August 28, 2020

The Merging Of Human And Machine. Two Frontiers Of Emerging Technologies

The field of human and biological applications has many applications for medical science. This includes precision medicine, genome sequencing and gene editing (CRISPR), cellular implants, and wearables that can be implanted in the human body The medical community is experimenting with delivering nano-scale drugs (including anti-biotic “smart bombs” to target specific strains of bacteria. Soon they will be able to implant devices such as bionic eyes and bionic kidneys, or artificially grown and regenerated human organs. Succinctly, we are on the cusp of significantly upgrading the human ecosystem. It is indeed revolutionary. This revolution will expand exponentially in the next few years. We will see the merging of artificial circuitries with signatures of our biological intelligence, retrieved in the form of electric, magnetic, and mechanical transductions. Retrieving these signatures will be like taking pieces of cells (including our tissue-resident stem cells) in the form of “code” for their healthy, diseased or healing states, or a code for their ability to differentiate into all the mature cells of our body. This process will represent an unprecedented form of taking a glimpse of human identity.

Five ‘New Normal’ Imperatives for Retail Banking After COVID-19

The current financial crisis highlights an already trending need for responsible, community-minded banking. How financial institutions respond to the COVID-19 crisis — and the actions they take as the economy begins to right itself — will influence their reputations in the long-term. Personalized service and community-mindedness have never been more important. The approach to providing them, however, will often be different from the past. Data-powered audience segmentation can help banks and credit unions proactively anticipate the needs of their customers, then offer services and solutions to solve them. Voice-of-consumer and social listening tools can help financial institutions understand and monitor their brand perception. It’s important to develop a process and allocate resources to engage with consumers in the digital space. For example, when complaints or concerns are raised on social media or other channels, they should be triaged quickly and effectively. If this capability is something you previously have put off developing, it’s time to re-prioritize. According to EY’s Future Consumer Index, only 17% of consumers surveyed said they trusted their financial institutions in a time of crisis. 

The 7 Benefits of DataOps You’ve Never Heard

The convergence of point-solution products into end-to-end platforms has made modern DataOps possible. Agile software that manages, governs, curates, and provisions data across the entire supply chain enables efficiencies, detailed lineage, collaboration, and data virtualization, to name a few benefits. While many point-solutions will continue, success today comes from having a layer of abstraction that connects and optimizes every stage of the data lifecycle, across vendors and clouds, in order to streamline and protect the full ecosystem. As machine-learning and AI applications expand, the successful outcome of these initiatives depends on expert data curation, which involves the preparation of the data, automated controls to reduce the risks inherent in data analysis, and collaborative access to as much information as possible. Data collaboration, like other types of collaboration, fosters better insights, new ideas, and overcomes analytic hurdles. While often considered a downstream discipline, providing collaboration features across data discovery, augmented data management, and provisioning results in better AI/ML outcomes. In our COVID-19 age, collaboration has become even more important, and the best of today’s DataOps platforms offer benefits that break down the barriers of remote work, departmental divisions, and competing business goals.

Generation Data: the future of cloud era leaders

What’s more, with most organisations adopting multiple cloud environments, data is more fragmented than ever before. As such, businesses are looking to data governance specialists (not just data scientists, but data engineers too) to ensure that there is a catalogue of where the data resides, across the different landscapes to ensure it’s well secured and well governed. It’s important to have people who can spot risks associated with where data is – or in some cases – isn’t stored, whilst deploying artificial intelligence (AI) to adopt new roles to secure it within the cloud environments. Cloud specialists can take on several different job titles within the business and at some organisations, a single data leader like the CDO must seamlessly shift between multiple roles in order to achieve success. Meanwhile at others, a team of data leaders each having a specialised role under a unified data strategy is a model for success. What’s clear is that as data becomes part of everyone’s working lives, to ensure we’re not short on talent, businesses need to engage with a wide range of individuals such as citizen integrators and citizen analysts to upskill within existing roles and to truly democratise data. This means equipping existing and future employees with the skills needed to garner insights from existing data sets.

Standing Out with Invisible Payments: The Banking-as-a-Service Paradox

Industry players, such as regulators, FinTech partners, and businesses in the banking, financial services and insurance industries, are starting to realise that it is not ideal to be a ‘jack-of-all-trades’. In fact, the core of BaaS is built upon strategic collaboration. As such, there should be more acceptance of strengths and weaknesses from financial players so they can better identify what they are good at and what they need help with. Essentially, financial players need to ‘piggyback’ on either big banks or other financial service partners with strong regulatory license network. Furthermore, if they can identify a market that is underpenetrated, this is a good opportunity to work with existing players to fill the gap. For instance, the recent partnership between InstaReM and SBM Bank India allow users to remit money to more markets and send funds overseas in real-time. As its licensed banking partner, InstaReM will facilitate international money transfers from India to an expanded list of markets, including new destinations such as Malaysia and Hong Kong. In another example, Nium’s partnership with Geoswift, an innovative payment technology company, will enable overseas customers to remit money into China.

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