With the attempt to increase the competitive capability of the country’s industries, CMKL University this year set up a major project to drive deep-tech training and expand work-based research, as well as to offer its first PhD and master’s degree courses.

CMKL University is a collaborative initiative of Carnegie Mellon University and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), established late last year to offer master’s and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering.

In its latest move, the university has announced it will expand its offerings with short-courses offering deep training in key potential technologies, and to continue to collaborate with the large corporates to increase their competitiveness through improving productivity efficiency.

Supan Tungjitkusolmun, president of CMKL University, said the mission of CMKL University is to contribute to raising the country’s competitiveness through empowering the capabilities of large corporates as well as to build vast deep-tech human resources.

It is now planning short training courses in artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, data analytics, and cybersecurity, to be offered to the public with an aim to create a significant number of skilled workers for the future.

The school this year joined hands with the Electronic Transaction Development Agency (ETDA)

to teach cybersecurity training courses.

Supan said they aim to offer deep-tech training courses to the general public as well as tailor-made course for agencies and organisations. The public component will be for executives, deep-tech staff, operations workers and university students. The tailor-made course would be calibrated for private-sector organisations and government agencies.

By 2019, it aims to train 200 to 300 people, using three to four organisations to deliver the tailor-made courses.

The school is also committed to expand its collaboration with the large corporates for work-based research. The idea behind work-based research is to pick a real-world problem or need and to conduct research and development to address the painpoint but also to empower business efficiency to achieve the company’s goals.

“Our role is to be a technology enabler for the corporates, and we have offered this kind of service since March this year,” said Supan.

Since being established, the school has worked with Thai Beverage Public Co Ltd (ThaiBev) and Betagro Group. Both are five-year collaborations.

The goal for the ThaiBev link-up is to improve logistics efficiency and productivity, as well as to create new products and services. Needed technologies include data analytics, artificial intelligent and machine learning.

Meanwhile, Betagro Group’s goal for work-based research is to empower its smart-farm strategy. It needs technology to increase product safety while also reducing costs. Among the technologies they need are Internet of Things (IoT), cloud services and Big Data analytics.

The collaborations are done under a team-driven approach, with teams composed of both PhD and master’s students along with lecturers and researchers from both KMITL and Carnegie Mellon University, together with human resources from the companies.

“We all work together from zero until we achieve the goal – that why it needs (five years) time in collaboration. We are all needed to create an impact to the business in order to finally impact the country’s competitiveness,” said Supan.

Moreover, CMKL University has also joined hands with ETDA to conduct co-research and development in cybersecurity and forensic data analytics. Its one-year project started in mid-2018.

“This kind of collaboration is to create a real impact on every dimension, including building the deep-tech human resource capabilities, addressing the real problems and needs of organisations, and creating an impact on the country’s competitive advantage as a whole,” said Supan.

By 2019, CMKL University aims to double the number of collaborations between organisations and agencies both in the private and government sectors. For example, it is now planning work with Money Table around blockchain and cryptocurrency technologies.

Applications now open

Applications are now open for PhD and master’s students at CMKL University. Applications are being taken until December, with the semester starting in August 2019.

Students enrolled in both the five-year doctorate and the two-year master’s programmes will take classes in both Pittsburgh and Thailand equally. It aims for 25 MS students and 10 PhD students for its first semester.

CMKL University is positioning itself as a world-class research and education platform for disruptive innovation that offers unique hands-on education and transformative research. By applying Carnegie Mellon’s globally acclaimed research and education programmes within a regional context, the school aims to tackle challenges that will drive the future development of Thailand and the Asean community.

Supan said the role of the university is to work with the private sector in search of their painpoints and needs, and then to together set goals and work toward a completed outcome.

Orathai Sangpetch, CMKL’s vice president of research and strategy, says the school’s role is to create the ready-to-use talents for the country and to build the knowledge needed to solve the problems of industry and other businesses.

“The PhD/MS programmes will address long-term problems, while short-course training is to address short-term problems,” said Orathai.

She said students and others who pass through CMKL University will become super researcher who can address the real-world problems of the sector, and function as deep-tech experts in electrical and computer engineering.

“We have set up CMKL University as the platform to create and develop advanced tech talents for the country.

“We are not only an educational institute,” said Orathai.

The inter-university collaboration will expand the human resources capacity for both Carnegie Mellon University and King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang.

“CMKL University aims to be the hub for all of Southeast Asia, not only for Thailand. We plan to attract students from all countries in the region to study with us,” said Orathai.

Lastly, to achieve the university’s goal it sees a need to host an annual tech summit in order to create awareness and build knowledge and talent capability. The “CMKL Tech Summit 2018” will kick off on December 13. It aims to boost the tech knowledge of individuals and corporates to better deal with disruption in the era of digital transformation.

Individuals and organisations at the summit will have a chance to upgrade themselves and remove momentary pain points. The main concept will focus on artificial intelligence (AI), making this event the first AI flagship seminar in Thailand.

“The main problems facing corporates in this digital transformation era are the lack of talent in the tech field and the lack of understanding in technology adaptation,” said Supan.

“As the leading technology university to collaborate with the world’s first AI software developer – Carnegie Mellon University – we decided to hold the seminar to help enhance the know-how and the competitiveness for both corporates and individuals.”

CMKL Tech Summit 2018 has gathered experts across the range of technologies and AI from the private and educational sectors from Thailand and worldwide. They include Thai Beverage Pcl and Betagro Pcl. Also sharing insights will be Dr Surakiart Sathirathai, the board chair of CMKL University, and a team of professors from Carnegie Mellon University.

The National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) is now working with the Science Park Promotion Agency (SPA) to enhance the incubation capability of their technology and to upgrade business incubation centres throughout the country.

The move aims to improve both the incubation process and its management in order to enhance incubation capacities in science and technology, and to ensure that innovative startups and entrepreneurs get useful benefits.

The improvement process is done using the “maturity model” provided by Creeda Projects, which has 35 years of experience in business incubation, acceleration, entrepreneurship, innovation and SME development.

Chalermpol Tuchinda, vice president of the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), said the collaboration aims to improve incubation and management capability of the agency’s Business Incubation Centre (BIC) and SPA’s 14 technology-business incubation centres located at universities nationwide.

The project has been piloted at the first technology-business incubation centres, five universities and Science Park Thailand.

It will be rolled out at the remaining centres soon.

The benefit of this improvement is deliver better incubation services to startups and entrepreneurs and to improve the management of incubation centres.

“Since offering technology business incubation services is mission of both NSTDA and SPA, we also have our own incubation centre, said Chalermpol.

“In order to keep our incubating capability up-to-date with the dynamic digital transformation, we realised that we needed to upgrade our capability.”

Startups and entrepreneurs have different needs at each of their three stages – seeding, growth, and maturity. So three different programmes are normally used to match the stages to science, technology, innovation technology, and business incubation services, said Sansanee Huabsomboom, the division director for Technology Business Incubation Centres at NSTDA.

“Each year, we offer pre-incubation to 80 projects and to provide incubation programme for 40 companies per year,” said Sansanee. “Each stays with us one to three years, depending on how fast they grow. The post incubation period is event-driven by mutual companies.”

Centre management boosted 

It is challenging to offer incubation service to the different companies in different stages of growth, she says, since they have different needs and require different types of incubation programmes. Therefore, NSTDA and SPA have to join hands to improve incubation centre management to enhance incubation services. Eventually, startups and entrepreneurs will benefit from the improvements.

Each year, with the help of the incubation centres’ services, the country has received an economic impact of between Bt500 million and Bt600 million.

Apart from offering incubation services, Sansanee said that NSTDA also provides an accelerator programme with seed funding. It started last year with a food accelerator programme that invited all companies in the food value supply chain and related industries such as packaging and ingredients to join.

The Food Accelerator Programme is a three-year programme intended to give three years of support to startups with revenues of Bt5 million and above, and seen as having the potential to grow. The aim is to help these companies to double their growth.

“We kicked off this programme last year, and 15 companies joined. Then we did our annual evaluation and found that only nine companies could continue in the programme. So we recruited five more companies this year to join,” said Sansanee.

Apart from the accelerator programme, Chalermpol added, the NSTDA also offers grants as matching funds to startups and entrepreneurs in science, technology and innovation fields.

The grant is around 75 per cent of an applicant’s total project valuation up to Bt800,000.

This grant was for the marketing budget, rather than for the product and service development budget. By 2017, it had provided grants to 80 companies that together created revenues of up to Bt300 million, and were expected to together create revenues of Bt900 million in 2018.

Size matters. And the Apple Watch Series 4 comes bigger in both models, a growth from 38-millimetre and 42-millimeters screen to the latest at 40-mm and 44-mm.

The bigger screens come with a redesign that features a stunning display with thinner borders and curved corners to help users to easily – and clearly – see all contents on the screen.

The larger screen allows users to see and do many more things with the watch.

The screen is now 30-per-cent larger while the watch is thinner and lighter, resulting in a better feel for the wearer.

Tuning options for the new screen allows users to personalise the display with their own designs and placement of their favourite, most important, or most frequently used applications on the display screen.

There are now up to eight configurations, each of which can be changed at any time and as often as the user wishes.

The display-screen configuration helps users check their information without the need to  tap  the screen.

Users can put up to four ID contacts on-screen and view financial information and activities in graph format, a new addition in Apple Watch Series 4.

It also supports many third party applications, including DeckCom app, which monitors and displays glucose levels, a great boon to diabetics.

The LifeSum app can let users instantly know many calories they are consuming and burning, great for those concerned about their weight.

Other new features include Watch Face, which comes with beautiful animation.

For photographic capability, users can take a live three-second picture as their home-screen photo.

And with the bigger screen, map-lovers can more easily search for routes and details on the watch.

Another useful feature for users is the Electrocardiogram heart rate sensor, with quicker and more frequent measurements from seven to 10 minutes.

And another new feature is a user alert that notifies when the wearer’s heart rate is too slow.

It defaults to an average 120-beat high rate and 40-beat low rate, but can be adjusted by the user to fit their personal heart rate.

A new Fall Detection feature is a game-changer that marries the Apple Watch Series 4 to Siri 4.

This feature helps users connect with emergency service and their loved ones if they have a fall-related accident.

Siri will ask whether the wearer is okay or not. Siri is satisfied if the answer is “okay”.

But if there is no response within 60 seconds (perhaps due to losing consciousness), or they respond that they are not okay, Siri will call out to the emergency unit number as well as contact the wearer’s personal emergency number (set in advance) and send an exact location to them.

For users over the age 65, the Fall Detection is active by default, but those younger will need to turn on the feature by going to Watch App, then to Emergency SOS and set the emergency contact to help with detection.

“That’s not the plan,” Zuckerberg told CNN Business when asked if he would consider stepping down as chairman.

He also defended Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, who has drawn criticism over her handling of the social media giant’s recent crises.

“Sheryl is a really important part of this company and is leading a lot of the efforts for a lot of the biggest issues we have,” said Zuckerberg.

“She’s been an important partner to me for 10 years. I’m really proud of the work we’ve done together and I hope that we work together for decades more to come.”

Facebook has stumbled from one mess to another this year as it grappled with continuing fallout from Russia’s use of the platform to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election, the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which user data was harnessed in a bid to help candidate Donald Trump, and a huge security breach involving millions of accounts.

Most recently, an investigative piece published last week by The New York Times said Facebook misled the public about what it knew about Russia’s election meddling and used a PR firm to spread negative stories about other Silicon Valley companies and thus deflect anger away from itself.

“It is not clear to me at all that the report is right,” Zuckerberg said of the Times article.

“A lot of the things that were in that report, we talked to the reporters ahead of time and told them that from everything that we’d seen, that wasn’t true and they chose to print it anyway.”

Zuckerberg also defended his company against the broader wave of flak it has taken this year.

“A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us,” he said.

“There are big issues, and I’m not trying to say that there aren’t… But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that that’s all there is, and I don’t think that that’s right either.”

After rising to become one of the easiest and most popular payment methods among Korean users through its flagship messenger service, Kakao Pay announced Monday it is expanding its business with an easy-to-use investment facilitator platform.

The mobile finance unit of South Korean mobile messaging giant Kakao announced the launch of a new service, Kakao Investment, which lets users invest in various projects through the KakaoTalk messenger without the need to install a separate app. The service will become available from Tuesday.

“If Kakao Pay focused on how to make spending easier for users until now, we are now looking to help users earn profit (through investments) in the most convenient way,” Kakao Pay CEO Ryu Young-joon said during a press conference in Seoul.

The biggest advantage of Kakao Investment is convenience, as users do not have to install a new app or sign up and link new bank accounts. The low minimum investment requirement also opens up investment opportunities to a wider public, Ryu said.

Users can open the KakaoTalk app, access Kakao Pay and click on the “investment” option to browse through a list of potential financial products to invest in, ranging from crowdfunding projects, securities and funds. The expected amount of return, excluding tax, is shown on a simple interface.

Kakao Pay said it has selectively picked out “mid-risk, mid-return” financial products expected to guarantee a return of around 10 percent. The minimum amount required for an investment is 10,000 won ($9).

While noting that all investment carries some level of risk and uncertainty, Kakao said the investment options it has prepared have been carefully selected and packaged to ensure a profit of at least 6 percent and as high as 15 percent.

In addition to the investment service, Kakao also plans to launch a cross-border mobile payment service by the first quarter of next year in partnership with China’s Alipay, operated by Alibaba’s financial arm Ant Financial Services.

Ant Financial is currently Kakao Pay’s second-largest shareholder, having invested $200 million in the Kakao subsidiary in February this year.

Since the partnership began, Kakao has been working to make Kakao Pay’s QR code and barcode payment service compatible with Alipay, and therefore available at Alipay-supported stores and businesses abroad.

The firm will first roll out a cross-border payment service in Japan — where mobile pay services are being strengthened ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics — and later move into China and Southeast Asia.

Steps to make Alipay available at Kakao Pay-supported stores in Korea are also underway, to raise convenience for foreign tourists, the company said.

“Kakao Pay users will no longer have to exchange currencies when visiting countries abroad, while foreigners visiting Korea will be able to pay for their goods more conveniently,” Ryu said.

According to the Kakao Pay CEO, the launch of its two new services are part of its broader vision to emerge as a “techfin” company, in which information technology leads innovations in finance, rather than the other way around.

“If Kakao Pay helped build a ‘wallet-less’ finance paradigm until now, we now want to focus on making finance more ‘effortless’ for local users,” he said.

Kakao Pay was rolled out in September 2014 as the first simplified mobile payment service that bypassed Korea’s cumbersome authentication procedures required for financial transactions, such as “public certificates.”

It has since introduced a slew of new areas such as biometrics authentication, membership barcode accumulation, and utility bill payment services. This year, it entered the offline payment realm by introducing a QR code and bar code payment option.

As of end-October, Kakao Pay’s monthly transactions handled surpassed 2.3 trillion won. The firm’s fleet of mobile finance services currently has around 25 million registered users, including 13 million active users per month.