IT Vision: Emerging Technologies

IT Vision: Emerging Technologies

Question: 

     “If you have one emerging technology that is posing the biggest challenge in terms of switching over the technology, which one would it be? And why?”

Answer:

     Recently, five emerging technologies are identified as the emerging and visionary technologies in IT (information technology). They consist of (a) Artificial Intelligence (AI), (b) Big Data Analytics (BDA), (c) Combined AI and BDA, (d) Web Wisdom of Things (W2T), and (e) AI-IoT Technology. Each of them has played the crucial role in IT currently and in the future. It appears that those novel technologies are posing the biggest challenge in terms of switching over the technology.

     The reasons are discussed below:

     1. AI recently has grown rapidly from a nascent stage to intermediate one in the last decade. AI is a youthful field in Computer Science in building an autonomous machine that intends to replace humans with daily activities. Robots mimic human behavior and frequently perform dangerous tasks (Dobson, 2015). AI scientists seek to create autonomous machines such as humanoid robots that have the capability of reasoning as human common sense (Brookshear, 2002).

     2. Big Data Analytics (BDA) is an effectively systematic and scientific process to analyze colossal datasets in various forms at very speed, likely in real-time, to uncover hidden patterns, unknown, correlations, useful relationship, and meaningful information (Minelli, Chambers, & Dhiraj, 2013).

     3. For the combined AI and BDA technology, Imanuel (2015) from Predictive Analytics Today describes that BDA makes a significant impact on many industries. Especially, BDA plays an impactful role on AI driven by smarter analytics engines, the ubiquity of data, and exponential growth in technology such as massive parallelism, machine learning algorithms, annotated data, etc. (Power, 2015). To reduce the complexity of analytical tasks, data scientists can use AI to add an intelligence layer on the top of big data. They may also use AI on BDA on the gigantic datasets to detect hidden correlations between critical factors in business. While a quantitative method uses limited variables in hypotheses, AI does not have a limitation on numbers of hypotheses from the vast possibilities. Humans may use as many as ideas that they can think of. AI, as well as BDA, can provide insights much more than humans do. Notice that the ubiquity of Big Data and human limitation in extracting meaningful information impacts significantly on the AI field. Recently many organizations have used AI for BDA to retrieve precise data and information from big data.

     4. W2T is a rapid development of the Web/Internet and the Internet of Things (IoT) in

the organic amalgamation and harmonious symbiosis among humans, computers, and things in the hyper world. Zhong et al. (2016) define the hyper world includes social world, the physical world, and the information world. 

     5. AI-IoT Technology 

     The fifth emerging technology that is identified is a new trend of combining Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), called AI-IoT technology.

     With enormous devices communicating each other, IoT will produce a sea of Big Data that bury treasurable insights for humans to predict accidents, crimes, health issues, natural disasters, business risks, etc. in predictive analyses. Big Data also underlies a big problem in analysis on Zeta bytes of machine data that is impossible for humans to understand with traditional methods. Perhaps, the only way to retrieve the hidden insights from big data generated by IoT is Artificial Intelligence in machine learning (Jaffe, 2014). AI establishes a construction and study of the modeling systems for data learning without following programming instructions. For example, bases on human behaviors from the learning systems, Amazon uses AI to recommend other books or products to customers or Pandora suggests what other songs users may like. 

     Since all of those emerging and visionary technologies have grown rapidly in a nascent stage, they are going to pose the greatest challenges regarding switching over the technology.