The Convergence of Blockchain, Machine Learning, and the Cloud | Steve Lund | TEDxBYU

[Music] [Applause] I'm actually here to talk about the convergence of some really interesting technologies I'm the technology guy here I'm the geek and I'm going to talk about some technologies called blockchain machine learning artificial intelligence in the cloud if you remember our very first speaker Erica orange she was talking about how technology is changing technology is changing at an ever-increasing rate that's happening today that's happening this year in 2018 these technologies I'm going to talk a little bit about and I'm going to show you and describe a couple of examples real-life examples of projects I'm working on around the world that are showing how these technologies actually are converging it's really important for us and for companies to stay ahead of Technology what happens if you don't what happens if you fall behind what happens if you're not staying up with the most current technologies well we heard a great example of what happened this week toys-r-us a brand that everyone of you know probably most of you have visited at least anyone over about 35 or 40 years old has been a hundred times in their stores they're out of business they filed bankruptcy after 70 years and why because they didn't stay up with technology they weren't monitoring it they weren't engaged with it they weren't implementing it within there with is within their stores so what I want to talk about today is how we stay in front of that technology and just a little bit about why I think it's so important so let me kind of set the stage a little bit my background as you can read in my bio has all been with technology companies I worked my yearly career with Hewlett Packard I learned a lot about the importance of Hardware about integrating Hardware about developing solutions and hardware I then went to work for Apple Computer for about 10 years and learned about the so the integration of hardware and software and developing solutions and technologies that were easy to use for everybody to use after h after Apple I went to work for Cisco at Cisco I learned the importance of taking all of these components now and applying new technologies to them some of these new technologies that that we started to deploy were things like machine learning and artificial intelligence and how to use that technology for your benefit to create alerts and notifications about your network and how they were being used and threats that were happening and potential failures of your network so I learned a lot about that and then the last four or five years have been working very closely in things new technologies like blockchain so one of the questions I get a lot is well what exactly is blockchain a lot of people think blockchain is Bitcoin and in cybersecurity basically what blockchain is is what's called a distributed ledger think about and think of what that means distributed means these files are distributed across hundreds of of computers that are networked together a ledger is basically a debit and a credit so managing that debit and credit within the platform across hundreds of computers actually provides a lot of benefits number one it makes it very hard to hack it makes it so that cyber security technologies can actually prevent those things from happening the other thing that it does it it creates a trust a level of trust for that data and that technology that may exist within each one of those nodes so what I want to talk a little bit about today now are some examples of how that technology is being used let's talk about one of them the first one that I want to share with you is a company called Merce Merce is in Copenhagen Denmark they're one of the largest shipping and logistics companies in the world let me give you a little example of what some of their challenges are as a company they manage about a hundred and fifty ports around the world these are ports where vessels are coming in and out continuously through the ports they also have about two to three million containers these are large containers that are coming again in real time in and out of the ports they're trying to manage where they are upper operationally so they have a really difficult time managing that and at the same time they're trying to track about four trillion dollars worth of business as all of this is moving around the world let's take one example let's take one vessel one vessel for example requires about 200 interactions just moving from point A to point B 200 interactions with individuals it also requires coordination with about 30 other companies it also requires about four inches of documentation remember this is where one vessel at one time between two ports vast amounts of data is getting generated so they've decided to use blockchain to help improve operationally many of those ships as they're going in and out of ports they're using blockchain to create what are called Smart contracts contracts between those 200 interactions between those four inches of documentation they can now reduce so they've been able to identify that they can actually increase by about 15% the number of ships that they can ship around the world at the same time reduced by about 10 or 15% their operational costs those are huge savings for companies that are worth billions and billions of dollars another example I like to share with you is a company called open open is the first end-to-end logistics supply chain platform for commodities this will affect about 30 different commodities commodities are things like rice and grain and oil and gas and metals all different types of metals so it's about a hundred and fifty year old business that has never had any technology before it's all manual today there's lots of fraud there's lots of pricing manipulation that happens because there no transparency of the of the transactions there's lots of theft and a lot of corruption in the business the other thing is that it it's it really is a pretty lengthy process it takes about five to six weeks for this entire process to be completed from beginning to end and again there's it's fraught with a lot of danger so with those as kind of the parameters that we've decided to use blockchain again as a as a back-end platform to help manage all of these transactions to create smart contracts to improve the efficiencies and operations of this we've been able to determine that we can take this five to six week process and actually reduce it down to minutes by automating this by providing technology to it by really increasing the efficiencies of each one of these operations and with blockchain now it creates transparency so that you can see every single operation that would normally take five or six weeks you can see the operations of setting up financing setting up warehousing setting up the transportation set it up setting up shipping setting up the the funding for it setting up the insurance there is a hundred different processes along that and in the past no one's been able to see the whole thing so you've never been able to really verify if you're getting a good price for something and the other problem that exists is that there's a there's about a hundred middlemen that are in the middle of this this process they're taking a little piece of the cut of those of the transactions that results in about a twenty to twenty five percent margin so within the the price of a commodity and let's say you're paying a dollar for for an ounce of copper twenty-five percent of that is useless it's just a middleman that's trying to take a cut we've been able to cut that completely out by using blockchain machine learning and AI so it really is creating some tremendous efficiencies the other thing that we can do because now we have all of the data in to end we can start running machine learning and aei models against each one of these processes number one to improve efficiencies but also to give the buyer or the seller a better view of what that what exactly that transaction is costing and how long it's going to take so for example by using some machine learning models now that we have all of that data we can set up alerts that say will you I want an alert that tells me whenever I'm shipping a copper from Shanghai to Chile during the month of January tell me what the average price is there's the shipping price for that or tell me what the logistic services or insurance services are for this particular month for this particular kind of commodity during this particular time of the year we've never been able to do that before without having all of that data at our fingertips we can do that now and finally the last example I have is a company that I work with in Israel called a Gua zo it gwazi au has built a machine learning intelligent platform that actually integrates all of this technology together seamlessly I mentioned I used to work for Cisco I worked for a business unit called Smart Services smart services was about a three billion dollar business it took Cisco about three years and about two or three hundred engineers to create this smart services application that actually did predictive analytics on your network to be able to anticipate when you may be having a failure on your network what we did using the Iglesia platform and this this integrated technology has been able to do in about two weeks with one engineer what it did Cisco three years and hundreds of engineers to do so you can imagine now the kind of things that we can do the kind of platforms we can create the kind of integration that's happening now between blockchain and machine learning and AI and the cloud all of these things are coming together they have not been proven and he'll just recently blockchain really was not ready for production 16 of the largest banks now are implementing blockchain projects so blockchain is now ready it's been proven it's been validated it has been certified machine learning is much more mature now ai is much more mature companies now really trust in the cloud now so the cloud is now a viable place to store a lot of this information so I guess my point now is that all of these technologies have converged they're now ready to go to market they are now production ready and now it's up to us to actually apply these new technologies to new problems that exist today my goal is that we can work together on this that we can find new solutions I'm a continuous learner so I love to learn about new technologies and I think every company in the world has to be a technology company if you're not you will be out of business just like Toys R Us had to file bankruptcy this year thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 144,756

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Bitcoin, Business, Coding, Computers

Id: LSbceOWZvJg

Length: 12min 38sec (758 seconds)

Published: Tue May 01 2018