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Currently, the global infrastructure is expanding into Space. The truth is, this is something that has already started happening. The commercial activity in Space creates many opportunities for both investors and entrepreneurs. It is expected to exceed government activity by 2020. At the 2017 edition of Webit.Festival Europe the Chairman of Space Angels Network Joe Landon talked about the entrepreneurial revolution in Space. Space Angels is a company which searches the world for the best space startups. It aims to create opportunities for the investors while enabling them to make profit from the commercial space industry. No matter what the industry is, new technology is always considered crazy at first. The Space was once considered science fiction, now it is a science fact. To make the topic more tangible, Joe Landon shared a couple of examples of innovations in the Space industry with the audience at Webit. The Falcon-9 Rocket was launched, landed and re-launched by SpaceX. Such reusable rockets spread the costs over the multiple launches and present a revolution in the Space industry. The Blue Origin - the space company of Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, had a similar success with its New Shepard suborbital rocket. It was launched and landed five times in a year.

“Reusability in Space is very important.”, Landon said.

There are innovations concerning 3D printing in Space. The company Made-in Space created a zero gravity 3D printer which enables the astronauts to print the exact tool they need in Space which lowers the costs. 3D Systems is a company which created the first manufactured object from asteroid material. The European banking center created $227 million fund to invest in space mining projects. According to a research report on the opportunities in the commercial space economy by Goldman Sachs, the costs of asteroid mining are comparable to these in Earth mines.   There are many forces which when acting together make Space innovations possible. Joe Landon stressed on the importance of the development in technology which reduces the costs of sending things to the Space. He emphasized on the role of the revolution in satellite technology. Commercial communication satellites a couple of years back were very heavy and extremely expensive to make and launch. It was important for these satellites to last for 15 years and to be very reliable which required further financing. The satellites from today can be held in a person’s hand and are far cheaper to produce and launch than their multi-million spacecraft predecessor. It is possible to launch dozens of them at the same time. This technology has a great impact on the space economy. Huge opportunities for investors and entrepreneurs arise.

“In ten years satellites will cost 10,000 times less, they will have 1,000 times lower mass and the launch will cost 350 times less.”, Joe Landon said.

He dispelled the myth that space companies need extremely big investments in comparison to other tech companies. In fact, the seeds and Series-A investment in space startups is identical to the rest of the tech market. The truth is that space companies from the past needed a lot of funding to build the expensive infrastructure which the space companies of today use. This advantage enables them to develop low-cost, quick businesses. Another myth is that space companies take too long before making any actual profit. The numbers show that since 2009 $14 billion were accounted as exits in the Space industry.

“In the future we’d like to think there are millions of people living and working in the Space.”, Landon said.

We are not talking about sending only missions to the Space, but also forming communities. Astronauts will be joined by people with all kind of expertise such as teachers, lawyers and doctors. Today, very few people go to Space. According to Landon in one or two generations there will be people who have lived their entire life only in the Space. This completely different perspective when the Earth is observed from the Space can change the way we think about it. As the Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell said:

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it.”

You can watch his full lecture here:   If you want to keep up with the latest trends in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 in 1 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

Nowadays, we have access to two things. First, a big amount of data about our personal information and second - access to AI which enables us to understand far better the insights that make us who we are. At the 2017 edition of Webit.Festival Europe the President and Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jercinovic, introduced the topic of ethics in the Artificial Intelligence because if this data is in the wrong hands, our privacy could be endangered.  An ethical imperative on how to use this data is necessary to be created. We should consider ethics from the perspective of both consumers and professionals to communicate in an informed way while considering the benefits and the risks which AI brings. Jason Jercinovic stressed on the development of the tools of today which compared to those of the past can recognize unstructured data. The truth is the world of social media and interconnected devices is one of unstructured data. And these tools enable us to understand the insights from that unstructured data at a scale and to work with them. [caption id="attachment_5137" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The President and Global Brand Director of Havas Worldwide Jason Jercinovic[/caption] The vast amount of data enables us to understand people’s behaviour in great detail. Furthermore, it allows us to create and deliver experiences which are extremely efficient since they are targeted to each individual based on personal preferences.

“With that information I can predict the future. I can influence how you think.”, Jercinovic said.

This technology is becoming more complex at a very fast pace. The reality is that companies are willing to use our personal information in order to target their products or services more precisely. Whether we accept this approach as ethical or not will not change the current situation. That is why, we need a code of conduct. At the end of his talk, Jason Jercinovic underlined once again the importance of making a difference between the benefits and the risks AI brings. It is no secret that this technology is used by companies to deliver high quality content and products to us, customers. AI is present in most parts of our live and it is here to make it better. To get a real idea of how AI is implemented in our daily life you can find more about eagleAi, an intelligence platform created by Havas Cognitive for ITV News. It aims to understand how consumers think and it was used during the USA elections. eagleAi processes a huge amount of posts, comments, tweets, news articles, debates and many more to determine what people are talking about and which issues they do find relevant. AiMEN is a cognitive social listening tool created by Havas Cognitive which with the help of AI discovers the posts of people who leave negative comments on the Internet and responds to them with quotes from the Bible. You can watch his full lecture here:   If you want to keep up with the latest trends in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 in 1 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

Bluetooth technology is developing with steady pace to satisfy customers, said industry veteran Martin Wooley from Webit.Festival Europe 2017 stage. He is Technical Program Manager EMEA for Bluetooth Segway - the standard body behind Bluetooth technology and told us how the company is regularly improving the range and the transfer speed of its devices.  "Back in the 1990’s there were a billion devices connected to the internet. But only 10 years later their number doubled to 2 billion largely thanks to the smartphones. The forecast for 2021 though is staggering. 48 billion devices will be connected to the Internet and 30% of them will be Bluetooth devices. This is not coincidence - Bluetooth has been systematically developed over the years to keep pace with the market requirements and and to enable new things. And it has become a key enable of the Internet of Things (IoT)", Mr Wooley said, when talking about the future of the IoT industry. He explained how Bluetooth is now heavily used in the medical and fitness industries rather than just being replacement for cable. "In the beginning Bluetooth was a cable-replacement technology that gave us wireless mice and keyboards and some great audio solutions. Wind the clock forward to 2020 and Bluetooth Low Energy is in pretty much every smartphone and tablet on the planet. It also gave rise to medical devices, health and fitness devices, wearable technology and so on. More recently Bluetooth 5 was released. The headline changes we have made were that we’ve made it twice as fast, we increased the range by a factor of 4 and the capacity of broadcasting data was increased by a factor of 8", the expert said. He also explained more about the bluetooth beacons used more and more by huge businesses. "You can use Bluetooth devices in two ways. They can either connect to each other and exchange data over the connection or they can work in a connection-less way, with one device just broadcasting data that any other device can see. Beacons are prime use case for the application of this broadcasting capabilities and the numbers are really interesting. Over the last couple of years we have shifted from companies that are running small pilot projects to rolling out serious deployments of beacons into their businesses and the forecasts are amazing. By 2021 the estimates are that there will be more than 500 million beacons shipped in that one year alone", Mr Wooley expects.

Norihisa Wada, the CMO of Tokyo-based Edulab, Inc., an edtech leader with a strong basis in assessment and learning science, took the Webit.Festival Europe 2017 stage by storm to tell us more about the latest innovations in educations in Japan. Mr Wada, who is a former SVP Nintendo, also teaches students in Kyoto University in the field of behavior change.  Meanwhile, EduLab is providing new technology to help for better assessments in education, for example voice and handwriting recognition, which will help for better evaluation of the learners. This will impact the college entrance exams in Japan, starting in 2020. "In year 2020 the college entrance exams will change. One big change is going from multiple choice questions test to an essay based question items. The second will be the English assessment areas. In Japan the two components were listening and reading, but we are going to add speaking and writing. These are the areas where we provide new technology like the voice recognition and handwritten technology to give a fine assessment of the learners. The national assessment in Japan is multiple choice. This will change into four spectrum assessment. You need to look into your personal characteristics. What are the creativeness you have", the expert said. He also explained about the nature of the four spectrum assessment: "First generation is computer based assessment. Second generation is what you call an adaptive learning assessment system. And third generation is what you call a formative assessment, where assessment technology is integrated into the learning process itself. The fourth generation is what you call a four spectrum analysis - assessment of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills". Mr Wada and his company are also open to investing in startups in the education industry. "We do a lot of investments today in the field of education technology. My work is connected to meeting new venture startups in the education area in which we could invest in the future. We have outposts throughout the world and these are the trends that we see today in the assessment field of education in Japan", he said.

Eric Klinker, former CEO of Bittorent and now Chief Executive Officer of Resilio Inc, was again among the top speakers at Webit.Festival Europe 2017 in Sofia. Mr Klinker now heads Resilio, spin-off of Bittorent, aiming to empower the IT administrator with world leading technologies to handle the ever expanding demands of moving big data reliably and fast over any network to any number of endpoints. Cloud computing is now a huge part of our personal lives as we use it for storing pictures, documents and other data. Huge companies also use it to store all of their data, but according to Klinker, and with the help of IoT, edge computing could soon overtake the cloud. Edge computing refers to data, being processed in the edge of a network instead of holding it in a cloud or a data warehouse. This reduces the communications bandwidth needed between sensors and the central datecentre and also, could eliminate a lot of security and privacy issues, because of its closeness to the edge of the data. "I start with the notion that IT is really good at one thing - it reliably produces cheap metaphors and buzzwords to help explain the things that we have always been doing. So in this way putting a bunch of computers in a room, called a Data Center is suddenly the Cloud. And the Cloud is easily the most successful IT buzzword we have ever seen. It is pure marketing genius", Mr Klinker said at the beginning of his speech. But he believes the pendulum is swinging. "While Mobile very much lives at the edge of the network, the processing power of the average early mobile device was so low, that it had to be combined with Cloud Computing to be useful. So all the processing of the web apps lives in the Cloud and in reality mobile computing is really a centralized computing exercise. But again, I think we can see the pendulum swinging. We can see IoT coming and we can see a world, where edge computing may finally come to life. And we will probably have more computing power and more computers on the edge of the network than we will have in data centers", the CEO of Resilio predicted. Mr Klinker explained that world of computing is driven by Moore’s law, which says that computers are going to get cheaper and more powerful and that they are going to do it exponentially over time. That means that there is going to be a lot more computers at the edge. But it also means that they will consume much more data than they could before and that is going to create much more data. And here edge computing can help. "A data by itself is not useful if you can’t network it to other computers to do useful things with it. The network is more like infrastructure. It is built with tools called back codes. They don’t obey Moore’s Law, they don’t double in productivity every 18 months. So what you are going to see in the next years is the diverging gap between the amount of data we can generate at the edge of the network and the capacity of the network to deliver that data to the places we needed. And that stress will be felt very acutely in the Cloud. Computing power is obviously going to grow on the edge. Other thing that drives challenges is the need to centralize all the computing in one place. We could put enough computers and data centers at great expense and effort for a while if we have the budget of Google to support computing trends like Mobile. But IoT will add two or three orders of magnitude more computers into the internet. Can we really continue to scale data centers like we do now?", Mr Klinker asked.

When we are looking towards the future, we usually think about Artificial Intelligence as something that will bring us autonomous vehicles, clean and safe environment and healthy and extended life. Everything we have envisioned is connected to the AI. But most of us still don’t realize how this amazing technology will be able to change our lives for the better and connect us in a way we didn’t think was possible. During Webit.Festival Europe the Partner at IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach shared his experience in this emerging field and explained why AI in its essence is a converging technology and enabler of the full human potential.

“We now use AI in situations where we didn’t have any solution yet - where technology is not capable of achieving specific results. We are putting a lot of efforts, time and resources to get there. What we have proved already is that we can solve complex, but narrow problems”, he said.

The first demonstration of a machine that was capable of solving a complex problem was in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in chess. Roughly 15 years later a team in IBM Research had the goal to understand natural human language. The public demonstration was to defeat a human at the show Jeopardy and this was accomplished. Another thing that happened last year was Alpha Go from Google DeepMind defeating Lee Sedol in the boardgame Go and also succeeding to solve a very complex problem in a very narrow domain. And just recently a team from Carnegie Mellon University succeeded in developing a smart machine that has defeated world class poker players in Texas Hold ‘Em because it can already understand and deal with incomplete information. This all means that the future goes into the direction where AI will be used for negotiation processes, strategy development and even high level policy analytics.

“When you go to your car dealer in the future you may have a small application on your device that helps you negotiate the best possible deal”, Auer-Welsbach said.

The biggest issue before the AI today is understanding humans and language. The machines understand natural text as data, not as text. This is a problem, because they are missing the context, which is necessary in order to really make use of all the data. In a recent attempt IBM broke industry record in conversation speech recognition by getting it down to 5.5%. This is important because the human error is at 5.1% which means that we are very close to understanding the natural human language from a machine perspective. This new ability can be used to build transformative relationships between humans and machines. [caption id="attachment_5072" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Partner at IBM Ventures Christoph Auer-Welsbach.[/caption] Christoph Auer-Welsbach predicts that there are 3 paradigms that are going to shape our communication with AI enabled computers in the near future. The first is that enterprise applications and all the major IT organizations in the world will make use of any kind of conversation methodology, bot or automating systems, in the next couple of years. So our whole way of interacting with machines is going to change from input-driven to engagement and conversation-driven. The second paradigm AI is pushing is mass individualization. Now we are living in a world where applications and solutions are built to satisfy the most common and homogenous group of people and reach them. The mass standardization we can see now is changing to mass personalization in a way that not only from a customer service view, but also from a product development and engagement point of view machines will be very much personalized on a person’s behavior, demand and attitude. The third is that we are moving to the world of AI-enabled Convergence. It enables other technologies to flourish and get into the system contextual information and act proactively and not from a passive response point of view. Artificial Intelligence is still in its infancy. That is why we need to be active and have the curiosity to understand what it is. It is important for every person on Earth to check the latest trends in this technology and understand how it could impact our personal and business life.

“The symbiosis between humans and machines is the most capable way of making use of technology and moving forward into the future. Because we can enhance each other’s capabilities. On the one hand we have human’s capabilities like compassion, intuition and value judgement and on the other we have the learning, discovery and fact checking that machines excel at”, the expert said.

You may watch Christoph Auer-Welsbach’s full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

In 1950’s it was estimated that the medical literature doubled every 50 years. By 1980 it was doubling every 3.5 years and by 2020 it will double every 73 days! More than 8000 new medical articles come out every day. This makes impossible for clinicians to keep up with such volume of data. The information out there is unstructured and is coming in different forms and from different sources. The only way our medical specialists can cope with the digital reality is with the help of artificial intelligence. During Webit.Festival Europe the Deputy Chief Health Officer for IBM Watson Health Dr. Lisa Latts explained how the latest technological advancements in this field will transform the world of healthcare in the next decades.

“We have made a lot of advancements in medical technology. Imagine the advancements we could have made if instead of just a fraction of data, we were able to access the entire lexicon of data that is available for an individual. Think what we could do and think of the price of not knowing”, she said.

Now, many patients are not able to get the right cancer treatment, because doctors don’t know the exact characteristics of the individual tumor. People with chronic diseases don’t have access to the right medicine, because their doctors don’t have their full medical history. All of these cases are going to change with the help of Big Data. But first, experts, like the ones working in IBM, must deal with several challenges. There are a lot of bad sources of data out there, so you need to be able to separate the true from false. Doctors have got data from medical records, laboratory data, medical literature, radiology data. So they need to be able to aggregate all those forms of information to get a complete picture of what is going on with an individual. If we combine all these we will start to get to the true value of the data and start to really do things with it in terms of what we are delivering to an individual patient. [caption id="attachment_5068" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Deputy Chief Health Officer for IBM Watson Health Dr. Lisa Latts[/caption] We are now in in the Third age of computer technology. The first age in the early 1900’s was the Tabulating systems era - computers that basically can do math and count. Then in the 1950’s we started with Programmable computers and we are still in that age today where we have computes that we can give a variety of information and tell them what to do with it. There is so much information available now that it is impossible to program all the characteristics and all the possible programs. So that brings us to the Cognitive computers era. IBM Watson started to work on this in the early 2000’s and 15 years after that was the official launch of Watson Health. A cognitive computer is different from programmable computer, because it can understand, reason, learn and interact. All of this allows Watson to harness entire bodies of data. It can actually read through the data it is fed to it.

“There is no way that a clinician can keep up with that amount of information, but Watson can. It can read million pages in a second and understand them. It can learn. So it will digest the data and will come up with evidence-based conclusions as a result. Those conclusions may or may not be right, so it takes humans to train Watson in terms of what is right and what is wrong. And it gets better and better over time”, Dr. Latts explained.

All this is possible thanks to the Watson Health Platform. It allows IBM to create an ecosystem, which can be used by developers within the company and outside. This has expanded to a network of collaborators and partners creating innovation across the world. Lisa Latts is sure that artificial intelligence will not replace human doctors. Instead, the combination of humans and Watson creates augmented intelligence, that will help them focus on the fields they are better than the machine. It will free up physicians and clinicians for what people and doctors do best - interactive communication. To do their job in the best way possible, physicians need to use interpersonal communication, compassion and to be able to abstract, generalize and dream. Meanwhile, cognitive computer systems are good at taking vast amount of data and come to conclusions. All these factors are used to advance evidence-based care. Traditionally we say that in medicine it takes 17 years for a breakthrough to be translated into clinical best practice. But in the dynamic society we live in, we don’t have the luxury to wait that long any more. Using a Watson-powered solution, clinicians аре quickly armed with evidence-based and ranked treatment options for their consideration. Recommendations based on the patient’s condition and medical evidence are available in approximately 30 seconds. A physician have to read 29 hours each work day to stay up-to-date with the latest medical literature. Watson needs only 3 seconds to read 200 million documents.

“Today we are working on a variety of solutions from cancer care to evidence-based care in a value-based care setting to life science. We, Watson Health, aspire to improve lives and give hope delivering innovation to address the world’s most pressing health challenges through data and cognitive insights”, Latts said.

You may watch her full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance a lot less. A famous quote from the former CEO of Ford Alan Mulally that is more than relevant for today’s age of incredible transformation, both for companies and for individuals. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution is expanding at full speed more and more established enterprises are struggling to transform their existing activities into a more digital businesses. During Webit.Festival Europe our guest had the chance to have these processes explained by the Vice President for Cloud and Mobile Technology at IBM Jonas Jacobi. His lecture walked us through the latest trends in Cloud Computing, Internet of Everything and Artificial Intelligence that are going to transform the life as we know it today. According to him, we as users tend to hold on things, whether physical or not, for way too long. And what that does to us and our corporations and companies is that we are holding back the opportunity to realize the future.

“It is important to realize this. If you look at where you are and where you want to be make sure to let go of the past to move on to the future”, the expert said.

He reminded that Cloud Computing is actually not a new thing, but we can all give credit to Amazon for making this the number one priority for many companies today. What is important to understand about Cloud Computing is that it is now a must have thing. The Cloud Computing era brought forward a process, called Digital Transformation. A lot of established companies now go through the rapid attempt to digitalize themselves and there is a real race to transform. The other thing that Cloud Computing brought is the lower bar for entry in the space of technology. If we go back 10 or 15 years ago, it required a much bigger minimal investment to try to launch a service. In the ever evolving markets there is a price war and ultimate race to the bottom. As soon as a company comes with a low price, everyone try to chase after. The markets are growing faster than we can actually imagine thanks to trends, such as IoE and AI.

“What that means for all the cloud vendors is that they have to focus on what makes them different. That is the key thing to succeed. It can not all go down to zero in terms of revenue from our services so we have to differentiate”, said Jacobi.

The important thing when we look at the things popping out on the market is that they go through some form of evaluation of the market. In the case of connected devices this process is called IoT Chasm and it follows several steps. A new trend comes out and everybody is super excited. We start with the honeymoon period which is like coming to a new place and saying that you are going to stay there forever. Then you start noticing some functions that doesn’t suit you well. But after a while you realize that you are committed to the technology. When a user is already committed, he starts looking not only for convenience, but for things like security of the product. Many IoE companies think of the security as of something that is going to come later. But we are on a stage of development in which someone can hack a car and steer it off the road Once the commitment is a fact, we get into those deeper issues, and as soon as we go through them we get into the major adoption curve of a new technology. [caption id="attachment_5060" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The VP for Cloud and Mobile Technology Strategy at IBM Jonas Jacobi.[/caption] Connected cars present a giant market opportunity. But now there are even 3D printed self-driving minivans that are with built in AI. We can talk to the bus and communicate with it. We can even ask for a good restaurant and it will take us there. Now technology is not disrupting just one business, but several at the same time. If you can 3D print a car then you disrupt manufacturing, traffic planning, optimizing traffic fall and making it greener. This is where we are heading. Soon we will just be able to download a blueprint and go print our own personalized car in the shop. The other giant trend in technology is the rise of Artificial Intelligence. And while many people perceive the adoption of such technology as a start of the battle between the man and machine, the reality is that AI will augment humanity and human intelligence, not replace us.

“At IBM we are working a lot with AI on healthcare. AI can help doctors reach a decision faster, get access to more information faster and anything else in the market. In this case it is an opportunity to improve and safe life of many”, Jacobi said.

He thinks that cognitive systems do not think for us, but help us do research and make better decisions. The IBM expert said that no matter how hard we resist and try to push back change, it will inevitably come to us, so we should instead endorse it and bring it in. Because the sooner we adopt new technology, ideas and business models, the faster we can evolve as companies and individuals. You may watch Jonas Jacobi’s full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]

We are all talking about the Fourth industrial revolution and its potential toll on the labour market around the world. As the developments of robots, AI and automation seem inevitable, countries, communities and organizations must find ways to adapt our skills to the needs of the future. During Webit.Festival Europe we had the chance to listen to one of the people that are going to drive this existential change in the processes of learning. The Director of Strategic and International Development at Wolfram Research Conrad Wolfram shared his thoughts on fixing the education for the AI age and took us on a journey through the challenges education faces today. Wolfram technology and consulting solutions drives innovation in data analytics, software development and modelling from startups to Fortune 500 companies, in industries as diverse as medicine, finance and telecoms. Conrad is also recognized as a world authority on fixing Math education, including advocating a fundamental shift to focus on computer-based computational thinking rather than hand calculation. During his speech, he outlined the main effects computers and AI have on education. The first one is that we need to learn subjects that have changed, because the computers now do work that usually humans used to have to do. The second is that AI gives us the tools for building a more personalized learning, assessment and experience during the learning process.

“The key point to understand is that we need humans to focus on what they are good at and leave computers do the same. And that involves also humans learning how to connect with computers in a meaningful way, so that we have the best interface to get the computers do what we want”, Wolfram said.

He gave the example with the ever changing survival skills during the years. Hundreds of years ago it was crucial to be able to make a fire or to kill an animal to eat. There are now different and very modern survival skills to do with computational knowledge. According to him the skill at the top of the future value chain is what we may call computational thinking - knowing how to think in a computational way about life. Around the world we spend many hours of child’s life every week learning Math. But Wolfram thinks that the big question we must ask ourselves is whether this Math is fostering computational thinking, or not? He thinks that right now this is not the wrong subject and we should use all those hours to do much more computational thinking oriented subjects. [caption id="attachment_5052" align="aligncenter" width="640"] The Director of Strategic and International Development at Wolfram Research Conrad Wolfram.[/caption] There are at least 3 good reasons for learning the right kind of Math. The first is that it gives us skills for the technical jobs that have powered our economies and continue to do so. The second is that it creates our everyday ability to work in the modern society and deal with the reask that are displayed to us. And the third is that it creates logical thinking about the ways we approach life. If we talk about the actual essence of Math, we must say that it is a four-step process. You define a question, you translate it to to this abstract notation and the reason you do that is that you can then compute answers much better than you can by talking about it in a normal language, like English or Bulgarian. Then you interpret the results. You take that abstract answer and you go back trying to produce the actual answer to the real question you asked.

“Here is what is going wrong in education. We spend almost all our time learning how to do step 3 by hand. This is the step that computers can do fantastically better than any humans. So what we all should be doing is use computers for step 3 much more and using students much more for steps 1, 2 and 4”, Wolfram said.

In school students learn how to solve a linear equation by hand, but in real life the equations we face are much harder and complex. Now our smartphones are able to solve linear equations after a voice command from us. So the key question is why are we spending 10 years of our students lives trying to get them to solve such tasks. Conrad Wolfram founded the computerbasedmath.org to drive implementation of the change. It is now a worldwide force in re-engineering the curriculum with early projects in Estonia, Ireland, Sweden and Africa. The main idea behind the project is that the computer already exist, we have it and it is not going away. And the main task is to figure out how the curriculum should look like. For years we had countries trying to be part of the knowledge economy as opposed to manual labour. The next step is an economy that is driven not only by knowledge, but by the interaction of humans and computation. According to Conrad Wolfram, without a fundamental reform of our education, we are not ready for that. So governments and organizations need to think about innovative ways to unstick the education ecosystem, so that we can have real innovations and not just have to stick with the same things.

“I am avoiding the term Math for much of what I’m now talking, because I think that Math has become a rather toxic word. I like the term computational thinking, but whatever it is called we have to reform what we are doing, either by making a new subjects or by doing a hostile takeover of the old subjects. And it is vital to make that as quickly as possible. Once you got automation in life from machines you need to use it so that humans can go further. We don’t have to make humans compete with the machines, because we will fail”, he said.

You may watch Conrad Wolfram’s full lecture here: If you want to keep up with the latest trend in the world of digital economy and technology, then Webit.Festival is the right place for you. Visit our website and book 2 of our Super Earlybird tickets for Webit.Festival Europe 2018 for just €100. Feel the Webit vibe with some of the best photos from this year’s event! [easingslider id="4954"]