Posts on Emerging Tech

When I was young, my parents resisted getting a microwave oven, believing it would encourage us to eat unhealthy and poor-quality food. It wasn’t until years later, when a friend actually bought them a microwave, that they relented, and started benefiting from the quick-fix cuisine it offers. They haven’t abandoned proper pots and pans, but they’ve found a way for tradition and expedience to coexist.  Fast forward to today, and there’s a similar shift happening...

Preservation of language is paramount to safeguard cultural identity, foster communication and expression, preserve knowledge and embrace linguistic diversity. Language preservation efforts support the promotion of more inclusive and diverse world and, when coupled with digital technology, can help reduce the current limitations of speech-technology favouring the most widely recognised languages. In our small but mighty Baltic nation of Estonia, a project is underway to ensure the preservation…

Ian Hodgkinson, Tom Jackson and Lisa Jackson presented their dark data calculator at the OECD Exploring 2023 Innovation Trends webinar in January 2023. In this blog, they are making the case for hidden carbon costs of digital technologies and the need for shining a spotlight on digital decarbonization. Digital data generation is on the rise, with the increased use of smartphones wearables and sensors, cloud computing and big data technologies. However, this also means that...

What is government digitalisation and public innovation good for? Rather, who is it good for? In these past few days, I have participated in several powerful events, such as the Tallinn Digital Summit, on the acceleration of digital transformation and innovation in governments. A thought that kept recurring in my mind is that, as the pace of digital transformation accelerates as a structural trend akin of a “game changer,” it is important to remind ourselves...

New technologies, techniques and concepts are rapidly changing policing, border management and law enforcement across the world. For example: The Netherlands is taking a systems approach to community policing through multi-agency collaboration. The police, the public prosecutor’s office, victim support, and the probation service are all based at one single location, enabling them to handle complete cases more effectively. The city of Chula Vista, California have implemented drones as first…

On 22 June, I had the privilege of participating in the conference “Artificial Intelligence: What’s in it for the Public Sector?”, organised in Brussels by the European Commission, the Interoperability Unit of DG DIGIT and the Joint Research Centre. It brought together policymakers and experts to discuss the opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI) brings to accelerate governments’ digital transformation and improve the design and delivery of public services. The event was a…

Fast forward and imagine the year 2035. For almost three decades, social media – also known as ‘persuasive technology’ – platforms, in that they attempt to influence users’ attitudes and behaviours, have dominated global markets. But now, the fall of established tech giants is in full swing. In this hypothetical near future, people and governments around the world demanded change after experiencing the negative effects of persuasive technologies. In this new world, governments in…