Driverless cars, facial recognition to be reality

The upcoming year of 2018 will be the year when Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning will hit the market, a global technology giant predicted recently.
At the same time, the forthcoming year would witness introduction of a number of new device payment systems, which will pave the way for 'open banking', projected Nordic telecom giant Telenor in its technology predictions for 2018.
"Artificial Intelligence and especially Deep Learning, the 'magic' that is bringing us driverless cars and facial recognition, has been sitting solidly atop the hype curve over the last few years," it said in a research, published on its website lately.
It was, however, predicted that 2018 would be the year when deep learning moves beyond the hype, and would find new markets outside of the Internet giants.
"The technology will take on a wide range of industries, including health, energy, transport and telco," it said.
The research also predicted that in 2018, a growing number of the devices would become payment devices including car keys, vending machines, smart phones, connected cars and sports watches.
"Artificial Intelligence and IoT will generate intelligent and personalised context-aware customer services, enabling more tailored solutions to help customers and companies alike make sound financial decisions, manage risk and reduce costs," the technology giant said.
"In 2018, several new device payment systems will be introduced globally. For the Asia Pacific region, we will see growth of IoT banking based services. In Europe, next year sees the introduction of the new Payment Service (PSD2) directive, which enables access to banks' customer data for external actors such as fintech-startups," it added.
"This paves the way for 'open banking' and innovation as well as challenges within current business models and the telco payment ecosystem. Security will be key in preventing cyber criminals from hacking the payment-enabled devices," says Bjørn Taale Sandberg, head of Telenor research.
Telenor also predicted that the upcoming year would see the debate around blockchain heating up. "Depends who you ask, but the problems are stacking up, and this year we may see blockchain technology struggle to break out of its cryptocurrency cradle."
"Blockchain is best known as the technology behind Bitcoin, a digital currency that doesn't need a central governing body to guarantee transactions," Telenor said in its research.
"One of the perks of blockchain is that it is, by design, resistant to modification. However, this also brings about the challenge of diversifying its practical applications: to create more varied and usable blockchain-based solutions, developers need to be able to modify it - to sort out bugs, upgrade technology and make widespread engineering decisions."
Sandberg predicted: "The blockchain industry will need to resolve these challenges to fully deliver on its promise. 2018 will see this debate heat up - and hopefully give us solutions."
Headquartered in Norway, Telenor is one of the leading telecom companies in the world with operations in Scandinavia, Eastern Europe and Asia. Telenor venture Grameenphone is the largest mobile operator in Bangladesh.

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