SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., December 7, 2021— The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) is becoming a community project as part of the ​​Cyber Domain Ontology (CDO) project under the Linux Foundation. CASE is an ontology-based specification that supports automated combination and intelligent analysis of cyber-investigation information. CASE concentrates on advancing interoperability and analytics across a broad range of cyber-investigation domains, including digital forensics and incident response (DFIR).

“Becoming part of the Linux Foundation is a major milestone for CASE that will significantly benefit the broader open source and cyber-investigation communities,” said Eoghan Casey, Presiding Director of CASE. “As an evolving standard supporting structured expression and exchange of cyber-investigation information, CASE will substantially enhance efforts to address growing challenges in the modern world, including cyberattacks, ransomware, online fraud, sexual exploitation, and terrorism. Our objective is to create a culture of common comprehension and collaborative problem solving across cyber-investigation domains.”

Organizations involved in joint operations or intrusion investigations can efficiently and consistently exchange information in standard format with CASE, breaking down data silos and increasing visibility across all information sources. Tools that support CASE facilitate correlation of differing data sources and exploration of investigative questions, giving analysts a more comprehensive and cohesive view of available information, opening new opportunities for searching, pivoting, contextual analysis, pattern recognition, machine learning and visualization.

Development of CASE began in 2014 as a collaboration between the DoD Cyber Crime Center (DC3) and MITRE, led by Dr. Eoghan Casey and Sean Barnum, involving the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In response to international interest, this initiative became an open source evolving standard, with hundreds of participants in industry, government and academia around the globe.

Early contributors include the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), the Italian Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems (IGSG-CNR), FireEye, and University of Lausanne. CASE governance and community coordination were formalized with support of Harm van Beek, Rich Brown, Ryan Griffith, Cory Hall, Christopher Hargreaves, Jessica Hyde, Deborah Nichols, and Martin Westman. Growing international involvement is tracked on the CASE website: https://caseontology.org/community/members.html

The Technical Director is Alex Nelson, and the Ontology Committee is led by Paul Brandt. The Adoption Committee brings together developers from diverse backgrounds to share experiences and battle test ontologies. The success of these efforts depends on members of the community actively contributing to CASE development and implementation. The project welcomes anyone interested in elevating cyber-investigation capabilities to strengthen evidence-based decision making in any context, including court, boardroom, and battlefield.

CASE, built on the Hansken trace model developed and implemented by the NFI, aligns with and extends the Unified Cyber Ontology (UCO). This year has seen the release of UCO 0.7.0, and most recently CASE 0.5.0. CASE and UCO now both are built on SHACL constraints, providing an instance data validation capability. Currently, CASE is developing a representation for Inferences, both human formulated and computer generated, to bind investigative conclusions to supporting evidence and associated chain of custody.

The CASE community has multiple collaborative repositories and activities, including translators for common digital forensic tool outputs as well as mapping CASE to the W3C provenance ontology (PROV-O). CASE uses the Apache-2.0 license.

Organizations and individuals interested in contributing to CASE can go to https://caseontology.org/

Supporting Comments

Hexordia

“The news that CASE will be transitioning to The Linux Foundation is an exciting move for the Digital Forensics, Incident Response, and Cyber Security communities,” said Jessica Hyde, founder of Hexordia. “One of the special things about CASE is that it has been developed to specifically support cyber investigations by those who understand the domain from a variety of sectors including academia, law enforcement, government, non-profits, and commercial entities. This uniquely positions CASE to describe the provenance, metadata, and data recovered in a multitude of environments and allow different organizations and a variety of tools to look at data with the same definitions of what the data is describing. What an exciting day for uncovering truth in data and ensuring common definitions of data as it moves through the nexus of tools, organizations, and jurisdictions that need to work together in today’s cyber investigations.”

IGSG-CNR

“The CASE transition to the Linux Foundation is remarkable news and encourages widespread use of this standard in a broad range of cyber-investigation domains to foster

interoperability, establish authenticity, and advance analysis,” said Fabrizio Turchi, senior

technologist at the IGSG-CNR, Italian National Research Council. “The European EXEC-II project includes a bespoke application for packaging evidence with metadata in CASE format for automated exchange, while maintaining provenance information to streamline cross-border cooperation among judicial authorities in the EU member states. In addition to searching for specific keywords or characteristics within a single case or across multiple cases, having a structured representation of cyber-investigation information allows more sophisticated processing such as data mining, machine learning and natural language processing techniques as in the European INSPECTr project and a shared intelligent platform for gathering, analysing and presenting key data to help predict, detect and manage crime in support of multiple law enforcement agencies.”

MITRE

“The MITRE Corporation is proud to see the continued growth and acceptance of the Cyber-investigation Analysis Standard Expression (CASE) open source project. MITRE is one of several organizations that helped create CASE and bring together the initial community of contributors,” said Cory Hall, principal cybersecurity engineer at MITRE. “With the transition of CASE to the Linux Foundation we see a bright future for the effort as the community advances this project to benefit digital investigators everywhere. The MITRE Corporation expects to continue contributing to this effort for years to come.”

MSAB

“As a long-term member of the CASE open source project, MSAB looks forward to the new possibilities that Linux Foundation will provide for CASE as the de facto standard for adoption by digital forensic tools. MSAB is preparing to implement CASE on our XRY and XAMN solutions to enable our products to seamlessly interact with tools from other vendors, academia, nonprofit organizations, and enthusiasts alike. With the common data exchange platform that CASE provides, our industry can process greater volumes of data faster, more accurately and with greater interoperability than ever before. We are committed to continuing to develop CASE under the Linux Foundation and are excited for the future of the project,” said Martin Westman, exploit research manager, MSAB.

Netherlands Forensic Institute

“CASE is the solid foundation for interconnecting digital forensic tools and combining their results to come to new insights. This is paramount not only for the NFI, but for the entire community to quickly apply science to day-to-day operations to fight crime,” said Harm van Beek, senior digital forensic scientist at the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). “We support CASE and the digital forensic community by implementing and extending the standard in Hansken, our open digital forensic platform.”

About the Linux Foundation

Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation and its projects are supported by more than 1,800 members and is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation’s projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, Hyperledger, RISC-V, and more.  The Linux Foundation’s methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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In 2021, after six years of community building and expanding from two projects to 18 projects, to over 50 labs, 16 Special Interest and Working Groups, and over 200 members, Hyperledger became a Foundation. 

This newfound identity arches over all of its projects, labs, regional chapters, and community groups. Hyperledger Foundation is now leading the collective effort to advance enterprise blockchain technology and fulfill its mission to foster and coordinate the premier open source enterprise blockchain community.

At Hyperledger Foundation, being open is core to what we do. We’re here to lead an open, global and welcoming enterprise blockchain ecosystem—a community where no contribution is seen as too small or insignificant. Our foundation comprises organizations, developers, executives, students, teachers, government leaders, and more. It’s supported by the Technical Steering Committee, various working groups, special interest groups, and Meetup communities all across the globe, now numbering more than 80,000 participants. 

According to LFXInsights, there has been a 53% growth in the total commits in the last three years, and new code contributors increased by 37%. A total of 366 organizations from both large and small companies have made code commits since 2016. And the pace of activity among new community members is accelerating as commits by new contributors have increased by 286% in the last year.

Some of the largest and most important production enterprise blockchain projects today are built using Hyperledger technologies. They include:

Supply chain networks, like IBM and Walmart’s Food Trust (Hyperledger Fabric)Circulor’s mine to manufacturer traceability of a conflict-mineral for automobile sustainable supply chains (Hyperledger Fabric) Top trade finance platforms such as TradeLens (Hyperledger Fabric), which has more than 300 orgs, across 600 ports and terminals and has tracked over 42 million container shipments, with close to 2.2 billion events we.trade, who have already onboarded 16 banks across 15 countries to join their blockchain-enabled trade finance platform (Hyperledger Fabric)

Over 13 Central Bank Digital Currency production and pilots using multiple Hyperledger projects have been identified this year alone.

With this transition, Hyperledger Foundation also gained new leadership with the appointment of Daniela Barbosa as its new Executive Director. Barbosa is a seasoned veteran of the open source community with over 20 years of enterprise technology experience, including previously serving as Hyperledger’s Vice President of Worldwide Alliances, where she was responsible for the project’s community outreach and overall network growth.

New Growth in Hyperledger Technologies 

According to research from Blockdata, Hyperledger Fabric is used by more of the top 100 public companies in the world than any other blockchain platform. 

Hyperledger-based networks are used by some of the largest corporations around the world, including more than half of the companies on the Forbes Blockchain 50, a list of companies with revenue or a valuation of at least $1 billion that lead in employing distributed ledger technology.

As an ever-growing library of case studies shows, Hyperledger technologies are already transforming many market spaces, including supply chains, trade finance, and healthcare. Hyperledger technologies are used in everything from powering global trade networks and supply chains to fighting counterfeit drugs, banking “unbanked” populations, and ensuring sustainable manufacturing. 

In addition, Hyperledger technologies are being applied to a number of new markets and business models. These include digital identity and payments, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), and NFTs like Damien Hirst’s The Currency project and DC Comics powered by Palm NFT with a near-zero carbon footprint using Hyperledger Besu.

Digital Identity 

Hyperledger technologies are being adopted to put individuals in charge of their own identity. People often need to verify their status, prove a birthdate, board a plane, comply with vaccine mandates, prove their education, or access money. Leveraging Hyperledger Aries and Hyperledger Indy, organizations worldwide are reshaping how digital information is managed and verified to increase online trust and privacy. These digital identity solutions create verified credentials that are effective, secure, accessible, and privacy-preserving. 

The Aruba Health App makes it easy for visitors who have provided required health tests to the Aruba government to share a trusted traveler credential — based on their health status — privately and securely on their mobile device. Launched initially as a trial, the Aruba Health App is built using Cardea, an open-source code base that has since been contributed to the Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) project. Cardea leverages Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Aries, and Hyperledger Ursa.IDUnion addresses the demand for migrating centralized identity systems towards decentralized self-sovereign management of digital identities for people, organizations, and machines. The service has 39 cross-sector partners building production-level infrastructure to verify identity data in finance, manufacturing, the public sector, and healthcare. IDunion has launched a Hyperledger Indy test network, built components for allocating, verifying, managing digital identities, and more. This consortium includes Hyperledger member companies Siemens, Bosch, Deutsche Telecom, and others.The International Air Transport Association IATA Travel Pass, built in partnership with Evernym using Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries, is a mobile app that helps travelers store and manage their verified certifications for COVID-19 tests or vaccines. MemberPass, built on Hyperledger Indy by Bonifii, is the first global digital identity ecosystem for credit unions and their members. It provides consumer identity while protecting personal information. Adopted by more than seven credit unions and counting, 20,000+ credentials issued. 

Digital Currency

Blockchain technology has already helped rewrite some of the rules for currencies and payments. Governments worldwide are now moving towards Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) or digital forms of their official currency. These will give central banks a more flexible, more secure form of their national currencies and lower the risks from alternative cryptocurrencies. Backed by a central bank, any CBDC, whether developed for wholesale or retail use, will be legal tender with the stability that regulation confers.

Governments are moving carefully, but many of the early projects are using Hyperledger platforms. The goals range from modernizing payment processes to removing barriers and costs associated with back-end settlement to boosting financial inclusion.

This fireside chat from Hyperledger Global Forum on CBDCs by experts from Accenture and DTTC offers a great overview of the benefits and different approaches to these new currencies and a look at the current landscape of CBDC research and experimentation across the globe.

The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank launched DCash, built on Hyperledger Fabric, as a mobile phone app for person-to-person and merchant payments. ECCB stated at an OECD event in 2020 that it selected Hyperledger Fabric because of its strong security architecture (a private permissioned blockchain with strong identity management) and open source code, contributing to its security, flexibility, and scalability, among other desired attributes.The National Bank of Cambodia created Bakong, a fiat-backed digital currency, using Hyperledger Iroha to promote its national currency use, giving the large percentage of its population without bank accounts a mobile payment system and cutting costs for interbank transfers.Additionally, a mix of retail and wholesale CBDCs trials using Hyperledger Besu has helped several other countries, including Thailand and Spain, to advance planning for new digital fiat currencies.

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the Hyperledger Foundation. To learn how your organization can get involved, click here

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The FinOps Foundation team is beyond excited to launch the 2022 State of FinOps Survey. Yes, there are plenty of self-published industry reports out there, but what makes this one different is that it’s built by and for the FinOps community.

Why do we create the State of FinOps each year?

FinOps, the operating model for cloud finance management, is a fundamental practice for organizations leveraging the cloud to align those costs with business value and outcomes. The FinOps Foundation community represents a broad spectrum of practitioners, including many leaders and forerunners in the space. Annual surveys help gather a snapshot of the current activities and perspectives across the community to deepen the understanding and surface trends. 

The results of each State of FinOps Survey become a report that delivers insights and benchmarks that helps us inform the roadmap of how the Foundation can improve the educational materials to advance practitioners and their practices. The more we understand how our community and practitioners are growing, maturing their practices, and the challenges they are struggling with, the richer the community projects can support everyone.

Evolving from the previous year

The first State of FinOps Survey and Report was released in 2021, creating a report template, data visualization style, and a first test at how our information and insights would help the community. We found success in gaining constructive analyst, press, and community feedback. 

In our first year:

We created the industry’s first community-focused and led survey and report on the FinOps disciplineCommunity members held us accountable for achieving key outcomes that we promised would be built from the report’s insightsWe strengthened our FinOps Framework by adding user-generated projects and stories by practitioners of various skill levels and from all types of organizations across the world

For the 2022 report, we focused on ways to incorporate even more practitioner and leadership feedback from the beginning. We also made a significant investment into the academic and data integrity of the report.

As FinOps practitioners and leaders worldwide look to this resource as a means of guiding and building their practices, we needed to ensure that the body of work contained a blend of academic merit and data-driven depth.

Doubling down on community and practitioner involvement

We created several working groups of staff and FinOps practitioners to help us build a better survey and report for 2022. These groups looked at the 2021 report and gave us constructive feedback to help us create a better asset and resource for the community.

“By refining the survey for 2022 on community feedback, it can be used for multiple areas and projects by the community in the coming year – it will be exciting to understand all the different perspectives in the FinOps category.” Joe Daly, Director of Community, FinOps Foundation

Leveraging Linux Foundation’s research team

A majority of the FinOps Foundation staff have FinOps experience, but we were honest with ourselves about needing more data analysis help with this year’s survey and report. Fortunately, we were able to utilize the expertise of the Linux Foundation’s newly established Research Team.

The team was with us from the outset, where they integrated with FinOps experts so that they could understand more about our community-centric approach.

“Designing the State of FinOps 2022 survey was a truly collaborative effort. It was clear from the beginning that establishing a Working Group to aid in the survey instrument’s design was necessary to generate the kind of data that would add value across the FinOps ecosystem.” Stephen Hendrick, VP Research

With LF Research’s help and support, we also decided to translate the 2022 survey to engage FinOps practitioners in French-speaking regions, who represent a significant demographic of our community. LF Research helped to achieve the French language translation as a new element in this year’s research effort to make the survey more accessible and inclusive.

We are very thankful for their guidance in structuring our survey and look forward to their expertise once we start analyzing results and building the 2022 report.

Building a long-lasting resource for our community

We learned a lot of lessons from the 2021 survey and report. One of the biggest lessons was an internal one in that this survey collects such a variety of information and data. It informed us that we could go one of two ways with this research tool: keep building one-off reports, or do the work and build something long-term for the community.

Our community leaders advised us that we needed to focus more on generating annual benchmarking and insights based on key practices. They also helped us iron out the method and approach to our questions to align more with the framework to get the best data possible from the survey.

Our goal is to have something more than another data report to add to the Internet. We want to create a valuable tool for FinOps practitioners and partners to improve their practice. We want this tool to be informed and built by the community, for the community.

Ideal outcomes from the 2022 survey

With the survey into its first weeks of collecting data, we’re very interested in measuring and understanding the following:

Are practitioners maturing their FinOps practices? What FinOps “maturity level” do they self-identify as?What phase in the FinOps lifecycle are practitioners operating for specific capabilities, how did they get there, and what are they planning to do next?What are the benchmarks practitioners use for FinOps capabilities?How do practitioners measure their success when implementing their FinOps capabilities?

We’re looking forward to seeing how the results inform our hypotheses and questions.

Building upon this report with open source standards

When done right, it turns out you can use open source software standards to encourage contribution and community even with a topic like cloud financial management. We’re very proud to find a way to work closely with our community while championing Linux Foundation open source principles.

Do you know someone who qualifies in taking the State of FinOps Survey? If so, feel free to share it with them. The survey is open, and we look forward to learning more about the FinOps community and industry to help strengthen it.

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Vertical industries are under constant pressure to innovate, facing the challenges of supply chains, diverse customer requirements, regulations, and a lack of talent to do everything leadership may envision in any complex business. 

These industries understand that their ownership of intellectual property for parts of their software stack is limiting business opportunities and expensive to develop and maintain. To accelerate adoption, openly working together on common infrastructure components presents more opportunities for business growth.

Our members in the automotive, motion picture, fintech, telecommunications, energy, and public health verticals have transformed their business processes and assets into software-defined assets. They are now building strategic frameworks that give them a competitive edge that only open source can provide. In 2021, verticals and new members continued innovating with newly formed communities in the agriculture industry and AAA-class 3D engines for entertainment and simulation.

While all of these vertical industries have unique open source projects and communities, they also share a common thread: All realize that open collaboration presents opportunities to reduce costs, cut time to market, increase quality, and open new areas of competition. The ability to achieve these results on a collective basis pushes innovation forward across respective industries.

Gaming and Simulation: Open3D Foundation and Open3D Engine

The Linux Foundation welcomed the Open 3D Foundation into its community of families in July of 2021. The first project in the foundation was the Open 3D Engine known as O3DE. Amazon Web Services donated it under an Apache 2.0 and MIT licensing model. The mission of the Open 3D Engine is to make an open source, fully-featured, high-fidelity, real-time 3D engine for building games and simulations available to every industry.

Since its inception, it has raised $2.7 million in commitments from 26 partners in over two years. It has received signed commitments from a range of companies such as Adobe, Intel, AWS, Niantic, Huawei, SideFX, HERE, and others.

The foundation is focused on industries that utilize 3D technologies. This includes video games, automotive, simulation, robotics, energy, real estate, training, film, special effects, machine learning, aerospace, and many other verticals.

Since its inception, it has grown to over 3600 stars, 1100 forks of the repository, 1,500 Discord users, and 500+ active members are online. It has increased to over 130 authors of code, 7000 file changes, 2,000,000 changes to lines of code, and a vibrant & active self-sustaining support community averaging 500 messages & minutes per day.

Motion Pictures and Visual Effects: The Academy Software Foundation

The Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) has continued to make an impact on the open source technologies that empower the motion picture and visual effects industries. To date, ASWF boasts 32 members and hosts 14 projects and working groups. 

Key achievements in 2021 include:

MaterialX being contributed as a project by Lucasfilm. MaterialX originated at Lucasfilm in 2012. It has grown into the central format for material description at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) since the production of Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The launch of the ASWF Assets Repository that gives open communities access to production-grade digital assets for testing, demonstration, and education purposes.

The launch of OpenColorIO v2.0, which is the output of three years in development and boasts numerous feature and performance improvements. In addition, a growing number of vendors are adopting their products and services, which is cementing OpenColorIO as an industry standard.

ASWF has seen the collaboration and sustainability of each of the projects and working groups it hosts increase, with each project seeing increases in organizational diversity and contributions in 2021 compared to the year before joining the ASWF.

ASWF looks forward to 2022 as it focuses on addressing new technology spaces such as virtual production.

Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)

Over the last decade, the Linux Foundation worked with industry leaders like Toyota and others to launch Automotive Grade Linux (AGL). AGL was established to build a common open source software platform to eliminate the fragmentation plaguing the automotive industry. AGL is the only organization with a mission to address all in-vehicle software, including infotainment, instrument cluster, telematics, heads-up display, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous driving.

The AGL community is reducing that fragmentation by combining the best of open source to create the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB), a single, shared, open source software platform for the entire industry. The UCB includes an operating system, middleware, and application framework and can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics, and instrument cluster applications. Sharing an open source platform allows for code reuse and a more efficient development process as developers and suppliers can build their solution once and deploy that same solution for multiple automakers. 

Supported by eleven major automotive manufacturers, including the top three producers by worldwide volume (Volkswagen, Toyota, Daimler), AGL is deployed  in production vehicles today:

Toyota’s AGL-based infotainment system is now in Toyota and Lexus vehicles globally.The 2020/2021 Subaru Outback and Subaru Legacy use open source software from the AGL UCB for the Subaru Starlink infotainment platform.Mercedes-Benz Vans is using AGL as a foundation for a new onboard operating system for its commercial vehicles.

Amazon AWS joined AGL as a Platinum member in January 2021 and is leading AGL initiatives around IoT and Connected Car. 

In early 2021, AGL announced a new Expert Group for Container and Service Mesh, led by Amazon AWS. The Container and Mesh Expert Group are developing an in-vehicle container solution for AGL and creating a service mesh and orchestration framework that can be deployed as part of AGL.

The IVI Production Readiness Expert Group, led by Toyota, has made significant progress in 2021. This EG is focused on bringing AGL closer to a production-ready state. By early 2022, major code contributions are expected from Toyota on Flutter for embedded IVI, a new cutting edge UI and App development framework for infotainment systems. This will allow manufacturers to cut the development time and cost of deploying innovative new applications in the vehicle. 

The Virtualization EG, led by Panasonic, has been busy working on cutting-edge VirtIO technology. This allows consolidation of vehicle cockpit systems such as IVI, Instrument Cluster, and Heads-Up-Display to run on a single processor. It also enables innovative use cases such as using Android for infotainment and AGL for Instrument Cluster on a single virtualized CPU. The consolidated cockpit is a vision of the future, and it’s being developed today at AGL. 

AGL also had two milestone platform releases this year, Unified Code Base (UCB) 11.0 Kooky Koi in February and 12.0 Lucky Lamprey in July. These releases included several updates to graphics, audio, speech recognition, application and security frameworks, web apps, and Chromium. Both releases are based on the Yocto 3.1 Long-Term-Support board support packages.

New Industry Vertical‭: ‬Agriculture

In May 2021, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the AgStack Foundation, the open source digital infrastructure project for the world’s agriculture ecosystem. Thirty-three percent of all food produced is wasted, while nine percent of the people in the world are hungry or malnourished. These societal drivers are compounded with legacy technology systems that are too slow and inefficient and can’t work across the growing and more complex agricultural supply chain. AgStack Foundation will improve global agriculture efficiency by creating, maintaining, and enhancing free, reusable, open, and specialized digital infrastructure for data and applications. AgStack will use collaboration and open source software to build the 21st-century digital infrastructure that will be a catalyst for innovation on new applications, efficiencies, and scale.

AgStack consists of an open repository to create and publish models, free and easy access to public data, interoperable frameworks for cross-project use, and topic-specific extensions and toolboxes. It will leverage existing technologies such as agriculture standards (AgGateway, UN-FAO, CAFA, USDA, and NASA-AR); public data (Landsat, Sentinel, NOAA and Soilgrids; models (UC-ANR IPM), and open source projects like Hyperledger, Kubernetes, Open Horizon, Postgres, Django and more.

Founding members and contributors include leaders from both the technology and agriculture industries and across sectors and geographies. Members and partners include Agralogics, Call for Code, Centricity Global, Digital Green, Farm Foundation, farmOS, HPE, IBM, Mixing Bowl & Better Food Ventures, NIAB, OpenTeam, Our Sci, Produce Marketing Association, Purdue University / OATS & Agricultural Informatics Lab, the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC-ANR) and University of California Santa Barbara SmartFarm Project.

New Industry Vertical‭: ‬AI Voice Technologies

In June, the Linux Foundation announced the Open Voice Network, an open source association dedicated to advancing open standards that support the adoption of AI-enabled voice assistance systems. Founding members include Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, and Deutsche Telekom.

Organizations are beginning to develop, design, and manage their own voice assistant systems independent of today’s general-purpose voice platforms. This transition is being driven by the desire to manage the entirety of the user experience — from the sound of the voice, the sonic branding, and the content — to integrating voice assistance into multiple business processes and brand environments from the call center, to the branch office and the store. Perhaps most importantly, organizations know they must protect the consumer and the proprietary data that flows through voice. The Open Voice Network will support this evolution by delivering standards and usage guidelines for voice assistant systems that are trustworthy, inclusive, and open.

Voice is expected to be a primary digital interface going forward and will result in a hybrid ecosystem of general-purpose platforms and independent voice assistants that demand interoperability between conversational agents of different platforms and voice assistants. Open Voice Network is dedicated to supporting this transformation with industry guidance on the voice-specific protection of user privacy and data security.

Much as open standards in the earliest days of the Internet brought a uniform way to exchange information and connect with any site anywhere, the Open Voice Network will bring the same standardized ease of development and use to voice assistant systems and conversational agents, leading to huge growth and value for businesses and consumers alike. Voice assistance depends upon technologies like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), Advanced Dialog Management (ADM), and Machine Learning (ML).

The Open Voice Network will initially be focused on the following areas:

Standards development: research and recommendations toward the global standards that will enable user choice, inclusivity, and trust.Industry value and awareness: identification and sharing of conversational AI best practices that are both horizontal and specific to vertical industries, serving as the source of insight and value for voice assistance.Advocacy: working with and through existing industry associations on relevant regulatory and legislative issues, including those of data privacy.

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support  Open3D Foundation, ASWF, AGL, AgStack, and Open Voice Network 

To learn how your organization can get involved with Open 3D Foundation, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with ASWF, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with AGL, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with AgStack, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with Open Voice Network, click here

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