Future Tech Blog

Last December, the Australian Bureau of Statistics quietly announced a major change to the way the 2016 Census would be conducted - making it mandatory for people to include their name and address, along with highly sensitive personal information about their household income and habits. A number of people, myself included, raised red flags about this massive breach of privacy.

Artificial intelligence has been around for a very long time with initial work beginning back as far as the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent times, with the explosion in the amount of data available, expert systems now have a lot more information to be able to work with, and a lot more opportunities to become useful as well. As a result, we’re starting to see AI being deployed for mainstream business applications.IBM Watson has been an early leader in this space, and continues to roll out innovative applications.In this Future Tech interview we talk with Jason Leonard, the Watson Business Leader for IBM across Asia Pacific, GCG & Japan about machine intelligence and the many industries where Watson is being deployed around the world.

It’s impossible to know exactly what’s in the food you’re eating, and for some of us — diabetics, celiacs, allergy sufferers, and others with food sensitivities — that can be a serious problem. By combining the established technology of spectroscopy with mobile communications and cloud computing, startup Tellspec is developing a handheld scanner that might one day reveal all.In this Future Tech interview we talk with Tellspec founder and CEO, Isabel Hoffmann, about Tellspec’s technology and plans, food allergies, additives, genetically modified organisms, and more.

Facial recognition systems rarely have the luxury of taking full frontal photos from stationary people: for many applications they need to rely on side-on, or top-down views of people in motion.In this Future Tech interview we talk with Brian Lovell, founder and CTO of Imagus Technology about the challenges of facial recognition and the capabilities of his company’s technology. Brian also discusses some of the implications, good and bad of facial recognition technology.

One of the biggest challenges facing robotics engineers is the development of sensors able to gather visual data at the speed and accuracy needed for rapid and correct decision-making, and that are light enough to be incorporated into small and mobile devices, such as drones.In this Future Tech interview we talk with the founder of Ocular Robotics, Mark Bishop, and commercial director, Dr Ramin Rafiei, about the technology the company has developed to solve these problems, and the application possibilities it opens up.

Until now there’s been no easy way to capture a 3D representation of an object, communicate that representation and easily recreate it. Russell Consadine’s DottyView technology changes all that.In this Future Tech interview, Consadine explores the potential applications for his technology, in areas ranging from customer service, consumer product guides and maintenance at remote oil and gas facilities.