Join the masterminds and creative catalysts at this year’s Vivid Ideas program. Vivid Ideas is where you can workshop, collaborate, be inspired and cultivate the fresh thinking to drive the creative agenda across tech, design, entertainment and culture. Come and hear from leading thinkers including James Cameron, Dare Jennings, Jane McGonigal and Kriti Sharma join the debate and learn new skills.

The New Zealand IoT (internet of things) Alliance believes cutting-edge technologies will have a profound impact on helping improve New Zealand’s agricultural productivity.

Thinxtra’s New Zealand network is now complete with 94% of the population within coverage, including all major cities and regional cities, and as far as Hawera and Invercargill. Every population centre throughout New Zealand now has comprehensive redundant Sigfox coverage, Thinxtra is currently focusing on expanding out the Sigfox network in rural and remote areas by the end of the year, to support NZ agriculture exporting to Australia and worldwide.

Unlocking the value of digital manufacturing.  The recent Rockwell Automation TechED event in Auckland was well attended and revealed the latest technologies for high performance manufacturing and production. With a strong focus on New Zealand’s food & beverage, water/wastewater and OEM industries, the event brought together industry professionals including end users, system integrators, distributors, partners and machine builders.

Biomimicry is the strategy of modeling designs and structures in technology after nature writes Isaac Maw for engineering.com  Building a two-armed assembly robot to have wrist, elbow and shoulder joints, like a human, is a good example of biomimicry.

Worldwide, the value of the horticultural industry will increase with better pollination systems, robust quality control, better traceability systems, more cost-competitive practice and solutions for the difficulty of finding seasonal orchard crews.

The ethics of artificial intelligence will be critical to the success of AI going forward, a Microsoft leader and a keynote speaker at the AI Day event in Auckland next week says. Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI Business, says that given AI has the potential to reshape not just industries and governments, but society as a whole. “Working on the ethics of the use of AI, from the beginning, in key areas like transparency, accountability, privacy and bias will be crucial to the success of AI going forward. “There is a strong focus on the ethical implications of the AI systems that are being built and deployed.” The European Commission’s group on ethics in science and new technologies recently warned that existing efforts to develop solutions to the ethical, societal and legal challenges AI presents are a ‘patchwork of disparate initiatives’. It added that uncoordinated, unbalanced approaches in the regulation of AI risked ethics shopping, resulting in the relocation of AI development and use to regions with lower ethical standards. AI Day on March 28 is being organised by NewZealand.AI and the AI Forum NZ, which is part of the NZTech Alliance, bringing together 14 national tech communities, more than 500 organisations and more than 100,000 employees to help create a more prosperous New Zealand underpinned by technology. Guggenheimer says one important element around the adoption of AI is the focus on having AI help to amplify human capabilities and allow them to do more versus simply replacing people and functions. “As AI is adopted by various organisations we are starting to see a few trends occurring. We are starting to see a series of patterns emerge that cut across industries and geographies. These include: “1. Business agents – that represents your organisation in interactions with your customers, employees and other businesses. “2. AI assisting professionals – by helping them get the information that they need so they can focus on more value-added tasks. For example, a chief financial officer who gets AI generated forecasts so that they can focus on driving the business forward instead of number crunching. “3. Tracking people and objects in space – so we can improve the safety, security and productivity of spaces that we work in. Proactively advising a worker that a box they are going to lift is too heavy based on accidentally putting too many items in the box is an example. “4. Autonomous systems – that proactively improve resulting in increasingly stable systems. An interesting application of this pattern is self-healing networks that stop threats and re-route packets when a part of the network becomes slow. “The beauty of these patterns is they can be applied to commercial entities and public-sector institutions, across the globe and across economies. We are seeing examples in agriculture, manufacturing, government, healthcare and many other areas.

“There are many areas where AI capabilities are working to copy human abilities, but in general these are done at an individual cognitive level today. Today there are standardised tests used to look at areas like speech recognition, image recognition, translation, machine reading comprehension and more. “We’re proud of our history in research and have been fortunate to see many of these advances first hand. Computer vision for identifying objects, speech recognition, solving games like Ms. Pac-Man and most recently reading comprehension are all areas where AI has reached or exceeded human parity for a specific task. “The advancements are still continuing at a rapid pace and last week we announced we had the first machine translation system to reach human parity for Chinese to English translation.

| A Make lemonade release  ||  march 21, 2018   |||

The first real-world tests of 5G mobile technology in New Zealand have begun on the streets of Wellington. However, there are still a number of hurdles, both technological and bureaucratic, to overcome before consumer access becomes a reality.

Sometimes, to move forward, you have to go back to the basics—sometimes way back. SpinLaunch, a startup spaceflight development company, raised $30 million to fund a catapult system—not a flaming ball to capture the castle catapult system, but rather technology to launch cargo into space more cost-effectively.

The announcement of the world’s first self-driving electric air taxi being piloted in Christchurch is just one of the examples of New Zealand becoming a living tech laboratory, NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller said today.

The Zephyr Airworks aircraft, financed by Google co-founder Larry Page, is a great testimony to responding to a global challenge around traffic and congestion, Muller says. “New Zealand is a living laboratory and we see many other examples of Kiwi ingenuity being attractive to the global tech market, such as the Incredible Skies autonomous drone testing space in Northland where they are testing the delivery of medicine to isolated areas. “Look at Rocketlab and its launches from Mahia Peninsula turning New Zealand into one of just a handful of nations to successfully put satellites into orbit. “New Zealand is filled with innovative problem solvers who are growing in numbers and playing significant roles in the development of world-class technology. It’s in our DNA.

“Some of the world’s largest tech firms see New Zealand literally as a living laboratory. “Facebook often carry out tests in New Zealand first before introducing new features. “Fairly recently we have seen Apple purchase Kiwi company Power by Proxi for a seven-figure sum and continue to retain their research and development facilities here due to the depth of New Zealand has developed in wireless power. “Christchurch-based Trimble, an international company headquartered in the US, listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, with an annual revenue of about $US2.3 billion and they have around 8500 employees worldwide yet continue to maintain a large R&D presence in New Zealand due to our world leadership in GPS and location data systems. “The top 200 New Zealand tech exporters are now selling more than $7 billion a year into offshore markets while employing thousands of Kiwis here in New Zealand. “New Zealand’s global reputation for technology leadership in space, GPS, artificial intelligence, IoT, agritech and creative technologies like AR/VR is strong and growing. “Such is the attraction of our living laboratory that some of the AI leaders from the world’s biggest tech companies - such as Amazon, IBM and Microsoft - will be in Auckland on March 28 to talk about artificial intelligence at AI-Day,” Muller says. This will be followed in May by Techweek, a showcase of New Zealand best technology, attracting hundreds of international delegates and investors as well as an expected 30,000 locals. Techweek runs from May 19 to 27 and includes nearly 400 events in more than 30 centres all over New Zealand from Northland to Otago.

| A MakeLemonade release  ||  March 15, 2018   |||