Emtech Asia in Singapore presents the latest developments on the crossing of business and technology. The agenda of the event has several tracks and the themes of the first day included deep learning, robotics, connected health and digital life. The summary below is by no means a complete overview of all talks. Article by Sven van de Riet (Giarte)
Researcher Quoc Le (Google) presented the latest developments regarding Google Brain. This project looks at learning for e.g. picture and voice recognition. The error percentages for these fields of research have dropped significantly. Whereas computers got a quarter of all words wrong in voice recognition a few years back, now this has dropped to around 8%. Results of the project are used in Google products like Photo Search in Google Plus. And the technology behind the project is now also available through Tensorflow as open source.
SuitX is a company that focuses on economically inspired robots and they built exoskeletons. These ‘half robots’ are attached to persons and strengthen or correct human posture. The company aims at providing a solution for the big problem of work related injuries. In the USA alone, the costs are estimated to run into the billions. But the company also aims at introducing skeletons for children with a physical handicap. For the cost of an electronic wheelchair, children could move more freely. It all looks a little clumsy at the moment, so it will still take several years to improve the product. But I do agree when the company claims: everything is better than just sitting in a wheelchair.
Cosmetics giant L'Oréal presented how technological advancements influence their products. The company introduced the app Makeup Genius for your mobile phone. The app helps you to show what certain cosmetics will make your face look like. This might appear as just a marketing gimmick, but they invested quite heavily in e.g. color representation and lighting to make everything look very alive. The company also investigates personalized skincare with the help of electronic skin patches. L’Oréal cooperates with mc10, a healthcare company that works on the BioStamp. These ‘stamps’ can collect data from your body and can be placed on several locations on your body.
Fellow Dutchman Sander Arts, from the American electronics company Atmel, showed how people take matters into their own hand within the so called Maker Movement. These persons seek and built solutions for problems they encounter in real-life. They use all kind of hardware and software, both can be obtained and programmed far more easily than in the past. For example, they use Arduino, an open source prototyping platform to build interactive, electronic objects.
Swedish company Sensavis presented the concept behind their 3D Classroom product. With the help of advanced 3D visualizations, teachers can better explain abstract concepts like photo synthesis or mathematical problems. For example, a teacher can show the visualization of a human heart and take different angles, depending on what he wants to explain. This approach helps to make difficult and complex themes much more understandable and provides an alternative to existing teaching methods. Where some students might have difficulties to grasp the idea with the conventional educational approach, the visualizations help to look at the same problems from a different and more insightful perspective.
For live tweeting throughout the event follow @svenvanderiet