🌱 Welcome to the eighth issue of the Seed and welcome to our new subscribers!
⚙️The Seed is a weekly newsletter with easy-to-read content focusing on Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology.
Our slogan: "Growing ideas through seeds of information"
💡 This week’s concepts
The IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a system of interconnected objects on the Internet that can collect and transfer data without human intervention. A “thing” can be any object with a sensor and access to the Internet (e.g: a connected solar panel).
📖 History of IoT
The IoT history is tightly linked with the development of the Internet and computers.
1982: Students at Carnegie Mellon connect a Coke vending machine to the ARPANET, ancestor of the Internet, to check remotely if the machine was empty.
1990: John Romkey presents a toaster controlled via the Internet.
1999: The IoT term is coined by Kevin Ashton.
2007: First iPhone.
2009: There are more IoT devices than humans on Earth.
2014: Amazon Echo is released. More than 100 million devices have been sold since.
2020: There are more than 50 billion IoT devices worldwide, including 11 billion connected to the Internet. Smartphones account for a huge part of the total.
🔬Applications of IoT
📱 For the general public, Smartphones (2.7 billion in use in 2019), smartwatches and wearable devices (more than 700 million in 2019), and Smart home devices like Amazon’s echo are IoT devices.
💍 In Healthcare, IoT allows for better monitoring of health. You can track your heartbeat, the quality of your sleep, and much more. One example of such a device is The Oura ring, presented below.
🏭 In Manufacturing, connected robots can warn operators when an anomaly is detected and help improve operational efficiency.
🚜 In Agriculture, connected sensors, created by companies like Telesense, monitor the health of the crops, seeds, to reduce potential waste.
💯 Key figures
70% of American households have at least one smart home device.
The global IoT market will represent more than $1,500 billion within 5 years. The Healthcare IoT market will account for a third.
Manufacturing is the fastest growing IoT sector.
Smart Agriculture systems represent a quarter of current IoT projects.
📈 News and Trends
Some news
🤳🏻 Google will show you the way using AR
Are you used to get lost in airports? No worries, Google will soon provide an Augmented Reality solution on Google Maps to guide you in some indoor mazes like airports. This solution will help you find your departure gate or a specific store in a gigantic mall!
💳 Visa now supports transaction with a cryptocurrency
The world-famous payment card company Visa has announced this week they will support transaction settlement using the USDC. USDC is a cryptocurrency-powered by Ethereum which value follows the USD value. This explains why it is considered to be stable.
🎙 Spotify on track to compete with ClubHouse?
Spotify has acquired Betty Labs, a live audio platform for discussing sports. With this acquisition, Spotify plans to diversify into live audio!
Trends - Artificial Emotional Intelligence
AI-based tech startups are proliferating and are found in all industries. Thus, scientists are going even further, trying to make AI more human.
Research teams at Loving AI and Hansen Technologies are currently teaching machines love, active listening, and even empathy! This is the start of Artificial Emotional Intelligence, and it should be blooming in the next couple of years when machines will convincingly show human emotions.
🧐 Doc, what is an authentic emotion?
Inevitably, you can ask yourself what is more human than emotions? Can we entrust to an intelligence that is inhuman by definition the features of human intelligence?
In science, the theory of mind is the ability to imagine the mental state such as beliefs, desires, or emotions. This has long been considered something unique to humans and some primates. But now, AI researchers are working to train machines to build a theory of mind models of their own. Therefore, trained robots could soon feel what we humans can feel, they'll be able to show fear and happiness, even love!
👉 Which use could we make?
Actually, this technology would improve current AI therapy applications such as WoeBot, a clinical therapy chatbot. By designing machines able to answer with empathy and concern, digital assistants such as Alexa will soon become a part of your family but don't worry, you won't have to feed her... good for savings.
Moreover, AEI could eventually end up in hospitals, schools, or prisons, providing emotional support robots to patients, students, and inmates in need.
Cigna, the U.S. biggest health service organization published a report in which it's shown that the rate of loneliness in the U.S. has doubled in the past 50 years.
🌐 What's next?
In our increasingly connected world, people report feeling more isolated. Future governments struggling with a massive mental health crisis may turn to emotional support robots to address the issue at scale. In today's increasingly inclusive world, we may one day see our children invite their robot spouse to dinner. Dystopian or utopian, the choice is yours.
❤️ Weekly Crush
Oura!
What if your ring could tell you if you are COVID-positive or not? Well, the Oura Ring may be able to do it, and much more…
⁉️What is the Oura Ring?
We often talk about connected watches that allow you to follow your physical activity or the quality of your sleep, however, this solution is cumbersome and, I don't know about you, but I don't like sleeping with a watch!
What if a ring could do the same then? Or even better? This is the promise of Oura Ring, a connected ring that tracks several physical indicators to analyze your health.
Indeed, this ring allows you to obtain very precise and detailed data (99.9% of accuracy on the resting heart rate according to its creators) about your sleep quality and everyday state of tiredness.
Accompanied by an application, the ring offers advice on how to improve rest, prevent unexpected physical activity, or... detect sudden changes in health... Thus, it could detect Covid or at least a significant change in its owner's health.
🏥 Oura Ring: the story of a HealthTech startup
The Finnish startup raised funds in 2018 from several stars such as Shaquille O'Neal or Will Smith, seduced by the promise of the company Oura Health. But this promise took on a new dimension when Google participated in raising 28 million dollars in September 2020!
When well-being and everyday life balance are at the center of the concerns of a large part of the population, the promise of understanding the darkness of one's sleep, all with a very compact fashion object, charms more than one sports addict...
💍 P.S: I don't want to get married... but I want to be offered a ring today...
🔎 Focus
Artificial Intelligence
🧠 What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
There are many definitions of what is AI. I’ve found this one from Jeremy Achin, the CEO of DataRobot, an AI company, quite interesting. For him:
An AI is a computer system that is able to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence… Many of them are powered by machine learning, some of them are powered by specifically deep learning, some of them are powered by very boring things like just rules.
So, strictly speaking, an AI is not an "intelligent" program. It can be as simple as a set of instructions.
There are two types of AI:
"Weak" AI are AI limited to specific tasks. E.g: Siri is a weak AI because it cannot answer questions outside of some limits.
"Strong" AI is a hypothetical AI that could rival human intelligence by understanding and learning any tasks that humans can. Currently, no one has developed a functional strong AI.
So, for the rest of this article, we will focus on "weak" AI.
🤷♀️ What are common AI techniques?
As mentioned by Jeremy Achin, AI is built using different techniques.
Two of them are Machine Learning and Deep Learning (a subset of Machine Learning). Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms are both learning from data to improve their performance without human intervention.
However, Deep Learning can go further than Machine Learning and solve more complex problems, using Neural Networks, that mimic how brain cells work.
🗿 Milestones of AI
1950: Alan Turing explores the notion of AI for the first time, by asking a simple question. "Can Machines Think?"
1955: 1st Artificial Intelligence Program by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and John Shaw.
1997: Gary Kasparov, then chess world champion, is defeated by Deep Blue, an AI program.
2012: IBM’s Watson wins Jeopardy!. Unlike chess, it requires creative thinking and the use of language.
2016: AlphaGo defeated the world’s Go champion.
⏭ The Future of AI
In 2019, the AI market represented $39.9 billion, and is now expected to grow 40% every year until 2027… Thus 2020s will likely be the decade of AI.
AI will be used in a wide range of applications: tasks automation, cybersecurity, IoT, fraud detections, facial recognition… Almost any business could benefit from it.
However, the rapid progress made by AI raises many ethical concerns (privacy, surveillance, discriminations…). You will learn more about it in our next Newsletter!
That’s it for this week! Hope you enjoyed it and see you next Friday 🙌
You have feedback to share or a question for us? Send us a message!📩
If this email was forwarded to you, you can subscribe by clicking on the link below.
Also, if you're still hungry for cool tech stuff we invite you to check out our Medium page right here.