At 25, Ms Annabelle Kwok has already made a name for herself. Two years ago, she made waves when she co-founded SmartCow, an artificial intelligence (AI) company that came up with an electronic board that could run various AI software. Last year, Ms Kwok left SmartCow and started NeuralBay, a company that focuses on detection and recognition software related to humans, objects and text, and offers AI-driven solutions for multinational corporations. Her clients include an aviation corporation, an automation industry company and chocolate company Ferrero. Ms Kwok traces her interest in tech to a box of Lego bricks with electric cables called Lego Mindstorms, which her parents, who work in banking, bought for her when she was in primary school.

With a billion people worldwide living with some form of disability, there is tremendous scope for the development of assistive technologies – a market expected be worth over $26 Billion by 2024. In the next 10 years, billions of IoT smart devices will be connected. AI will enable these devides to listen, see, reason and predict without a 24/7 dependence on the cloud (this physical interface between humans and machines is what Microsoft terms the "intelligent edge") and the average smart home will generate around 50GB of data every single day. It's happening, Join 15k digital minds to shape what's next for your business Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a crucial part of that puzzle, as AI advances such as predictive text, visual recognition and speech-to-text transcription are already showing enormous potential for helping people with vision, hearing, cognitive, learning, mobility disabilities – as well as a range of mental health conditions. "AI can be a game changer for people with disabilities. Already we're witnessing this as people with disabilities expand their use of computers to hear, see and reason with impressive accuracy," explains Brad Smith, President and CLO at Microsoft.