Massive Open Online Courses

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) are very recent, but are quickly gaining popularity.  Coursera is one of the big platforms that offer those free courses, along with edX and Khanacademy just to mention a few.  Last year I took a fantastic course offered by Coursera  called ‘Model Thinking’ given  by Prof. Scott E. Page, who’s Read More …

Snowden showed us the dangers of Big Data with PRISM, are we up to the challenge to steer its use?

A television screen shows former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden during a news bulletin at a cafe at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport June 26, 2013. Credit: Reuters/Sergei Karpukhin   As we already discussed on my Big Data presentations,   being able to analyse the amount of data that traces all our actions and movements is a Read More …

Nine Key Questions To Evaluate A New Technology

Technical and scientific knowledge is growing at a fast speed.  This allows for a lot of experimentation and innovation but in order to do it, you need first to acquire very specific knowledge, to educate yourself in many technical disciplines. This is not at everybody’s reach.  In particular, it is hardly at reach of non-technical Read More …

Is your Robot feeling lonely? Connect it to RoboEarth

It (or he/she?) doesn’t need to, there is now a platform to connect to others.  I wouldn’t call it the Facebook for Robots, it’s more like a giant Academia 🙂  but RoboEarth enable robots to share their experiences, their learnings.  It is a Cloud environment that allows them also to use external storage and computation Read More …

Internet of Things and the Power of Feedback Loops

This 2011 Wired post from Thomas Goetz about Feedback Loops is about how we can change (or improve) our behaviour just by measuring it.  I would add another factor that I think is as important to make us change, that is when we put our behavior on display. As example, if you have been on a Read More …

Small talk on Big Data

Last week I presented this topic to professional women at PWI here in Brussels. It’s called ‘small talk’ because it is not a technical presentation but one for a broader audience, to create awareness on this Big Data trend.   The main concept I wanted them to take away is the change in the business arena Read More …

Women In Tech : There is Hope says Vivak Wadhwa

I loved this article from Vivak Wadhwa, from Stanford University about (the lack of) women in technology.  He was saying that Sillicon Valley seemed to him a meritocracy, as a lot  of nationalities where represented, but then his wife make him see the missing element…women!  You can argue that for a real diversity, we should Read More …

Railways Powered by Inspire

I was at the conference Powered by Inspire here in Brussels.  It was all about geo-spatial European Standardization. Erika Nissi, from the International Union of Railways, spoke about their particular situation regarding this European Directive.  They want to move on that direction, and they will comply eventually, but railways have a lot of other Directives and Read More …

Big Data, a trend to follow for business innovation

Every day more than 2.5 quintillion (2.5 x 1018 ) bytes of data are created, coming from business and bank transactions, posts on social media sites, digital photos, videos, and other sensors as GPS signal and more. Big Data is the name of the mass of unstructured data available nowadays on Internet. All this large Read More …