Recent Blog Posts

This is a guest blogpost by Jason Kingdon, chairman and CEO, Blue Prism Robotic Process Automation’s potential to transform the way we work means every technology vendor under the sun is now ...

While – if one of the most peculiar songs of the 21st century is to be believed – there are upwards of nine million bicycles in Beijing alone, Reuters reports that there are just 27,000 Pepper ...

It’s a reality – and one that becomes ever clearer, the more you travel and the more folk you meet – that the vast majority of people are actually quite stupid. Without getting all political, ...

This is a guest blogpost by Andrew Beers, CTO, Tableau. Ideally, every business decision today would be based on a thorough understanding of all relevant data available. But there’s simply too much ...

In this edition of Tech in APAC, we'll cover some of the top headlines in the region, starting with how a transportation agency in Australia is using machine learning. At the peak of the Covid-19 ...

This is a guest blogpost by Triveni Gandhi, Senior Data Scientist, Dataiku We like to think of data and numbers as indisputable, but the reality is that every piece of information is a product of ...

With the economy opening up, business leaders are looking at how quickly things can start returning to normal. What does normal look like? Numerous studies have shown that over the last year, ...

A Pennsylvania mum has been charged with multiple counts of harassment after reportedly using deepfake technology to oust her daughter’s cheerleading rivals. In a current-day reimagining of Sophie ...

It has been fashionable for the past several years to invoke the term “artificial intelligence” as a ritual bath for the use of IT in healthcare. And while a level of hype can be taken with a pinch ...

Online genealogy platform MyHeritage has embraced deep learning with its Deep Nostalgia service, which allows users to crudely animate photos of their long-dead descendants – or, let’s face it, ...

There is a new dirty word in politics. Over the last few weeks politicians and commentators have spoken publicly about how this year’s GCSE and A’levels won’t be based on algorithms. Instead, they ...

Scientists have been using machine learning to pick out the animal kingdom’s prime suspects for the next coronavirus, and we’re sorry to report it spells party over for a number of familiar ...

This is a guest blogpost by Dr Jamil El Imad, Chief Scientist at NeuroPro. Alan Turing, a brilliant scientist and mathematician is attributed with being the father of artificial intelligence. He ...

For Christmas, we got you the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime. A special surprise from October 2020. A hologram of Robert Kardashian. Here is the transcript in full: “Happy Christmas, reader. ...

A senior lecturer in management at the University of Exeter has suggested a number of wise-cracking robots have the emotional intelligence required to make them suitable for leadership roles. ...

If there is something a CIO could do to enable the business to increase its earnings by 5%, everyone would be listening. McKinsey recently highlighted the difference in performance between those ...

This dystopian shambles of a year has reached a new, personal low, after a PR email revealed that a robotics company based in Reading has completed its first successful trial of a VR-controlled ...

AI is used to find hidden meaning in large datasets. What if an AI system could truly understand an end-to-end business process. What if an AI system could optimise a business process autonomously? ...

A recent survey from price comparison site, comparethemarket.com, has highlighted the subtext, which obscures a host of unfair assumptions made in the depths of computer systems. These assumptions ...

This is a guest blogpost by Claus Jepsen, chief technology officer, Unit4 For decades now, users of enterprise resource planning software have been trained to believe that all the action must take ...

IBM’s decision to spin out its Global Technology Services business is an example of a business trying to remain relevant in the era of cloud computing. In the 1990s, the company pivoted to global ...

As a pig called Gertrude demonstrated Neuralink’s brain implant technology – spiking in mental activity whenever she thought about food before toiling on a treadmill for an inconsequential period ...

Sebastian Klovig Skelton’s article in this week’s CW ezine issue, ‘Auditing for algorithmic discrimination’ could hardly be more timely. The fall-out from the algorithmic exams fiascos of recent ...

This is a guest blogpost by James Loft, COO, Rainbird. If 2020 has been anything so far, ‘unpredictable’ is as good a descriptor as any. The financial services sector has suffered disrupted supply ...

This is a guest blogpost by Jason Kingdon, Chairman & CEO of Blue Prism And it's raining RPA [Robotic Process Automation]… IBM's announcement that they are acquiring a Brazilian Robotic Process ...

In the post-pandemic, post-Brexit world, businesses of all sorts face a range of new challenges – and many will be wondering if AI-based automation could help them win through. From adding more ...

In this week's Ask the Expert segment, Romain Bottier, senior solutions architect for high performance computing and artificial intelligence (AI) at Dell Technologies South Asia, advises ...

Microsoft’s move to replace MSN.com’s human editors with artificial intelligence has resulted in the software misidentifying one woman of colour for another – before regurgitating other outlets’ ...

Restaurants in the Netherlands have been easing themselves back into business with the help of robotic waiting staff, going some way to repair the profession’s reputation after China’s automated ...

AI and machine learning might not be the first thing you think of when you start listing the impacts of lockdown, but the Covid-19 crisis is having effects far beyond the obvious ones. It came up ...

Earlier this month Ocado Technology and a consortium of academic institutes announced Armar-6, the culmination of the five years EU-funded SecondHands project. The premise behind the project was to ...

This is a guest post by Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner, BT The future isn’t at all what we expected. Ten years ago, we might easily have imagined the contact centre of 2020 as an ...

Remember before the pandemic, when news of robotics firms and their increasingly capable creations filled us with dread? Well, to paraphrase Tim from The Office, we never thought we’d say this, but ...

Jeff Bezos may get brickbats over Amazon's treatment of its warehouse workers and Bill Gates may find himself at the centre of a coronavirus conspiracy theory, but for surefire billionaire Bond ...

You sometimes hear people say we might all be part of an elaborate simulation, a highly sophisticated video game created somewhere else in the universe for a bit of entertainment. If that’s the ...

This is a guest post by Raju Vegesna, chief evangelist at Zoho For many, artificial intelligence (AI) is a distant and incomprehensible concept associated only with science fiction movies or ...

This is a guest post by Zhang Dixuan, Atlas datacentre domain general manager at Huawei’s intelligent computing business department The quest for knowledge has driven us to discover the highest ...

So, the past few days has seen some serious deadlines and finals come and go. And, no, we're not going to talk about the rugby (yet). In the world of IT, the "Brexit" of our industry, AKA "Digital ...

There's no doubt now that AI works, and it can work very well indeed – as a technology, at least. And as one of our recent research projects reported, AI-based machine learning (ML) is increasingly ...

This is a guest post by Srinivasan CR, chief digital officer, Tata Communications No matter how much technology keeps evolving, making predictions about the future is always a risky business. But ...

This is a guest blogpost by Adam Kinney: Head of Machine Learning and Automated Insights at Mixpanel When it comes to data, machine learning (ML) is one of the hottest industry trends. But while ML ...

It’s not uncommon for cloud-first companies to participate in open source communities – after all, they have benefited from the very same open-source technologies that power their businesses. In ...

What are the chances of deepfakes poisoning the integrity of the UK’s current General Election? Probably a lot higher now a think tank has created clips of the two frontrunners endorsing each other ...

A robot hand has been taught by OpenAI to successfully solve a Rubik’s Cube in an average time of four minutes. “So what?” you ask, being the unbearable Rubik’s Cube expert you are. It’s true, mere ...

During the Future Decoded conference in London, Microsoft discussed a paradigm shift in application development. But it was not setting out its plans for a new software developer’s kit, programming ...

Amazon has revealed it will soon be introducing an option for users to change its Alexa virtual assistant’s voice to that of self-appointed Kangol ambassador Samuel L Jackson. The announcement ...

Now, don’t get us wrong: we’re as jittery about living in a future of wearable technology as the next milquetoast loser. Some nights we can’t even sleep due to the nagging noughties fear that our ...

“Once you put someone in orbit, it is a lot harder to fix it if something goes wrong,” says Paul Kostek, a senior Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) member and senior systems ...

This is a guest blog post by Tom Dailey, chief international legal, policy and regulatory officer at Verizon The regulatory and policy landscape is a really important topic for all businesses given ...

It's hard to recall a recent presentation from a vendor that didn't include the AI or Machine-Learning buzz-phrases. I'm not just talking IT here - coffee vending machines probably also incorporate ...

Nationwide invests in a startup developing AI that can work out how it should change the way it communicates with different people.

This is a guest blogpost by David Richards, co-founder and CEO, WANdisco At its recent Cloud Next conference Google rolled out a number of new cloud products, services and packages – all designed ...

It has been a week of activism and a call for action, with the Extinction Rebellion, causing major disruptions in London. But alongside grass roots demonstrations, there appears to be a greater ...

Custom hardware is usually the only option available to organisations that need to achieve the ultimate level of performance for AI applications. But Nvidia has taken massive strides in flipping ...

China’s top insurance company, Ping An, has nabbed a coveted Hong Kong government project to develop the city’s electronic personal identity system, or e-ID, for local residents. When ready, e-ID ...

There are no lessons that can be gleaned from the tragic loss of life following the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash on March 10, 2019. As has been reported across the web, the crash bears ...

Improving crop yield using artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic as researchers and tech suppliers cast their sights on an industry that isn’t exactly the forerunners in applying ...

All the world loves robots, and when they are robots holding something a human might hold, doing an activity a human might do, and preferably doing it while looking a bit like a human (two legs, ...

In the run-up to Valentine's Day, toothpaste brand Closeup has teamed up with MullenLowe, a Singapore creative agency, to discover if love can overcome all boundaries (even firewalls), with a ...

A recent pop event at Lloyds Bank in London hosted by DominoData has highlighted one of the age-old ailments of IT. It is the illness of being misaligned with the business. The latest example of ...

The pace of change in the skills in demand (as machine intelligence, now called AI, matures) is matched only by the pace of change in educational technology (using machine intelligence to transform ...

There is a mantra in technology that if a program is fed bad data, it will produce bad results. The same is true of AI. The quality of a machine learning application is directly related to the ...

Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and rural technology start-up Digital Agriculture Services (DAS) have launched a new platform that uses artificial ...

The big challenge for 2019 is not Brexit. It is the demographic time bomb. Britain can no more leave "Europe" than it makes sense to tie our economy to a protectionist "ever closer Union". I will ...

This is a guest blogpost by Julian Nolan, CEO, Iprova A technology revolution is taking place in the research and development (R&D) departments of businesses around the world. Driven by data, ...

World-renowned auction house Christie’s has offered up its first ever artwork created by an algorithm, but as usual with artificial intelligence (AI), there’s an elephant in the room: it’s crap. ...

Amazon has had to rein in the artificial intelligence it was using to help vet job applicants after picking up on its male chauvinist tendencies. As is the case with its human bigot counterparts, ...

Singapore’s National Environmental Agency (NEA) is roping in Alphabet life sciences research outfit Verily’s technology to separate male mosquitoes from female ones in an ongoing project to tackle ...

You don’t need to be told by two self-satisfied dudebros that poking AI with a stick might come back to bite us one day, but Joe Rogan’s recent podcast with Elon Musk has certainly reminded us to ...

The digital revolution is challenging the regulatory environment across every westernised, developed economy. Governments in the EU, UK, France, Germany and the US are each trying to take a lead in ...

What’s all this about deepfakes? We can’t move lately for the sinister imagery that accompanies this ubiquitous news item designed to make baby boomers put down their Oat So Simple. While the likes ...

From Huawei’s Kirin 970 system-on-chip (SoC) that packs in a neural processing unit to Google’s new Edge TPU that performs machine learning tasks on IoT devices, the use of dedicated chips to speed ...

Why is there so much publicity for 40 year old AI techniques, albeit with more processing power, bigger data files and more reliable communications lines?

As much as we try to embrace all the various wonders of modern technology, we still turn into Danny DeVito’s character as the bitter, resentful father in Matilda whenever we see a news story about ...

Technology companies are always coming up with increasingly elaborate ways to announce their new products. But when drone manufacturer decided to postpone the press event where it would announce ...

Bosch has forced startup firm Mayfield Robotics to cancel the release of Kuri, a home robot that was all set to patrol your house and rob your dog of its last shreds of dignity. Could it be that ...

Businesses need to give robots a probabtion period for different roles andd must be prepared to bring out the P45

If you are starting to suspect that the AI hype is overblown, and that it's just the latest term that marketing folk love to add to make their product sound more interesting, you are not alone. ...

This week, we suppose we’re meant to have some kind of sideways take on Downtime icon Elon Musk selling flamethrowers to his lamewad fans, but documenting this man’s hijinks is starting to become ...

One app mentioned at Zendesk’s customer experience conference this month was Replika, an AI friend that on first impression seems barely an improvement on grandparent’s crumpet Eliza from 1964. ...

Amid the growing arms race between the US and China to dominate the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence (AI), it is industry players and markets that will really drive adoption of the ...

Every time a robot does something that humans deem to be suspicious, a debate is sparked about when artificially intelligent beings will take over the world. There have been more than enough films ...

This is a guest post co-authored by Zach Katsof, director of intelligent communications at Arkadin; Holger Reisinger, SVP of large enterprise solutions at Jabra; and Alan Shen, VP of consulting ...

Guangzhou-based drone company EHang has broken the world drone display record for the most drones used at an airborne show, but the decidedly indifferent Chinese media preferred to point out the ...

A new study by Seagate has revealed that APAC organisations are warming up to artificial intelligence (AI), but a significant number have not invested in the data and technical solutions required ...

One of machine learning’s most well-known use cases is fraud detection, an area that has drawn the attention of a growing number of technology suppliers looking to develop the best algorithms and ...

The House of Lords report on AI and UK economy and society came out this week, with the guardedly bullish title: “AI in the UK: ready, willing and able?” The question mark is moot. I think a strong ...

At Huawei’s annual analyst summit in Shenzhen this week, the Chinese technology giant unveiled its predictions about what the future holds from a technology perspective in its Global Industry ...

It’s the week of the 2018 London Book Fair at Olympia, and the worrying news has reached Downtime that our jobs are indeed under threat from the rise of the robots, with the publication of the ...

What will happen to London's high streets when robots replace the people that buy all the flat whites?

The technology industry is still relatively young, and certainly has a lot more growth to come. But it’s old enough now for us to see the repeating trends that make regulatory and legal ...

In a country that, according to Michael Gove, has “had enough of experts”, you might have expected the death of Stephen Hawking to trigger a bunting rush not seen on these shores since the street ...

Philip Hammond’s Spring statement, as UK chancellor, reached, predictably, for the rhetoric of the so-called fourth industrial revolution. Not for the first time. Whenever he gets the chance to say ...

It is not surprising that telemarketing jobs will be taken by robots but the fact that modelling jobs are 98% likely to be done by robots in 2035 is.

This is a guest blogpost by Luiz Aguiar, data scientist at GoCompare. We produce a massive amount of data every day. Not only that, our attitudes towards the data we produce are also changing. ...

This is a guest blogpost by Matt Jones, lead analytics strategist at Tessella, in which he argues companies with physical products and infrastructure cannot simply cut and paste the tech giant’s AI ...

Despite recent advancements in deep learning, which has its roots in neuroscience, it not a dramatic breakthrough in artificial intelligence as it is sometimes portrayed. That was the key point ...

It’s nice that we have a prime minister that chooses to use one of her most high-profile speeches of the year to talk about technology. It’s equally good that her chancellor similarly discussed the ...

Amazon, originator of the smart speaker category in the home, is taking Alexa into the office too. However, as David McClelland explores in the first of a two-part feature, Amazon isn't the only ...

Time now to check in with Downtime linchpin Sophia the robot, who’s been dazzling the world once again – this time at CES 2018. No, it’s not wig-cleaning day for Ray’s wife at Disney World’s “Hall ...