What is the smart factory? In simple terms, it is the aspirational concept of a digitally transformed factory or warehouse. It is a cyber-physical ecosystem of virtualized and connected assets, people, and processes that constitute the manufacturing platform of the 4th industrial revolution that is Industry 4.0. One of the great expectations of 5G is that it will bring a new level of flexibility to the shop floor of a Smart Factory, allowing a growing number and range of mobile autonomous robots and vehicles to safely operate and coexist with humans in a manufacturing environment. The net expected outcome is the transition of today's static production models toward highly dynamic and software-defined production models.

You know a technology has reached a tipping point when your kids ask about it. This happened recently when my eighth grade daughter asked, "What is Machine Learning and why is it so important?". Answering her question, I explained how Machine Learning is part of AI, where we teach machines to reason and learn like human beings. I used the example of fraud detection. In many ways catching fraud is like finding needles in a haystack – you must sort and make sense of massive amounts of data in order to find your "needles" or in this case, your fraudsters.

Automation is now carriers' top priority. Automation is necessary to operate 5G and needed to fully monetize new services enabled by NFV and SDN – required to scale for IoT and more. The market makers at the start of the Zero Touch journey and the future of Network & Service Management presented in Madrid at the second Zero Touch Automation Congress. Fresh approaches such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are going to revolutionize telecoms networking operations and the strategic shift is already underway, in this transformation of Network Operations, NFV Orchestration & Services Management to an automated future.

While consumers across ASEAN are excited about 5G's promise of faster home broadband speeds and mobile internet connections, it is the technology's low network latency and power consumption that offers a variety of opportunities for businesses. Globe Telecom in the Philippines rolled out Southeast Asia's first 5G broadband service in select areas of the country in June, partnering with telecommunications giant Huawei to give the world's largest community of social media users a home broadband service that is now the fastest in ASEAN. About 20 times faster than 4G, everything from instant high-definition movie streaming to cloud gaming will be less than seconds away once 5G is commercially available across the rest of the region in the next few years. Businesses, meanwhile, can unlock increased value from Internet of Things (IoT) applications, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced robotics and a multitude of other uses. A recent report from consultancy firm A.T. Kearney predicted that this increased value will be worth around US$147 billion for ASEAN businesses by 2025 – with US$81 billion of that additional revenue gained through the growing use of AI in industries such as trade, transport and financial services.

Every good love story has a moment in which the precious ingénue, blind to the complexities of the world, misinterprets the lover's move. Romeo, believing Juliet to be dead, poisons himself. The folly of love is not so much about what we do when we are flooded with feelings, but what can happen when we have incomplete data. This is perhaps why a crop of new apps have arrived, harnessing the powers of artificial intelligence, to offer relationship advice. One of them, Mei, is billed as a "relationship assistant."

In the ever onward march of modern technology, we humans have sometimes felt uncomfortable about the increasing automation of telecommunications – from machines calling us with recorded messages to switchboard operators replaced by numbered menus to choose from. However, we seem to be turning a corner, with many people now happy to communicate with devices such as chatbots. For example, a report from media data specialists Comscore which looked at the future of voice technology in the US, found that half of smartphone users engage with voice technology and messaging apps on their device, and one in three do so on a daily basis. According to Call Centre Helper investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will increase by more than 300 per cent over the next year, and eight out of ten businesses have already implemented AI as a customer service solution, or are planning to do so by 2020. A blog by NewGenApps has looked at the top 11 ways that companies are now using AI in their business processes, and they say that "What started as a rule-based automation is now capable of mimicking human interaction. It is not just the human-like capabilities that make artificial intelligence unique. An advanced AI algorithm offers far better speed and reliability at a much lower cost … compared to its human counterparts."

Most real-world networks are incompletely observed. Algorithms that can accurately predict which links are missing can dramatically speedup the collection of network data and improve the validity of network models. Many algorithms now exist for predicting missing links, given a partially observed network, but it has remained unknown whether a single best predictor exists, how link predictability varies across methods and networks from different domains, and how close to optimality current methods are. We answer these questions by systematically evaluating 203 individual link predictor algorithms, representing three popular families of methods, applied to a large corpus of 548 structurally diverse networks from six scientific domains. We first show that individual algorithms exhibit a broad diversity of prediction errors, such that no one predictor or family is best, or worst, across all realistic inputs. We then exploit this diversity via meta-learning to construct a series of "stacked" models that combine predictors into a single algorithm. Applied to a broad range of synthetic networks, for which we may analytically calculate optimal performance, these stacked models achieve optimal or nearly optimal levels of accuracy. Applied to real-world networks, stacked models are also superior, but their accuracy varies strongly by domain, suggesting that link prediction may be fundamentally easier in social networks than in biological or technological networks. These results indicate that the state-of-the-art for link prediction comes from combining individual algorithms, which achieves nearly optimal predictions. We close with a brief discussion of limitations and opportunities for further improvement of these results.

Verizon is working with Mcity at the University of Michigan to advance transportation safety and shape the future of autonomous vehicles and smart cities using 5G. The Verizon 5G Ultra Wideband network is now live at the Mcity Test Facility where we are testing various 5G solutions designed to boost pedestrian safety and avoid car accidents. This includes installing 5G-connected cameras at every intersection inside the Mcity test track to help identify traffic and pedestrian patterns to prevent collisions. While connected cars have sensors that can "talk" to each other to help avoid accidents, cameras connecting to traffic light signals can help protect people walking or biking. "We've installed signal controllers at the intersections within Mcity that provide signal phase and timing data to the 5G network," said Eric Raamot, chief technology officer at Econolite.

CHIBA – At this year's Tokyo Game Show, the big draw was next-generation 5G networking -- setting pulses racing with the prospect of a radically more immersive gaming experience. Offering data transmission speeds around 100 times faster than 4G, 5G is expected to enable more seamless imagery -- particularly lower latency, more vivid images -- and sharper motion. Industry experts say it will dramatically improve the quality of augmented and virtual reality games. "It was very smooth, responsive and consistent," said Omar Alshiji, a 23-year-old game designer from Bahrain, after trying out the fighting game Tekken at the NTT Docomo Inc. booth. The major mobile carrier installed 5G base stations at its booth this year, making the high-speed network available at the show. The four-day industry event, held in the city of Chiba, ended Sunday.

We've seen how technological advancement has displaced jobs, especially so in the manufacturing and telecommunications industry. Now, the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is causing people to worry about being replaced by robots. Even Jack Ma himself acknowledged that AI is a threat to job security. "AI and robots are going to kill a lot of jobs, because in the future, these will be done by machines." How then, can we remain one step ahead?