Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning and the internet of things (IoT) lead emerging technology conversations across the world. Companies recognise that these technologies are ready to be used to drive real business benefits. The Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region is set to pick up the pace on these two fronts. According to a recent cloud survey by MIT Technology Review Custom and VMware, more than 70% of non-users of AI in APJ said their organisations will adopt the technology within five years. IDC forecasted global IoT spending to surpass $1 trillion USD in 2020, with APJ leading the way.

Connected car startups raked in over $1 billion in funding last year, even though most consumers have yet to hear the term, connected car. With more than 1,700 autotech startups now in the game, competition is ramping up at all levels of the automotive IoT ecosystem. From automotive cyber security solutions providers to connected head-up display companies, new autotechs are coming online almost daily. Growth and sustainability of the connected car market demands a symbiotic relationship between automakers and 3rd-party tech providers.Without major automakers, there is no market for autotech products. With 250 million connected vehicles projected to be on the road by 2020, there's plenty of opportunity for automakers, and for the connected car startup.

The news has always played an essential role in our lives, keeping us informed about the world and the issues we care about. But the fact is, while there is a sea bad news, there is also a plethora of "good news" happening where people are making progress solving real issues. The Google Assistant is now making this kind of news easier to find. "Tell me something good" is a new experimental feature for Assistant users in the US that delivers your daily dose of good news. Just say "Hey Google, tell me something good" to receive a brief news summary about people who are solving problems for our communities and our world, the company said in a blog post.

Technology experts have uncovered a vast misinformation campaign attempting to spread stories on a hugescale. Facebook, and Twitter have found and removed hundreds of accounts that were apparently set up to target users in the US, UK, Latin America and the Middle East. But it is not clear what the campaign was being used for. The accounts appear to have been tied to Iranian actors and cybersecurity firms said they had appeared to be promoting Iran's geopolitical agenda around the world. But whether the campaign was being set up to launch any more specific or targeted attack remains unclear.

NEW DELHI: The rate at which deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology is increasing, it will be widely available to the masses in the next 10 years, says a new Gartner report. Movements and trends like Cloud computing, the "maker" community and open source will eventually propel AI into everyone's hands, said the report titled "Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2018" on Tuesday. Among other technologies that are gaining fast traction, the research found that Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will reach maturity in the next five to 10 years. "Business and technology leaders will continue to face rapidly accelerating technology innovation that will profoundly impact the way they engage with their workforce, collaborate with their partners, and create products and services for their customers," said Mike Walker, Research Vice President at Gartner. "CIOs and technology leaders should always be scanning the market along with assessing and piloting emerging technologies to identify new business opportunities with high impact potential and strategic relevance for their business," Walker said.

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Microsoft Hong Kong in May 2018 to form an Artificial Intelligence (AI) research partnership to incubate talent and encourage breakthroughs in various sectors by accelerating scientific progress and enabling data-driven research. Commenting on the memorandum, Professor Andy Hor, Vice-President, and Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research), University of Hong Kong stated HKU was glad to join hands with Microsoft in this AI partnership to enable the professionals and researchers at HKU to apply AI in research projects. Prof Andy noted that Healthcare and Fintech are the key industries in Hong Kong and that through this collaboration with the company, HKU students have the chance to equip themselves with knowledge of Data Science and AI. This will enable researchers to accelerate their professional development, she added. Cally Chan, General Manager of Microsoft Hong Kong said that the company's mission is to empower their partners in different industries to take a significant leap forward in accelerating digital transformation and achieve more.

It's hard to make a case for the "sudden" development of something that has been a formal topic of research for more than 60 years. Attending presentations on Artificial Intelligence (AI) at three recent conferences and following that up with extensive reading does, however, suggest that all of us engaged in teaching-training-learning need to be familiar with recent AI developments and projects that are rapidly changing our world. The April 2018 Unconference for Dreamers, Doers, and Drivers Shaping the Future of Learning, held on an Arizona State University campus and previously discussed here on the Top of Mind blog by The Tambellini Group Senior Analyst Alex Freeman, paid ample attention to AI. Developments in all three areas are continuing to open doors to potential collaborations between learning facilitators, learners, and machines in ways that may foster more dynamic, engaging, and results-oriented learning experiences for those we serve in our lifelong-learning environments. Examples cited by Keller include customizable learning experiences, student-persistence prediction, unbiased grading systems, more sophisticated and useful teacher-student performance analytics, suggested learning paths, better ways of matching students and teachers in learners' moments of need, and detecting fraudulent activity in the learning process. Unconference participants walked away from Keller's presentation and their subsequent explorations of the topic with a commitment to "design blueprints for an AI-enabled virtual assistant for teaching, learning and advising, factoring in expanded functionalities over the next 5, 10, and 20 years," the ShapingEDU "10 Actions to Shape the Future of Education" communique confirms.

Customers want your business to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve their experience and make their life easier – even if they don't know what it is or what it does. They understand that they must enable AI-powered experiences to better serve customers and to keep up with competitors. But even with adoption and interest being as high as it is, we're just at the beginning of the AI journey. When you type anything into Google, you're met by a barrage of search results. I just typed "Artificial Intelligence" into the search engine and was met by a grand total of 330 million results.

Takahiro Hayashi won his first nationwide title in shogi while still in high school and by the age of 22 he was the world amateur champion. His coaches were urging him to turn pro. But Hayashi wanted to be an entrepreneur, not a chess player. So in 2009, he found himself in a room with local venture capitalists, presenting a 120-page pitch about his social game firm. "One of the investors told me that he didn't really listen to the explanation of our business plan," the 41-year-old Hayashi said in an interview at Heroz Inc.'s headquarters in Tokyo.

It was 2011; a year that may be considered the beginning of IT/OT convergence. LTE was the new technology on the block; touting fast ethernet speeds from almost anywhere. Machine to Machine (M2M) communications between industrial control system (ICS) devices was becoming a cost effective way to improve the reliability, redundancy, and operational timeliness of the nations' critical infrastructure. To pave the way for this radical change, the way devices responsible for controlling electric, gas, and water commodities communicate, an even more radical change of the status quo was required; the merging of the traditionally separate information technology and operational technology paradigms. Traditionally, operational technology was physically air gapped from the internet.