Cisco Podcast Network

This week starts with plans to see Damon Wayans Jr. (Coach, from New Girl) and somehow turns into a full therapy session about all the little ways technology can sometimes frustrate us a bit (even as two tech evangelists).

Ian and Kat riff on the everyday tech frustrations that seem small until they absolutely are not—printers that still don’t work, painful guest Wi-Fi experiences, verification codes that take forever, streaming apps that somehow make watching TV harder, and the very specific betrayal of getting a “your order has shipped” email when all that’s actually happened is a label was created.

Along the way, they talk about the weirdly exhausting parts of living online, from constant customer surveys to impossible CAPTCHA tests to the realization that sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is literally Brick your phone for a day. It’s part rant, part group chat, and very much one of those episodes where if you’ve ever muttered “why is this still so bad?” at a piece of technology, you’ll probably feel seen.

If you like the show, since we didn't talk a whole lot of tech this week...give us a click: https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/solutions/small-business/index.html#tabs-35d568e0ff-item-4bd7dc8124-tab

In today's episode, Cisco CX engineers and architects reveal how cruise ship networks are built and upgraded: everything from door locks and cameras to navigation and guest entertainment runs over the same segmented, secured infrastructure, and internet connectivity depends on intermittent satellite links so content must be stored locally. We follow a high‑stakes dry dock upgrade on a large cruise ship — with tight timelines, complex staging, and on‑the‑fly design changes to handle issues like NAT, multicast/PTP, MTU and firewall integration — and learn how planning, testing and rapid problem‑solving kept the ship sailing.

In this episode of Tech Unscripted host George Lewis talks with Terry Bankston (Delaware State University), Dr. Vicki Robinson (retired U.S. Department of Education), and T.J. Mercer (founder of Move In Day Mafia) about closing the digital divide at HBCUs and in surrounding communities.

They explore pressing challenges—aging infrastructure, unreliable connectivity, disconnected cell plans, and lack of devices—and highlight solutions driven by partnerships: campus laptops and hotspots, living‑learning spaces, hands‑on volunteer support, and wraparound services that build stability.

The discussion emphasizes measurable impacts like higher retention and graduation rates, increased student confidence and belonging, and how coordinated university‑community‑industry collaborations can scale digital inclusion and career readiness.

In this episode of Tech Unscripted host George Lewis talks with Terry Bankston (Delaware State University), Dr. Vicki Robinson (retired U.S. Department of Education), and T.J. Mercer (founder of Move In Day Mafia) about closing the digital divide at HBCUs and in surrounding communities.

They explore pressing challenges—aging infrastructure, unreliable connectivity, disconnected cell plans, and lack of devices—and highlight solutions driven by partnerships: campus laptops and hotspots, living‑learning spaces, hands‑on volunteer support, and wraparound services that build stability.

The discussion emphasizes measurable impacts like higher retention and graduation rates, increased student confidence and belonging, and how coordinated university‑community‑industry collaborations can scale digital inclusion and career readiness.

In this episode of the Cisco AI Insights Podcast, hosts Rafael Herrera and Sónia Marques are joined by Cisco ML Engineer Paul Mutawe to explore the fascinating paper, "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks," which introduces a novel time horizon metric to evaluate how autonomously AI agents can execute complex, multi-hour engineering projects.
The discussion looks at the rapid evolution of these agents, highlighting the key finding that the fifty percent success time horizon is doubling every two hundred and seven days, while detailing how unbiased benchmarking environments like the Modular Public harness are used to evaluate frontier models alongside real-world complexities like the sixteen-item messiness factor, which significantly reduces agent success rates, and the critical need for human-in-the-loop oversight to combat context rot.
A special thank you to the research team at Model Evaluation and Threat Research, who developed this paper. If you are interested in reading the paper yourself, please visit the link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.14499