Innovation in Smart Technology is fairly predictable.
Surprised?
If you want to know where the breakthroughs are likely to occur today, just follow the money (funding) trail back about 5 years and see what the government was funding at the time.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) is usually a good bell weather for smart innovations that will likely be transferred in time from the military sector to civilian use.
The following is a partial list of areas where the military plans to fund research over the next 5 years and where we are likely to see some fruitful smart technology ideas.
Note the improving levels of "smarts or intelligence" in each.
Materials and Structures
- Materials and structures that are dynamic and adaptable, including large space structures and ultra-lightweight space optics that can be compactly stowed for launch and then dynamically deployed.
- Materials and structures that inherently change their intrinsic properties (e.g., “soft to hard”) in response to the environment and/ or can heal or rebuild themselves when damaged.
Biology and Biomedical
- New approaches to understand and mitigate the deleterious effects of environmental stresses (stress, fear, etc.) that address both the physiological and the psychological effects of those environments.
- Research to advance the understanding of neuroscience for the improvement of learning, memory, and training.
Biological Warfare Defense
- New concepts for reliable and minimally invasive pre-symptomatic diagnosis.
Training and Simulation
- New concepts for enabling a real-world simulation to enhance training and simulation, including the seamless use and manipulation of real terrain data, the handling of large numbers of entities in the same place, and interactive (not just pictorial) representations.
- Quantitative, mathematical models of behavior (individual and crowds) and cultures.
- Approaches to automatically generate new simulation and/or training scenarios from lessons learned.
Fundamental and Applied Mathematics
- The application of existing or new mathematical concepts to emerging defense problems such as extracting knowledge from large databases or quantifying the uncertainty in the performance of complex DoD systems such as mobile networks.
- Fundamental mathematical approaches to understand and quantify the behavior of biological systems.
- New mathematical approaches that dramatically improve the efficiency of collecting and processing sensor data.
Walter Derzko
Expert, Consultant and Guest Speaker on the emerging Smart Technologies and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy
".....Strategy without action is a day-dream; action without strategy is a nightmare"
- old Japanese proverb
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