TRENDS 2017

INSPIRATION SERIES

Trend watcher, futurist and international keynote speaker Richard van Hooijdonk takes you to an inspiring future that will dramatically change the way we live, work and do business. New technology will have an impact on everything we do. Over 350,000 people have already attended his renowned inspiration sessions. He works together with RTL television and presents the weekly radio programme ‘Mindshift’ on BNR. With his international research team he investigates ‘mega trends’ such as robotics, drone technology, autonomous transport systems, Internet of Things, virtual reality, cryptocurrency, quantum computing, big data, biotech, nanotech, neurotechnology and their impact on many industries.

Richard van Hooijdonk was recently voted ‘most sought after trend watcher in the Netherlands’.

Richard van HooijdonkTrendwatcher & futurist

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Allied sciences and complementary technologies

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It’s no overstatement to say that the most exciting tech trends for 2017 are transform-ing the future. The trends we’ll discuss really are the shape of things to come, the tech-nologies that will define your grandchildren’s lives.

And we’re excited to report that some of the things already possible will seem like sci-ence fiction. So we’ve been careful to ana-lyse only the best science, bringing you the hard facts and our best insights into the trends that will define the future.

Our goal is to help you understand the frontiers of scientific discovery, to grasp

the disruptions not just of the present, but of the next few decades. We want to help you sense the seismic shifts initiated by the allied sciences and complementary devel-opments we analyse and explain for 2017.

We know that it’s getting harder to keep up with tech trends, and it’s important to have a sense of the ways in which biology, chem-istry, physics, and engineering are working together as never before. So we’ve done much of the hard work for you, explaining and connecting these trends to explore how every discovery in one field opens a new door in another, allowing collaboration that pushes the bounds of the possible.

Richard van HooijdonkTrendwatcher & futurist

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We want to help you get a glimpse of the future. And to do that, you need to have a holistic sense of these complementary developments. So as you imagine the future of one trend, keep in mind its connections to others. It’s hard to credit the innovation that these related trends have already made possible. For instance:

• What would you think if we told you that the technology to control machines with your thoughts already exists?

• Or that transplant patients can now have custom-tailored organs printed in real-time?

• Or that artificially intelligent hedge fund management is already here?

• Or that your doctors can have you swal-low a pill-sized sensor that reports everything from your vital signs to the efficacy of the medications you take?

Once you grasp these current technolo-gies--and they are here, now--it’s easier to see how we can predict that within the next three decades, human ageing will be defeated, android assistants will be com-monplace, and self-repairing, self-driving cars will end traffic accidents and conges-tion forever. Are you ready to see the future? Ready to embrace the changes that are coming? Keep reading to find out!

The Internet of ThingsRoboticsSelf-driving systems3D / 4D PrintingVirtual reality, augmented reality and mixed realityBiotechNeurotechNanotechBig data

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is conceptually uncomplicated: connect almost anything to a networked system of sensors, processors, and software and reap the benefit of data and control. An almost unimagi-nable torrent of information can be had (big data), enabling predictive analytics through the application of artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, the connectivity that drives this horizontal and vertical inte-gration allows some powerful advances in smart tech.

An emerging frontier in the IoT is medical wearables and implants. By swallowing a pill that includes a grain of sand-

sized sensor activated by stomach acid, and by attaching a wearable patch to their skin, patients can provide their phy-sicians and healthcare teams real time information on their vital signs and processes. In practice this means that drug adherence, lifestyle changes, and patient compliance can be measured objectively by phy-sicians, and that patients can know whether the medicine they’re taking is working as it should.

Perhaps most importantly, given privacy concerns, patients can control what, and with whom, information is shared.

And this isn’t sci-fi: Barton Health in the US has already begun prescribing Proteus Discover to its patients!

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The Internet of Things

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The last several years have seen tremendous improve-ments in robotics. Driven by the relative decline of the cost of automation in comparison to human labour and by the grow-ing recognition that advanced robots are superior to skilled workers at a variety of tasks, robotic automation will soon be a part of daily life and work. As the relatively crude automa-tion of the past gives way to smaller, smarter, more mobile designs, we need to prepare for revolutions in production and logistics, medicine and home health care.

We tend to think of robotics as limited to heavy industry, but that’s an outdated view. Advances in mobility, force lim-itation, and machine learning are pushing robotics beyond factories, and a new legion of personal assistant robots will soon join us in our homes. Android assistants and fully automated factories are very nearly here!

Recent developments in quan-tum computing such as IBM’s Watson point to stunning thinking machines that can potentially replace account-

ants, engineers, physicians, and solicitors. Mobile, intelligent, safe robots might replace as many as 80% of current jobs, creating an employment cri-sis in the very near future--a ‘Fourth Machine Age’ revolu-tionising employment.

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Robotics

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Self-driving systems are poised to change transportation for-ever. Recent developments in the capacity of sensors to share information, improve-ments in real-time process-ing, and advances in wireless communication mean that machines will soon take the controls of your car, freeing you to read the news, check your email, or just relax and enjoy the ride. This trend promises imminent disruption and is far, far more advanced than you might realise.

One example that illustrates how developed this trend is is

Otto, a California based startup acquired by Uber. Otto recently showcased an autonomous tractor-trailer, revamped with $30,000 of high tech equip-ment, that could deliver its cargo over a 120 mile journey without human interference.

Otto uses a suite of sensors including lidar to locate itself relative to the road and other vehicles. And when you con-sider that while $30,000 may be a lot of money to upgrade a passenger car, it’s only about 1/6th of the price of a new truck, and the sense of adding this tech to an existing fleet

(or to new trucks) makes a great deal of sense. The question isn’t: “Will self-driving systems replace human drivers”, but rather, “How soon?”

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Self-driving systems

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3D printing is a form of ‘addi-tive manufacturing’ in which layers of thermoplastic or resin are extruded and hardened by high-precision machines. Already disrupting traditional manufacturing and medicine, as printing tech improves and price fall, expect innovation in everything from retail to medi-cal implants and restaurants.

Because 3D printing offers on-demand fabrication, and because the printers them-selves can be dispersed rather than centralised, in the very near future, you’ll be able to order an item and have it made for you, in your home, in a mat-ter of minutes. And this same convenience works for indus-try as well: rather than waiting for that replacement part to be shipped, it can be instantly

printed in-house, making lead times a thing of the past.

And the possibilities of additive printing are astounding. For example, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre successfully printed ear, bone and mus-cle structures, later implanting them in animals. The printed tissues matured with the test subjects, functioning as would their natural counterparts. Their research has been funded by the US military in an effort to help severely injured soldiers recover from otherwise cata-strophic injuries.

These advances are made possible by using ‘bio-ink’ to print organic tissues including blood vessels. Developed by researchers at the University of Missouri, bio-ink is a liquid

slurry of cells and nutrients, often including an inorganic structure or matrix on which the cells can grow. Once printed into shape, the resulting struc-ture is bathed in nutrients or implanted and allowed to grow.

Organovo, a bioprinting com-pany, currently produces liver and kidney tissue for research, allowing ethical human test-ing to determine the safe limits of drug dosages, for instance. In the very near future, expect human organs to be grown for transplant, saving many lives and making the long waits for transplantable organs a thing of the past.

We think hospitals will soon start transplanting bioprinted organs, and that’s just the beginning!

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3D/4D Printing

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Virtual and augmented reality are poised to forever alter edu-cation, industry, medicine, and entertainment.

Differentiated by the degree to which the experience they provide is immersive, virtual reality takes its user out of the real and into a simulated world, whereas augmented reality, overlays graphics or informa-tion on the real world, incorpo-rating the environment of the user. Mixed reality is a bit of both--overlaying the real world with the interactively digital.

One of the most interesting uses for this new tech is in real estate.

Imagine being able to tour a property and have pertinent information--everything from commuting times to your office or the dimensions of a room--materialise before your eyes as you need it. As the MR glasses you wear sense your eye movement, they could seamlessly offer data on the kitchen, bath, mortgage or average utility bill. Perhaps they could project your furniture in the room as well, allowing you to see exactly how your couches might fit. This is the future of real estate, enhanced by AR.

Realtors are excited by the prospect of virtual tours,

imagining a day not too far off when their clients can see new properties from the comfort of their homes, merely by wearing a VR headset. The 3D model of the home, complete with the users furniture and decorations, could be virtually explored to provide a life-like sense of the home.

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Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality

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In biotechnology, imagination is as important as science. It’s all about reimagining biology as complex tech and looking for ways to tweak it to our advan-tage. But for life itself to be manipulable, scientists needed to couple the best quantum computing with innovative nanotechnology and advances in biology and chemistry. In that sense, biotech signals a

growing trend: the intercon-nectedness of the sciences, engineering, and the growing processing power of the fast-est computers. When these are joined to imagination, some very exciting possibilities can be realised.

For instance, researchers at the University of California—San Francisco and its partner,

Gladstone Institutes, used a gene-editing platform called CRISPR to copy the T cells of people genetically immune to the effects of HIV. By revis-ing the cells of regular people, they may be able to confer this genetic resistance. Imagine an inoculation against HIV! And that’s just the beginning for this fantastic trend.

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Biotech

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Focusing on brain-computer interaction, neurotechnology links thoughts to the outside world. Depending on complex sensors and sophisticated development in the sciences and engineering, neurotech offers us the possibility to allow the blind to see, paraplegics to walk, and the depressed to heal themselves. It also enables us to control machines with our thoughts, potentially disrupting a host of allied technologies like robotics and self-driving sys-tems.

The key to this new tech is the brain-computer interface (BCI), a system that allows the direct

measurement of brain activity, translating these tiny electrical signals into a language a com-puter can understand. By send-ing clear signals to a computer, anything that can be automated can potentially be controlled by nothing more than a thought.

Sound like science fiction?

Phillips is already developing home medical systems that use BCIs to help patients suf-fering from neurodegenerative diseases control their home appliances. These systems measure the electrical activ-ity of the brain generated by particular thoughts, thoughts

such as ‘open my email.’ The BCI translates these thoughts into a command, much as a voice controlled system might, allowing a patient with limited dexterity and speech to control devices that would otherwise require touch or sound to acti-vate.

Not only does this make inde-pendence an attainable goal for people who might otherwise require constant care, advances such as these point the way forward for thought-controlled robotics of all kinds.

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Neurotech

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Nanotechnology is as exciting as it is complicated, explor-ing the surprising properties of micro-particles to turn the rules of physics and chemistry on their head. From anti-micro-bial shapes to tubes with walls no more than an atom thick, nanotech promises radical dis-ruption in material science and medicine.

But we shouldn’t imagine these nano-developments as a single technology; they represent diverse advances in physics, chemistry, 3D printing, biology, and engineering. And these complementary sciences are reshaping reality in a stagger-ing variety of applications.

For instance, a promising example of nanomachines was developed by Joseph Wang of

the University of California at San Diego and Anna Balazs of the University of Pittsburgh. By creating microscopic ‘motors’ of gold and platinum, they’ve demonstrated that the addition of hydrogen peroxide allows these tiny particles to self-repair disrupted circuits. Taking advantage of the chem-ical reaction between the liquid and the platinum to act as pro-pellant, they found that the gold side of these Janus particles was attracted to the energy differential caused by the dis-ruption, effectively steering the particles into place where they could close the circuit and effect a repair.

Imagine that the next time you spill coffee on your PC or douse your mobile with water, the damaged circuits were able to

self-heal! That’s pretty cool, but this advance is far more excit-ing than that. Everyday tech we rely on like telecommunication satellites are often incredibly costly to repair. It’s impractical, to say the least, to haul them in when a circuit fails or to fix them in space. Instead, these nanoparticles can allow them to self-heal, saving millions of Euro and providing uninter-rupted, long-term service. Soon, nearly anything electronic may be able to fix itself if it breaks.

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Nanotech

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Big data is the growing tsunami of information generated by mobile devices, sensors, the Internet, and networked objects like credit card machines or wearables. It’s ‘raw and unstruc-tured,’ and it demands sophis-ticated analysis to become useful. You’ve probably heard of it, but it’s easy to misunder-stand. We recommend that you reconsider seeing big data as little more than an abstraction, a rarefied business concept, or a marketing buzzword.

Instead, recognise that big data is the key to customer satis-faction, the lynchpin joining

daily life and consumer desire. It allows businesses to better understand their clients, predict their desires, and adapt in real time. And by linking big data to artificial intelligence, some fantastic new developments are possible.

Machine managed hedge funds are now a reality. Aidyia, run by a complex AI system, uses the data it collects from global markets--really big data--to predict price fluctuations and long-term market trends. Working much like the human mind, Aidyia tries to understand changes in the market in context,

capturing the forest as well as the trees. It’s not trading faster, it’s trading smarter. And Aidyia is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Big data

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The Internet of Things

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Robotics

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Self-driving systems

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Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality

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Biotech

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3D / 4D Printing

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Big data

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Nanotech

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Neurotech

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The Internet of Things: everything talking to everything else

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is conceptually uncomplicated: connect almost anything to a networked system of sensors, processors, and software and reap the benefits of data and control. An almost unimaginable torrent of information can be had, enabling predictive analytics through the application of artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, the connectivity that drives this horizontal and vertical integration allows some powerful advances in smart tech.

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to todayIt’s critical to understand that the tech that drives the IoT isn’t a single trend but rather a number of interconnected developments. 2014 witnessed the resurrection of artifi-cial intelligence (AI) to cope with the sheer volume of data to be assessed for patterns. The omnipresence of smartphones and devices like tablets and wearables meant that a critical mass of data generating ‘things’ had arrived. And improvements in sensor tech, cloud computing, and wireless speed enabled the integration of these data sources with one another at the periphery

or ‘edge,’ and with the centre for processing and analysis.

In 2014, crowd funding and an explosion of venture capital facilitated a rapid growth of the IoT. From improved patient monitoring to augmented reality, from self-driving cars to smart cities, and from interconnected factories to robotics, the IoT raced forward in 2014. The pace of startups, mergers, and acquisitions was just as rapid, as indus-try giants like Cisco and Google gobbled up potential competitors and collaborators.

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2015, however, was a year of consumer revolution, the moment when the IoT jumped from industry to consumer. Though the previous year saw the industrial and commercial applications of the IoT on separate tracks, the use of wearables for workers, for instance, illustrated the ways in which there might soon be a coming together. And the growth of the consumer IoT meant that the advantages of this new tech were introduced to the public for the first time. In 2015, Best Buy began offering a ‘smart home’ section, Fitbit’s connected wearables changed the face of fitness, and smart, connected electronics made their way into people’s daily lives on a massive scale, with Harbor Research estimating that

there were no less than 3 billion new connected devices.

Of course consumers weren’t the only winners in 2015. Smart power grids and smart buildings, using sensors to measure and predict usage and increase efficiency, slipped from the pages of science fiction into real life. From buildings that can sense human absence and lower lighting to power grids that notice and reward low usage at peak hours, the IoT proved itself a viable strategy to those concerned that it was little more than high-tech hype. And in industries dependent on factories, the use of the IoT to collect and analyse data meant improve-ments in efficiency and revenue.

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But the weaknesses of sending oceans of data to a central repository for analysis became clear as well. The solution: ‘edge’ analysis, made possible by improved processor speed at the periphery, in which data is analysed at its source. Of course, there are limits to the power of edge analysis when compared to the quantum processing possible at the centre. And there were other challenges exposed by this explosion of tech as well.

• First, privacy watchdogs grew more and more concerned about how data was gathered, shared, and stored. Given that an army of devices were collecting and sharing private data, legislators real-ised that many early adopters were una-ware of the private information that was being shared by vendors, let alone the risks of hacking and data theft in unse-cured systems. Especially in industries like healthcare, data theft from con-nected devices became a real source of concern, as did potentially predatory data analysis by insurance companies.

• Second, the IoT industry was still frag-mented due to the proprietary ‘space’ carved out by major players like Google or Apple and the legion of independent start-ups. For the IoT to truly take hold, firms and their propriety devices and software would need to ‘play nice’ with one another, something that, so far, seems impossible.

• Third, the growth of the IoT demonstrated that current wireless networks are simply unable to handle the mass of data being generated by ubiquitous connection. 5G wireless networks can solve this problem as their ultra-high frequencies can carry more information by far than current low frequency wireless. But — and this is a big, big but — 5G requires a complete overhaul of the hardware and infrastruc-ture of wireless; not retro-fitting but total replacement will enable the switch. The costs and time involved are staggering.

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Current developments

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This year saw the pace of mergers and acquisitions increase as it became abundantly clear that no one firm had a lock on the expertise necessary to make the most of the IoT. Thus, rather than developing the skills, knowledge, and tech in-house, industry titans increasingly acquired the firms that already had the expertise of the future. Dell, IBM, Texas Instruments and Intel, for example, announced expansions of their supplier networks to keep apace of IoT development.

2016 was also the year of internal recalibration. IBM and Intel, faced with losses in their legacy segments, cut workers and shifted resources to the IoT. IBM, in particular, is going ‘all-in,’ betting that their latest AI, Watson, will dominate the analysis of the big data generated by the IoT. This reflects the growing realisation in the high tech market that the IoT is more about the data it generates than about the connected devices themselves.

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There were also some misses as elements of the IoT’s promise failed to find their target with consumers, and some of last year’s problems remained unsolved.

• First, much of 2015’s push for smart homes met with apathy. Ideas like refrigerators that order milk before you run out or pre-dictive maintenance might ultimately attract consumers, but at the moment, people have proven shy about upgrading their homes with the latest tech. The good news is that these innovations have found a place in industry already, as smart factories and smart grids now rely on predictive purchasing and maintenance.

• Second, although leaders like Google, Mercedes, Audi, and Tesla will soon or are already offering self-driving cars, consumers seem less than excited. As Mary Beth Griggs reports for Popular Science, recent polling the in the US reveals lacklustre interest. “Only 15 percent of respondents wanted a completely self-driving car, and more than 45 percent wanted no self-driving capabilities at all.” Consumers reported being concerned about the safety of a completely self-driving system, and 94.5 percent expressed a desire for steering wheels, brakes, and accelerators in addition to self-driving systems. This doesn’t mean, of course, that the idea of self-driving cars will fail on the market. Rather, it illustrates potential opportunities and challenges for investors in this tech.

• Third, the fragmentation of the IoT market worsened as firms increasingly came to see their use of the IoT as a trade secret. Brian Kester, head of IoT for Autodesk, warned that businesses are coming to see the IoT as a competitive advantage requiring security and secrecy. If this continues, development of the IoT may be hampered for years to come.

• Finally, concerns about data security persisted in 2016. Recent and future legislation in the EU and UK will stifle data collection, necessitating express, explicit permission from consumers and outlawing the use of personal data by insurers. And industries investing in the IoT for themselves were forced to improve network security at no small cost.

“Only 15 percent of respondents wanted a completely self-driving car, and more than 45 percent wanted no self-driving capabilities at all.”

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BUT THERE WAS GOOD NEWS AS WELLInterest and investment in the IoT in the Netherlands led to the world’s first nation-wide IoT network, and Asia — especially Singapore — seems poised for an IoT revolution in terms of smart cities. As Don DeLoach, President and CEO at Infobright, tells New Equipment Digest:

“Most cities are now working on long-term smart city plans that contemplate autonomous cars. Most automotive companies are also considering these capabilities, along with the growth of ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft and the role these key new entrants make to the market overall…Cities are also adjust-ing their infrastructure for more sustainable, productive, and livable environments, including more aggressive contemplation and deployment of IoT-based services.”

Moreover, there were improvements in the security of the IoT. WISeKey, for instance, is integrating security minded AI and authen-tication protocols into its vertical networks. As they explain in a recent press release:

“IoT devices would be able to organise themselves into trusted networks based on mutual authentication, identity and integrity. This trusted cybersecurity platform will only enable IoT devices which can provide a recognized identity and a valid integrity report to communicate with peer devices that are part of the trusted community.”

“This is a promising development, pointing the way to a solution for IoT security in the years to come.”

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IOT IN YOUR BODY: PROTEUS DISCOVERAn emerging frontier in the IoT is medical wearables and implants. By swallowing a pill that includes a grain of sand-sized sensor acti-vated by stomach acid, and by attaching a wearable patch to their skin, patients can provide their physicians and healthcare teams with real time information on their vital signs and processes. In practice this means that drug adherence, lifestyle changes, and patient compliance can be measured objectively by physicians, and that patients can know whether the medicine they’re taking is work-ing as it should. Perhaps most importantly, given privacy concerns, patients can control what, and with whom, information is shared. Barton Health in the US has already begun prescribing Proteus Dis-cover to its patients.

IOT IN THE HOME: ECHO DOT, NEST, AND OWLETEcho Dot is a puck-sized device that pairs with Alexa to transform her into a multi-room personal assistant like Tony Stark’s Jarvis. A home-based Siri, Echo Dot allows you to set alarms, adjust climate, order pizza, call a taxi, play music, and schedule your appointments by voice command. As it learns new skills from users and program-mers, it is automatically updated with these new capabilities.

Nest, a smart thermostat, learns its user’s preferences for tempera-ture, and automatically adjusts the climate for optimal comfort. For instance, Nest knows that you prefer your home at 21 °C when you wake, but like to sleep a bit cooler, at say 18 °C. As you get ready for bed or watch a movie in the evening, it’s already cool-ing your bedroom while keeping your living room comfortable. And because Nest knows when you’re home, it can save you money by cutting heating and cooling while you’re at work or on holiday.

Owlet is a smart sensor system that monitors your baby’s health via a wearable, in this case a tiny sock. The sock measures your baby’s vital signs and transmits its data to a bedside hub or mobile, allow-ing parents to ‘rest assured’ that their child is safely sleeping.

Exciting applications of the technology

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IOT AND SMART INFRASTRUCTURE: THE TRANSACTIVE GRIDBrooklyn Microgrid is using blockchain technology to facilitate peer-to-peer energy exchange with its TransActive Grid. By con-necting sensors and meters with blockchain, the microgrid meas-ures energy production via solar panels and compares this to energy consumption in neighbouring homes. When one house pro-duces more than it uses, it sells the excess power to a neighbour automatically, allowing peer-to-peer energy transfer and a private market for utilities. Local production and distribution, of course, increases transmission efficiency, reduces pollution, provides redundancy and flexibility in the face of storms, and leads to signif-icant cost reductions.

IOT IN INDUSTRY 4.0: SCHAEFFLER AND IBM’S WATSONIBM’s Watson has been hired by Schaeffler, the world leader in bearings production, to analyse the data from millions of sen-sors and devices across the IoT. Watson’s computational power and deep learning, non-linear cognition, mean that it can assess tremendous volumes of data and find meaning in its patterns. Schaeffler and IBM hope that Watson can improve the speed of decision-making and point to paths for improving efficiency and lower costs.

One example of how Watson can help is evident in Schaeffler’s pro-duction of the bearings that allow wind turbines to spin. Mainte-nance of these bearings is expensive; IBM hopes that by studying the data, Watson can provide insights into the performance of these bearings over time, reducing maintenance costs and the energy losses associated with them. One element of this analysis will be Watson’s assessment of sensors on each turbine that measure wind speed. By predicting periods of low wind, Watson will direct maintenance to occur on these least windy days.

Another example is Schaeffler’s move to predictive maintenance on train bearings. By embedding sensors in these systems, the com-pany will provide Watson the raw data on vibration, temperature, torque and speed, allowing IBM’s AI to predict problems and sched-ule maintenance before there is a failure.

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As the cost of sophisticated sensors con-tinues to drop, and as the speed and qual-ity of connectivity rises, it’s obvious that more things will be networked through the IoT. Smart algorithms will allow virtu-ally everything to talk to everything else, communicating their data and collectively answering the challenges of daily life.

It’s not hard to imagine the smart objects of the future. In the next ten to twenty years, you’ll see everything from the mundane to the fantastic. You’ll begin your day with a networked coffee mug that registers the heat and taste of your morning brew and shares this data instantly with your coffee maker, individually optimising flavour and temperature based on what you’ve enjoyed in the past. Your car will have the heater ready when it senses you’re ready to leave

the house, and it’ll drive you to work while you check your email. Your office will sense your approach and raise the lighting for comfortable reading, and later it will order that Thai dish you really like for lunch. At the end of the day, you’ll come home to a house that senses when you approach with your hands full, automatically opening the door for you and bringing the kitchen lights online. Since the refrigerator can sense what’s inside it, your kitchen will offer sug-gestions for quick meals based on the avail-able ingredients. In short, daily life will get more comfortable as these smart devices solve problems with — well — smarts!

The growth of the IoT will soon allow not just driverless cars, but also vehicles that sense when they need repair before they break down, and drive themselves to the

What does the future of the IoT look like?

(robotic) mechanic. And in much the same way, networked wearables will monitor every aspect of your health, alerting your physi-cian to problems before you begin to feel ill. The future of networked objects and com-plex algorithms will make the things around you not just reactive but preemptively active, predicting your needs and providing for them before you need to ask.

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Much of the next few years will be devoted to solving existing problems:

SECURITY WEAKNESSESSecurity weaknesses in the IoT will continue to trouble the industry for the next three to five years. As business increasingly comes to rely on the data networks this new tech provides, expect massive investments in security upgrades and a race to develop the skills and knowledge necessary to secure the IoT.

BULKY OPERATING SYSTEMS Recent developments in the sensors and data transmission reveal that standard oper-ating systems are simply too large to power the IoT’s army of devices. Forward thinking startups and the more flexible of the giants will turn toward producing micro-operat-ing systems, much as was witnessed in the early era of smartphones.

Challenges for the future of the IoT

SOFTWARE NEEDS IMPROVEMENTThe software driving the analysis of big data requires dramatic improvement. The vol-ume of data produced by the IoT will require developments in cloud storage, AI analytics, algorithm development, and edge analysis. As these concepts are at the heart of a web of technologies, improvements will demand across-the-board advances in big data.

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WE ACTUALLY NEED 5G INTERNET5G internet will be required to keep up with the IoT’s promise of data collection and the infrastructure replacement this neces-sitates is a huge commitment. New York City, for instance, has several hundred 4G cell phone towers to handle its mind-bog-gling volume of traffic. But on a 5G system, it would require millions upon millions of transmitters — and anywhere you couldn’t see such a tiny ‘tower,’ you wouldn’t have service. Most importantly, as you’ve probably guessed, they’ll all need to be connected to that invisible backhaul. This is the ‘last mile’ problem brought to its keenest point. We’re not talking about wiring a few hundred towers, but pretty much every building, every house, and every street in Manhattan. The scope of the problem is immense, which is why insiders expect 5G to arrive first in homes and then only later on city streets and in public places.

To make 5G wireless work as 4G does now, we’ll need to build an entirely new infrastructure of wired connections. And that’s going to be expensive. Experts suggest that new forms of con-tracts will emerge in the process, as mobile companies try to share the expense with businesses that demand 5G for their customers and co-workers.

Smart businesses will capitalise on these problem-solving trends, positioning themselves at the centre of IoT innovation.

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Robotics: androids on the horizon

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Once confined to heavy industry, robots are now common in factories of all kinds. Increasingly, the products we use every day are manufactured by machine hands. But as advances in mobility, force limitation, and machine learning continue, a new legion of personal assistant robots will join us in our homes.

Recent developments have improved robots’ ability to work in human environments, to learn complex tasks, and to teach other machines what they’ve discovered, shortening the training time when retooling an assembly line, for instance.

The last several years have seen tremendous advances in robotics. This trend is driven by the relative decline of the cost of automation in comparison to human labour and by the growing recognition that advanced robots are superior to skilled workers at a variety of tasks. As the relatively crude automation of the past gives way to smaller, smarter, more mobile designs, we need to prepare for revolutions in production and logistics, medicine and home health care.

“Android assistants and fully automated factories are very nearly here!”

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2015 witnessed dramatic improvements in machine mobility. Consider that stairs, une-ven pavement or ground, debris, and clut-ter present profound challenges to wheeled or tracked robots. Indeed, an environment designed for human beings, to say noth-ing of post-disaster complications, offers engineers any number of headaches. But advances in bipedal robotics spearheaded by Boston Dynamics, KAIST (formerly the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, and Carnegie Mellon University are paving the way. For instance, KAIST’s bipedal robot recently took first place in a DARPA challenge designed to test robotic responders to reactor meltdown

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

scenarios like Chernobyl and Fukushima. Uneven cinderblock footing, stairs, and sim-ulated radio frequency interference pushed the robots to their limits as they completed a variety of task from turning circular valves to cutting through walls. While none of the designs was autonomous, the winning teams shared a careful balance between human and machine.This points the way forward in the near future: rather than fully autonomous sys-tems, in the next three to five years, bipedal robots will rely on human assistance when faced with tasks beyond their programming. As machine learning improves, however, even multi-function robots may no longer require a helping hand.

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In 2015, advances in the field of machine learning brought fully autonomous robotics one step closer. Amazon sponsored its Pick-ing Challenge, testing a variety of robots’ ability to recognise, grasp, and pack items from its storage shelves (the victor was able to select and pack ten items in twenty minutes). The idea, of course, is to replace its costly human workforce with relatively inexpensive machines, but as is so often the case in the field of robotics, what is easy for us is hard to teach a robot. A human worker can recognise the difference between an umbrella and a cane at a glance, but this is complicated for machines. But advances in ‘deep learning,’ artificial thinking that mim-ics the human brain, when combined with improved sensors, are allowing engineers to

leap forward, bringing Amazon’s dream of a fully mechanised fulfilment centre closer to reality.

These advances don’t just improve indus-trial robots. 2015’s improvements to machine learning and mobility made the idea of home healthcare and personal assis-tant robots more viable. For instance, the same tech that allows a bipedal robot to climb stairs in a reactor ensures that a robot assistant can function smoothly in a home. And when asked to hand a patient her med-icine, Amazon’s effort to teach machines to differentiate objects might allow a robotic caregiver to understand that by ‘medicine,’ its patient means ‘small orange cylinder containing pills.’

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2016 has been dominated by the co-bot and it’s vastly improved sensors and human-machine interface. Traditionally, the power-ful robots used in factories required large safety zones. Given the incredible forces they exert, they needed to be sequestered behind fences or cordoned off in the recesses of the floor where people were not allowed. Reimagining human-machine interaction, Swit-zerland’s ABB, Denmark’s Universal Robots, and Boston’s Rethink Robotics now offer robots capable of working safely alongside humans. These machines are careful, precise, and tireless. Rethink Robotics, for instance, has offered ‘Baxter,’ a co-bot whose move-ments are both precise and force-limited, since 2012. This may sound old hat in 2016, but Baxter is still the cutting edge of problem solving in robot tech.

Current developments in robotics

In both factory and home, robots face three challenges: • First, they need to be able to work safely alongside human

beings. Especially for personal assistant and home care robots, inadvertently injuring people is simply unacceptable.

• Second, robots need to be able to navigate environments designed for people.

• And finally, machines and their sensors must be able to recognise a variety of objects that may not be clearly labelled or uniformly arranged.

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2016 has also been also defined by artificial intelligence (AI). Improvements in processor speed and machine learning are breaking new ground in robotics, allowing industry leaders to capitalise on this new terrain. Perhaps the most exciting field of research for AI is machine teaching. By connecting robots through the Internet of Things (IoT) and providing them a con-stant stream of data about the tasks and performance of sim-ilar machines, robots have proven capable of teaching one another to work better.

As Amanda Schaffer reports for the MIT Technology Review, one obstacle on the path to mechanised distribution centres and robotic personal assistants is that “many of the jobs humans would like robots to perform, such as packing items in ware-houses, assisting bedridden patients, or aiding soldiers on the front lines, aren’t yet possible because robots still don’t recognise and easily handle common objects.” We spend our childhoods learning what things are and developing the manual dexterity to handle them safely. Robots, by contrast, must be programmed to do these (simple for us) tasks, and this is both expensive and time consuming. One solution to this problem is to teach one robot to differentiate, say, an apple from an orange, and then have that robot remotely teach others of its kind to do the same thing.

Baxter’s design, and the experience of its engineers in practical applications in factories, are presenting plausible answers to two of these. Mobility really isn’t in Baxter’s wheelhouse, after all! Working alongside people, Baxter senses when a human approaches, and adjusts the speed and direction of its movements or halts altogether if necessary. Baxter is strong enough to do the heavy lifting for the humans with whom it works, but sensitive enough to respond to people’s presence, even to the point of letting them know it’s keep-ing an eye on them. There is no danger for the people near it, point-ing the way forward for personal care robots with similar systems.

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Stephanie Tellex of Brown University has partnered with Rethink Robotics to teach its Baxter robot to recognise and manipulate everyday objects. Baxter isn’t programmed as such; instead, it learns much as a child would, studying each thing, experimenting with a variety of ways to grasp it, and then storing this information for sharing with others of its kind. When one Baxter learns, all Baxters learn.

Another such experiment in machine learning has been realised by Fanuc, an industry giant in robotic arms. In cooperation with Nvidia, a leader in microprocessors and AI, Fanuc want to revolutionise

automated assembly lines with machine learning. At present, every new production run in a factory requires a difficult, time-intensive process of reprogramming. The company’s vision is to develop smart robotic arms to shorten this process, having one robotic system train and share what it learns with the others. To handle the sheer volume of data that robotic learning generates, Fanuc turned to the chipmaker to provide the processing power its system requires. Thus, it isn’t one new technology or development at work but rather the interconnection of various trends: robotic engineering, big data, the IoT, and AI.

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SWARMBOTS:

M.A.R.S.The German agricultural giant, Fendt, is applying forward thinking and advanced sensor systems to farming. Their Mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms (MARS) is a design for a lightweight, automated group of tiny robots released from a central loca-tion. Using sensitive GPS systems, these swarmbots can plant and tend crops with precision, and their light weight presents no danger to the soil or to people. Though autonomous, they are monitored and con-trolled remotely, allowing their user to immediately assess their performance.A MARS system uses the idea of swarm to provide redundancy, speed, and safety, guaranteeing high yields.

Some exciting applications of the technology

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SMALL-SCALE ROBOTICS:

The burger botIncreases in minimum wage have driven the fast food industry to rethink its kitchens. San Francisco based Momentum Machines is meeting the needs of the future with its ‘burger bot’ that can cook and assemble as many as 400 burgers an hour. This will allow restaurants like McDonald’s and Wendy’s to move to a kiosk-driven model with a minimal human workforce. And these bots offer greater precision, speed and repeatability than any human, increasing profits and decreasing costs. Momentum Machines is demonstrating that many rou-tine jobs are now ripe for automation. From grocery store stockers to gourmet restau-rants, an inexpensive robot may soon be the go to option for smart business.

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KATIACarbon Robotic’s Kick Ass Trainable Intel-ligent Arm, or KATIA as it’s affectionately known, is a commercial grade, inexpensive, extensible robotic arm that can be fitted with a staggering array of ‘hands.’ From 3D printing to laser cutting and cake decoration, KATIA can do it all. Low cost, mobile tech like this is paving the way for production revolution in which small and medium sized businesses can afford to automate, and because extensible systems like KATIA can be so easily fitted with new tools, the initial investment in the robotic arm can grow with the company. As machine learning improves, expect that systems like KATIA will access the collected experience of other robots, meaning that they will have hundreds if not thousands of skills ready to hand.

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Improvements in the machine-human interface: prosthetics and surgical botsProsthetic hands are still relatively crude, but new research at Johns Hopkins is pushing the boundary between science fact and science fiction. By mapping a patient’s brain to determine which portions of his grey matter controlled finger movement, scientists were able to implant a chip that translated thoughts into actions for a prosthetic hand, allow-ing individual finger movement with an 88 percent success rate. Incredibly, no training was required of the patient: all he had to do was will his artificial fingers to move and the hardware translated his thoughts into action. This could provide incredible benefits to those who’ve lost limbs, potentially leading to technologies that would allow paraplegics to walk and work with their ‘hands’ again.

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THE NEXT THREE TO FIVE YEARS: EXTENDING 2016’S ANSWERS

Ashutosh Saxena, an expert in machine learning, insists that this shift in thinking is the wave of the future. “Earlier such robots were not designed with data sharing in mind…[but] deep learning is par-ticularly well-suited to handling such variations without needing much manual programming.” New robotic systems will be built with learning and sharing in mind, doing away with the need for clumsy programming when they’re required to change tasks.

Think for a moment about how the machines of the next few years could realise Amazon’s mission of a mechanised warehouse in which hundreds of thousands of items are stored prior to packing and shipping. By allowing one robot to learn to differentiate and manipulate Amazon’s products, every robot of its type could then instantly reproduce that action. And the last few years’ improve-ments in mobility allow robots into roles for which they were previously unsuitable. Moreover, when sophisticated force-limiting systems are integrated into smart, mobile robots, they can safely assume roles in home healthcare and act as personal assistants.

What does the future of robotics look like?

The next three to five years will see continued developments in machine learning and mobility, bringing personal care assis-tants, robotic firemen, and completely automated factories that much closer. Even now, sophisticated sensors, improvements in human-machine interfacing, and developments in small-scale robotics are disrupting industries as diverse as mining, fast food, medicine, and fabrication. One problem this creates is that any task that is predictable and repetitive can be performed by an inexhaustible machine.

Recent developments in quantum computing such as IBM’s Wat-son point to stunning thinking machines that can potentially replace accountants, engineers, physicians, and solicitors. Mobile, intelligent and safe robots might replace as many as 80 percent of current jobs, creating an employment crisis in the very near future: a so called ‘Fourth Machine Age’.

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10 YEARS AND BEYONDMoore’s Law predicts that processing speeds will reach near-human capacity by the next decade. Expect, then, that advances in machine learning will allow robots to enter the white collar workforce and begin replacing information workers much as they displaced factory workers in the mid to late 20th century. Bipedal, autonomous robotic systems are likely by 2025, and when coupled with advanced sensors and smart controls, will find their way into hospitals, schools, militaries, and homes.

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Service robots that can mow the lawn or clean windows - are forecast to increase to about $46 billion in the 2016-2019 period, compared with about $7 billion in 2015. The total number of service robots for professional use sold in 2015 increased by 25 percent. The sales value surged by 14 percent to a new record of $4.6 billion. By 2019, sales forecast indicates another rapid increase up to an accumulated value of $23 billion for the period 2016-2019. The over-all outlook for all professional service robots is very positive: In the period 2016-2019, sales of approximately 333,000 new units will rise to a total of $23 billion.

The worldwide sales of industrial robots achieved a new record number of 248,000 units in 2015. This represents a rise of 12 per-cent compared to the previous year. There is no end in sight to this growth trajectory: By 2018, some 2.3 million units will be deployed on factory floors, so says the 2016 World Robotics Statistics, issued by the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). By the end of 2019, around 2.6 million industrial robots will be at

work around the world - one million more robots than in 2015. That reflects a compounded annual growth rate of 12 percent. 70 percent of those robots work in the auto, electrical/electronics and metal/machinery industries. In 2015, growth occurred in the electronics industry, which boasted an 18 percent rise; the metal industry posted an increase of 16 percent, with the automotive sector growing by 10 percent.

Interesting facts and figures

0

50

100

150

200

250

300

2005

*Forecast

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

+12%

2014

+15%

2015

2015-2017:+12% per year on average

Source: IFR World Robotics 2014

Worldwide annual supply of industrial robots 2005 - 2017*

‘000

of u

nits

2016 2017*

Considerable increase between 2014 and 2017

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3.0

Self-driving systems: the road forward for thinking machines

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Self-driving systems are poised to change transportation forever. Recent developments in the capacity of sensors to share information, improvements in real-time processing, and advances in wireless communication mean that machines will soon take the controls of your car, freeing you to read the news, check your email, or just relax and enjoy the ride.

And since nearly all traffic accidents are the result of human error, not only will we be freed from the tedium of driving and released from traffic jams and congestion, autonomous vehicles will save lives — nearly 38,300 in the US alone per year. This isn’t just a problem for America: Europe isn’t far behind that number of fatalities, even with its vastly superior public transportation infrastructure.

This is a staggering loss of life, but the good news is that the tech is nearly road ready. As early as 2017, we can expect truly self-driving systems to fight for legislative approval, and by as early as 2030, driverless

cars may be more popular than those that require a driver at all times.

Self-driving cars are smart, using deep learning that models human cognition to learn and adapt to changing road condi-tions and hazards. By gathering data from onboard sensors and cameras, and match-ing what these ‘eyes’ see with detailed maps, a processor capable of deep learning (DL) can assess the environment. It does this almost like we do, although for us, this process is subconscious and automatic.

Deep learning uses layered algorithms to process data. Like layers of an onion moving

inward toward decision, each layer assesses information — preserving or discarding, highlighting or forgetting — and passing its assessment inward, ever deeper. Complex algorithms help these layers identify what matters, and each successive move inward drives the thinking machine closer to a final assessment.

At the core of the process, this sorted and refined flow of data allows probabilistic rea-soning that mimics the way we process data and make decisions. This is the real magic of self-driving: a machine mind capable of decision-making in a complex, multi-faceted environment.

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The improved safety of self-driving systems has been clear for some time. As early as 2010, the EU began experimenting with ‘platooning:’ having a number of semi- autonomous vehicles follow a professional driver. But advancements in sensors and smart software quickly replaced the platoon model, allowing individual vehicles to drive themselves more safely than a human being could. Flash forward to 2104, and the major players in self-driving systems are pushing legislatures across the globe to consider autonomous vehicles. Human drivers are yesterday’s news.

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

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2014 was also a big year for Tesla. Perhaps the most well known driver of this emerging technology, Tesla leapt forward by taking advantage of the possibilities of open sourc-ing to refine its patent portfolio. Not only did this encourage innovation, but also by shar-ing their tech with competitors, Tesla invited collaboration and complementary engineer-ing — a very smart strategy in an increas-ingly crowded field. They’ve also led the way in marketing: to the younger, more tech savvy, their tongue-in-cheek public cam-paign struck just the right notes. Moreover, by offering public demonstrations of cars that will come to their owners on command, Tesla has really pushed the public to see it as the leader in this high tech sector.

But contrary to what you might think, it’s actually the usual suspects of the automo-tive industry that are the biggest investors in this brave new future. Uber, Google, and Tesla may have been the earliest adopters, but it’s Toyota, Hyundai, and GM that

have the most numerous, most advanced, self-driving systems. That is, while the ‘techy’ firms have been the most vocal adopters, the Japanese auto industry in particular is betting on a future in which the roads are dominated by autonomous vehi-cles; Detroit and Europe are lagging behind. But don’t count giants like Volkswagen and Mercedes out just yet, nor can Tesla’s real-world tests of self-driving systems be ignored as flash and hype.

In 2014, Uber announced its plans to replace human drivers in the near future. Its CEO, Travis Kalanick, revealed that “Uber will eventually replace the people who drive its cars with cars that drive themselves,” following this up in 2015 by collaborating with Carnegie Mellon University to create the Uber Advanced Technologies Centre to bring this dream to fruition. The idea, of course, is that as tech improves, Uber will deploy a fleet of driverless taxis to replace its legions of freelancers, all of whom bite into profits.

Google, as everyone knows, unveiled its self-driving prototype for road testing. Though Google’s test model was involved in fourteen crashes, only one — that’s right, one — was the fault of the Google vehicle. The remainder were, as statistics warn, the fault of other drivers, and this merely con-firmed the safety projections for self-driving systems.

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Advances in sensor tech and analysis drove innovation this year. Whether the self-driving systems use video, radar, light, or ultrasound, the most important issue is their ability to analyse the data they provide in real time, which can mean in as little as 1/10th of a second. Improvements in processor speed, power, and cost meant that for the first time, commercially viable systems could be developed — and the industry began to accelerate. That is, as the cost per unit decreased, automakers could begin to think of self-driving not as a novelty, but as a sell-able good.

One sign of this trend is that California and Nevada began licensing self-driving cars, though completely autonomous driving is still prohibited. Instead, self-driving systems that sense impending collisions and react, and those able to steer a vehicle safely onto

the shoulder should the driver be incapaci-tated, will be allowed by law. Moreover, legis-lation requires that the vehicles be operated by a licensed driver at all time, and numer-ous safety guarantees — including a third party safety check — are required. These are however the thin end of the wedge as we can expect growing acceptance, legal and commercial, of self-driving systems soon.

Another significant trend in 2016 was the self-driving truck. Otto, the California based startup acquired by Uber, showcased its autonomous tractor-trailer. Revamped with $30,000 worth of high tech equipment, Otto reported that their “professional driver was out of the driver’s seat for the entire 120-mile journey down I-25, monitoring the self-driving system from the sleeper berth in the back.” Otto uses a suite of sensors including lidar to locate itself relative to the

road and other vehicles, but experts explain that the nuts and bolts of freeway driving is actually pretty simple. And when you con-sider that while $30,000 may be a lot of money to upgrade a passenger car, it’s only about 1/6th of the price of a new truck, and the idea of adding this tech to an existing fleet (or to new trucks) makes a great deal of sense.

Current developments in self-driving systems

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It’s no surprise, then, that Daimler/Freight-liner is also testing self-driving trucks in Nevada, looking forward rather than invest-ing in the tried and true. Indeed, 2016 demonstrated that self-driving trucks offer remarkable advantages. About a third of the cost of shipping by truck is wages. More-over, human drivers are limited to 11-hour shifts. Add to these issues the safety con-cerns of the current fleet — nearly 4,000 fatalities a year in the US alone — and the savings mount up quickly. And since most long haul truck driving happens on freeways, the technical challenges are more modest than you might expect. Otto’s successes are leading the way forward.

Self-driving in the city is another matter, but one worth exploring to reduce pollution and congestion. One recent development in such self-driving systems is Sohjoa, a Helsinki based experiment in autonomous public transport. Small, self-driving buses ferry passengers around the city at very low

speed, testing and refining autonomous tech in its most challenging environment: urban centres. To be fair, the bus has a straight route and a safety switch manned by a human being, but varying traffic and weather conditions are providing reams of real-time data. A forward-thinking attempt to redefine public transportation, the goal is to reduce the number of privately owned cars in the city.

Not to be left behind, Mercedes recently tested its self-driving ‘Future Bus’ in Amster-dam. While only semi-autonomous and restricted to a specific lane and low speed, Mercedes is proving its proof of concept and refining its tech. Powered by a system called CityPilot, the ‘Future Bus’ is a refinement of its existing system to help truck drivers bet-ter control their vehicles on freeways. It can sense and stop for pedestrians, automati-cally coming to halt at bus stops and open-ing its doors for passengers.

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CATERPILLAR’S SMART ORE TRUCKSIndustry giant Caterpillar has long produced enormous trucks for the mining industry. But recent advances in sensor tech and soft-ware have allowed them to automate these behemoths, enabling Caterpillar to deliver self-driving ore trucks to its customers. Able to ‘see’ where they’re going and navigating the twists and turns of open pit mines, these autonomous vehicles can be monitored from a central command centre, minimising the human workforce and vastly improving mining safety. And since they safely work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, their clients report increases in produc-tivity and profit, illustrating why we think you’ll soon see fleets of self-driving trucks on freeways.

COMMA.AI’S $999 SELF-DRIVING SYSTEMComma.ai’s owner, George Hotz, announced that his self-driving kit, which can be added to any car, can compete with designs like Tesla’s Model 3 at a fraction of the price — and without the need to purchase a new car. Using off the shelf and generic compo-nents, Comma.ai is innovating on a budget. Hotz’s system, how-ever, is admirable advanced, allowing assisted driving controlled by forward looking sensors and some very smart processing.

This tech is worthy of attention because it solves one of the funda-mental problems plaguing consumer roll-out of self-driving tech — high cost for what remains essentially a novelty.

Exciting applications of the technology

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What does the future of self-driving systems look like?

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Industry insiders admit that driverless sys-tems have yet to be accepted by the pub-lic. In part, this is because they redefine the relationship between consumers/drivers and their cars. Not only do some people love driving, but almost everyone has some res-ervations about handing the controls over to an algorithm. As Detlev Mohr cautions, it’s not consumer demand that’s driving these innovations so much as experimen-tal thinking by automotive giants. Thus, no one’s really sure how fully — or how soon — self-driving tech will be embraced by the public. This is a significant challenge moving forward. Automakers like Mercedes, Toyota, and GM have technical hurdles to overcome, especially when it comes to self-driving in urban environments, but perhaps even more pressing are the problems posed by the human element.

As Hans-Werner Kaas told McKinsey, convincing people to trust intelligent cars is a hard sell. “We need to feel comfort-able to actually cede the control of the vehicle to a set of very intelligent pro-cessors and sensors and, frankly, under-lying software,” he said. And even with recent — and dramatic — improvements in machine learning and processing, self-driving systems will find it challeng-ing to share the road with unpredictable human drivers. So what can we expect?

The tech is nearly here. Companies on the cutting edge are developing redundant cross-spectrum systems of sensors, mean-ing that they will rely on more than one type and integrate the various data they receive. In the next three to five years, smart sen-sors and improved algorithms will mean that self-driving cars and trucks, especially on freeways, will be a viable option.

Tesla and Uber think that by 2020, they’ll have fully self-driving cars ready, especially in those cities most carefully mapped. But perhaps the single biggest selling point of self-driving systems for the individual consumer is safety. And as Google’s tests reveal, that promise can’t be kept unless a significant portion of the vehicles on the road is autonomous. When (if) they are, you can expect a decrease in personal owner-ship and an increase in car sharing. As an autonomous vehicle drops one client off, very much like a taxi, it will be summoned by another, and then another, operating smoothly throughout the day. Far from crushing car sales, experts think that the sheer number of vehicles being sold will be higher than it is today.

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But perhaps the biggest area of growth and change will be commercial. For shipping companies currently tied to human driv-ers, the safety and savings of autonomous trucks are too good to pass up. And as self-driving systems get the nod from leg-islators, it’s reasonable to expect fleets of autonomous trucks ferrying goods around Europe and North America, perhaps as soon as 2025.

TECHNICAL AND ETHICAL HURDLESTo be fair, the technical challenges for self-driving are immense and present advances in the face of such hurdles are impressive. The onboard processors linked to sensors must be able to sense the road, its lanes, other vehicles, obstacles, pedestri-ans, and anything else they might encounter in a dizzying number of weather and lighting conditions. This has proven difficult, as sen-sors are easily confused by falling snow or blowing leaves. Moreover, the more unusual

or new the circumstance, the more difficult the task for the deep learning processor.

In the next ten years, engineers and pro-grammers will be looking to improve deep learning algorithms to better equip them to deal with novel events. But there are ethi-cal challenges, too. Imagine a self-driving car encountering a group of pedestrians on an icy roadway. Perhaps they’ve gathered around a car accident and are helping an injured driver. On either side of these endan-gered people, the self-driving vehicle detects dense trees. In milliseconds, the processor must assess what to do — and under the circumstances, braking will result in a colli-sion with the people, killing or injuring many of them.

Should the vehicle prioritise the life of its owner? Should it make a utilitarian calcu-lation of total injuries or deaths and steer itself — and its occupant — into the trees?

Would you purchase a car that might care more about others than about you? Should the law demand that these systems choose the lives of many over the life of the driver? There are no easy answers here, and such ethical questions pose a daunting obstacle to the widespread adoption of self-driving systems.

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Interesting facts and figures

The US will be an early leader in deploying autonomous vehicle technology, an effort that will eventually help put nearly 21 million self-driving cars on the world’s roads by 2035, IHS Automotive pre-dicts… The new forecast reflects a 43 percent compound annual growth rate between 2025 and 2035, he said. While 21 million self-driving cars sounds like a lot, consider that globally, traditional vehicle sales hit $82.9 million last year. In 2015, Toyota, on its own, sold more than 10 million vehicles.

Estimated connected car revenues (and market share) by product package, 2015-22

CAGR24,3%

$35.5 billion

Note: Due to rounding, numbers shown here may not add up precisely to the totals provided.Source: Strategy& analysis© PwC. All rights reserved.

Safety

eCall/bCall

Automatic collisiondetection/prevention

Centraldanger warning

more

Autonomous driving

Distance/park/motorway assistant

Distance/park/motorway pilot

Traffic sign detection/recognition

more

Connected services

Mobility/vehicle management

Entertainment

Navigation

more

2015(estimate)

2016(estimate)

2017(forecast)

2022(forecast)

$45 billion$52.5 billion

$155.9 billion

$58.2 (37%)

$54.9 (35%)

$42.8 (28%)

$20.7 (39%)

$14.3 (27%)

$17.6 (34%)$16.8 (37%)

$10.5 (24%)

$17.7 (39%)$13.6 (38%)

$8.3 (24%)

$13.6 (38%)

2015E 2016E 2017E 2018E

Five-Year (2015-2020)CAGR 134%

2019E 2020E

Cars

On

The

Road

_M

illio

ns)

2

4

6

8

10

12

Source: BI Intelligence Estimates, 2015

Estimated cGlobal Installed Base Of CarsWith Self-Driving Features

All Levels

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4.0

3D and 4D printing: manufacturing the future

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3D printing is a form of ‘additive manufacturing’ in which layers of thermo-plastic or resin are extruded and hardened by high-precision machines. Already disrupting traditional manufacturing and medicine, as printing tech improves and price fall, expect innovation in everything from retail to medical implants. Because 3D printing offers on-demand fabrication, and because the printers themselves can be dispersed rather than centralised as is currently the case with manufacturing, in the very near future, you’ll be able to order an item and have it made for you, in your home, in a matter of minutes. And this same con-venience works for industry as well: rather than waiting for that replacement part to be shipped, it can be instantly printed in-house, making lead times a thing of the past. Moreover, because 3D printing vastly simplifies the move from prototype to product, R&D costs plummet and barriers to entry fall.

Leaders in this new tech such as Carbon offer cost parity with traditional manufacturing at a much higher production rate. Since 3D printers are less expensive and more mobile than traditional production methods as well, 21st century manufacturing will be dispersed, local, and inexpensive rather than concentrated and costly. As this tech gets cheaper, you can expect a crowd-sourced movement of exploration and creation. Anyone can design a prod-uct to fill a need, print it, test it, and upload the schematics for free (or sale). Anyone with a 3D printer can then download your plans and replicate your design.

Now that’s disruption!

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Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to todayIn 2014, the 3D printing industry raced ahead, growing by an unprecedented 35.2 percent. As the advantages of on-demand fabrication became clear, the demand for this tech exploded. For example, hospitals saw the advantages of being able to print implants and medical devices as they were needed, and of course on-demand printing means that they can tailor-fit the device to the patient. 2015 saw hospitals print syn-thetic skin for burn patients and custom airway splints to hold open the delicate air-ways of babies suffering from tracheobron-chomalacia. Not only do these splints grow with the patient, they only cost $10 and a few hours per splint to produce.

And by paring 3D printing with digital scan-ning, physicians were able to produce life-

like prosthetics for patients with debilitating facial injuries. By scanning their faces, doc-tors were able to reproduce custom-made prosthetics printed in-house.

2014 also witnessed improvements in industrial uses for 3D printing. Improve-ments in the tech by companies like Carbon and DDDmaterial allow faster, more reliable, more accurate printing. Carbon’s new M1 printer uses its Continuous Liquid Interface Production (CLIP) 3D printing technology. As Carbon explains, CLIP “works by project-ing light through an oxygen-permeable win-dow into a reservoir of UV-curable resin. As a sequence of UV images are projected, the part solidifies and the build platform rises.” In contrast to traditional 3D printing, this produces higher tolerances and better

surface finishes and allows the use of very tough resins as base material. In practice, this means that the M1 can be used to produce parts for industrial applications where high rigidity and toughness must be matched with fine precision.

But it wasn’t all good news for 3D printing. Stock prices plummeted for many 3D print-ing mavericks. Stratasys, for instance, found that orders of its 3D printers declined pre-cipitously in 2015 due to market saturation. And 3D Systems decided that the consumer market wouldn’t be profitable for years, withdrawing its only home-based printing system. At least for the foreseeable future, the medical uses of 3D printing are the most likely to see dramatic growth.

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Current developments in 3D and 4D printing technologyThe aerospace industry is increasingly attracted to 3D printing because light, strong, precise components are its main-stay. Boeing announced that its 737 MAX aircraft would be powered by engines using 3D printed fuel nozzles to aerate the jet fuel. Not to be outdone, Orbital ATK tested a printed hypersonic combustor in its scram-jet engine. After 20 days of testing, Orbital reported absolutely no problems with the 3D printed component. In fact, according to their press release, “Additive manufac-turing opens up new possibilities for our designers and engineers…This combustor is a great example of a component that was impossible to build just a few years ago.” It’s reasonable, then, to expect revolution-ary performance gains in the industry as 3D printing advances.

Medical tech also leapt forward in 2016. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre suc-cessfully printed ear, bone and muscle structures, later implanting them in animals. The printed tissues matured with the test subjects, functioning as their natural coun-terparts would. Their research has been funded by the US military in an effort to help severely injured soldiers recover from other-wise catastrophic injuries.

These incredible breakthroughs are made possible, in no small part, because spe-cialised printers can use ‘bio-ink’ to print organic tissues including blood vessels. Developed by researchers at the University of Missouri, bio-ink is a liquid slurry of cells and nutrients, often including an inorganic structure or matrix on which the cells can

grow. Once printed into shape, the resulting structure is bathed in nutrients or implanted and allowed to grow.

Organovo, a bioprinting company, cur-rently produces liver and kidney tissue for research, allowing ethical human testing to determine the safe limits of drug dosages, for instance. In the very near future, human organs will be grown for transplant pur-poses, saving many lives and making the long waits for transplantable organs a thing of the past.

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And 4D printing emerged this year as well, adding the dimension of time to the idea of 3D printed objects. By understanding the way structures react to water, for instance, researchers at Harvard have demonstrated that they can design 3 dimensional objects that later change their shape. While still in its infancy, the hope for this tech is that complex structures that change shape as needed, such as for instance a heart valve, can be produced.

As is usually the case, these advances also showcased limitations in the tech. 3D print-ing faces at least three challenges mov-ing forward. First, the printing industry has focussed its machines on small parts, that is, it has concentrated on fabricating items measured in millimetres and centimetres. This makes perfect sense: given the demand for bio-printing and medical uses, all of which are small-scale, machines capable of printing materials by the metre have yet to emerge. But as the tech advances, espe-cially in industries like construction and aerospace, the demand for sheets of printa-ble building material will certainly grow.

•●Onepotentialsolutiontothisproblemcan be found in recent developments in 4D printing. It’s possible to print a folded material that unfurls itself post-printing. This may allow modestly sized printers like the M1 to produce outsides components.

•●Thesecondchallengeisprintspeed.Though Carbon3D has dramatically cut the time it takes to print an object, the process is still much slower than tra-ditional fabrication. And though 3D printing allows a designer to develop

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a finished product very quickly, mass producing parts through additive man-ufacturing is still painfully slow.

•●Finally,thematerialsthat3Dprinterscan use are relatively limited. To func-tion, they must be liquids that can be extruded through a tiny nozzle. In prac-tice, advances in material tech have pro-duced some very tough resins, as Boeing and Orbital ATK can attest. But many cur-rent designs are built around metals. For 3D printing to really shine, we may need to redesign engines from the ground up, rethinking how we can shape components to take advantage of resinous materials.

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Exciting applications of the technology

FOOD INK.’S CULINARY PRINTERThe revolutionary Dutch pop-up restaurant, Food Ink., has debuted a printer capable of extruding and cooking everything from hummus to smashed peas to soft cheese to pizza dough. In short, anything that can be reduced to a paste. Operating much as a standard 3D printer does, the machine from byFlow sculpts food with a precision extruder, allowing almost architectural cre-ativity to define the shape of the dishes its chefs imagine.

4D DRUG DELIVERYBecause 4D printing can produce shapes that predictably change in response to external stimuli, it’s possible to print ‘layers’ of oil that encapsulate water-based drugs. These tiny sandwiches of oil and medicine are called ‘mutlisomes,’ and they react to changes in temperature or pH, releasing their contents when needed. In the future, we may see printed, nano-packets of med-icine injected before we need them, wait-ing to deliver drugs as we need them in response to illness or injury.

PRINTED AIRWAYSAn unfortunate number of children are born with defective airways, necessitating difficult and dangerous surgical intervention. But this could soon be a thing of the past: University of Michigan’s biomedical engineer, Scott Hollister, has designed a printed airway that holds open the child’s trachea as he or she grows until it is gradually absorbed by the body. This slowly disintegrating airway allows the bronchial cartilage to grow slowly on its own, and does away with the need to surgically remove a normal stint that would soon be too small for the child.

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What does the future of 3D and 4D printing look like?

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The future of printing is exciting. Researchers at Harvard recently announced their success printing beating heart tissue. Currently designed to replace animal testing, much like Organovo’s liver and kidney tissue, this breakthrough tells us a great deal about what’s to come in the next decade. Soon, everything from bone and muscle to organs like kidneys and livers will be printable, on demand, with no danger of organ scarcity or rejection. This isn’t science fiction — it’s almost here.

But don’t expect printing only in hospitals. One of the biggest advantages of this process is the compact size and portability of the equipment required. 3D printers are already in place on the International Space Station to replicate parts for repair. After all, it’s more than a little difficult to shuttle parts from Earth to space every time they’re needed!

For that reason, space exploration visionaries see 3D and 4D print-ing as integral to the colonisation of Mars, for instance. Given the time, cost, and difficulty of making the trip, explorers will need to take everything they need with them, including the capacity to manufacture things that might break, wear out, or that they simply didn’t realise they’d require.

And as material science improves, so too will the utility of 3D print-ing. HRL Laboratories has developed a new resin with special properties. Post-printing, it can be fire-hardened into flawless ceramic, extending the range of possible uses for 3D printed com-ponents. It’s reasonable to expect that lightweight ceramics and super-plastics will replace high-tensile strength metals, opening the door for 3D printing of jet engines and car motors.

Indeed, it’s conceivable that within the next few decades, 3D and 4D printing could supplant traditional machining, revolutionising the vehicle manufacturing industry by allowing the additive fabrication of cars.

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Interesting facts and figures

Worldwide shipments of 3D printers rose by 35 percent year-to-date (YTD) through the first three quarters of 2015, and the majority of those sales (95 percent of the total 173,962 units shipped) were attributed to low-cost personal/desktop 3D printers with an aver-age price of below $5,000. Interestingly, however, it appears that this demand is not necessarily coming from individual at-home con-sumers, but rather from business-to-business (B2B) purchases.

Additionally, 3D printer market reports from the past few months have revealed even more optimistic numbers for the 3D printing industry, including projections that 3D printer hardware revenue is expected to approach $1.5 billion by 2019; the 3D bioprinting market will reach $1.82 billion by 2022; and that the 3D printing materials market will reach a whooping $8.3 billion by 2025.

9.8%

8.5%

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4.9%

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46.1%

Industrial Design

Architecture

Sensors & Instruments

Electronics Manufacturing

Higher Education

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Distribution of Industry Spending

Source: www.3dhubs.com/trendsNote: This data is based on 3D Hubs enterprise customers. 3D Hubs completes over 40,000 prints per month.

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5.0

Virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality: seeing really is believing

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Virtual and augmented reality are poised to alter education, industry, medicine, and entertainment forever. The difference between these related technologies is the degree to which the experience they provide is immersive: virtual reality takes its user out of the real and into a simulated world; augmented reality, by contrast, overlays graphics or information on the real world, incorporating the environment of the user. Mixed reality is a bit of both — overlaying the real world with the interactively digital.

Augmented and mixed reality add to what’s already there, making them ideal platforms for sharing information about the world. Virtual reality, on the other hand, creates a new reality limited only by imagination. Both are exciting and useful, though they are often used for different purposes.

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In 2012, Oculus VR, a leader in the headsets that drive the tech, collected $2 million in Kickstarter investment to develop two pro-totype headsets, the so-called ‘Development Kit’ 1 and 2. Clunky, 2D, and merely beta-ver-sions, these headsets nonetheless offered a full 90 degree perspective for their wear-ers. This may not sound impressive, but the proof was in the promise: a mere two years later, Oculus was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion. That’s a staggering purchase price that should reinforce the disruptive potential of VR. A similar example in AR was Magic Leap, a researcher in augmented real-ity retinal display. They asked investors for support and were rewarded with a haul of

$542 million; Google was the leading inves-tor, but the list was a virtual who’s who of high tech. If you follow the money, it’s hard to underestimate the impact that Face-book and Google think this tech might have. Insiders suggested the potential for trillions in sales across a range of industries.

There were other headset players as well. HTV, in collaboration with the game designer Valve, unveiled the Vive headset at the 2015 Game Developers Conference. This headset uses separate screens for each eye and can track eye movement, opening possibilities for more than entertainment.

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

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You are probably familiar with Pokémon GO, the augmented reality hunt for cute crea-tures in real-space. But if you think this fun and addictive game represents the best in AR, you’d be mistaken; the tech is already far more advanced than you might imagine.

MAGIC LEAPMagic Leap has maintained its aggres-sive posture toward venture capital, raising another $800 million and bringing the value of the startup north of $4 billion. While they have yet to release their tech to the public, they have offered a glimpse at the results.

Magic Leap uses ordinary looking lenses, much like those you might find in ordinary glasses. But that’s where the similarity ends. Rather than AR or VR, Magic Leap is calling what they do mixed reality (MR), because their tech tricks the brain into thinking what’s there is real. A step beyond AR, the results shocked Wired magazine when they explored the prototype. Think way beyond games: by projecting data and graphics in mid-air and tracking hand and eye movement, our mobiles and pcs may soon be replaced by heads-up displays only we can see.

And the possibilities are nearly endless, stoking investors’ enthusiasm. Magic Leap demonstrates the potential to use VR and its related tech as an educative tool, as a research aid, and as adjunct to tourism. By projecting data and graphics over ordinary reality, students could learn more about their interests, for instance, or be directed to more details about their favourite exhibits in a museum. CLICK FOR VIDEO

Current developments in VR, AR and MR

Source: KeongDaGreat/

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not as business-friendly as HoloLens’ MR, illustrating the different advantages that VR and A/MR bring to the table.

THE VOIDNevertheless, VR’s immersive potential leapt forward in 2016, with Ken Bretschneider, Curtis Hickman, and James Jensen’s brain-child, Visions of Infinite Dimensions, finally coming to fruition. The VOID offers its users the chance to experience the excitement of movies, in this case the Ghostbusters fran-chise, in a way that could only be dreamt of before.

The VOID is a miracle of high-tech VR wiz-ardry. Tracking users with motion capturing software, this system of sensors informs the users’ headsets, offering a seamless expe-rience of the set pieces familiar to moviego-ers. By mapping every virtual object with a correspondingly real thing in ‘meatspace,’ the VOID brings a virtual world to life. When you reach for a virtual object, your hand

finds something tangible. Users describe a complex of overlaid effects that trick the mind; you know it’s not real, but you experi-ence it as real anyway. You feel the texture of wood panelling in a hotel you know isn’t there, get hit with something wet when you’re slimed by protoplasm, and smell roasting marshmallow when you cross streams to defeat the Stay-Puft marshmal-low man. Your senses don’t lie to you, so there’s no effort to maintain the illusion. It’s make-believe without imagination.

L’OREALAnd it’s not all about entertainment. Some forms of education benefit from immersion, as L’Oreal has discovered. By using off-the-shelf cameras to capture hairdressers at work, L’Oreal has used a VOID-like studio to create VR training centres it hopes to deploy world-wide. Apprentice hairdressers can study the techniques of experts from all angles, even stepping into the virtual shoes of a pro for a first-hand look.

HOLOLENSMicrosoft is also in the MR market, offer-ing its HoloLens, and in collaboration with the education giant Pearson, has a train-ing program for nurses that replaces actors and large-scale simulations with virtual emergencies. Already in place at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centre in Lubbock and at San Diego State University, HoloLens demonstrates the utility of this approach. We expect that education will increasingly rely on virtual and mixed reality platforms in the near future.

For researchers, three dimensional repre-sentations could aid in complex design, for example, as it’s easier to manipulate and understand a special representation of an object that appears real - think here of Tony Stark manipulating holograms in his lab in Ironman. This is not lost on the tech-titan IBM, which is increasingly turning to MR for data visualisation. Rosstin Murphy, an engi-neer at IBM, explains that VR’s immersion is

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But really good, ubiquitous virtual reality is a challenging goal. Believably simulating reality is no small task, after all, and with the exceptions of installations like the VOID, VR systems are still hobbled by their weaknesses.

• First, VR can be a hard sell. Because the experience itself is immersive and self-contained, it’s hard to demonstrate to a non-user. And merely showing video of what the headset displays doesn’t really provide a sense of the power of VR. Headset makers and VR develop-ers will need to discover new techniques to market their product. So far, this has meant bringing the tech to malls and con-ventions and letting people try it out for themselves. Whether this will be enough to generate demand is anyone’s guess.

• Second, VR sickness is a big problem. Because your eyes and brain are tricked, sometimes receiving signals that conflict with your inner ear, disorientation, dizzi-ness, and nausea are common. Feeling like you need to vomit when playing a game

or taking a tour isn’t going to help extend the reach of VR. Mark Zuckerberg is trying to tame this nasty side-effect by slowing the frame rate on the Oculus Rift headset — we’ll see if it works. He hopes as well to mitigate the next issue as well: lag.

• Third, the immersive experience is under-cut by lag. If you’ve ever suffered through a buffering video you know how irri-tating this can be, but imagine the VR world stuck in a standstill, struggling to catch up with your head movement.

• Fourth, for home use, VR is still too expen-sive. Facebook will soon unveil a home VR system for the price of only £1000 (Sony PlayStation is offering a similar system for £625), and believe it or not, that actually is a bargain. Not only must the computer

running the system be very advanced and graphically capable, but the head-sets themselves are expensive, and the VR system is a bandwidth hog. And MR fares even worse: Microsoft’s HoloLens is a whopping $3000. For now, it’s hard to see many committing to that price tag.

• Finally, for VR to reach its full potential, it needs to carefully track the user’s eye and body movements. Right now, even the most advanced systems for home use struggle with that. The VOID solves the latter issue with a system of sensors, but this simply isn’t practical if we want everyday VR. And as easy as it might sound to track eye movement, it isn’t.

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Exciting applications of the technology

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VR FOR MILITARY TRAININGThe costs of soldier training can be enor-mous, and the risks are considerable. To answer these challenges, the military is exploring VR training for combat manoeu-vres. Designed much like the first person shooters popular with gamers, these VR systems teach soldiers the best techniques to breach doors, for instance, or move down an urban street under fire. Because the sim-ulation can mimic a real environment, sol-diers can prepare for very specific missions this way as well. This gamification of train-ing allows easy repeatability, relatively low cost, and no risk. And because the training program can be paused, instructors can provide real time feedback and have a sol-dier repeat what he just learned.

AR AND VR IN REAL ESTATEImagine being able to tour a property and have pertinent information, everything from commuting times to your office or the dimensions of a room, materialise before your eyes as you need it. As the MR glasses you wear sense your eye movement, they could seamlessly offer data on the kitchen, bath, mortgage or average utility bill. Perhaps they could project your furniture in the room as well, allowing you to see exactly how your couches might fit. This is the future of real estate, enhanced by AR.

And realtors are excited by the prospect of virtual tours as well, imagining a day not too far off when their clients can see new proper-ties from the comfort of their homes, merely by wearing a VR headset. The 3D model of the home, complete with the user’s furniture and decorations, could be virtually explored to provide a life-like sense of the home.

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The future of VR is exciting. We think movies will become entirely virtual in the not too distant future and offer more interactive adven-ture than pure spectacle as they are now. Beyond the entertainment industry, education and medicine stand to benefit in the next three to five years.

As L’Oreal and Texas Tech’s nursing program illustrate, complex, interactive skills can be visualised and practiced in VR and MR. Soon, expect skilled trades like machining, plumbing, and electrical work to be taught in M and VR, and for pros to use AR to help them take their work to the next level. For instance, an electrician wearing AR glasses will be able to ‘see’ the power lines in a closed wall and know precisely where he needs to cut in.

And as the tech becomes cheaper and better, we think you’ll see it become an integral part of basic education, helping students grasp geometry, geography, and science. Teachers will be able to rotate three dimensional models before their students’ eyes, move from a map of Tanzania to its capital for a virtual tour, or illustrate the com-plex motion of electrons around a nucleus with a moving, realistic, interactive graphic. And as IBM shows us, everything from data visualisation to R&D can benefit from the inclusion of this powerful technology.

What does the future of VR, AR and MR look like?

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Medicine, too, sees the benefit of VR. Trials have already begun for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) using virtual reality. Guided through stress-inducing re-experiencing of the initial trauma by therapists, soldiers may one day receive counselling and aid through the use of complex VR systems. Current research reveals that by engaging patients with VR games that mimic the range of motion demanded by physical therapy, they are better able to tolerate the pain inevitable to treatment. One example for those needed shoulder rehabilitation is a snowball fight simulation using penguin opponents. Focusing on winning and not on the injury, patients respond better to the difficult process.

Patients suffering from autism, too, have seen remarkable improve-ment with the addition of VR. Through interaction with avatars in modelled social scenarios, children learn to recognise and respond to social cues. Researchers and clinicians are able to measure their brain activity as they play, and early reports suggest increases in brain activity in the portions of their grey matter responsible for regulating social behaviour.

Ten years or more from now, we’re betting on MR implants that replace mobile devices as our means of interacting with the digital. By then, it will be routine to swipe left on the graphics that hover where only you can see them, opening an email with a nod.

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Interesting facts and figures

Virtual reality and augmented reality, its closely related sister technology, already represent a $1 billion market, and the market -research firm SuperData estimates that investors will pump $2.8 billion into VR and AR companies this year alone.

After years of development, 2.5 million virtual and augmented reality devices are expected to be sold this year, rising to over 24 million device sales in 2018. The analysts estimate that more than 12 million virtual reality headsets will be sold in 2017, with sales of augmented reality smart glasses expected to be worth $1.2 billion in the same year. CCS Insight believes that although augmented reality and virtual reality are two very different tech-nologies, they each have the potential to deliver transformative experiences. Goldman Sachs predicts all of this to become an $80 billion industry by 2025.

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6.0

Biotechnology: reimagining life as technology

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Biotechnology is a trend in which imagination is as important as science. For researchers in this exciting field, it’s all about reimagining life as technology: seeing cells as tiny machines or photosynthesis as a mechanism to produce solar energy. It’s about new questions, novel approaches, and the creative manipulation of basic biology.

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to todayFor life itself to be transformed into tech, scientists needed to couple the best quan-tum computing with innovative nanotech-nology. This led to some exciting advances. For instance, in the last few years, scientists have had access to processors capable of handling the staggering amount of informa-

tion necessary to decode individual human genomes, allowing individualised therapy. And this matters: there are enough genetic differences between patients (and between cancers, too) that doctors benefit from knowing exactly what’s happening at the level of DNA.

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fuel photosynthesis, these scientists engi-neered tobacco that more efficiently uses available sunlight.

Imagine a steam engine. It needs pressure to work, but too much pressure can dam-age the mechanism. Photosynthesis has a comparable logic — plants require sunlight to produce energy, but too much sun actu-ally damages the mechanism by which they do this. So plants have evolved a system for protecting themselves from too much light — a system that these researchers have tweaked to squeeze a bit more efficiency from nature.

And they’re now working on foodstuffs like rice. Krishna Niyogi, one of the scien-tists from the Berkeley team, noted that “The molecular processes we’re modify-ing are fundamental to plants that carry out photosynthesis, so we hope to see a similar increase in yield in other crops.”

But plants like soybeans, corn, and sugar-cane can do more than feed us. Biofuels have been a fixture of the last decade, with trends like biodiesel pushing the limits of renewable energy. Made from a vegetable source like soybean oil, biodiesel is usually mixed with conventional fuel to form a ratio. In 2014, for instance, Chevrolet released its Chevy Cruze Clean Turbo Diesel, rated for a B20 or 20/80 blend of bio/fossil fuel mix, signalling the move from the laboratory to real life, where these new biofuels can make a difference in how we consume fossil fuels.

As a practical example, many hospital patients are treated with anticoagulants that reduce the risk of stroke. But dosages are highly individual: too much and the patient dies from internal bleeding; too little and the patient dies instead from stroke. In 2013, researchers in Japan discovered that they could assess the individual dosage nec-essary for optimal effect by examining a patient’s DNA. This took the guesswork out of dosing, and patients who would have died from complications instead went home to their families.

And by modifying the basic building blocks of life, scientists can now do some pretty amazing things to ordinary plants. For instance, by modifying the way plants protect themselves from too much sun, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley were able to increase the growth of tobacco plants by 15 percent. Essentially allowing the leaves to pull an internal sun-shade when they have had enough light to

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Biotechnology continued to be an attractive option for pharmaceutical companies like Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Pfizer, and Novartis. Because legislation provides no less than twelve years of data exclusivity in addition to patent duration, investments in R&D really pay off. Moreover, this is a hard field to enter for generics producers because of the difficulty and cost of production. This drives the industry giants to increasingly invest in this ultra-high tech trend.

But challenges for the medical application of bio-tech have emerged as well. The US Federal Drug Agency began to require that pharmaceutical companies demonstrate that their biotech worked better than standard medicines, and greater scru-tiny of pricing and safety has impacted the bot-tom line in 2016. It makes sense, then, that R&D is focused on the big stuff — no one’s going to say no to a cure for cancer, for instance.

Researchers at the University of California — San Francisco and its partner, Gladstone Institutes, used a gene-editing platform called CRISPR to copy the T-cells of people geneti-cally immune to the effects of HIV and revise the cells of those who are not, possibly confer-ring this genetic resistance. This might allow a general inoculation against HIV/AIDS, saving tens of millions of lives in Africa alone. Alex-ander Marson, a member of the research team at Gladstone, revealed to Futurism.com that “This toolkit has been a huge missing piece in infectious disease research… Now we have the ability to make modifications in human immune cells and right away see the effects. The potential is immense — this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

It’s easy to see why medical biotech is at the heart of research and development.

Current developments in biotechnology

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What does the future of biotechnology look like?

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In the next few decades, expect expanded biotech research on the most pressing health problems. This is an exciting time to watch this trend: in the next 10-20 years, we may actually be able to cure the most common forms of cancer and reverse heart disease, prevent Alzheimer’s and cure autism. In more than one laboratory now, there are advances in biotech that are very, very close to actionable breakthroughs.

Consider, for example, that at MIT, Guoping Feng and a team of researchers have demonstrated that they can reverse the behavioural symptoms of autism in mice. The Shank3 gene is a pro-tein that allows neurons to communicate with each other. By quieting this gene during embry-onic development, and allowing it to express itself in early childhood, they were able to affect the expression of autism. Continued research at the Washington University School of Medi-cine in St. Louis (WUSTL) has identified a gene related to autism as well. The neurofibromato-sis type 1 (NF1) gene, also responsible for a rare form of cancer, was found to be positively corre-

lated with autism. Stephanie Morris, one of the team’s researchers, explained that “Our research indicates that this single gene also is associated with autism spectrum disorders in these same patients. That may make it possible to look down-stream from the gene to find common pathways that contribute to autism in the wider population.” And given that this single gene is so closely linked with autism, it points the way forward for treat-ment.

As the global population greys, we’re seeing increases in the diseases of later life. Scientists have recently discovered that one cause of declin-ing health is that as cells age, they stop dividing and enter a period of permanent stasis called ‘senescence.’ Essentially the opposite of the hyper-division characterising cancer, these worn-out cells are nevertheless at the heart of diseases like osteoporosis, macular degeneration, and ath-erosclerosis. But scientists up till now have been reluctant to tinker with them for fear of flipping the cancer switch and causing uncontrolled cell divi-sion.

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But not any more. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine may have found a solution. Rather than working to change the behaviour of these problematic cells, they decided to remove them, filtering them from the otherwise healthy bodies of laboratory mice. In a pioneering study they published in Nature this year, they found that flushing senescent cells twice weekly from their test subjects led to markedly lower rates of heart, kidney, and eye disease — and extended the mice’s lifespans by up to a third.

The Mayo Clinic was so impressed with the results that it helped found Unity Biotechnology, a biotech start-up funded in part by Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame, and is beginning the process of moving this technique from mice to human beings. Their goal isn’t primarily to increase the number of years we live — though they probably will — but rather the quality of those years, allow-ing us to maximise our enjoyment of the time we have. Imagine living to 150 but feeling like you’re 35 the whole time!

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Interesting facts and figures

The market of bio-agriculture, combined with that of bioseeds, is projected to reach a value worth USD 27.46 billion by 2018.

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Biopharmacy Bioservices Bioargiculture Bioindustrial

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Source: London Stock Exchange. Data based on FTSE Biotech sub-sector

Biotechnology mony raised on the LSE

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7.0

Neurotech: artificially interacting with the workings of the brain

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Neurotechnology is an emerging field of research that focuses on brain-computer interaction, usually designed to stimulate or respond to the human brain. Depending on complex sensors and sophisticated development in the sciences and engineering, neurotech offers us the possibility to allow the blind to see, paraplegics to walk, and the depressed or stressed to heal themselves. It also enables us to control machines with our thoughts, potentially disrupting a host of allied technologies like robotics and self-driving systems.

The key to this new tech is the brain-computer interface (BCI), a system that allows the direct measurement of brain activity, translating these tiny electrical signals into a language a computer can understand. By sending clear signals to a computer, anything that can be automated can potentially be controlled by nothing more than a thought. Sound like science fiction? Keep reading.

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Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

The firsts steps on the path to true neurotech were rehabilitative therapies that used mind-map-ping or neural measurement to help patients who had lost motor function due to stroke, for instance, to re-wire their neural pathways. By providing biofeedback, these patients could have a sense of when they were exciting the correct portions of their brain, slowly allowing them to move their facial muscles or arms and legs again. Similarly, during brain surgery (routinely performed while the patient is awake), physicians could have the patient speak or move to assess improvement while directly stimulating different areas of the brain with a probe prior to placing an implant.

Even as much as a decade ago, scientists were experimenting with magnetic resonance imaging to directly measure brain activity.

Assessing a test subject who was watching a movie, these researchers hoped that they could see exactly how the mind processes visual stim-uli. By 2011, a team at the University of Berkeley, California had succeeded, recreating the images that a test subject had seen by measuring and reproducing brain activity.

This was an exciting breakthrough because it opened the door to other, more sophisticated forms of measurement, and eventually to very sophisticated BCIs. By measuring brain activity in real time, scientists can now explore a brave new world of treatment for everything from depression to paraplegia, and they could hope to influence brain activity or allow the brain to influence the outside world without the need for invasive implants.

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Current developments in neurotech

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Until recently, severe spinal trauma left the injured bound to a wheelchair for life. But neurotech offers at least two promising possibilities for those suffering paraplegia. First, researchers at the University of Min-nesota have developed a non-invasive BCI that allows paraplegics or those suffering from neurodegenerative diseases to control a robotic arm with their thoughts.

As Bin He, the lead researcher on the project explained, “This is the first time in the world that people can operate a robotic arm to reach and grasp objects in a complex 3D environment using only their thoughts without a brain implant… Just by imagining moving their arms, they were able to move the robotic arm.”

Using a cap fitted with sensors that meas-ure electrical activity in the brain, the robotic arm was able to move in concert with thoughts, merely by having the test subjects imagine the motion they desired. Repeated

trials demonstrated that they were able to move everyday objects from a table to a shelf 70 percent of the time, without the need for complicated training or invasive implants. This could revolutionise options for the impaired without necessitating costly or risky surgery, and it points the way for-ward to help the disabled regain control of their lives.

The hope for the future is a partial robotic exoskeleton that could be fitted for patients who’ve lost the use of their arms, for instance. By directing the robotic arms like they would their own, they could navigate the trials of daily life — literally allowing the paraplegics to walk again!

A second approach involves restoring biol-ogy through the BCI, rather than working to give the injured the ability to control a set of robotic limbs. Researchers at the Uni-versity of Irvine, California have, for the first time, demonstrated that they can bypass

damaged nerves and provide a paraplegic mediated access to his limbs. In a ground-breaking study, scientists used BCIs to provide tech-mediated stimulation to the patient’s legs, allowing him to walk with-out the assistance of a robotic exoskeleton. The idea was to transfer thoughts directly to muscles in the legs, bypassing the injured sections of the spine.

Although the test patient was selected on his ability to control the BCI, and although he required training in a virtual reality envi-ronment to learn to provide the system clear ‘thought inputs,’ this development repre-sents a startling leap forward in treatment. Soon, it may be possible to implant a para-plegic with a BCI that allows him to use his arms and legs!

Building on the pioneering work of the UC Berkeley team that explored how the mind processes what the eyes watch, scientists were able to assess electrical activity in the

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part of the brain responsible for vision, and managed to reconstruct images in real time, effectively playing back what the test sub-ject was watching. If you’ve seen the Black Mirror episode, ‘Grain,’ then you have an idea of what this could mean — and its dys-topian possibilities. In the future, by implant-ing a tiny chip in a person’s head, we might be able to record and replay anything we see, using our frontal cortex as a biological GoPro!

Philips is developing home medical sys-tems that use BCIs to help patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases control their home appliances. As you would expect, these BCIs measure the electrical activity of the brain generated by particular thoughts, such as ‘open my email.’ The BCI translates this thought into a command, like a voice controlled system would, allowing someone with limited dexterity and speech to control devices that would otherwise require touch or sound to activate.

Not everything in neurotech is designed to help the unwell. For instance, Daniel Chao and Brett Wingeier, co-founders of Halo Neuroscience, wondered if direct stimulation of the neural pathways that regulate mus-cle activity could enhance the efficiency of a workout. So they invented a wearable, basi-cally a small headset that looks a lot like a pair of headphones, that can send signals directly to the brain. What they found was that by summoning more muscle fibres to work, not only could they increase appar-ent strength, but the exercise was actually more effective at building muscle - perhaps as much as 50 percent more effective. This technique can also help the brain build and improve new neural pathways, decreasing the time it takes to learn complicated motor skills.

Halo claims that the US military has shown an interest in this aspect of its tech, using ‘neuropriming’ to hasten the speed of pilot and sniper training. While this clearly has

uses for occupational therapy, for instance, it’s easy to see just how many complex tasks could be made easier to learn with this tech.

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Neurotech is advancing rapidly as BCIs become more sophisticated and as computer processing speeds allow us to assess the big data produced by the brain.

One avenue of future development is mood ther-apy. Thync, for example, offers its buyers a weara-ble band that stimulates the brain to create either relaxation or excitement, depending on the needs of the user. Through a small pad positioned above the eyebrow, the Thync band sends signals to the frontal cortex, allowing users to ease their anxiety or turn up their attention. We expect that contin-ued research in this field will allow direct mood assessment and correction. In the near future, a small wearable may sense an oncoming wave of depression and affect brain chemistry to ward it off, all without the need for conventional drugs!

But perhaps the most exciting possibilities being considered now involve BCIs capable of enhanc-ing the human brain. Such ‘neuro-hybrids,’ a step in the direction of the cyborgs of science fiction,

will have ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ brain implants that enhance cognition, memory, and motor function in real time by monitoring brain activity and instantly adjusting time to maximise performance.

In some ways, this is truly exciting. Imagine being able to search your memories like you would search computer files or having everything from basic heart function to muscle growth assessed and influenced by your mind! But in other senses, the ethical challenges provoked by this tech are considerable. Should we allow enhanced neuro -hybrids to compete in sports against unenhanced humans? Indeed, will the non-hybridised be able to compete at work, or will this new tech effectively create an underclass of ‘normal’ people?

Will this merely perpetuate and exacerbate the effects of social and material inequality? As we develop neurotech, we may need to turn to the archives of science fiction to consider the ethical aspects of this deeply futuristic technology.

What does the future of neurotech look like?

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8.0

Nanotech: microscopic is the new big

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nanoscale comparisons

10-6 10-310-910-12

things man-made

things natural

picometers (trillions) nanometers (billions)

nanoscale (1-100 nm)

micrometers millimeters (thousants)

Ant 5 mmCells 100 µmBacteria 1 µmProteins 10 nmDNA 2,5 nm

Nanotube 10 nm Transistor 22 nm NEMS 100 nm Quantum dots300 nm Pinhead 1 mm

Water 0,3 nmmolecules

Nanoscale comparisons

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Nanotechnology is as exciting as it is scientifically complicated: it uses the unusual and surprising properties of micro-particles to turn the rules of physics and chemistry to its advantage. From anti-microbial shapes to tubes with walls no more than an atom thick, nanotech promises radical disruption in material science and medicine.

These nano-developments are however not a single technology; they represent diverse advances in physics, chemistry, 3D printing, biology, and engineering. Not a united field, nanotech is better understood as a rough collection of allied sciences and experi-ments, a collection requiring staggering expertise and a team of related technologies to bring it to market.

As Anthony Vicari, a tech analyst for Lux Research explained to Investing News, “Nanomaterials have some fea-tures in common — small size of course, and some common production meth-ods — but their properties, uses and tar-get applications vary from cosmetics to cars to consumer electronics.” He said, “To talk about nanotech is a bit like talk-ing about a total market for metal and lumping together gold, steel, titanium and uranium.”

The high-tech research environment most conducive to advances in such a diverse field is largely, but not solely, located in the US. In fact, the government there has spent more than $18 billion since 2001 on direct nanotech funding through its National Nanotech Initiative (NNI). But the US is not alone, of course; global funding in 2014 was estimated at $24 billion. Numbers like that should reinforce the idea that nanotech is more than a buzzword.

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Nanotechnology takes advantage of the strange physical properties of micro-par-ticles and advances in our ability to print and manipulate atomic-scale materials. For instance, by arranging sheets of carbon only one atom thick in a honeycomb lat-tice, scientists in 2013 were able to produce super-strong, super lightweight graphene, useful in everything from car bodies to sport equipment and space tech. Stronger and lighter than carbon fibre, this new synthetic material could revolutionise the aerospace industry in the next decade. Immediate uses for graphene offer improvements in flat panel TVs, refinements in lightweight body armour, and increased battery efficiency.

The medical uses of nanotech are perhaps the most exciting. For instance, Nanospec-tra Biosciences proved that nanoparticles, called ‘auroshells’ because of the gold they contain, could be accumulated selectively in tumours, while normal cells do not absorb them. When struck by near infrared lasers, these nanoparticles converted the light into heat, killing the cancer cells while only min-imally injuring surrounding healthy tissues. As this tech is tested and refined, we expect that the selective, direct cancer treatment made possible by nanotech will increasingly become the first choice of physicians.

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

CLICK FOR VIDEO

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Amazing as these breakthroughs are, they revealed challenges too. Perhaps the most pressing was the cost of such new tech. “Very often,” Dr. Timothy Fisher, of Purdue Univer-sity, told the American Society of Mechani-cal Engineers, “a technology that exploits a unique attribute of a nanomaterial can offer improvements in functional or engineering per-formance, but almost as often, these technol-ogies require scarce materials (and therefore expensive) or slow or complicated manufac-turing processes (also expensive).”

Graphene isn’t inexpensive, nor obviously are ‘auroshells,’ and if a lightweight, high-storage car battery triples the cost of the vehicle, it’s doomed as a consumer good. For nanotech to deliver on its promises, we’ll need to see increased efforts at commercialisation and improved scalability.

2014 and 2015 weren’t quiet either, and the pace of nanotech accelerated. 2014 witnessed scientists from Australia and Spain successfully replicate a

nanotexture drawn from the wings of the ‘Wander-ing Percher’ dragonfly. The result: a spiky silicone surface that physically prevents bacteria growth, promising anti-microbial environments. Rather than relying on secondary anti-microbial agents like bleach that require constant reapplication, these structures are themselves inherently ‘clean.’ This offers distinct benefits for hospitals, where everything from floors to surgical instruments could be made permanently sterile. And research teams from Harvard and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign refined nano-batteries, proving that they were able to 3D print tiny batteries, about the size of a grain of rice. They hope that this new tech can be used to power tiny medical implants and devices like hearing aids.

What batteries were to 2014, medical nanotech was to 2015, from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s sponge-like silica particles that remove heavy metals from water, to new nano-sensors for diabetic patients that measure blood glucose in real-time.

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Current developments in nanotech

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In 2016, the cost of nanotech continued to decrease, leading to greater commer-cialisation of the tech. That’s good news on a number of fronts, especially for the environment. Climate change is increas-ing desertification in many of the poorest parts of the world, challenging the least well off to find clean drinking water. One recent application of nanotech may help solve this problem. Tiny nanorods have been demonstrated to spontaneously vaporize water because of the special interaction that ultra-tiny spaces have on moist air. Potentially, this means that a system of billions of these tiny water

producing rods could draw clean drink-ing water from the air. Incredibly, this tech was discovered by accident, highlighting the disruptive, unpredictable nature of this field.

Sustainability was a watchword in 2016, and Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) pursued water savings by designing clothing impreg-nated with nanoparticles of silver and copper. The naturally anti-microbial materials, when struck by ordinary sun-light, created heat that evaporated organic molecules, meaning that in the

near future, nothing more than a quick hang in the sun might be necessary to clean clothes! Not only would this mean less water usage — 14 to 17 gallons per load for modern front-loading washing machines — but also a vast reduction in the need for detergents that can pollute existing water sources.

And further research on graphene moved beyond basic material science, imagin-ing uses for the novel substance beyond lightweight strength. Vicas Berry and Ankit Mehta, researchers at the Univer-sity of Illinois at Chicago, discovered

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that this new nanomaterial can be used to detect cancer. By using graphene threads to measure the minute electri-cal fields caused by human cells, their team of engineers and physicians was able to assess when individual brain cells had moved beyond normal function into the hyper-growth that means cancer. By taking a simple cell sample, or perhaps by embedding these nanoparticles in patients in minimally invasive procedures, we may soon be able to detect cancer before it becomes symptomatic, making a cure far more likely.

But it’s not only static materials — micro-layered carbon or silver-impreg-nated cloth — that’s at the forefront of this trend. Nanomachines, exactly what the name suggests, are pushing the boundaries of work and repair to the microscopic. Driven by the basic laws of matter and energy, these tiny machines can do a great deal — everything from

repairing a circuit to providing medi-cine to the inside of an artery. In fact, this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry was awarded to a French team for its inven-tion of a molecule-sized motor. To say that this is potentially revolutionary is something of an understatement, and experts think that the nanotech era may prove even more disruptive than the digi-tal age.

For instance, a promising example of nanomachines was developed by Joseph Wang of the University of California at San Diego and Anna Balazs of the Uni-versity of Pittsburgh. By creating micro-scopic particles of gold and platinum, split evenly between the two and thus earning these particles the name of ‘Janus,’ they’ve demonstrated that the addition of hydrogen peroxide allows these tiny motors to repair disrupted cir-cuits. Taking advantage of the chemi-cal reaction between the liquid and the

platinum to act as propellant, they found that the gold side of these Janus parti-cles was attracted to the energy differen-tial caused by the disruption, effectively steering the particles into place where they could close the circuit and effect a repair. Imagine that the next time you spill coffee on your PC or douse your mobile with water, the damaged circuits were able to self-heal! That’s pretty cool, but this advance is far more significant.

Consider complex devices like telecom-munication satellites that are incredibly costly to repair, or remote sensors like seismographs warning coastal areas of the danger of tsunami. It’s impractical, to say the least, to haul these devices in or repair them in place. Instead, these nan-oparticles can allow them to self-heal, saving millions of Euro and providing uninterrupted, long-term service.

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NANO-DELIVERY OF CHEMOTHERAPYNormally, chemotherapy is delivered systemically, poisoning the patient as well as the cancer. While often necessary, this leads to unpleasant or even dangerous side-effects. However, Professor Nobuyuki Tamaoki of Hokkaido University in Japan was able to synthesise nanotubes that move in response to light. Given that they are hollow, they could serve as vehicles for targeted cancer drugs, allowing these tiny cargoes to be delivered where and when they’re needed.

NANOSENSORS FOR CRITICAL INFRASTRUCTUREIn 1963, changes in the water level at Vajont Dam in Monte Toc, Italy, led to catastrophic failure of the cliff face adjacent to the struc-ture. A massive flood of water swept away the nearby village, killing approximately 2000 people. Similarly, on 31 March this year, a bridge in Kolkata, India, collapsed when the bolts used in its construction failed. 27 people were killed, and more than 80 were injured. On 28 October, an Italian overpass failed while being crossed by a heavy truck, killing one and injuring 5. Unfortunately, these failures are not particularly rare, and critical infrastructure such as bridges and dams requires constant assessment to remain safe.

New nanotechnology can help. By embedding countless tiny sensors in a thin sheet of plastic, engineers could continuously monitor the health of these structures, knowing instantly when a problem devel-ops, saving many lives. These nanosensors could be embedded in buildings, roadways, bridges, retaining walls, and dams to provide warning of imminent failure before tragedy strikes.

Exciting applications of the technology

CLICK FOR VIDEO

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What does the future of nanotech look like?

It’s advances like these, driven by discoveries across the sciences, that open the path to the future of nanotechnology. And as the cost of non-renewable energy mounts, expect radical solutions for renewable energy.

One such disruptive tech we can expect over the next decade is energy harvesting from floors and roadways. Wood pulp is a readily available, inex-pensive, recyclable product. Xudong Wang, a sci-entist at UW-Madison, has found that the cellulose

nanofibres in the pulp can be made to produce an electrical charge. When treated with the right mix of chemicals, these nanofibres produce an electricity when pressed against their untreated twins. The result is an inexpensive tech that gen-erates energy from otherwise wasted — and free — weight. Not only could this new tech be layered under conventional flooring, it can be built into major roads and freeways, providing energy cap-ture that is predictable and green.

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Interesting facts and figures

“For example, across all sectors globally from 2012 to 2014, sales of nano-intermediates grew from $167 billion to $453 billion, while sales of nano-enabled products grew from $848 billion to $1.6 trillion.”

Signaturesinitiatives

(11%)

Environ.,Health,Safety(7%)

FoundationalResearch

(42%)

Infrastructure &Instrumentation

(16%)

Applications,Devices,Systems

(24%)

2017 NNI Investments by PCA

The nanomedicine market, which has been estimated at about 20 percent to about 40 percent of the overall nanotechnology mar-ket, was valued at $78.54 billion in 2012 and is expected to grow to $117.60 billion by 2019, according to a new market report published by Transparency Market Research “Nanomedicine Market (Neurol-ogy, Cardiovascular, Anti-inflammatory, Anti-infective, and Oncol-ogy Applications) – Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast, 2013 – 2019.”

0

5

10

15

20

30

35

25

40

45

2020P2008

1,1 2

23,425,7

41,8

2009 2014 2015

p + projectionsSources: BCC Research, July 2009, September 2015 and November 2015.

Global market for nanotechnology in environmental applications, 2008-2020

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9.0

Big data: better living through better information

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Big data is nothing more than the information gathered electronically by mobile devices, sensors, the Internet, and networked objects like credit card machines or wearables. It’s ‘raw and unstructured,’ a mass of meaningless numbers requiring ordering and analysis to become useful.

Just a few years ago, there was simply too little data to be useful — or in some cases, simply too much to be processed. But recent advances in the IoT and computing make it possible to generate the info and crunch the numbers to find meaningful patterns. It’s easy to misunderstand big data, though, seeing it as an abstraction, a rarefied business concept, or a marketing buzzword.

But it’s more useful to recognise big data as the key to customer satisfaction, the lynchpin joining daily life and consumer desire. Every time you shop online, hail a taxi electronically, or surf the web, you’re generating meaningful data. And every time you go to your favour-ite restaurant with your location services active on your mobile, make a purchase with your credit card, or use social media, businesses are watching to optimise their appeal. That is, when you eat, post, shop, or surf, you’re telling businesses what you like (and don’t like) so that they can better serve you.

And they’re paying attention. In the past, only the most forward-thinking companies invested in data. Now, they can’t afford not to: a recent survey found that no less than 48 percent of businesses made the leap to big data in 2016.

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Important breakthroughs in the years leading up to today

“Again, don’t think of big data as an abstraction.”

Chances are you watch movies on Netflix. The streaming content giant knows that it has only 90 seconds to hook a viewer before they move on, and it knows that with thousands of titles, it’s easy to get lost in the choices and switch off. To solve this ‘rabbit hole’ problem and hook you quickly, Netflix uses a smart algorithm to select titles it thinks you’d be most interested in. To do this, it collects data on your viewing habits. What do you watch and how often? Did you watch a film all the way through or give up early? What are your favourite genres?

Let’s say you like romantic comedies. Every now and then, the Netflix algorithm will throw an emo-tional drama in the mix to see how you respond. Then, it slowly adapts to your viewing habits if they change. It also uses the choices your friends make to select titles for you. Its smart algorithm knows that friends often share a cluster of inter-ests, so it watches what they like to get a better sense of what you might like too. This is a great example of how big data shapes business in response to demand. By collecting information on your behaviour, including your response to new offers and the behaviour of your friends, Netflix tries to enhance and personalise your experience.

Source: Kaspars Grinvalds/

Shutterstock.com

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Current developments in big data

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Netflix is only the beginning—a clear exam-ple to concretise big data. But this trend is useful anywhere information is available, and it’s only limited by how data can be produced and assessed. For instance, very few people enjoy air travel. We do it when we must, but nearly everyone has had a bad experience during a flight. British Airways hopes to change that, and is looking to patent a digestible sensor no larger than a pill to shape the future of flight.

When you board the plane, they want you to swallow the tiny sensor. It monitors your heart rate, sleep patterns, body temperature, and other indicators of stress or happiness. By collecting data from hundreds of thou-sands of passengers, British Airways hopes to better understand its customers’ desires and frustrations. When and under what

conditions do passengers tend to sleep and arrive well-rested? How often do they need to stretch their legs? What’s the best tem-perature for optimal comfort? How often do passengers want to eat? What lighting creates the most comfort?

British Airways thinks it can answer these questions better with big data, and if they’re right, they can better serve their customers and increase sales — a win for everyone! Big data can also optimise people’s expe-rience of a city. Consider Barcelona, Spain. Parking in any urban centre is a nightmare. Barcelona faces the added problem of intense summer tourism.

But by using its city-wide Wi-Fi to collect and distribute data, the city built a parking information system on Microsoft Azure’s

foundation. In real time, this system tracks parking patterns and available options, let-ting users know where they can find open spots. Not only does this ease conges-tion and lower stress, it helps the city bet-ter manage tourism and large gatherings like the Mobile World Congress. We think more and more cities will begin to use big data analytics to improve daily life, less-ening congestion, optimising their utilities, and putting the ‘smart’ in smart city with advanced AI.

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The limits of big data, as we mentioned ear-lier, are data collection and analysis. Vast improvements in both are unleashing this trend’s unrealised potential. Consider that artificially intelligent (AI) hedge funds are now a reality. Aidyia, run by an AI system engineered in part by Dr. Ben Goertzel, uses the data it collects from global markets to predict price fluctuations. Working much like the human mind, Aidyia tries to understand changes in the market in context, capturing the forest as well as the trees.

In an interview with MIT Technology Review, Goertzel said: “Our system ingests a variety of inputs, including price and volume from exchanges around the world, news from various sources in multiple languages, macro-economic and company accounting

data, and more… It then studies how these various factors have interrelated histori cally, and learns an ensemble of tens of thousands of predictive models that appear to have predictive value, based on its study of historical data.”

Aidyia uses deep learning to evolve with experience, teaching itself to perform better in the long-term, and Goertzel’s idea isn’t to trade faster but better by leveraging the analytical power of AI to decrypt complex data. And this gives us a very good sense of the future.

As machine learning continues to improve, and as processing power grows with Moore’s Law, we expect AI to take an increasing role in big data. The growth of the IoT will soon mean that nearly everything is

What does the future of big data look like?

both connected and data generating; at that point, only very advanced AI will be able to collect and assess the monstrous volume of data we will generate every day.

The upside of this is that more and more of our daily life can be optimised, from wear-ables that assess our health and make real time suggestions (and perhaps dispense medication through nanotech implants) to self-driving vehicles that track one another as they move and unfailingly avoid colli-sions. There really is no limit to the utility of big data, but there’s also a persistently creepy side to this trend.

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The ethical challenge of big data

As you see by now, big data works by watching everything. But are we sure we want that kind of everyday surveillance? Many of us are uneasy about electronic privacy now, but for big data to bring its best to us, we’ll need to provide it even more access to our lives.

As Ben Rossi reports for Information Age, “Consumers are becoming more wary about what is happening with the vast amounts of data now collected about them – with high-profile and damaging data breaches continuing to make the headlines.”

You might recall the now infamous case in which Target inferred from a young woman’s searches that she was pregnant — sending her advertising that alerted her parents to her condition before she told them. While this might elicit an embarrassed laugh from most of us, Google — for instance — openly says that you have no right to privacy if you use its services, which we all do. Keep in mind that Chrome stores cookies and tracks searches, and Gmail scans every message you send and receive to better refine the advertising you see.

Will you be comfortable when everything from your car to your pillow collects data? Should there be limits on what can be col-lected and shared? Are you willing to provide access to even the most intimate details of your life to businesses whose track record of securing this information is less than stellar? These are tough questions — and they need answers now, as we’re already in the age of big data.

“We rightfully worry about data breaches, but that’s not the worst of it.”

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Interesting facts and figures

Big data is estimated to be a $66.8 billion business by 2021.

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Because of new technologies, we are on the verge of great changes. Robots, nanotech, biotech, the Internet of Things and big data provide new business models and lead to even greater disruptive innovations. Choose the session ‘Trendz! Onward to2030’ and treat your clients, business relations, staff or visitors to a unique and energising experience.

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