Robotics

BBVA Compass is far from experiencing an AI takeover of the sort Wikipedia describes, but teams from around the bank, including Mortgage, Finance and Compliance, have discovered the power and efficiency of automation.

With the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications across industries, there has been understandable confusion around associated terms, including Robotic Process Automation, Intelligent Automation and even AI itself.

Gesturing to the mint colored typewriter on the table, BBVA US Director of Risk Technology and Productivity Amory Booher said, “Technology has a lifecycle with a start and end date. For instance, the computer changed how we interacted with typewriters. Similarly, artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities are changing how we interact with computers. We don’t know if these technological advancements will be as significant as going from the typewriter to the computer, but it’s incumbent on us to understand how these technologies are being applied so we can use them to make our lives better.”

BBVA Open Talent, the world’s biggest fintech competition, will this year mark its tenth anniversary by working with more start-ups than ever before.

Find out more and register for Open Talent 2018 here.

For decades, human beings have used technology to make day-to-day life simpler and more comfortable.  Science has evolved and become more sophisticated in meeting our concrete needs in a more precise manner. The entertainment sector has also benefited from technological advances, by incorporating virtual reality into immersion experiences.

Probably the first thing the philosopher would do would be to create a strategy to explore it. Just like when he designed a user's manual for the human mind with Logic or when he developed a method of thinking critically to examine metaphysics. Aristotles “tried to show that all things in nature belong to certain groups and subgroups,” writes Jonstein Gaarder in Sophie’s World. But first, he counted up the tools he had for this task.

Wearables manufacturers are changing their focus from fitness and health, to improving user productivity and connectivity. That´s the great challenge facing a business whose size is expected to double between 2017 and 2021.

The Italian director Ettore Scola once said that movies are a painted mirror. Dramas, comedies and adventures of all kinds have been presented on the big screen for decades. But the imagination of film directors when creating science fiction has taken them even further, to a once-distant future that we’ve finally reached. Many screenplays were written about the present we now live in, but how accurate were their predictions?

Artificial intelligence has political, social, economic, military and even philosophical implications. And Twitter provides some good insight on them. Here are eleven key accounts that must be followed in order to understand how machines are learning to think in an increasingly complex way.

For a while after science-fiction was first coined as a term, it seemed like the only thing the genre would be capable of producing would be just that: purely fictional works with no connection to reality. Today, we can already enjoy some of the futuristic innovations featured in some movies a while back, such as virtual reality or artificial intelligence. Which sci-fi movies predicted the future digital era and got it right?

All organizations operate at what is known as the edge of chaos. It is a transition space between order and disorder, a region of bounded instability, where forces both progressive and conservative battle for control. A manager may have a three-year strategy, and the protocol, teams and departments in place to deliver it, but realizing that strategy means contending with countless disruptive events; a new competitor entering the market, a shift in consumer behavior – even, perhaps, the manager’s own desire to retire to a quiet village on the countryside.

When Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440, he couldn’t publish everything he wanted. The supply of text was limited, censorship prevented him from publishing certain things, there were few authors around and demand for reading materials was low. In the 21st Century, the situation is very different. It’s worth exploring these differences, recalling the process that Marshall McLuhan called the Gutenberg Galaxy.

One of the things about huge conferences like Money 20/20 in Las Vegas is that you get to see the ideas that will shape the future of the banking sector.

BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman is convinced that technological advances will be accompanied by greater progress and well-being, but he is also calling for policies and structural reforms that are capable of mitigating the costs of the transition to the new digital society. Supporting research and education, promoting competition and transparency in the markets and developing new employment policies and social protection systems were among the recommendations Francisco González shared at an event organized by El Periódico de Catalunya and BBVA in Barcelona.

The revolution in the automobile industry isn't just about driverless cars. Blockchain technology will also have an impact on the sector, especially on the internal processes of companies.

From a small town in Burgos province, the mobile robotics engineering firm ASTI shows that digitization provides an opportunity to restore the fabric of industry.

For decades now, the conceptual terminology of urban planning has been striking. There are smart cities, urbaneering, digital cities, information cities and interconnected cities. These new terms, together with new tools like the internet of things and big data are transforming a debate that began several thousands of years ago in ancient China and the valleys of Mesopotamia. The discussion of the future of cities is far from new, as it entails some of humanity’s oldest concerns. What is unique today – as we’ll see – is not the novelty of the concepts but their potential.

Year 2049. Three decades have passed since Richard Deckard began hunting down and retiring Nexus 6 models. The Wallace Corporation has built an empire on the ruins of Tyrell Corp, designing a new generation of replicants, more obliging and integrated in society.  Through the implementation of memories, the new models have an emotional foundation that makes them more stable than their predecessors, much more similar to humans.

We know there are planets of a size similar to the Earth and at a distance from their sun that make them inhabitable. It´s also possible that there are vestiges of life on Mars, in the ice-covered oceans covered of Europa - a satellite of Jupiter - or on Enceladus, one of the moons of Saturn. Sending spaceships manned by robots to study the solar system, recreating the conditions of life on Mars inside a mine, or trying to reproduce a living organism in a laboratory – as Dan Brown relates in his latest bestseller – are some of the scientific experiments that are now being performed to solve the enigma of the origin of life.

In a conversation with journalist Gloria Lomana at the Forbes Summit, BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman offered his view of the transformation being provoked by the digital revolution. According to Francisco González, this fourth industrial revolution is going to change the world and offer opportunities to everyone.

BBVA’s Group Executive Chairman said that developing the best banking application in the world (according to Forrester) has been a work that “has taken many years.” To get to this point, Francisco González underscored that “the most important thing was when we adopted ‘agile’ work methodologies that allow us to deliver upgrades every three months.” The application helps customers make better financial decisions and manage their financial lives better. Ultimately, he stated, we “want to be the best adviser of our customers.”

Agriculture stands at the threshold of a new revolution. The rising population, the competition for increasingly scarce resources and the phenomenon of climate change are just some of the challenges facing the sector as it seeks to feed all of humanity. We need to produce more with less, a challenge that the farm sector has already begun to answer, thanks to the Internet of Things, whose sensors have brought the benefits of big data to the farmsteads and croplands.

Social bots are increasingly present online. They are often responsible for spreading fake or misleading news on platforms Facebook and Twitter and can influence the topics that are discussed on these social networks. According to a study by Indiana University (United States), covered by El País, between 9% and 15% of Twitter accounts are controlled by these programmed bots.

The financial sector has undergone tremendous change in the past few years thanks to the adoption of emerging technologies such as the smartphone.

“Can machines think?” This is one of the questions that appear in unedited letters that were found in a warehouse at the University of Manchester. They were written by the “father” of artificial intelligence, Alan Turing.

Advances in mechanics, manufacturing techniques and artificial intelligence are giving way to increasingly sophisticated and specialized robots. These are some examples of the next generation of robotics that are being developed in MIT laboratories.

Technological transformation is changing the rules of the game in many industries. The world of food – and new consumption habits – have not escaped the innovation of the startups: intelligent kitchens, robot chefs, home deliveries in tupperware, food orders with no minimum amount, artificial intelligence to calculate calories... it´s time for foodtech.

Machines are getting smarter: trading trillions of dollars in stocks around the world, driving cars, performing surgical operations (570,000 last year), managing and running entire hotels, making cocktails on cruise ships in the Caribbean… truly, we are living in the age of the machine.