IEEE Future Directions Blog
The IEEE Future Directions Blog, authored by Roberto Saracco, offers daily insight and observations on emerging technologies, trends, and their implications. Featured below are a selection of blog posts on the digital transformation, digital reality, symbiotic autonomous systems, and related topics.
Digital Transformation
In this blog series, Roberto Saracco examines the Digital Transformation and its overarching impacts. The shift from the economy of atoms (scarcity) to the economy of bits (abundance) is leading to major disruptions across many industries. Two IEEE Future Directions initiatives have been working on crucial components of the Digital Transformation, Digital Reality (AR and VR) and Symbiotic Autonomous Systems (Digital Twins). Read more below:
Digital Transformation – Scarcity vs Abundance
Digital Transformation – Flanking bits to atoms
Digital Transformation – How many bits are needed?
Digital Transformation – Taking a broader view
Digital Transformation – The loss of value
Digital Transformation – Disruptions, Part II, Part III
Digital Transformation – Towards the Disruption
Digital Transformation – Distributed Digital Platforms
Looking Ahead to 2050
Looking Ahead to 2050 is an in-depth twelve-part blog series by Roberto Saracco that examines Symbiotic Autonomous Systems, including the various technologies at play, their verticals, and how advances in this emerging area will change the world. The IEEE Digital Reality Initiative intends to build on the ongoing work in this area to address current challenges and foster the transition to a symbiotic relation among autonomous systems.
IEEE SAS eBooks
These eBooks collect posts each year that have been published since 2016 on the FDC blog touching upon the broad area of symbiotic autonomous systems from technology enablers evolution to personal and social impacts.
Related Posts
Additional posts of interest on Symbiotic Autonomous Systems include:
Playing a piano in the air. HiTech virtual reality - Robotics researchers at San Diego UC university have announced the development of a soft glove that can provide (artificial) tactile sensation in a virtual reality world...
A sort of symbiotic autonomous system… - Every week a new drone is announced and although most of them look alike (at least to my untrained eye) a clear trend seems to emerge: they are getting easier and easier to interact with...
A hand that can see - Creating a prosthetic hand that can move like a “hand” and operate like a “hand” is much more difficult that it would seem. It is not just about being able to move and create a shape that fits the purpose, as an example keeps the fingers sufficiently open to go around a egg and then closing them to pick it up. It is also about “knowing” that you cannot squeeze an egg unless you want to break it...
Smart contact lenses are getting closer - Advances in smart materials, that is materials that can sense a variety of parameters and react on those, continues at a fast pace. The idea of embedding sensors in a contact lens is not new, Google announced back in January 2014 a project for a contact lens that would be able to detect glucose in the tears and partnered with Novartis to bring the lens to market by 2019...
Prosthetic intelligence - At TED 2017 Apple executive Tom Gruber (one of the guy behind Siri) gave an interesting talk pointing out that we should create artificial intelligent systems to make ourselves more intelligent and he made the prediction that humankind will become smarter thanks to a seamless interaction with artificial intelligence...
Excitement from Neural Laces - The recent launch of Neuralink by Elon Musk, a company whose business is connecting brains to computers, has created quite an excitement in the scientific community, not because scientists feel that they will succeed anytime soon, the problems that remain to be solved are huge, but because Elon Musk has a knack for creating innovative, and successful, business...
Brain to muscles interface - Brain Computer interfaces are now making the headlines of newspapers around the world. They hit the imagination making miracles possible. At the end of March the news of Bill Kockevar, a 53 year old man paralysed from his shoulders who lost control of his limbs after a bike accident, able to feed himself through the BrainGate2 interface indeed seemed like a technology miracles to the bystanders and to Bill himself...
Nanowires to connect with the spinal cord nerves - Optogenetics, the technology and science looking at interaction with neurones and nerves, is a new area but it has already achieved in a short time amazing results in looking at brain neuronal circuits expanding our understanding of its structure and functions...
Stretchable brain interfaces - Scientists are learning to create smart materials with desirable properties like conductivity, flexibility, bio-compatibility and so on. This makes possible their application in areas that were out of touch in the past...
Enhanced control through Brain Computer Interface - With today’s technology the easiest way to establish an interface between the brain and a computer is to look for brain signals related to movement. When you think of moving a hand an electrical signal is generated in a specific part of the brain and researchers have perfected their capability to intercept these signals...
Connecting the brain with fibres as thin as hair - The exploration of a living brain has made significant progress in the last ten years thanks to optogenetics, a set of technologies that makes neurones sensitive to light (through genetic manipulation by inserting a virus into the neurone) light the neurones and detect their electrical activity...
Lending your brain to a robot - Today most robots work in isolation from humans (there are often fences to ensure safety and avoid unwanted interaction with the machine) but in the future robots are likely to become part of the team and interactions will need to be seamless, as it is today among human workers...
Building bio-bots - Living cells have already being used in several experiments to test drugs and to study various physiological characteristics. Now scientists are taking a step forward, that is using living cells as component of robots creating a symbiotic organisms...