TechTouch Asia

by Andy Watson, SAP Concur’s SVP & GM for Asia Pacific Japan and Greater China Source: SAP Concur. View from a plane window. Owners of untidy homes and weary business travellers may not realise that they have much in common until Japanese decluttering expert Marie Kondo came along. She made the connection clear. Just like it’s possible − with the right method − to transform your chaotic home into a neat abode that sparks joy, it’s possible to turn business travel from pain to pleasure with some technological ingenuity. Traditionally, business travellers need to: - Manually conduct multiple searches for desired flights and hotels. - Bookings are done separately, with the need to repeatedly key in personal and booking information. - Consolidate multiple bookings in one place, often in a paper-based fashion with no capability for changes or real-time prompts and updates. - Go through a tedious submission process for internal approval of the trip. - Safekeep pa...

VIP guests are invited to place their hands on the logos to trigger the launch mechanism for ConnecTechAsia . ConnecTechAsia , comprising BroadcastAsia, CommunicAsia and NXTAsia has opened in Singapore. Held from 18-20 June 2019, the event showcases technologies and trends that are shaping Asia’s digital future. Harriet Green, CEO and Chairman, IBM Asia Pacific, kicked off the event with a keynote on the shift from digital experimentation to large scale adoption of new technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT). She spoke about how technology impacts the reinvention of business ecosystems and is reshaping business architectures of entire industries. Green said companies already benefiting from emerging technologies include: - Standard Chartered, which pioneered an AI engine with IBM to enhance trade document processing, a traditionally-manual activity. The bank handles over 36 million pages of trade documents ...

Source: Sony. The new SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 cameras. Sony has introduced two new cameras to its IP-based pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera family. The SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 join the BRC-X400, announced in April. The new models offer a 4K upgrade option – a first for Sony’s PTZ cameras to ensure today’s HD usage and protect the investment for tomorrow. The SRG-X400 and SRG-X120 are designed for a variety of corporate, education, healthcare, houses of worship and government applications. On the other hand, 4K resolution comes standard on the BRC-X400, which is ideally suited for broadcast studio and reality TV production as well as live event capture. These cameras incorporate Sony’s newly-developed 4K Exmor RTM CMOS image sensor that ensures superb image quality. The sensor achieves natural colour reproduction with minimal noise. A built-in, high-resolution 4K lens accommodates wide-angle shots up to 70 degrees, and for added flexibility, the cameras can be ceiling-mounted. They boa...

Source: Microsoft. Dr Giri. A professor and her students are using artificial intelligence (AI) to predict how airborne diseases can propagate based on climate conditions, air quality, and population density. “If we can employ AI algorithms to predict the spread of disease and understand how environmental changes, including climatic conditions and external factors like pollution impact the ecology and epidemiology of disease, we can initiate precision public health at a granular level,” explains Dr Nupur Giri, Professor, and Head of Department of Computer Engineering at Vivekanand Education Society’s Institute of Technology (VESIT), Mumbai, India. In 2018, the team began with looking for correlations to predict how tuberculosis (TB) would spread. The disease affected an estimated 2.74 million people in India in 2017. India is one of the countries with the most multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB) patients in the world. To study the impact of environmental conditions, such as clim...