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Today I am giving a keynote talk at the Digital Economy Show in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mx, at a Conference whose team is The Digital Transformation is here.
In this and the following posts I will capture some of the thoughts I shared in my keynote.
The shift from atoms to bits started in the last century with the availability of the first sensors creating a mirror image of atoms. Those first sensors were human beings, operators, that converted some aspects of the world into input messages for computers to process. More recently, engineers created sensors that can mirror the world of atoms into a world of bits. These sensors have created an unstoppable avalanche of data and we are now learning to extract value out of them to the point that a “Data Economy” is emerging. Sensors are a crucial part of the Data Economy and this is why I will spend some time on them and their evolution.
Interestingly, our ability to correlate and analyse data operates like having sensors on data, what I call Soft IoT. As we have available
- more and more data streams,
- the computational capability to correlate and analyse them and
- techniques to extract meaning,
these soft IoT are becoming more and more important and this is an area where Institutions can drive the evolution since they can create a framework for sustainable open data.
More than that. Institutions can transform scattered aggregation of data into a data infrastructure that can support wealth creation through third parties using those data to provide services, as well as making current processes more efficient or changing current processes with new ones.
This is leading to a Digital Transformation of our Society, of the way of generating wealth and on the way of defining “wealth”. Although technology is important, it remains an enabler. The challenges are in the way of fostering its adoption, in using it, in facing and counteracting enequalities and dealing with novel ethical issues, an aspect that is addressed by IEEE as it considers the impacts of technology.
The Digital Transformation is ongoing, and although it might seem already here I claim that we have just opened the door, with all the road ahead that remains to be walked and sometimes built.
EIT Digital is fostering the Digital Transformation in various ways, through educating the future entrepreneurs, helping present ones to scale up their business and funding innovations in some key areas.
