Byton Concept Car

Byton wants your car to feel more like your living room rather than a just a means of transportation. That’s the idea behind its concept car, which the company says will be launching in the U.S. in 2020.
 
The concept vehicle’s most striking characteristic is its gigantic screen, which stretches across the entire dashboard. The car will also include facial recognition so that it can identify the driver and load his or her settings as he or she enters the vehicle.

Vuzix Blade Augmented Reality Glasses

Considering Alexa has made its way into just about every Internet-connected product, it was only a matter of time before the digital butler arrived in smart glasses. The Vuzix Blade augmented reality glasses will support Alexa so that wearers can ask for things like the weather and directions. The Vuzix Blade’s display also sits more prominently in the wearer’s field of view than Google Glass and looks much more crisp and colorful. If developers create compelling apps that blend Alexa’s capabilities and augmented reality, the Blade AR glasses could have some promising potential.

My Special Aflac Duck

Many smart robotic toys are designed with education in mind. But My Special Aflac Duck has a very different but nonetheless important job: The interactive toy, developed by research and development workshop Sproutel, was created to provide comfort to children diagnosed with cancer.

Children can mirror their care routines on the duck and can express their feelings through the toy by holding a circular token to its chest that prompts it to assume the corresponding emotion. Holding a token with a smiling happy face or a frowning angry face to the duck, for example, will enable it to react accordingly. This is meant to provide a sense of companionship to children as they undergo treatment and therapy. The duck is expected to be available for children diagnosed with cancer at no cost in late 2018 or early 2019. In early 2018, it will be shipping to children at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to undergo additional testing.

A Quantum Computing Arms Race Will Lead to First Results

In this year’s hype cycle for emerging technologies, Gartner estimated that quantum computing is still more than ten years away. However, the developments in quantum computing are going a lot faster than expected. The race for the holy grail of computing is on and companies such as Google, D-Wave or IBM, universities such as Yale or UNSW or startups such as Rigetti Computing are all working on developing quantum computers. Each of these organisations has reported breakthroughs in 2017, with the latest being IBM who announced the first 50-qubit quantum processor in November 2017.
A 50-qubit quantum processor is getting closer to quantum supremacy, which IBM now estimates to be at around 57-qubits. Quantum supremacy is defined as the ability of quantum computing to solve problems which can no longer be solved with the world's fastest supercomputer. Not only organisations are working on achieving this quantum supremacy, but also countries are investing billions in it. China is building the world's biggest quantum research facility. Their objective is to have a quantum computer by 2020 that has the computational power of a million times all computers in the world combined.
With several organisations aiming to reach quantum supremacy before the end of this year, there is a real arms race going on. According to Vijay Pande, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, quantum computing is moving out of the science domain and into the engineering phase. Therefore, 2018 will likely see several organisations reach quantum supremacy and focus on scaling up the technology to start working on some of the world’s biggest problems. 

Blockchain Will Mature and the ICO Hype Will Slow Down due to Regulation

The hype around ICOs has amazed many and as of the end of November, 228 ICOs raised a total of $3.6 billion. Apart from many successes, there were also many scams and people who tried to game the system and rob people of their money.

Although the number of ICOs will continue to grow in the first months of 2018, we will also see more regulation. Slowly, governments and regulators will wake up and start to understand the impact this new way of funding has on innovation and economic growth. However, they also understand that consumers need to be protected and criminals need to be caught. Hence, there will be increased regulation in the coming year, slowing down the enormous hype of ICOs. We will see better organised ICOs, still raising millions of dollars, and the first example of these new ICOs was the Kik ICO, raising $97 million with an ICO that will pave the way for more mainstream ICOs.
Apart from more mainstream ICOs, 2018 will also see the first true blockchain applications that will be used by consumers and organisations, where those using the services not necessarily know that they use blockchain technology. After all, for Blockchain to become mainstream, it has to become as pervasive as the internet. Consumers do not know how Amazon or Facebook works, but they are more than happy to use it. That is what is required for Blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology, to have a real impact on organisations and society.
2018 will see more applications being developed and launched, of which many of these by the companies that did do an ICO in 2017. It will move Blockchain towards maturity. Earlier, I discussed seven cryptocurrencies that are worth following and forecasted the end of Bitcoin, as it is technically flawed (despite the ridiculous price increase in the past weeks, which reminds me of tulip mania in the 17th century). All in all, 2018 will be a very interesting year in terms of Blockchain.

Artificial Intelligence Will Take a Leap Forward, without Human Data

2017 was the year that AlphaGo Zero taught itself the game of Go and within 40 days became better than any human or artificial player ever existed. It did so without any human data as input and purely played against itself. As a result, it taught itself strategies and moves no human has ever thought of and arguably progressed the evolution of the game of Go exponentially in a very short timeframe. This achievement marks a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence.
In 2018, this will only continue and we will see more examples of artificial intelligence that will behave in unexpected ways, as it already did so this year. In 2017, for example, AI developers from Google built algorithms that had to compete for scarce resources, resulting in increasingly advanced strategies to beat the component. Google Brain developed algorithms that created new encryption methods, unlike any seen before, to protect information from other neural networks. Finally, Facebook had to shut down two algorithms that created its own secret language, unsolicited and used advanced strategies to get what it wanted. If one thing becomes clear from these developments, it is that artificial intelligence will be fundamentally different to human intelligence.
With the AI arms race in full swing, governments and organisations are increasing their investments in the development of ever more intelligent AI. In September 2017, Putin said that “whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world”, signalling that Russia will intensify its AI activities. On the other side of the world, China aims to outsmart the USA in AI, with Europe unfortunately nowhere to be seen. The AI arms race seriously scares well-known entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking and a solution for the existential threat of AI is still far away.
The combination of an AI arms race and developments where artificial intelligence can be trained without human data will likely result in massive steps forward in 2018. As AI becomes smarter, more money will flow into it. However, ordinary organisations, as well as small and medium enterprises, are likely to miss out, as the power of AI will consolidate among just a few players and countries.

Approach to Data Ownership is on the Horizon

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) become enforced, changing the way how companies should protect data of European citizens. This new regulation will have a big effect on organisations, but in 2018 we will also see the launch and further development of platforms that go even further and enable secure and private data sharing. It can best be compared to each piece of data having its own vault with its own rules linked to it, governed by smart contracts. Any transaction involved with every piece of data can be tracked and monitored and the data owner can benefit in real-time.
One solution currently in the works is the Fujitsu Data Exchange Network. This platform will enable organisations to share proprietary data with competitors, without having to be concerned about revealing confidential information. Another platform revealed recently is the IOTA Data Marketplace. This data marketplace is focused on Internet of Things devices and sensors. Applications or organisations can select a sensor across the globe, make a micropayment to the owner of the sensor and get direct access to the data stream of that sensor, which can be used for data analytics or applications. A revolutionary marketplace, with already over 30 participants, including Microsoft, Fujitsu, Orange and Accenture.
Such renewed data ownership is enabled by the convergence of Big Data and Blockchain. However, it will require a different approach by organisations. Instead of having a large data lake with all consumer data stored centrally, in the future organisations will have to obtain (technical) consent of each customer to access their data vault and use the data for insights. This would involve more than approving a complicated terms & conditions and most likely requires some sort of payment. Several companies are working on new solutions and in 2018, we will see the first workable applications, requiring organisations to prepare for a new reality of data owned and controlled by consumers.

Edge Computing Enables Intelligent Networks

Edge computing is the key factor to make the Internet of Things work since connected devices will generate so much data that transmitting, storing and analysing all that data at a central location is no longer viable. Not only that, connected devices such as drones, self-driving cars or robots will, most likely, require extreme rapid processing. Creating the data, sending it to the cloud for analysis and returning the results to the device will simply take up too much time.
The predictions are that in the coming decade, we will add approximately 100 trillion sensors to our global economy, generating an unfathomable amount of data. The solution for all this data that requires rapid processing is doing edge computing; computations on the sensor itself, albeit at first this will be done on the device instead of on the sensor. Peter Levine, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, even believes that edge computing will slowly take over cloud computing. Although that might sound pretty crazy, it also seems very logical. Today, an average self-driving car produces approximately 1 Gigabyte of data per second, which will likely increase in the years to come. Having to send that data to the cloud, analyse it and return the results would simply not work.
Therefore, in 2018, we will see increased attention to edge computing to enable intelligent networks, where connected devices will perform the required analytics at location and use the results to perform a certain action. It will happen in a few milliseconds, instead of the few hundred milliseconds it takes today when using cloud computing. With self-driving cars that difference can be the difference between a crash or a safe ride home. The world’s cloud computing giants are not ignorant about the opportunities of edge computing. Microsoft has developed Azure IoT Edge and Amazon recently developed AWS Greengrass. In addition, startups such as Packet and Vapor IO are also bringing cloud computing to the edges. In 2018, edge computing will find its way to connected devices, before truly taking off in 2019.