Digital technologies for a better world

Our fast growing virtual world creates opportunities and challenges: realizing an experience economy, fighting digital crime and improving ambient living. Learn more about the way digital technologies enable and manage the virtual world at Innovation Day.

Conversational bots creating new experiences

Nowadays companies are constantly improving their customer support services. There is a strong demand for new technologies that can, in addition to improving the type of service, save money by reducing human resources.

On the other hand, there is a growing demand by end consumers to solve their problems more quickly, using instant messaging to interact with the organization, using channels available online or even a physical conversational bot on the sales spot that sees the consumer and adapts to different inputs (e.g: sentiment, age, local, hour, …).

“For those channels and solutions, there are ways to explore the human-computer interaction by exploring artificial intelligence methods and machine learning applied to the user experience during the interaction, in order to make this interaction the richest possible”, says Innovation Day speaker Davide Ricardo, Chief Technology Officer at Load.

How can blockchain help us in the fight against fake news, corruption and hacking?

An oracle is – in the context of blockchains and smart contracts – an agent that finds and verifies real-world occurrences and submits this information to a blockchain to be used by smart contracts.

“Smart contracts contain value and only unlock that value if certain pre-defined conditions are met. When a particular value is reached, the smart contract changes its state and executes the programmatically predefined algorithms, automatically triggering an event on the blockchain”, says Pieter Zuliani, Technology Evangelist at PegusApps. “The primary task of oracles is to provide these values to the smart contract in a secure and trusted manner.”

Digital empowerment of older users

“Many older adults don’t find their way to online services that are commonly used. The fact that each app requires learning to work with a specific interface is a huge barrier. The target user wants simplicity and consistency, no overload of info”, says Lene Schroyen, Project Manager at Verhaert.

Smart home technologies have become more affordable and accessible, however the older adults are under-represented among the users. “Yet it’s easy to imagine a fitness tracker, smart socket, fitness watch … contributing to keep older adults active (socially, physically and mentally). That’s exactly what they want. I’ll share insights from the Vizier project at the Innovation Day.”