Samsung showcases AI & IoT at CES 2019

Samsung showcases AI & IoT at CES 2019

Samsung showcases their latest in AI and IoT technology at the CES 2019 press conference in Las Vegas.  Connected Living is demonstrated through Smart appliances, such as refrigerators, washing machines utilizing “Family Hub” and “Digital Cockpit”, as well as the latest product announcements in laptops and Samsung’s latest “Space Monitor”.  Highlights include the introduction of the QLED 8K TV line, with the largest being at 98”.

Here is the full coverage of Samsung Press Conference:

First 5G deployment in San Francisco

First 5G deployment in San Francisco

November – San Francisco Bay area is going to be primary area for the first phase of deployment of 5G for mobile devices. It is going to be one of the smart city where information and communication, including mobile connectivity are going to improve quality of urban life – from professional to private. From social networking, to real-time GPS navigation and maps, mobile payments, video streaming and access to the Internet at the fingertips anywhere, anytime. 

A lot of trials and testing are going on right now. 5G wireless communications needs new transmission equipment in the network to be sure that every IoT device out there is connected to the right network and can deliver significant performance increase. For enjoying media content, we now use a second screen and often a third screen. In this connected world we are talking not just about the million additional devices but billion of them.

What need to be bring to the table is mobile operating system because people are consuming videos and media on the mobile devices more and more. There are also different requirements for various situations: if you using it for surgical operation in healthcare or if you remotely driving a car or if you are just sending a message to the network. 

What does 5G technology mean for us? When you push some content and you see on the screen that little “loading or buffering wheel”, the icon that shows you that time is elapsing – that is 4G. With 5G all those things are going to go away. No waiting time for download. Things are going to happen instantly. Today 65% of content consumption traffic on tablets is video traffic. Slightly lower, around 42% is on the smartphones. Deployment of 5G will allowed that performance on the devices will be much faster and it will be instant.

5G plays significant role for connected cars, airplane traffic or smart factories.  It is important in the era that has a flood of automated data. By 2020 average internet user is going to create around 1,5 GB of traffic per day but smart hospital will produce 3,000 GB and autonomous vehicle 4,000 GB per. Airplane data will even use 10 times more than a driverless car – 40,000 GB per day. The top of the list ranked smart factory with 1,000,000 GB daily.

For the initial testing, why choose San Francisco?  Being located as part of the extended Silicon Valley, it is a foundation for Internet of Things (IoT). This means all applications are easily going to find it and will are going to find route here – explained an executive from Ericsson at the Mobile World Congress Americas in September. Ericsson is building a pipe that will supply all the devices. By 2022 the company predicts that there will be 500 million IoT devices ready for 5G. In addition to the network, there is going to be new applications development for IoT on the top of 5G.

Initial roll out of 5G is going to happen probably early 2019 and 2020 but the momentum for expansion to other cities will be later on. Things are going to be perform faster, the quality of experience for mobile devices is going to be significantly better and low latency.

Connected Car Expo in Los Angeles

Connected Car Expo in Los Angeles

The Connected Car Expo took place in November 17-19 at Marriott Hotel in the downtown Los Angeles. The Press and Trade event that unites automotive and technology professionals in the connected car industry this year again gathered the major top players and media.

In his openings remarks the mayor of Los Angeles Eric Garcetti stated that people are waiting for time that technology liberate them from daily traffic daily and increase the safety they seek on the streets. And, it is the right moment when the technology is embracing the future instead of chasing it away.

Michelle Avary, VP Automotive Product & Strategy at Aeris and CCE Advisory Board member presented Top Ten Automotive Startups. Michelle is also a Founder of Women in Automotive Technology startup, Silicon Valley based networking group. She shared the outline of the selection criteria that CCE Advisory Board use to choose the notable startups in connected cars field. That are four broad categories: safety, mobility, connectivity and autonomous. The Winners of 2015 Top Ten Startups of the New Automotive Industry are: Capio, High Mobility, TriLumina, Getaround, Elio Motors, Sober Steering, Driversiti, Quanergy, Nebula Systems and HopSkipDrive.

Then CCE Emcee Brian Colley, Editor-at-large and host of CNET On Cars, took the stage to address the status of connected cars industry. What is the future of our streets and our cities? It can be called the connected cars era.

For the first time in 2015 an autonomous car drove across U.S. coast-to-coast road trip. On the panel The Long and Winding Road to Autonomous three experts: Prof. Dr. Thomas Form, Head of Electronics and Vehicle Research at Volkswagen, Brian Droessler, VP of Software & Connected Solution at Continental North America and Ph.D. Gary O’Brian, Global Director of Advanced Engineering at Delphi Electronics and safety discussed what the industry has done and what still need to be done in the road to highly automated driving.

What is the future of our streets and our cities?

As we have seen the last few years,  it is conversion to digital and electronics devices that have been flowing into the cars. In the next 10 years we will be seeing a change in the information, entertainment, navigation and logistics in our vehicles. There are changes on how we relate to the cars, how we fit with them and what we expect from them.  The connected cars are taking their seat at the table in electronic digital connected world and are a part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

When we think about technology, the mental picture that comes to our mind is: smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets.  It should be so, because we have many types of devices in our lives.  The reality is, the electronics and electronics devices are not technology. Technology is a word that we can find in dictionary, a word that pre-dates the era of electronics and pre-dates of the era of electricity.  Technology by a definition is: “A branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment”. Technology in simply words means how we get things done. In the vehicles it means how we get where we want to go; how we do it efficiently, comfortably, and safely with the vehicle serving us, as oppose to us have to alter our life around the need of transportation.

There are 4 great challenges and requirements that we need to overcome and meet for connected cars:

Transparent – limit distraction via using the clean interface on the dashboard. In the past we had the remote controls that were extremely complicated and the customers were lost and did not use many of the functions. Simply too much was too much.  That cannot be the case for the car, the connectivity has to allow for focus on the driving, not the interface.

Intuitive – Easy to understand how to use and why, because the connected cars speak to the entire population:  people in different professions, tech geeks, TV enthusiasts, etc. Why means they need to understand– what is a benefit for a customer to have connected car, autonomous car, why they need that future.

Intimate – the internet is the future of the car. When we look at the cars now, the relationship between us and car is dumb in many aspects. The car doesn’t worry about you, the car doesn’t care about you, it doesn’t know more about you from the day bought and brought it home to the day you sell it. It is itself.  The car is just kind of a cold machine for the most part. In the future, the personalization will be flowing into the car through the connectivity, and make it better today than was yesterday. More about me the driver, better tuned to what I need from it.  This experience as well as services that we bring in, as the driver, I need them to follow me into the car, not just have them live on my phone, my desktop, my tablet, my TV or my home.

Constant – Reflecting the kinds of services that are second nature outside the car. At present, the car is an island. You have a routine of behaviors in your life, then, when you get into the car, the behaviors change, it is different. The view is different for the navigation dash, it use different media services. In the cars we feel a little cut off from our regular life, sort of an awkward little connection to those things we do outside of the car. This will be changed when we have constant heartbeat of all our services, relationships, personalization and digital world following us into the cars consistently. This will make the transportation aspect of our life consistent with the rest so it feels like the same space we live in, just one that is moving.

This is the goal of the connected car and what it brings, a new portion of our life that is now a continuation of the way we live, not a break from the real life or being held hostage and in limbo in traffic.  Work, social interaction, entertainment, enjoyment of the trip, recognition of who you are and what you do will all be part as the new experience for getting from point A to point B in a car in the next few years.

Text by Lidia Paulinska and Tomasz Kolodziejak

 

 

 

 

 

 

Korea Technology in Silicon Valley

Korea Technology in Silicon Valley

The two-day KTech – KGlobal@Silicon Valley 2015 symposium and expo organized by the Korean Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning along with KOTRA Silicon Valley; was dedicated to promote Korean technology and its ties with Silicon Valley. The event took place on November 12-13, 2015 at Marriott hotel in Santa Clara, CA. The opening remarks were delivered by Yong Soo Kim, Assistant Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning, ChangYup Na, Managing Director of KOTRA in Sillicon Valley, Jong-Lok Yoon, President of National IT Industry Promotion Agency, Congressman Mike Honda from 17th District of California and Dongman Han and Consul General of Republic of Korea in San Francisco.

The main theme of this year event was “Automated Future: Human + Technology”.

The first keynote speaker Curtis Sasaki, Vice President of Ecosystems and IoT General Manager from Samsung Electronics stated that in 2020 many of our devices will be connected. Sasaki who worked in the past at Apple and Sun Microsystems, and today at Samsung, the most recognizable brand from Korea, described some effort and the products that company offers: Samsung Sleepsense, the sleep monitor, Samsung Gear S2, stylish and smart watch, and Samsung gear VR. According Sasaki, next area where we should expect a lot of traffic is VR (Virtual Reality). And VR is not just for a gaming but may also conquer other territories such as real estate, where surprisingly, people are willing to buy a house without visiting it or in education where the technology can offer the VR tour of the world in every school. Samsung applied the VR in their smartphones, like the Galaxy 5, and just headphones are needed to get a VR experience. In his summary, Sasaki pointed out the challenges that society faces nowadays and summarized the solutions: IoT can be a catalyst, partnerships are critical, technology and innovation are moving at an even faster pace than in the past.

A world experienced wide robotics revolution – stated second keynote speaker Rodney Brooks, Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics – sustaining growth in the face of demographic inversion. Brooks is convinced that time for the robots to interact with humans in the daily life is now. As he described it: It knows what you mean and it does what you want. Radical rethinking of manufacturing strategies is underway. The time is now because of convergence of Industrial Internet (Intelligent devices networked into intelligent systems), Additive manufacturing (Changing the economics of scale), Near-shoring (Benefit of low-cost outsourcing is eroding), Digital revolution (Cheap sensing, cheap computation, pervasive connectivity). As the population enjoys long life expectancy the robotics is going to get pulled into in home for elder care and find it use in the aging population. Brooks showed the statistics from Europe, 1950 when the population reaches 349.8 million and life longevity was 80, in Europe 2050 the population will be 401 million with life longevity to the late 90. The speaker reminded the audience that the first commercial robot was developed was in a GM factory in New Jersey in 1961. Today robotics represents baxter, research robot; the product of robust and growing developer community sharing code and applications, uses the Unified RobotDesriptor Format (URDF) for collaboration across groups, uses open source ROS framework, the standard in academia and corporate research, complete robotics platform with low-level control for custom application development, interface for custom end-effector development.

The keynote speakers set the mood for a vibrant Automated Future: Human + Technology panel discussions over the next two –days of KTech symposium. Meanwhile more than 35 Korean companies in security, wearables, big data, e-learning, hardware and software were presenting their solutions for the world at the expo area along with international job fair at the Marriott hotel in Santa Clara.

Photos of the event can be found at: https://brightblueii.com/photos/ktechsilicon-valley-2015/

More information at the website: http://www.ktechsv.org/