World first as scientists created the world’s first DNA storage file system
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF DNA can store huge volumes of information and it lasts for hundreds of thousands of years making it an ideal storage medium for tomorrow’s technologies. The majority of the cells in the human body contain the information you need to build a complete person...
Blockchain without the miners, IOTA unveil their revolutionary new cryptocurrency
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Mining cryptocurrency is an incredibly contentious, complex, and energy expensive operation, but now a German non-profit has built a cryptocurrency that does away with miners completely, and they’re being backed by the biggest names in tech. Bitcoin isn’t the only cryptocurrency on a hot...
Microsoft calls for a “Digital Geneva convention” to defang cyber attacks
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF In some respects we are starting to see the advent of open cyber warfare between competing sovereign nations and unless someone steps in the problem is only going to escalate. Last year cyber the rise of warfare prompted the US Government to implement a...
Rise of the “Citizen Developers,” Microsofts Stack Overflow bot makes programming easier
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Imagine being able to build mobile applications and applications without ever having to know how to code. That’s where we’re headed, and it’ll be here sooner than you think. A little while ago I wrote an article on a new first of a kind...
Tech giants team up to create the world’s first Deep Learning standard
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of today’s technology companies are creating proprietary AI’s that can’t interoperate with each other but a new framework from Facebook and Microsoft is setting out to change that. As Artificial Intelligence (AI), and in this case more specifically Machine Learning becomes more pervasive...
Microsoft unveils it’s new real time AI engine
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI’s that can analyse data in real time will become increasingly important as we come to rely on them more and more to help us make, and automate, decisions It’s probably fair to say that in many cases, whether it’s the new breed of...
Microsoft’s AI just got a perfect score on Mrs. Pacman
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Games and play help humans learn new skills, especially when we’re young, but it increasingly looks like AI’s are the superior game players Video games are one of the best ways to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) – they offer risk free digital environments for...
Microsoft’s pig wrangling competition is teaching AI’s to cooperate
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Today’s AI’s operate independently of each other, but in the future they’ll need to cooperate and Microsoft wants to teach them how. I live in the countryside in the UK, and I also visited France a lot when I was a child, so I...
Skype can now translate ten languages in real time
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Over the past five decades the world has got immeasurably smaller but language is still a barrier, but that’s all beginning to change. Yes, it’s a small world. Or so we’re told. The advent of the telephone and the internet made distance irrelevant and...
Microsoft will offer DNA storage in the cloud by 2020
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With the amount of information on the planet exploding and traditional storage technologies reaching their theoretical limits we need a new way to store the torrents of data society is creating, and DNA storage looks increasingly like it’s the answer. Microsoft, who last year...
World’s top AI experts met to discuss Doomsday scenarios, and solutions
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Showcasing how AI will destroy the world is easy but finding a solution isn’t. Today’s press is full of column inches on the future impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on society. On one side of the fence AI optimists predict a brave new world...
Wall Street supremo’s pile into a new AI hedge fund dubbed the future of finance
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Until now the financial services industry has never been able to benefit from a network effect, but that’s about to change and it could tip Wall Street on its head. The “Network Effect” is a phenomenon known the world over, it’s where a service...
Microsoft’s AI has learnt how to write it’s own code and create its own programs
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF An AI that can code and build new computer programs from scratch could change the world, give rise to a whole new generation of entrepreneurs. And put a lot of people out of jobs… For many of us the digital world’s an alien place....
Bromium’s micro-virtualisation technology stops Malware in its tracks
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF With the number of cyber attacks rising exponentially companies are turning to virtualisation to help them contain attacks, and it looks like it’s working. Speak to anyone – anyone at all, even your grandmother, and they’ll tell you that the number of cyber attacks...
Google and Facebook are building the worlds fastest trans Pacific internet cable
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Global internet use is exploding and more of the internet giants are taking it upon themselves to fund their own trans oceanic internet cables in order to secure spectrum, decrease latency and improve security The world of submarine internet cables is vast and its...
Intels Nervana chip shows the giant is serious about owning the AI market
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Many of the AI breakthroughs over recent years have only been possible because of the exponential increase in the amount of computing power available to support them, now Intel and other chip companies are in an arms race to own the future of AI ...
GE’s revolutionary industrial machines can have conversations with engineers
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF As emerging technologies combine we’re entering the era where we can talk to machines in the same way we talk to other people – and the possibilities are staggering. As more and more emerging technologies mature – or, at least improve, we are gradually...
Microsoft enters the race to build a viable quantum computer
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Quantum computers are millions of times more powerful than todays traditional computers, if they can be developed and bought into the mainstream humanity will see major innovation breakthroughs across the board, from drug discovery to space travel. Microsoft, who earlier last year release a...
Ukraines army uses Hololens to make their tanks invisible
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Augmented reality systems can be used in novel ways to change how you see the world and they have cross industry applications. In the latest example of consumer technology adapted for military applications, Microsoft’s Hololens is being put to work to allow tank crews...
World first as Microsofts speech recognition software becomes as accurate as humans
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF After almost forty years of research speech recognition systems are now as good as humans. Microsoft have announced that they have made a major breakthrough in speech recognition and created a technology that, finally, recognises the words in conversational speech as well as humans do –...
