Emerging Trends

New technologies built on data and networks: AI, machine learning and NLP, AR and VR, robotics, big data, IoT and smart cities, cloud services, grid computing and blockchains.

Key ideas

Artificial intelligence lets machines do tasks that need human-like intelligence; machine learning is the part in which systems learn patterns from data, and NLP lets computers understand and produce human language.
Augmented reality adds computer-made objects to the real view, as through a phone camera; virtual reality replaces the view with a fully computer-made world seen through a headset.
Robotics builds machines that sense their surroundings, decide and do physical tasks on their own, in factories, medicine, space and disaster zones.
Big data is too large and fast-growing for ordinary tools; it is described by five Vs: volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value.
In the Internet of Things, everyday devices with sensors exchange data over the internet; a smart city uses such data to run traffic, lights, water and power efficiently.
Cloud computing rents storage, servers and software over the internet: IaaS gives bare infrastructure, PaaS a platform to build apps on, SaaS a ready program used in a browser.
Grid computing joins many computers in different places to work on one large task; a blockchain is a shared, decentralised ledger in which every block holds the hash of the block before it.

Remember

Volume; velocity	how much data; how fast it arrives and must be handled
Variety; veracity; value	many formats; how trustworthy it is; the useful insight it gives
IaaS	rent virtual servers and storage, then install your own system
PaaS	a ready platform and database on which developers build and run apps
SaaS	a finished program used through a browser, with nothing to install
Sensor readings	per sensor = minutes ÷ interval (1 day = 1,440 minutes); × number of sensors
Data per day in KB	readings × bytes per reading ÷ 1024
Block k of 1 to n changed	blocks k to n fail the hash check: n − k + 1 blocks
Grid computing	tasks per computer = total tasks ÷ computers; data doubling yearly: 5 GB → 5 × 2³ = 40 GB in 3 years

Watch out

Counting only the changed block in a blockchain: every later block fails the check too.
Confusing AR and VR: AR keeps the real world in view; VR shuts it out.
Mixing up PaaS and SaaS: developers build on PaaS; users simply use SaaS.
Forgetting to turn hours into minutes, or bytes into KB (÷ 1024), in sensor-data sums.

Worked example

34 weather sensors each send a 128-byte reading every 15 minutes. How many KB of data do they send in a day?

Working: 96 readings × 128 bytes × 34 = 417,792 bytes; ÷ 1024

Answer: 408 KB