The big cloud presentation at Tuesday’s IDF was a post-lunch session called, “Driving towards cloud 2015: a technology vision to meet the demands of cloud computing tomorrow” by Intel Senior Fellow Stephen S. Pawlowski. Pawlowski’s job at Intel is “pathfinding”—he’s one of the guys who looks at long-term trends and tries to help steer the company in the right direction. As a big-picture guy, Pawlowski’s presentation was necessarily pretty general, since he had a ton of ground to cover in laying out the trends and issues that Intel sees as shaping cloud computing between now and 2015.

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a tool to mine aircraft black boxes for valuable data after every flight, something they say will improve daily operations and prevent accidents.

An airplane’s black box, or flight data recorder, continuously records performance data and other information during flight. That data has long been used to reconstruct the events that occurred before an accident to understand what happened. But the researchers believe that data can be used proactively, and daily.

Retrieving and analyzing data from a flight data recorder after a...