Horizons newsletter – Week 18 // 2018
Horizons is a bi-monthly Dasym Research initiative to show you how the Dasym themes have been in the news. We publish the Horizons on our website and as an email newsletter. If you wish to receive the email, please contact Investor Relations.
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This is an emotional story
The recognition of your face through software can now pay your bill, or get you arrested. Detecting the specific emotions on your face however, is an application still in its infancy. Today’s software is learning to read Ekman’s universal facial expressions (see visual) and is becoming more skilled in cultural nuances such as the Japanese “hidden smile” and reading plastic-surgery faces. For example, Affectiva’s database of 6 million faces from 87 countries is now able to catch the “politeness smile,” an expression prevalent in Southeast Asia and India but rare in the Americas, Africa and Europe. Knowing how people feel holds enormous potential and both tech giants and smaller vendors such as Affectiva and Eyeris heavily invest in the facial recognition market. According to Allied Market Research this market will grow to $9.6 billion by 2022. Further advancements in technology can create a wealth of emotional data, that is priceless for applications from monitoring advertising impact and serving media content based on people’s emotional state to detecting emotions of self-driving car passengers.
Digital identity revolution
Lately it has become painfully clear that an unregulated internet is a risk to our digital identity. Signs of this growing awareness can be found in the revelations around Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and the latest backlash against tech companies like Paypal for letting customers agree with impossible terms and conditions. Indeed, the WEF lists limited ability to choose what personal data to share and the non-user friendliness of online services as thresholds to a safe digital identity. In times when more transactions are conducted digitally, a verifiable and trusted digital identity becomes a necessity. Moreover, it has become a fundamental prerequisite to access critical services and participate in modern society. The growing awareness of the importance of a well-managed digital identity might unlock the potential of alternatives for identity management. For example, security technologies such as WebAuthn, validate a user’s identity without storing the provided data. In addition, Blockchain and other emerging technologies could replace inefficient and costly manual processes. This might harness a digital identity revolution, not only for the wealthier citizens in the West, but also for the more than 1.1 billion people who are still unable to prove their identity.
The global economy’s next growth engines
The global economy requires new growth drivers, since most advanced economies face structural headwinds to their economic growth – such as falling productivity rates and ageing populations – and China’s economic expansion is at the same time starting to cool down. Recent data from IMF’s World Economic Outlook (April 2018), shows that Asian economies with numerous consumer markets are forecasted to post strong growth, such as India, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. Together, the combined GDP of South and Southeast Asia will grow almost 50% in the next five years, by $3.5 trillion. Furthermore, in Africa, outperformers with high growth rates and fast growing populations can be found, such as Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda and Ethiopia in Eastern Africa and Ghana, Senegal and Ivory Coast on Africa’s West coast. In the coming five years, the combined GDP of these regions will increase by more than two-thirds, and their populations by almost 50 million. While the African and Asian growth currently plays a minor role in the global economy, they will gain prominence as the next frontier of emerging market in the mid-term future.
