More than one-third of Italy’s richest people inherited their fortunes, compared with just 29 percent in the U.S. and 2 percent in China, according to a 2014 study of the world’s billionaires by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Germany has the highest share of inheritor-billionaires among developed economies, 65 percent. Overall, heirs and heiresses make up about half of Western Europe’s billionaires.
Sandvine, a broadband services company, says that 30 percent of internet data usage at home comes from phones and tablets. That’s up from 20 percent in 2013 and 9 percent in 2012.
Gartner Hype Cycle for ICT in China, 2016
Despite the slowdown in GDP growth to 6.9 percent in 2015, China is still making aggressive investments to drive the adoption of high technology by local enterprises and organizations, according to Gartner, Inc…
The massive consumer base and the number of internet users in China (estimated at 650 million internet and 980 million mobile internet users in 2016) present the most-promising big data opportunities. Led by hyperscale internet companies such as Baidu (internet traffic data), Alibaba (supply chain and transaction data) and Tencent (social data), approximately 25 percent of businesses have been pursuing the value of big data.
“The government-sponsored strategy ‘Internet Plus’ is targeted at boosting economic growth through digital transformation,” said Jie Zhang, research director at Gartner. “It has issued a detailed action plan for 11 key industries in 2015, mandating the necessity of digital business transformation by leveraging big data and cloud technologies.”
The biggest buzz in China’s internet industry isn’t about besting global tech giants by better adapting existing business models for the Chinese market. Rather, it’s about competing head-to-head with the U.S. and other tech powerhouses in the hottest area of technological innovation: artificial intelligence.
Venture capitalists have been pouring money into startups focused on AI, which broadly refers to efforts to make computers emulate human cognitive functions such as recognizing speech or images. Chinese tech companies such as search giant Baidu have been investing heavily in the technology, and poaching high-level talent from foreign rivals.
Enthusiasts of the technology in China say those resources, along with some particular advantages in China, such as the sheer volume of data generated by its enormous population of internet users, makes this an area where China can excel.
“China is poised to be a leader in AI because of its great reserve in AI talent, excellent engineering education and massive market for AI adoption,” says Kai-Fu Lee, a former Microsoft and Google executive who is now chief executive of Sinovation Ventures. The firm, formerly known as China’s Innovation Works, has invested $100 million in 25 AI-related startups in the U.S. and China in the past three years.
In total, over $1.1B has been deployed across 21 deals to Chinese digital health companies in the first six months of the year. It’s worth noting, though, that three investments each totaled over $100M in financing over the period including Ping An Insurance-backed medical services app Ping An Good Doctor, Beijing-based mobile healthcare app maker Spring Rain Software, and health data mining startup iCarbonX.
The chart above highlights how mega-rounds have propelled China’s digital health investment since 2012. Deal activity in the first half of 2016 was nearly equivalent with that of all of 2015.
Submerged version of Nikola Tesla’s remote-controlled boat
PBS:
[Nikola] Tesla wanted an extraordinary way to demonstrate the potential of his system for wireless transmission of energy [radio]. In 1898, at an electrical exhibition in the recently completed Madison Square Garden, he made a demonstration of the world’s first radio-controlled vessel. Everyone expected surprises from Tesla, but few were prepared for the sight of a small, odd-looking, iron-hulled boat scooting across an indoor pond (specially built for the display). The boat was equipped with, as Tesla described, “a borrowed mind.”
“When first shown… it created a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced,” wrote Tesla. As happened fairly often with his inventions, many of those present were unsure how to react, whether to laugh or take flight. He had cleverly devised a means of putting the audience at ease, encouraging onlookers to ask questions of the boat. For instance, in response to the question “What is the cube root of 64?” lights on the boat flashed four times. In an era when only a handful of people knew about radio waves, some thought that Tesla was controlling the small ship with his mind. In actuality, he was sending signals to the mechanism using a small box with control levers on the side.
Tesla’s U.S. patent number 613,809 describes the first device anywhere for wireless remote control. The working model, or “teleautomaton,” responded to radio signals and was powered with an internal battery.
Tesla did not limit his method to boats, but generalized the invention’s potential to include vehicles of any sort and mechanisms to be actuated for any purpose. He envisioned one operator or several operators simultaneously directing fifty or a hundred vessels or machines through differently tuned radio transmitters and receivers.
When a New York Times writer suggested that Tesla could make the boat submerge and carry dynamite as a weapon of war, the inventor himself exploded. Tesla quickly corrected the reporter: “You do not see there a wireless torpedo, you see there the first of a race of robots, mechanical men which will do the laborious work of the human race.”
Tesla’s device was literally the birth of robotics, though he is seldom recognized for this accomplishment. The inventor was trained in electrical and mechanical engineering, and these skills merged beautifully in this remote-controlled boat. Unfortunately, the invention was so far ahead of its time that those who observed it could not imagine its practical applications.
[Nikola] Tesla’s work in robotics began in the late 1890s when he patented his remote-controlled boat, an invention that absolutely stunned onlookers at the 1898 Electrical Exhibition at Madison Square Garden. [Tesla said in 1935:]
At present we suffer from the derangement of our civilization because we have not yet completely adjusted ourselves to the machine age. The solution of our problems does not lie in destroying but in mastering the machine.
Innumerable activities still performed by human hands today will be performed by automatons. At this very moment scientists working in the laboratories of American universities are attempting to create what has been described as a ” thinking machine.” I anticipated this development.
I actually constructed ” robots.” Today the robot is an accepted fact, but the principle has not been pushed far enough. In the twenty-first century the robot will take the place which slave labor occupied in ancient civilization. There is no reason at all why most of this should not come to pass in less than a century, freeing mankind to pursue its higher aspirations.
Last year was the busiest year for robotics M&A activity, with the industry seeing nearly 15 acquisitions of private companies (we excluded reverse mergers and unit acquisitions). This year there have been three M&A deals involving private robotics companies year-to-date.
Source: BLS
HT: CB Insights
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBCOMm_ytwM]
Machine Learning Research Institute:
As previously announced, we recently ran a 22-day Colloquium Series on Robust and Beneficial AI (CSRBAI) at the MIRI office, co-hosted with the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute. The colloquium was aimed at bringing together safety-conscious AI scientists from academia and industry to share their recent work. The event served that purpose well, initiating some new collaborations and a number of new conversations between researchers who hadn’t interacted before or had only talked remotely.
Over 50 people attended from 25 different institutions, with an average of 15 people present on any given talk or workshop day. In all, there were 17 talks and four weekend workshops on the topics of transparency, robustness and error-tolerance, preference specification, and agent models and multi-agent dilemmas. The full schedule and talk slides are available on the event page.
Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, gave the opening keynote. Russell spoke on “AI: The Story So Far” (slides). Abstract:
I will discuss the need for a fundamental reorientation of the field of AI towards provably beneficial systems. This need has been disputed by some, and I will consider their arguments. I will also discuss the technical challenges involved and some promising initial results.
Russell discusses his recent work on cooperative inverse reinforcement learning 36 minutes in. This paper and Dylan Hadfield-Menell’s related talk on corrigibility (slides) inspired lots of interest and discussion at CSRBAI.
If your organization is moving toward digital too slowly, your people may be looking to leave. That’s one of the findings highlighted here and explored more fully in Aligning the organization for its digital future.
M2:
1. The worldwide Internet of Things market is predicted to grow to $1.7 trillion by 2020, marking a compound annual growth rate of 16.9%. – IDC Worldwide Internet of Things Forecast, 2015 – 2020.
2. An estimated 25 billion connected “things” will be in use by 2020. – Gartner Newsroom
3. Wearable technology vendors shipped 78.1 million wearable devices in 2015, an increase of 171.6% from 2014. Shipment predictions for this year are 111 million, increasing to 215 million in 2019. – IDC Worldwide Quarterly Wearable Device Tracker
4. By 2020, each person is likely to have an average of 5.1 connected devices. – Frost and Sullivan Power Management in IoT and Connected Devices
5. In a 2016 PwC survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 45% say they now own a fitness band, 27% a smartwatch, and 12% smart clothing. 57% say they are excited about the future of wearable technology as part of everyday life. 80% say wearable devices make them more efficient at home, 78% more efficient at work. – PwC The Wearable Life 2.0: Connected Living in a Wearable World
6. By 2020, more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element, large or small, of the Internet of Things. – Gartner Predicts 2016: Unexpected Implications Arising from the Internet of Things
7. 65% of approximately 1,000 global business executives surveyed say they agree organizations that leverage the internet of things will have a significant advantage; 19% however, still say they have never heard of the Internet of Things. – Internet of Things Institute 2016 I0T Trends Survey
8. 80% of retailers worldwide say they agree that the Internet of Things will drastically change the way companies do business in the next three years. – Retail Systems Research: The Internet of Things in Retail: Great Expectations
9. By 2018, six billion things will have the ability to request support. – Gartner Predicts 2016: CRM Customer Service and Support
10. By 2020, 47% of devices will have the necessary intelligence to request support. –Gartner Predicts 2016: CRM Customer Service and Support
11. By 2025, the Internet of Things could generate more than $11 trillion a year in economic value through improvements in energy efficiency, public transit, operations management, smart customer relationship management and more. –McKinsey Global Institute Report: The Internet of Things: Mapping the value behind the Hype
12. Barcelona estimates that IoT systems have helped the city save $58 million a year from connected water management and $37 million a year via smart street lighting alone. – Harvard University Report
13. General Electric estimates that the “Industrial Internet” market (connected industrial machinery) will add $10 to $15 trillion to the global GDP within the next 20 years. – GE Reports
14. General Electric believes that using connected industrial machinery to make oil and gas exploration and development just 1% more efficient would result in a savings of $90 billion. – GE Reports
15. The connected health market is predicted to grow to $117B by 2020. Remote patient monitoring is predicted to be a $46 billion market by 2017. – ACT Report
16. Connected homes will be a major part of the Internet of Things. By 2019, companies will ship 1.9 billion connected home devices, marking an estimated $490 billion in revenue (Business Insider Intelligence). By 2020, even the connected kitchen will contribute at least 15 percent savings in the food and beverage industry, leveraging data analytics. – Gartner Research Predicts 2015: The Internet of Things
The global collaborative robots market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 60.04% between 2016 and 2022 from $110 Million in 2015 and is expected to reach $3.3 Billion by 2022.
The collaborative robots market is application driven; the application in the automotive sector accounted for the largest share in 2015
The global collaborative robots market is driven by application in industries such as automotive, metal and machining, furniture and equipment, food and beverages, plastic and polymers, and others.
Collaborative robots used in the automotive sector accounted for the largest share of the global collaborative robots market in 2015; this market is expected to grow at a significant rate between 2016 and 2022.
In developed regions, such as North America and Europe, growth in the collaborative robots market in the automotive sector is expected to be driven by rise in safety rated manufacturing and the growing trend of precision which were not possible due to the common human errors.
Collaborative robots are used in the furniture and equipment industry and this market is expected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period.
An acceptance and installation rate of collaborative robots in furniture and equipment industry is increasing and is expected to continue to grow rapidly during the forecast period. This growth is expected to be significant in RoW region for new fleet of applications.
Asia-Pacific is expected to hold a large share of the collaborative robots market by 2022.
Europe was the largest market in 2015, followed by Asia-Pacific and North America. Regulations have driven the market for collaborative robots to reduce the need for safety fences between human and robots and mitigate the effects of imminent collisions (accidents).
Europe was the early adopter which has resulted in a large market for collaborative robots in 2015.
The collaborative robots market in Asia-Pacific is expected to surpass that of Europe by 2018 and hold a large market share through 2022.
The major companies in the global collaborative robots market are:
ABB Ltd. (Switzerland)
KUKA AG (Germany)
FANUC Corporation (Japan)
Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany)
Universal Robots (Denmark)
Rethink Robotics (U.S.)
Energid Technologies (U.S.).
MRK-Systeme GmbH (Germany).
“Everything is about time. You’re lead timed, your speed to market, and that’s the leveling wind in our industry. Short run manufacturing means that you’re going to have a fairly high touch model. We were really looking to increase productivity and improve our delivery in our service and our quality, mainly from a standpoint of error-proofing, because there’s a number of things that have to be done 100% correctly,” explained Ron Kirscht, President of Donnelly Custom Manufacturing. “But, if that’s what your job is and you’re doing it as a person, it becomes a little mundane, and that’s when people can become inattentive.”
Baxter collaborative robots are on the job at Donnelly’s plant in Alexandria, MN, taking on those time consuming, repetitive tasks where there’s no room for errors. This includes removing parts from a conveyor belt and stacking each one on customized stacking devices. By automating these jobs with robotics, Donnelly employees are assigned to more valuable work.
Kirscht added, “Baxter has some qualities that he brings to Donnelly that creates excitement, innovation and enthusiasm, allowing people to come up with ideas in ways for utilizing Baxter. I think that the Baxter robot is a game changer in modern manufacturing, because it really creates an opportunity for people on the manufacturing floor to innovate. It spawns creativity.”
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ant9adbTK5M]
