Technology change and climate change are two of the biggest driving forces in the world today. We’re seeing an unparalleled amount of change to adapt to over the next few decades, and nothing is as important as the huge task of limiting global warming to 1,5°C. The business community will be key to achieving that […]
Driverless vehicles are on the road now. It’s a big news story. Getting the cars to behave with their human-driven peers has taken a tremendous amount of work. Getting them to avoid collisions is still a work in progress. When you dig into what’s making automobile automation possible, you will find that a lot of […]
Thanks to increased processing power and the availability of increasing volumes of data (“sensorisation” of the industry), the discussion about artificial intelligence (AI) in the mechanical engineering sector is gaining momentum. In the case of the advancements required for Industry 4.0, such as predictive maintenance and networked, efficient production, the use of adaptive algorithms offers […]
HPC focus must shift to SMMEs The initiative to establish a High Performance Computing (HPC) facility in South Africa came from the academic research community. When Dr Happy Sithole was working on his PhD in material science, there was a small cluster of super computers at the University of Limpopo, but for some very large […]
Some predictions suggested cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) would only arrive in 2020 or even as late as 2025. But it’s already here and this rapid progress may have caught some vendors napping, particularly in the small-to-medium business (SMB) category, and they may have to surrender to their very own Kodak moment. SMBs must be […]
The Rockwell Automation Fair took place in Philadelphia, USA, in November 2018 and I was one of the South African media representatives fortunate enough to go and touch base with the global engineering industry. As part of my personalised conference agenda, I had the chance to chat to two female leaders in the company and […]
South Africa is awaiting the arrival of not one but three international data centres, each representing a major hyperscale provider. Suffice to say, SA and its neighbours will soon have access to the same digital power, flexibility and reduced costs that makes the likes of Google, Facebook and Netflix possible. It’s not an isolated event […]
If you follow the @EngineerITnews Twitter account (and you really should), you will know that I recently had the opportunity to travel abroad for the Rockwell Automation Fair in Philadelphia, USA. With thousands of attendees, the scale of this conference was unlike any I had seen before in South Africa. However, I was pleased to […]
By now you’ve probably heard about the impending digital migration for South African broadcasting. Initially, this shift from old-school, analogue technology to newer, more efficient digital technology was set to take place in 2015 but the deadline for a national migration has been pushed out several times. With our neighbours Namibia and Botswana blazing ahead […]
This is an edited extract of a talk delivered by Prof. Cochrane at the University of Pretoria’s Flexible Futures Conference, a higher education and innovation conference and expo. Prof. Peter Cochrane was chief technology officer at British Telecommunications and recently became a Professor of Sentient Systems at the University of Sussex, Ipswich. Most new technologies […]
