Brad Smith made a case for a government initiative to lay out rules for proper use of facial recognition technology, with input from a bipartisan and expert commission.

Facial recognition technology raises significant human rights and privacy concerns, Smith said in a blog post.

“Imagine a government tracking everywhere you walked over the past month without your permission or knowledge,” he said.

“Imagine a database of everyone who attended a political rally that constitutes the very essence of free speech.”

It could become possible for businesses to track visitors or customers, using what they see for decisions regarding credit scores, lending decisions, or employment opportunities without telling people.

He said scenarios portrayed in fictional films such as “Minority Report,” “Enemy of the State,” and even the George Orwell dystopian classic “1984” are “on the verge of becoming possible.”

“These issues heighten responsibility for tech companies that create these products,” Smith said.

“In our view, they also call for thoughtful government regulation and for the development of norms around acceptable uses.”

Microsoft and other tech companies have used facial recognition technology for years for tasks such as organizing digital photographs.

But the ability of computers to recognize people’s faces is improving rapidly, along with the ubiquity of cameras and the power of computing hosted in the internet cloud to figure out identities in real time.

While the technology can be used for good, perhaps finding missing children or known terrorists, it can also be abused.

“It may seem unusual for a company to ask for government regulation of its products, but there are many markets where thoughtful regulation contributes to a healthier dynamic for consumers and producers alike,” Smith said.

“It seems especially important to pursue thoughtful government regulation of facial recognition technology, given its broad societal ramifications and potential for abuse.”

Concerns about misuse prompted Microsoft to “move deliberately” with facial recognition consulting or contracting, according to Smith.

“This has led us to turn down some customer requests for deployments of this service where we’ve concluded that there are greater human rights risks,” Smith said.

Andrew Lai, co-founder and accelerator director of SproutX, said that agtech and food-tech are among the high-potential fields today. According to McKinsey, agriculture was ranked as the world’s least digitised industry. Agriculture has more opportunities than any other industries for digitisation and improving productivity. Agri-food has become a global trend.

“It is real disruption happening in food and agriculture today; it is not something coming up in the future, and not something that is happening in a different industry,” said Lai.

The agri-food start-up sectors vary from biotech, food e-commerce, Internet of Things and software. Consumer technologies have enormous potential to transform smallholder farming.

“Around 40 per cent of the world’s labour force is engaged in the agriculture sector and many of them are unbanked. They do not have a bank account. They cannot access financial services. AgUnity is an agricultural unbank. It provides free smartphones to farmers who can record their data. Based on their data they can be provided loans, as that would reveal their production yields, profit and risk,” Lai said.

Another case is Sundrop, which is growing tomatoes in the desert. It is a global leader in sustainable agriculture, growing fresh fruits and vegetables using renewable inputs.

Asia Pacific is most impacted by food security. There are more people living in the Asia Pacific region than outside the region, while most agri-food start-ups – around 62 per cent – are in the United States.

Sean Trairatkeyoon, chief executive officer and co-founder of JuiceInno8, a deep-tech start-up with focus on food biotechnology space, said that the number of deals in food/agtech space in the past five years was rising.

As an agricultural nation, and to launch a foodtech and agtech revolution, Thailand requires a huge leap. As the second-largest exporter of sugar and rice and the third-largest producer of shrimp, there are only about US$500,000 (Bt16.6 million) worth of food/agtech start-up investment and there is only one deal. None of them is a food/agtech accelerator.

Meanwhile, in the United States, as the world’s largest producer of corn and soy, the value of food/agtech start-up investment is over US$2 billion since 2013.

There are over 300 deals in food/agtech start-up investments and more than 15 food/agtech accelerators.

Trairatkeyoon said that the government and organisations in Thailand should refocus themselves to see the potential of food-tech and agtech. There are only two industries in which Thailand has a clear advantage – tourism and food and agriculture.

“If Thailand wants to drive forward in the next few years, there is a lot more space in future food for Thai companies to grow,” said Trairatkeyoon.

Lai said that SproutX invests in many areas of agricultural technologies. In terms of competitive advantage for Thailand, obviously there are a lot of agriculture areas.

“Most of our portfolio is actually Internet of Things digitising the farms. But now we are open to anything, software and solution stuff and Internet of Things that help people organise what they are doing, or insect farming. Another one is robot,” said Lai.

Currently, he said, SproutX has invested in 19 agtech start-ups, mostly from Australia. But it is creating new fronts, specifically in Southeast Asia, where it is looking at hundreds of new high-tech start-ups in Southeast Asia and Asia in general.

“We are already the most active high-tech investor in the world and we think the future is full of opportunities. There are not many players here currently. So, it is a great opportunity for us,” said Lai.

He said SproutX positions itself as an ecosystem builder. Building top agri-food companies involves building an ecosystem, including agri-food community via event and hackathons; pre-accelerator and workshop; and accelerator.

“We are the most active agtech investor focusing on early stage. We are the only consistent agtech early-stage investor in the Asia Pacific, helping start-up teams from ideation through to international scaling,” said Lai.

SproutX’s model is to be the first investor and to continue investing in later stage rounds as a follow-on investor. The SproutX Venture Capital Fund has a 10-year term.

Meanwhile, Leon Ge, assistant vice president of ID Capital, a Singaporean venture capital, said the world faces the challenge of food shortage in the future and high technology is needed to produce food for every single person in the world.

“We look for disruptive technologies for agriculture and food industry,” said Ge.

Joseph Zhou, partner at BitsXBites, a food-tech accelerator venture capital in China, said that BitsXBites is China’s first food-tech accelerator and venture capital, established in 2016. It invests from the early stage – from seed all the way to series A.

The physical “Great and Good Friends” exhibition, celebrating 200 years of relations between Thailand and the United States ended on June 30 at Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles (QSMT) after being on display for over three months. But those who missed the show can now enjoy its digital version, thanks to a collaboration between Google, the US Embassy in Bangkok, the Thai government and the QSMT.

Without moving a toe, audiences can have a spectacular 360-degree view of the exhibition, including a glimpse of a historic letter from US president Abraham Lincoln to King Mongkut back in February 1862, the portrait of King Bhumibol Adulyadej in a silver niello frame presented as a gift to president John F Kennedy in 1963 and many other artefacts exchanged between the two countries over the past two centuries.

The exchange of letters between Lincoln and King Mongkut is where the phrase “Great and Good Friend” is used extensively used, which became the theme for the celebration of bicentennial relations.

Lincoln wrote to thank the King for sending “rich presents … as tokens of goodwill and friendship for the American people”.

The exhibition is not just about visual simulation of golden, dazzling artefacts. There also plenty of descriptive texts that narrate the stories from the time bilateral ties were born, stories behind each gift and artefact as well as the journey to the birth of the exhibition.

Curators Trevor Merrion and William Bradford shared their experiences in bringing to life the historic exhibition. For instance, there were challenges in “taking the artefacts on loan, their conservation, transport and production that required long hours of work by hundreds of Thais and Americans to feature over 79 artefacts from 15 institutions in the US and Thailand”, they said.

“I hope that telling stories of the last 10 generations [would help] some young Thai people understand better what is unique and valuable about the relationship about Thailand and the US,” said US Ambassador Glyn Davies, who pushed for the exhibition project more than three and half years ago.

“One of my jobs has been to help Thai people, especially young people, understand why it is important that Thailand and the US should work together,” Davies added, reiterating his intention behind putting the exhibition together on the digital platform.

For educational purposes, the exhibition is also planned to be featured in the Google Expeditions app to allow teachers across the world to take their classes on virtual field trips to QSMT

What is Google’s aim behind promoting this kind of soft power diplomacy? The tech giant’s country director for Thailand, Ben King, explains that the goal is to demonstrate how Google can be locally relevant and contribute efficiently to Thailand, and not be just another corporate based in Thailand.

And how exactly does one describe Google Art & Culture? As something that is completely free to use, democratic and accessible to any museum, says Suhair Khan, Program Manager of Google Arts & Culture who put it together.

While Google Arts & Culture may start becoming more visible in Thailand, the application itself has been active since 2011 with over 1,500 cultural institution partners in 70 countries, covering over 6 million photos, videos, manuscripts and other documents of art, culture and history.

It is no different for digital transformation. At its core, digital transformation is about adopting technology and harnessing its power to overcome business challenges and unlock growth opportunities. Businesses in every sector are either already undergoing this transformation, or are preparing for it. Done properly, it can have a big positive impact on a company’s fortunes. The vice versa is equally true.

That is why it is important for businesses to have a clear understanding of what they want to achieve via digital transformation. While the scope of technology is wide-ranging, the areas it affects fall into four broad categories.

Operational efficiency

The adoption of technology has been affecting specific business processes for a while now. However, the pace of technological advancement has picked up tremendously in recent years. That has seen it influence not just individual processes, but change entire business models.

Advancements in technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, Internet of Things and data analytics are helping businesses achieve operational efficiencies by improving overall productivity and reducing costs through predictive maintenance. This in turns leads to faster time-to-market, leaner operations, and greater agility to respond to market changes.

Workforce empowerment

Digital innovation and adoption are also changing the way we work and have big implications for businesses. Firstly, it allows them to offer flexible work arrangements to their staff, which is a big draw especially for the younger digital-savvy workers. With more employees on mobile devices, and as those devices become increasingly sophisticated, we are seeing the rise of a mobile workforce, because employees are empowered to work from anywhere, anytime and using any device.

Secondly, the use of collaboration tools can help to make meetings – an integral part of running a business – more efficient and productive. Technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to improve efficiencies on this front. We already talk to our phones, our cars, and our houses. We will soon start talking to our conference rooms, and after that, to artificial intelligence-powered virtual team members. According to our research, 95 per cent of white-collar workers are open to the idea of AI-enabled virtual assistants help them with basic meeting mechanics, while 57 per cent say AI would increase productivity. This will empower the workforce to achieve much more.

Personalising customer experience

In today’s hyper-connected digital environment, customers have become used to the idea of accessing services at their fingertips, quite literally, driven mainly by apps on their smartphones. As such, customers have much higher expectations from every company they deal with, even with traditional business. Technology can play a key role in helping them to provide a more personalised experience to their customers.

However, each sector, and within the sector individual businesses, will have their own unique requirements for personalising services. In the financial services sector, for example, banks are looking at technology to not only enable seamless financial transactions for their customers, but also reduce excessive paperwork traditionally associated with the sector. In the retail industry, brick and mortar retailers are leveraging technology to analyse in-store traffic patterns and customer activities in real time to gain insights into their preferences and empower their staff to offer personalised service, show the right products and improve overall engagement.

Cybersecurity

As digital adoption continues to grow, an increasing number of devices, ranging from smartphones and tablet computers to automated machines and security cameras, are being connected to each other as well as the Internet. Many of these devices connect to the Internet across multiple networks – home, office and public.

While there are immense benefits of this, it has also increased the risk of cyberattacks, not least because hackers now have far more options from where they can potentially attack a company’s network and steal valuable data. Any adoption of technology, no matter for what purpose, needs to place cybersecurity at its centre.

For any company to be successful with its digital transformation, it needs to fully understand the implications of technology, the impact it can deliver as well as the challenges with its adoption. Only then can it fully harness its power to solve business issues and unlock growth. A good starting point is to ask the basic question: What do I really want to achieve?

Vatsun Thirapatarapong is managing director of Cisco in Thailand and Indochina.

The US giant said it and 10 initial suppliers would jointly provide the money for the China Clean Energy Fund, aimed at helping the companies make the transition to clean energy.

Apple said the project would produce an initial one gigawatt of clean energy, equivalent to powering nearly a million homes.

Most of Apple’s products worldwide are assembled in vast production networks in China that employ hundreds of thousands of workers, and the company has taken various steps to reduce resulting carbon emissions.

It said in April that its headquarters in Cupertino, California, had gone 100 percent renewable and announced initiatives to achieve the same in other Apple facilities worldwide.

China’s four-decade transition into an industrial behemoth has brought the side effects of severe air, soil and water pollution, and the government is pushing various initiatives to clean things up including incentives for renewable energy and the electric-car industry.

Among other projects, in late 2016 Apple said it bought a 30 percent stake in subsidiaries of China-based Goldwind, the world’s largest wind turbine maker, to produce renewable energy.

The research firm Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments rose 1.4 percent in the past quarter to 62.1 million units, but said it remains unclear if the sector is seeing a sustainable recovery.

PC sales have been sluggish in recent years as many consumers turn to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and hold onto their bulkier devices for longer.

Gartner said much of the growth appears to be from businesses upgrading their PCs to Windows 10.

“PC shipment growth in the second quarter of 2018 was driven by demand in the business market, which was offset by declining shipments in the consumer segment,” said Mikako Kitagawa, analyst at Gartner.

“In the consumer space, the fundamental market structure, due to changes on PC user behavior, still remains, and continues to impact market growth. Consumers are using their smartphones for even more daily tasks, such as checking social media, calendaring, banking and shopping, which is reducing the need for a consumer PC.”

The analyst said the PC market may falter in the next two years when the replacement peak for Windows 10 passes.

The report said China’s Lenovo and US-based HP were in a virtual tie for the number one spot in the PC market, each with a 21.9 percent share, followed by Dell with 16.8 percent and Apple with 7.1 percent.

Meanwhile, another study published Thursday by market intelligence firm IDC also reported market growth.

According to IDC, the number of desktop, notebook and workstation computers sold in the second quarter reached 62.3 million units — up 2.7 percent year-on-year. That exceeded the firm’s forecasts of just 0.3 percent growth.

The gain is the most significant since the first quarter of 2012, which saw a rise of 4.2 percent, the firm said.

The new series aims to help enhance workflows and output for industries such as architecture, engineering and construction, which require fast, high quality and multi-site printing operations, Fuji Xerox said in a press statement.

The new series features a secondary Ethernet port that enables shared usage between two different networks, such as an intra company network and a separate network for guest users. Users can securely access the DocuWide 6057/3037 series from their mobile PCs with the option of specifying a device in a different physical location. By enabling secure printing and scanning at external premises, the new wide-format series brings forth a more flexible and efficient manner of working, the statement added.

The series is among Fuji Xerox’s first A0 multifunction devices to adopt the EA-Eco LGK toner – an advanced energy-saving black toner with a matte finish that is gentle to the eyes and yet offers clear visibility. Combined with faster printing speeds of 1.4 timescompared to previous models, and an increased print resolution, from 600 dots per inch (dpi) to 1,200 dpi, users’ work quality is elevated with accurate design reproduction and vibrant output. The feature improvements enhance reproduction of fine lines and circular arcs, which will be advantageous for architectural design printing and design output from various computer-aided detection systems frequently used by engineering fields such as production, construction, and facility implementation.

[Other Functional Enhancements]

Color scanning functions have also been improved. Users can now check scanned images on the control panel, and delete notes and remarks in red ink on design documents while scanning and copying, before storing pre and post amended documents for archival purposes. Furthermore, Fuji Xerox’s exclusive Multiple Transmission function allows users to store scanned images in PC folders and simultaneously print them out either on an A0 multifunction device, or an office multifunction device, depending on the print size and color/monochrome. The series supports not only wide-format roll paper but also cut sheet paper of different sizes—A3, B4, and A4. For easy collection, the paper output tray is at the front of the device.These new features help simplify users’ daily tasks and improve productivity.

Broadcom described CA as a major provider of information technology management software, in an acquisition that would help the chip maker diversify its offerings.

“This transaction represents an important building block as we create one of the world’s leading infrastructure technology companies,” Broadcom chief executive Hock Tan said in a release.

The deal was approved by the boards of both companies.

Broadcom will pay $44.50 per share of CA stock; about 20 percent over the closing price for common shares at the end of formal market trading on Wednesday, according to the company.

“We are excited to have reached this definitive agreement with Broadcom,” CA Technologies chief Mike Gregoire said in the joint release.

“This combination aligns our expertise in software with Broadcom’s leadership in the semiconductor industry.”

The companies expected the acquisition to close in the final quarter of this year. The merger must be approved by shareholders and regulators.

Broadcom in April transferred its headquarters from Singapore to the US as promised when it tried to buy Qualcomm.

The prior month, President Donald Trump issued an order barring the proposed $117 billion hostile takeover of Qualcomm, citing what he called “credible evidence” such a deal “threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”

It would have been the biggest-ever deal in the tech sector.

Trump’s order made no mention of China, but an earlier letter from the US Treasury Department warned that a takeover might hurt US leadership in 5G, super-fast fifth-generation wireless networks now being deployed, and consequently pose a threat to US security.

The presidential action was allowed because Broadcom is a foreign entity, but would not have been possible had it completed its move to Silicon Valley.

On March 14, Broadcom said it was withdrawing its offer for Qualcomm.

Broadcom was founded in California but moved its headquarters after a 2015 deal that merged it with Avago Technologies.

The social networking giant admitted in April the data of up to 87 million people worldwide — including more than 300,000 in Australia — was harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

Under Australian law, all organisations must take “reasonable steps” to ensure personal information is held securely and IMF Bentham has teamed up with a major law firm to lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIO).

The OAIO launched an investigation into the alleged breaches in April and depending on its outcome, a class action could follow.

IMF said in a statement late Tuesday it was seeking “compensation for Facebook users arising from Facebook’s alleged breaches of the Australian Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988”.

“The alleged breaches surround the circumstances in which a third party, Cambridge Analytica, gained unauthorised access to users’ profiles and information.

“The complaint seeks financial recompense for the unauthorised access to, and use of, their personal data.”

In its statement, IMF Bentham said it appeared Facebook learned of the breach in late 2015, but failed to tell users about it until this year.

IMF investment manager Nathan Landis told The Australian newspaper most awards for privacy breaches ranged between Aus$1,000 and Aus$10,000 (US$750-US$7,500).

This implies a potential compensation bill of between Aus$300 million and Aus$3 billion.

Facebook did not directly comment on the IMF Bentham action but a spokesperson told AFP Wednesday: “We are fully cooperating with the investigation currently underway by the Australian Privacy Commissioner.

“We will review any additional evidence that is made available when the UK Office of the Information Commissioner releases their report.”