Forecasting the Future:

Forecasting the Future 

The internet is already a huge factor in our daily lives and continues to advance every day. Used for medical, educational, and every day life purposes. If anybody else like me grew up watching cartoons and the infamous Jetsons which follows along a family in an advanced technology reliant world. Growing up I had the silly assumption that was how technology would be when I was older. 

Three students in grade twelve in Delhi have created an app that will help people with disabilities like  deafness, blindness, and muteness be able to communicate with ease. The app is called Practikality and has already helped a seven year old partially mute and deaf boy be able to be more social in his every day life. The students got the idea after they realized Braille and sign language helped these people with disabilities but didn't really give them the chance to fully express themselves. The application hasn't been fully released but is in the final stages of testing. One of the students got his main inspiration for the application when his Grandfather lost his ability to speak. He said "He was feeling very helpless, and I wanted to do something about it. That's why I started thinking about the bigger picture, and of those people who do not have the ability to see, hear or speak." The same student also visited a school for the blind and gave him the motivation to make this dream of helping the disabled a reality. The application has three main features called Voice, Easi, and Vision. The Voice feature is made for mute humans by converting text into human like voices. The best part about this feature is that it also allows emotion to be heard through the voices like joy, hate, anger, sorrow, and disgust. They must type the message they would like to say which can be converted two way into speech or into morse code allowing the user to properly express themselves. The next feature is called Easi that stands for Electronic Assist for Sign Interpretation and is used for humans who have a hearing impairment. It basically does the opposite of the previous feature I discussed instead of turning text into voice this feature turns voices into words for the user to read on their device. There is also the ability to customize the users database by adding shortcuts to help with the lag between translations. Finally there is Vision, which is for the visually impaired and is supposedly a safe navigation to help identify objects and other people. The feature is able to function through facial recognition and environmental analysis. A small bonus within this feature is called Educational Assistance that allows the user to store the content so they can open it for later usage. The application will be free to the first 100,000 users but a minimal fee will be added for certain features. The project was awarded at an awards banquet called Microsoft Imagine Cup Indian Nationals where they received 'Best Project on Accessibility Track.'

Recently World Internet of Things Day was celebrated earlier in the month of April. In India they went into detail on what to expect in the future and just how much the industry will be worth in just a few short years. They expect the Internet of Things market to be above 9 billion dollars by 2020. With this increase they are planning to see major advances in all categories like agriculture, telecommunications, health, automobiles, plus many others. There is a growing interest in the IoT sector right now with the top concerns being in privacy and health sections. The main problem with the privacy is when users are working with the hardware it was actually recording and transmitting the information without alerting the user of the process. Now that may sound like a big problem but it gets worse all the servers that store the date are interconnected so all information can be accessed if just one small server is hacked leaking out all the important information.

Although they haven't found a complete solution to this security/privacy issue experts think that machine learning could help protect this data. PN Sudarshan said that "Machine learning will play an important part to teach devices to pick up human cues better and avoid recording/transmitting personal data. Companies with access to huge consumer databases, like Google and Amazon need to maintain stringent data protection policies," With the machine learning being added in they are hoping this will provide change in the major issues of privacy.

Finally I want to discuss the hot topic that has been changing the world of technology since its early release. Of course i'm talking about Virtual and Augmented reality and how its changed the way we play video games along with many other things. Now we exchange and come across new data everyday but sometimes it's hard to interpret and work with the new information which is why things like virtual reality are coming into play in how we will interact with data in the future. Now what scientist are proposing to help us understand the new data better that if we were able to actually walk around and move the data around it would make the process a lot easier. It is still in the early phases of just how augmented and virtual reality can help users separate the data it still could become one of the most successful innovations in the world. This will allow users to better separate and work through the what seems to be endless amounts of information. The main focus of getting this idea to work is how much time it will save users in the big picture.

Now we may not drive flying cars, have robot maids, or even a machine that cooks anything we ask like George Jetson. However, the advances we are making every day inch us closer and closer to solving multiple problems whether they involve health or agriculture. New inventions and innovations are changing are day to day lives. We may be closer to those flying cars and pizza at the push of a button then we think.