Autonomous systems in businesses are no longer experimental. Robots now work alongside humans in warehouses, retail stores, and hospitals, frequently deployed and supported by channel partners who never expected to become advisors on fleet operations and security inside customer networks.

This evolution is creating both opportunity and exposure. Robotics-as-a-Service and robotic deployments are becoming part of the managed service stack, yet few frameworks exist to guide customers on how they should be secured, audited, or governed. This raises new questions in the adoption process: “Should I trust it?”, “Who has access to the data?”, and “What happens when something goes wrong?”

When scale expands the attack surface

Automation within customer environments blurs the line between IT and OT (operational technology) responsibilities. Treating them as a shared domain is key to preventing blind spots.

Deploying a robot at one site is manageable for IT and OT groups to handle. Managing hundreds of thousands of robots across multiple retail or logistics locations -- that’s the challenge that customers are facing today. Each new machine deployed adds potential risk to a customer's infrastructure: misconfigured WiFi, outdated firmware, and insecure update channels all present meaningful vulnerabilities.

This is where Robotics-as-a-Service offerings can cover this gap and minimize risk. The robotic provider’s fleet management services should provide each channel partner and customer with:

• Visibility: A complete inventory of devices, software versions, and configurations.
• Integrity: The Robotics-as-a-Service offering should perform updates and end-to-end monitoring for any unauthorized access.
• Agility: Ability to monitor performance and make remote edits for operating within dynamic environments.

Each robot should be designed to operate fully autonomously without requiring broad or sensitive access to customer networks, and should maintain strict security boundaries. This ensures the robot does not introduce new risks for IT and OT teams.

Data governance in motion

Robots challenge traditional data governance programs because of the sheer diversity of information they collect while operating in public and dynamic spaces. A single robot may generate events, points of interest, telemetry, imagery, and mapping data — each with different formats, storage needs, retention profiles, and compliance considerations. Data is often distributed across multiple locations, aggregated at different layers, and subject to handling rules that depend on the specific sensor or subsystem producing it.

For channel partners and customers, the ability to understand these data types, sources, locations, and flows — and ensure they align with relevant frameworks — is foundational to creating trust at scale. Documenting the full data flow is the first step in governing any autonomous system. If you can draw the flow, you can govern and secure it effectively.

From there, security-by-design and least-privilege architecture form the backbone of good governance. These practices ensure that data access is intentional, restricted, and auditable, supporting data quality, transparency, and accountability across the fleet. In robotics, a few principles consistently reinforce trust:

• Purpose limitation: Sensors capture only what is required for navigation, safety, task validation, or product improvement.
• Image anonymization: Any incidental human imagery is blurred before presentation or review.
• Encryption and access control: All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, with access tightly governed by role-based permissions.
• Retention discipline: Data is kept only as long as it provides operational or product value, then securely deleted.

When providers explain these safeguards in plain language, governance becomes an enabler rather than a constraint — and trust becomes a differentiator rather than a hurdle.

Governance as a service differentiator

As deployments grow, governance becomes a competitive edge. Customers no longer just want performance metrics; they want assurance that their automation ecosystem behaves predictably and securely.

Robotics providers should demonstrate that assurance by:

• Providing access to a centralized data governance, privacy, and compliance repository for documentation, such as a Trust Center, that includes diagrams, security controls, and other architectural insights.
• Sharing third-party attestations or certifications, such as UL safety certification for key components and SOC 2 for cloud-based robotic services.
• Offering whitepapers or other published documents that clarify the robotic data flow, including how and where data is processed, transmitted, stored, and for how long.

When you can show exactly how data moves and who can access it, trust stops being an abstract goal and becomes part of your value proposition.

Preparing for a new regulatory landscape

The regulatory landscape for AI and robotics is maturing quickly. In the EU, new risk-based frameworks are formalizing documentation, transparency, and post-deployment monitoring. In the US, state-level obligations for companies using AI and autonomous systems continue to expand, with similar patterns emerging globally.

The best way to stay ahead is to engineer for principles, not headlines. Autonomous systems that already minimize, anonymize, encrypt, and evidence their decisions will adapt naturally as new laws arrive. Document how the system makes decisions—even reactive ones like obstacle avoidance—and make audits part of routine operations rather than exceptional events.

For the channel, readiness isn’t about predicting every regulation. It’s about building around stable, durable principles: minimization, encryption, explainability, and documented accountability. Autonomous systems grounded in these fundamentals can shift with whatever policy comes next.

Trust as operational ROI

Every managed service provider (MSP) knows the cost of an outage or breach. The same applies to autonomous systems. The more predictable and transparent your deployments are, the faster customers will adopt and renew.

Trust reduces friction across every stage of a partnership: procurement, onboarding, compliance, and support. In practice, that makes trust a measurable form of ROI.

The future of robotics in the channel won’t be defined by who moves fastest, but by who moves most responsibly.

Disabled people generally have an, at best, uneasy relationship with new technology. On one hand, technology can help with playing video games via adaptive controllers, communicating through augmentative and alternative communication (AAC devices) and there are projects dedicated to creating voices for non-speaking people that feel like their own.

For those competing in sports, new technology is a vital part of competitions access – the sport wheelchairs of today are eons beyond their counterparts of yesteryear.

Neural interface technology, which enable people to control devices using their nervous systems, are a potential avenue for improving accessible tech and helping technologists bring their software to everyone. But it’s important to recognize this technology is emerging in a complex landscape – context here is key.

On the other end of the spectrum, technology has been used in all kinds of dangerous ways to worsen the life of disabled people, eroding trust in technology particularly in the medical field. For example, nuclear experiments were carried out on institutionalized, disabled people from the 1940s to 1970s and in the digital landscape, concerns about algorithmic ableism are significant.

This process, in which algorithms discriminate and perpetuate bias against disabled people, has only become relevant thanks to the proliferation of AI tools and social media algorithm changes that often de-prioritize content from marginalized creators, including those with disabilities.

We live in a world where there are subscription services for devices people need in order to communicate their thoughts, while 3D printing creates low-cost and friction options for those who need artificial limbs and small adaptions. Where does that leave us with neural interface technology?

Konstantin Sonkin, the founder and CEO of i-BrainTech says that neural interface technology could be beneficial when it comes to making technology more accessible. But he adds that both the industry and the consumer world need to understand the bigger picture.

“Accessibility is not just about technology,” Sonkin says. “it also requires affordability, simplicity, and real-world integration.

“A major challenge is moving beyond the lab and into everyday life without requiring invasive procedures or highly specialized training. The goal should be to create systems that are reliable, scalable, and user-friendly so that people without technical expertise can benefit…The question is not just can neurointerfaces make technology more accessible, but how we design them to ensure they do.”

The hurdles for neural interfaces

Despite the rampant underlying optimism of technology developments for accessibility available on the internet, there have been recent examples of companies hitting regulatory hurdles. The US’ Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that digital accessibility company accessiBe has to pay a $1 million settlement over allegations it misleadingly marketed the capabilities of its web-based, AI accessibility tool.

Any product promising to improve the lives of disabled people should, of course, be carefully examined for efficacy and reliability. Artificial limbs are another area where technology is both improving access while increasing cost and leading to sentences like, “I can’t go out today, I forgot to charge my leg.”

Those who speak to ITPro are clear that there are a host of barriers before neural interface technology can create a world where all technology is accessible. Even if the majority of the ethical puzzle surrounding them is able to be solved. Jeremiah Robison, the founder and CEO of bionic clothing firm CIONIC, says he’s concerned about a hypothetical situation in which a neural interface company goes belly up or can’t bring its product fully to market.

“The implanted side of neural implants is much more problematic,” Robison tells ITPro. “It is difficult to finance the appropriate plans for offboarding the technology should the innovators go out of business. Do we set aside funds to maintain the product, or to de-implant? How would this limit funding for innovation?”

He adds that the sheer financial reality of getting a neural interface to market can’t be overlooked.

“Practically, it costs a great deal of money to develop neural interfaces and going from IRB trial on a small number of patients to commercial viability is a huge undertaking.”

IRB in this instance refers to a institutional review board, otherwise known as an ethical review board, which oversees research involving human subjects and is responsible for clearing it as ethical.

Better representation is key

Accessibility-focused technologies have a persistent problem, whether it be a wheelchair that climbs stairs, gloves that produce sign language from the spoken word, or neural interfaces zeroed in on helping those with reduced motor function. Namely, they rarely include a wide swathe of disabled people as part of the design process.

Paul Armstrong, an industry consultant and founder of TBD Group, tells ITPro that this has to change in order for the accessibility innovations of neural interfaces to come to fruition.

“The conversation tends to center on pushing human limits, military applications, and consumer tech rather than solving real-world problems for disabled users,” Armstrong says. “There’s enthusiasm around medical breakthroughs, but unless these solutions move beyond lab environments and include disabled people in leadership, design, and testing, accessibility often remains an afterthought over maximising output.

One designer and researcher, Liz Jackson, has popularized the term ‘disability dongle’. This is a piece of technology that seems well intentioned but doesn’t actually help with the real-world problems disabled people are facing in their daily lives. These are tools that, more often than not, raise more questions than they do answers. Questions like: ‘how am I going to pay for this?’ or ‘who is going to sell the replacement part?’. As she told the CBC in 2019: “As designers are spending more and more time trying to come up with a specific fix, that's time and resources that are not allocated to actually innovating access”.

In some disability communities, there is also pushback against the use of neural interface technologies like cochlear implants, seeing their use as a violation of disability cultural norms. In the words of Gallaudet University, the US’ only post secondary program dedicated to deaf and hard of hearing students:

“Among deaf people, the implants are generally hailed as a boon for individuals who lost their hearing later in life, but their use in deaf children has been controversial. The effectiveness and risks of the implants are a major part of the debate, but there is an additional conflict between those who view deafness as impairment and those who see it as a valued part of cultural identity.”

Still, Armstrong says that this technology is closer than ever – and still just as complicated. He advocates for more conversation around who controls neural interface technology, such as whether or not it should be open source, as well as plans to build trust in neural interfaces among historically marginalized groups.

“It's a fascinating time for the area, but not without tough questions and decisions ahead,” he concludes. “But when has progress like what we can taste now ever been so close or as 'easy'.”

Despite one billion people, or roughly 15% of the global population, living with a disability, there remains much work to be done by governments and businesses to close the digital access divide that exists today.

This digital divide has become even more prominent with the emergence of COVID-19, with differently-abled people, like everyone, suddenly forced to grapple with the challenges of social distancing and lockdowns. Technology eased this strain for many of us, but research by South Korean academics found the surge in mid-pandemic internet usage wasn’t mirrored by people with disabilities. Differently-abled people were also less likely to be aware of, utilise or perceive the usefulness, of digital services.

Although there was no need for direct personal contact in accessing many public services, such as information on COVID-19 cases and the location of testing clinics, people with disabilities still faced barriers due to a lack of digital literacy and access. With the divide feeling wider than ever, innovators are increasingly looking to artificial intelligence (AI) to narrow the gap.

Digital barriers

From studying to accessing services and communicating, recent technological advancements have transformed every aspect of day-to-day life. People with disabilities, however, still face challenges in accessing the systems that have become more integral to our way of life. Even before COVID-19, differently-abled people used the internet, and other digital systems, at a level that was much below the standards people without disabilities have come to expect.

People with visual impairments, for example, use screen readers, applications that provide computer-synthesised speech output, to access web content. Their screen readers, however, find it problematic to convert text-to-speech if designers haven’t included appropriate alt-text tags on graphics, forms, tables, or links.

People with motor impairments, too, who had zero or limited use of their fingers or hands face considerable barriers due to cluttered layouts on websites, buttons or links that are too small. They also face difficulties using a pointing device, like a computer mouse. Finally, people with cognitive impairments like autism, dementia, or traumatic brain injury face significant trouble in understanding the design, layout, and navigability of websites that aren’t accessible.

Wielding AI for good

The use of AI – comprising mixed reality, speech recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and automation – has become more common in homes and offices, Soumendra Mohanty, chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer with Tredence, tells IT Pro.

“Today, if a patient calls a clinic, they get the opportunity to interact with virtual doctors and not just human doctors,” he says. “While a virtual doctor may not replace an actual human doctor, it could give a patient the confidence that they were able to interact with an entity whose body language was similar to a real human doctor.

“People with visual disabilities can take the help of advances in AI relating to gesture/touch or voice-enabled products and services. On the other hand, people with hearing disabilities can use gesture-enabled interventions using AR/VR apps. Finally, people with speech-related disabilities can use gesture/touch interventions in AR/VR apps.”

People with visual impairments, indeed, face severe accessibility challenges and, at times, are faced with the hard decision of giving up on their educational aspirations altogether, adds Mousumi Kapoor, the founder and CEO of Continual Engine, an accessibility systems provider. “The use of computer vision, NLP, machine learning, and AI can make complex documents and images readily accessible to people suffering from visual impairments,” she says.

“Earlier on, developers and designers needed to manually make image content accessible by physically authoring meaningful alt text (alternate text) for images. With the help of software products powered by AI, however, this process is automated, saving up to 60% of the time in comparison to doing the same processes manually. Besides enabling people with visual disabilities to get access to content that was earlier inaccessible to them, the use of such technologies helps in making content accessible to all.”

Building bridges with technology

One of the biggest differences AI-powered tech can make for people with disabilities is allowing them to form meaningful relationships with other people on a similar disability spectrum. When it comes to online dating, Michele Abraham, founder and CEO of Quiver Dating, tells IT Pro, people with disabilities are at a disadvantage.

“Most, if not all, popular dating apps do not cater to people with visible and invisible disabilities,” she says. “That is one area where AI in conjunction with AR virtual dating platforms can truly make forming meaningful relationships that much easier for people with disabilities.”

Online dating, however, is just one of many kinds of platforms using AI to improve access for people with disabilities. There are several others that fall into this bracket, including Moment.AI, a startup that’s striving to develop an in-vehicle AI system that can detect, monitor and analyse whether a driver is fit to continue driving. The firm aims to create image-based and video-based datasets using simulators to allow AI systems to pre-empt stress-induced medical events, such as strokes and seizures, before they lead to accidents.

Perhaps a little more widely known, Neuralink, founded by Elon Musk in 2016, aims to use a brain implant to allow humans to interface wirelessly with computers and mobile phones. The fully-implantable chips intends to help people with paralysis, as well as neurological disorders and disabilities in the future.

Finally, ObjectiveEd’s Braille AI Tutor, developed in conjunction with Microsoft, is a teaching aid for students who suffer from visual disabilities. This product uses gamification to help children learn through speech recognition with the help of a braille display.

Whether AI-powered tech will meaningfully improve conditions for people living with disabilities, is one that hinges on how robust and accessible the technology becomes. Thanks to recent developments, however, the future certainly appears brighter than it ever has.

Virtual reality (VR) is starting to find its feet as an enterprise tool, and one of the most popular use cases for it is in training. Engineers can use it to learn how to maintain large and expensive pieces of machinery, managers can run conflict resolution simulations, and construction workers can model building projects. These applications are merely the tip of the iceberg, however, and the technology is being used in some unique and unexpected settings.

One of the most interesting players is Rezzil, a company using VR to train and develop Premier League footballers. Run by ex-gaming developers, the company builds VR platforms that can accurately simulate real-world scenarios, allowing clubs to train players and analyse match tactics. The system works by using HTC Vive headsets combined with wireless adapters and the company’s ‘puck’ trackers – one on each foot and shin – to accurately track a player’s movement and ball control, including motions like outside spin, stops and kick-ups. Rezzil has fine-tuned the physics to the point the system will even model and respond to different boot types and sizes.

Easing the road to recovery

One of the main ideas behind the technology is to help players recover faster from injuries, says co-founder Adam Dickinson. Leg, knee and ankle problems are among the most common issues that can affect professional footballers, but recovery usually requires them to avoid traditional practice and training for extended periods of time, during which their skills can atrophy.

“The main factor in rehabilitation is a player can lose about 60% of their cognitive sharpness during that injury, where they fall off,” Dickinson explains. “The whole point is that we can keep them sharp, we can put them back in the same scenarios, the decision making, keeping them at that elite level.”

Because Rezzil’s training drills involve minimal physical contact, he adds, players can keep their skills up without risking further strain. This has allowed injured players to retain their contracts at clubs by showing their cognitive skills haven’t suffered, whereas they may otherwise have been let go.

Aside from rehabilitation and general skills training, Rezzil’s technology also allows clubs to analyse previous matches and tactics deployed. The system can ingest match data from the industry-standard data tracking tools used in sports stadia, convert it into positional information and then recreate the match in a virtual environment. This allows managers, coaches and players to review the action, as it happened, from any angle they choose.

“Traditionally, a manager's position on the pitch is the worst place to view any game ever,” says Dickinson. “So they like to be up in the stands, or you might be experiencing where you thought a goalkeeper was at fault, but actually, his line of sight was blocked by a player. It's really, really useful for conflict resolution.”

This can also be extended to building out custom-made training drills based on specific situations and opponents, such as analysing a certain player’s habits in order to counter them. “For example,” Dickinson continues, “if you know Mbappé is going to always run down the right-hand side of a certain player, that defender can train over and over and over again without the fatigue, in that position.”

This attention to detail has paid dividends for Rezzil; the company counts major Premier League clubs including Arsenal, Manchester City, and Manchester United among its customers, as well as American and German sides. The company has also deployed its systems for the upcoming World Cup in Qatar, but it’s not just limited to football; Rezzil is already working with an NBA basketball team in the US and attempting to branch out into sports like golf and American football.

Converting professionals to new ways of working

Of course, working with cutting-edge technology isn’t without its challenges. Dickinson says one of the biggest problems when doing on-site demonstrations with customers is the lack of connectivity within training grounds, which has forced them to carry a selection of Wi-Fi dongles and mobile hubs around with them. Rezzil also had to customise a lot of the VR hardware it uses for use in a specific environment. For example, although the clip-on battery packs powering the wireless adapters for HTC’s desktop headsets work fine with jeans, Dickinson explains they’re heavy enough to pull football shorts down.

Subsequent advances in mobile VR technology have mitigated these issues, but for Dickinson, the hardware has always been somewhat less important than getting the software and the interaction models to feel natural and realistic. Because many players aren’t familiar with high-end VR, he says, they have to be carefully introduced to the technology to avoid turning them off altogether.

“We've got to put it in front of Premier League players. If they swung their foot and then the ball was a second after, they'd just say 'no, it doesn't work'. So we learned our lessons trying different haptics. We have a much stronger feedback just using audio, letting your brain fill in the pieces – but you have to have zero latency. That's the key.”

In addition to catering for professional clubs, Rezzil has also branched out into the consumer market. The company’s Player 22 software acts as a more ‘gamified’ offering that appeals to casual players whilst still retaining the technical foundation of its more established packages. However, Dickinson says that while becoming “the EA Sports of VR” isn’t exactly unappealing, the company still remains focused on serving top-tier athletes.

“It's been a long, long road, and it won't end. The elite side will always feed in,” he says. “We want to find someone [through our platform] that would have never been discovered; someone who would never have been found traditionally, through traditional scouting methods.”

For the past few years, virtual reality technology has been going through a bit of an awkward adolescence. While the first few generations of headsets were initially impressive, the ‘wow factor’ quickly faded and wider adoption has so far been limited by a few key factors. These include awkward setup, a comparatively limited number of apps, and the need to either be tethered to a bulky PC, unless you’re willing to accept a significant drop in performance and quality.

HTC has been doing its level best to change that, however. Unlike Facebook’s Oculus Quest headsets, which have taken a more consumer-friendly approach, HTC’s Vive family has its sights set squarely on the high-end ‘prosumer’ and business market. The latest fruits of its endeavours is the Vive Focus 3, a standalone enterprise VR headset that could very well represent the future of VR as a business tool.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Design

The most significant improvements come in the form of the Focus 3’s design. VR headsets – particularly standalone units that require onboard compute hardware – have typically been bulky and uncomfortable affairs, but the Focus 3 bucks this trend somewhat. The visor portion is noticeably more compact than its predecessor, the Vive Focus Plus, for example, and it’s more comfortable to wear for extended periods without getting physically tiring.

It’s much more ergonomically designed overall. This is in spite of the fact that at 785g, it’s actually around 100g heavier than the Focus Plus; the trick is that the weight has been distributed more evenly between the front and back of the headset, via a removable battery pack at the rear which acts as a counterweight.

This is another masterstroke for businesses; when the battery dies, you can swap it out for another fully-charged battery on the fly. This means if you’re doing a long day of demos or workshops, you don’t need to keep pausing to periodically recharge the entire headset.

The gaskets around the edge of the visor are also removable, allowing them to be swapped out and cleaned between users for comfort and hygiene. Both they and the battery packs are magnetically attached, and removing them is simplicity itself. So much so, in fact, that we quite often accidentally knocked them loose when handling the Focus 3 – although since they clip straight back on again, this isn’t really an issue.

The headset itself is easy to get on and off, too, with a quick-release catch at the back to loosen the fit, and an adjustment knob to tighten it, both of which are easy to operate with the headset on. As with all of HTC’s recent headsets, it can be used with glasses, but we did find that it’s easy to over-tighten the fit, which made our spectacles dig uncomfortably into the bridge of our nose.

One more point of importance, albeit purely aesthetic, is that it looks a lot less silly than HTC’s previous headsets. The black colour scheme is not only much more sophisticated than the white Focus Plus, it helps hide the lenses that stud the visor to support its inside-out tracking. While units like the Vive Pro 2 have a vaguely insectile air about them – or, in the case of the Focus Plus, the look of a pair of googly eyes stuck to the front of your visor – the Focus 3 looks appealingly sleek and futuristic.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Display

The screen has also seen big improvements. It uses a pair of 2.88in LCD panels, each with a resolution of 2,448 x 2,448. That translates to a 5K resolution across both eyes and on top of that, the field-of-view has been bumped up to 120 degrees, while the refresh rate has gone up to 90Hz. That’s up from 110 degrees and 75Hz, respectively, on the Focus Plus and matches the PC-driven Vive Pro 2 on all but the refresh rate.

Those are some distinctly impressive numbers, and in practice, the screen looks noticeably sharper than previous iterations. In-app text is easier to read, smaller details are easier to pick out and the overall visuals are smoother and more expansive. For practical purposes, this will be a differentiator for anyone wanting to use VR for design or prototyping work, but it also makes using the Focus 3 more pleasant across the board.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Specs and performance

Built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 platform, the Focus 3 promises impressive performance – and it delivers. The headset can run graphically complex VR apps with no trouble, and we experienced no stuttering, lag or slowdown. That’s partly due to the Focus 3’s active cooling system, which uses a combination of heatpipes and fans to keep the silicon from overheating.

These fans kick in during most operations, but they’re not loud enough to be distracting and work admirably well for maintaining stable performance across the board. Even the PC streaming feature – which we’ll cover in more detail shortly – managed to keep a solid and consistent framerate.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Battery life

Of course, all of this performance has to take its toll somewhere, and the battery life isn’t exactly lengthy. After roughly an hour of serious use, we found that the Focus 3 had lost a third of its charge; if you started using it in the morning, we’d be surprised if it lasted past lunchtime.

On the other hand, this isn’t a headset that’s designed for all-day use, and outside of something like a demo experience at an event, you’re unlikely to need that much continual use. Even if you do, the swappable batteries have your back. You’ll have to buy additional batteries and charging cradles separately, but each battery does have a handy indicator that can tell you at a glance how much juice is left without having to put the headset on.

Charging the headset itself is nice and convenient, with a single cable going into the device and it takes less than two hours to fully power the unit. Even better, the Focus 3’s two rechargeable controllers don’t require a separate power socket. The headset comes bundled with a double-headed USB-C cable; one end goes into the USB-C port on the headset’s right-hand side, and the two split ends go into the controllers – both of which also feature LED battery indicators. It’s a clever and convenient solution, and one that we hope more headset manufacturers adopt.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Features

The Focus 3 is packed with similar quality-of-life improvements, one of which is the boundary system. If you start to stray outside the defined usage area, you’ll start to see a wireframe boundary; fairly standard stuff, but once you cross the threshold, it uses the passthrough feature (which feeds footage from the external tacking cameras directly to the screen) to effectively create a portal into the real world. It allows you to keep a close eye on your surroundings, which is handy in restricted spaces.

Elsewhere, the audio deserves special mention. The Focus 3 uses open-backed dual-driver speakers built into the headband, as opposed to headphones, and they’re remarkably clear and high-quality. They’re also great at delivering 3D spatial sound for added immersion. Where they really excel, however, is the ‘audio privacy’ feature.

This is designed to help stop people around you from listening in to whatever may be happening in your virtual environment – a sensitive meeting, perhaps, or some confidential training. It uses the same principle as active noise cancelling on high-end headphones, but turned outwards and works amazingly well; it’s genuinely difficult to hear what’s happening within the headset, even when you’re right next to whoever’s using it with no other background noise.

The biggest issue is still the app store; as with almost all VR platforms, the selection available on the Vive Business App Store is extremely limited, with a few too many gimmicky ‘experiences’ that are more akin to theme park simulator rides than useful business tools. That said, there has been improvement. There’s a handful of genuinely useful enterprise apps on there, including conflict resolution simulations, hazard awareness training, a handful of desktop virtualisation programmes and, of course, HTC’s excellent Vive Sync app.

These improvements don’t extend to the store UI itself though, which is still clunky and awful, and only allows you to browse available apps rather than install them. To do that, you have to head to the web store on a smartphone or PC, find the app you want (and pay for it, in many cases) then put the headset back on, head to your library and download it from there.

It’s an arcane and obtuse process, but fortunately many business users will be able to bypass it, thanks to the management tools that HTC provides alongside the Focus 3. These tools allow IT admins to manage a fleet of headsets, including updating firmware, tracking the locating devices, and updating their firmware. It’s also compatible with third-party Android Enterprise MDM solutions. These management tools can be used to remotely load apps onto the headset, or you can use the built-in microSD card slot to install them, as well as expanding the Focus 3’s storage beyond its 128GB capacity.

If the apps you need to use are PC-based, however, there is another option, which is the PC Streaming app. This essentially uses a PC on your network to host a VR app, and then streams it to your headset, either wirelessly or via a USB-C cable. This works astonishingly well in practice, streaming demanding VR content from our PC to our headset wirelessly over a home network with a minimal amount of stuttering and dropped frames. It’s not ideal for anything requiring absolute precision, but as a method for increasing the Focus 3’s versatility, it’s extremely commendable.

HTC Vive Focus 3 review: Verdict

There’s no question that VR is still a long way away from being a universally applicable technology. While there are an increasing number of use-cases for the hardware – particularly with remote working now firmly entrenched – it’s just not relevant to a large proportion of organisations.

For those that do need it, however, HTC’s Vive Focus 3 is a generational leap forward. The specs and performance are powerful enough to keep up with demanding apps, the display looks breathtaking and for when you need a bit of extra grunt, the PC streaming feature is genuinely astonishing.

What really sets this device apart, however, is the array of smart design choices that HTC has made in its construction. The removable battery packs and gaskets are a stroke of genius, and it’s the most comfortable VR headset we’ve worn by a country mile. Add to that some smart charging features and intelligent noise cancelling, and you’ve got a genuinely transformative package.

It’s not perfect, of course; at over £1,000 before tax, it’s not an investment you’ll be making lightly. Additional battery packs will also cost extra, and considering how polished the actual headset is, the business app store is bafflingly unintuitive. Despite the cost, however, this headset is a must-have for any organisation that’s considering seriously investing in VR technology. Enterprise VR may have started as a bit of a novelty, but it’s certainly not any more.

Organisations all over the world are currently grappling with the challenges of how to adapt their culture to a new hybrid-first model. While many potential solutions have been posited, one organisation is taking a somewhat different approach; distributed HR platform Remote.com has turned to virtual reality technology to unite its employees, not just for meetings and brainstorms, but for social and team-building events.

This week, we’re joined by Remote’s director of people, Nadia Vatalidis, to explain how the company’s using VR to bring its workforce together without having to rely on video calls. We discuss some of the challenges of rolling out VR collaboration across a business, as well as the advantages it has brought.

Footnotes

• How do I best support my remote workers?
• Three keys to a long-term remote working strategy
• Remote working: Are you ready for the new normal?
• How to manage a distributed team
• Out of office - on forever: Meet the companies leaving the office for good
• How to manage people successfully from a distance
• 12 must-have tools for working from home
• Onboarding during the pandemic and beyond
• IT Pro Panel: The loneliness of the long-distance worker
• How do IT leaders prepare for a refusal to return to the office?
• IT Pro Panel: Why CIOs have embraced hybrid working
• Transforming training with virtual reality
• IT Pro Live: How virtual reality will power Workplace 2.0
• I had a meeting in VR, and it felt like the future
• The IT Pro Podcast: Will VR ever be mainstream?
• Why AR, not VR, is the next big thing in business
• Mixed Reality: How to augment your IT
• Why video conferencing is so tiring and what you can do about it
• Game on: How playing video games could level up your career

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HTC has expanded its lineup of business-focused VR headsets with two new devices: the PC-driven Vive Pro 2 and the Android-based all-in-one Vive Focus 3.

Unveiled today at the company’s virtual Vivecon 21 event, the new headsets boast both an expanded 120-degree field of view and a combined resolution of 5K across both eyes.

The new headsets are aimed at a variety of enterprise use-cases, including virtual training, design and prototyping tasks, and remote collaboration. The latter is supported by the company’s Vive Sync platform, which enables remote meetings in a virtual environment as part of the Vive XR Suite of business applications.

HTC is also launching a new storefront for business VR apps, as well as a training platform for supporting VR-based classroom training.

HTC’s partners have welcomed the announcement, with representatives from Dassault Systèmes, Autodesk, Adobe, and other professional 3D creation tools praising the high visual fidelity offered by the new headsets.

“With HTC’s new generation of high-resolution VR headsets, the level of photorealism is boosted to a completely new level which will greatly help to make the right decisions during project reviews," said Christian Lang, CEO of architectural software firm Enscape.

The Focus 3 is designed for portability, and uses a magnesium alloy chassis for reduced weight and increased durability. Its weight has also been better distributed to aid comfort, which includes the addition of a battery pack to the rear of the headset. In addition to providing a counterweight, this swappable battery pack includes quick-charge capabilities to enable all-day use without having to charge the headset every time the battery runs out.

This feature – as well as the new swappable gaskets inside the visor – comes in response to the emergence of new customer use-cases, like demonstrations, where multiple people need to use a headset over the course of a day. New rechargeable controllers have been launched alongside the Focus 3, which promise a 15-hour battery life on a single charge.

The Focus 3 also includes contact-free directional speakers, which allow users to hear audio from their virtual environment without blocking out what’s going on around them in the real world. This features additional outward noise cancelling, as well as an ‘audio privacy mode’ to further limit what can be heard outside of the headset.

It’s built on top of a customised version of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 platform, which has been augmented with fan-driven cooling and heatsinks in order to maintain maximum performance for demanding VR applications. The Focus 3 supports a maximum refresh rate of 90Hz and can stream footage to PC through a USB-C cable, with wireless streaming supposedly coming soon.

For higher performance needs, HTC is offering the Vive Pro 2, which includes a 120Hz max refresh rate, dual stacked-lens optics for reduced motion blur, and redesigned headphones with 3D positional audio. The company has also collaborated with both AMD and Nvidia to optimise the Display Stream Compression technology used to power the device, which is backwards-compatible with DisplayPort 1.2.

Both devices include a number of business-focused features; the Vive Pro 2 will be compatible with all existing Steam VR peripherals, including base stations, movement trackers, and controllers, while the Focus 3 is compatible with Android Enterprise MDM products, meaning it can be managed by IT departments through existing tools like MobileIron or SOTI.

For customers that don’t already have an MDM solution in place, HTC also offers a pre-built ISO-certified suite for remotely managing and updating Focus 3 devices on a network.

The Vive Focus 3 will go on sale on 24 June for £1,060 exc VAT, including a two-year warranty and services package.

The Vive Pro 2, meanwhile, is available to pre-order today in a headset-only package for those that want to upgrade an existing installation. This version can be preordered for £659 inc VAT (with a cost of £719 if bought after the pre-order period), while the full kit with base stations and controllers – which will hit shelves 4 August – will cost £1,299 inc VAT.

If you ever need proof that we’re living in the future, just look at virtual reality; a technology that was considered science fiction less than two decades ago is now available to all for a comparatively affordable price. Despite its rapid development, however, it has yet to find its place outside of niche gaming and tech enthusiast communities.

Manufacturers like Lenovo and HTC have tried to bring VR into the business world, but enthusiasm is still seemingly limited. While applications like training, prototyping and collaboration have all shown a degree of usefulness, it appears that VR still lacks a ‘killer app’. In this episode, we look at the development of enterprise virtual reality technology, and whether it’s ever going to crack the big time.

Footnotes

• Virtual reality is dead. Long live VR
• I had a meeting in VR, and it felt like the future
• Lenovo launches new enterprise-focused VR headset
• Should companies use virtual reality to cut costs or boost sales?
• Transforming training with virtual reality
• HTC Vive Pro hands-on review: Ready, player one?
• VR for art's sake: How virtual reality can change the world of culture
• The future tech helping battle the pandemic
• IT Pro Live: How virtual reality will power Workplace 2.0
• Mixed Reality: How to augment your IT

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In the past few years, we’ve seen virtual reality technology turn from a science fiction trope into an accessible gaming medium, but VR is about much more than just entertainment. The technology has a multitude of applications within the business world, from design planning and data visualisation to remote virtual meetings, and in this keynote session, HTC's Graham Wheeler explains how VR could power the office of the future.

Graham Wheeler

General manager, EMEA, HTC

Graham Wheeler, is the current General Manager of HTC EMEA. Graham is based in HTC’s European headquarters near London. In his role he oversees HTC’s growing European business across its virtual reality content, software and hardware ecosystem. As part of HTC’s global innovation vision Graham oversees HTC’s entire product portfolio including the recently launched 5G Hub. Graham joined HTC in 2005, becoming the fourth employee in the European office and has now been with the company for 13 years. Graham has served in a number of roles across HTC’s European product, engineering and service teams, before heading up operations across the smartphone and VIVE business.

If your working day is anything like mine, chances are you’ve spent most of your time bouncing from one video call to another over the past few weeks; I’ve spent so much time on Zoom that I feel like the interface is burned into my retinas. It’s not a bad way to stay in touch, compared to text-based messaging or standard phone calls, but it still feels oddly forced and impersonal in some ways. While I’m still a proponent of virtual pub trips and hangouts, I’m starting to tire of having endless video meetings.

Recently, however, my eyes have been opened to a better way of keeping in touch over long distances, and it comes from a somewhat unexpected source: virtual reality. Consumer VR has been a thing for a number of years, with Oculus, PlayStation and others trying to capture the attention of gamers with entertainment-focused headsets.

The concept has yet to gain a major foothold among the general public and in recent years VR companies have turned to the business sector in the hopes that it might catch on there. The response from enterprise has been similarly lukewarm, though; outside of areas like prototyping and 3D modelling, there seemed to be few practical applications for the technology, but our new era of social isolation might just have given VR its first killer app.

HTC’s Vive unit has this week taken the wraps off Vive Sync, a business-focused app that is essentially a virtual conferencing tool. Instead of plonking themselves down in front of a webcam to have a meeting, participants don a headset and are transported to a virtual space where they can move around and interact with full-body digital avatars representing their fellow attendees.

I tested out the new app – which is in beta until the end of the year – to talk to David Sapienza. David is the head of Vive’s internal 2 Bears studio and the mastermind behind Sync. Because 2 Bears’ developers are split between San Francisco and Taiwan, collaboration was always a bit of a headache even before the world went into lockdown.

Sync was originally developed as an internal tool to help mitigate this problem, allowing team members to collaborate with a greater sense of presence and personal connection by using an immersive VR environment. In the demo I was shown, this took the form of a serene little open-air platform with a view of the San Francisco bay in the background.

Is it a cheesy gimmick? In some ways, yes, but it’s also surprisingly engaging. Being able to see the body language of the person I was talking to (or at least a rough approximation of it), helped make the conversation feel more natural and genuine, and the ability to move around and switch between sitting and standing was welcome after weeks of having to be glued to my chair.

Beyond that, though, Sync is full of neat little touches that make it genuinely useful. You can spawn tables in a variety of sizes, for example, from small cafe-style tables all the way up to massive boardroom tables, or even amphitheatre seating; a small thing, but one that subtly helps structure and set the tone of a meeting, rather than everyone just floating around aimlessly.

You can also bring up a massive, cineplex-sized virtual screen to display slides, documents and videos within the environment, which conveniently switches to a night-time look for better visibility when you do so. An aesthetically pleasing world clock in the corner even lets participants keep track of what time it is in everyone’s respective corners of the globe, which means meetings are less likely to drag on into the wee hours.

For large, multinational companies who need to conduct in-depth meetings between different geographies, using something like Sync certainly makes more sense than flying a plane-load of executives to one central location. HTC itself is even set to conduct a full annual board meeting next week using the tool.

It’s got problems, of course, namely ones of accessibility. The beta version of Vive Sync is currently free, but you’ll have to pay for the service at some point, and you’ll have to drop several hundred pounds on a headset for every employee that needs to access it. With that being said, I used a standalone Vive Focus Plus headset to dial in, and the setup process was mercifully short and simple. The company is also planning to open it up to more platforms in the future, including potentially other VR headset models and ever letting people dial in on a normal PC.

There are stumbling blocks, and the technology isn’t likely to replace the trusty video call any time soon – but sticking a VR helmet on and having the next best thing to a real-life face-to-face conversation felt closer to the future promised by utopian science fiction than anything I’ve experienced to date. It’s not quite the holodeck – but I can see it from here.

Google will stop selling its Daydream View headsets. The BBC has halted investment in its virtual reality team. And Samsung won’t be supporting its Gear VR on future smartphones, earning a heartfelt eulogy from rival VR firm Oculus. It’s not looking good for phone-based virtual reality. Is this the end? And, if so, what’s next?

Oculus’ CTO John Carmack admitted in his eulogy – a talk given at a development conference – that there were tech problems for smartphone-based VR, which uses your own handset to power the device. Those challenges included battery drain and overheating issues, a lack of compelling content, but also the “friction” of slotting a handset into the headset. “If you could magically hold your phone up in front of your face and it just transformed into a VR headset, we’d have like 95% retention,” he said. “But if you have to pop your phone out of its phone case and dock it into a Gear case, you’ll use it twice.” He suggested Oculus considered adding a gamepad controller as it made gaming easier and more fun, but couldn’t make it work with the tech.

Anthony Steed, a professor in the department of computer science at University College London, agrees that smartphone VR has been disappointing. “As an experienced VR researcher, they were quite good [for] raising awareness, but the quality of [the] experience was nowhere near the high-end displays,” he said. “If anything, it was a little premature as these systems didn’t really show off the full potential of having full tracking (position and rotation) of both head and hands. Because of the range of devices, Daydream was a little hard to target as a developer.”

However, the future could still be bright. “If you compare [it] to the Oculus Quest, which is basically the same technical components as a smartphone, there the experience is much superior as it is all dedicated or customised to the task,” said Steed.

Is peak VR in the past?

George Jijiashvili, senior analyst at Ovum, notes that smartphone VR headset sales actually peaked in 2017, when Samsung announced it had shipped five million Gear headsets – although he believes that many were given away for free. At that time, Google said ten million Daydreams had shipped since its launch three years before. Even with those millions of devices, there was still never enough of an install base to support content makers.

Ovum downgraded predictions for the tech last year and Jijiashvili expects the figures to remain muted. “Unrealistic expectations were set for the adoption of VR headsets back in 2016, when many companies jumped to invest in this new and exciting media format,” he said, admitting that analyst firms like his own added to the problem: “This industry got caught up by the VR hype to some degree, but now everyone has had a reality check.”

Indeed, while right now the discussion around the smartphone VR market is negative – eulogies are rarely good news, after all – that doesn’t mean the technology is wrong, merely that the mass perception of it might be skewed. Tuong Nguyen, senior principal analyst at Gartner, argues that smartphone VR is still at its adolescent stage. “Characterising phone-based VR as being dead based on recent news items is misleading,” he said. “Just because it’s not ready now, or because the VR market is not mature now, doesn’t mean there’s no opportunity for it ever or in the future.”

What’s next for VR?

Set aside the eulogies and shuttered projects, and there is still life in VR. “Despite the doom and gloom stories about VR, spurred on by these recent developments, I remain very optimistic about VR’s future,” said Jijiashvili. “Abandoning phone-based headsets like Gear VR and Daydream is just part of VR’s journey.” Indeed, smartphone VR helped millions of people give the technology a try to better understand its possibilities, he argues, and let tech companies test hardware and content, helping to inform the next generation of devices.

So while smartphone-based displays may be dying off, VR still has a future – or many futures, according to Steed. Gaming headsets will continue to develop, driving consumer demand, he predicts, while industrial uses will require higher quality, specifically designed headsets to fit niche applications. “So we can’t really talk about one next step for VR, there are multiple ones,” he said.

Jijiashvili agrees. “Gaming remains the low-hanging fruit for VR, but this technology is rapidly gaining traction in enterprise – and I think this area offers massive growth potential for VR,” he told us. “Design, education, training, marketing, healthcare and collaboration are a few use cases that companies all around the world are increasingly using VR for. The move towards standalone VR headsets is further accelerating this trend. As you can imagine, it’s easier for companies to manage and utilise integrated, wire-free headsets instead of PC or smartphone-tethered solutions.”

Frank Furnari, the founder of VRtuoso, echoes this sentiment. While his presentation and conferencing software can use dedicated headsets or smartphone-based devices, it’s much harder to support the former. “Corporate smartphones are locked down,” he said. “And Oculuses are becoming much cheaper.” Indeed, the cost of a high-end smartphone is much more than the latest dedicated headsets, he notes, suggesting VR will take off with dedicated headsets, and was held back by smartphone-based models.

So there are still plenty of ways for VR to find a niche – we just need to see past the hype and find uses for it. “The mismatch between expectations and what VR can do is one of the biggest reasons why it always seems like the coming week or month or year is always the year for VR or the year VR is dead,” said Nguyen. “VR is definitely coming and it can deliver value in different ways – some, if not many, of which we haven’t discovered yet. But as I mentioned above, it’s not today, tomorrow, or even next year. It’s two to five years out.” In other words, the future is bright for VR, because it simply isn’t here yet.

Google has launched the second iteration of its no-code Teachable Machine so that inexperienced users can take their bespoke machine learning (ML) models and apply them to projects such as classroom activities.

Teachable Machine 2.0 carries over the features from the original, allowing users to record images and video from a webcam and use them to train ML models for tasks like pattern recognition. Now, these same models can be taken and exported to websites, apps and physical machines.

Open source curriculums are making use of the tool to give children their first taste of ML, without the intimidating aspect of learning to code.

One such example is a programme run out of MIT's Media Lab by education researcher Blakeley H. Payne for six to 10-year olds. The children are invited to the lab where they use Teachable Machine 2.0, among other things, to get a wider knowledge base about technology and what it can do.

"Parents - especially of girls - often tell me their child is nervous to learn about AI because they have never coded before," said Payne. "I love using Teachable Machine in the classroom because it empowers these students to be designers of technology without the fear of 'I've never done this before.'"

The tool is entirely browser-based and all the data that's fed into it stays on the origin computer while the processing is done in the browser.

Teachable Machine can record from a computer's webcam and microphone and be trained to recognise images, sounds or poses. It can identify different people or objects and detect when they leave or return to the shot.

Other real-world use cases involve helping those with impaired speech use voice-powered computer products. For example, neurologic conditions that impair speech, such as motor neurone disease, can impede an individual's ability to interact with software. But, Teachable Machine can take audio, turn it into a spectrogram and be trained to correct the sound of speech that isn't produced normally.

Elsewhere, educators at New York University's interactive telecommunications program used the tool to create video games where characters could be controlled using hand gestures, thanks to the pose recognition feature.

You can get started with Teachable Machine too by following this link and basic tutorials can found on Google's page.

Nvidia researchers have created the first privacy-focused federated learning paradigm to train medical imaging analysis tools using artificial intelligence (AI), in partnership with King's College London.

Federated learning involves multiple parties such as developers and organisations collaboratively training a centralised deep neural network (DNN) using data from multiple sources.

When it comes to patient data, which is needed to train such models, privacy issues arise when sharing data between parties. This method means the private data never has to leave the hospital from where it's stored.

Instead of taking the data out of the hospital, the federated learning method relies on installing a client at the hospital's systems. Then, the centralised federated learning server, where the data is turned into knowledge but located elsewhere, can communicate with that client and processes the data locally at the hospital, only sending the learned insights back to the server and not the raw data itself.

"The client contains data that has been stored in a harmonised way," said Jorge Cardoso, associate professor in AI at King's College London. "We then take an algorithm, we put it into this container that is then sent to the different hospitals. This container learns from the data locally and the parameters of the model, not the data, is sent back to a centralised server.

"The centralised server then takes multiple realisations of the model that have been trained on separate datasets and creates a consensus out of it," he added. "This consensus is sent back to the hospitals, learns from data again and the updated models are sent back to the centralised server."

The process is repeated until the algorithm learns all that it can from the data, the whole time never learning who the data belongs to or where it came from. According to experts, the model appears to solve one of the more prevalent fundamental issues in medical data sharing.

"As I see it, the flaw in most solutions is model inversion, allowing the ultimate exposure of the individual patient's identity," said Peter Borner, president and CEO at The Data Privacy Group.

"It would seem that the approach being adopted by Nvidia and Kings has taken this major issue into account. I am excited to see this approach mature into a fully-fledged solution that will enable research teams to fully cooperate with the danger of breaching patient confidentiality."

To further protect the privacy that federated learning affords, the researchers are investigating the feasibility of adding the e-differential privacy framework, a way to formally define privacy loss.

The model has been tested using data pulled from the BRaTS 2018 dataset which contains the MRI scans of 285 patients with brain tumours. The data allowed the researchers to evaluate the performance of the multi-modal and multi-class segmentation class.

They found a comparable performance from the federated learning model to a data-centralised system; Nvidia said the slight performance decrease was a "natural tradeoff" between privacy protection and quality of the trained model.

The research will be formally presented to attendees of MICCAI, a large medical imaging conference starting today in Shenzen, China.

Academics have called for a change in outdated patent laws to allow AI to legally author patented ideas.

A team of academics has created an AI specifically to think of new ideas, two of which include a specially designed food container that can be easily handled by robots and a lamp which flashes in a rhythm which is difficult to ignore, reports the BBC.

As of now, patent offices insist that new patents must be attributed to humans, a notion researchers label "outdated" as they applied for the two patents on the AI's behalf.

The AI in question is called DABUS, created by Missouri-based Dr. Stephen Thaler, CEO of Imagination Engines, and has previously made headlines through its creation of surreal artworks.

Academics from the University of Surrey have teamed up with Thaler and intellectual property (IP) rights lawyers to file the patent in the UK in a bid for it to be attributed to DABUS.

However, Section 7 of the UK's Patents Act 1977 states that "any person may make an application for a patent either alone or jointly with another", but not any other type of entity.

Thaler argues that DABUS works differently to other AIs that are built to solve problems such as automating cloud-based cyber security systems. DABUS is built to create new ideas, an argument which meets the standard criteria of an 'inventive act', according to Thaler.

A spokeswoman from the European Patent Office told the BBC that changing the law to allow non-human entities to legally author patents would create a wealth of problems.

"It is a global consensus that an inventor can only be a person who makes a contribution to the invention's conception in the form of devising an idea or a plan in the mind," she explained.

"The current state of technological development suggests that, for the foreseeable future, AI is... a tool used by a human inventor."

She went on to say that changes to patent law would have knock-on effects on other areas such as authoring rights in copyright law and data protection also.

Ryan Abbott, one of the law professors at the University of Surrey that joined the DABUS project has been invested in the topic of AI patent authorship for years. In 2016, he published a paper on the reasons why AI should be afforded the right to own patents.

"Artificial intelligence has been generating inventive output for decades, and now the continued and exponential growth in computing power is poised to take creative machines from novelties to major drivers of economic growth," said Abbott in the paper's abstract. "In some cases, a computer's output constitutes patentable subject matter, and the computer rather than a person meets the requirements for inventorship."

Speaking to the BBC, Abbott acknowledged the difficulty faced by lawmakers, saying it could take until the mid-2020s before real progress is made.

When Artificial intelligence (AI) is mentioned, Blade Runner and its replicants or the Terminator franchise often share the same sentence. But outside pop culture, AI is already having a profound impact on every aspect of our lives and shaping how businesses connect with their customers. But what is AI and how does it work? 

At the heart of any AI system lies a complex amalgamation of algorithms, data, and human ingenuity. The fathers of AI are generally held to be Marvin Minsky, who founded MIT’s AI laboratory, and Alan Turing, whose work into AI in the 1950s laid the foundations for the explosion of AI we see today.

From banks using AI to identify suspicious activity, to predictive text in email clients and productivity platforms, AI is already everywhere we turn. It can all sound very worrying that a machine intelligence knows so much about our lives, but AI is now a core component of many of the digital services we all take for granted.

How does AI work?

AI is an umbrella term that includes a range of different technologies, approaches, and architectures. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI that forms the basis for many AI systems in use today. 

ML is the practice of feeding large amounts of data into algorithms, which over time result in a system that can make predictions and decisions without specific human instruction. For example, streaming platforms and online marketplaces use ML to learn consumer preferences and make accurate show or product recommendations.

Modern AI systems often work by running data through a complex ML structure called an artificial neural network (ANN), built to mimic the flow of neurons through a human brain. 

Deep learning, a subset of ML used for AI systems that need to process large amounts of unstructured data, ANNs are connected in a structure similar to a human brain. The "deep" aspect of deep learning is reflected in the multiple layers of ANNs within the structure, with layer processing data independently before passing it to the next layer for further analysis.

In this way, deep learning models can be trained to recognize patterns in vast swathes of unstructured data. This is important when it comes to processing data in near real-time, as in a text-to-speech system or natural language processing (NLP).

Generative AI, which has become widely used since 2022, relies on deep learning architectures to produce outputs based on user inputs. Most popular models currently operate using an architecture known as a transformer, which allows for sophisticated responses based on contextual processing of user inputs.

Benefits of AI for business

Like any technology, AI has pros and cons. First and foremost, the technology allows for the automation of menial tasks so that employees can focus on more important and enriching activities.

Workers can save up to a month of work per year using AI tools, according to Slack’s 2023 State of Work report. The study took in responses from over 18,000 global workers, with many of those who regularly use generative AI tools reporting improved productivity through the technology.

Outside of automating tasks that humans would normally do, AI can be used to perform jobs at a speed or precision that humans could never achieve. For example, AI can carry out big data analytics on a firm’s unstructured data, to identify trends or flag anomalous results. 

In short, AI is a vital technology when it comes to noticing the unnoticeable. It excels at drawing connections between data points. This is why AI cyber security has great potential to help businesses defend themselves, with AI security systems able to proactively identify threats based on suspicious activity and recommend courses of remedial action.

Cyber security powered by AI will also be necessary to counter the new wave of AI threats businesses face. This includes the use of AI for deepfakes and social engineering campaigns.

Risks of AI for business 

As with any technology, AI also has its drawbacks. From an employee perspective, AI-linked job cuts are a serious threat, particularly as AI systems become more capable at handling everyday office work. Research published by the UK Department of Education in 2023 found that skilled workers are most at risk from AI, particularly in the insurance and finance sectors.

AI also comes with the risk of making incorrect decisions or producing outputs that do not align with facts. Generative AI models are prone to ‘hallucinations’, a term used to describe confidently incorrect responses to user inputs. These can be damaging to a company’s reputation if sent directly to customers or the wider public and can mislead decision-making if not identified at an internal level.

On a broader level, all AI systems are capable of inherent bias. For example, some hiring algorithms are biased against applicants from underrepresented groups, which can result in decisions that are ableist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory. Many developers have committed themselves to ethical AI development, with a goal to remove as much bias as possible and to ensure models are accountable.

Legislators have been targeting the potential risks of AI for some time, but laws are only just coming into place to regulate the technology. For example, the EU AI Act seeks to limit the deployment of AI systems that are deemed to have a high innate risk.

For these reasons, some businesses are choosing not to invest in generative AI for now with leaders in controlled industries particularly cautious over the potential for unwanted outputs.

Examples of AI in use today

Digital assistants are often how most people are exposed to an AI for the first time. The use of chatbots for customer services has expanded massively as these AI tools have improved, with generative AI having improved the detail of chatbot responses. 

On a less visible level, AI algorithms have already become commonplace in many pieces of software. For example, in modern productivity suites users are given word or full-sentence suggestions based on their personal context.

As mentioned above, AI can be fantastic for identifying anomalous, erroneous, or suspicious data across an organization’s estate. This has numerous applications, with AI systems able to chip away at laborious tasks night and day – with the right training – more accurately than human workers.

AI is already empowering security teams to turn the tide against hackers with enhanced protections against network or identity-based attacks, while generative AI tools such as Copilot for Security provide cyber security teams with summaries of attacks and suggestions for responses.

Leaders can also use AI to improve their supply chain through targeted analysis of inefficiencies and projections for how changes could improve overall operations. The same process can be applied to business models to help leaders make data-driven decisions, or even for detailed weather forecasting based on climate data. On a larger scale is already being used by scientists to feed into decisions in the fight against climate change.

Another practical application of AI is in healthcare. Advanced algorithms are being employed to analyze medical data, and diagnose diseases. The power of AI is the ability of these systems to sift through vast amounts of data about a patient and their condition, which would be impossible for a human clinician. Already, preventative care for breast cancer is being revolutionized by AI. For example, Imperial College London is testing an AI system that can detect 13% more cancers than a human clinician alone.

In the near future, improvements in AI computer vision could allow devices to better guide blind or people with vision impairment. The same technology is already being used on a more basic level for autonomous robots on manufacturing floors, as part of the move toward smart manufacturing. 

Applied AI vs general AI

Applied AI, also known as weak AI, refers to AI systems designed for a specific purpose. These systems excel at making recommendations based on historical data and processing vast amounts of information to provide more precise predictions or suggestions. Weather forecasting, for example.

General AI, also known as strong AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI), is a term for a theoretical AI system that could equal or surpass the intellectual capabilities of a human. Such an AI would be self-aware and far closer to the kind of AI one sees in sci-fi movies.

If realized, general AI could pose a serious risk to humanity. When generative AI development picked up in earnest some called for a six-month pause in AI development so that innovation did not dangerously outpace legislation.

Some companies, such as OpenAI or Google DeepMind, are expressly seeking to create general AI. But at present, such models can only be found in academic papers and the realm of science fiction.

The future of AI

We have witnessed an unparalleled expansion of AI tools over the last two years. ChatGPT began a step change in how AI is seen and used by millions. Across all sectors, AI's transformative capabilities are reshaping the way we work, communicate, and interact with technology.

However, alongside its benefits, AI also introduces significant risks and challenges. Concerns surrounding data privacy, bias, and job displacement loom large, underscoring the importance of ethical and responsible AI development and deployment. And the spectre of super intelligent AI, capable of outpacing human intelligence and autonomy, raises existential questions about the future of humanity.

As we navigate this rapidly evolving technological landscape, it is imperative to strike a balance between innovation and regulation, harnessing the power of AI while mitigating its potential harms. Collaborative efforts across governments, industries, and academia are essential to establish frameworks that promote transparency, accountability, and inclusivity in AI development and deployment.

Looking ahead the future of AI holds immense promise, yet it is also fraught with uncertainties. Continued research and investment are crucial to unlock AI's full potential while addressing its ethical, social, and economic implications. By fostering a culture of responsible innovation and human-centric design, we can steer the future of AI toward maximum benefits and minimum risk.

Cisco has introduced new AI software for network analysts that helps differentiate a general issue from a potentially damaging threat to a network.

The new tools are designed to help human IT teams wade through the large volumes of alerts generated by analytics in Cisco's DNA Centre and identify the ones that can really hurt a business.

The new software enhancements aim to improve the accuracy and reliability of threat detection while being able to identify trends and root causes too.

Cisco's DNA Centre users surface around 8,000 'anomalies' every day, according to the firm, with many of these being superficial errors that do not require immediate attention. In a test case, the new system was able to whittle down the 8,000 anomalies to around 300 personalised core issues that need to be remedied.

"That's a 75% reduction in alerts, it's a huge, huge increase in IT efficiency, so now I can pay attention to those 303 that are really unique to me and unique to my environment," said Scott Harrell, SVP and GM of Cisco's Enterprise Networking Business. "It makes me much more efficient, makes me much more able to provide a better service to my users."

When a threat detection product learns what's normal and what isn't, it can deliver legitimate, actionable alerts to IT teams, sidestepping the mammoth 8,000 alerts given in the past, according to Cisco.

Machine learning could also provide organisations with the ability to monitor trends on a network autonomously which means threats can be anticipated and fixed before they cause damage to a network.

"One of the cool parts about machine learning is that I can take seemingly uncorrelated pieces of data and I can start to actually provide insights as I watch these pieces of data move in concert," said Harrell.

"I can start to become predictive about when I see certain problems arise [I can see] the precursors that led to those problems and start to flag those well in advance before they ever became a problem for the network administrator," he added.

Cisco is somewhat late to the party when it comes to analytics tools, however, its CEO believes the new tools give it a unique place in the market.

"We're the only company that has technology that you can integrate across the datacentre, the campus, switching to wireless, enterprise router platform," said Chuck Robbins, CEO and Chairman at Cisco. "[We also have] a robust security portfolio, including cloud security gateways and you can see many of our competitors doing acquisitions in this space to try and extend their footprint because they know that customers want this.

"I think our advantage is we're going to have more seamless architectures and we have technology in all of them so that should give us quite the head start."

Cisco also thinks that its 35-year history in the market has allowed it to collect one of the richest networking datasets, something which is fundamental to creating an effective AI product.

"It all starts with the data and Cisco has one of the best datasets than anybody in the industry," said Harrell. "We've been using machine learning, we've been using AI for decades now for things like security - we block over 20 billion threats a day in our security portfolio."

"So, we have one of the richest datasets in the world and we're going to apply that to networking," he added. "We have a huge high volume of data from every dimension you can imagine and that's really key - it's not just the volume of data, but the diversity of data and the quality of that data."

Microsoft has quietly pulled its facial recognition database of 10 million images of 100,000 people's faces offline.

MS Celeb was published in 2016 and contained images of faces gleaned from the internet used to train recognition algorithms. The images were harvested from search engines and included based on them being uploaded with a Creative Commons license.

"The rich information provided by the knowledge base helps to conduct disambiguation and improve the recognition accuracy, and contributes to various real-world applications, such as image captioning and news video analysis," said Microsoft at the time.

According to the accompanying research paper, the database was originally supposed to just include images of celebrities, but according to researcher Adam Harvey's Megapixels project, the term 'celebrity' was used quite broadly.

"While the majority of people in this dataset are American and British actors, the exploitative use of the term "celebrity" extends far beyond Hollywood," said Harvey. "Many of the names in the MS Celeb face recognition dataset are merely people who must maintain an online presence for their professional lives: journalists, artists, musicians, activists, policy makers, writers, and academics.

"Many people in the target list are even vocal critics of the very technology Microsoft is using their name and biometric information to build."

Aside from developing facial recognition algorithms, the database had other applications. Military researchers harnessed the large dataset, as did Chinese AI and facial recognition companies SenseTime and Megvii, according to the Financial Times.

The database was also reportedly linked with startups in China that build AI algorithms to profile and track ethnic minorities, mainly consisting of Muslims.

China's pervasive surveillance camera network has come under scrutiny since its inception, as has its social credit system but the discovery of the profiling and tracking of the Uighurs was a first for the country.

Although it's been taken offline, traces of the database still exist on the web and freely available to download on GitHub, along with many other databases filled with millions of images.

The facial recognition industry is one of much controversy, the technology is frequently shown to be inaccurate - in some cases showing racial and gender bias. Other notable cases include the NYPD's clumsy use of the technology, using celebrity lookalikes to search its database for real criminals.

Using publicly available images to fill databases has also caused a stir in recent months. Notably, a database used by IBM contained one million faces gleaned from image hosting site Flickr, which prompted privacy concerns.

The UK fact-checking charity Full Fact has been named as one of the 30 grantees of the Google AI Impact Challenge (GAIIC) at Google's annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, California.

The GAIIC forms part of Google's AI for Social Good program which aims to harness the world's leading technology specifically in AI to help solve some of the most pressing societal and economic issues the world faces today.

Of the 2,602 applications, just 20 organisations were chosen as the shared recipients of the $25 million grant. Other recipients included New York State University which aims to optimise emergency service responses and Pennsylvania State University for its deep learning tools that are helping to predict locations and times of natural disasters.

"Forty percent of the applications came from organizations with no previous experience with artificial intelligence, which is still a developing concept in the social impact field," said Google. "Our job, as we thoroughly vetted the applications, was to choose the best projects based on feasibility, potential for impact, scalability and the responsible use of AI".

The Full Fact charity has been working on automated fact-checking since 2013 and has partnered with other companies to build and deploy technologies on three continents.

"Over the next three years, we'll use artificial intelligence to dramatically improve and scale global fact-checking efforts, working with international experts to define how artificial intelligence could transform this work, developing new tools and deploying and evaluating them," said Full Fact. "In three years, we hope our project will let individual citizens and internet users place trust with confidence, help internet companies make fair and informed judgements at scale, and enable policymakers to better understand how they can respond to misinformation while robustly protecting free speech".

Google's six-month AI Challenge Accelerator will begin next week in San Franciso where all the grantees will be invited to participate in a customised program delivered by Google Developers Launchpad.

Here, Full Fact and the other recipients will receive consulting from Google Cloud, mentoring from Google AI experts, opportunities to attend exclusive events and different training courses.

The company has received funding from Google on two previous occasions, it received an initial 20,000 from Google in 2018 to support the fact-checking work and then received a further 210,445 from the tech giant for the charities role in supplying tech for Google Search.

Full Fact also struck a deal with Facebook in January to start fact-checking the content that's uploaded to the embattled social network as part of its anti-misinformation campaign now it has finally reached the UK.

"People will be told if a story they've shared, or are about to share, has been checked by Full Fact," said the charity. "They'll be given the option to read more about the claim's source -- but won't be stopped from sharing anything. False content will appear lower in news feeds, so it reaches fewer people".

The charity will only be checking images, videos and articles and when users share content, they will be prompted whether or not said content has been approved by Full Fact. Satirical and opinion pieces will be exempt, the charity said.

In other news from the I/O conference, Google announced a huge list of privacy-focused features, following on from Facebook's latest commitment to greater privacy controls from the company.

But instead of just declaring change like Zuckerberg did, Google actually showed us what it plans to do, introducing its incognito mode almost everywhere, updated policies on handling cookies, modular security updates and more.

Whenever artificial intelligence, aka AI, comes up in conversation, the usual image that springs to most people's minds is a threatening killer robot along the lines of Terminator that has nothing but murderous intentions towards humanity.

But these days the AI acronym is being liberally sprinkled far and wide, often referring to things that stretch well beyond its primary meaning. In this feature, we look at some of the common myths and misconceptions, compared to the real scientific situation in each case.

1. AI will create a malevolent Skynet-style system that will destroy humanity

Let's look at the most popular myth first the scary robot elephant in the room. Terminator is the most well-known example, but it is a recurring sci-fi theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey to the latest season of Star Trek: Discovery. On the one hand, technology has been automating the delivery of ordnance for decades, with in-missile video footage from the 1991 Gulf War just one watershed moment in a process towards greater autonomy that dates back to the German V1 and V2 rockets of World War II. The US army has been deploying Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) for decades, and now has around 10,000 of them in regular use. But all of these still have human operators for key functions. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been awarding grants for the development of UAVs that can navigate themselves indoors. But as the RAND corporation points out, very few countries use armed drones just yet, and there is much controversy about their central value in warfare compared to conventional weapons systems. So even if fully autonomous fighting machines are developed, there are still many hurdles before they are deployed without human oversight, let alone take over the world.

2. AI systems and robots will eventually replace all jobs, making most people redundant

According to a report published by the UK's Department of Work and Pensions, 8,820,545 jobs could be wiped out by 2030 because of AI, particularly in the retail sector. Aside from the strangely specific number of job losses predicted, it's worth noting that it won't just be menial labour that gets replaced. Complex intellectual activities are already being replicated by expert systems, such as legal and medical advice. AI has been making inroads into healthcare to allow earlier diagnosis without the need for consultation with specialists, who are always at a premium. You can even put your job title into the Will Robots Take My Job website to see how likely you are to be replaced by AI. In reality, though, similar arguments have been made since the agrarian and industrial revolutions. On the one hand, many jobs will be automated by AI, but on the other, people can retrain, or young people educated in a different direction for the new jobs that are emerging potentially designing and building those AI-powered robots.

3. Siri, Google Home, Cortana and Alexa are AI

Voice-activated speakers have been a Christmas hit for the last couple of years, and more people are getting used to giving the smartphones verbal commands, too. These are undeniably clever, convenient systems (when they work), but in reality, they are just advanced natural language processing (NLP) recognition algorithms akin to dictation software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. There is no original thought going on, just a lot of pre-programmed responses to verbal commands.

4. AI is a computer version of the human brain

We now get to the main underlying myth of AI that computers model the human brain. This could be the subject of multiple PhD dissertations, but in a nutshell (and just for starters), computers are still based on the Von Neuman machine model of the mid-1940s. This reads data from memory, operates on it, and writes the result back to memory. This is not how brains work. Even multi-core processors, or HPC datacentres full of them, are still much more serial in their operation than a brain, which in contrast has a slow frequency (around 200Hz compared to multiple Gigahertz) but is massively parallel. Not just massively parallel, but inputs and outputs are connected in complicated feedback loops, with workings that we still don't understand completely yet. This isn't to say that computer AI isn't amazingly useful, or that we won't ever fully understand the human brain. But current AI is at best a very rough simulation, not even close to a digital facsimile of the cerebrum of homo sapiens.

5. AI systems can learn for themselves

Another two-letter acronym often found alongside AI is ML (Machine Learning). The common myth is that ML is a fully autonomous process, which will potentially lead to AI that transcends human intelligence and eventually decides to get rid of us (see 1 above). However, ML still intrinsically involves teaching by humans. Every AI system needs to be fed source material chosen by people, and its outputs adjusted by human experts until they work. This is precisely the process that Google's self-driving car system is going through right now, and this won't stop even when it gets the green light as a commercially available system in new vehicles.

6. AI systems will be much more impartial than human beings

As a result of AI's ML being fed by humans, there's no reason to believe that it will be any more impervious to prejudices than the humans that taught it. Early facial recognition systems had trouble identifying ethnicities, and the Tay Twitter bot was rapidly turned into a rabid racist by the tone of social media conversations. On the other hand, an AI that has been trained to be as impartial as the best human examples will consistently be better in this respect than the worst humans, which is where there is clear value for the legal and medical professions, amongst others.

7. AI will soon be smarter than human beings, or never will

Because AI runs on computers that are not an exact replica of the human brain (see four above), this is a bit of a trick question. On the one hand, there is no sign that a general AI will transcend overall human intelligence anytime soon, because we still don't know exactly what the latter is. But on the other hand, much more narrow AI has been beating humans for some years now, such as defeating the best human chess player, and surpassing the best players of Jeopardy!. In 2004, none of the vehicles in the DARPA Grand Challenges completed the course, but in 2005, five did, and now we have self-driving cars being tested on public roads. So AIs will likely be smarter than humans in many key areas (and already are in some), but may never be in a general, overall sense whatever that even means.

8. The technological singularity is approaching, or will never happen

Related to seven above, there is a theory, originally presented by maths and computer science professor Vernor Vinge, that the development of artificial superintelligence will arrive around 2030 and then AI will upgrade itself beyond human understanding and the world will change unrecognisably. This has been dubbed "the singularity". For reasons already discussed above, the date already looks massively optimistic before we even get into the details, due to our lack of understanding of the human brain. But, on the other hand, the singularity doesn't necessarily have to involve completely human intelligence. We could be creating something that isn't human, just loosely based on us. Nevertheless, this idea still gives computers the ability to have their own intentions, which somehow emerge spontaneously from the advanced technology. Right now, no AI can do anything other than what humans told it to do, even if your flaky desktop PC might sometimes make you believe otherwise.

9. AI is just sci-fi and nothing that should concern business

Just as AI can create new jobs as well as replace old ones, it's a topic that should be central to all businesses that intend to survive and grow over the coming decades, rather than ignored. On the one hand, the scary sci-fi scenarios of human replacement are very distant if ever likely to happen at all. But, on the other hand, there are real opportunities to enhance business services and consumer interaction via the more limited systems that have been shown to be effective already. Business intelligence data analytics, forward resource planning, and automated customer service are just the beginning. Companies that embrace AI, whilst being realistic about its limitations, will be the ones that prosper.

Discover more about data innovations at Intel.co.uk

Blockchain? We've tried this, but it didn't pass proof-of-concept. 5G? It's exciting but won't make much difference for us. Artificial intelligence (AI)? Let's see how that goes for our customers first, but we're not at that point yet.

It's a similar story for many businesses trying to evaluate recent technology innovations, all of which have been anchored in varying degrees of reality and hype. Technology like 5G, for example, has been widely touted as a Godsend. Mobile World Congress (MWC) this year was flooded with 5G buildup, and handset manufacturers touting prospective benefits.

But even for global software giant Epicor, these technologies are still untested and offer very few real-world advantages for customers. For CTO Himanshu Palsule, 5G, in particular, will make no more than a "minimal" difference to Epicor's ERP portfolio, which spans more than 50 products, and when it comes to improving its internal processes, it will only scratch the surface.

"Any time the pipe's getting bigger and faster, innovation's going to get better from that," he tells us during a briefing at Epicor's customer conference Insights 2019. "But I don't see any radical changes to our stack or strategy as a result of it."

This point of view isn't just isolated to 5G, however; AI, AR, blockchain, the list stretches on and on. All of these innovations, and their wide-ranging degrees of success, have captured the imagination of industries in recent years, with businesses experimenting with adoption to varying degrees. While the rollout of 5G is becoming more of a reality, for many organisations, blockchain adoption remains a purely academic exercise.

We want to avoid technological 'overkill'

"Blockchain often gets misunderstood and confused with cryptocurrency, but that has nothing to do with it," Palsule explains. Just a day earlier, he revealed that Epicor had experimented with blockchain with the hopes of porting this into a tangible product. But these attempts ended in failure.

"The interesting part of blockchain for me is the distributed general ledger; the ability to get multi-party transactions in a secure route across all those different entities, and then summarise that back at the end," he tells IT Pro.

"First we researched the technology, the ability for us to take a single a single transaction, take a general ledger entry, have it broken down into parts and then come together. And yeah it's fast, it's secure, it's global, et cetera."

However, he explains that his company was unable to find "compelling use cases" for customers, and that ROI would be disappointing.

Palsule is personally excited by the technology, particularly with respect to multi-party authentication, and feels it'll evolve with time. But, he adds, it would be "overkill" to solve a problem that otherwise can be solved in ERP. This was rejected as early as the proof-of-concept stage because Epicor couldn't find a meaningful way of bringing blockchain to its customers.

And perhaps the businesses that Epicor serves, from manufacturing to lumber, are part of the problem too. While customers such as UK-based manufacturer Iracroft tell IT Pro they want Epicor to be forward thinking in their attitude to technology, many customers are still steeped in legacy infrastructure as well as legacy attitudes.

One area that Epicor has pushed far beyond any other has been the power of the public cloud, and more specifically the technological potential of adopting Microsoft's Azure platform. A host of new features in Epicor releases coming next month, including an AI-powered chatbot, will sit atop this underlying base layer.

But a significant chunk of Epicor's customer base will not only remain unconvinced, but will actively push back against this. They argue their businesses are running just fine with relatively older Epicor builds, and they hold a degree of scepticism around Epicor's embracement of cloud technology. When faced with the prospect of being forced into using a peer-to-peer technology like blockchain to support authentication, this frustration is likely to grow even further.

Ethics in AI will keep me up at night - if anything

But across these technologies, regardless of when, where or how they're implemented, the industry needs to keep a watchful eye on the unintended consequences that may arise. For Palsule, the ethical development of AI is at the crux of the issue.

"We as ERP vendors are abstracted enough that we don't worry about it today - because of what we do. But as we get into HMC [human capital management], we get into payroll, and we are not planning to do that anytime soon, the ethics of AI become very interesting because now you are guiding decisions.

"On the one hand they don't have a human bias, but on the other hand they have a huge algorithmic bias that cannot be easily changed. If you don't correct a bad algorithm, it's going to start creating patterns and biases that, by the time you find, could have led to a bad decision."

The likes of Microsoft and Google are wrestling with this ethical and morally-charged issue today. Google, for example, recently launched a disastrous AI ethics advisory board that became steeped in controversy. Microsoft, meanwhile, has repeatedly insisted any AI development it pursues in the future must be grounded in ethics, not long after its own AI-powered chat bot infamously became inseparable from the worst kind of internet troll.

On this front, Palsule leans more towards compliance and legislation than self-governance among the tech community, so long as this doesn't in itself block innovation.

"You put your hat on as a technologist and you want to move as fast as possible to solve complex problems, and then you put on your other hat as a business leader, and standardisation, and authentication, become important.

"Technology is moving at a great pace right now, so if you have to slow down a tad to make sure we're doing it for the right reason, that's great."

Think of AI and you'll almost invariably be thinking of a cloud-based compute system where queries are captured at source and sent to the cloud for processing, after which the result of that processing is sent back to the source. But there's a different side to AI that's starting to gain more exposure, localised embedded AI.

There's been a lot of talk over the past year about neural processors, especially in the smartphone arena, and we should only expect the buzz around these embedded AI platforms to increase. So what are we expecting these embedded AI systems to do, and how will they differ from the far more powerful cloud-based systems?

We sat down with David Harold, VP marketing and communications Imagination Technologies, while at CES to talk embedded AI and the impact it will have on the coming years. Imagination Technologies recently announced a new automotive technology system, PowerVR Automotive, and it's safe to say embedded AI will be finding its way into more and more cars.

With countless automotive and technology companies all racing towards the autonomous driving ideal, the interim step of Level 3 autonomous driving - where an onboard system can take complete control of the vehicle, while ensuring the driver remains vigilant and engaged - is high on the agenda for 2019. But cars move quickly, and situations can change even more quickly, so the compute required for instantaneous decision making can't be based in the cloud, where a drop in connectivity could spell disaster.

That's why the automotive sector is one area that will undoubtedly see extensive embedded AI development over the coming years - if a car is going to be making potentially life or death decisions, you need that compute power in the car. As Harold pointed out, the localised self-awareness of an autonomous vehicle can't rely on connectivity, the system inside the vehicle must be processing all the local sensor data and making those decisions. It's something that Danny Shapiro - senior director automotive Nvidia - echoed when we spoke to him, too. While there has been a lot of talk about how 5G will help enable the autonomous car revolution, it won't change the fact that the critical compute systems need to be embedded in the car.

Of course there's already a huge amount of technology in cars, before you start to think about autonomous driving technology, and none of that is going away. Systems like music, navigation, communication, even passenger video playback will need to be controlled by that same in-car technology system, so you don't want any compute power that the autonomous driving system needs to be soaked up by your Spotify streaming or the movie your kids are watching in the back.

The answer is virtualisation. Just as with enterprise-level hardware, an in-car, embedded system can use virtualisation to sandbox each application to ensure that one doesn't affect another, while also making sure that critical systems are completely protected from any malicious code or apps that end users may introduce. There needs to be a level of prioritisation, too, ensuring that those critical systems have enough compute power and resources to operate at optimal levels. Essentially, the AI or neural systems that we'll see embedded in cars, will be just as complex and versatile as anything in a data centre, but obviously far more compact.

But it's not just automotive where embedded AI will be having a significant impact; another area where embedded and cloud-based AI will work in union is security and surveillance. CCTV cameras coupled with facial recognition systems have become an integral part of local, national and international security efforts. It's a prime example of how physical technology - the camera - works with integrated technology - an embedded AI processor - and cloud-based resources - security services databases - to achieve a single goal, identifying potential threats.

That process could be accelerated if that facial recognition was done locally, but you obviously can't embed a huge database locally. However, Harold suggested that you wouldn't necessarily have to.

If you were searching for specific people, and your intelligence told you that there's a high probability of them being in a specific area, you could have their details stored within the camera. The embedded system would basically ignore anyone who doesn't match the four or five faces it has stored locally, making the process much faster and giving security forces a better chance of acting upon the intel.

This scenario highlights that a third level of AI is likely to gain momentum, with AI embedded at the edge. The concept of edge computing has been around a while, and again it's all about improving performance and latency by bringing that compute closer to the physical location of the user. By placing edge servers at the cell tower, you could deliver more power than the embedded AI system, along with more storage for larger databases, while still providing significantly improved latency and performance compared with bouncing to a cloud- supporting data centre.

There's absolutely no doubt that AI is going to have an impact on everything we do, from personalising our consumer experiences, through searching for and predicting threats, to analysing market and geopolitical data to make effective business decisions, but it won't be a one size fits all' solution. AI will be a hybrid solution, marrying localised embedded technology, edge-based compute and enterprise level cloud platforms, all the while delivering a seamless experience to users. In fact, that's already starting to happen today.

Virtual Reality is a major trend at the moment, whether talking in consumer applications or business applications. It was even the main subject of Steven Spielberg's major Hollywood blockbuster 'Ready Player One', which is set in 2045 and focuses on VR software called OASIS a VR platform that humans turn to when their world becomes so desolate, they seek solace in an artificial one.

But VR is equally as important in the real world. It's often used for gaming, where people can use it to escape from the everyday grind, entertaining themselves with an alternate reality. Although the technology has largely been associated with gaming, it's not all about shooting zombies or flying spaceships.

There are apps to immerse yourself in a story, apps for creating Art, for travelling without actually leaving your sofa, there are even apps for getting more out of popular video streaming sites the possibilities are endless.

Read on to see our pick of the best apps around for a quality virtual reality experience.

Cisco Spark VR

Cisco Spark VR breaks down physical distances by enabling teams to communicate, regardless of their location. Whether colleagues are thousands of miles apart, or just around the corner from each other, virtual reality kits make it possible to meet and collaborate in digital form rather than send countless emails or messages to each other.

It includes features such as Cisco Spark Spaces for group chats, sharing files, a virtual whiteboard, video chat and instant messaging. To use Cisco Spark VR you'll need an Oculus Rift headset and an existing Cisco Spark account.

NYT VR

The New York Times has used virtual reality to put its readers at the centre of stories they have covered. The publication pushed the frontiers of journalism by reporting on the US presidential race and the Syrian refugee crisis in an immersive 360-degree fashion with the NYT VR. The app posts new VR films every month.

Tilt Brush

If you want someone to understand both how impressive VR can be and that it's not just for games, Tilt Brush is the app to show them. The concept of using VR to create three-dimensional paintings is a simple one, but put it the right hands and the results can be truly astounding.

YouTube

YouTube has - by far - the largest library of virtual reality content around. All of the videos on the platform can be watched in VR in a virtual theatre, and it also supports 360-degree video, allowing users to upload their own VR footage. The content itself might not be revolutionary yet, but if 360-degree video is ever going to go mainstream, YouTube is where it'll be.

Google Earth VR

The beauty of VR is that it can take you to strange and faraway places. This doesn't have to mean distant galaxies though; with Google Earth's VR app, you can explore some of the most iconic and breathtaking landscapes on the planet, zooming over entire continents at will.

VuildUs

Samsung's experimental VuildUs software allows users to scan a room and plan out the interior design in virtual reality, placing furniture and fittings and changing colours. Although designed primarily for home users, it has real applications for architecture, planning and business - so much so that we gave it an award for best business software when it was debuted at MWC 2017.

Minecraft

As one of the most popular games ever made, it's no surprise that there's a VR version Minecraft. In fact, Oculus CTO John Carmack ported it to the device himself. Although it's technically a game, the sheer scale and versatility of Minecraft (particularly for areas like education) make it one of the most interesting pieces of VR software around.

Business expenditure on AI and intelligent automation technology is expected to reach $232 billion in the next seven years, according to KPMG, an 18-fold increase on the $12.4 billion spent globally today..

The increased expenditure on such technologies, which include artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotic process automation (RPA), is detailed in KPMG's latest report on automation, titled 'Ready, Set, Fail?: Avoiding setbacks in the intelligent automation race'.

It found that businesses will struggle to get a return on investment in AI projects unless they're signed off at the most senior level, while for automation to be effective it must be incorporated into a wider digital transformation of the business that is led by technology.

"It's not clear whether most companies understand that intelligent automation is about changing business processes, and then restructuring the organisation around those new processes now driven by technologies that didn't exist before," the report read.

"This means shifting the business and operating model from one of people supported by technology to one of technology supported by people. It's a digital-first operating model."

The study, which involved interviewing executives from a range of sectors in businesses around the world, was commissioned to understand why businesses deployed AI, the implications of deployment, and how this could be scaled.

Researchers found that while most executives emphasised intelligent automation can digitally transform their businesses and staff roles, several challenges existed - including being unable to handle the pace of change, having to choose from hundreds of technology options, and having to define the future workforce.

"If it's not done right, they may be disappointed at what they save on work that is automated," said KPMG's leader of cognitive automation initiatives, Cliff Justice.

"Determining what can be scaled across multiple areas requires some strategic thought and testing of the concept in units that are small enough to succeed with repetitive tasks. Hard decisions have to be made about reshaping workforces and training employees in new skills. There could be downsizing."

KPMG concluded that while companies recognise the potential value in reshaping strategies around AI, there has been little progress so far, with the vast majority of projects still in the planning stages. Nearly two-thirds of executives interviewed, however, indicated plans to fully implement RPA by 2021, while 49% plan to implement cognitive automation at scale by then.

The researchers also identified growing evidence that taking a more strategic approach to automation focused on developing new business models could increase the returns by between five and ten times. They warned companies against "piecemeal efforts" that focus on cutting costs of legacy processes, and reducing headcount.

"Done strategically, leveraging AI yields important advantages: improved customer service, empowered employees, better innovation, lowered costs, faster projects, and upgraded, standardised and higher quality operations," the report continued.

"But to realise these transformational benefits, any AI effort should be part of a strategy aligned with overarching business goals and pursued across the organisation."

KPMG's findings follow a PwC report issued last month that predicted AI deployment will create 7.2 million jobs in the next 20 years while culling seven million.

Cisco is set to pump $100 million (76.8 million) into building one of the world's largest AI research centres with University College London (UCL), aiming to spur innovation in machine learning, big data and autonomous vehicles.

The UK government welcomed the plans, with prime minister Theresa May and digital secretary Jeremy Wright saying the initiative will run hand-in-hand with the government's industrial strategy that aims to generate 230 billion to the UK economy by 2030.

Once built, the centre will house more than 200 academics and researchers and will train new talent in AI and innovation, digital skills and more as the centre seeks to expand the use of AI to different industries.

"The UK has become the natural destination in Europe for the largest and most innovative tech companies to operate and invest," Wright said, according to City AM. "Cisco's strong commitment to the UK highlights we have the ambition, research excellence and regulatory environment for world-leading firms to develop the innovations that will change people's lives for the better."

The scheme was unveiled at Downing Street at the end of last week and May described it as a vote of confidence in the government's industrial strategy. It follows figures released last month showing that London hosts twice the number of AI firms as Paris and Berlin combined, with Mayor Sadiq Khan describing it as offering "a strong pipeline of AI innovation".

"We believe that the UK's expertise in AI and its commitment to making sure future innovators have the right digital skills will help ensure the nation's citizens are well-positioned to capture the opportunity ahead," Chuck Robbins, Cisco's chairman and chief executive, said about his company's investment.

"It's wonderful to renew our partnership with Cisco and work together to upskill the UK in machine learning and artificial intelligence," UCL provost, Professor Michael Arthur, added. "I'm particularly looking forward to opening the new AI Centre in the coming months to position us as a sector leader in computer science."

Artificial intelligence will create as many jobs as it displaces in the UK, but its impact will be felt disproportionately across different sectors.

This is according to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that argues that AI will create 7.2 million jobs over the next 20 years, slightly more than the seven million predicted to be automated.

However, the impact of new technologies will not be felt evenly, as sectors like healthcare and education are set to benefit, whereas manufacturing and transport are estimated to see the largest decreases in jobs due to AI.

"People are understandably worried about the impact of AI on jobs, and businesses and the government need to address these concerns head on," said Euan Cameron, UK AI leader at PwC.

"As our analysis shows, there will be winners and losers. It's likely that the fourth industrial revolution will favour those with strong digital skills, as well as capabilities like creativity and teamwork which machines find it harder to replicate."

The report, published today, predicts that healthcare will be the biggest beneficiary of AI, with an estimated 1.5 million jobs created with 526,000 workers replaced by AI, a 22% net increase of nearly a million new jobs. There were similar outlooks for professional, scientific and technical jobs with a 16% net effect of 484,000 new roles.

"Healthcare is likely to see rising employment as it will be increasingly in demand as society becomes richer and the UK population ages," said John Hawksworth, chief economist at PwC.

"While some jobs may be displaced, many more are likely to be created as real incomes rise and patients still want the 'human touch' from doctors, nurses and other health and social care workers."

At the other end of the spectrum, manufacturing is predicted to lose 25% of its workforce to AI, equivalent to nearly 700,000 jobs, even when newly created jobs are accounted for. The transport and storage industry told a similar story, with PwC predicting a net loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, while the government and defence sector will cut 274,000 roles.

"As driverless vehicles roll out across the economy and factories and warehouses become increasingly automated, the manufacturing and transportation sectors could see a reduction in employment levels," added Hawksworth.

PwC's research almost mirrors Gartner's AI and the Future of Work report from earlier in the year that predicted AI will create 2.3 million jobs and eliminate 1.8 million by 2020, with a varied impact across industries.

Picture: Shutterstock

It doesn't really matter if you use Google, Amazon or Microsoft's AI algorithms, according to experts.

The real differentiator is not whether you use Lex, Azure AI or Google's machine learning tools, but the quality of your own data, speakers at OpenText's Enterprise World 2018 conference said yesterday.

"The algorithms are nothing without the data," Mike Gualtieri, principal analyst at Forrester, said. "Algorithms get all the press, but the competitive advantage, the accuracy of those models, the decisions that the models can make, it all comes from the data, and the data that enterprises have is very specific to them and their customers."

While Google and the other tech giants investing fortunes into machine learning models have trained their tools on billions of images, pieces of text and other media, none of these AI systems have the specific data that companies have to hand, Gualtieri explained.

"They've got a lot of web content but do they have the transaction information? They don't have that so enterprises shouldn't think 'I'll just wait and Google will do all the AI for me'. Every enterprise has their own valuable information and from that they are going to be able to create the models using machine learning."

That makes having quality data enterprises' primary concern, OpenText argued, before picking an AI or machine learning tool that can turn that data into insights.

Industries could also benefit from sharing data with one another, the analyst explained, warinng that enterprises should be wary of sharing information that gives them an edge over their rivals. "That balance has to be found about what's competitive and what's good for everyone in the industry to share."

Lalith Subramanian, VP of engineering for analytics at OpenText, said that with the advent of emojis and text language, AI was having a tougher time analysing conversations.

"It's not English anymore, it's abbreviations and all kinds of things," he said. "To me one of the most fascinating areas of exploration for this company has got to be around 'what is modern conversational linguistics' because it's not about strictly structured language with very formal grammars. You're having instead abbreviations and words and vocabularies [are] changing."

While every vendor is eagerly advertising the apparent benefits of applying AI to business processes, Subramanian said it's unlikely that drivers for using the technology would be very different to the usual factors of cost-cutting, increasing revenue, or fear of regulatory infringements.

"[Customers] say 'we would like to improve our customer service and build a chatbot'. Okay, but what's it going to take for you to buy one of these systems with a chatbot?" he said.

"You're not going to buy it unless you can lay off 15, 20, 30, 40 people in your staff because nothing else is going to justify it. Because I can't tell you your customer stats are going to go up by X per cent. It's got to be a little bit more of a concrete use case which usually I define by fear of jail, or greed."

Former chess world champion Garry Kasparov has said that any jobs that are lost to the rise of AI and automation are simply collateral damage in the process of civilisation's advancement, arguing that the loss of jobs is outweighed by the societal good that AI can achieve.

Speaking at Tableau Conference Europe, the chess grandmaster equated the looming risk posed by AI to certain roles and professions with the job losses caused by increased factory automation in the 20th century.

"I don't want to sound callous for people who are at risk of losing their jobs to automation, but that's the history of civilisation," he said; "that's the history of progress. We used to lose manufacturing jobs to machines - the only difference now is the people who are at risk have college degrees and Twitter accounts."

Kasparov has first-hand experience of being made redundant by machines, after famously becoming the first world champion to ever be beaten by a computer in a full chess match in 1997. Twenty years later, a different AI accomplished a much greater feat, defeating the world champion of Go, a game which is (mathematically speaking) vastly more complex than chess.

According to Kasparov, AI will force humans to move into different types of roles than the ones they currently occupy. As an example, he highlighted radiology, an area in which AI algorithms are rapidly surpassing their human equivalents in being able to detect anomalies and other potential indicators of cancer.

While this will most likely result in fewer radiology jobs in the future, the end result will be faster, more accurate and more accessible radiology scans for patients, which will lead to improvements in detection times and treatments for patients.

Similarly, he argued that because machines are perfectly suited to performing repetitive, clearly-defined tasks, they will eliminate much of the rote work involved in professional, white-collar roles, allowing humans to engage in more creative tasks.

"According to a McKinsey study from 2016 on the US job market, the median human performance at the workplace required 4% creativity. 4%. There's so much room for us to become human," he said, "to shift some of this rote cognitive work to AI and unleash our creativity."

However, Kasparov argued that the term 'artificial intelligence' is somewhat misleading, suggesting that 'augmented intelligence' may be closer to the truth. He also stated that artificial general intelligence (AGI) - the point at which AI can independently think and reason in a similar way to humans, outside the parameters of a specific function - is still a long way off. "AGI is still science fiction," he said. "It is the fundamental disconnection between machines operating with odds and then moving to something that we call AGI where you need some emotional intelligence."

Fundamentally, he said, AI is neither good nor bad: "It's not a magic wand, but it's also not a Terminator." Instead, he argued that AI is a tool that can be used for both good and ill, but it ultimately has the potential to vastly improve human existence. "We aren't being replaced. We're being promoted."

Robots enslaving humans is a common theme in science fiction, but it hasn't put people off having artificially intelligent bosses, according to research from Oracle.

The AI at Work study, conducted in partnership with research firm Future Workplace, found that most employees were ready to embrace AI at work, with 93% saying they would trust orders from a robot.

In fact, 79% of HR leaders and 60% of all employees believed that failing to use AI will have negative consequences on their own careers, as well as impacting their colleagues and their organisation overall.

"As this study shows, people are not afraid of AI taking their jobs and instead want to be able to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest innovations," said Emily He, Oracle's senior vice president of marketing and human capital management.

"To help employees embrace AI, organisations should partner with their HR leaders to address the skill gap and focus their IT strategy on embedding simple and powerful AI innovations into existing business processes."

Canvassing 1,320 respondents, a mix of HR leaders and employees, the research identified a large gap between the way people are using AI at home and at work. While 70% of people are using some form of AI in their personal life, only 6% of HR professionals are actively deploying the technology and only 24% of employees are currently using some form of AI at work.

Dan Schawbel, research director at Future Workplace, believes organisations need to take advantage of AI to stay relevant in the future job market.

"AI will enable companies to stay competitive, HR leaders to be more strategic and employees to be more productive at work. If organisations want to take advantage of the AI revolution while closing the skills gap, they will have to invest in AI training programmes," he said.

"If employees want to stay relevant to the current and future job market, they need to embrace AI as part of their job."

Gartner predicts that while AI will replace 1.8 million jobs by 2020, it will create 2.3 million jobs, while one in five workers will rely on AI to support their work by 2022. University of Oxford researchers estimate that 35% of UK jobs are at risk of automation over the next two decades.

Picture: Shutterstock

Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of British firm DeepMind, is to advise the UK government's new Office for Artificial Intelligence.

Two other AI experts, CognitionX co-founder Tabitha Goldstaub and Professor Dame Wendy Hall, professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, have also accepted roles as the government seeks to position the UK as an AI leader. Goldstaub will serve as the chair of the newly-announced AI Council, and Hall will be the UK's first Skills Champion for AI.

Hassabis's role will be to advise the government and the country on AI issues, helping address skills shortages and fostering innovation in the field.

"I've always believed that AI could be one of the most important and widely beneficial breakthroughs of the 21st century - and as a proud Londoner, it's fantastic to see the UK's world-class universities and startups already making major scientific advances," Hassabis said. "Alongside the research, I'm very excited about the role the UK can play in making the case globally for AI's safe and ethical deployment."

The trio will ensure the government is focusing on achieving the key points relating to AI set out in its Industrial Strategy.

"Cutting-edge technology is the basis of the future of our economy," digital secretary Matt Hancock said. "Under this government, investment in the tech sector doubled in the last year, is growing at three times the pace of the rest of the economy, unemployment is at a 40-year low, inequality is falling, and we are seeing the first sustained fall in debt in a generation. We must build on these strengths."

He added the government wanted to choose the best people to seize the opportunity and Hassabis, Goldstaub and Hall all have the vision to make the UK a world leader in AI technologies.

Goldstaub said on Twitter: "I'm passionate about the potential we have to unlock the power of AI to benefit everyone. And I'm honoured to work with The Office for AI @demishassabis @DameWendyDBE and the AI Council we bring togeher to champion rapid and responsible adoption."

"These appointments will help lay the foundations for the UK AI industry to thrive and provide the leadership we need to help it grow," Hall added.

Tech industry body TechUK welcomed the government's decision to involve the tech sector more closely over its AI strategy.

"TechUK has long called for industry to be deeply engaged in taking forward the government's AI strategy and has heralded the importance of maintaining the UK's AI leadership," Sue Daley, head of cloud, analytics and AI at techUK said. "The appointment today of Demis Hassabis and Tabitha Goldstaub ... sends a very clear, positive message that; only by government and industry working together, will we realise the full potential of AI.

"TechUK also welcomes the continued leadership of Dame Wendy Hall on AI skills, given that building the next generation of UK AI talent is vital to securing the UK's AI future."

IBM is helping bring a more immersive experience to Wimbledon this year, with the introduction of AI-powered automated video highlights, built using Watson.

The AI engine will recognise a player's emotions and use these to deliver tailored video highlights to viewers around the world. IBM claimed the AI can interpret what the player is feeling, then combine this with crowd noise and player movements to curate a highlights reel for viewers.

This also makes it a lot easier for editorial and production teams to put together the most engaging content possible for tennis fans.

Developed by IBM Research scientists and IBM iX consultants, the Watson-powered technology allows footage to be sorted into bite-sized chunks that can be easily shared across social networks. With an average of three matches per court every single day of the tournament, that means only the very best content will be broadcast and staff won't have to filter through hundreds of hours of tennis to find the best bits.

"We want to engage with existing as well as new fans around the world, to help them be part of Wimbledon 2018, especially in what will be such a competitive sporting summer," said Alexandra Willis, head of communications, content and digital at the All England Lawn Tennis & Croquet Club (AELTC).

"We want to tell the stories of the phenomenal athleticism of our great players, the gladiatorial nature of the matches they play and explain the sporting narratives that will cut through to our audience. IBM is critical to us in helping us place content with fans where they want to consume it and acknowledge the ever-increasing focus on video and new content formats in social media."

Other innovations IBM has developed for this year's Wimbledon tournament include an AI insights dashboard that will present real-time footage of every shot during the course of the sporting event, accompanied by an excitement level, which will help the editorial team make better decisions about their social and web content.

"People are judging Wimbledon on the experience they had last month, or even yesterday," Sam Seddon, Wimbledon client and programme executive at IBM, said. "Technology plays a really important role in making their digital channels the most engaging place to experience The Championships. Increasingly, the AELTC is embracing the role of AI as being a foundation of that digital experience and strategy."

London houses twice the total number of AI companies of Paris and Berlin combined, according to a new report launched on the eve of London Tech Week.

The UK's capital is home to 758 firms for which AI is a central part of their business models, a survey commissioned by the Mayor of London has discovered.

These companies span 30 industries, with focuses on insurance, finance and law, according to AI advice platform CognitionX, which compiled the London: The AI Growth Capital of Europe report. Investment in London's AI businesses grew by 50% last year to surpass 200 million, including a 48 million funding round for smartphone health app Babylon Health and a 27 million Series A round for authentication tool Callsign.

Meanwhile, 32% of the firms having at least one founder from a minority ethnic background, and 25% with at least one female founder.

Speaking at the launch of London Tech Week, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said: "There are few areas of innovation that have the power to define our future economy and society more than artificial intelligence. As mayor, it is my goal to ensure both that London is at the forefront of developing and capitalising on these new technologies, and that all Londoners can benefit from the opportunities that they create.

"The research describes a city with a rich technology ecosystem, a strong pipeline of AI innovation and an academic and investment base set up for the long term."

Khan hopes to capitalise on London's AI knowledge to turn the capital into a smart city, a goal he announced last year.

Today he outlined a roadmap featuring more than 20 initiatives to achieve that aim, including proposals to bring full fibre broadband to all new homes, working with TfL and councils to roll out 4G more widely across public buildings, and adding smart sensors to public infrastructure like lamp posts, as well as supporting bids to test 5G.

The use of open data at TfL and City Hall to build apps for the public is set to continue, with Khan allocating 365,000 to improve data-sharing among public services.

"We are really looking forward to working with startups and other partners to ensure Londoners have good access to homes and can easily travel around the city," Lilli Matson, director of transport strategy at TfL, said. "This is central to quickly developing innovative solutions to deliver more homes and offer better options to encourage more journeys to be made by walking, cycling and public transport."

The mayor also plans to invest 365,000 to improve data-sharing among public services and proposes to draw up a pan-London cybersecurity strategy to safeguard people's personal information, a plan that would bring together bodies including the London Digital Security Centre and the London Cyber Innovation Centre.

London's chief digital officer, Theo Blackwell, said: "We will strike a new deal with citizens on use of their data so when it is appropriate to share data, it is done in a trusted, safe way and for public benefit."

Khan will also launch the Civic Innovation Challenge, first announced in December, to grant startups 15,000 to test ideas that are designed to tackle social challenges like inequality, climate change and the capital's ageing population.

"As one of the world's leading technology hubs, we need to be bold and think big, to experiment and try things out that have not been done elsewhere," he said. "I see London's future as a global 'test-bed city' for civic innovation, where the best ideas are developed, amplified and scaled."

Samsung has announced plans to open a new artificial intelligence research lab in Cambridge "to strengthen the company's AI capabilities and explore the potential of user-centric AI".

The Samsung AI Centre, Cambridge (SAIC-Cambridge) will be chaired by former director of Microsoft's Cambridge Laboratory, Professor Andrew Blake, and will help the UK become a world leader in advanced technologies and AI development.

"AI is being adopted in virtually every facet of our day-to-day lives and as a society, we are at the brink of realising near-exponential possibilities to make our lives easier through this powerful new technology," said Samsung. "Samsung is well-positioned to bring this innovative user-centric AI to market as it is uniquely capable of realising connected AI due to its diverse product portfolio and its scale."

The company added that it aims to expand its R&D workforce in the UK, including AI experts, from the current number of 250 to 400 in the future.

The UK government recently joined forces with the European, US and Japanese tech sector by pledging 1 billion to drive AI research in the UK. As part of the AI Sector Deal, 300 million of government spending will be coupled with 300 million in private investment, not to mention the 400 million of state funding previously announced.

This money will be spent on funding 1,000 PhDs related to AI by 2025 as well as the development of the Turing Fellowship programme, set up to grow research talent in the UK. The funds will also go towards training 8,000 specialist computer science teachers for secondary schools across the UK.

Earlier this year, a comprehensive report by a House of Lords Select Committee said the UK is in a "unique position" to help shape the development of AI on the world stage because it "contains leading AI companies, a dynamic academic research culture, and a vigorous startup ecosystem as well as a host of legal, ethical, financial and linguistic strengths. We should make the most of this environment, but it is essential that ethics take centre stage in AI's development and use."

The 13-member Committee, which included journalist Baroness Bakewell and the Lord Bishop of Oxford, was tasked with assessing the economic and social impact of artificial intelligence and, following a 10-month consultation, the panel proposed a set of principles that will be used to form the basis of a code of practice; something it hopes will be embraced internationally. You can read more about these principles here.

"This new artificial intelligence research centre in Cambridge is one of the key milestones in the long-term strategy of the company," said Seunghwan Cho, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics. "In this new world of connected devices and services based on AI, Samsung's vision is to help people do their jobs and live their lives better. We enable a physical connection between people and information, finding new ways of working together to develop more human-centred technology that serves the needs of users first."

Prime minister Theresa May added: "Today's announcement by Samsung will create high-paying, high-skilled jobs and our modern Industrial Strategy will encourage further investment like this all around the country. It is a vote of confidence in the UK as a world leader in artificial intelligence, and the new AI research centre will benefit from the world-renowned talent and academic prowess of Cambridge.

Microsoft has acquired machine learning startup Semantic Machines to push conversational AI into Cortana and its Azure Bot Service.

California-based Semantic Machines uses machine learning and adds context to conversations with chatbots, taking information received by the AI and applying it to future dialogue.

The company is run by a mix of conversational AI pioneers, including entrepreneur Dan Roth, UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and Stanford University professor Percy Liang, as well as former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick. Its speech recognition team previously led automatic speech recognition for Apple's personal assistant Siri.

Microsoft hopes to add Semantic Machines' technology into its current work in conversational AI, improving speech recognition and natural language understanding. Today, it reports that one million developers use its Cognitive Services and 30,000 developers use Azure Bot Services.

"With the acquisition of Semantic Machines, we will establish a conversational AI centre of excellence in Berkeley to push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces," said David Ku, chief technology officer at Microsoft AI and research.

"Combining Semantic Machines' technology with Microsoft's own AI advances, we aim to deliver powerful, natural and more productive user experiences that will take conversational computing to a new level."

Like Microsoft, Google and Amazon have take steps to improve voice assistants and conversational AI. Earlier this month Google showed off its own human-sounding virtual assistant Google Duplex, which booked a hair appointment over the phone by mimicking human speech.

Amazon has also looked into improving conversational capabilities with Alexa and have said it is developing a 'memory' for it, which will enable it to remember bits of information it is given by users while in a conversation.

Picture: Shutterstock

The tech sector has joined forces with the UK government, together pledging to invest nearly 1 billion to develop new AI technologies in the UK.

More than 50 private sector companies will contribute 300 million to the AI research fund, named the AI Sector Deal, with the rest coming from existing government grants, plus an extra 300 million the government is making available.

The money will be spent on training for 8,000 specialist computer science teachers, 1,000 AI PhDs by 2025 and the development of the Turing Fellowship programme, which has been set up to grow research talent in the UK.

"The UK must be at the forefront of emerging technologies, pushing boundaries and harnessing innovation to change people's lives for the better," Matt Hancock, secretary of state for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, said.

"Artificial intelligence is at the centre of our plans to make the UK the best place in the world to start and grow a digital business. We have a great track record and are home to some of the world's biggest names in AI like Deepmind, Swiftkey and Babylon, but there is so much more we can do."

A total 21 million of the government's funding will be handed to London startup promotion body Tech City UK - now Tech Nation - to spend on further developing startup hubs around the UK, a move first announced in last year's Budget, while 9 million will be spent on building a Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation, as announced in early 2017.

Gerard Grech, CEO Tech Nation, stressed that the UK must embrace and shape the future of AI, saying: "As a recognised global centre of AI expertise with companies like DeepMind, Improbable and 5AI, the UK is in a great position, and by building strong networks of shared knowledge and expertise, we can make it even stronger.

"Tech Nation cannot wait to get started on shaping its first programme for the UK's fastest-growing AI companies next year, which will help those who have proven their potential to reach the next level."

Aside from the injection of cash, accounting software firm Sage will set up an AI pilot programme to educate young people about the opportunities in AI and teach them the skills they need to build up the UK's innovation footprint.

The AI Sector Deal forms part of the government's strategy to invest in emerging tech around the UK. IT was highlighted as an integral part of the Artificial Intelligence Grand Challenge, a long-term plan to put the UK at the front of AI innovation.

Marc Waters, UK & Ireland MD at at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, one of the companies investing in the agreement, welcomed the deal and said: "The AI Sector Deal is a welcome and positive step forward for UK businesses and one that I believe moves the country closer toward achieving the UK's ambitious goals for an AI-powered future."

Tech industry representative body, TechUK, said the AI Sector Deal provides a "clear blueprint" for how the UK can become a leader in AI.

Antony Walker, deputy CEO of TechUK, said: "The UK has an impressive track-record on AI. But we must keep pace and, as the scale of innovation continues to accelerate, we need to ensure that the UK stays at the forefront in the development and application of these powerful new technologies.

"The sector deal focuses on the key issues of maintaining leadership and driving uptake, building the skills pipeline and ethics. Success will depend upon AI companies being deeply engaged in the process."

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) announced today the launch of the Catalyst UK programme, a project which aims to increase the adoption and efficiency of supercomputers in the UK.

The high-performance computing (HPC) programme will see supercomputers running ARM chips and SUSE open source software built at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester.

In total, the three supercomputer sites will consist of HPE Apollo 70 HPC systems hosting 12,000 cores running on ARM chips, and each site is expected to use 30 KW of power. HPE expects the installation to be complete by summer 2018 and will run it for three years.

Catalyst UK will also provide researchers with training that focuses largely on exascale computers, which are meant to be able to compute a billion calculations per second.

"Today's announcement marks a major step forward in boosting collaboration between the government and business to harness the power of innovation in supercomputing and AI," said Sam Gyimah MP, science minister.

He added that the programme, along with other AI and HPC investments the government is making, has "the potential to increase the UK's competitiveness in emerging industries around the world, grow our economy and create the high value jobs we need to build a Britain fit for the future".

Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith, head of the HPC Research Group at the University of Bristol, said the new HPC machines will help his researchers try to scale across the low latency data communications link InfiniBand , leading to benefits for industrial and academic parties.

"The Catalyst UK initiative will give us the exciting opportunity to explore the potential of Arm-based systems to support a broad spectrum of HPC workflows including simulations of gravitational waves and planet formation, earth observation science models and fundamental particle physics calculations," added Dr. Mark Wilkinson, director of the HPC facility at the University of Leicester.

Marc Waters, HPE's MD for the UK & Ireland, said the programme was a necessary step to improve AI adoption in the UK, saying: "Investment in projects that increase access to the right infrastructure is needed to ensure that the UK has the optimal combination of knowledge, skills, and technology, to realise that ambition."

The economic benefits of supercomputers, through large-scale data analysis, are also a focus for Catalyst UK.

PwC researchers estimate that AI adoption could boost global GDP by 14% come 2030, the equivalent of an additional $15.7 trillion.

Virtual reality technology may not have been the instantly world-changing, paradigm-shifting technology that many predicted it would be, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have huge potential to offer businesses.

Whether it's architectural models, 360-degree video content or promotional experiences, VR technology can add value to a wide range of companies. However, if you're going to extract that value, then you need to ensure that you're using the very best technology available. There's a wealth of VR headsets on the market, covering both lightweight mobile devices and high-end PC-driven powerhouses - and these are the best of the best.

Samsung Gear VR

Samsung managed to largely corner the mobile VR market by offering a polished, premium experience at an attractively low price point. The Gear VR does admittedly require a Samsung device to function, but it provides one of the best mobile VR experiences around.

Google Daydream View

After finding success with the Cardboard viewer, Google last year decided to step up its VR offering, releasing a proper premium headset, complete with an attractive, comfortable design and even a bundled remote. While there's still not many devices that support it, Google Daydream is an excellent headset.

Google Cardboard

The original and still one of the best, Google's Cardboard viewer is brilliant in its simplicity. Although it's little more than a slot for your phone and some rudimentary lenses, Cardboard is still the easiest way to experience mobile VR. It's also incredibly low-cost, making it an excellent choice for proof-of-concept demonstrations.

HTC Vive

It may be more than two years old at this stage, but the venerable HTC Vive has retained its status as one of the most technically capable headsets on the market. HTC also released the Deluxe Audio Strap last year, which adds integrated headphones and improved weight distribution and ergonomics. Combined with a healthy price-cut, this arguably makes the original Vive a better-value option than the newer Vive Pro.

HTC Vive Pro

While we don't quite think that the HTC Vive Pro is worth the extortionate 800 ticket price when compared to the original, the fact remains that it is the most technically capable and well-built VR headset currently on the market. If you need the best of the best - and you've got deep pockets - then the Vive Pro is for you.

Oculus Rift

The surge of interest in VR was kickstarted five years ago by Oculus and although it hit some stumbling blocks along the way, the Oculus Rift is still one of the most sophisticated and powerful virtual reality devices. If you've got the money and a PC powerful enough to run it, you're unlikely to be disappointed.

PlayStation VR

Sony is currently the only console manufacturer to offer its own virtual reality headset and it's proved a huge success straight out of the gate. Not only is it an excellent-quality headset, it also supports a wide range of games, indicating that third-party support won't just be a flash-in-the-pan.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has unveiled a number of AI and deep learning services aimed at helping enterprises fix vital infrastructure and best support their business with AI.

Digital Prescriptive Maintenance Services and Artificial Intelligence Transformation Workshop, both of which are delivered through its Pointnext professional services division, focus on making the most of AI for existing infrastructure and business initiatives.

The former, HPE said, uses prescriptive maintenance to suggest and automate fixes for problems within industrial systems before they cause damage. This is as opposed to predictive maintenance, which just detects what equipment is likely to fail.

Using services from Pointnext combined with technologies and reference architectures from HPE and various partners, Digital Prescriptive Maintenance Services "captures all relevant data sources in the enterprise, including real-time and batch data from IoT devices, data centers and the cloud", HPE said, and then uses supervised and unsupervised learning to improve its performance over time.

The Artificial Intelligence Transformation Workshop, meanwhile, is intended to help organisations identify where they can best use AI within their business and adopt the technology rapidly.

"Global tech giants are investing heavily in AI, but the majority of enterprises are struggling both with finding viable AI use cases and with building technology environments that support their AI workloads. As a result, the gap between leaders and laggards is widening," said Beena Ammanath, global VP of artificial intelligence at HPE Pointnext.

On the deep learning side of things, HPE has introduced the Apollo 6500 Gen10 System, which is optimised for deep learning and can, the company claims, carry out model training three times faster than previous generations, thanks to the server's support for eight Nvidia Tesla V100 GPUs.

Additionally, HPE has added a Deep Learning Performance Guide to its Deep Learning Cookbook, which was released last year.

"Deep learning relies on high performance computing to identify patterns and relationships within massive amounts of data - however, traditional high performance systems are unable to keep pace with these requirements," said Pankaj Goyal, VP of hybrid IT strategy and AI at HPE. "The HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 System is purpose-built to enable organisations of all sizes realize the benefits of deep learning faster than ever before."

Main image credit: Bigstock

Ocado Technology is fighting fraud with machine learning, improving its detection rate by 15 times since using automation to detect wrongdoing.

The technology division of the online supermarket has built its own machine learning-based algorithm with Google's TensorFlow and Google Cloud to help it detect fraud among the sheer petabytes of data it stores in Google Cloud.

The system is part of the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), and attempts to differentiate between shoppers who accidentally input the wrong personal details or who use an expired debit card, and those who have a malicious intent.

For Ocado, part of the danger of fraud is that leaving it unchecked could result in the fraudulent information being moved to other systems and divisions in the business, eventually impacting customer service.

This has led Ocado to develop a mechanism for predicting and recognising these incidents among millions of other normal events using data collected from past orders, as well as cases of fraud.

To do this, engineers have built a deep neural network using TensorFlow and uploaded the whole fraud detection system to the cloud.

"From the data we had collected from past orders, including cases of fraud, we created a list of features which included the number of past deliveries, the cost of baskets, and other information," said Ocado's Holly Godwin. "The more features we included in the training data, the more reliable the model could be, so we made sure that we were providing our model with as much information as possible.

"After collating our data, we then had to decide upon an algorithm capable of learning from the information. Eventually we implemented a deep neural network on TensorFlow, as it was precise and easy to deploy into production. Using TensorFlow was a natural choice as we had already made the move over to Google Cloud for data analytics so using TensorFlow alongside our data stored on the Google Cloud Platform worked well."

The algorithm had to be as accurate as possible, because confirmed fraud cases are rare, typically one in every thousand orders (0.01%), and a machine learning model that is only 99.9% accurate could still miss several instances of fraud.

"The motivation behind using machine learning for fraud detection was twofold: speed and adaptability," Godwin added. "Machines are fundamentally more capable of quickly detecting patterns compared to humans. Also, as fraudsters change their tactics, machines can learn the new patterns much quicker."

Ocado's push to include more features in the training data have created a more reliable model which has already achieved significant success, improving Ocado's precision of detecting fraud by a factor of 15.

The Oculus Rift is perhaps one of the most significant technological advancements of the past decade. First revealed back in 2012, the Rift was the first successful virtual reality headset, offering users a totally immersive way to experience movies and games.

Oculus Rift latest news

07/03/2018: The Oculus Rift has surpassed its primary rival the HTC Vive in one of its biggest markets, new figures have indicated.

February's Steam Hardware Survey - a monthly opt-in survey conducted by digital gaming platform Steam to determine what components and peripherals its customers are using - shows that the Oculus Rift has pulled ahead of the HTC Vive in terms of popularity for the first time ever.

The race between the two devices is still incredibly close - the Rift is now used by 47.3% of Steam's VR users, compared to 45.3% using the Vive. But this marks the first time since both headsets launched that the Rift has overtaken Vive among Steam's users, though it has been the culmination of a reasonably steady growth in popularity for Oculus's flagship product.

This survey is far from a concrete indication of sales performance, as it measures only the number of headsets that are in use among Steam's PC gaming community. This is, however, an overwhelmingly large portion of both devices' overall markets, and provides a good benchmark as to the relative popularity of both headsets - especially as neither company release official sales figures for their devices.

The main factor in the Rift's growing market share is likely to be its relative value when compared to the Vive, as the Rift is still significantly cheaper than its main rival with a price difference of around 200.

The Windows Mixed Reality segment has also made minor gains, with a market share of 5.36% according to Steam's figures.

Oculus Rift price and release date

The Oculus Rift is now on general sale in the UK, and can be ordered from Amazon, as well as purchased instore at retailers including John Lewis, Harrods, GAME and Currys PC World. The device debuted at 549, including VAT.

To complement the launch, Oculus set up a series of demo areas at various retail locations, in order to sway undecided customers. A strong physical presence is important to the company, according to CEO Brendan Iribe, who told CNBC "you have to see it to really believe it, and we feel like once you see it, you're gonna want it".

"Getting it into broad retail around the world is going to be very important to the success of VR and to the success of Oculus and the Rift".

Oculus Rift design

The Oculus Rift DK2 was a squat, boxy affair. The consumer model is a much more attractive device, however; it's had a full-on makeover and is looking sleek and polished.

In place of the elasticated strap, the visor is now secured by a flexible plastic harness. The headset itself now has rounded sides and a flat, but slightly curved front, with a smooth finish on the face and textured plastic on the sides.

In a move that will please the visually-impaired, you can also now wear it with glasses, as well as adjusting the interpupillary distance of the lenses via a slider.

As a head-mounted device, comfort is critical. The DK2 is a bulky beast, weighing in at almost 400g. However, Oculus has trimmed a lot of the Rift's unnecessary fat for its big reveal, and Oculus is boasting of the Rift's light and comfortable nature.

Oculus Rift specs

Due to its highly-specialised nature, the Oculus Rift is much more technically capable than many other devices, and has some pretty beefy specs in terms of its visual hardware.

The Rift runs at 2,1601,200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, which equates to a per-eye resolution of 1080p. It also runs at 90Hz, which, while not quite as impressive as the 120Hz claimed by PlayStation VR, is perfectly acceptable. There's no noticeable lag or latency, and motion looks smooth and natural.

Oculus Touch controllers

While the leaked images of the Oculus Rift indicated that it was shipping with an Apple TV-style remote, Palmer Luckey surprised crowds at the device's unveiling by taking the wraps off a totally new input system.

Oculus Touch, as it has been dubbed, is a set of two wireless controllers that feature triggers for sensing grip on the palm and index fingers, as well as having traditional buttons and thumb sticks.

With built-in positional tracking similar to the headset, the controllers provide physical haptic feedback, which enables users to pick up and interact with virtual objects just as they would with real ones. In practise, the controllers are supremely comfortable, and the most instantly natural and ergonomic VR inputs we've tried.

The Oculus Rift will also ship, and be fully compatible, with an Xbox One controller for Windows. Included as part of Oculus' partnership with Microsoft, this is to allow developers and users to work with an already-familiar input system.

Oculus Rift features

To make it easier for developers to work with, both the Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 game creation tools is integrated into the Oculus Rift software. This will allow developers to preview any VR experiences they create from within the Rift itself.

The Rift uses a dedicated software platform, Oculus Home, to display its content on. Similar to the Xbox dashboard, it features different subsections for content, as well as tiled previews, storefronts and social integration. Thanks to Windows 10's native support for the Oculus Rift, users can also stream games from an Xbox One to the headset, viewing them in a virtual theatre.

Unlike many of its competitors, the Rift features built-in earphones, which can be adjusted for comfort. They're also detachable, which will allow gamers that are particular about their audio requirements to use their own headsets.

Oculus Rift system requirements

One of the Rift's drawbacks is that it needs a seriously powerful PC in order to properly run it. Company executives previously quoted a ballpark figure of around $1000 as the amount a sufficiently-specced machine would cost.

To start with, any prospective Rift customers will need a desktop PC with a CPU and graphics card equivalent to - or better than - an Intel Core-i5 4590, and an Nvidia GTX 970 or an AMD R9 290, as well as 8GB of RAM.

They'll also need to be running Windows 7 SP1 64-bit or newer, with 1 USB 2.0 and 3 USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI 1.3 output.

For those that don't build high-powered gaming PCs for fun, Oculus has partnered with a number of different PC manufacturers to create a certification program.

Specific PCs from OEMs including Dell, Asus and Alienware carry badges proclaiming them "Oculus Ready", meaning they are guaranteed to support the device straight out of the box.

Due to the highly GPU-intensive nature of the Oculus Rift's requirements, the headset is not compatible with Macs.

Oculus Rift movies

As well as games, Oculus is planning to bring VR movie content to its device, and the company has created its own production house, Oculus Story Studio to create experiences.

Henry, the second title from the division, is helmed by former Pixar alumni Ramiro Lopez Dau, and picked up an Emmy award for Outstanding Original Interactive Program. The company debuted another production, Dear Angelica, at the Sundance Film Festival 2016.

Previous news

30/10/2017: Virtual reality headsets could pose significant health risks to users, particularly children, unless changes are made to the way the technology is developed.

That's according to new research from Leeds University scientists, who have carried out what is considered to be one of the first investigations into the long-term health impact of virtual reality headsets.

"The problems come when the normal relationship between the perceptual information and the corresponding action is disrupted," said Mark Mon-Williams, professor of cognitive psychology at Leeds University, in a blog post.

"One way of thinking about such disruption is that a mismatch between perception and action causes 'surprise'. It turns out that surprise is really important for human learning and the human brain appears to be engineered to minimise surprise."

He added that if there is a mismatch between the visual information and the hand movements within a VR experience, this 'surprise' occurs, forcing the brain to adapt.

"The issue is that the process of adaptation may cause difficulties - and these difficulties might be particularly problematic for children as their brains are not fully developed," added Mon-Williams.

The study, which was first reported by the Guardian, monitored 20 children aged between eight and 12 as they played a game using a virtual reality headset. While no children were found to have had eyesight deterioration, there were two examples of reduced stereo-acuity, or their ability to judge the distances of objects, and one example of a child having drastically reduced balance after removing the headset.

The research comes at a time when technology companies are looking to bring virtual reality to the mass market, outside of its use within gaming.

Google, Microsoft and Samsung have already developed their own VR technologies, and social media companies are pushing for interactive video content, while filmmakers are using VR to create 360-degree movie experiences.

However, the study warns that technology companies need to understand the long-term health impact of prolonged VR use and work to counter issues such as nausea or headaches as a priority.

"It may turn out that the human brain can adapt to these unnatural pressures without any long-term problems," said Mon-Williams. "But it's also possible that these pressures may cause long-term difficulties. These issues are of particular concern in young children who may be more susceptible to disruptive pressures owing to their developing brains."

12/10/2017: Oculus unveils VR business bundle

Businesses can now step into the world of VR with an Oculus Rift package for $900.

The Oculus for Business bundle is the first time that the Rift will be sold specifically for commercial use and is intended to make it easy for companies to use VR by providing them with all the necessary tools.

The business bundle, which costs $900, will include the headset, touch controllers, three sensors, a remote and three Rift Fits. Along with the hardware, Oculus is also including a commercial warranty, a commercial licence, and "preferential customer service" in the business bundle to help make the transition into VR even easier.

The company website highlights key features of the device such as its easy setup and the fact it's comfortable to wear, saying it could be used for training and education.

"VR enhances everything from training and education to marketing, product development, and data visualisation helping you strengthen relationships, tell stories more effectively, and foster business growth," the company said.

The bundle is available for order through the Oculus website.

15/08/2017: Oculus launcher now supports Steam VR games

The launcher software that powers the Oculus Rift has become much more versatile, after an update that should make accessing all your VR content much easier.

The updated Oculus launcher software now includes the ability to launch any Oculus-compatible content on your PC, not just games and experiences that have been downloaded through Oculus' own storefront.

That includes Oculus-compatible games bought through Valve's digital distribution platform Steam, as well as any other source. Note that the games will have to be specifically compatible with Oculus Rift, rather than VR in general - so titles exclusive to the HTC Vive are still off-limits.

The update also adds a new feature for supporting multiplayer parties, allowing up to four Oculus Rift owners to chat across different apps. This means that you won't have to be playing the same game as your friends in order to carry on a conversation.

Oculus apps will also feature detailed release notes that can be viewed within the library, as part of the update, with several bug fixes also introduced. The update begins rolling out to users today.

21/07/2017: Oculus exec Jason Rubin has said that lowering the price of the company's Rift headset is crucial for VR's success, stating that the company's ecosystem is now reaching a level of maturity that will help drive mass adoption.

"I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Price matters. Lowering the price point of high-end VR hardware is a win for consumers, a win for developers, and a win for the industry as a whole," he wrote as part of a blog post.

"As PC and component prices continue to drop, VR will become increasingly affordable, attracting even more people to the highest-end experiences that VR has to offer."

As part of its 'Summer of Rift' sale, Oculus has slashed the price of its Rift and Touch bundle, which also includes six games. The bundle is available for just 399 during the sale.

The platform has been experiencing some success, with multiple titles surpassing $1 million in sales, and players racking up a combined total of 1.3 million hours in the top five Oculus apps.

Rubin highlighted some of the platform's major recent releases, such as Echo Arena, Lone Echo and Marvel Powers United VR, as well as promising more flagship titles for 2018 which will be unveiled over the course of this year.

"With Summer of Rift bringing more people to the community, we look forward to fuller lobbies and more multiplayer magic," Rubin said. "VR shines when you're sharing a virtual space with other people. We now have many titles that are delivering on the social promise, and we'll continue to invest in that space."

14/07/2017: Facebook is reportedly developing a budget version of its Oculus Rift headset, in an effort to push the technology into the mass market with a more appealing price point.

The company appears to recognise the current problem with virtual reality technology, namely that the pricing options are far too restrictive. At 400+, headsets like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are expensive products on their own, even before the necessary purchase of a 1,000 PC to run them. Even cheaper products, such as Samsung's Gear VR, require you own a top of the line Samsung device.

Facebook's cheaper headset is expected to be priced around $200, but will not need to be hooked up to, or bundled with, a PC or mobile device, significantly cutting down on the overall cost of the tech.

The project, codenamed 'Pacific' according to Bloomberg sources, will attempt to produce the same interactive gaming experience of the current Oculus Rift, although the device will be a more compact version. It's hoped the tech will act as its own media hub, rather than an extended display.

It's expected to be based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon processing chips, with power that's somewhere between Samsung's Gear VR, and the high-end Rift. Sources suggest it will feature a similar interface to the Gear VR, with support for a wireless remote.

Facebook expects to begin briefings with video game designers and content creators by October, according to one source, with an expected shipping date of sometime in 2018.

Despite recent price drops, the Oculus Rift has remained an expensive device that has prevented it from gaining mass market appeal. A recent market analysis by tracking firm Superdata put Rift purchases at 383,000, compared with the similarly priced HTC Vive at 667,000 units. However, Samsung's Gear VR, with its relatively cheap initial buy in, is leading the way with around 22% of the VR market.

10/07/2017: Oculus cuts price of VR set to $399

Oculus is temporarily cutting the price of its hardware to $399 as the industry puzzles over why its technology has not taken off among customers.

Oculus announced in a blog post that it is cutting the price of the Rift headset and Touch controllers to $399 for six weeks, starting today. This matches the price of the PlayStation VR set made by Sony and is cheaper than the HTC Vive at $799.

The post explains that the offer is part of a "Summer of Rift" deals designed to encourage more people to buy Oculus products.

In an interview with Reuters, VP for content Jason Rubin said that the company wanted to cut the price sooner but wanted to wait until there was enough content to keep a broad audience busy, not because it's a sign of weak product sales.

He said: "We're now in a space where the mass market can be much happier".

In March the Facebook-owned company reduced the price of its headset by $100. Oculus VP of product Nate Mitchell said back then that this year there was a focus on bringing more people into VR. He added that the cheaper price "should let even more folks who've been waiting to get into VR to jump in".

29/06/2017: Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has reportedly donated $2,000 toward the development of a workaround that allows Rift games to be played on the HTC Vive.

Luckey, who left the Facebook-owned Oculus VR back in March, pledged the cash to CrossVR's Patreon campaign, which is being used to fund the on-going development of ReVive. The hack allows HTC Vive owners to play Rift exclusive titles that otherwise would not appear on the Steam store page.

Jules Blok, creator of the ReVive project, thanked Luckey for his donation in a message on his Patreon page, which almost covers their entire monthly pledge goal after taxes and a website cut is taken. At the time of writing, the project has raised $1,976 of its $2,000 goal.

The donation, which was first spotted by UploadVR, is a little unexpected given that Oculus, bought by Facebook in 2014, initially shot down the project back in April 2016, ultimately blocking the software just as ReVive was beginning to gain popularity.

A statement at the time read: "This is a hack, and we don't condone it. Users should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software."

It's unclear what this donation is supposed to signify, and there is no sign as to whether this will turn into recurring support. It may simply be that Luckey is choosing to back a technology that he has spent his career trying to pioneer.

He left Facebook after it lost a $500 million lawsuit to ZeniMax, which claims Oculus's device relied on ZeniMax IP developed by legendary game deveoper John Carmack while at the company (he later moved to Oculus), and after being discovered to have donated to a pro-Donald Trump trolling campaign. Facebook said at the time that Luckey would be "dearly missed".

25/05/2017: Oculus's first employee just quit

Oculus' first ever employee has announced he's leaving the company, saying he's been presented with a unique opportunity at a startup - which is something he really wants to do.

Chris Dycus started as an engineer at Oculus in 2012, when his friend and co-founder of the company Palmer Luckey decided it needed to bring onboard staff. He was instrumental in the development of the Oculus VR headset and helped the company sell to Facebook for $2 billion back in 2016, just four years after it launched.

"Chris Dycus, employee number 1, out," Dycus wrote in his parting statement in a Facebook post. "I am a little disappointed I won't make it to my 5 year Oculus anniversary only 2.5 months away! Oh well."

Dycus' new role will be based in Southern California (SoCal), but he wouldn't say which particular company he would be joining, nor what his role will be.

There are still lots of Oculus' original staff at the company, including Nate Mitchell, Michael Antonov, and Brendan Iribe, suggesting it can't be all that bad working for Facebook rather than Oculus. Luckey left last year amid political controversy around the US election.

17/05/2017: ZeniMax, the game publisher that successfully sued Facebook Oculus for $500 million, has now turned its sights on Samsung's Gear VR.

The move is unsurprising, given that Samsung's virtual reality headset was built using Oculus software - it now appears that ZeniMax has come to collect.

The filing below, made to a court in Texas last Friday and initially reported by Polygon, is an extension of the original lawsuit against Oculus and repeatedly cites that initial victory, in which "the resulting verdict established that the Oculus VR software is tainted by Oculus's violations".

It also argues that "Samsung knows, or reasonably should know, that the Samsung Gear VR is based upon ZeniMax's intellectual property", and that as a result is in breach of those same non-disclosure agreements.

Given that there was no indication of any wrong doing at the time of development, it stands to reason that Samsung did not obtain any licensing agreements from ZeniMax, however the filing argues that the "ongoing use of ZeniMax's intellectual property amounts to a knowing and continuing misappropriation".

ZeniMax is now seeking damages, as well as lost profits from the sale of Gear VR units and cover for lawyer and court fees.

In the initial case against Oculus, a jury determined that Oculus used ZeniMax codes to launch the Rift VR headset, obtained by former ZeniMax employee and Oculus CTO John Carmack. As a result the company was forced to pay $500 million of the original $2 billion demanded by ZeniMax.

Carmack is currently counter suing over the sale of his company id Software to ZeniMax in 2009, in which claims that he is still owed $22.5 million.

Zenimax v Samsung by Brian Crecente on Scribd

Next up is The Unspoken, a game by legendary developer Insomniac Games which involves "an urban magic fight club". Use the Oculus Touch controllers to fling fireballs at foes, summon mystical allies, and more.

Lastly, there's point-and-click adventure Wilson's Heart. This stylish noir tale features the vocal talents of luminaries such as Rosario Dawson, Alfred Molina and Michael B. Jordan, tasking the player with solving an unsettling mystery in an abandoned hospital.

At face value, the three games are worth more than 70 in total, making this bundle an excellent deal for anyone who was already thinking about investing in a new GPU and a Rift.

10/03/2017: Oculus CTO and id Software co-founder John Carmack has re-opened the legal feud between Oculus and Zenimax Media, bringing a $22.5 million lawsuit against the company.

The games industry legend is suing ZeniMax over the sale of his company id Software. Carmack claims that he is still owed a total of $22.5 million from ZeniMax's purchase of the Doom studio in 2009.

According to Carmack, he was set to receive a promissory note valued in excess of $45 million as part of the $150 million deal. He swapped half of that value for ZeniMax common stock in 2011, but alleges that the company is now refusing to pay him the rest of the money or let him convert it into stock options.

While it follows hot on the heels of another legal dispute between Carmack and his former employers, the two cases are not directly linked. ZeniMax recently sued Carmack, along with Oculus, its founder Palmer Luckey, CEO Brendan Iribe and parent company Facebook, over claims that Carmack stole ZeniMax IP in order to help develop the Oculus Rift. Facebook was ordered to pay ZenimMax $500 million after the court found Oculus used ZeniMax computer codes, but ZeniMax has also requested an injunction stopping Oculus from selling the Rift.

In Carmack's lawsuit, first reported by the Dallas Morning News, ZeniMax stated that the aforementioned dispute is the reason it is not paying up. Carmack's claim noted that not only did ZeniMax not charge him with breach of contract, Oculus was also acquitted of stealing trade secrets.

"When ZeniMax bought id Software in 2009, it agreed to pay a total of $150 million for that purchase. Now that the final installment of that bill is coming due, ZeniMax is simply refusing to pay," the lawsuit said. "But sour grapes is not an affirmative defense to breach of contract."

02/03/2017: As we draw near to the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Oculus Rift, Facebook has decided to reduce the price of the VR headset for the first time, dropping from $599 to $499.

Oculus has also cut the price of its Touch Controllers mere months after the Rift accessory went on sale, from $199 to $99. Additional Oculus sensors are also now available at a reduced price of $59.

The Rift and Touch Controller bundle, that previously would have set you back $798, is now available for $598.

The new prices are live today, although we are still waiting on clarification of the new UK prices.

"Last year was all about getting the hardware out there, getting the software out there really enabling developers to build great content," said Oculus VP of product Nate Mitchell, speaking to GamesBeat. "This year, the focus is really around bringing more people into VR."

As an added bonus, those customers who bought an Oculus Rift or Touch Controllers in the last 30 days before the price cut will receive $50 credit on its digital store.

Mitchell added that the cheaper price "should let even more folks who've been waiting to get into VR to jump in".

The price cut means the Rift bundle is now $200 cheaper than the HTC Vive, which with motion controllers is priced at $799.

The move is somewhat of a surprise given the Rift's relatively short time on the market, but it will certainly help Oculus sell more units.

But a cloud still hangs over Facebook-Oculus, which is still reeling from the damage caused by the lawsuit brought by ZeniMax. Not only did Facebook have to pay out $500 million, an impending injunction against the use of the disputed VR code could result in the death of the Rift entirely.

24/02/2017: ZeniMax, the video game company that successfully sued Facebook over VR intellectual property theft, has made good on its promises to try and block the company from monetising the code in future products.

Following its $500 million lawsuit, ZeniMax has now requested that a federal judge issue an injunction to block attempts by Facebook's Oculus to use the code, which if successful could limit the number of games available on the fledgling VR headset.

ZeniMax filed for the injunction on Thursday at the US District Court for Northern Texas, the same court that awarded in favour of the company earlier in the month.

"ZeniMax's motion does not change the fact that the verdict was legally flawed and factually unwarranted," an Oculus spokesperson said. "We look forward to filing our own motion to set aside the jury's verdict and, if necessary, filing an appeal that will allow us to put this litigation behind us."

Earlier this month, a US jury found that Oculus had used ZeniMax codes to launch its VR headset, and that executives, including Oculus founder Palmer Lucky, had violated non-disclosure agreements during the building process.

Speaking at the time, a ZeniMax spokesman told gaming website Polygon: "We will consider what further steps we need to take to ensure there will be no ongoing use of our misappropriated technology". The company also said it would seek an injunction to "restrain" Oculus and Facebook from ongoing use of the code.

The case came mere months after Facebook paid $3 billion for the startup, which was one of the first companies to start developing modern VR headsets.

What this means for Oculus remains to be seen, as the company has already distributed the disputed code to other game developers, and it has been used in a number of games available on Samsung's Gear VR.

10/02/2017: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown off new prototype input gloves for the Oculus Rift, which allow users to physically interact with virtual worlds.

Zuckerberg shared the new technology as part of a Facebook post, in which he detailed his recent tour of Oculus' research lab. Based out of Redmond, Washington, he said that the lab was "where some of the best scientists and engineers in the world are pushing the boundaries of virtual and augmented reality".

"The goal is to make VR and AR what we all want it to be: glasses small enough to take anywhere, software that lets you experience anything, and technology that lets you interact with the virtual world just like you do with the physical one."

For Oculus, adding the ability to type in VR could be the key to cracking the enterprise market; an area that will prove crucial to the long-term survival of VR tech in general.

Zuckerberg will also be glad of the distraction from Oculus' recent court case loss, in which the company was ordered to pay $500 million for copyright infringement, false designation and breach of a non-disclosure agreement by founder Palmer Luckey.

02/02/2017: Facebook has been ordered to pay $500 million after losing the Oculus lawsuit. ZeniMax filed the lawsuit against Oculus back in 2014 for $2 billion.

A U.S. jury determined that Oculus used ZeniMax computer codes to launch their own virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift. The executives are said to have broken a ZeniMax non-disclosure agreement (NDA) in the beginning of the headset building process.

A major part of the $500 million comes from a $200 million NDA violation. The remaining amount comes from two false designation violations: $50 million against Oculus and co-founder Palmer Luckey and $150 million against former CEO Brendon Iribe.

Despite the big win, ZeniMax may not stop at the lawsuit.

"We will consider what further steps we need to take to ensure there will be no ongoing use of our misappropriated technology," a ZeniMax spokesperson told Polygon after the ruling.

The spokesperson also stated that they plan on "seeking an injunction to restrain Oculus and Facebook from their ongoing use of computer code that the jury found infringed upon ZeniMax's copyright." This injunction would bring Oculus Rift sales to a halt.

Although Oculus executives were found guilty of using ZeniMax technology, they were not found guilty of misappropriating ZeniMax trade secrets--which Oculus claimed was the heart of the lawsuit.

"We are undeterred," said an Oculus spokesperson on the finding. "Oculus products are built with Oculus technology."

Oculus stated that it was "disappointed" and would be filing for an appeal.

18/01/2017: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the stand in court yesterday to defend his company, as well as its subsidiary Oculus, in a trial over intellectual property theft.

Zuckerberg was brought into the dispute last year, when ZeniMax's original lawsuit against Oculus and its founder, Palmer Luckey, was re-filed, with additional defendants including Facebook.

ZeniMax Media, parent company of game developers Bethesda Softworks and id Software, claims that its research and intellectual property were used to help Luckey create the Oculus Rift.

Zuckerberg told the court yesterday that "like most people in the court, I've never even heard of Zenimax before" - despite the fact that it publishes some of the most successful games in the world. He also explicitly denied that ZeniMax's tech formed the basis for the Rift, saying "the idea that Oculus products are based on someone else's technology is just wrong", according to the BBC.

Echoing the statement released by Oculus when the original lawsuit was issued in 2014, Zuckerberg seemed to imply that ZeniMax was merely attempting to make a quick buck. "It's pretty common when you announce a big deal that people just come out of the woodwork and claim they own some part of the deal," he said.

Indeed, Facebook's mammoth acquisition deal to buy Oculus was even larger than initially thought. While Zuckerberg's company paid $2 billion (the amount sought by ZeniMax in damages) to buy Oculus itself, his testimony apparently also revealed that Facebook shelled out a further $1 billion to retain key Oculus staff members and to offer incentives.

The trial is expected to last for around three weeks, with Oculus founder Luckey - who has rarely been seen in public since he was outed as backing a pro-Trump group last year - expected to be called later this week.

17/01/2017: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg will testify in court as part of a trial alleging that Oculus was built on technology stolen from Bethesda's parent company, ZeniMax.

The lawsuit was initially filed in May 2014, following Facebook's acquisition of Oculus for $2 billion. While it originally named Oculus and its founder, Palmer Luckey, as defendants, an amended version was filed last year that also includes Facebook as a defendant, along with Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe and CTO John Carmack.

The trial, which commenced on 9 January, revolves around claims by ZeniMax Media that the Oculus Rift virtual reality device was developed with ZeniMax IP by games industry legend and former id Software employee John Carmack, during his time employed by ZeniMax.

ZeniMax states that while Luckey developed the first Rift prototype in 2012, input from Carmack and other Zenimax personnel "literally transformed" it by adding specialised software and hardware improvements

Both Luckey and Carmack violated non-disclosure agreements expressly preventing them from using ZeniMax's VR tech without its permission, the suit also argues.

Facebook's involvement stems from ZeniMax's claims that the company "knew or had reason to know" that Oculus was not the legal owner of the full rights to the VR technology used in its headset.

"Defendants have now been unjustly enriched by billions of dollars in value exploiting ZeniMax's hard work and VR Technology as if it were their own," the lawsuit reads.

Carmack, Facebook and Oculus have all maintained their innocence, with Oculus stating that the suit has "no merit whatsoever" and that "ZeniMax did not contribute to any Oculus technology".

If successful, the lawsuit could see Facebook liable for up to $2 billion in damages - the same amount it paid to acquire Luckey's company.

Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest buzzwords in the business world right now, with scores of companies rushing to take advantage of advances in machine learning and neural networks.

Facebook is one such company, and the social network has invested a great deal of time and energy into building support for chatbots and AI tools into platforms like Facebook Messenger.

It has also extended these functionalities to Workplace, its enterprise collaboration platform that now has 30,000 customers.

At MWC in Barcelona, Julien Cordoniou, Facebook's vice president for Workplace, told IT Pro that artificial intelligence and bots are key to the tool's future.

"The move from collaboration to automation is a pattern we see across every company, every industry and all of our customers," he said. "Turning Workplace from being a collaboration platform into an automation platform is what we define as next-generation IT."

According to Cordoniou, Workplace customers like Norwegian retailer Elkjop are changing the way they use the platform, making use of Workplace's bot support to automate tasks like inventory management and shift management.

"I think it's extremely important. If artificial intelligence can be used to automate some of the repetitive tasks that you don't necessarily want to be doing, or that you don't want your employees to do, I think it's a big win for the company. And that's typically the kind of thing that drives employee happiness, employee sentiment and hopefully employee retention."

Amazon is also making a big effort to work AI into its commercial offerings, launching Alexa for Business as a way to let customers use voice-activated AI for practical tasks like booking meetings.

Most customers, Cordoniou said, are still buying Workplace as a collaboration tool, in an effort to reduce the distance between head office and frontline staff. The product has been particularly successful in the retail and manufacturing sectors, where workers on production lines or shop floors don't have a desktop device with which to access traditional intranets or enterprise messaging tools.

Danone, for example, has 80,000 workers, half of whom are factory workers who have never had a company laptop - but they do all have mobile phones. This also applies to Walmart's 2.5 million staff, who also use Workplace to communicate.

However, he told IT Pro that he thinks this is changing, and that bots and other solutions will soon be as big a driver as Workplace's collaboration tools. "In a few years, people will buy Workplace for the network and the communication platform that it is, but they will also buy Workplace for the quality and the diversity of the applications that they will find on top of the platform," he said.

"It's certainly a conversation we have with every customer, and this is also where we want to take them to. We don't just want to be a communication platform, we want to be the platform where you go to do your job, to get the job done - and that goes with automation."

Facebook is also committed to building a platform rather than a product with Workplace. Rather than attempting to be a one-stop shop, Cordoniou said, Facebook's strategy is to partner with best-of-breed companies like Box, Okta, Microsoft, Google and others.

This, he said, allows customers the specifically tailor workplace to their needs, or even to build their own solutions of top of it using tools like AI. "We don't want to build everything ourselves. We know very well what we do well and what we don't do well," he said. "For me, it's a partnerships play."

Blockchain is still in the "hype stage", and isn't going to start producing real results until 2019 at the earliest, according to auditing and professional services firm KPMG.

Its head of tech growth, Patrick Imbach, believes that new technologies like blockchain always go through a phase of explosive hype and popularity, as investors scramble to back it and companies start rapidly moving into the space.

However, Imbach told IT Pro yesterday that it's generally only once the hype has died down that these technologies actually start generating commercially viable results - and blockchain is not yet at that point.

"It was hype in 2017, it will remain hype. I hear loads of chatter about blockchain, in particular in the UK," he said at MWC in Barcelona. "Whilst everyone acknowledges the potential, I think it's very early stages - we're at the hype stage.

"I'm not sure actually whether some sort of tangible use-cases and commercial models based on blockchain technologies will evolve over the next months. We're still a little bit early in that process, I wouldn't expect any exciting commercial opportunities to arise in large numbers any time soon - in the UK, particularly."

Blockchain's potential for financial services is often touted, but a Gartner study last October found that banking CIOs ranked the technology 20th in a list of business-differentiating technologies they would consider investing in.

However, more mature blockchain technologies could have wider applications for various industries, from financial services to government and security, where identity management could be a key driver.

Artificial intelligence, by contrast, is a much more mature technology, KPMG's Imbach said. While he pointed out that many companies that claim to be leveraging artificial intelligence are actually just using data analytics, he said that the the AI market is poised to start generating some interesting business use-cases over the course of 2018.

"I expect 2018 to be a year when there will be more substance behind it."

One-third of all patient enquiries to the NHS 111 service will be handled online by AI come 2020, according to a leaked report.

An internal evaluation, leaked to The Telegraph, suggests that almost 16 million patient inquiries could be handled by AI within two years, at which point NHS smartphone apps will become the "primary method of accessing health services", rather than a telephone.

The draft report comes amid calls to come up with ways to alleviate mounting pressures on an increasingly overburdened health service.

Last month was the NHS's busiest call period since call data collection began in 2010, with over 1.6 million calls to the NHS 111 service, roughly 54,000 per day, according to official figures. Of those calls, the proportion of patients abandoning their calls after 30 minutes was 7.2%, almost double that of December 2016.

The system has also been marred by a series of scandals that have raised questions over its efficacy, including the death of an infant after signs of a serious illness were missed, and criticisms that many call handlers lacked medical training.

The UK government has also previously warned that NHS needs to make better use of AI and analytics on patient data if it's to compete against private medical companies. Think tank Reform made similar recommendations last week, saying the NHS should also concentrate on the quality of patient data it can feed into AI apps that could benefit the public.

Since then, the leaked internal proposals reportedly urge that an online service is developed using an algorithm to handle a quarter of NHS 111 enquiries by next year (around 16 million cases) rising to a third by 2020.

The new service would allow patients to check symptoms online and read tailored advice generated by an algorithm, with the option of referring their case for a call from an out-of-hours GP.

An NHS England spokesperson told IT Pro via email: "NHS 111 Online offers an additional route for urgent medical advice as an extra option - alongside telephone advice or a face-to-face consultation. If it frees up time for staff to spend with those patients who do prefer a direct conversation, that should be a win-win."

However, patient groups have previously expressed concerns about attempts to digitise NHS services, saying those without access to computers or smartphones would be left out.

Joyce Robins, director of Patient Concern, said that the proposals make "very unfortunate assumptions" about the availability of online devices, particularly when involving elderly patients.

"It's also wrong to assume that people want to deal with their health in such a depersonalised way and I would be very fearful of the kind of mistakes that could be made, when you are relying on people who are poorly and often confused to work their way through computer questionnaires," said Robins, speaking to The Telegraph.

However, the report, which covered research on NHS pilot schemes providing online services to 7.5 million patients, revealed that younger people were far more likely to use the service than older patients. In some regions, over three-quarters of those accessing online services were under 35.

NHS 111 Online currently exists as four pilot services in the UK, but the leaked report suggests the AI service will be launched across England by the end of 2018.

Picture: NHS

The UK and France are set to share knowledge on artificial intelligence (AI), in a bid to realise the economic and social benefits of the technology together.

Experts in data, cyber security, digital government and digital skills from both sides of the channel will collaborate and share insights at an Anglo-French technology conference due to take place later this year.

This morning's announcement took place during the annual UK-France summit this week at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst.

Secretary for Digital, Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS), Matt Hancock, said: "The UK and France are strengthening ties in technology and innovation. I'm looking forward to leading a cutting-edge digital conference this year which will see our world-leading experts in cyber security, digital skills, artificial intelligence, data and digital government share their talent and knowledge.

"Both countries benefit when our digital economies are strong and the event will deepen our bonds and foster cross-Channel collaboration between those at the forefront of modern technology."

The UK's tech sector broadly considers Brexit a threat to its future, and lobby group techUK has urged the government to protect the industry in trade talks with the EU, but UK venture capital investment hit an all-time high in 2017 at nearly 3 billion.

France is also fostering its technology industry, turning a defunct railway station in Paris into a hub for startups, large firms and investors.

Julian David, CEO of techUK, added: "This event is a significant step towards greater collaboration between the British and French tech sectors.

"International platforms for collaboration, such as the one announced by Matt Hancock today, provide valuable cross-border perspectives on many of the social, legal and ethical questions that will be raised as we continue to innovate."

The countries also used the summit to reiterate their support for net neutrality, the concept that all websites should be equally open to all. The US recently reversed a law enforcing net neutrality, though the Federal Communications Commission's decision is now subject to a number of lawsuits.

Both the UK and France's governments announced an alliance between Imperial College London and the French National Centre for Scientific Research on Tuesday to strengthen academic ties around AI.

Picture: Shutterstock

Google has opened up its Cloud AutoML tool to address the widening skills gap businesses are experiencing in the machine learning and AI space.

Although the company has already released pre-trained machine learning models to developers via APIs, they're still too complicated for businesses without a specific machine learning resource to integrate the tech across the entire business.

So they launched a much simpler product, Cloud AutoML, which offers machine learning capabilities to integrate into applications in less than a day.

"Currently, only a handful of businesses in the world have access to the talent and budgets needed to fully appreciate the advancements of ML and AI," Jia Li, head of R&D and Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist at Google Cloud AI, said in a statement.

"There's a very limited number of people that can create advanced machine learning models. And if you're one of the companies that has access to ML/AI engineers, you still have to manage the time-intensive and complicated process of building your own custom ML model."

Cloud AutoML enables businesses without the expertise to build models using learning2learn and transfer learning from Google.

It will release its Cloud AutoML in stages, with the first feature coming being Cloud AutoML Vision, a resource to help organisations create custom machine learning models for image recognition. With an easy-to use drag and drop UI, developers can upload images, train and manage models, which can be sent straight to Google Cloud.

"Early results using Cloud AutoML Vision to classify popular public datasets like ImageNet and CIFAR have shown more accurate results with fewer misclassifications than generic ML APIs," Li and Li explained.

Picture: Bigstock

Gartner believes Brexit will have a significant impact on the way businesses spend their IT budgets in 2018, with organisations spending more on software and cloud-based services that offer greater flexibility and favourable conditions compared to long-term, high upfront investments.

Worldwide IT spending will increase to $3.7 trillion in 2018 - growth of 4.5% compared to 2017's numbers, Gartner predicted yesterday.

"Global IT spending growth began to turn around in 2017, with continued growth expected over the next few years," John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner, said. "However, uncertainty looms as organisations consider the potential impacts of Brexit, currency fluctuations, and a possible global recession. Despite this uncertainty, businesses will continue to invest in IT as they anticipate revenue growth, but their spending patterns will shift."

Enterprise software revenues are already showing strong growth, Gartner's report said, projected to increase by 9.5% over the next 12 months and an additional 8.4% in 2019 to hit $421 billion.

The analyst house predicts organisations will continue to invest in digital business, blockchain and IoT projects, but also move from big data to algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI).

"Looking at some of the key areas driving spending over the next few years, Gartner forecasts $2.9 trillion in new business value opportunities attributable to AI by 2021, as well as the ability to recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity," said Mr Lovelock.

"That business value is attributable to using AI to, for example, drive efficiency gains, create insights that personalise the customer experience, entice engagement and commerce, and aid in expanding revenue-generating opportunities as part of new business models driven by the insights from data."

He said the key will be spending a chunk of budget on AI technologies in order to unlock their potential business value, especially when trying to find cost savings in the near future. "Spending on AI for customer experience and revenue generation will likely benefit from AI being a force multiplier the cost to implement will be exceeded by the positive network effects and resulting increase in revenue," Lovelock added.

Devices won't experience such significant revenue increases though, growing 5.6% over the next year and 5.7% in 2019. End user mobile device revenues will creep up slightly because they will cost more, although PC growth isn't so encouraging, with Gartner predicting revenues will remain flat.

Picture: Bigstock

The NHS has been urged to consider using AI to boost its digital transformation efforts.

Think tank Reform believes the NHS can benefit from using AI, detailing how in its report Thinking on its own: AI in the NHS.

"Despite the hype around AI in healthcare, examples of it being implemented and deployed in the NHS are sparse," the report notes. "Broadly speaking, it is incumbent on individual providers to introduce new technologies into the NHS. With a different approach to technological adoption, however, which would gradually embed AI in service transformation plans, the future could look quite different."

Reform thinks the NHS should take the potential of AI and use it to develop a detailed framework for purchasing AI-enabled systems, making sure it remains a focused activity, and developing services that would benefit the majority, rather than the minority.

This includes collecting the right type of data, in the right format for an AI application, and sharing it securely with all those that would benefit from its insights.

"The healthcare system is still heavily reliant on paper files and most of its IT systems are not based on open-standards," the report continued. "This limits the exchange of information across the health system. Increasing the quality of the data collected within the NHS is of crucial importance as the accuracy and fairness of AI algorithms are wholly dependent on the data they are being fed."

However, the NHS must also address the concerns of both its workers and the public around AI. Getting buy-in from both the public and healthcare professionals means confidence will be raised and outcomes will have more of an impact, Reform believes.

The think tank has put forward 16 recommendations to the NHS, including creating training datasets for other organisations that can use them to train algorithms for use in the public health service and that IT companies in charge of AI for the NHS should be responsible if systems fail.

Previously the NHS has been criticised for its approach to sharing data, axing its care.data scheme to pool patient data following a review by the National Data Guardian in 2016. A deal with DeepMind to share 1.6 million patients' data was branded "inexcusable" by academics, and the hospital involved had its knuckles rapped by the healthcare watchdog in May last year.

Eyebrows were rightly raised when Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus VR. Now, though, it seems the world is starting to understand Zuckerberg's insight.

Back then in 2014 virtual reality seemed to be limited to games. Three years later and we're already seeing global rollouts of commercial VR products, such as Audi's Configurator: this not only switches colours but lets customers configure add-ons such as alloy wheels and see the effect in virtual reality. And it's not just cars. Everything from films and games to immersive advertising is making its way to the platform: it's time to ask not if you should join them, but how?

Immersive experiences

Ikea has never been slow to innovate, and saw the potential of VR early on. Its showrooms have a magnetic pull on price-sensitive, fashion-conscious home owners, but not everyone lives within striking distance of one of its warehouses. So, in 2016 it saved them the journey by rolling out a "virtual" kitchen through Steam. Built using Ikea cupboards, filled with Ikea accessories, it was a fully interactive, immersive environment, with sliding drawers, chopped food and pans that you could virtually "cook" with.

"We see that virtual reality will play a major role in the future of our customers," said Ikea's new chief executive, Jesper Brodin, when the product launched. He believes that VR will soon be an integrated part of people's lives. "Someday, it could be used to enable customers to try out a variety of home furnishing solutions before buying them."

The kitchen experience (watch a demonstration here) isn't Ikea's only venture into virtual worlds. It commissioned Hamburg digital agency Demodern to build an immersive interactive showroom delivered using VR headsets, which allowed shoppers to both view the contents of a flat, and change its fabrics, wall colours, and even lighting. They were effectively trialling the environment before slipping off the headset and taking home the parts they liked from the store's real-world shelves.

In each environment, the customer sat at the centre of a 360-degree world, which for many creatives accustomed to video and web is an unfamiliar environment in which to start work.

Matt Beverage is co-founder and creative director of London-based Pebble Studios, a specialist in VR and immersive content. He sees the need to think about what's behind you while moving away from traditional cuts between scenes as one of the most important considerations for anyone who wants to produce VR content. In many ways, he believes, developers need to adopt a gaming mindset."Games have always concerned themselves with taking the viewer through a narrative, and VR is closer to that than it is to traditional TV and video content. With film, you can cut between shots and environments but if you do that in VR you lose people because they suddenly realise that they've got a headset on, rather than buying into that world."

VR won't suit every environment, or use case, so it's important to think about what and how you're selling, and whether VR is the right medium. Often, said Beveridge, it isn't.

Narrative and quality

"Narrative" comes first, he said, and relying on the technology to generate interest probably isn't enough. "GoPro cameras are a great analogy. The GoPro website is full of great footage, but in reality, 99% of them are used by idiots like me and their mates on their snowboarding holiday, to shoot terrible videos that they bore all their friends to death with."

VR is at the same stage, he argued, and brands can't put out sub-standard footage and hope to find an audience. Even companies that spend time and money on their offering should be conservative when estimating who might see the result.

There are fewer than a million VR headsets in Britain, and with Facebook cutting the price of the Oculus Rift twice since the start of the year, some may assume that demand isn't currently outstripping supply. Yet, as prices fall ,the barriers to entry will also come down. It's already possible to buy sub-200 360-degree cameras on the high street, but placing these in a room and stitching together the poorly thought-out result is likely to turn people off the idea of VR as a promotional medium.

"VR is changing so quickly that narrative will likely outlast the technology itself," Beveridge warned. "You can watch great movies from the 1940s now, and they'll have stood the test of time if the narrative was good, but if you watch a ten-year-old movie that was built around effects, it's already going to look terrible."

This applies directly to VR. It still has a novelty factor but, in a world where content hangs around longer than we might like on the web, it pays to think carefully about how you want to present your products or service.

Building transient worlds

A striking Pebble Studios project is a VR tour of the Bowmore whisky distillery. Aware that drinkers who find a whisky they like tend to stay loyal to the brand, Bowmore wanted to help them identify with the unique factors that contributed to its product's distinctive taste, including the location, water source and even weather. Quantifying the return on its investment would be difficult, but VR was considered appropriate because it lent itself well to playing out at whisky conferences and in airport duty free lounges, where shoppers could be transported to the distillery's base on the Hebrides .

On a smaller scale, VR is making strides in real estate. Like Ikea's virtual rooms, VR house viewings give the user an idea of what it would be like to live in an environment, by giving them the opportunity to see it from the inside. Rightmove's early ventures are available on its YouTube channel, as are those of Nottingham agency Walton & Allen. Do these videos tell a story? Not in the traditional sense, but they do have a narrative that this is what your life could be like if you moved here.

Reality vs unreality

Real estate and furnishings are logical uses for VR. The same could be said for media, cars and holidays, but the case is less clear-cut for products that don't envelop the user in the real world.

And that's the key. Successful VR recreates reality on a virtual plane, allowing the audience to experience something that would otherwise be out of their reach at least without them making a not-inconsiderable journey.

"When you put on [a headset], you enter a completely immersive computer-generated environment," wrote Zuckerberg when he announced Facebook's interest in Oculus VR. "The incredible thing about the technology is that you feel like you're actually present in another place with other people. People who try it say it's different from anything they've experienced in their lives."

On a raw, technological level, he's right, but from what we've seen so far it seems that, when it comes to VR promotion at least, making the results as familiar as possible, rather than different, may be the key to success.

Main image credit: Shutterstock