THE NATIONAL Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec) will focus its attention on five areas to support Thailand 4.0 scheme.

Sarun Sumriddetchkajorn, director of Nectec said that the agency next year will focus on five areas: agriculture, smart manufacturing and services industries, health and medicine, energy and environment, and education, including lifelong education and learning.

For agriculture, the agency has developed a Food and Agriculture Revolution model, a “smart farm” solution to support the country’s farmers. The smart farm will focus on technology, management and application to increase on-farm production and help to reduce costs, while also upgrading agricultural standards to fit the digital economy.

In the area of smart manufacturing and services industries, the agency will utilise innovation and technology to support machine monitoring systems, and production-line health monitoring systems, in order to maintain performance and support efficiency.

It can closely monitor data indicating the state and performance of the machines, and so help to reduce machinery maintenance costs. The monitoring could also improve energy management for different sections of the production line, thus contributing to high productivity in the manufacturing sector.

The agency works with the Office of the National Economic and Social Development Board and the Digital Economy and Society Ministry to develop data integration of poverty analytics. The resulting data about basic social welfare needs is integrated with other relevant data and processed through big data analytics, data integration, global positioning and network and graph analysis to help find optimal policies to improve the quality of life for the nation’s people.

For health and medicine, the agency will focus on developing a personal health record system, an information technology system able to enhance the efficiency of provincial health services. The system will also facilitate management of health data interfaces with immediate interchangeable standards in a precise and quick manner. It would allow users to access the system via tablets and smart devices, and for doctors to send feedback to the clinic.

The agency also developed an e-referral system in Bangkok and metropolitan areas in order to transfer patient treatment data between community medical clinics and the main hospitals, so that doctors could carry on treatment for patients who are moving between facilities.

Meanwhile in the area of energy and the environment, the agency has partnered to develop energy analytics systems to monitor electricity demand, and to analyse and design energy management ranging from the energy consumed by individuals to the use of renewable energy, including energy preservation and enhancement of energy usage. The agency will also develop and set up EV charging stations in order to increase public confidence in the use of these vehicles.

Addressing the area of lifetime edu-cation and learning, the agency is developing massive open online courses and open education resources to support and improve the education sector. It will provide KidBright, a board developed to stimulate the potential of systematic and creative thinking among children through a learn-and-play method. The board is equipped with a display and simple sensors that operate in compliance with the function commands. The learners can design and create the block-structured programming commands via an application on their smartphones.

Nectec’s Sarun noted the agency’s researcher teams would work together with partners under the concept of “practical research, springboard innovation.” The concept will guide them as they utilise research findings, technology, knowledge and digital innovation to produce new services and products to support and promote business growth, create added value, and bring in new income.

The result, said Sarun, would be sustainable social and economic development within the country. In doing so, it will also conduct research that will help make choices that become a significant springboard to uplifting the country into a Thailand 4.0 future.

Last year, the agency enjoyed success in developing new innovation and technology in five main areas: big data and analytics, image processing and optical imaging, machine learning, CT scans and X-rays, as well as reluctance motors and switches. It developed over 286 prototypes and provided 398 papers.

“Science, technology, research and innovation can be important tools to develop the country in various dimensions,” said Sarun. “It would improve the quality of life for Thai people as a whole and drive the country’s Thailand 4.0 scheme.”

Yet there have been no virtual assistants to help us at work … until now.

Cisco Partner Summit announced on Friday the Cisco Spark™ Assistant, which it says is the world’s first enterprise-ready voice assistant for meetings.

It will be available first on the Cisco Spark Room Series portfolio, including the new flagship Cisco Spark Room 70, which was also announced at the same time.

Cisco Spark Assistant is the latest innovation on the Cisco Spark platform. Unlike all-purpose voice assistants, Cisco Spark Assistant has one goal: to help you have great meetings that run more smoothly.

“During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting set-up and other logistics to become more creative than ever,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM, Applications Group, Cisco.

“The future of great meetings is Spark with AI and our partners have an incredible opportunity to help customers take advantage of this game-changing technology.”

Netflix members who have a supported device and a premium plan can now enjoy movies and shows in HDR.

That means more vibrant colours in “Chef’s Table”, more terrifying depths in the Upside Down in “Stranger Things 2”.

More than 200 hours of HDR entertainment is currently available and next year more HDR PCs will be on the market.

This feature is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with industry partners.

Intel CPUs of seventh generation and up provide the capability to play Netflix HDR10 encodes. Both Intel and Nvidia developed GPUs that use 10 bits per channel for each of the RGB colours, increasing the colour space that can be represented.

With the new hardware available on consumer PCs, Netflix and Microsoft partnered to put the software pieces in place.

Microsoft added the necessary operating system and browser changes in its Windows 10 Autumn Creators Update, and Netflix engineers integrated the APIs to complete the video-player work.

The admission played into concerns that Apple was stealthily nudging iPhone users to upgrade to newer models by letting them think it was the handsets that needed replacing and not just a matter of getting new batteries.

“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices,” an Apple spokesperson said in response to an AFP inquiry.

“Lithium-ion batteries become less capable of supplying peak current demands when in cold conditions, have a low battery charge or as they age over time, which can result in the device unexpectedly shutting down to protect its electronic components.”

Lithium-ion batteries are commonly used in mobile devices, and charging capacity naturally wanes with use and time.

Meanwhile, smartphone operating software is perpetually improved with updates that typically increase appetites for electricity.

Last year, Apple introduced a feature to “smooth out” spikes in demand for power to prevent iPhone 6 models from shutting down due to the cold or weak batteries, according to the California-based company.

The iPhone 6 made its debut in late 2014.

The feature, which slows performance to demand less power, has been extended to iPhone 7 handsets with the latest iOS operating software and will be added to other Apple products “in the future,” the spokesperson said.

Apple releases new iPhone models annually, and sales of the handsets power its money-making engine.

People worried about performance could replace batteries, which Apple does for free for iPhones covered by warranty or for $79 if that is not the case.

Apple design of handsets makes it borderline impossible for people to change batteries themselves.

Rumors have persisted for years at tech news websites devoted to Apple products and among fans of the company’s products that iPhone performance was being intentionally slowed, perhaps to push users to buy newer models.

The consumer electronics industry overall has routinely been accused of designing products that wear out sooner than necessary in a strategy referred to as “planned obsolescence.”

The FlashStation FS1018 is a powerful 12-bay, low-latency, all-SSD NAS powered by an Intel Pentium D1508 dual-core CPU.

It has eight gigabytes of DDR4 EEC RAM, expandable up to 32GB.

There are four plug-and-play Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and selected network add-on cards can be installed with a PCIe 3×8 slot, providing more than 40K 4K Random Write IOPS.

The cutting-edge hardware delivers high performance and throughput even with multitasking and multiple virtual machines hosted.

The all-new Virtual Machine Manager enables the testing of software in sandboxes, isolating connected machines and increases server flexibility.

“Designing a form factor that satisfies the need for both performance and drive capacity was crucial,” said product manager Jason Fan.

The DiskStation DS218 is a two-bay NAS equipped with a 64-bit quad-core processor delivering sequential throughput at over 112 MB/s reading and 112 MB/s writing.

It comes with 2GB of DDR4 memory, four times the capacity of its predecessor.

The DS218 is also optimised for 10-bit 4K H.265 video transcoding via Video Station.

Michael Wang, another product manager at Synology, noted that 4K video content is “becoming more and more common”.

“If your device isn’t capable of 4K video playback, the DS218 provides online 4K video transcoding to 1080p and below for a smoother experience.”

The FS1018 and DS218 run on DiskStation Manager, the intuitive operating system for Synology NAS devices, with various applications offered to enhance work productivity.

Synology has received several media accolades, topping the mid-range NAS category in TechTarget magazine’s storage-solution survey and winning PC Mag Readers’ Choice seven years in a row.

The newly emerging “Digital Mobility” trend offers a less-hassled lifestyle, because smartphone users can now manage a variety of matters via their phones with greater ease and convenience.

One of the major drivers of this lifestyle trend in Thailand is a government policy to promote e-payment services that cut cash management costs. That initiative has led to progress among many services. Examples include expanded use of chip-embedded debit cards (EDCs) and more EDC installations at card-accepting merchants, plus the introduction of the PromptPay service and QR code payments, which will surely change customer behaviour. Concurrently, more online services have been devised that allow users to make financial transactions via online platforms.

According to the Bank of Thailand, the number of mobile banking accounts had reached 26.3 million by the second-quarter of 2017, or 52.8 per cent year on year growth. As well, monetary transfers and payment transactions via mobile banking services had surged 99 per cent year on year.

Notably, inter-bank transfer transactions had increased nearly 131 per cent, due in large part to the launch of PromptPay service early in 2017, wherein over 90 per cent of PromptPay transfers were conducted on smartphones. Same bank transfers and payments via mobile banking services had risen 95 per cent and 87 per cent, respectively.

The volume of mobile banking transactions accounts for 61 per cent of all banking transactions, becoming larger than the combined volume of transactions via Internet banking and ATMs.

Mobile banking rolls out

Amid leapfrogging growth in mobile banking services, Kasikornbank has embarked upon strategies to meet this challenge. Being the No 1 Thai digital banking provider, KBank has enhanced their mobile banking capacity for broader service coverage to serve retail and SME customers, as well as e-commerce merchants, seeking fast and convenient trade transactions via three KBank applications.

They include K Plus, which is now Thailand’s single most popular mobile banking application. The number of K Plus users is expected to reach 8 million by the end of this year and 10.8 million in 2018. Most recently, KBank has been promoting QR code payments – an integral K Plus feature – across the country by making it easier for merchants to agree to QR code payment acceptance. Marketing campaigns have encouraged customers to use the QR code payment system. This is another real challenge of leveraging technology to drive change in consumer behaviour.

The goal of K Plus is to transform mobile banking into a lifestyle platform that could better meet all customer needs. In so doing, the lifestyle banking platform employs machine learning technology to analyse and develop guidelines in offering new services in line with customer behaviour. Among these services is marketing data targeting specific customers via the Mobile Life Plus menu on K Plus. In 2018, a cross-border money transfer menu will be added to K Plus – “low-value remittance” will be a new dimension in cross-border money transfer services for retail customers. With this service, customers in Thailand would for the first time be able to transfer money via K Pus to recipients in over 40 countries worldwide, including China, the US, Britain, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and the European Union.

K Plus Shop is the only application from any Thai bank designed for merchants to receive payments via QR code. To facilitate over 9 million Chinese tourists visiting Thailand each year, K Plus Shop also allows merchants to receive payments from Alipay and WeChatPay. KBank targets around 2.5 million transactions by Chinese tourists per year. Currently, over 450,000 merchants have downloaded the K Plus Shop application, and it is expected that one million merchants will use it in 2018.

K Plus SME, a mobile banking application for SMEs, gives customers access to information and helps them to conveniently and quickly manage their own business and finances. Entrepreneurs can easily check their account balances, regardless of whether the money comes from an electronic transfer or a cheque, and the app even shows their own returned cheques. The total number of K Plus SME users should reach 420,000 by the end of this year and 500,000 in 2018.

Commercial banks are facing increasing competition from business rivals. Financial institutions, fintech start-ups and other businesses are eyeing to expand into financial services. Banks have to elevate their service capabilities to meet that challenge and facilitate changing customer behaviour. K Bank believes the transformation of mobile banking into a lifestyle platform will be the key answer, responding to the digital mobility trend and new lifestyles around the world today and in the future.

Patchara Samalapa is senior executive vice |president, Kasikornbank. 

The starting point for any kind of digitalisation is to solve a customer pain point. Sometimes, that customer can be a real, paying customer. Sometimes, it’s just someone within your organisation.

I head a project, “Flip For Site”, whose customer is internal but whose reach grew to include all of Thailand. It was designed to address one of DTAC’s greatest challenges, finding new locations to build base towers. We had teams ready to build more cell sites, but we just didn’t have the locations. Given that network quality is so critical to the customer’s experience, this was an issue I really wanted to solve. And with Flip For Site, we did. Since last March, we’ve collected over 11,000 locations from landowners interested in letting DTAC build a tower on their|property.

To get to that point, we looked at recurring models in the digital arena. Netflix is often used to describe an online business where one can rent something instead of owning it. Renttherunway.com, for example, has been called a “Netflix for designer dresses”. Another model is crowdsourcing, such as Wikipedia or Kickstarter, where small individual contributions are compiled into an impactful final result. Even Uber started as the crowdsourcing of ride sharing.

The crowdsourcing model is what inspired Flip For Site. Previously, our engineers would select where to build the next base tower and hand over a latitude and longitude to the site acquisition team. In turn, they would drive out to that area and start knocking on doors, looking for landowners who are often not at home, or not willing to discuss the installation of a tower in their backyard with a perfect stranger. One day, I suggested to my boss, “What if our 25 million customers could be our site acquisition team, instead of just 25 people?”

Thus was birthed Flip For Site, which offers Bt10,000 to anyone supplying the contact details of a landowner with whom successfully manage to sign a rental agreement. Following the agile method, we quickly rolled out our idea in a basic shape good enough to test it out. By using Google maps and an online form, we were able to enrol our colleagues from within the technology group. Within a couple of weeks, over 450 sites were submitted! We then scaled the project to include all of DTAC before finally opening it to all our customers. And finally we successfully launched it nationwide, |so that anyone can now become a DTAC partner and rent their property to us.

Projects like Flip For Site would have been very difficult a few years ago, when the company was still structured quite traditionally. |Today, we have embraced a new |”flip it” culture, meaning everyone is committed to working quickly and collaboratively. I got a lot of support from our legal and regulatory teams, for example. It’s a huge cultural shift for the organisation, as new agile methods of working are much more fast-paced and imply a very horizontal organisation. But working like this means we can get new products to our clients faster and more often. With the “Internet of Things” |and 5G on the horizon, DTAC’s |flip-it culture will be key to becoming our customers’ favourite digital |partner.

Wannee Peeramanchai is AVP, head of service performance and quality assurance unit, DTAC.

WITH THE AIM to build the nation’s strength and to nurture Thailand as the leading hub of innovation in the Southeast Asia region, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL) has joined hands with Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to establish CMKL University.

The collaborative activities, to be known collectively as the Carnegie Mellon-KMITL (CMKL) programme, will occur both in Thailand and at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is a longterm collaboration to significantly expand research and education in the areas of information, computing and autonomous technologies.

The Carnegie Mellon-KMITL programme will focus on collaborative education, research and faculty development programs.

The education component will sponsor students for masters-degree and PhD programs in electrical and computer engineering at CMU. Successful students will be awarded degrees from both institutions.

To facilitate the collaboration with Carnegie Mellon, a separate institution – CMKL University – has been established in association with KMITL to administer the programmes for research and education activities in Thailand.

Supan Tungjitkusolmun, president of CMKL University, said that the new institution aims to be a model new growth engine that provides world-class knowledge and expertise from Carnegie Mellon.

“The university aims to support the government’s Thailand 4.0 initiative and the Eastern Economic Corridor (EEC) special economic zone [plan]. CMKL University will work hand-in-hand with our industrial partners on advanced research to create new innovations. It is to bring the CMU culture of excellence to transform research and education in Thailand and Southeast Asia,” said Supan.

CMKL offers top PhD and MS programs in areas of computer engineering and digital technologies, including software systems, cloud computing, Internet of Things, big data, artificial intelligence and robotics.

The CMKM programme will involve professors, researchers and students from both Carnegie Mellon and KMITL, and include several industry partners from Thailand.

The industry partners so far signed up are Thai Beverage Public Co Ltd (ThaiBev) and Betagro Public Co Ltd.

“Students will do research according to addressing industry issues rather than taking an academic point of view. We’re doing research to really be used in industry,” said Supan.

Hyong S Kim, the Carnegie Mellon-KMITL (CMKM) program director, said that CMKL University is the fifth collaboration of this kind between CMU and universities in countries outside the United States.

“We initiated this [latest programme] three years ago,” said Kim. “We have a lot of Thai students who come to CMU for a PhD or masters degree and they are talented and smart. Thailand is a perfect fit for our culture of excellence. We do not collaborate with all, we are very focused and selective,” said Kim.

This kind of collaboration will help drive Thailand’s move forward and increase the country’s competitive strength, he said.

“CMU is not the best in everything. We are certainly a good quality [university] and we want to transfer the quality to KMITL and Thailand, which share our culture of excellence,” he said.

“Because we solving important research problems we hope to see the research deployed and commercialised and people using it. Then you would impact the economy of Thailand to become the technology hub in Southeast Asia.”

The university would offer three degrees – a PhD in electrical and computer engineering, a masters degree in electrical and computer engineering, and a masters degree in software engineering.

The PhD in electrical and computer engineering would be a research-focused programme utilising advanced knowledge in ECE, including AI, IoT and computer systems to solve industrial challenges. The MS in electrical and computer engineering would be an intensive study in the fundamentals of digital technologies with the opportunity to specialise in algorithms, AI, robotics, devices, communications, or software systems.

The MS in software engineering would develop the understanding and skills needed for graduates to become the architects and project leaders |of complex software systems with applications drawn from real-world challenges.

Chalermpol Toojinda, director of Software Park Thailand, said that the collaborative nature of CMKL University is good news for both education and industry sectors in Thailand. The focus on researching and then deploying solutions to real-world industry problems could result in important breakthroughs, said Chalermpol.

It would help build the resources in Thailand to improve the country’s competitiveness, he said.

“We are looking forward to a chance to collaborate or link with them to encourage the country’s software industry,” said Chalermpol.

The Federal Communications Commission, in a three-to-two vote, adopted a proposal by Republican appointed chairman Ajit Pai, who said his plan would scrap “heavy-handed” rules adopted in 2015 which he argued discourage investment and innovation.

The vote capped a heated partisan debate and is just the latest in a battle over more than a decade on rules governing internet service providers in the courts and the FCC.

Democratic member Mignon Clyburn, one of the two dissenters, charged that the agency was “handing the keys to the internet” to “a handful of multibillion dollar corporations.”

Immediately following the vote, officials from two states and others vowed to challenge the FCC action in court.

Net neutrality activists have staged a series of protests in cities around the US and online, amid fears that dominant broadband providers could change how the internet works by favoring their own services and hindering those of rivals, and charging more for certain kinds of access.

Net neutrality backers have argued rules are needed to prevent internet service providers from blocking or throttling services or websites for competitive reasons.

Critics of the 2015 rule counter that it was based on utility-style regulation designed for 1930s telephone companies, not a dynamic internet market.

Not a water pipe

Pai said ahead of the vote that his plan would restore “light-touch” rules which allowed the internet to flourish, and promote investments to enable new and emerging services.

“The digital world bears no resemblance to a water pipe or electric line or sewer,” Pai said.

“Entrepreneurs and innovators guided the internet far better than the heavy hand of government.”

But dissenting FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the rollback will hurt consumers and others.

“Net neutrality is internet freedom. I support that freedom,” she said.

“This decision puts the Federal Communications Commission on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the American public.”

Appointed by President Donald Trump, Pai was a fierce critic of the neutrality rules adopted under former president Barack Obama in 2015 and earlier this month unveiled his plan named the “Restoring Internet Freedom” order.

Many Republican lawmakers backed Pai, although a few had urged the FCC to delay the vote to allow Congress time to consider legislation.

More court challenges

Within minutes of the vote, the attorneys general of New York State and Washington State vowed to challenge the FCC in court.

“The FCC just gave Big Telecom an early Christmas present, by giving internet service providers yet another way to put corporate profits over consumers,” New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said.

“New Yorkers deserve the right to a free and open internet. That’s why we will sue to stop the FCC’s illegal rollback of net neutrality.”

Others planned legal challenges including the consumer activist group Free Press.

“We’ll have plenty to say in court about the legal mistakes littered throughout this decision,” said Free Press spokesman Matt Wood.

Pai and internet firms have maintained that internet users will see no difference once the new rules are implemented.

Commission member Michael O’Rielly dismissed “fearmongering” by neutrality backers.

“The internet has functioned without net neutrality rules far longer than with them,” he said.