However much advancement we see in technology, around half of the world’s population remains “unconnected”, which poses one of the biggest challenges for the near future. We will also talk about a hilarious, and creepy, example of how machine learning technology still has a long way to go, and a smart way to make cities smarter.

Connecting the unconnected

Most of us can’t imagine a world in which we’re not constantly “on”, or connected. This makes it easy to forget that not all people are connected to what we consider essential. How does your company do when the WiFi has a bad moment? There’d be some mishaps or annoyances, or even the complete inability to work. Yet half the world does not have such technology and remains unconnected. Several projects worldwide are working to resolve this issue. Read more about it on bdtechtalks. We’re excited to live in an online world that better reflects the real world!

Privacy should be in the hands of the user

MIT developed a platform together with Harvard University that takes care of all of those pesky privacy settings for you. With the inclusion of GDPR in Europe, we do have a lot more options when it comes to what kinds of data we want to share, but the websites we visit and apps we use don’t exactly make it easy for us to find all of the settings we’re looking for. This platform, called Riverbed, helps users restrict the use of their data across the web, all they have to do is set it up and indicate their preferred sharing settings. A platform like this puts data privacy back into our own hands. Check it out!

AI can make human faces, not so much cats

The project ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com was already kind of creepy. It’s a place where every time you refresh, you see a picture of a person who does not exist, their photo was created by an AI. All in all, it’s successful, most of the time you really do feel like you’re looking at a real person. But there’s a website that copied the concept, ThisCatDoesNotExist.com, and that is properly horrifying. Futurism outlined the whole concept for us, so go there to check out how far machine learning has (and hasn’t…) come!

Interact with infrastructure

Hello Lamp Post is a project created to connect people with their environments more. The idea is that residents of a community can go to an object – such as a lamp post – and ‘chat’ with it via popular messaging applications. The objects will provide information of different kinds; think history, culture, tourism, or simply road directions. Another aim of this project is to collect feedback on community initiatives. Hello Lamp Post wants to help build smart cities that take its ‘users’ into account.. Go to Smart Cities Dive for the full insight. Would you go up to a phone booth and strike up a conversation with it when you’re lost? We personally would love to see it.

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Photo by Sheldon Nunes on Unsplash