ARUP were selected as TechFest winners for the ‘Best Use of Technology: Whole Life Performance’ Award for the project, ‘Unlocking the power of AI to achieve early blockage detection in sewer networks’ at the TechFest Awards 2023, powered by Construction News and New Civil Engineer.

Welcome Alan Kiernan from Cation Consulting

Alan Kiernan is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and co-founder of Cation Consulting, a Dublin-based global group of specialists in Cloud, conversational AI Bots, and voice. They have extensive experience in the telecoms, finance, insurance, tech, and travel industries. Their mission is to enhance user interactions through the combination of conversational AI, intelligent document processing and call centre intelligence, across multiple channels and languages.

Transport companies are increasingly using technology to reduce their carbon footprint and move closer to net-zero emissions. These advancements are critical in the fight against climate change and in meeting the goals set out in the Paris Agreement. The Paris Agreement, often referred to as the Paris Accords or the Paris Climate Accords, is an international treaty on climate change. Adopted in 2015, the agreement covers climate change mitigation, adaptation, and finance.

Healthcare systems generate huge amounts of data and this opens the opportunity for data discovery, artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide insight, synchronise data between silos, optimise innovation, enhance decision making and increase efficiency of research.

"The current wave of advances in artificial intelligence doesn’t actually bring us intelligence but instead a critical component of intelligence:- prediction."

It's hard to miss the images of plastic waste in the media, with some of the statistics and pictures being both frightening and sickening. In 2015, the annual production of plastics increased to nearly 381 million tonnes, this is roughly equivalent to the mass of two-thirds of the world population. From a study conducted in 2010, it was estimated that 8 million tonnes of plastic entered the oceans with roughly 10,000 to 100,000s tonnes of plastic in surface waters (Our World in Data). 

Artificial Intelligence In Healthcare

There are few (if any) industries that can be transformed by artificial intelligence to the degree that healthcare can. As initiatives around the world seek to digitise healthcare data, there are huge opportunities for game-changing tools and platforms. However, with potentially a yottabyte (1024 gigabytes) of healthcare data in the United States alone, we are no closer to this utopian, data-driven world of healthcare. Data in existence is not standardised, highly fragmented and is stored in incompatible legacy platforms. The technology exists, so why is healthcare so far behind other sectors in utilising existing technology and what needs to be done to catch up?

Crime Prevention

Imagine the possibility of preventing a fatal offence. This happens more commonly than the public are aware of, all thanks to technology. One example of crime prevention- in 2015, a teenager in England was taken into care after it was revealed he had been researching gun types and nearby school locations to possibly carry out a school shooting. Authorities were able to intervene as the teenager had been flagged as a vulnerable threat. 

We are currently on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, and what an exciting time it is! The way we live, work and relate to one another is changing. The 4IR is characterised by a fusion of technologies that are blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological spheres. With this new era comes enormous potential for automation and development; enterprises are investing in it, but is the government?

Working within the technology industry there are some buzzwords which come up over and over again, current one being 'Artificial Intelligence'.