Emerging Technologies with Business Applications (2023 Fall)

This course is an elective course particularly designed for the ITM NCHU MBA students specialized in Electronic Commerce. Medium of instruction of this course is English, occassionally supplemented with Chinese. The loading of this course is not light. Students are expected to attend all lectures and complete all courseworks. Attendance will not be accounted for a part of the final score. But, absence without proper reason will be.

Professor John Sum is a strict person and sometimes a monster. His expectation on the behavior and the performance of a student is stringent. It is simply because John Sum has been teaching in the area of electronic commerce for more than two decades. Materials in his mind are abundant. Only some of them are extracted and complied as teaching materials.

Professor John Sum always wishes to give every student score 100. Are you one of them?

In prior to add this course, please download and read this document. It outlines the course shcedule and most important the code of conduct of a student to behave in my class. If you are struggled to meet the code of conduct, you better drop this course.

Prerequisites

1. Able to read, write, speak and listen in English.
2. Skillful in the use of word processing software for report writing and presentation.
3. Skillful in searching information over the Internet.
4. Knowledge in one of the following subjects: Principles of Computing, Computer Literacy, Introduction to Information Systems, Introduction to Computer Science, Introduction to Information Technologies or other related subjects.
5. Able to complete a coursework report as compared with a jorunal publication.

Course Outline

1. Topic I: What is 'emerging technology'?
   • Here is my definition.
   • Update: 20230918.
   • Update: 20230925.
2. Topic II: Evolution of technologies.
3. Topic III: Information and communication technologies.
   • Brief on telecommunication technology.
   • Brief on telecommunication technology (20231127).
4. Topic IV: Artificial intelligence and machine learning.
   • 3D-Net: Monocular 3D object recognition for traffic monitoring.
   • How Does Tesla's Autopilot Work?
   • Offline voice assistants: Voice assistants without Internet connection.
   • Text-Command interface -> GUI-Command interface -> Voice-Command interface -> Humanized-Voice-Command interface.
   • IBM Data and AI Team Open source large language models: Benefits, risks and types, September 27, 2023.
5. Topic IV-Advanced: Introducing Generative AI.
   • Large language models: OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Bard.
   • Chinese LLMs: Baidu Ernie, Tencent Hunyuan, BAAI WuDao.
   • Offline LLM models: LLM services without Internet connection.
   • Goodfellow, I. et al. (2014). Generative adversarial networks. arXiv preprint, arXiv:1406.2661.
   • Goodfellow, I. et al. (2020). Generative adversarial networks. Communications of the ACM, 63(11), 139-144.
   • Radford, A., Metz, L., & Chintala, S. (2015). Unsupervised representation learning with deep convolutional generative adversarial networks. arXiv preprint, arXiv:1511.06434.
   • Wikipedia, Factor analysis: A generative model for statistical analysis in social science research.
   • TechEmergent (2023), 60 best generative AI companies and startups in 2023.
   • Midjourney: A text-to-image generator.
     • Question: What is(are) the possible application(s) of text-to-image generation?
   • Create an Internet celebrity using free AI tools, like ChatGPT, Google Translate, Midjourney and DeepFake.
   • YouTuber experience sharing: Towards a profitable YouTuber with the use of AI tools.
6. Topic V: Financial technologies.
7. Topic VI: Business/Industrial applications.
   • Manufacturing execution systems (beware of the terminology).
     • History of the MESA models, from Manufacturing Enterprise Solutions Association (MESA) International.
     • Manufacturing execution systems, from SAP.
     • Manufacturing execution systems, from Autodesk.
   • Production and plant optimization, from Siemens.
   • Digitial twin.
     • What is digital twin? from Autodesk.
     • Azure Digital Twins demo|Creating replicas of real-world environments.
     • Ericsson's 5G Digital Twin Simulation.
     • Siemens and NVIDIA to enable industrial metaverse.
   • AI + Digital Twin.
     • With digital twin, a light-off factory can now be visualized and controlled (remotely) from its digital twin.
     • With AI, the light-off factory could be made to be an autonomous system.
     • Predicting and visualizing the coming behavior of a system.
     • Note: A digital twin can simply be a bunch of data showing the current status of a system.
   • BMW Factory - Integration of A.I. in the Production Line.
   • Artificial Intelligence in the Automotive Industry, from Glorious insight.
   • AI and manufacturing, from IESE Business School.
   • AI in Manufacturing: China Experiences. (3+ hours)
   • Practical AI use cases for manufacturing, by Siemen and Maya HTT (54 minutes).
8. Topic VII: EC/Tech firms, research labs & developer platforms.
9. Topic VIII: Related issues.

Assignments

1. Assignment 1 (Due Date: October 9, 2023).
2. Assignment 2 (Due Date: October 23, 2023).
3. Assignment 3
4. Assignment 4

Lecture Diary

• Lecture diary 20231030.

Use of AI Tools

AI tools, like ChatGPT and Google Bard, have to be used with extrememly careful. Some AI tools might give incomplete information in response to certain questions. Moreover, Google Bard does not provide any reference for the content generated. Students have to be aware of these drawbacks.

ChatGPT, Google Bard and other AI text generators are very good in paraphrasing. Using these tools to paraphrase your assignments and project reports are highly encouraged.

You are allowed to use AI tools, like ChatGPT and Google Bard, for your assignments and project report. In the first step, you have to complete your assignment or the project report based upon your own writing. In the second step, you could use those AI tools to paraphrase the contents of your assignments and reports.

WARNING: For any part of the content (respectively, any word) you have put in an assignment or report, I will ask for your reason and explanation why this part of content (respectively, the specific word) has to be added. If you fail to do so, your assignment (respectively, group project) score will be zero. Nevertheless, your assignment (respectively, group project) score will be zero if you fail to give the source for any part of the content you have added in your assignment (respectively, group project).