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 –...
UN backs ID2020 blockchain consortium to give 2 billion people an identity
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The UN is backing a blockchain consortium to help them give a voice, and recognition, to over 2 billion people. According to the United Nations there are over 2 billion people who have no way of proving who they are. And while at first glance...
Techs biggest names are working together to regulate AI research
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF AI, the Genie we’ve let out of the bottle is on the cusp of improving at an exponential rate and we need to talk about the potential consequences. Artificial intelligence is hitting its stride, already giving us machines that can drive themselves, talk to...
Nasdaq-GE blockchain paves the way for Virtual Power Plants and distributed energy grids
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Nasdaq imagines a day when you can bypass the local power company and buy power from whoever you like – even your neighbours. Imagine a day when the national rail company buys its power from collectives of neighbourhood consortiums who have an excess from...
Microsoft experiments with underwater datacenters
The oceans are home to coral reefs, ship wrecks and now – datacenters Continuing its long tradition of datacenter experimentation in the name of efficiency, Microsoft announced it has been testing an unusual new datacenter concept – placing servers underwater out in the ocean. Close to half of today’s society...
Microsoft wants to democratise Artificial Intelligence
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Microsoft wants to to give everyone access to artificial intelligence and a supercomputer. Earlier this year, Google’s DeepMind artificial brain conquered a world class champion at the game of Go — a feat that even amazed Elon Musk. But Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is less impressed, at...
Microsoft is turning Azure into the world’s largest supercomputer
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Microsoft has been toying around with FPGAs and now they’re on track to turn Azure into the world’s biggest supercomputer. Microsoft is embarking on a major upgrade of its Azure cloud platform and while the new hardware that the company is installing in its 34...
Machine learning boosts Google’s translation capabilities to near human levels
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The technology behind Google’s AlphaGo is about to give Google Translate a major upgrade and it’s within a whisker of being as good at it as humans are. Last year, a computer system built by a team of Google engineers beat one of the world’s...
BHP turns to blockchain to improve its supply chain
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Blockchain is finding a home in the enterprise and now BHP want to use it to improve their supply chain. At this weeks Global Blockchain Summit BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining firm, revealed that it is going to begin using the Ethereum blockchain and IPFS running on Microsoft Azure...
Scientists use WiFi to read your emotions
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF We are edging closer to living in the world of Minority Report, surrounded by technologies that authorise us, sense us and interact with us remotely, and now the only thing that is fiction is privacy. Whether it’s at your local fuel station or at...
Storing the worlds information in a shoe box, Microsoft buys millions of strands of DNA
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF Is Microsoft building its own team of super sales people? No, it’s all about storage. Very dense, very long term storage. Your next computer might store its data on DNA and while this concept is nothing new Microsoft is spending millions of dollars on buying...
Eclipse, the world’s first AI produced short film hits the screens at Cannes
WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF The worlds first AI produced short film is a portent of things to come. Earlier this year I wrote a thought article showcasing how emerging technology will change how entertainment is produced, distributed and consumed and here I am, just months later, writing another...
Google reinvents hyperscale storage
Organisations that operate hyperscale cloud data centers, such as Alibaba, AWS, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Tencent have always pushed the limits of what’s technically possible with yesterday’s hardware so in 2011 it came as no surprise that they formed the Open computing Project alliance, a program that set about to...
The rise of the Innovative CIO
The CIO’s role is changing driven by Cloud and an increasing number of ‘as a Service’ solutions that progressively reduce the organisations dependency on maintaining a high number of specially skilled ICT staff. Under these new conditions organisations have two options – they can make their technology managers, architects and...
Google is being disrupted
Alphabets new structure is a response to Googles falling ad revenues and increased competitive pressure An Exercise Thank you for reading my article but be warned that I’m going to ask you to take part in a quick exercise and to incentivise you to do so I’m going to...
In the future everything will be connected
In 400 years time our descendants will look back at our Age in the same way we look at the Stone Age Leonardo Da Vinci was a genius, by combining his observations of the laws of nature with his passion for mechanical invention he managed to conceive early versions of...
