Month: December 2017

Written by Kyle Harrington, Taesan Josephson, and Jackson Ottman

Imagine waking up for a morning hike up Granite Peak. You then have an executive meeting on the beaches of Hawaii. Later, you play ping pong with your friend who lives in New York and near the end of the day, you sit courtside for the NBA finals and watch Kyrie Irving make one of the most clutch 3-pointers in history. You’ve had all these amazing experiences within a day, and you never had to leave the comfort of your own home. Virtual reality (VR) allows users to experience events and see places that would normally be out of the realm of possibility. This ability to transcend normal imagery and take users to a unique environment has the potential to disrupt industries such as gaming, engineering, retail and training, to name a few.

Continue reading What Will Virtual Reality’s Future Hold?

 Written by Michelle Dufflocq Williams and Jordyn Kronenberg

In the world of technology, concepts seemingly overlap and it’s easy for them to become jumbled. For example, the terms “deep learning,” “machine learning,” “artificial intelligence” and “cognitive computing” seem to be used interchangeably at times, making grasping these concepts confusing and overwhelming.

The purpose of this blog is to communicate simply and clearly: what exactly is the difference between deep learning, artificial intelligence (“AI”), machine learning, and cognitive computing?

Continue reading Diving Deep into Deep Learning

By: Matt Young, Ryley Campbell, Jeana Kerr

The growth of the digital economy has put it on course to account for 25 percent of the entire world economy by 2020, up from 15 percent in 2005, according to recent findings from Accenture’s Digital Economic Value Index. As a result, more companies are turning to platform-based business models to capitalize on the unprecedented opportunities today’s digital economy offers [1]. In fact, the growing influence of the digital economy is largely related to the growth of two-sided market platforms.

In this blog post we will provide a broad overview of two-sided market platforms and provide a guide to successfully creating your own two-sided market platform.

Continue reading Creating a Two-Sided Platform

By: Shafer Higgins, Cheyenne Keeler, and Alexia Coston

Our prior two blog posts introduced the concept of seasteading as well as its potential market applications. This final entry will discuss the “barriers” that make success for seasteading difficult. Seasteading offers the tantalizing potential to be the next vast frontier for homesteading. But as amazing as it sounds, various barriers have so far stalled development, leaving it a mere dream.  The barriers explored below include the high costs of building a seastead, the technology involved in the development of a seastead, and the market uncertainty associated with a new, disruptive technology.

Continue reading Seasteading Part 3: Barriers to Success

By: Shafer Higgins, Cheyenne Keeler, and Alexia Coston

The prior blog post explained the overall concept and goal of seasteading. This blog post examines several specific potential applications. Market applications for seasteading are practically unexplored, but several initial models for the benefits of sea-based living are quietly taking shape. We highlight two use cases, a floating special economic zone and mobile floating infrastructure. They involve taking advantage of the freedom, flexibility, and mobility afforded by seasteading.

Continue reading Seasteading Part 2: Market Applications

By: Shafer Higgins, Cheyenne Keeler, and Alexia Coston

Concept

“Seasteading” is a term that was originally coined by author Ken Neumeyer in his 1981 book Sailing the Farm and it stems from the movement of homesteading. Seasteading refers to “building politically independent cities that float on the ocean”.  In 2008, Patri Freidman founded The Seasteading Institute, “a nonprofit think-tank working to provide a machinery of freedom to choose new societies on the blue frontier based on the notion that the most successful floating cities can inspire change around the world”.  The Institute has become the main driver of the seasteading movement and sees seasteading as the solution for ecological disasters such as rising water levels, flooding, and overpopulation. In this series of three blog posts, we will cover seasteading’s progress, benefits, market applications, and barriers to success.

Continue reading Seasteading Part 1: Technology Overview

By Thea Levinson & Aspen Runkel

Neurotechnology Overview

Neurotechnologies are those technologies that deal with nerves or the nervous system (neuro). A simple Wikipedia summary describes neurotechnology as “any technology that has a fundamental influence on how people understand the brain and various aspects of consciousness, thought, and higher order activities in the brain.  It includes technologies that are designed to improve and repair brain function and allow researchers and clinicians to visualize the brain.” The field of neurotechnology has been around for nearly half a century but has reached maturity only in the last twenty years. The advent of brain imaging revolutionized the field, allowing researchers to directly monitor the brain’s activities during experiments.

Continue reading Overview of Neurotechnology

By Anthony Adams & Andrea Bowman
University of Montana, College of Business, Fall 2017

Often made analogous to war, the game of football is as stereotypically American as it gets: massive humans slamming into one another at breakneck speeds in an animalistic display of pure will, size, and physicality. Players of the sport are revered for their toughness and tenacity, both mentally and physically. The nature of the sport leaves even the strongest bloodied and bruised, but it’s the injuries beneath the surface of the skin that pose the most grave danger to the sport itself.

Continue reading Concussions: Exploring Preventative Technological Solutions to an Epidemic