Companies can expect to see disruption in traditional models of data usage, storage, and analysis next year, with newcomers challenging the dominance of incumbent brands across various markets, including edge computing and 5G, according to the technology advisory and investment firm GP Bullhound. The firm's 13th annual Technology Predictions 2020 report culled insights from its worldwide team and discusses GP Bullhound's Top 10 trends and innovations that will impact the digital economy over the coming year. This will significantly enhance mobile computing capabilities, according to the report. The race to establish a claim to be the originator of the first fully operational 5G network has created a battleground around the telecom industry giants. Traditionally large players in this space, including Qualcomm, Samsung, and Huawei, will be some of the key companies vying for this claim over the next year.

For instance, Ericsson predicts in the latest Mobility Report that by the end of 2019 there will be 1.3 billion cellular IoT connections worldwide. By 2025 this number is expected to jump to 5 billion. Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates* that the economic value to be generated by IoT globally will amount to $3.9–11.1 trillion per year by 2025, and a focus in 2020 and beyond will be connectivity driving valuable outcomes. As enterprises become "digitized" and enable more connected machines, sensors and solutions, the current computing power done in the cloud simply won't be fast enough to optimize performance in real-time. In order to monitor, analyze and optimize connected IoT applications, enterprises will need computing power done near the edge.

SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son unveiled a $184 million initiative Friday to accelerate artificial intelligence research in Japan, enlisting Alibaba's Jack Ma to expound on his goal of commercializing the technology. Son's company announced a partnership with the University of Tokyo that includes spending 20 billion yen ($184 million) over 10 years by mobile arm SoftBank Corp. to establish the Beyond AI Institute. He roped in the Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. co-founder for an on-campus chat, during which the two billionaires discussed their vision for the future of technology. The institute will support 150 researchers from various disciplines and focus on transitioning AI research from the academic to the commercial using joint ventures between universities and companies. Health-care, city and social infrastructure and manufacturing will be the primary areas of focus, SoftBank Corp. said in a statement.

Though it's still several years away from widespread deployment, 5G is a key component in the evolution of cloud-computing ecosystems toward more distributed environments. Between now and 2025, the networking industry will invest about $1 trillion worldwide on 5G, supporting rapid global adoption of mobile, edge, and embedded devices in practically every sphere of our lives. It will be a proving ground for next-generation artificial intelligence (AI), offering an environment within which data-driven algorithms will guide every cloud-centric process, device, and experience. Just as significant, AI will be a key component in ensuring that 5G networks are optimized from end to end, 24 7. AI will live at every edge in the hybrid clouds, multiclouds, and mesh networks of the future. Already, we see prominent AI platform vendors--such as NVIDIA--making significant investments in 5G-based services for mobility, Internet of Things (IoT) and other edge environments.

Telecommunication (Telco) outdoor position recovery aims to localize outdoor mobile devices by leveraging measurement report (MR) data. Unfortunately, Telco position recovery requires sufficient amount of MR samples across different areas and suffers from high data collection cost. For an area with scarce MR samples, it is hard to achieve good accuracy. In this paper, by leveraging the recently developed transfer learning techniques, we design a novel Telco position recovery framework, called TLoc, to transfer good models in the carefully selected source domains (those fine-grained small subareas) to a target one which originally suffers from poor localization accuracy. Specifically, TLoc introduces three dedicated components: 1) a new coordinate space to divide an area of interest into smaller domains, 2) a similarity measurement to select best source domains, and 3) an adaptation of an existing transfer learning approach. To the best of our knowledge, TLoc is the first framework that demonstrates the efficacy of applying transfer learning in the Telco outdoor position recovery. To exemplify, on the 2G GSM and 4G LTE MR datasets in Shanghai, TLoc outperforms a nontransfer approach by 27.58% and 26.12% less median errors, and further leads to 47.77% and 49.22% less median errors than a recent fingerprinting approach NBL.

In a time where end users have little tolerance for downtime or subpar performance, keeping network operations running at an optimal level is essential. Outages are not only costly from a productivity perspective, but they can also expose an enterprise to security risks. Maintaining peak service levels in increasingly complex, highly distributed and virtualized enterprises requires effective network monitoring. But the capture of performance data from the physical layer to the application layer can be a complicated process hampered by a lack of visibility into end-to-end network activity. While many organizations are benefiting from advances in network monitoring, fueled in part by AI network monitoring, most organizations are still relying on outdated tools.

If Google's Pixel 4 is your daily driver, good news: It's now able to screen robocalls -- and more. Google announced this morning an update to the Pixel 4's Call Screen feature in the U.S. that automatically declines calls from unknown parties and filters out suspected robocallers, alongside an improved video calling experience on Duo, the rollout of the new Google Assistant to more users, and a zippier software experience made possible by memory usage optimizations. It's a part of what Google's calling feature drops, which will deliver "bigger updates" to Pixel devices with "more helpful and fun features" going forward. The first arrives starting today, with others to follow on a monthly cadence. "Pixel phones have always received monthly updates to improve performance and make your device safe," wrote Google group product manager Shenaz Zack in a blog post.

Video content will become richer and more data-intensive as it evolves from HD to 4K to 360 and even 8K. Companies are moving these visual workloads to the cloud and edge in order to keep up with capacity, growth and service demands. With the emergence of edge computing and cloudified, 5G networks, organizations have an opportunity to deliver insights through artificial intelligence (AI) that complement new user experiences and are adaptable to the complexities of delivering video content to a global audience. Companies need a visual cloud and media analytics platform that is flexible enough to support changing business models and deployment options, software that enables rapid innovation, and hardware that can scale to provide a range of performance, all while being able to lower total cost of ownership and grow profitability. Intel launched the Intel Select Solutions for Visual Cloud to give companies an easier path towards successful content creation and delivery starting with the Intel Select Solution for Simulation and Visualization and Intel Select Solution for Visual Cloud Delivery Network.

Almost every presentation began apologetically with the refrain, "In a 5G world" practically challenging the industry's rollout goals. At one point Brigitte Daniel-Corbin, IoT Strategist with Wilco Electronic Systems, sensed the need to reassure the audience by exclaiming, 'its not a matter of if, but when 5G will happen!' Frontier Tech pundits too often prematurely predict hyperbolic adoption cycles, falling into the trap of most soothsaying visions. The IoTC Summit's ability to pull back the curtain left its audience empowered with a sober roadmap forward that will ultimately drive greater innovation and profit. The industry frustration is understandable as China announced earlier this month that 5G is now commercially available in 50 cities, including: Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Enrique is an HR, Tech and Future of Work expert and keynote speaker and founder of Hacking HR, a global learning community at the intersection of future of work, technology, business and organizations, with thousands of members all over the world. He came to the United States from Venezuela as a Fulbright Scholar. Prior to coming to the US, Enrique was the CEO at Management Consultants, a firm specialized in Human Resources in Venezuela. Before Management Consultants, Enrique worked in the telecommunications sector as a Senior Project Engineer for Telefonica. He is also the cofounder of Cotopaxi, a recruitment platform focused on Latin America and the Caribbean.