The 20th century was a famously fertile time for visions of the future, but the 21st century has failed to inspire them in the same way. Science fiction writer William Gibson, author of the prescient cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, has called this "future fatigue", pointing out that we barely ever make reference to the 22nd century. One reason for this apparent stasis is that most of the ideas of the future that captured people's imaginations in the 20th century have mutated since then. For example, plastic was billed as the material of the future. It has become an abundant material resource that is durable and versatile, just as its manufacturers promised.

Dr Mark van Rijmenam is The Digital Speaker. He is a leading strategic futurist who thinks about how technology changes organisations, society and the metaverse. Dr Mark van Rijmenam is an international keynote speaker, 5x author and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Datafloq and the author of the book on the metaverse: Step into the Metaverse: How the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion-Dollar Social Economy, detailing what the metaverse is and how organizations and consumers can benefit from the immersive internet. He is the publisher of the'f(x) e x' newsletter, read by thousands of executives, on the future of work and the organization of tomorrow.

A healthy workplace makes good use of the latest insights on human behaviors, wellness, and achieving sustainable performance, and deploys the cutting-edge work tools of the times. A wide array of ever-more powerful technologies is becoming part of the core design of organizations--from artificial intelligence (AI) to 3D printing, we now assume they will be part of the fabric of work and the workplace. So, what might these factors mean for the different possible futures of the workplace? The workplace of the future could potentially manifest many of the technological possibilities being developed today. Hence, there are a range of views about how the boundaries between us and our devices might play out in a world of super computing power, particularly in the world of work.

Multivariate time series forecasting is an important yet challenging problem in machine learning. Most existing approaches only forecast the series value of one future moment, ignoring the interactions between predictions of future moments with different temporal distance. Such a deficiency probably prevents the model from getting enough information about the future, thus limiting the forecasting accuracy. To address this problem, we propose Multi-Level Construal Neural Network (MLCNN), a novel multi-task deep learning framework. Inspired by the Construal Level Theory of psychology, this model aims to improve the predictive performance by fusing forecasting information (i.e., future visions) of different future time. We first use the Convolution Neural Network to extract multi-level abstract representations of the raw data for near and distant future predictions. We then model the interplay between multiple predictive tasks and fuse their future visions through a modified Encoder-Decoder architecture. Finally, we combine traditional Autoregression model with the neural network to solve the scale insensitive problem. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that our method achieves statistically significant improvements compared to the most state-of-the-art baseline methods, with average 4.59% reduction on RMSE metric and average 6.87% reduction on MAE metric.

The world's biggest tech manufacturers are currently taking the stage at IFA 2019 in Berlin, Germany. The event is billed as Europe's largest consumer tech show where consumer tech meets innovation. But in a digital world where the lines between B2B and B2C are becoming increasingly blurry, there are a few critical lessons for businesses from all industries too. On the surface, IFA is simply a platform for 1,939 of the world's leading tech brands and manufacturers to showcase their latest innovations, products, or services across 163,900 square meters. Sure, many of these products will appear on wish lists and dominate headlines around Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the impending holiday season. But, if you zoom out from that, there is a message for every CEO.

Preparing for and implementing AI projects can be a multi-year journey. According to the latest figures, only 28% of respondents reported getting past the AI planning stage in the first year. This is due to several factors including the relative maturity of the technology (at least in the ever-expanding set of industry use cases), the level of complexity involved such as extensive integration requirements, limited enterprise experience and lack of internal skill sets, concerns with AI bias as well as governance, risk and compliance concerns, extensive change management requirements and more. With so much emphasis on demonstrating quick wins, whether as part of corporate innovation programs or digital transformation initiatives, over-long AI projects can potentially impact the reputations of much larger initiatives than just their own. As CIOs move from "projects to products" in their approach to product management, these lengthy AI projects can delay innovative new internal or external product releases as well. One of the first decisions to make is whether to build or buy.

A mysterious, cone-shaped device, shown in a demo Monday at Microsoft's Build event in Seattle, hinted at a big leap in capability for the company's digital assistant: the ability to see and identify people. In the ruthless war among Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google's Assistant, this is a feature we haven't yet seen from the competition. What we don't know is what this prototype is, and whether it will ever come out. Microsoft's official, overshadowed demonstration showed us the conference room of the future. Microsoft incorporated Cortana, the Surface Hub, and Skype's translation and transcription features, together with PowerBI and Microsoft Teams, into a cohesive working environment.