:

Photo
Photo
WFII 2021 Outlook: Forging a Path Forward (Graphic: Wells Fargo)

AWS Announces Amazon HealthLake

AWS Announces Amazon HealthLake

Amazon HealthLake enables healthcare organizations to store, transform, and analyze all of their data in the cloud

Cerner, Ciox Health, Konica Minolta Precision Medicine, and Orion Health among customers using Amazon HealthLake

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organization’s complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWS data lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning. The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags, and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations. As a result, Amazon HealthLake makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data. Organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data so they can make much more precise predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications. To learn more about Amazon HealthLake, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/healthlake.

As machine learning becomes more mainstream, companies across every vertical business are trying to apply it to their data to deliver meaningful business value. Healthcare is applying machine learning to improve operations and patient care, with AWS customers like 3M, Anthem, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Cerner, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, GE Healthcare, Infor, Pfizer, and Philips embracing the cloud and machine learning to get more value out of their vast data troves. From family history and clinical observations to diagnoses and medications, healthcare organizations are creating huge volumes of patient information every day with the goal of getting a full view of a patient’s health and applying analytics and machine learning to improve care, analyze population health trends, and improve operational efficiency. However, clinical data is complex and renowned for being siloed, incomplete, incompatible, and stored in on-premises systems spread across multiple locations. Getting all this information aggregated and in the FHIR format is a start toward the goal of standardizing structured data, but the majority of data remains unstructured and still needs to be tagged, indexed, and structured in chronological order to make all of the data understandable and able to query. Some healthcare organizations build rule-based tools to automate the process of transforming unstructured data (e.g., medical histories, physician notes, and medical imaging reports) and tagging clinical information (e.g., diagnoses, medications, and procedures), but these solutions often fail because the data needs to be normalized across disparate systems and because the tools can’t account for every possible variation in spelling, unintended typos, and grammatical errors. Other organizations use general-purpose optical character recognition (OCR) software to process data sources, but these tools lack the medical expertise to be effective and so organizations resort to manual data entry by medical professionals which adds expense to the digitization process. Even if organizations are able to aggregate and structure their data, they still need to build their own analytics and machine learning applications to uncover relationships in the data, discover trends, and make precise predictions. The cost and operational complexity of doing all this work is prohibitive to most organizations; and as a result, the vast majority of organizations end up missing out on the untapped potential to use their data to improve the health of patients and communities.

Amazon HealthLake offers medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies a service that brings together and makes sense of all their patient data, so healthcare organizations can make more precise predictions about the health of patients and populations. The new HIPAA-eligible service enables organizations to store, tag, index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at petabyte scale in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake allows organizations to easily copy health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud and normalize every patient record across disparate formats automatically. Upon ingestion, Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning trained to understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information, index events into a timeline view, and enrich the data with standardized labels (e.g., medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.) so all this information can be easily searched. For example, organizations can quickly and accurately find answers to their questions like, “How has the use of cholesterol-lowering medications helped our patients with high blood pressure last year?” To do this, customers can create a list of patients by selecting “High Cholesterol” from a standard list of medical conditions, “Oral Drugs” from a menu of treatments, and blood pressure values from the “Blood Pressure” structured field – and then they can further refine the list by choosing attributes like time frame, gender, and age. Because Amazon HealthLake also automatically structures all of a healthcare organization’s data into the FHIR industry format, the information can be easily and securely shared between health systems and with third-party applications, enabling providers to collaborate more effectively and allowing patients unfettered access to their medical information.

“There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what’s possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone’s goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations.”

By aggregating, labeling, indexing, and structuring all their data, Amazon HealthLake makes it easy for customers to query, analyze, and use machine learning to make sense of their data. Customers can use other AWS analytics and machine learning services with Amazon HealthLake like Amazon QuickSight for interactive dashboards and Amazon SageMaker for easily building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. For example, healthcare organizations can use Jupyter Notebook templates in Amazon SageMaker to quickly and easily run analysis for common tasks like diagnosis predictions, hospital re-admittance probability, and operating room utilization forecasts. Healthcare and life science organizations can use Amazon HealthLake to get a complete view of patient and population health, derive insights using analytics and machine learning, and discover previously obscured relationships and trends.

Cerner Corporation, a global healthcare technology company, is focused on using data to help solve issues at the speed of innovation – evolving healthcare to enhance clinical and operational outcomes, help resolve clinician burnout, and improve health equity. “At Cerner we are committed to transforming the future of healthcare through cloud delivery, machine learning, and AI. Working alongside AWS, we are in a position to accelerate innovation in healthcare. That starts with data. We are excited about the launch of Amazon HealthLake and its potential to quickly ingest patient data from various diverse sources and transform the data to perform advanced analytics to unlock new insights and serve many of our initiatives across population health,” said Ryan Hamilton, SVP, Population Health, Cerner.

Ciox Health is a health technology company that is dedicated to improving U.S. health outcomes by transforming clinical data into actionable insights. “At Ciox, we work to enable greater health by improving the way health information is managed,” said Sasidhar Mukkamala, SVP of Data Management, Ciox Health. “Much of the health information that we ingest is unstructured, like notes and handwritten PDFs, and it is a challenge to find solutions that allow us to realize the full analytic value of that data. With 60 percent of the market share in risk adjustments, this is a huge opportunity. We are excited about getting started with Amazon HealthLake and its potential to help us meet this need and deliver better risk adjustments, predictions, billing, and much more, all informed by health data.”

Konica Minolta Precision Medicine (KMPM) is a life science company dedicated to the advancement of precision medicine to more accurately predict, detect, treat, and ultimately cure disease. “We are building a multi-modal platform at KMPM to handle a significant amount of health data inclusive of pathology, imaging, and genetic information. Amazon HealthLake will allow us to unlock the real power of this multi-modal approach to find novel associations and signals in our data. It will provide our expert team of data scientists and developers the ability to integrate, label, and structure this data faster, and discover insights that our clinicians and pharmaceutical partners require to truly drive precision medicine,” said Kiyotaka Fujii, President of Global Healthcare, Konica Minolta.

Orion Health is a global, award-winning provider of health information technology, advancing population health and precision medicine solutions for the delivery of care across the entire health ecosystem. “At Orion Health, we believe that there is significant untapped potential to transform the healthcare sector by improving how technology is used and providing insights into the data being generated. We are pleased to find a like-minded company in AWS who, with Amazon HealthLake, is now taking the next step in using machine learning to help make sense of health data in a secure, complaint, and auditable way,” said Anne O’Hanlon, Product Director, Orion Health. “Data is frequently messy and incomplete, which is costly and time consuming to clean up. We are excited to work alongside AWS to deliver new ways for patients to interact with the healthcare system, supporting initiatives such as the 21st Century Cures Act designed to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, and Digital Front Door, which aims to improve health outcomes by helping patients receive the perfect care for them from the comfort of their home. Expanding the relationship we enjoy with AWS gives us an opportunity to innovate and explore new ways to deliver patient-centered healthcare and high quality health outcomes that help people live a healthier life.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

Amazon.com, Inc.

Media Hotline

[email protected]

www.amazon.com/pr

KEYWORDS: Washington United States North America

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Data Management Health Technology Software General Health Networks Internet

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo

AWS Announces Nine New Amazon SageMaker Capabilities

AWS Announces Nine New Amazon SageMaker Capabilities

Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way for developers to prepare data for machine learning

Amazon SageMaker Feature Store delivers a purpose-built data store for storing, updating, retrieving, and sharing machine learning features

Amazon SageMaker Pipelines gives developers the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning

Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides developers with greater visibility into their training data so they can limit bias in machine learning models and explain predictions

Deep profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger monitors machine learning training performance to help developers train models faster

Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker delivers new capabilities that can train large models up to two times faster than would otherwise be possible with today’s machine learning processors

Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager delivers machine learning model monitoring and management for edge devices to ensure that models deployed in production are operating correctly

Amazon SageMaker JumpStart provides a developer portal for pre-trained models and pre-built workflows

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced nine new capabilities for its industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, making it even easier for developers to automate and scale all steps of the end-to-end machine learning workflow. Today’s announcements bring together powerful new capabilities like faster data preparation, a purpose-built repository for prepared data, workflow automation, greater transparency into training data to mitigate bias and explain predictions, distributed training capabilities to train large models up to two times faster, and model monitoring on edge devices. To get started with Amazon SageMaker, visit: https://aws.amazon.com/sagemaker

Machine learning is becoming more mainstream, but it is still evolving at a rapid clip. With all the attention machine learning has received, it seems like it should be simple to create machine learning models, but it isn’t. In order to create a model, developers need to start with the highly manual process of preparing the data. Then they need to visualize it in notebooks, pick the right algorithm, set up the framework, train the model, tune millions of possible parameters, deploy the model, and monitor its performance. This process needs to be continuously repeated to ensure that the model is performing as expected over time. In the past, this process put machine learning out of the reach of all but the most skilled developers. However, Amazon SageMaker has changed that. Amazon SageMaker is a fully managed service that removes challenges from each stage of the machine learning process, making it radically easier and faster for everyday developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy machine learning models. Tens of thousands of customers utilize Amazon SageMaker to help accelerate their machine learning deployments, including 3M, ADP, AstraZeneca, Avis, Bayer, Bundesliga, Capital One, Cerner, Chick-fil-A, Convoy, Domino’s Pizza, Fidelity Investments, GE Healthcare, Georgia-Pacific, Hearst, iFood, iHeartMedia, JPMorgan Chase, Intuit, Lenovo, Lyft, National Football League, Nerdwallet, T-Mobile, Thomson Reuters, and Vanguard.

Today’s announcements build on the more than 50 new Amazon SageMaker capabilities that AWS has delivered in the past year to make it even easier for developers and data scientists to prepare, build, train, deploy, and manage machine learning models, including:

  • Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler automated data preparation: Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler provides the fastest and easiest way to prepare data for machine learning. Data preparation for machine learning is a difficult process. This difficulty arises from the fact that data attributes (known as features) used to train a machine learning model often come from different sources and exist in various formats. This means that developers must spend considerable time extracting and normalizing this data so it’s consistently easy to use with machine learning. Customers might also want to combine features into composite features to give the machine learning model more helpful inputs. For example, a customer might want to create a feature that describes a group of customers that are prolific spenders so they can be offered loyalty program rewards by combining features for items previously purchased, amount spent, and frequency of purchases. The work associated with transforming data into features is called feature engineering, and it consumes a lot of time for developers when they’re building machine learning models. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler radically simplifies the process of data preparation and feature engineering. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, customers can choose the data they want from their various data stores and import it with a single click. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler contains over 300 built-in data transformers that can help customers normalize, transform, and combine features without having to write any code, while managing all of the processing infrastructure under the hood. Customers can quickly preview and inspect that these transformations are what was intended by viewing them in SageMaker Studio (the first end-to-end Integrated Development Environment for machine learning). Once the features have been engineered, Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler will save them for reuse in the Amazon SageMaker Feature Store.
  • Amazon SageMaker Feature Storefeature storage and management: Amazon SageMaker Feature Store provides a new repository that makes it easy to store, update, retrieve, and share machine learning features for training and inference. Today, customers can save their features to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). This works well for a simple set of features that are mapped to a single model, but most features are not mapped to only one model. Most features are used repeatedly by multiple models and multiple developers and data scientists, and as new features are created, developers also want to be able to reuse them repeatedly. This leads to multiple S3 objects to manage, which can quickly become difficult to manage. Developers and data scientists try to solve this by using spreadsheets, paper notes, and emails. Sometimes they even try to build a custom application to keep track of the features, but this is a lot of work and error-prone. Further, developers and data scientists need the same features not only to train multiple models with all of the data available and where this activity can happen over hours, but also to use during inference when the predictions need to be returned in milliseconds and often use just a subset of the data in relevant features. For example, a developer might want to create a model that predicts the next best song in a playlist. To do this, developers would train the model on thousands of songs and then provide the model the last three songs played during inference to predict the next song. Training and inference are very different uses cases. During training, the models can access the features offline and in batch, but for inference, the model needs only a subset of the features in near real-time. Since machine learning models have a single source of features that need to be consistent, these different access patterns make it challenging to keep the features consistent and up to date. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store solves this problem by providing a purpose-built feature store where developers can access and share features that make it much easier to name, organize, find, and share sets of features among teams of developers and data scientists. Since Amazon SageMaker Feature Store resides in Amazon SageMaker Studio—close to where machine learning models are run—it provides single-digit millisecond latency for inference. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it simple and easy to organize and update large batches of features for training and smaller instantiations of them for inference. That way, there’s one consistent view of features for machine learning models to use and it becomes significantly easier to generate models that produce highly accurate predictions.
  • Amazon SageMaker Pipelinesworkflow management and automation: Amazon SageMaker Pipelines is the first purpose-built, easy-to-use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service for machine learning. As customers can see with feature engineering, machine learning comprises multiple steps that can benefit from orchestration and automation. This is not dissimilar to traditional programming, where customers have tools like CI/CD to help them develop and deploy applications more quickly. However, with machine learning, CI/CD tools are rarely used because they don’t exist or because they are hard to set up, configure, and manage. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can define each step of an end-to-end machine learning workflow. These workflows include the data-load steps, transformations from Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, features stored in Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, training configuration and algorithm set up, debugging steps, and optimization steps. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, developers can easily re-run an end-to-end workflow from Amazon SageMaker Studio, using the same settings to get the exact same model every time, or they can re-run the workflow on a regular schedule with new data to update a model. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines logs each step in Amazon SageMaker Experiments (an Amazon SageMaker capability that organizes and tracks machine learning experiments and model versions) every time a workflow is run. This helps developers visualize and compare machine learning model iterations, training parameters, and outcomes. With Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, workflows can be shared and re-used between teams, either to recreate a model or to act as a starting point for making improvements through new features, algorithms, or optimizations.
  • Amazon SageMaker Clarifybias detection and explainability: Amazon SageMaker Clarify provides bias detection across the machine learning workflow, enabling developers to build greater fairness and transparency into their machine learning models. Once developers have prepared data for training and inference, they need to try to ensure the data is free from statistical bias and that model predictions are transparent, so they can explain how the model features are contributing to predictions. Today, developers sometimes try to use open source tools to detect statistical bias in their data, but these tools require a lot of manual effort and coding and are typically error prone. With Amazon SageMaker Clarify, developers can now more easily detect statistical bias across the entire machine learning workflow and provide explanations for predictions their machine learning models are making. Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler where it runs a set of algorithms on features to identify bias during data preparation with visualizations that include a description of the sources and severity of possible bias. This way, developers can take steps for mitigation. Amazon SageMaker Clarify also integrates with Amazon SageMaker Experiments to make it easier to check trained models for statistical bias. It also details how each feature inputted into the model is affecting predictions. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Clarify integrates with Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor (an Amazon SageMaker capability that continuously monitors the quality of machine learning models in production) to alert developers if the importance of model features shifts and causes model behavior to change.
  • Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debuggermodel training profiler: Deep Profiling for Amazon SageMaker Debugger now enables developers to train their models faster by automatically monitoring system resource utilization and providing alerts for training bottlenecks. Today, developers don’t have a standard way to monitor system utilization (e.g. GPU, CPU, network throughput, and memory I/O) to identify and troubleshoot bottlenecks in their training jobs. As a result, developers can’t train models as quickly and cost effectively as possible. Amazon SageMaker Debugger solves this problem with Deep Profiling’s newly announced capabilities, which provide developers the ability to visually profile and monitor system resource utilization in Amazon SageMaker Studio. This makes it easier to root cause issues and reduce the time and cost of training machine learning models. With these new capabilities, Amazon SageMaker Debugger expands its scope to monitor the utilization of system resources, send out alerts on problems during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio or via AWS CloudWatch, and correlate usage to different phases in the training job or a specific point in time during training (e.g. 28 minutes after the training job started). Amazon SageMaker Debugger can also trigger actions based on alerts (e.g. stop a training job when irregularities in GPU usage are detected). Amazon SageMaker Debugger’s Deep Profiling works across frameworks (PyTorch, Apache MXNet, and TensorFlow) and collects necessary system and training metrics automatically without requiring any code changes in training scripts. This allows developers to visualize how their system resources were used during training in Amazon SageMaker Studio.
  • Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker accelerates training times: New Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker makes it possible to train large, complex deep learning models up to two times faster than current approaches. Today, advanced machine learning use cases—such as natural language processing for intelligent assistants, object detection and classification for autonomous vehicles, and image classification for large-scale content moderation—demand increasingly large datasets and more graphics processing unit (GPU) memory for training. However, some of these models are too big to fit in the memory provided by a single GPU. Customers can attempt to split models across multiple GPUs, but finding the best way to split the model and adjusting training code can often take weeks of tedious experimentation. To overcome these challenges, Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker offers two distributed training capabilities that enable developers to train large models up to two times faster at no additional cost. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker’s Data Parallelism engine scales training jobs from one GPU to hundreds or thousands by automatically splitting data across multiple GPUs, improving training time by up to 40%. The reduction in training time is possible because Amazon SageMaker’s Data Parallelism engine manages GPUs for optimal synchronization using algorithms that are purposefully built to fully utilize AWS infrastructure with near-linear scaling efficiency. Distributed Training with Amazon SageMaker’s Model Parallelism engine can efficiently split large, complex models with billions of parameters across multiple GPUs by automatically profiling and identifying the best way to partition models. They do this by using graph partitioning algorithms to optimally balance computation and minimize communication between GPUs, resulting in minimal code changes and fewer errors caused by GPU memory constraints.
  • Amazon SageMaker Edge Managermodel management for edge devices: Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows developers to optimize, secure, monitor, and maintain machine learning models deployed on fleets of edge devices. Today, customers use Amazon SageMaker Neo to create optimized models for edge devices that run up to twice as fast, with less than a tenth of the memory footprint and no loss in accuracy. However, after deployment on edge devices, customers still need to manage and monitor the models to ensure they continue to perform with high accuracy. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager optimizes models to run faster on target devices and provides model management for edge devices, so customers can prepare, run, monitor, and update deployed machine learning models across fleets of devices at the edge. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager gives customers the ability to cryptographically sign their models, upload prediction data from their devices to Amazon SageMaker for monitoring and analysis, and view a dashboard that tracks and visually reports on the operation of the deployed models within the Amazon SageMaker console. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager extends capabilities that were previously only available in the cloud by sampling data from edge devices and sending it to Amazon SageMaker Model Monitor for analysis, so developers can continuously improve model quality by retraining them when their accuracy declines over time.
  • Amazon SageMaker JumpStart enables the machine learning journey: Amazon SageMaker JumpStartprovides developers an easy-to-use, searchable interface to find best-in-class solutions, algorithms, and sample notebooks. Today, some customers that lack experience with machine learning have difficulty getting started with machine learning deployments, while more advanced developers find it difficult to adopt machine learning for all of their use cases. With today’s launch of Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, customers can now quickly find relevant information specific to their machine learning use cases. Developers new to machine learning will be able to select from several complete end-to-end machine learning solutions (e.g. fraud detection, customer churn prediction, or forecasting) and deploy them directly in their Amazon SageMaker Studio environments. And, experienced users will be able to choose from more than a hundred machine learning models to quickly get started on building and training models.

“Hundreds of thousands of everyday developers and data scientists have used our industry-leading machine learning service, Amazon SageMaker, to remove barriers to building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. One of the best parts about having such a widely-adopted service like SageMaker is that we get lots of customer suggestions which fuel our next set of deliverables,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Today, we are announcing a set of tools for Amazon SageMaker that makes it much easier for developers to build end-to-end machine learning pipelines to prepare, build, train, explain, inspect, monitor, debug, and run custom machine learning models with greater visibility, explainability, and automation at scale.”

With corporate operations in 70 countries and sales in 200, 3M is creating the technology and products that advance every company, enhance every home, and improve everyday life. “3M’s success is grounded in our entrepreneurial researchers and our constant focus on science. One way we have advanced the science of our products is the adoption of machine learning on AWS,” said David Frazee, Technical Director at 3M Corporate Systems Research Lab. “Using machine learning, 3M is improving tried-and-tested products, like sandpaper, and driving innovation in several other spaces, including healthcare. As we plan to scale machine learning to more areas of 3M, we see the amount of data and models growing rapidly – doubling every year. We are enthusiastic about the new Amazon SageMaker features because they will help us scale. Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler makes it much easier to prepare data for model training, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store will eliminate the need to create the same model features over and over. Finally, Amazon SageMaker Pipelines will help us automate data prep, model building, and model deployment into an end-to-end workflow so we can speed time to market for our models. Our researchers are looking forward to taking advantage of the new speed of science at 3M.”

Deloitte is helping transform organizations around the globe. The organization continuously evolves how it works and how it looks at marketplace challenges so it can continue to deliver measurable, sustainable results for its clients and communities. “Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler enables us to hit the ground running to address our data preparation needs with a rich collection of transformation tools that accelerate the process of machine learning data preparation needed to take new products to market,” said Frank Farrall, Principal, AI Ecosystems and Platforms Leader at Deloitte. “In turn, our clients benefit from the rate at which we scale deployments, enabling us to deliver measurable, sustainable results that meet the needs of our clients in a matter of days rather than months.”

A subsidiary of Koch Industries since 2004, INVISTA brings to market the proprietary ingredients for nylon 6,6 and recognized brands including STAINMASTER, CORDURA, and ANTRON. It is one of the world’s largest integrated producers of chemical intermediates, polymers, and fibers. “At INVISTA, we are driven by transformation and look to develop products and technologies that benefit customers around the globe,” said Caleb Wilkinson, Lead Data Scientist at INVISTA. “We see machine learning as a way to improve the customer experience, but with datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows, we needed a solution to help us prepare data, and develop, deploy, and manage machine learning models at scale. To speed these processes, we worked with the AWS team on several new features. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we can now interactively select, clean, explore, and understand our data effectively, empowering our data science team to create feature engineering pipelines that can scale effortlessly to datasets that span hundreds of millions of rows. We can also easily automate and manage machine learning workflows at scale with Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, so we can easily stitch together individual steps of the machine learning workflow. Together with Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler and Amazon SageMaker Pipelines, we can operationalize our machine learning workflows faster.”

Snowflake Data Cloud shatters the barriers that have prevented organizations of all sizes from unleashing the true value from their data. “One of the biggest challenges our enterprise customers face is preparing data for machine learning projects,” said Christian Kleinerman, SVP of Product at Snowflake. “We’re excited about Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, which makes it easier for organizations to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning. With the addition of Snowflake as a data source in Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, joint customers will soon be able to leverage the integrated platform capabilities of Snowflake, together with the interactive data preparation and machine learning capabilities of Amazon SageMaker. Customers will have the ability to go from raw data to machine learning models and insights faster than previously possible.”

Founded in 2013 by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks brings together data engineering, science, and analytics on an open, unified platform so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster. “At Databricks, we are committed to bringing together data engineering and science and analytics so data teams can collaborate and innovate faster,” said Adam Conway, SVP of Products at Databricks. “We are looking forward to continuing our partnership with AWS in 2021, especially with the seamless integration our customers can experience with AWS on Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. With this partnership, our customers can leverage Delta Lake with Amazon SageMaker to prepare robust training data so they can create the most accurate machine learning models.”

MongoDB Atlas is the fully managed service for MongoDB, the popular database designed to help teams build, scale, and iterate quickly. “Our mission at MongoDB is to free the genius within everyone by making data stunningly easy to work with. MongoDB Atlas runs more than 1.5 million database clusters, powering critical applications for our customers; we want to make it easy to build, train, and deploy machine learning models based on the data those applications generate,” said Mark Porter, CTO at MongoDB. “We are excited that our customers now have a faster, visual way to aggregate and prepare data for machine learning using Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler. Coming in 2021, our customers will soon be able to query and analyze data across Amazon S3 and MongoDB Atlas within Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, enabling them to get more value from their data faster.”

Intuit is a mission-driven, global financial platform company and proud maker of TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint. “We chose to build Intuit’s new machine learning platform on AWS in 2017, combining Amazon SageMaker’s powerful capabilities for model development, training, and hosting with Intuit’s own capabilities in orchestration and feature engineering,” said Mammad Zadeh, Intuit Vice President of Engineering, Data Platform. “As a result, we cut our model development lifecycle dramatically. What used to take six full months now takes less than a week, making it possible for us to push AI capabilities into our TurboTax, QuickBooks, and Mint products at a greatly accelerated rate. We have worked closely with AWS in the lead up to the release of Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, and we are excited by the prospect of a fully managed feature store so that we no longer have to maintain multiple feature repositories across our organization. Our data scientists will be able to use existing features from a central store and drive both standardization and reuse of features across teams and models.”

The Climate Corporation (Climate) is a subsidiary of Bayer and the industry leader in bringing digital innovation to farmers around the world by increasing their productivity using digital tools. Climate is focused on helping farmers understand their fields in ways that have never been possible before and derive impactful recommendations from agricultural data. “At Climate, we believe in providing the world’s farmers with accurate information to make data-driven decisions and maximize their return on every acre,” said Daniel McCaffrey, Vice President, Data and Analytics at Climate. “To achieve this, we have invested in technologies such as machine learning tools to build models using measurable entities known as features, such as yield for a grower’s field. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can accelerate the development of machine learning models with a central feature store to access and reuse features across multiple teams easily. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store makes it easy to access features in real-time using the online store or run features on a schedule using the offline store for different use cases. With Amazon SageMaker Feature Store, we can develop machine learning models faster.”

DeNA is a leading provider of mobile and online services, including games, e-commerce, and entertainment content distribution in Japan. “At DeNA, our mission is to deliver impact and delight customers using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Providing value-based services is our primary goal, and we want to ensure our businesses and services are ready to achieve that goal,” said Kenshin Yamada, General Manager, AI Systems at DeNA. “One of our key initiatives is to expand our capabilities in artificial Intelligence and machine learning. Amazon SageMaker has helped us in our path to implement machine learning in many of our businesses by providing extensive capabilities to train and deploy accurate models. One of the areas we want to focus is on data preparation and make it easy for our engineering teams. With Amazon SageMaker Data Wrangler, we believe we can hit the ground running with a rich collection of transformation tools without the need to write additional code. As we become more efficient with data preparation, we also want to ensure our teams across our diverse businesses do not repeat or duplicate work in building similar features for our applications. We would like to discover and reuse features across the organization, and Amazon SageMaker Feature Store helps us with an easy and efficient way to reuse features for different applications. Amazon SageMaker Feature Store also helps us in maintaining standard feature definitions and helps us with a consistent methodology as we train models and deploy them to production. With these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker, we can train and deploy machine learning models faster, keeping us on our path to delight our customers with the best services.”

iFood is an online food delivery portal and one of the largest food delivery companies in Latin America offering quality services to consumers. “At iFood, we strive to delight our customers through our services using technology such as machine learning,” said Sandor Caetano, Chief Data Scientist at iFood. “We have been using Amazon SageMaker for our machine learning models to build high-quality applications throughout our business. Building a complete and seamless workflow to develop, train, and deploy models has been a critical part of our journey to scale machine learning. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines helps us to quickly build multiple scalable automated machine learning workflows, and makes it easy to deploy and manage our models effectively. Amazon SageMaker Pipelines enables us to be more efficient with our development cycle. We continue to emphasize our leadership in using artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver superior customer service and efficiency with all these new capabilities of Amazon SageMaker.”

Since naming AWS as its official technology provider in January 2020, the DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga – organizer and marketer of Germany’s top soccer leagues Bundesliga and Bundesliga 2 – and AWS have embarked on a journey together to bring advanced sports analytics, by way of Bundesliga Match Facts powered by AWS, to life for fans and TV broadcasters around the globe. “Amazon SageMaker Clarify seamlessly integrates with the rest of the Bundesliga Match Facts digital platform and is a key part of our long-term strategy of standardizing our machine learning workflows on Amazon SageMaker,” said Andreas Heyden, Executive Vice President of Digital Innovations for the DFL Group. “By using AWS’s innovative technologies, such as machine learning, to deliver more in-depth insights and provide fans a better understanding of the split-second decisions made on the pitch, Bundesliga Match Facts enables viewers to gain deeper insights into the key decisions in each match.”

CS DISCO is a SaaS provider that offers solutions to automate and simplify a variety of legal tasks, including discovery. “At CS DISCO we have revolutionized the way legal evidence is reviewed with our DISCO AI platform for ediscovery,” said Alan Lockett, Principal Data Scientist at CS DISCO. “We are always looking to improve how quickly our advanced deep learning models train. Our team has worked with the Amazon SageMaker team at AWS and believes that technologies such as distributed training and others can help accelerate our AI use cases.”

Turbine is a simulation-driven drug discovery company delivering targeted cancer therapies to patients. “We use machine learning to train our in silico human cell model, called Simulated Cell™, based on a proprietary network architecture. By accurately predicting various interventions on the molecular level, Simulated Cell™ helps us to discover new cancer drugs and find combination partners for existing therapies,” said Kristóf Szalay, CTO at Turbine. “Training of our simulation is something we continuously iterate on, but on a single machine each training takes days, hindering our ability to iterate on new ideas quickly. We are very excited about Distributed Training on Amazon SageMaker, which we are expecting to decrease our training times by 90% and to help us focus on our main task: to write a best-of-the-breed codebase for the cell model training. Amazon SageMaker ultimately allows us to become more effective in our primary mission: to identify and develop novel cancer drugs for patients.”

Latent Space is a startup focused on building the world’s first fully AI-rendered 3D game engine. “At Latent Space, we’re building a neural rendered game engine where anyone can create at the speed of thought. Driven by advances in language modelling, we’re working to incorporate semantic understanding of both text and images to determine what to generate,” said Sara Jane, Co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Latent Space. “Our current focus is on utilizing information retrieval to augment large-scale model training, for which we have sophisticated machine learning pipelines. This setup presents a challenge on top of distributed training since there are multiple data sources and models being trained at the same time. As such, we’re leveraging the new distributed training capabilities in Amazon SageMaker to efficiently scale training for large generative models.”

Lenovo is the world’s largest maker of personal computers. Lenovo designs and manufactures devices such as laptops, tablets, smartphones and a variety of smart IoT devices. “At Lenovo, we’re more than a hardware provider and are committed to being a trusted partner in transforming customers’ device experience and delivering on their business goals. Lenovo Device Intelligence is a great example of how we’re doing this with the power of machine learning, enhanced by Amazon SageMaker,” said Igor Bergman, Lenovo Vice President, Cloud & Software of PCs & Smart Devices. “With Lenovo Device Intelligence, IT administrators can proactively diagnose PC issues and help predict potential system failures before they occur, helping to decrease downtime and increase employee productivity. By incorporating Amazon SageMaker Neo, we’ve already seen a substantial improvement in the execution of our on-device predictive models – an encouraging sign for the new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager that will be added in the coming weeks. The new Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager will help eliminate the manual effort required to optimize, monitor, and continuously improve the models after deployment. With it, we expect our models will run faster and consume less memory than with other comparable machine-learning platforms. As we extend AI to new applications across the Lenovo services portfolio, we will continue to require a high-performance pipeline that is flexible and scalable both in the cloud and on millions of edge devices. That’s why we selected the Amazon SageMaker platform. With its rich edge-to-cloud and CI/CD workflow capabilities, we can effectively bring our machine learning models to any device workflow for much higher productivity.”

Basler AG is a leading manufacturer of high-quality digital cameras and accessories for industry, medicine, transportation and a variety of other markets. “Basler AG delivers intelligent computer vision solutions in a variety of industries, including manufacturing, medical, and retail applications. We are excited to extend our software offering with new features made possible by Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager,” said Mark Hebbel, Head of Software Solutions at Basler. “To ensure our machine learning solutions are performant and reliable, we need a scalable edge to cloud MLOps tool that allows us to continuously monitor, maintain, and improve machine learning models on edge devices. Amazon SageMaker Edge Manager allows us to automatically sample data at the edge, send it securely to the cloud, and monitor the quality of each model on each device continuously after deployment. This enables us to remotely monitor, improve, and update the models on our edge devices around the world and at the same time saves us and our customers’ time and costs.”

Mission Automate handcrafts software solutions on behalf of their global customers. “We constantly look for new solutions that can provide the best quality software to our customers, but as a small organization, we don’t have the same ability to specialize in silos like other organizations,” said Alex Panait, CEO at Mission Automate. “Amazon SageMaker JumpStart now provides us a way to get started with machine learning faster, including new techniques that we can use in our own workflows to increase our service offerings and reduce costs. The option to select machine learning models and algorithms from popular model zoos allows us to quickly train customized machine learning models, which helps our customers get to market faster. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we are able to launch machine learning solutions within days to fulfill machine learning prediction needs faster and more reliably.”

MyCase offers a powerful legal practice management software that helps law firms run efficiently from anywhere, provide an exceptional client experience, and easily track firm performance. “We have several business and product elements that can be improved with machine learning,” said Gus Nguyen, Software Engineer at MyCase. “Amazon SageMaker JumpStart allows us to launch end-to-end solutions with one click and access a collection of notebooks to help us more deeply understand customers and use predictions to better serve their needs. Thanks to Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, we can have better starting points which makes it so that we can deploy a machine learning solution for our own use cases in four to six weeks instead of three to four months.”

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 77 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Japan, Spain, and Switzerland. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

Amazon.com, Inc.

Media Hotline

[email protected]

www.amazon.com/pr

KEYWORDS: United States North America Washington

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Technology Other Retail Security Professional Services Networks Internet Retail Data Management Other Professional Services

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo

Domini Impact Equity Fund Ranks in Top 1% of Morningstar US Fund Large Blend Category for 1-Year Period Ended December 1, 2020

Domini Impact Equity Fund Ranks in Top 1% of Morningstar US Fund Large Blend Category for 1-Year Period Ended December 1, 2020

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Domini Impact Investments LLC (“Domini”), an investment adviser specializing exclusively in impact investing, today announced that the Domini Impact Equity Fund, the firm’s flagship fund launched in 1991, ranked in the top 1% of its Morningstar category for the one-year period ended December 1, 2020. This news comes exactly two years following a successful change in the Fund’s investment strategy. The Fund also ranked in the top 1% for the one-year period ended September 30.

On December 1, 2018, Domini introduced a new investment approach for the Fund that combines two unique investment management strategies designed to capture the strength of the U.S. economy through the lens of the impact investor:

  • Core: Through its “Core” strategy, the Fund invests in a diversified selection of mid- to large-capitalization companies that demonstrate strong environmental and social performance relative to their peers, as determined by Domini’s proprietary research and analysis of each company’s impact.
  • Thematic Solutions: Through its “Thematic Solutions” strategy, the Fund adds opportunistic exposure to a select number of solution-oriented companies in which Domini has strong long-term conviction, and the Fund determines which companies support certain sustainability themes, including the low-carbon transition, access to clean water, sustainable food systems, financial inclusion, and more.

Following successful implementation of this new strategy, the Domini Impact Equity Fund Investor shares (ticker symbol: DSEFX) ranked in the top 1% of the US Fund Large Blend categoryof mutual funds for the one-year period ended December 1, 2020, as calculated by Morningstar, a respected mutual fund ranking service, based on risk-adjusted total return. The Fund also ranked in the top 1% of the same category of mutual funds for the one-year period ended September 30, 2020, based on risk-adjusted total return.

The 1-year ranking as of December 1, 2020 was among 1,332 funds. As of the same date, the Fund’s Investor shares also ranked in the top 7% of the category among 1,218 funds for the 3-year period, in the top 38% among 1,054 funds for the 5-year period, and in the top 66% among 810 funds for the 10-year period.

The one-year ranking as of September 30, 2020 was among 1,370 funds. As of the same date, the Fund’s Investor shares also ranked in the top 8% of the category among 1,229 funds for the 3-year period, in the top 41% among 1,066 funds for the 5-year period, and in the top 58% among 819 funds for the 10-year period.

Morningstar calculates Category % Rank based on a fund’s risk-adjusted total return percentile rank relative to all funds in the same category. The highest (or most favorable) percentile rank is 1 and the lowest (or least favorable) percentile rank is 100.

Learn more about the Fund

Learn more about Domini’s Impact Investment Standards

About Domini Impact Investments LLC

Domini Impact Investments LLC is an SEC-registered investment adviser specializing exclusively in impact investing. Domini serves individual and institutional investors who wish to create positive social and environmental outcomes while seeking competitive financial returns. Domini applies social, environmental and governance standards to all its investments, believing they help identify opportunities to provide strong financial rewards to its fund shareholders while also helping to create a more just and sustainable economic system.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. Before investing, consider the Fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. Contact us at www.domini.com or by calling 1-800-582-6757 for a prospectus containing this and other important information. Read it carefully. The Domini Impact Equity Fund is not insured and is subject to market, recent events, impact investing, portfolio management, information and mid- to large-cap companies risks. You may lose money. DSIL Investment Services LLC, Distributor, member FINRA. 12/20. DSEFX’s top 1% one-year ranking as of September 30, 2020 was among 1,370 funds. Its three-year ranking in the top 8% among 1,229 funds was also strong. The 5-year ranking was 41% among 1,066 funds, and the 10-year ranking was 58% among 819 funds. DSEFX’s top 1% one-year ranking as of December 1, 2020 was among 1,332 funds. Its three-year ranking in the top 7% among 1,218 funds was also strong. The 5-year ranking was 38% among 1,054 funds, and the 10-year ranking was 66% among 810 funds. Morningstar Category % Rank is a fund’s total-return percentile rank relative to all funds in the same category. The highest (or most favorable) percentile rank is one and the lowest (or least favorable) percentile rank is 100. The Category % Rank above is for the Investor share class only; other classes may have different performance characteristics.

©2020 Morningstar, Inc. All rights reserved. The Morningstar Category % Rank referenced above: (1) is proprietary to Morningstar and/or its content providers; (2) may not be copied or distributed; and (3) is not warranted to be accurate, complete, or timely. Neither Morningstar nor its content providers are responsible for any damages or losses arising from any use of this information.

Claire Dorey

Domini Impact Investments LLC

212-217-1031 (direct)

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: United States North America New York

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Other Consumer Women Other Retail Finance Banking Men Professional Services Consumer Retail Other Professional Services

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo

Seagate Designs RISC-V Cores to Power Data Mobility and Trustworthiness

Seagate Designs RISC-V Cores to Power Data Mobility and Trustworthiness

The company built a system on a chip, demonstrating one of the cores as functional in hard disk drives

FREMONT, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ: STX) announced that it has designed two processors based on the open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

One of the open standards-enabled cores is designed for high performance and the other is area-optimized. The high-performance processor has already been built with RISC-V-enabled silicon and demonstrated as functional in hard disk drives (HDDs). The area-optimized core has been designed and is in the process of being built.

Because both processors offer RISC-V security features, the benefits add up to more robust edge-to-cloud data trustworthiness, security, and mobility—all essential in the era when so much data is on the move.

The announcement, made today at the virtual RISC-V Summit 2020, is the first public report on the results of Seagate’s several years of collaboration with RISC-V International.

“Having shipped close to one billion cores over the last year, Seagate has developed significant expertise in system-on-a-chip design,” said Cecil Macgregor, Vice President, Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) Development. “We now expanded the capability to add customized RISC-V cores to our portfolio, which is critical to future products. We live in a time of unprecedented growth of enterprise data—and much of this data is in motion. These cores will allow devices to share a common RISC-V ISA. Using open security architectures, they will enable more secure movement of data.”

The high-performance core offers up to triple the performance for real-time, critical HDD workloads versus current solutions. In an initial use case, this core enabled Seagate to dramatically increase the real-time processing power available. The processor paves the way for finer positioning by implementation of advanced servo (motion control) algorithms.

The area-optimized core boasts a highly configurable microarchitecture and feature set. It’s optimized both for footprint and power savings. It powers auxiliary, supporting, or background workloads. It can execute security-sensitive edge computational operations (including next-generation post-quantum cryptography) while targeting a small-footprint implementation of security features over performance.

One of the key use cases for this core is security. A member of OpenTitan, Seagate is committed to open and transparent security.

“We see a significant potential for open, extensible architectures like RISC-V,” said Dominic Rizzo, OpenTitan Project Director and Engineering Lead at Google Cloud. “OpenTitan’s open-source implementation benefits from RISC-V’s open nature, enabling pan-industry transparency, trust,, and silicon security. Because Seagate understands the promise of RISC-V for security, we are excited to collaborate with Seagate on the open-source silicon root of trust we are currently developing.”

The Seagate cores will also accelerate real-time analysis in the data center and at the edge. Such analysis is crucial to the work of scientific communities with mass data needs.

“At Los Alamos National Laboratory, using computational storage to move processing near data has begun to significantly alter the way we analyze data and perform scientific discovery,” said Brad Settlemyer, Sr. Research Scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “By having compute integrated closely with storage we are able to create persistent data transformations that speed up data analysis by 1000-fold. This greatly relieves our primary compute tier from these tasks. We will be continuing our drive toward efficiency gains for our mission needs by partnering with vendors and actively participating in important industry initiatives like computational storage.”

Seagate has determined that solutions on this front tend to involve custom silicon: that’s where RISC-V shines.

“Introducing RISC-V to storage devices creates an opportunity to implement application-specific computational capabilities that enable massive parallel computational storage solutions,” said John Morris, Seagate’s Chief Technology Officer. “We believe that these architectures support many important use cases that include scientific simulation (for example, weather prediction) as well as the learning part of machine learning.”

For more on Seagate’s RISC-V innovations, visit this page.

About Seagate Technology

Seagate Technology crafts the datasphere, helping to maximize humanity’s potential by innovating world-class, precision-engineered data storage and management solutions with a focus on sustainable partnerships. Learn more about Seagate by visiting www.seagate.com or following us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and subscribing to our blog.

©2020 Seagate Technology LLC. All rights reserved. Seagate, Seagate Technology, and the Spiral logo are registered trademarks of Seagate Technology LLC in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Agnieszka Zielinska

(503) 380-0948

[email protected]

Greg Belloni

(415) 235-9092

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: California United States North America

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Hardware Data Management Consumer Electronics Technology Software

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo

PACCAR Announces Regular Quarterly Cash Dividend and Extra Cash Dividend

PACCAR Announces Regular Quarterly Cash Dividend and Extra Cash Dividend

BELLEVUE, Wash.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
PACCAR (Nasdaq: PCAR) Inc’s Board of Directors today declared a regular quarterly cash dividend of thirty-two cents ($.32) per share, payable on March 2, 2021, to stockholders of record at the close of business on February 9, 2021. The Board of Directors declared an extra cash dividend in the amount of seventy cents ($.70) per share, payable on January 6, 2021, to stockholders of record at the close of business on December 18, 2020.

“PACCAR has generated excellent shareholder returns and annual net income due to its industry leading premium-quality global products, strong growth of aftermarket parts and services, innovative use of technology, including e-commerce, and continued expansion of its financial services,” shared Mark Pigott, executive chairman. PACCAR has delivered annual dividends, including regular quarterly and extra cash dividends, totaling approximately 50% of net income for many decades. PACCAR’s average annual return to stockholders has outperformed the S&P 500 index in the past five-, fifteen- and twenty-year periods.

“PACCAR implemented stringent safety guidelines in all of its facilities, earlier this year, to ensure the health and safety of our employees. I am proud of our employees who have delivered another year of excellent performance to our shareholders,” said Preston Feight, PACCAR chief executive officer. “PACCAR’s profits and strong cash flow have enabled the company to invest in new and expanded manufacturing and distribution facilities, environmental leadership, and new technologies such as autonomous driving, zero emissions powertrains and connected vehicles. The truck markets in North and South America and Europe have rebounded strongly this year and it appears that 2021 should be another good year.”

PACCAR is a global technology leader in the design, manufacture and customer support of high-quality light-, medium- and heavy-duty trucks under the Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF nameplates. PACCAR also designs and manufactures advanced powertrains, provides financial services and information technology, and distributes truck parts related to its principal business. PACCAR shares are listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, symbol PCAR. Its homepage is www.paccar.com.

Ken Hastings

(425) 468-7530

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: Washington United States North America

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Fleet Management Aftermarket Automotive Trucking Other Automotive Automotive Manufacturing Transport Manufacturing

MEDIA:

Wolters Kluwer Targets Precision Dosing with Tabula Rasa HealthCare’s DoseMeRx Integration

Wolters Kluwer Targets Precision Dosing with Tabula Rasa HealthCare’s DoseMeRx Integration

Sentri7’s Antimicrobial Stewardship solution delivers personalized vancomycin dosing to enhance patient safety and support pharmacy, workflow

WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Wolters Kluwer, Health, a global provider of trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions, has announced the integration of DoseMeRx™, a Tabula Rasa Healthcare precision dosing solution, with Sentri7’s Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) solution. With a single click, pharmacists can review patient-specific parenteral vancomycin dose recommendations calculated automatically using key clinical data such as patient weight, laboratory values, creatinine levels and drug administration times.

“Dosing and monitoring of vancomycin can be complex, requiring patient data and laboratory results to individualize the dose for each patient,” said Charles Cornish, Executive Vice President, Hospitals Business Unit, TRHC. “By integrating our precision dosing platform with Wolters Kluwer’s Sentri7 solution, pharmacists across the country will have convenient, integrated real-time Bayesian dosing support to align with the best practices in the American Society of Health System Pharmacists 2020 guideline recommendation for dosing and monitoring of vancomycin.”

Vancomycin is one of the most commonly used antibiotics in hospitals today. Traditionally, calculating vancomycin doses for patients requires coordination among pharmacists, nurses, and laboratory technicians, as well as manual calculations that are time-consuming. With the DoseMeRx integration, pharmacists have automated access to faster, more precise calculations, without any data entry, and proactively monitor for adjustments to reduce a patient’s risk of acute kidney injury.

“Pharmacists are routinely challenged by how best to avoid adverse drug events in patients. By improving the methodology for precision dosing, pharmacists can focus on delivering the best possible patient care,” said Karen Kobelski, Vice President and General Manager, Clinical Surveillance, Compliance & Data Solutions at Wolters Kluwer, Health. “With the seamless transfer of patient specific parameters between Sentri7 and DoseMeRx, clinical teams have the expert solutions they need to predict more accurate drug concentration over time.”

In addition to the DoseMeRx real-time vancomycin dosing platform, pharmacists can leverage Sentri7’s evidence-based AMS rules to assess appropriate vancomycin use and keep prescribing in line with their hospital’s antimicrobial stewardship goals and the CDC’s Core Elements of Antimicrobial Stewardship program.

Click here to learn more about Sentri7’s Antimicrobial Stewardship (AMS) solution.

About Wolters Kluwer

Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the clinicians, nurses, accountants, lawyers, and tax, finance, audit, risk, compliance, and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services.

Wolters Kluwer reported 2019 annual revenues of €4.6 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.

Wolters Kluwer provides trusted clinical technology and evidence-based solutions that engage clinicians, patients, researchers and students in effective decision-making and outcomes across healthcare. We support clinical effectiveness, learning and research, clinical surveillance and compliance, as well as data solutions. For more information about our solutions, visit https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/health and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter @WKHealth.

For more information, visit www.wolterskluwer.com, follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube

About DoseMeRx

DoseMeRx is a Tabula Rasa HealthCare technology solution (NASDAQ: TRHC) developed specifically for clinical practice. The DoseMeRx clinical decision support solution empowers healthcare providers to optimize dosing of high-risk parenteral medications to streamline operations, reduce adverse drugs events, decrease costs and improve patient outcomes. For more information, visit doseme-rx.com

About Tabula Rasa HealthCare

Tabula Rasa HealthCare (TRHC) provides medication safety solutions that empower healthcare professionals to optimize medication regimens and reduce medication-related risk, specifically targeting adverse drug events. TRHC’s technology solutions, including DoseMeRx™ and MedWise™, improve patient outcomes, reduce hospitalizations, and lower healthcare costs. TRHC’s extensive clinical tele-pharmacy network improves care for patients nationwide. Its solutions are trusted by health plans and pharmacies to help drive value-based payment results. For more information, visit TRHC.com.

Media:

André Rebelo

Public Relations Manager

Wolters Kluwer

+1 781.392.2411

[email protected]

TRHC Media Contact:

Dianne Semingson

[email protected]

T: (215) 870-0829

TRHC Investor Contact:

Frank Sparacino

[email protected]

T: (866) 648-2767

KEYWORDS: Massachusetts United States North America

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Nursing Health Hospitals General Health Clinical Trials Pharmaceutical Biotechnology

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo

ADDING MULTIMEDIA iHeartMedia Renews and Extends Relationship With Pioneering Radio Hall of Famer Charlamagne Tha God for the Nationally Syndicated Hit Radio Show “The Breakfast Club”

ADDING MULTIMEDIA iHeartMedia Renews and Extends Relationship With Pioneering Radio Hall of Famer Charlamagne Tha God for the Nationally Syndicated Hit Radio Show “The Breakfast Club”

iHeartMedia Also Names Charlamagne Tha God Senior Creative Officer of Cultural Content and Programming

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
iHeartMedia announced today that it has renewed and extended its relationship with the phenomenal culture-shifting multimedia mogul Charlamagne Tha God, co-host of New York’s Power 105’s wildly popular and nationally syndicated hit radio show “The Breakfast Club,” heard by over 4.5 million listeners each week. One of the world’s most well-informed, authoritative, and distinctive media personalities, Charlamagne Tha God has become a crucially important and influential voice in culture. Under the new five-year agreement, Charlamagne will continue his uninhibited, trademark interview style on the award-winning radio show with his relentless effort to unveil truth by asking the questions audiences most want to hear, weekdays from 6-10:00 a.m. EST, as well as “Weekends with The Breakfast Club,” alongside co-hosts Angela Yee and DJ Envy.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201208005417/en/

Charlamagne Tha God (Photo credit: Keith Major)

Charlamagne Tha God (Photo credit: Keith Major)

“The Breakfast Club,” celebrating its 10-year milestone this month, has become the bullhorn for modern culture and widely regarded as the most informative and entertaining top-rated contemporary Hip-Hop/R&B morning show today. Charlamagne Tha God, Angela Yee, and DJ Envy are known for their unrivaled interviews with celebrities and recording artists. Guests on the show have ranged from former President Barack Obama, President-elect Joe Biden, and VP-elect Kamala Harris to Snoop Dog, Jay-Z, and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The crew also host “Weekends with The Breakfast Club,” a 3-hour weekly program featuring a countdown of the top 20 songs on the charts and signature interviews. “The Breakfast Club” was inducted this year into the Radio Hall of Fame in theActive Network/Syndication (10 years or more) category.

“I give my sincerest thanks to iHeart for empowering me over the past decade to be the best talent that I can be, and for honoring me as an owner and executive,” said Charlamagne. “I love the audio business and iHeart is the biggest and best audio company in the world. As Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of the Black Effect Podcast Network and now Senior Creative Officer of Cultural Content and Programming at iHeart, all I want to do for the next 5 years is continue to move the culture of radio and podcasting forward by curating a new era of voices, programming, and events. GOD IS GREAT! Now, it’s time to get back to work.”

“The Breakfast Club” has raised over 1.7 million dollars over the last three years for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, Gathering for Justice Movement, and Project 375 with their 24-hour radiothon Change4Change (one of Charlamagne’s many initiatives).

As the new Senior Creative Officer of Culture Content and Programming, Charlamagne will be discovering and curating new talent and programming for radio and podcasts and developing productions and community initiatives. In September, iHeartMedia and Charlamagne announced a historic joint podcast publishing venture, The Black Effect Podcast Network, the world’s largest podcast publisher dedicated to Black listeners, bringing together the most influential and trusted voices in Black culture for stimulating conversations around social justice, pop culture, sports, mental health, news, comedy, and more. Also, in addition to the Breakfast Club, Charlamagne will be developing a show where he will lead exclusive one-on-one interviews with some of the most notable artist, athletes, and voices in our society. The conversations would air quarterly across various iHeartRadio stations, podcasts and other digital platforms.

“Charlamagne is a multiplatform talent, creator and innovator and we are excited to extend our existing partnership on the nationally syndicated morning show ‘The Breakfast Club,’ while also creating successful new historical ventures like the Black Effect Network,” said Thea Mitchem, EVP of Programming for iHeartMedia. “His voice continues to be unique and authentic and a driving force and influence in today’s hip hop and pop culture. He, along with the entire Breakfast Club, continue to have the incredible ability to connect with audiences and artists alike, delivering the most entertaining and informative content and programming to listeners throughout the country.”

As a cultural cannon continuing to expand his awe-inspiring entertainment empire Charlamagne announced the launch of Black Privilege Publishing his new partnership imprint from Atria Books at Simon & Schuster that aligns with his mission to bring crucial, culturally-relevant content to the marketplace from emerging and renowned Black voices around the world. The inaugural release on Black Privilege Publishing will be trailblazing movement strategist and social justice leader Tamika D. Mallory’s eagerly anticipated publishing debut, State of Emergency, due out in May 2021.

Charlamagne Tha God will also debut a talk show on Comedy Central in 2021.

ABOUT CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD

Charlamagne Tha God, also known as Lenard McKelvey, is one of the most potent, influential, and authoritative voices in media today. He is the widely-coveted, outspoken, thought-provoking co-host of the hottest nationally-syndicated radio show in the U.S., “The Breakfast Club,” heard by over 4.5 million listeners each week. Charlamagne’s production company, CTHAGOD World Productions, discovers and advocates for original, emerging talent who resonate with popular culture long before they become mainstream. A cultural architect and executive producer, Charlamagne is the co-host of the popular podcast, “Brilliant Idiots.” He is a New York Times bestselling author of the book, Black Privilege and global bestseller Shook One, which propelled him to become one of the world’s leading voices in the mental health discussion. In 2020, Charlamagne launched The Black Effect Podcast Network, an unprecedented, historic 50-50 joint venture with the world’s number one commercial podcast publisher, iHeartMedia. He achieved another groundbreaking milestone when he signed a global multi-year, multi-project development, production, and audio licensing partnership with renowned comedian, actor and writer Kevin Hart, and Audible Inc., the world’s largest producer and provider of original spoken-word entertainment and audiobooks.Charlamagne announced the launch of Black Privilege Publishing, his new partnership imprint from Atria Books at Simon & Schuster, in alignment with his mission to bring crucial, culturally-relevant content to the marketplace from emerging and renowned Black voices around the world. The inaugural release on Black Privilege Publishing will be trailblazing movement strategist and social justice leader Tamika D. Mallory’s eagerly anticipated publishing debut, State of Emergency, due out in May 2021. Charlamagne Tha God will also debut a talk show on Comedy Central in 2021.

About iHeartMedia

iHeartMedia (NASDAQ:IHRT) is the number one audio company in the United States, reaching nine out of 10 Americans every month – and with its quarter of a billion monthly listeners, has a greater reach than any other media company in the U.S. The company’s leadership position in audio extends across multiple platforms, including more than 850 live broadcast stations in over 160 markets nationwide; through its iHeartRadio digital service available across more than 250 platforms and 2,000 devices; through its influencers; social; branded iconic live music events; other digital products and newsletters; and podcasts as the No. 1 commercial podcast publisher. iHeartMedia also leads the audio industry in analytics, targeting and attribution for its marketing partners with its SmartAudio product, using data from its massive consumer base. Visit iHeartMedia.com for more company information.

FOR CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD

Marvet Britto

Global Brand Strategist

The Britto Agency

[email protected]

iHeartMedia

Angel Aristone

[email protected]

KEYWORDS: New York United States North America

INDUSTRY KEYWORDS: Music Online Entertainment Celebrity TV and Radio

MEDIA:

Logo
Logo
Photo
Photo
Charlamagne Tha God (Photo credit: Keith Major)