Author: Connected World
Is privacy in the age of AI (artificial intelligence) a lost cause? One new research program aims to create greater privacy, aka privacy by design, where the AI platform never sees a face on an image, but the final edited image still looks natural. The research is being done at Purdue University, where a new patent-pending system leverages before and after photos uploaded to an AI editing platform. It allows users to mask sensitive regions of a photo, such as the face. The technology can then reintegrate the sensitive region back into the image. Here is how this can help:…
Advanced technologies in transportation are not new—ITS (intelligent transport systems) can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s when more basic traffic management systems were first introduced. In the 1980s and 1990s, we began to see more large-scale ITS efforts, integrating GPS, data collection, and more. But, today, ITS is booming around the world. Berg Insight suggests the estimated market value for ITS deployed in public transport operations shakes out like this: Europe: €2.6 billion in 2025 €3.3 billion by 2030 A 5.3% growth rate North America €1.2 billion in 2025 €1.6 billion in 2030 A 5% growth rate…
The NYC Million Trees Initiative took 2,000 volunteers and more than 30,000 hours to count the street trees in New York City. New AI (artificial intelligence) technology can help do that in under an hour. At Purdue University, a digital forestry team has created a computational tool to obtain and analyze urban tree inventories on public and private lands. The AI-enhanced visual computing method combines AI with satellite data to monitor urban trees. To help their system better understand urban tree distribution, the researchers trained their foundational model at Purdue’s Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. The three-week training process involved…
#Factoftheweek 10 times amount of data By 2029, AI agents are projected to generate 10 times the amount of data from physical environments compared with all digital AI applications combined, according to Gartner. Why? As agentic AI systems interact with the physical world, they generate large amounts of data across logical, spatial, and multi-agent scenarios. This growing dataset provides a unique opportunity to learn underlying patterns and enable accurate predictions and simulations. This shift signals a major turning point in how AI systems learn about and model the world. These capabilities may accelerate progress in areas such as robotics, autonomous…
Alerts and realtime data from the night sky can tell us stories about what is happening in the universe. Scientists can then use this information to better understand the nature of dark matter, dark energy, and other unknown aspects of the universe. Earlier this year, astronomers’ computers around the world lit up with 800,000 notifications about new asteroids in our solar system, exploding stars, and other changes in the night sky. To help, a software system from the University of Washington can process 10 terabytes of images that are produced every night. The alert pipeline was developed by a team…
#Factoftheweek 12.3%. This is the anticipated growth for fleet-management systems in Southeast Asia, growing from 3.6 million units in 2024 to more than 6.4 million units by 2029, according to Berg Insight. Fleet management in Southeast Asia is surging. After a slow period following the pandemic, the current outlook is strong due to: Overall economic growth Strong, competitive market Growing awareness of fleet telematics The penetration rate in the total population of fleet vehicles used by businesses is at the same time estimated to increase from 17.5% in 2024 to 27.1% in 2029. In a broader sense, the trends seen…
The warmer weather is here, and so are opportunities for smart home dealers to sell devices and technology that put backyards front and center, including automated outdoor shades. In greater numbers, homeowners are turning to automated shades to make maximum use of their outdoor spaces and turn backyards into beautiful private getaways just a few feet away from home. According to a January 2026 study by Strategic Revenue Insights, “The global motorized outdoor shade system market is projected to reach a valuation of approximately $12.5 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of 7.8% from 2025…
As technology advances, so too does the opportunities for farmers and the agriculture space to leverage data to make decisions about water, fertilizer, and harvest. Now, a new app aims to provide insight into crop health, weather forecasts, soil conditions, and climate patterns. Researchers at Virginia Tech have built a new tool that leverages Google Earth Engine and open-access geospatial databases to bridge the gap between agricultural research and practical decision-making. The app supports more than 45 crop types and can be applied to open-field farming systems worldwide. It pulls data from trusted sources that is updated regularly. Here is…
#Factoftheweek 5.2 billion users globally. That is the anticipated use for over-the-top messaging apps by 2026, which is a 16% increase from 2025, according to Juniper Research. What does this mean? Businesses messaging strategies will evolve, as they look to connect these channels to their platforms. Juniper Research suggests there is one clear, new standout opportunity: click-to-chat. Click-to-chat enables businesses to capture customer data and engage in conversational commerce experiences without overloading over-the-top messaging. Still, mobile messaging vendors should simplify enterprise adoption by offering preconfigured templates that ease the launch of website-originated messages. Communication is changing with the rise of…
Common Ground Alliance estimated in 2019 the annual total social costs of underground infrastructure damage in the United States reached roughly $30 billion. What if we had a better way to determine location of underground infrastructure? New research aims to answer this question. Purdue University engineers have developed a patent-pending method to decrease hazardous strikes to underground utility pipes during construction projects. This method leverages GPR (ground-penetrating radar) data to estimate the location, orientation, and radius of underground utility pipes. The technology analyzes the electromagnetic wave reflections, but the challenge with GPR alone is it often overlooks inherent uncertainties and…