Skip to main content
- 5G: Promising speeds unimaginable by today’s
standards — 7.5 Gbps according to Samsung’s latest tests — 5G is the
real-time promise of the future. Enabling everything from interactive
automobiles and super gaming to the industrial Internet of Things, 5G
will take wireless to the future and beyond, preparing for the rapidly
approaching day when everything, including the kitchen sink, might be connected to a network, both local and the Internet.
- Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality: After many
years in which the “reality” of virtual reality (VR) has been questioned
by both technologists and the public, 2016 promises to be the tipping
point, as VR technologies reach a critical mass of functionality,
reliability, ease of use, affordability and availability. Movie studios
are partnering with VR vendors to bring content to market. News
organizations are similarly working with VR companies to bring immersive
experiences of news directly into the home, including live events. And
the stage is set for broad adoption of VR beyond entertainment and
gaming — to the day when VR will help change the physical interface
between man and machine, propelling a world so far only envisioned in
science fiction. At the same time, the use of augmented reality (AR) is
expanding. Whereas VR replaces the actual physical world, AR is a live
direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose
elements are augmented (or supplemented) by computer-generated sensory
input, such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. With the help of
advanced AR technology (e.g., adding computer vision and object
recognition), the information about the surrounding real world of the
user becomes interactive and can be manipulated digitally.
- Nonvolatile Memory: While nonvolatile memory
sounds like a topic only of interest to tech geeks, it is actually huge
for every person in the world who uses technology of any kind. As
we become exponentially more connected, people need and use more and
more memory. Nonvolatile memory, which is computer memory that retrieves
information even after being turned off and back on, has been used for
secondary storage due to issues of cost, performance and write
endurance, as compared to volatile RAM memory that has been used as
primary storage. In 2016, huge strides will be made in the development
of new forms of nonvolatile memory, which promise to let a hungry world
store more data at less cost, using significantly less power. This will
literally change the landscape of computing, allowing smaller devices to
store more data and large devices to store huge amounts of information.
- Cyber Physical Systems (CPS): Also used as the
Internet of Things (IoT), CPS are smart systems that have cyber
technologies, both hardware and software, deeply embedded in and
interacting with physical components, and sensing and changing the state
of the real world. These systems have to operate with high levels of
reliability, safety, security and usability since they must meet the
rapidly growing demand for applications such as the smart grid, the next
generation air transportation system, intelligent transportation
systems, smart medical technologies, smart buildings and smart
manufacturing. 2016 will be another milestone year in the development of
these critical systems, which while currently being employed on a
modest scale, don’t come close to meeting the demand.
- Data Science: A few years ago, Harvard Business Review called data scientist the “sexiest job of the 21st
century.” That definition goes double in 2016. Technically, data
science is an interdisciplinary field about processes and systems to
extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either
structured or unstructured, which is a continuation of some of the data
analysis fields such as statistics, data mining and predictive
analytics. In less technical terms, a data scientist is an individual
with the curiosity and training to extract meaning from big data,
determining trends, buying insights, connections, patterns and more.
Frequently, data scientists are mathematics and statistics experts.
Sometimes, they’re more generalists; other times, they are software
engineers. Regardless, people looking for assured employment in 2016 and
way beyond should seek out these opportunities, since the world can’t
begin to get all the data scientists it needs to extract meaning from
the massive amounts of data available that will make our world safer,
more efficient and more enjoyable.
- Capability-based Security: The greatest single
problem of every company and virtually every individual in this cyber
world is security. The number of hacks rises exponentially every year,
and no one’s data is safe. Finding a “better way” in the security world
is golden. Hardware capability-based security, while hardly a household
name, may be a significant weapon in the security arsenal of
programmers, providing more data security for everyone. Capability-based
security will provide a finer grain protection and defend against many
of the attacks that today are successful.
- Advanced Machine Learning: Impacting everything
from game playing and online advertising to brain/machine interfaces and
medical diagnosis, machine learning explores the construction of
algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. Rather than
following strict program guidelines, machine learning systems build a
model based on examples and then make predictions and decisions based on
data. They “learn.”
- Network Function Virtualization (NFV): More and
more, the world depends on cloud services. Due to limitations in
technology security, these services have not been widely provided by
telecommunications companies — which is a loss for the consumer. NFV is
an emerging technology which provides a virtualized infrastructure on
which next-generation cloud services depend. With NFV, cloud services
will be provided to users at a greatly reduced price, with greater
convenience and reliability by telecommunications companies with their
standard communication services. NFV will make great strides in 2016.
- Containers: For companies moving applications to
the cloud, containers represent a smarter and more economical way to
make this move. Containers allow companies to develop and deliver
applications faster and more efficiently. This is a boon to consumers,
who want their apps fast. Containers provide the necessary computing
resources to run an application as if it is the only application running
in the operating system — in other words, with a guarantee of no
conflicts with other application containers running on the same machine.
While containers can deliver many benefits, the gating item is
security, which must be improved to make the promise of containers a
reality. We expect containers to become enterprise-ready in 2016
Comments
Post a Comment