Emerging Technologies with Business Applications (2026 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.

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'? Fundamental issues and related concepts.
   • Emerging Technology (20240909).
   • Apple: Apple PC (1976), Macintosh (1984), iPod/iTune (2001), iPhone (2007).
   • Microsoft: Hololens (2016), Copilot (2024).
   • Note: Use and/or development of technologies for work are interdependent on the operation (resp. process) design together with the organization design.
   • Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - a leading person in a firm in chare of the use/development of technologies for the firm.
2. Topic II: Evolution of Technology (2023 version).
   • Contents in the lecture notes.
     • Industrial revolution.
     • Automation and electrification.
     • Information technologies.
     • Intelligent technologies.
     • Benefit and threads.
   • Supplementary: Processor Achitecture.
     • AMD Zen architecture. First released: 2017. (Wikipedia).
     • ARM Holding. ARM architecture (equi. advanced RISC machine or Acorn RISC machine). (Wikipedia).
       • ARM primary designs and licenses its CPU architectures' intellectual properties (IPs) to other processor developers for making new processors.
       • Partial list of ARM processors.
     • Intel, Introduction to Intel® Architecture, Feburary 9, 2024.
     • Nvidia processor architectures.
     • x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group (Oct 15, 2024).
   • Supplementary: Processing Units and Embedding Technologies.
     • Graphical processing unit (GPU), central processing unit (CPU).
     • XPU: Specialized designed processing unit like neural processing unit (NPU), intelligent processing unit (IPU), tensor processing unit (TPU) and data processing unit (DPU).
     • System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture - Multiple processing units, controllers, memories and others on a single chip. In simple words, it is a network of systems on a single chip.
     • Silicon photonics: Speeding up data communication among the systems on a chip.
   • Summplementary: Processor copmuting paradigm: Digital computing; Analog Computing; Neural Computing; Probailistic Computing; Quatum Compuitng.
3. Questions.
   • State the name of a mechincal computing machine which were invented in the 19th century and the use of this computing machine.
   • What technologies have been developed to let you enjoy the services provided by your smartphone? Note that, many of them are not intelligent but disruptive.
   • What technologies have been developed to support the GPS service?
   • Telecommunication technology is one group of them. Telecom technology, 4G or 5G, refers to a collection of technologies supporting voice and data services. Could you name a few of these technologies?
   • In terms of the functions/services, what are the differences between iPhone 16 and iPhone 15?
   • In terms of the hardware/software technologies, what are the differences between iPhone 16 and iPhone 15?
   • Why aerospace technology is an important communication technology and location service technology?
   • Why location services are important?
4. Topic III: Information and communication technologies.
   • Telecommucation technology.
     • Telegraph (resp. telephone) is for data (resp. voice) communication.
     • Wired versus wireless.
     • Today telecom network: Data and voice communication network.
     • List of wireless tech generations.
     • Brief on telecommunication technology (20231127).
   • Internet: Data communication network.
   • Satellite constellation. Satellite internet constellation.
   • Outer-spsace communication newtork.
   • Global Internet usage report, Janurary 2023 edition.
   • Cloud services: supported by a network of computers and the Internet.
   • IEEE The spirit of innovation (on communication).
   • Intelligent infrastructure = Information infrastructure + AI services.
   • Web 1.0 => Web 2.0 => Web 3.0 (Information infrastructure + AI services + Blockchains).
5. Topic IV: AI and machine learning (equivalently, intelligent technology)
   • Intelligent products and services.
   • 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 -> GUI-Command -> Voice-Command -> Voice-Command + Humanized Voice Response.
   • IBM Data and AI Team Open source large language models: Benefits, risks and types, September 27, 2023.
   • Nobel Prize laurerates who are interested in the "Brain" and the "Theory of Mind".
     • Charles Scott Sherrington, Edgar Douglas Adrian (1932 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).
     • Leon Cooper (1972 Nobel Prize in Physics).
     • Gerald Maurice Edelman (1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).
       • Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Basic Books, 1987).
       • Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind (Basic Books, 1992).
     • Friedrich August von Hayek (1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
       • The Sensory Order: An Inquiry Into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology, 1952.
     • Herbert Alexander Simon (1978 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences).
       • Models of Man: Social and Rational- Mathematical Essays on Rational Human Behavior in a Social Setting, 1957.
       • Human Problem-Soving, (with Allen Newell), 1972.
     • Eric R. Kandel (2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine).
     • John J. Hopfield, Geoffrey Hinton (2024 Nobel Prize in Physics).
   • Stuart Russell, Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, (4th Edition), Pearson 2020. (Table of Contents).
6. Topic V: Generative AI.
   • Large language models: OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini.
   • Chinese LLMs: Baidu Ernie, Tencent Hunyuan, BAAI WuDao, DeepSeek.
   • 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.
   • Types of Generators/Models.
     • Text-to-text.
     • Text-to-math.
     • Text-to-procedure.
     • Text-to-code generator. (cf Code-to-text)
     • Text-to-video generator. (cf Video-to-text)
     • Text-to-music/sound generator. (cf Audio-to-text)
     • Multi-modal input/output. (Text+Image+Video+Audio)
     • Language model versus reasoning model.
     • AI agent.
   • Questions.
     • What is(are) the possible application(s) of text-to-image generation?
     • How to use LLMs for knowledge aquistion?
     • How to use LLMs for research?
     • How to apply LLMs in enterprise operations?
   • 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.
   • Interview Fei-Fei Li, December 11, 2023.
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. Advanced Topics.

Supplementaries

Assignments

Use of AI Tools

AI tools, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, 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 Gemini 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).