Podcast: The Computer Weekly Downtime Upload – Episode 28

In this week’s episode of the Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast, Brian McKenna, Caroline Donnelly and Clare McDonald talk about some of the week’s biggest stories in tech, including the grounding of several British Airways flights as a result of technical difficulties, the endless opportunities of 3D printing and modelling, the US government’s JEDI cloud project and the demise of some of the UK’s oldest big data companies.

• Caroline fills the team in on the elusive nature of the recent technical glitches that caused several British Airways flights to be cancelled, ruining holidays far and wide. The team discusses the pressures airlines feel to add digital technologies to their portfolio in order to appear as premium brands, a feat made difficult by legacy systems.
• Matt Hancock is mentioned on the podcast once again, as new funding is announced for the NHS, aiming to help the organisation better use artificial intelligence (AI). The team debates whether the various claimed uses of AI in healthcare are, in fact, that, or if they are actually just normal IT applied to a healthcare scenario.
• Clare talks about her meeting with Kadine James, the creative tech lead at Hobs 3D. After finding herself on the longlist of Computer Weekly’s most influential women in UK tech, James invited Clare to Here East to talk about encouraging more diverse groups into technology, how 3D printing is an example of creativity and technology colliding, and how tech can be used to make the world a better place.
• Caroline talks about the US Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure cloud contract, more excitingly known as JEDI – a very interesting acronym used to describe a less than exciting project. The project aims to build a general-purpose cloud for the use of US defence, using multiple cloud contracts stacked on top of a long-standing cloud agreement to cater to the department’s needs.
• Brian rounds off by explaining big data firm MapR’s eventual absorption by HPE, and tells a woeful tale of three long-gone big data companies and a now dusty toy elephant.