Data, and who has it, is the real concern Set in a dystopian Los Angeles, the story centres on the tracking down and killing of a renegade group of artificial humans – replicants – escaped from space and trying to extend their lifespans beyond the built-in four years. The story is set in 2019. Surprise, we aren't exactly there in terms of the future Hollywood envisioned in 1982 so it's seized the opportunity to hurl the idea even further into the future, 2049, with a new telling. Opportunism,...

Wireless Technologies Finland is a country most people would associate with lakes (it has 187,888, more than any other country), heavy metal music, the Mosaic internet browser and companies such as Nokia. Few would perhaps know that it’s the home of the Air Guitar World Championships and fewer still would associate it with the automotive industry. In Scandinavia, you wouldn’t be wrong if you suggested Finland’s neighbour Sweden was perhaps better placed for anything to do with cars, after...

Software Architectures A $30m injection of cash into the UK’s Bristol-based AI chip startup Graphcore in July this year was another clear indication of how AI chip development is disrupting the traditional CPU players. Earlier in the same month, leading AI chipmaker NVIDIA struck a deal with Chinese web services firm Baidu with a promise to “accelerate AI”, while Microsoft executive vice president for AI research Harry Shum recently talked about how Microsoft is developing its own AI chip for...

Statistical Data Analysis When IBM paid a reported $2bn plus for The Weather Company last year, a few eyebrows were understandably raised but a year on and the mist is starting to clear a little. Although it was always obvious that weather data lay at the heart of the decision – particularly the potential for it when you consider the developing autonomous vehicle industry – there was still a sense of what more could it do? Was there anything else in the pot? Like any acquisition, the acquired...

Business Process Automation The recent decision by US-Norwegian business Kolos to build a giant, 600,000m2 datacentre in the city of Ballangen, Norway, is on the surface at least, a wise decision. Ballangen, which incidentally is the birthplace of singer Frida from 70s pop group Abba, is inside the Arctic circle, which sort of solves the cooling issue. Maybe. As demands to store and manage data accelerates, driven by increased machine connectivity and data analytics, so the pressure on...