When I started working, back in 1971, magnetic tapes where seen as a magic form of data storage. One could store an unbelievable 1.1 MB of data! At that time the alternative was storing data on paper tapes… This very old technology (in Moore’s clock reference) has kept improving, although …
Read More »Body on a Chip
Over the last 20 years microfluidics has made possible to create micro-laboratories where molecules can interact in predefined stages, like writing and executing a program with a computer consisting of tiny reservoirs connected by pipes. This evolution led to the development of organ on a chip easing the testing of …
Read More »Pizza is fuelling innovation
According to the 2018 Pizza Power Report the worldwide business of selling pizzas has reached 134B$, 3 billion pizzas have been eaten last year in the US, over 30 billions in the world. That’s not bad for something that started as a slice of bread with some tomatoes and cheese. …
Read More »In a blink of an eye
There are many persons that cannot use their senses, and movement, to interact with the environment and with devices that in most cases have been designed to interact with people with normal abilities. The use of computers, sensors and software has made possible in the last twenty years to develop …
Read More »AI is becoming a marketing word and it’s a pity -VIII
Human Machine Interaction Interactionwith a machine has been basically a mechanical activity. I push a lever and a cog is engaged. There is no awareness on the side of the cog, it just finds itself executing what has been forced on it. When interacting with a computer the situation is …
Read More »AI is becoming a marketing word and it’s a pity -VII
Home Intelligence If there is an area where AI hype is in full swing that is the home environment. We are bombarded by intelligent vacuum cleaners, intelligent microwave ovens,… even intelligent toobrush. True to tell, some advertisers downplay the intelligence a bit and talk about “smart”: the smart kitchen, the smart …
Read More »Self-driving: a disruption around the corner. For whom?
Doesn’t matter who you are talking to, car manufacturers, trucking companieus, taxi drivers and lay people, everybody perceives that the coming of self-driving cars is going to produce a disruption in the transportation area and in the transportation value chain. There are perceptual aspects, such as “if I have a …
Read More »AI is becoming a marketing word and it’s a pity -VI
Chatbots Chatbots, robots that can talk and interact with people using natural language are a reality and indeed they are a concrete example of artificial intelligence application. As shown in the figure they are able to learn, get trained to be able to speak and interact at two levels: to …
Read More »AI is becoming a marketing word and it’s a pity -V
Health Care The area of health care is also overflowing with data (although privacy issues are way stronger in this area) and the trend is towards more and more data being generated. The increase in number and adoption of wearable sensors detecting life parameters and the shift towards digitalisation in …
Read More »Speech2Face
I don’t know about you but I often wonder as I am talking on the phone to a person I never met how that person would look like. Is the voice pointing to a specific age, to some specific traits? Of course it is in general easy to tell a …
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