Advancements In Technology

The most interesting element of Israel’s overnight attack on Iran wasn’t the fire and fury – it was the stealth drone operation that took place just before it. According to a report in The War Zone, Israeli operatives covertly slipped into Iran ahead of Operation Rising Lion and used small drones to disable multiple surface-to-air missile and radar sites deep inside the country, paving the way for Israeli Air Force fighter jets to strike strategic targets like nuclear sites and military installations without having to worry about enemy air defenses. Sound familiar? It echoes Operation Spider’s Web, Ukraine’s long-planned incursion into Russian territory where FPV drones were concealed in wooden cabins on trucks, smuggled across the border, and then deployed to take out Moscow’s strategic bomber fleets parked at airbases across the country. We’re seeing a new playbook for drone warfare emerge. Covertly place low-cost drones behind enemy lines. Preemptively neutralize air defense or other critical military assets. Launch high-value follow-on strikes with minimal risk. Repeat, over and over and over. These operations are redefining battlefield access and timing, confirming that the traditional layers of air defense once seen as all but invulnerable can be surmounted by relatively inexpensive drones and shrewd planning. But this isn’t just a new tactic – it’s a new framework for projecting power. What we’re seeing is a shift away from traditional assumptions about time, distance, and defense-in-depth. When drones can be deployed from inside the wire, from hiding spots on civilian trucks or safehouses, the old perimeter no longer exists. That has massive implications for how we design bases, plan campaigns, and build countermeasures. It means logistics networks must now assume they’re battlefield terrain. It means strategic infrastructure – power plants, command centers, supply depots – can be targeted without warning. And it means that long-range strike is no longer the exclusive domain of nation-states with advanced bombers or missile programs. A disciplined team with off-the-shelf tech and a good plan can now reshape the air defense equation. Defense strategy needs to catch up to this new reality: - Anticipating and preparing for deep interior strikes by non-state actors and state proxies - Building systems that defend in 360 degrees with the versatility to adapt to new challenges as they emerge - Prioritizing automation, machine vision, and counter-drone precision over legacy air defense layers The lesson from Israel and Ukraine isn’t just that drones are evolving, but that operational art is evolving with them. The countries that treat this seriously are rewriting the rules in real time – and the ones that don’t are setting themselves up for disaster.

A surgeon in Berlin just operated while looking straight through a patient's spine. Not with X-rays. With holograms floating above the body. Helios Berlin-Buch is the first German hospital where surgeons wear AR glasses during spinal surgery. They see organs, bones, and blood vessels in 3D - while operating. What this means: → 40% more accurate implant positioning → Significantly shorter surgery times → Faster recovery for patients Think about that. 1.9 million spine surgeries happen globally each year. 1.9 million people facing potential paralysis. 1.9 million families holding their breath. Now imagine those same surgeries with: • Millimeter precision guided by AI • Surgeons seeing through tissue in real-time • Gesture controls keeping hands sterile The technology that once were for a privileged few? Now spreading to major hospital globally. Here's what changes everything: A spinal implant off by 2mm can mean permanent nerve damage. With AR, surgeons place it perfectly. First time. Every time. By 2025, 20% of surgeons will operate with this superhuman vision. That's 380,000 spine surgeries made safer. 380,000 people with better chances of walking. 380,000 families getting good news. This isn't just better surgery. It's a whole change in healthcare to improve and use the latest technology. The solutions are getting cheaper and more accessible, but still more funding is needed to support doctor's training with AR/VR and the otherwise complicated operations. Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for more breakthroughs saving lives. ♻️ Share if you believe every surgeon should have superhuman vision. #MedTech #Innovation #FutureOfHealthcare

Elbit's $120M Hermes 900 contract. Unknown customer wants persistent maritime surveillance. 30-hour endurance changes the maritime ISR game. While everyone debates manned vs unmanned, Elbit just proved the economics. Hermes 900 delivers 30-hour persistence at a fraction of P-8 Poseidon operating costs. The sensor package story. • Maritime Patrol Radar with SAR/GMTI • EO/IR with laser designation • AIS vessel tracking • ESM/ELINT for signal intelligence • SATCOM for beyond-horizon ops Why this matters. Illegal fishing costs $23B annually. Drug smuggling routes shift daily. State-sponsored maritime incursions increase 40% year-over-year. You can't patrol million-square-mile EEZs with manned aircraft burning $10K/hour. Technical reality. 350kg payload capacity. 30,000ft ceiling keeps it above weather and small arms. Autonomous operations in GPS-denied environments. Integration with naval command centers for real-time cueing. The shift from Israeli contracts matters. After multiple cancellations over Gaza operations, Elbit needed international validation. This unnamed customer (likely Indo-Pacific based on maritime focus) provides it. 100,000+ flight hours globally proves reliability. But the real metric? Cost per square mile surveilled dropped 70% versus manned alternatives. Three capabilities driving adoption. 1. Persistent ISR over vast ocean areas 2. Real-time data fusion with shore/ship systems 3. High-threat operations without risking crews Timeline suggests 12-24 month delivery. Production lines already warm from Israeli orders. Maritime domain awareness just got affordable. When protecting offshore assets, tracking dark vessels, or monitoring contested waters, endurance beats everything. Are your maritime sensors compatible with MALE UAS integration? Ground stations ready for 30-hour mission management? The ocean doesn't sleep. Neither should your ISR.

F-35 Lightning II helmet, The Most expensive helmet in the world The F-35 Lightning II Helmet-Mounted Display (HMD) is indeed considered one of the most advanced and expensive helmets in the world. Here are some fascinating facts about this cutting-edge piece of technology: Cost: The F-35 HMD costs around $400,000 to $500,000 per unit, making it the most expensive helmet in the world. Development: The helmet was developed by Elbit Systems, an Israeli company, in collaboration with Lockheed Martin and other industry partners. Features: The F-35 HMD provides a high-resolution, high-field-of-view display that presents critical flight information to the pilot, such as: 1. **Head-up display:** A see-through display that overlays flight data onto the outside world, allowing the pilot to focus on external references. 2. **Helmet-mounted display:** A separate display that presents information to the pilot's eye, such as targeting data, sensor feeds, and tactical information. 3. **Symbology:** The helmet uses a custom-designed symbology system to present information to the pilot in a clear and intuitive manner. Capabilities: 1. Wide field of view: The helmet provides a 30-degree field of view, allowing pilots to track targets and maintain situational awareness without needing to move their head. 2. High-resolution displays: The helmet's displays offer high resolution (1280x1024 pixels) and high refresh rates (120 Hz), providing crisp and clear images. 3. Night vision: The helmet is compatible with night vision goggles, allowing pilots to operate in low-light environments. 4. Targeting capabilities: The helmet can be used for targeting, with built-in laser rangefinders and laser designators. Advantages: 1. Improved situational awareness: The F-35 HMD provides pilots with a significant increase in situational awareness, allowing them to respond more quickly and effectively in combat. 2. Enhanced targeting capabilities:The helmet's targeting features enable pilots to engage targets more accurately and efficiently. 3.Reduced pilot workload: By presenting critical flight information directly to the pilot's eye, the helmet reduces the workload and allows pilots to focus on flying and engaging targets. The F-35 Lightning II Helmet-Mounted Display is an incredible example of modern technology and innovation in aviation. Its cutting-edge features and capabilities make it an essential tool for F-35 pilots, providing them with unparalleled situational awareness and targeting abilities.

Is more data always better? Let's have a thought exercise: - Imagine you'd like to figure out how many people are searching for 'cupcakes' everyday. - Where do you start? Search engines. You will need to think about which source of browsers - Chrome is the obvious choice, but what about Bing and Safari? What about other markets? Naver/Yahoo? What about folks search directly in Amazon/Walmart/Target, or Instagram/Tiktok/Youtube? - How would you define the search term - cupcakes is obvious. How about 'cypcakes' with a typo? or incomplete term like 'cupca'? How about cupcake in a different language, or through voice search? - Then thinking about data capture - are you going with server side logging, or client side logging? What type of device coverage are there? If we are capturing both - then there's also the problem of chronological syncing - what about missing data? - the list goes on, and this is just getting started... Generally in my opinion, everything comes to a point of diminishing marginal returns. Even worse, after a certain point, incremental volume may actually drive less value. With the ubiquitous access of network and devices, we are accumulating unprecedented amount of data. While unit collection is becoming cheaper, the latent costs have been increasing, in terms of: - storage: physical spaces, devices, maintenance, power - cleaning: more data, more potential noise and biases - understanding: our data literacy may not scale with the growth of data - explaining: even though as data professionals / orgs could manage the previous 3 steps, it could also be increasingly difficult to explain to stake-holders and influence business - it could take longer just to educate everyone, what type of data we are looking at, not to mention understanding the inference of the data. When data are scarce, it's much easier to accomplish the upkeep with data: know exactly how they are collected, processed, analyzed, and inference are made. With the explosive growth of data, it's impossible to understand this massive information without abstraction, and during that abstraction, new biases could be introduced. This will be even more exacerbated with GenAI that we could literally generate massive amount of 'new' data any second of the day, any day of the week. Our intellectual devices are trained to take abstractions from raw rich data (think about how many bits of information of audio and video are captured by our eyes and ears and how rapidly our brains are processing and understanding them), but less capable of correctly understanding massive abstractions from massive data. Therefore those old intuitions and heuristics may not function properly. Drinking too much water is bad for health. At some point, we need to think about, what is the right amount dosage of data that is optimal for the data organization, and for the business, and how do we develop mechanisms to remove data. Not all 0/1s are useful - if so, we would have had a much larger genome.

🇮🇱 A quiet revolution in Israeli artillery just became real. The 155 mm self-propelled howitzer SIGMA, developed and produced by Elbit Systems Israel, is no longer a concept or future program. It entered operational service with the IDF Artillery Corps in June 2024 and is now maturing fast as Israel replaces legacy M109 platforms with a fully automated, high-precision fire system. Powered by a 155mm/52-caliber gun, SIGMA delivers a range of up to 40+ km with standard rounds and beyond 70 km with precision munitions, high rate of fire using an automatic loading system, 360-degree engagement, and rapid shoot-and-scoot mobility on a 10×10 tactical chassis. Designed for counter-battery survivability and networked fire missions, it brings modern automation into the artillery battlefield. This upgrade marks a major leap in land #firepower: greater accuracy, reduced collateral damage, faster response times, and safer operation for crews. The future of artillery is #automated, #mobile, and #precise. 🔥🎯

Our potential for growth is intertwined with advancements in technology. Yet, for every leap forward, a new challenge emerges. Our capacity to generate data is skyrocketing. However, the infrastructure required to move this data hasn't kept pace. Between 2018 and 2024, network bandwidth increased dramatically, but the volume of data produced grew at an even more staggering rate. This mismatch is only increasing and it will shape what is possible for AI. We will produce 18 times more data than our current infrastructure can handle, leaving valuable insights untapped — unless we rethink the architecture of AI, moving far more processing to the edge of organizations. This bandwidth bottleneck presents a critical challenge: vital data will be "trapped" due to the physical limits of our current technologies. Data may be the new oil, there's no super tanker to transport it. Addressing this imbalance isn't just a matter of more deep sea cables or satellites or cell towers We need to rethink what data we transfer and how we transfer the data that we can't. The future of our digital economy depends on it. #DigitalTransformation #EconomicResilience #InnovationStrategy #FutureOfFinance

When "More" Isn't Better ... ... ... Did you know that despite exponential advances in technology and data, the cost of developing a new drug has skyrocketed 100-fold since the 1950s (adjusted for inflation)? Meet Eroom’s Law, the ironic mirror of Moore’s Law. While semiconductors get cheaper and faster, Pharma R&D grows costlier and less efficient. In his seminal paper, “Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency,” Jack Scannell highlights a critical flaw: our heavy reliance on “brute force” methodologies like high-throughput screening, molecular biology, combinatorial chemistry ... These approaches, while powerful, often drown us in a data deluge without improving clinical trial success rates. Worse, they sideline older, iterative strategies that once drove breakthroughs through hypothesis-driven science and incremental learning. The paradox? More data ≠ better outcomes. Without smarter tools to analyze and prioritize information, we risk inefficiency by volume. Scannell’s work reminds us that innovation isn’t just about scale: it’s about balance. Could blending cutting-edge tech with time-tested, iterative approaches unlock stalled progress?

One of my biggest takeaways from Data Council last week is the impact that AI is having on data infra. It's changing how we think about storage and retrieval of data in two big ways: 1️⃣ 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗮. With the human cost of generating anything from images to videos to content and reports plummeting, we're going to see the amount of data generated continue to skyrocket. At Fabi.ai for example we see teams conducting exploratory data analysis at a much higher rate than in the past because it's so much easier to do. This is true not just for AI data analysis platforms like Fabi, it's true for any AI solution. 2️⃣ 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗰𝘆. As AI applications become more integrated into workflows, users expect near-instantaneous responses to maintain productivity. At the same time as the volume of data continues to increase, the expectation for faster data retrieval continues to increase. Using AI is an inherently iterative process that requires trial and error and I don't ever see that changing. As AI gets better we may need fewer iterations, but until we learn to ask the perfect question in a single shot, the very nature of the use of AI will remain iterative. And when iterating, even waiting a few seconds for a response can kill the flow and quickly adds up when you have to do this over and over. There are two demos and one fireside chat that stood out to me in particular: a demo from Firebolt running an AI agent for data analysis on terabytes of data in sub-seconds, the Instant SQL demo from MotherDuck and a fireside chat with Jordan Tigani, Kishore Gopalakrishna, and Yury Izrailevskyfrom MotherDuck, StarTree and ClickHouse respectively. All of these illustrate the sea change that’s been happening and what’s to come. These new solutions will make previous solutions feel like dial-up vs fiber. Iceberg and data lakes were all the rage, and I predict these will have a real impact on how the bulk of data gets stored, but the progress on real-time data retrieval is genuinely exciting to me (and candidly, the tech behind data lakes is still a bit murky to me). I still believe that despite the explosion in data volume, most enterprises will start adopting these solutions and expect their AI tools to work hand-in-hand with them. How do you see AI impacting your data infrastructure strategy? Are you prioritizing real-time capabilities, or are there other data technologies you're more excited about implementing in 2025?

Picture a surgeon donning a headset that overlays crucial data and 3D holographic visuals directly onto the patient’s body in real time. Augmented reality (AR) combined with computer vision will be changing how doctors plan and perform surgeries. The goal? Greater precision, fewer complications, and reduced costs for hospitals. Key Advancements in AR-Driven Surgery: - Interactive 3D Models: Surgeons can view virtual, layered images of organs and tissues, helping them pinpoint exact incision sites and navigate complex procedures. - AI Powered Decision Support: By analyzing patient scans and historical data, the system can highlight potential risks or offer real-time suggestions to the surgical team. - Hands Free Controls: Gesture recognition replaces the need to manipulate devices physically, minimizing distractions and contamination risks in the operating room. - Seamless Hospital Integration: These tools can sync with patient records and other hospital systems, making it easier for the entire care team to stay updated. Could AR become the new gold standard in operating rooms worldwide? Would you feel more at ease knowing your surgeon is wearing an AR headset? #innovation #technology #future #management #startups