4 Trends Are Transforming Human Society

In the past, scientists and engineers collaborated to connect computers all over the world together to make data communication process as ease as possible. After that, the invention of the personal computer and social networks brought billions of people online and connected regardless of their geographical locations. Without a doubt, the next level of connectedness is that everything on the Earth such as rivers, oceans, animals, trees in forests, biological cells in human bodies, streets, buildings, vehicles will have their own digital avatars on the Internet and can communicate with each other in some ways. It likes each of us has a Social Network account. This is the era of Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT offers seamless opportunities for not only every person to sense and interact with their surrounding environment but also authorities of cities can become more reactive and responsive to handle unexpected incidents, to solve existing problems which were impossible before. For example, traffic jams have always been big problems to mega cities, by monitoring and analyzing the traffic patterns 24 hours per day, a city can suggest different routes to different passengers even if they have the same destination.

Smart Agriculture is another very important application of IoT. By monitoring and controlling air temperature, moisture level, and light intensity, scientists are now working hard to create artificial intelligent environments inside buildings to grow quality food in a shorter time frame without using any pesticide. This innovation is known as Vertical Farming.

Without gas, oil, electricity, there would be no industrial revolutions and breakthrough innovations. They are foundations of the twenty-first century. However, with the increase in energy consumption, experts estimate that humans are going to run out of natural energy resource after 75 years. That's why there were many studies conducted at different scale in different countries to study techniques to harvest energy from Sun, Wind and Sea waves. German, Denmark, US are the most active countries in this area. Different technologies are being experimented at large scale in the US for solar energy. Denmark and German are now using Wind energy.

Despite the fact that personal computers and smartphones, tablets are very popular and become daily parts of many people, they do not provide a full sense of experience and the way we interact with them is not natural as we have to learn how to use them. Microsoft recently announces Hololens (Augmented Reality) which will undeniably be the disruptive technology in the next few years. By wearing glasses, users can see 3D models generated by computers in front of their eyes and augmented into physical real world items. a User can chat with remote persons just like they are in the same space or meeting room.

Another very interesting application is Virtual Reality Journalism (VRJ). Readers of newspapers or watchers of videos can not really sense and feel of what was going on in crime scenes. VRJ makes participants experiencing the crime scene just like they were there, it creates lots of feelings and thoughts.

Data Science is currently one of the hottest jobs on the market. Why is it so attractive? The amount of data generated every two years since 2010 is more than the total amount of data our ancestors generated in the past hundred years. The size of data is becoming so huge that old data analysis techniques are not efficient enough to analyze it. This is the place where we need data scientists who leverage cloud computing power to extract useful or important information, knowledge from these data to give us insights to create new innovations or solve existing problems which we were impossible to solve before.

Many of you have experienced its application when surfing websites like Amazon (items recommendations), Netflix (Videos recommendations) and Spam Filtering (Email). There have been many fascinating applications of data science. One of the most interesting application is the smart house. By studying your movement pattern during a day, the smart house can schedule activities of different household appliances such as coffee machines, washing machines.By learning comments posted on Social Networks, the smart house can decide your feeling whether you are happy, sad or angry so that it can adjust the light or play a song to make you feel better.

It is estimated that there will be 50 billions of sensors installed almost everywhere on this planet by 2020. These sensors will generate a huge amount of data in real time. With the advancement in data technology and science, the hidden information, knowledge from these data will be extracted, uncovered by data scientists and will be provided to humans via virtual and augmented reality. This provides the unique opportunity in the history for humans to know and understand the surrounding world in a natural way using common sense.