Digital transformation has accelerated greatly over the course of 2020 and many challenges and potential applications of relatively new technologies have been uncovered.  Here we take a look at how six major technologies are poised to evolve through 2021.

3-D Printing

“Working with colleagues from Università della Svizzera italiana, the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, and Princeton University, MIT researcher and mechanical engineer Michael Foshey hopes the printer will bring the concept of “visually perfect” 3D printing closer to reality, where the difference between an object and its 3D printed replica is almost impossible to tell.”

Artificial Intelligence

“An artificial intelligence (AI) network developed by Google AI offshoot DeepMind has made a gargantuan leap in solving one of biology’s grandest challenges — determining a protein’s 3D shape from its amino-acid sequence. The ability to accurately predict protein structures from their amino-acid sequence would be a huge boon to life sciences and medicine. It would vastly accelerate efforts to understand the building blocks of cells and enable quicker and more advanced drug discovery.”

Augmented / Mixed / Virtual Reality

“Virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies have continued to receive high levels of funding and investment during the past decade, and this is predicted to continue into the next. IDTechEx forecasts that the market for these technologies will reach over $30 billion by 2030. Virtual reality alone is expected to grow to $8 billion.”

Cloud Computing

“The global public cloud infrastructure market will grow 35 percent to $120 billion in 2021, as the cloud continues to “take center stage” in the recovery from the pandemic, according to Forrester Research. “The aggressive move to cloud, already proceeding at a healthy clip before the pandemic, will spike in 2021, yielding even greater enterprise adoption, cloud provider revenue and business value,” the Cambridge, Mass.-based market research company said in its “Predictions 2021” report.”

Blockchain

“Although most of blockchain's success over the past decade has been linked to crypto-currencies, distributed ledger technology is poised to move into mainstream applications. In the coming decade, technology will shift from automating and replacing manual labor to replacing routine cognitive work, and blockchain is poised to be a key driver of the "fourth industrial revolution."”

Internet Of Things

“The Internet of Things (IoT) and related data have an important role to play in helping us control the economic, environmental and societal impact of this crisis. IoT can be seen as an ambiguous term, which puts the emphasis on the notion of a thing/object, when the actual focus should be on the collection of industrial or physical data. An object which only creates data, is a necessary “evil”, as all companies need new data to carry out any transformation.”

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