Technology, innovation, trends and opportunities

Technology is moving at an incredible pace. The years to come will bring impressive technological breakthroughs with massive impact on our lives, markets and societies. In our connected world, with the unprecedented level of information, knowledge and ideas exchange, innovation is happening continuously, at scale and in several forms. It is driven by corporations, secret labs, universities, startups, research scientists or simply by thousands of creative individuals across the globe.
The most promising developments in the wider information technology spectrum. Here is the list:
Artificial Intelligence
Everybody is talking about Artificial Intelligence these days. And yes, in many cases, the topic is covered with exaggerations and hype. Fortunately, the overall A.I. progress and the pace of the underlying technological innovation easily justifies this hype. Consider the progress achieved in fields like Deep Learning and areas such as Computer Vision and Natural LanguageProcessing.
Computer vision is making huge steps, with massive applications in autonomous cars, navigation, robotics, pattern recognition, medical diagnosis and more. Language Understanding has made tremendous progress as well?-?recently reached the levels of human understanding?-?Microsoft reports a word error rate of 5.9% which is equal to human performance on the same input.
Digital assistants become more and more intelligent, contextual and proactive. At some point in the near future, your digital assistant will be able not only to handle your tasks and information requests but also to do respond with humor?-?and this will be a major milestone for A.I. Your digital assistant will know (and keep learning) the style of your humor and how it depends on the time of day, the day of the week, the social arrangement, the agenda of the day and your implicitly quantified mood. 

Developers can now experiment with cognitive service in no time and at low cost,
Natural User Interfaces
It's all about seamless experiences: voice-driveninteractions?-?not only voice commands, but more advanced, natural dialogues and forms of communication combining multiple signals in meaningful, streamlined experiences.
Imagine being in your smart home, asking your digital assistance to 'provide more information about this', where 'this' is resolved automatically by your Digital Assistant, using gaze analytics via connected cameras. This way your Digital Assistant understands what you were looking at when you asked the question.
Then, using object detection algorithms, concludes on the class of objects 'this' refers, to empower a natural and intelligent response and a meaningful conversation development.
At the same time, haptic offers significant opportunities for innovation. Haptic is about recreating the sense of touch by applying force feedback, vibrations, or motions to the user. Startups like Lofelt develop such applications for gaming, AR, VR, and entertainment while Ultrahaptics is working on 'invisible touchless interfaces'. And this is where AI, Natural user interfaces, AR and VR and Touchless User interfaces based on Gesture Recognition are all blended together in smart, innovative scenarios empowering end-users.
Virtual Reality
The virtual reality (VR) technology is exploding. So are the opportunities for innovative experiences, use-cases and products. Content creation for VR is a great opportunity with significant startup activity worldwide. VR startups are working across multiple domains and business scenarios, including E-commerce, gaming, socialapplications, learning and education, healthcare, online VR environments and more. The next few years will bring impressive progress on all VR hardware, applications and VR content.
Augmented Reality
Augmented reality is what we get when physical and digital worlds blend into a single experience. Typical examples are Microsoft HoloLens and Google Glass. Again, this is an area that will grow rapidly as the opportunity for innovation is unlimited: content experiences, content discovery, dataexploration and visualizations, intelligent and contextual object annotation, dynamic physical world mapping and discovery, industrial applications for field workers?-?are just some examples of the applications which will empower the ways we understand our world.

Analytics and Visualization
Data availability has exploded?-?modern corporations have access to vast amounts of complex data, both internal and from the public domain. The breadth and depth of data available, require new ways to summarize, visualize and present data. Novel ways to experience data and insights could involve intelligent interactive synopsis and 'data navigation' systems, VR and AR experiences, voice-driven insights discovery and 'personalized data exploration' scenarios. I do believe that there are great new ways to visually browse and understand data, discover and explore hidden structures, trends and patterns.
Blockchain
Blockchain is one of the most disruptive technologies out there. Its distributed, decentralized and immutable properties make it the ideal way to store and track data across numerous domains and use cases.
I see significant new applications and novel scenarios beyond crypto-currencies and fin-tech. Startups are already working on novel concepts that make sense to leverage blockchain. In the years to come, some of these willdisrupt social, government and even political aspects of our world.
Robotics
Robots are already here, in one form or another. Regardless the particular class?-?humanoids, nano-robots, military, industrial, and so on?-?the progress is impressive. On one hand it is the advances in terms of hardware, sensors and operating software; on the other hand it is the progress of Artificial Intelligence which makes possible to integrate cognitive services and dramatically increase Robot's capabilities for real-time decision making.
In the near future we will start to meet Robots with proactive behaviors, advanced context understanding, able to adapt to human sentiment, enforce 'personalities' and communication styles.