Which kind of Cyborg are you?

By Andy Thurai (@AndyThurai)

[This article is a result of my conversations with Chris Dancy (www.Chrisdancy.com) on this topic. The original version of this was published on Wired magazine @ http://www.wired.com/insights/2014/01/kind-cyborg/].

Machines are replacing humans in the thinking process. The field of Cognitive Thinking is a mixture of combining rich data collection (with wide array of sensors), machine learning, predictive analysis, and cognitive anticipation in a right mix. Machines can do “just-in-time-machine-learning” rather than using predictive models and are virtually model free.

The Cognitive Computing concept revolves around few combined concepts:

1. Machines learn and interact naturally with people to extend what either humans or machines could do on their own.
2. They help human experts make better decisions.
3. These machines collect richer data sets and use them in their decision making process, which creates the need for intelligent interconnected devices. This creates a network of intelligent sensors feeding the super brain.
4. Machine learning algorithms sense, predict, infer, think, analyze, and reason before they make decisions.

Which kind of cyborg are you?

The field of cybernetics has been around for a long time. Essentially, it is the science (or art) of the evolution of cyborgs.  The cyborgs have evolved from assistive cyborgs to creative cyborgs. Not only can they adapt to human situations, but they are also able to learn from human experiences (machine learning), think (cognitive thinking), and figure out (situation analysis) how to help us rather than being told.

ATOS API: A zero cash payment processing environment without boundaries

When ATOS, a big corporate conglomerate (EUR 8.8 billion and 77,100 employees in 52 countries), decided that they wanted to become the dominant Digital Service Provider (DSP) for payments, they had a clear mandate on what they wanted to do. They wanted to build a payment enterprise without boundaries. [Wordline is an ATOS subsidiary setup to handle the DSP program exclusively]. One of the magic bullets out of that mandate was:

The growing trust of consumers to make payments for books, games and magazines over mobiles and tablets evolving into a total acceptance of cashless payments in traditional stores and retail outlets bringing the Zero Cash Society ever closer.

This required them to rethink the way they processed payments. They are one of the largest payments processors in the world, but they were primarily focused on only big enterprises and name brand shops using their services. Onboarding every customer took a long time, and the integration costs were high. After watching the smaller companies such as Dwolla, Square and others trying to revolutionize the world they decided it is time for the giant to wake up.

The first decision was to embrace the smaller vendors. In order to do that, they can’t be a high touch, very time consuming, takes forever to integrate and very high cost per customer on-boarding environment. They wanted to build a platform that is low touch, completely API driven, fully self-serviced, and continuously integrating yet provides secure payment processing transactions. In addition, they were also faced with moving from the swipe retail payment systems to support ePayment and mobile payments. Essentially, they wanted to build a payment platform that catered not only to today’s needs but flexible enough to expand and scale for the future needs and demands. They wanted to offer this as a service to their customers.