Break out your best black and white finery: The barcode celebrates its 50th birthday this summer!

Since the first pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum bore the striped label and made a scanner go “beep” on June 26, 1974, the humble barcode has spent the last five decades making cashiers’ lives easier (like the true Cancer it is).

As times have changed, the barcode has evolved to keep up. Now, we’re in the heyday of its next evolution, 2D barcodes, including what are more commonly known as QR codes. This tech cycle has implications for sustainability, consumer education, and more, according to Carrie Wilkie, SVP of standards and technology at GS1 US, the standards organization that underpins the barcode ecosystem.

“There’s all sorts of stuff that comes next. And I think that will just continue to evolve, as we have different demands as consumers, as retailers, and [as] regulators have different demands for what information they need,” she said. “And then, as the tech in our pockets continues to evolve: What can we read? How can we read it? How can that information become available to us?”

The introduction of barcodes themselves was a revolution at the time, Wilkie said.

“If you’re old enough, you may remember people used to go around grocery stores with price sticker guns and put price stickers on everything. That usually matched up with a cashier at a checkout line who was manually entering the price off of those tags,” according to Wilkie. “It was just inefficient, it took a long time, and it was prone to errors.”

Keep reading here.—KG

…to the next huuuge revolutionaries in the tech industry. Yep, we’re talkin’ about the company at the center of rocket science and data science. Mm-hmm, you know it: the company that already changed the game in everything from automotive lightweighting to golf clubs.

Okay, we’ll spill the tea. Drum roll, pls. Say hi to Altair. They’re shaping the future with truly next-level tech, from design and simulation tools to HPC and AI innovation. You’re gonna wanna know all about ’em.

We teamed up with Altair to write an article that breaks down everything you need to know about the company and how they’re working at the cutting edge of all things technology. It’s a must-read, really.

Stay in the know.

Tech Brew caught up with Babak Hodjat, Cognizant’s CTO of AI, who’s credited with helping to invent the NLP tech that paved the way for Siri, about what his new San Francisco-based lab is up to and why he thinks multi-agent architecture could be the next cloud revolution for enterprise.

This conversation, the second of two parts, has been edited for length and clarity. (Part one is here.)

It feels like we’re hearing more and more about agents, especially in the past few months. What do you think the future is there?

Well, first, let’s level-set on what an agent is. If you consider an agent to be a large language model wrapper around some functionality or some data, or some microservice or API, then that transition to an agent-based architecture is already kind of happening without us even realizing it. For us at Cognizant, we have a very large intranet called One Cognizant. All the apps and everything is there. It’s very, very useful. We all use it internally. And so immediately after generative AI systems came out, people were thinking, “Hey, why do we have this clunky search interface to this list? Let’s have it be like a ChatGPT interface into this at the top level.” At the same time, this is an intranet, so you have an HR app and you have a finance app, and all these apps are under there, and all these teams that are responsible for these different functions are also saying, “Hey, for this HR app, let’s replace the clunky search box with a ChatGPT-like interface.” So what ends up happening is you have the top-level of the ChatGPT-like interface, and then you have all these apps having their ChatGPT-like interface, and it’s silly for you to be handed off from one to the other. So you come to the top level and you say, “Hey, I want to fill out my timesheet,” and it takes you to the second level. And now you have to type in, “I want to fill out my timesheet again” to the timesheet app? That doesn’t make sense. So very naturally, people start thinking, “Wait, I can actually have the LLM representing the timesheet app talk to the LLM representing the top-level of my intranet app in natural language, so that I don’t have to force my user to do that. They kind of touch base with one another, and they handle my query.” Immediately, when you start thinking that way, you’re starting to think about an agent-based architecture.

Keep reading here.—PK

Federal law enforcement officials are already using AI tools, and they’re eager to pilot more, despite pesky challenges like admissibility, privacy, and sustainability.

That’s according to federal officials who spoke last month at General Dynamics Information Technology’s AI conference in DC, where they explained how agencies like the DOJ, the FBI, and the State Department approach implementing AI technologies.

While the federal government has introduced basic guidelines on AI usage, they basically boil down to following whatever policy was already in place in any given department. Melinda Rogers, chief information officer of the DOJ, told attendees that buzz around AI doesn’t translate into easy gains.

“I would caution chasing the shiny new object,” Rogers said. “I’ve always said the technology part is the easiest part.” Far more difficult, she told attendees, is creating processes for using that technology that people use effectively.

Justin Williams, the deputy assistant director of the FBI’s information management division, said the agency has to be careful when procuring products with AI or machine learning components, as black-box processes won’t stand up in court.

“Imagine if one of our agents goes into a court, and he’s asked, how did you come across this information? and we throw our hands up and go, ‘Well, I don’t know. We just typed it on the computer and spit it out,’” Williams told attendees.

Keep reading here.—TM

Tech’s gone green. Here’s the deal: 78% of consumers consider it crucial for tech companies to adopt sustainable practices. It’s time to get real about sustainability, and Suzy’s insights can help. They put together a super-nifty infographic that’s jam-packed with consumer trends and a look at the best brands acing sustainability. Give it a peek.