“Mobile distribution really is the catalyst that will turn this whole decline of television argument on its head,” said Viacom CEO Bob Bakish in his opening keynote conversation at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. The daylong media and advertising-oriented gathering drew capacity audiences to sessions focused on disruption and opportunities in a dynamic and vastly different media landscape. Bakish knows that 5G will open new distribution channels and autonomous cars will remove “the last vestige of video-free environment.” Continue reading The Future of Television is Mobile Says Viacom CEO at CES

What is edge computing and what can it bring when married with 5G, asked TechRepublic editor-in-chief Jason Hiner, who moderated a CES panel on the topic. AT&T vice president Alicia Abella described edge computing in historical context, as the pendulum has swung back and forth from centralized computing (in the 1960s to 1980s) to compute power on the desktop (with the advent of the desktop PC), back again to a centralized notion with the cloud, and now back to a distributed model with edge computing. Continue reading CES Panel: Possibilities of Marrying 5G with Edge Computing

The Internet of Things and 5G are just two areas impacting self-driving and connectivity, said CTA senior director of government affairs Jamie Boone, who noted the sector’s public policy challenges. Verizon VP public policy Melissa Glidden Tye said that her company launched 5G in October 2018 and has “big plans for autonomous vehicles (AVs) and smart cities” this year. “5G has been dubbed the fourth Industrial Revolution,” she said. “Everything that can be connected will be.” Waymo just passed 10 million miles, another significant milestone. Continue reading CES Panel: Public Policy, Regulations for 5G and Self-Driving

In his CES pre-show keynote presentation, LG Electronics president and chief technology officer Dr. I.P. Park set the stage for an AI-infused vision of tomorrow by questioning if we are “making our lives better, how much better, and better how?” Park called on XPRIZE Foundation founder and executive chairman Peter Diamandis to illustrate what artificial intelligence enables and Landing AI founder and CEO Andrew Ng to explain how AI technologies will evolve. Open-source webOS and 5G were the cornerstone technologies for the product demonstrations by Luxoft and Qualcomm, respectively. Continue reading CES Keynote: LG Exec Asks if Life Is Better and By How Much

Faye Francy, executive director of the Automotive Information Sharing and Analysis Center (Auto-ISAC), led a conversation about the impact of machine learning, deep learning and AI on the autonomous vehicle (AV) ecosystem. “They work together to bring great things — and possibly nefarious things — to the auto industry,” she said. Inivision AI chairman Seamus Hatch noted that the three terms aren’t interchangeable. “We’re many years behind the singularity,” he said. “It’s a machine trained to solve a specific problem faster and more accurately than a human.” Continue reading CES Panel: Impact of Evolving Tech on Autonomous Vehicles

At a CES panel on “connecting the world,” independent consultant Matt Jones posed the question all involved parties are asking as we move to an autonomous ecosystem. “We need to solve problems for real users,” he said. “It could be providers or cities looking at those questions, of how we’ll deploy and service these vehicles.” He started by looking at the issues from the level of a city — Los Angeles in this case — as represented by Los Angeles Department of Transportation general manager Seleta Reynolds. Continue reading CES Panel: Imagining, Building a New Autonomous Ecosystem

Autonomous vehicles have been a part of tech culture for so long that it’s hard to realize that only a handful of people have actually ridden in one. So it was with great surprise that our very first Lyft ride out of our Las Vegas hotel on Sunday night was in a “self-driving” vehicle. Lyft partnered with Irish auto-parts-company-turned-autonomous-vehicle-startup Aptiv (formerly known as Delphi) to offer CES attendees and Vegas commuters the option to ride in one of their 30 “self-driving” BMW 5 Series. Continue reading We Were Passengers in a Las Vegas ‘Self-Driving’ Rideshare

With the buzz way down, AI research more vibrant than ever, and more mainstream experimentation, there’s a lot to potentially look forward to at CES 2019 in the field of AI and machine learning. And already it all seems to converge on one very interesting trend: pragmatism. As AI exits the lab, and heads into the world, we’re expecting new and compelling applications. At CES this week, we’re hoping to see advances in areas such as autonomous vehicles, consumer robots, computer vision, smart assistants, and a more integrated Internet of Things. Continue reading Here’s What We Hope to See This Week at CES Related to AI

At CES 2019’s opening event at Mandalay Bay, CTA vice president of market research Steve Koenig aimed to whip up enthusiasm in the packed room for the technologies attendees would be seeing both at CES Unveiled, which followed this session, and on the many exhibit floors opening on Tuesday. He pinpointed the importance of 5G in bringing to full fruition many of the technologies that have been percolating at the annual CES confab over the past five years, including the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and 8K TV. Continue reading CES 2019: Big Technology Changes Await the Arrival of 5G

In a session on the future of mobility/transportation, speakers from several companies described the tipping point of the impact of technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Deloitte’s Allan Cook spoke about how AR/VR can be used to appeal to a younger generation loathe to enter a car dealership. “The AR/VR glasses are here now and they’re affordable,” he said. “It really helps your customers visualize what they’re seeing and give them an immersive experience.” Continue reading CES Session: Predicting the Future of Mobility & Connectivity

Cambridge Consultants has trained artificial intelligence to reconstruct images from a highly distorted image or video feed in real time that is the AI’s best guess of what the source image originally looked like. The unique approach of their DeepRay product involves recognizing and correcting for a wide universe of distortion patterns. Cambridge Consultants’ first clients are self-driving car companies concerned with accurate object and risk detection, but DeepRay could also have a number of entertainment industry technical and story applications. Continue reading DeepRay Uses AI to Reconstruct Distorted Video in Real Time

Tech sector job openings are now one signifier of a well-run corporation. That’s true for the Drucker Institute, which relies on tech guru Peter Drucker’s management principles to rank the Management Top 250 companies. In addition to other factors, the Institute now also looks at each company’s listings for high-level tech jobs, via Burning Glass Technologies, a labor-analytics firm that provides data on jobs in such innovative areas as blockchain, robotics and artificial intelligence. Increasingly, companies across numerous industries are hiring employees with specific technology skills. Continue reading Silicon Valley Competes with Corporate America for Workers

A future untapped market for media and entertainment is the time gained in our days thanks to the freedom provided by self-driving cars. As the world’s population increases, travel times also continue to grow. When we no longer have to focus on the road while in our vehicles, all that time becomes a perfect opportunity to provide content. Audi and Disney have partnered to create what the German automaker is calling a “new type of media” to fill that time. The fruits of this partnership are scheduled to be revealed at January’s CES in Las Vegas. Continue reading Audi, Disney to Demo Media for Autonomous Vehicles at CES

A group of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists believe blockchain can be used with artificial intelligence to create an open marketplace and thus speed development of AI projects. University of California computer science professor Dawn Song and Hanson Robotics chief scientist Ben Goertzel are among the group that wager adoption of blockchain would create a wider distribution of data and algorithms. That would democratize the development of AI beyond the handful of large companies currently dominating the field. Continue reading Startups Use Blockchain to Democratize Artificial Intelligence

According to Gartner Research vice president Brian Burke, the democratization of AI is one of the five megatrends impacting emerging technologies. Although AI is currently in the “hype” stage of its evolution, to be followed by disillusionment, by 2020 it is expected to shape 80 percent of new technologies. Pursuant to that prediction, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) released plans for a college of artificial intelligence to be built with $1 billion in investment, of which two-thirds has already been raised. Continue reading Gartner Labels AI a Megatrend, MIT Plans AI-Centric College