Technology trends to watch out for this year
In the future, we will see more appliances growing ears and programmable brains guided by Echo, Google Home and HomePods
The upcoming year ahead will see a boom in conversational interface development with more and more developers creating Alexa skills, Google actions, and Apple Home Kit automation that can be used by the respective ecosystems. Gaurav Nagar, Director and CTO for Appworks Technologies, gives us insights of the 2018 roadmap ahead.
We are well into 2018 and it is already looking at the watershed year for technology. A more efficient way to “discover” these services will make it even easier for the users to extract full benefit from their smart home appliance. We are finally getting close to practical, flexible, easy to build adhoc solutions for home automation. We will see more and more appliances growing ears and programmable brains guided by Echo, Google Home and HomePods. so what’s in store ahead?
AI and capsule: Neural networks are passé – AI now comes in a capsule! Geoffrey Hinton’s work on Artificial Neural Networks and Deep Learning has helped sculpt the shape of AI as it stands today. His research team recently presented papers on capsule networks and usable algorithms which will take AI to the next level of consciousness.
Kubernetes: The domination of Kubernetes ( K8s) is complete. This year will see robust tools built around this ecosystem to enhance and assist people moving to containers. All container orchestration products will be re- built as K8s “distributions” much like Cloudera, Hortonworks etc. are for Hadoop ecosystem.
Docker: This is a make or break year for Docker as a company. With a number of people already predicting the downfall of Docker, it remains to be seen how well this company, beloved by troves of developers and open source enthusiasts, and which brought containers to the mainstream development toolbox, will manage to stay fit and strong this year. Heading to the cloud: The movement to cloud environment has picked up speed yet a number of enterprises are yet to take that leap of faith. 2018 will see this move m e n t accelerate with better security and data isolation guarantees provided by known cloud providers. Cloud environments have also become cheaper to use, are charged by the hour and is easier to manage.
Blockchain: It’s high time blockchain is adapted in public domain with the support of a legal framework. With more and more governments looking to use it productively and proactively, this year may witness the birth of a widespread built- for- public product which is not a pure- play crypto- currency platform.
Security and privacy: AI will become a major cybersecurity threat, and it will also be the greatest saviour! Rule- based security and fraud detection systems have been in use for ages. They are being given a turbo boost with machine learning and AIbased products. Privacy is also a main- stream concern and this space will see a lot of movement.
Virtual Reality: Virtual Reality has a lot of promise but has yet to deliver. With steady advancements and refinement being witnessed in this segment, we may see the first commercially successful VR headset release this year which will make the humancyborg trade- off worth it. DevOps and DevSecOps: DevOps practices will see an even wider adoption by enterprises and startups. DevOps ( if done correctly) gives substantial yield across the product lifecycle and the need for it is gaining importance as companies look to ship high- quality products at an even faster clip. One of the concerned areas is the integration security practices in DevOps tooling. This is where we will see a healthy growth of specialised tools which can plug into the existing toolchains and provide muchneeded compliance.
Quantum computers: Quantum computing is coming, and it will change everything! IBM and Google are racing to claim the crown of quantum supremacy, while Intel has made significant progress in making use of Silicon to fabricate quantum chips. A commercially viable quantum computer may become generally available by mid- 2018.