The second day of EmTech Asia focused on fintech, intelligent transportation, the global food challenge and augmented and virtual realities. Again, this is a summary of the day and by no means a complete review of all talks.
Three speakers discussed the latest develoments in financial services with special attention for the situation in Singapore. Sopnendu Mohandy of the Monetary Authority of Singapore spoke about the movement towards a cashless society where financial transactions disappear into the background. The authority is also looking at ways to speed up the regulation process. They are working on a ‘sandbox’ where providers can test and simulate new financial products and so speed up the time to market.
Tony Chew of Citibank spoke on biometric security, technologies that must help to improve the security on mobile devices. Singapore is not a leader on this front according to Chew. As an example he mentioned the American bank USAA bank, a bank that targets the US military. They use all three ways of biometric security – face, voice and fingerprint – in their security of mobile devices.
Reset of transport
The theme intelligent transportation focused on autonomous cars and BMW and Nissan presented their latest developments. Peter Phleps spoke on behalf of the Institute for Mobility Research, the research body of BMW. They investigate the future of mobility and published in 2015 a study on the effects of modern ICT on physical transportation.
Doug Parker explained how nuTonomy, a startup in Singapore, works on software for autonomous car. They focus on the most challenging area for these cars: urban environments. In the city, there are many obstacles and people that the car has to deal with. Parker predicted that a city like Singapore, with 800.000 cars, can keep the same transport capacity with only 300.000 cars by making them smart.
Our food challenge
When 9 billion people are to roam the earth, providing food to all of them will be a challenge. We can calculate that it is impossible to keep up with the current volume trends in e.g. beef consumption. Mark Post of Maastricht University presented the latest developments on ‘cultured’ beef. Post became famous with the first grown hamburger. The meat for this hamburger was grown from only a few muscle tissue cells from a cow. This technique must help to grow meat without having an exponential growth in the number of animals. They started with beef, but there is also research on chicken, pork and fish.
Clean water
Besides food, clean water is just as important. Around 780 million people have no easy access to clear water. Their only option is to buy bottled water, much more expensive that water from a source or tap. Theresa Dankovich developed a water filter based on paper. She bundled the paper into a book in which all of the pages are water filters. The book also contains tips how people can better take care of their water. Dankovich is now busy scaling up the production of the Drinkable Book so it can be produced by machines.
Gaming
Erin Reynolds presented her game Nevermind, the first game that used biofeedback. Players use a biofeedback sensor that measure e.g. the heartrate of people. The game changes as the condition of the human player changes. The game can become more difficult when the heartrate goes up and become simpler again when people calm down. This technology can help to give people control again over their own body.
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