Author: Contributor
by Davide Villa Smart devices are increasingly a part of everyday life both inside and outside of the home and this only accelerated further in 2020. Outside of the home, security cameras and other smart devices are being used to support public health and safety during the pandemic. Capabilities such as thermal imaging technology to detect fever, or cameras to understand footfall and traffic in specific city areas for crowd management, are examples of ways this technology can be leveraged. Demand may well have increased, but data storage and security continues to be an important consideration. Positive news for smart…
Mmaki Jantjies, University of the Western Cape and Paul Plantinga, Human Sciences Research Council There are significant disparities in South Africa’s education system. Schools are divided into quintiles, from one to five; the poorest, in quintile one, struggle enormously with a lack of resources and support. They also tend to have poorer educational outcomes. That has a direct effect on university admission and outcomes. One of the government’s attempts to address these inequalities is through technology. This began as early as 2003 with the Draft White Paper on e-Education. These and similar policies aim to resource more marginalised schools, universities…
By Kelly Preston Insurers understand all too well the value of managing data and extracting meaningful insights from it. But as the number of data points continues to grow exponentially thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing, and social media platforms, those who are best able to leverage a digital-centric approach to derive business insights accurately and timely while assessing risk, will be the ones strongly positioned for success in a modern business environment. As touch points expand by the day, relying on only a contact centre, email address, and website to deal with customer engagement is no…
By Martin Taylor A recent report by the CBI found that nine-in-ten UK workers will need to learn new skills or retrain entirely by 2030. According to the CBI, 21 million people lack the basic digital skills needed to cope with digitalization, and resolving this issue is projected to cost a staggering £130 billion over the next decade. With the UK workforce already struggling to keep pace with technological advances, does the relentless march of “automation everywhere” mean that pretty soon many of us may find ourselves entirely displaced by robots? Should we fear for our jobs – or will we just get…
by Marc Zimmer, Connecticut College Takeaways A “deep learning” software program from Google-owned lab DeepMind showed great progress in solving one of biology’s greatest challenges – understanding protein folding.Protein folding is the process by which a protein takes its shape from a string of building blocks to its final three-dimensional structure, which determines its function.By better predicting how proteins take their structure, or “fold,” scientists can more quickly develop drugs that, for example, block the action of crucial viral proteins. Solving what biologists call “the protein-folding problem” is a big deal. Proteins are the workhorses of cells and are present…
In a year defined by uncertainty, Adri Führi, Group CFO at e4, reflects on the accelerated rate of change and the increased focus on the value of the CFO role brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic while offering insight into what may lie ahead after the worst of the Covid-19 crisis is over. The pandemic has demonstrated the value of CFO and its vital importance during times of crisis. Not only does the CFO have the full financial picture of the organisation at hand, but is relied upon to optimise its financial wellbeing and put safeguards in place to protect…
by Nick Durrant This year has been a tough year for many but looking ahead to 2021, the technology world promises a wide range of opportunities to adapt. It’s tough to make predictions about 2021 when none of us are sure how the rest of 2020 will pan out. What we do know for certain is that the world will never be the same. Gartner recently shared the following story to illustrate this point. When the employees at an industrial site returned to work after the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, they noticed a few differences. Sensors and RFID tags had…
Symbiosys IT has been appointed as the official distribution partner for Sub-Saharan Africa for the Intuitive for PaperCut MF Dashboards from data visualisation tools provider, Intuitive. Symbiosys will deliver Intuitive for PaperCut MF – a pre-integrated BI solution which is delivered with a complete set of standard configurations – to its reseller channel. The solution can be installed and enabled by users within a few hours at a significantly reduced cost, and with superior analysis capability when compared with similar Business Intelligence solutions. The configured dashboards deliver significant value to both the IT department and to other stakeholders within the…
By Lukas van der Merwe Cyber threats are becoming more pervasive and persistent and are growing increasingly sophisticated. In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, the volume of attacks has also accelerated dramatically. Breaches have become a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’, and the cost of a breach can cripple a business that is not prepared. Cyber insurance is therefore a must, but as a relatively new product on the market, the process of underwriting it is not yet mature. This leaves insurers open to potentially high levels of risk. Intelligent technology solutions can assist insurers to more effectively…
By Johan Scheepers The increased need to implement and execute digital transformation strategies in South Africa has further increased the need for companies to switch to enterprise, cloud-driven IT spending. Companies who have not migrated their operations to be cloud-based are piling up and this is where digitalisation has become the saving grace in corporate environments through cloud-driven IT spending and ultimately growth. Due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate of cloud adoption has grown significantly this year, as many companies not already in the cloud were compelled to migrate to it by enforced remote work. Not…