President’s Message
Dear Friends,
Very Warm Greetings!!!
We are in the midst of what probably can be called as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, which is convergence of boundaries or their blurring as we know them, between physical, biological and digital worlds through innovations. Technologies are emerging and evolving super-fast. As per some technology futurists, some of the most imminent trends expected in 2020 and a little beyond are: Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a service, 5G Data Network, Autonomous Driving, Personalised and Predictive Medicine and Computer Vision. A fundamental transformation of our societies as we know them presently will take place on a global scale affecting economy and the ways in which humans will interact. There will be big disruptions too with technology and manpower getting redundant or obsolete.
AI is one of the most path-breaking and transformative technological evolutions of our times. AI is presently an expensive proposition for businesses to design, develop and deploy their own AI-based systems. Consequently, much of the AI applications will continue to be outsourced from service providers and 2020 may probably witness wider adoption and many more providers offering tailored applications and services for specific or specialised tasks.
While 5G mobile data networks became available in 2019 for the first time, 2020 is likely to be the year when 5G really starts to fly, with more affordable data plans, more stable connections with super-fast download and upload speeds as well as greatly improved coverage. While we still aren’t at the stage where we can expect to routinely travel in, or even see, autonomous vehicles in 2020, they undoubtedly will continue to generate a significant amount of excitement. Laws, existing infrastructure, social attitudes and human behaviour may undergo change before and after the advent of autonomous driving becomes a practical reality for most of us. Time will tell as to “if,” or “when,” this will become a reality.
Technology and biotechnology are currently transforming healthcare at an unprecedented rate. We will see much more medical investigation applications and precision medicine, which allows doctors to more precisely diagnose, to prescribe medicines and apply treatments, thanks to a data-driven understanding of how effective they are likely to be for a specific patient. The convergence of digital, biology, robotics, nano technologies and medicine are going to play a great role in healthcare.
Computer vision technology allows smartphone cameras to recognise which part of the image that it’s capturing is a face, and powers technology such as Google Image Search.
As we move through 2020, computer vision-equipped tools and technology may be applied for an ever-increasing number of uses e.g… production lines, identifying defective products or equipment failures and, security cameras to raise an alert in case of anything out of the ordinary, without requiring 24×7 monitoring, and for facial recognition. However, the consequent erosion of privacy will always be a debatable issue. The fast advancement of technology is inevitable with its advantages and disadvantages.
Preeti Mehta
President