Trend: AI-Speech technology passes Turing Test in specific areas

Speech recognition and language understanding are at the heart of the future of search and information, with many challenges, such as how a reference works, understanding what “he”, “she” or “it” means in a phrase.

It is not at all a trivial problem to solve in language and this is just one of the millions of problems that natural language processing can solve.

Alexa and Google Home are some of the top devices for speech recognition capabilities today. At Basecodeit, we have experience developing skills for Alexa (using AWS Lambda service at its core, and DynamoDB as well), and Actions for Google Home, providing in-voice capabilities to current/already existing platforms.

Trend: Super-large graph neural networks (GNNs)

will  play a major role in 2019 by teaching machines “common sense”. As the goal of a convolutional network is to process an image-complex kind of structured data— and “digest” it into some compressed set of features, a graph network has the same goal, except that its objective is to ingest and derive useful high-level forms of the information contained in a graph. Robust GNNs can function as a human brain that consists of neurons (or nerve cells), equipping machines with common sense, comprehension and cognitive capabilities.

In 2018 we strengthened our Machine Learning capabilities in CNN for image/video recognition, object tracking and others. This gave us the baseline to jump into a whole new era of Neural Networks, as GNNs, ir order to take humans/machines relationship to a new level.

Trend:  Commercialization of blockchain technology speeds up

Blockchain technology is a circulated digital library that saves data securely across multiple systems and makes online transactions possible. It is a reliable source and throughout the transactions it eliminates the need for mediators.

In 2019, blockchain technology will be widely used. There are many advantages of blockchain technology that still need to be explored and companies will explore these things in 2019.

For example, the implementation of blockchain is highly needed in the energy industry.

There are also many necessary applications of blockchain technology for the automotive industry. 62% of the executives in the automotive industry think that in the next two years blockchain will have a troublesome effect in the industry. Some examples:

  • Self-Driving Cars: One of the biggest and most obvious disadvantages for autonomous vehicles is the lack of a centralized authority to guide and regulate the car. Blockchain aims to bridge that gap, Manufacturers wouldn’t have to create their own proprietary network. They’d just have to join an open network using the infrastructure and services that exist within it.
  • Mileage certification:  Blockchain won’t just benefit those who are reimbursed for the business use of their personal vehicle. It will also certify the overall mileage on a car.
  • Safety: One of the more meaningful use cases for blockchain is monitoring safety. By creating an irrefutable ledger of maintenance and safety, employers and their mobile workforces will benefit tremendously.

Blockchain is one of our core technology drivers. We had several success cases implementing distributed platforms via Smart Contracts, boosting industries like Insurance, Education, leveraging IPFS and video content distribution.

Trend: 5G

5G networks are the next generation of mobile internet connectivity, offering faster speeds and more reliable connections on smartphones and other devices than ever before. It’s going to enable a whole new generation of mobile apps, like:

  • Surgery
  • Self-driving cars
  • Drones
  • VR/AR
  • Smart Cities
  • Auto-driving technology

As per our Technology Radar, virtual and augmented reality is going to be present in our developments efforts and expand our current experience in the field (Unity games + ML + VR/AR), in order to provide the markets the needed skills and expertise to address the present/future challenges.

Trend: Computing Architecture and AI-Chips

In the future, computing, storage and networks should meet the demand for high-performance computing for AI development and the demand for low-power scenarios on the Internet of Things. Together with emerging memory devices, the heterogeneous computer architecture with FPGA, GPU and ASIC drives the development of traditional computer architectures. The fundamental changes in the computer architecture will accelerate the arrival of AI and the quantum computing era in the foreseeable future.

Using new services like AWS Inferentia and Google TPU cloud, our cloud experts are going to fine tune the whole Basecodeit’s ML ecosystems and platforms, which includes Tensorflow/Sage Maker models, etc.

Trend: Digital ID

Biometric technology matures and is used on a broad scale. When 3D sensors are widely used and multiple models of biometric features are integrated, each device is equipped with machine intelligence to see and hear the world. Biometric technology reshapes the identification and verification of people, making your digital identity a sort of second identity card. From phone unlocking, door access control to restaurants, supermarket checks, train stations, airport security checks and doctors in hospitals, biometric technology plays an increasingly important role in simplifying trust and improving our daily lives.

Important as it is, we expect that this biometric features, that we already include in our projects, like Face Recognition and Fingerprint login, will become widely used in 2019 developments.