Sometimes the centre of gravity in tech is very clear, but as we enter 2022 there are lots of areas where trillion dollar questions are wide open. These are the questions I wonder about today, from crypto to cars to fast fashion - there are others.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this list of technology questions for 2022 feels like an answer to the question "what is digital disruption?".
We have reached a moment in time where old technologies - eCommerce or videoconferencing for example - are finally breaking into established industries. And the impact, at scale, cannot be found in technology but rather in every single industry it disrupts.
Driverless trucks are already heading out to the highway, as shipping companies increasingly look to autonomous technology to meet rising demand for goods.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: interesting study from Deloitte about the future of self driving and the first possible market to be disrupted: delivery truck in southern USA.
Everything you need to know about lidar in five minutes or less including what it means and its uses.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: an exceptionally good intro to lidar technologies and its myriad of applications - it's not just for self driving cars. And note that one of the leading companies in the field is from Quebec city!
When Commander detects that something in the road ahead cannot be handled by itself, it gracefully transitions control to Telessist, our novel remote assistance technology. Telessist enables our robotaxi service to scale quicker, safely driving riders through any scenario that the world can throw at us.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a very interesting article about a robot taxi system, how it works and its limitations. Fun read to understand what is possible and what is not in self driving tech today. This is important because many of digital transformation use case depend on this for profitability (for example eCommerce delivery cost should reduce drastically when this available).
The coronavirus pandemic means the AR glasses have become even more useful for those working on the 911, Cayenne, Taycan, and other Porsches.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: everyone has experienced remote work in recent weeks. Zoom, Teams or Meet are fine if you work in an office. But out there in the fields, you need more. Enters AR, with the promise of hands free access to knowledge and télécommunications. This articles explains how AR is used to repair high end cars. Other applications include field service, architecture, etc. But be careful: the devices are bulky, with limited battery life and clunky software. For example, the company behind the AR glasses mentioned in the article has shut down a few years ago and magic leap is in dire straights. AR will remain an R&D experiment until Microsoft (most advanced today), Facebook, or Apple delivers useful glasses to the masses.
Chinese startup UDI deploys self-driving vans to deliver food to lockdown areas. To do that, the startup has hired 100 employees and is preparing to put its assembly line into high gear in the next several months. “I’m not saying we solved all the problems,” Professor Liu says, citing system integration and cost as the biggest challenges. “Can we do better? Yes, it can always be better.”Click here to edit the content
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: tragedies often inspire innovation. I assume the autonomous vehicle will get a shot in the arm in the new normal of limited contacts. Watch the videos in the article to get a feeling on how the vans drive themselves - it is sometimes scary. Lots of improvements are required.
Engineering teams at Tesla, GM, Honda, and others are struggling to make self-driving cars work properly.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: a great review of autonomous car state of the art as well as some thoughts on what cities may look like when self-driving cars are among us. Spoiler: it will bee great but it will take time... ;-)
Demand for location services and location intelligence continues to expand across multiple sectors, including automotive, enterprise and IoT, mobility services, mobile apps and digital advertising. Location platforms which can meet the needs of key sectors and use-cases will be best placed placed for growth.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: maps are and essential component for many digital transformation solutions. This detailed report provides a comparative study between the major providers. Sorry not to see openStreetMap or others.
Expansion through pilot with tech company Nuro. Walmart continues expanding its Grocery Pickup and Delivery service, currently with nearly 3,100 pickup locations, and deliveries from more than 1,600 stores.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is the Holy Grail of eCommerce: cheap, fast, reliable delivery of orders. Looks like grocery delivery, with its high frequency and large order size is the killer app as evidenced by these many tests by Walmart and - my own opinion - the acquisition of Whole Foods by Amazon.
Shared mobility services are more convenient — and in some cases, more affordable — than owning a car. We break down a number of these emerging modes of transport by trip length. Personal car ownership isn’t dead yet. That said, as cities in the US grow more congested, public transportation systems are failing and traffic is worsening, all of which is making quick and efficient transport more difficult.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: amazing review of the changes coming to personal transportation in the coming years.
Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has plans to colonize Mars, and thinks AI may turn humans into its pets. Here's how Musk's companies are actually taking on virtually every industry.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: impressive to see how ar and wide his impact has been.
Robo-cars are picking up everything its sensors see, hear, and detect. So to corral all this information, Cruise — through a hackathon event — created an open-source data visualization platform called Webviz. Other autonomous vehicle companies offer different aspects of the self-driving process, like Baidu's Apollo open-source autonomous driving platform. Now Cruise is opening up its application for anyone who works with robotics.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: interesting to see all the data self-driving cars process. More interesting though is that tools and technologies required to make self-driving cars, trucks and other vehicles is becoming more readily available which should spark an even faster adoption cycle.
US corporates are currently using facial recognition for everything from fast food orders to trying on makeup to issuing life insurance policies, and more.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTER: facial recognition used to be a very difficult thing to do but AI and machine learning specifically has blown this out the water opening the way for a slew of real world useful applications.
For the past few months Tesla has been slowly sharing details of its upcoming “Hardware 3” (HW3) changes soon to be introduced into its S/X/3 lineup. Tesla has stated that cars will begin to be built with the new computer sometime in the first half of 2019, and they have said that this is a simple computer upgrade, with all vehicle sensors (radar, ultrasonics, cameras) staying the same. Today we have some information about what HW3 actually will (and won’t) be.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this very detailed and technical article describes the hardware components that make up the Tesla computer that drives autopilot and that should be powerful enough to enable self-driving in every Tesla today as promised.
Tesla ha appena presentato sul mercato la nuova model3, l'auto che ufficialmente è in grado di guidare da sola. La parte interessante è che anche i vecchi modelli (quelli in grado di offrire un autopilot "parziale") potranno essere aggiornati con un chip che si trova dietro il volante, rendendo quindi potenzialmente tutte le tesla in grado di guidare senza autista.
Ritengo che questa tecnologia sia ancora acerba, ma senz'altro riguarderà il futuro dei trasporti nelle nostre città.
This conversation happened after the release of the paper from our group at MIT on driver functional vigilance during use of Tesla's Autopilot. The Tesla team reached out to me offering a podcast conversation with Mr Musk. I accepted, with full control of questions I could ask and choice of what is released publicly. I ended up editing out nothing of substance. This was an insightful discussion on various aspects of Tesla Autopilot that I hope catalyzes further nuanced conversation on the future of AI-assisted driving. Starts at 2:35. The full outline of the video is as follows: 0:00 Introduction 2:35 Start of conversation: Autopilot motivation 4:01 Display the vehicle's perception of the driving scene 7:11 Algorithms, data, and hardware development 10:23 Edge cases and common cases in driving 12:18 Navigate on Autopilot 13:57 Hardware and software path toward fully autonomy 17:08 Driver supervision of Autopilot 20:13 Human side of Tesla Autopilot (driver functional vigilance) 23:13 Driver monitoring 24:30 Operational design domain 26:57 Securing Autopilot against adversarial machine learning 28:29 Narrow AI and artificial general intelligence 30:10 Physics view of love 31:53 First question for an artificial general intelligence system
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this is a very geeky interview with Elon Musk on autopilot and the future of self-driving cars. Thoughtful, structured and informative it brings to light a very strong point: the value of a car lies in its capacity to self drive and every Tesla has this feature already builtin. Basically it means that cars will soon cross the threshold of autonomy, opening a whole new era for personal transportation. But more importantly I believe for businesses that rely on delivery logistics: ecommerce of course but also groceries, medical supplies, etc.
Driverless vehicles are hardly a novel concept anymore, but what is really going on in the autonomous car industry? How do self-driving cars work? Who are making these cars? Why is it taking this long? This article will answer these questions.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: this article provides a good overview of the current state of the art in self-driving cars, the players involved, an idea of the investments required and a list of challenges that explains why we are where we are and still have to drive our cars on the road today...
Nuro, the autonomous delivery startup, has raised $940 million in financing from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a whopping amount that will be used to expand its delivery service, add new partners, hire employees and scale up its fleet of self-driving bots. Nuro has raised more than $1 billion.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IOT MATTERS: fast & cheap delivery is the last issue to solve for eCommerce. This massive investment means that the technology will get deployed more widely. Unfortunately, as opposed to UBER, the company must manufacture deploy and manage the fleet of vehicle, which means that you will not it Nuro explode on the market in a few years like UBER did in the past 5 years.
Statistically, the least reliable part of the car is ... the driver. Chris Urmson heads up Google's driverless car program, one of several efforts to remove humans from the driver's seat. He talks about where his program is right now, and shares fascinating footage that shows how the car sees the road and makes autonomous decisions about what to do next.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: great visual explanation of how driverless cars see the world. Applications of this technology are endless in business: self driving wheelbarrows on shop floors or construction sites, worker safety warning systems in dangerous environments, package delivery system in hospitals, etc. Content starts at 7m30s approximately
Experimental Design imagines another scenario: neighborhoods eliminate the growing stream of delivery vehicles by organizing central locations or deploying a kind of package delivery van that comes around once or twice a day like an ice-cream truck. Neighbors might gather around the day’s influx of retail goods and exchange news, transforming the hermetic life behind closed garage doors into a more open and collaborative kind of community.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: the impact of self-driving cars for cities that were designed and built around cars remains unknown. Phoenix being one of them where Google waymo self-driving taxis is being tested at scale today. This article explores the possible impacts and they are fascinating, going well beyond transportation.
Dave Mercer has been driving trucks across America since 1986. He has hauled ice cream to Nevada, burgers to Oregon, and trailers to Baltimore. “It can be a rough life,” he says. “You’re away from…
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: self-driving cars may actually impact the truck transportation industry in a huge way. The papers explores how it will do so.
The future of navigation will be centralized around HD maps. While plenty of companies exist to provide this type of data, all are limited by paywalls and strict Terms-of-Service. It is time for this paradigm to change. Comma.ai is releasing US interstate HD maps from our 5,000,000+ miles of data.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: to make digital transformation a reality we required to blend the digital and the real world. In particular it is essential to have high definition maps of the real world and this paper explains why this is important, and why they have made their model opensource for everyone to see and use.
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Once prospective partners in the ecosystem have been identified, there are a variety of ways to work with them, ranging from collaborations that involve a limited financial commitment to outright acquisitions.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: large organizations are not structured to deliver on the innovation that digital transformations required. Partnering with startups is thus the way to go.
The digital center of competence (DCoC) is responsible for setting direction and ensuring that learning is widely shared. In this structure, the competence center does not have P&L responsibilities, but it does have its own budget, and each business unit (BU) owns its own internal digital initiatives. The DCoC assumes three important functions to develop products and services, build skills across BUs, and create external networks.
Farid Mheir's insight:
WHY IT MATTERS: when you create a digital center of competence (which McKinsey suggests and I agree in most organizations), then you must equip it with a budget (seems obvious but rarely is) and give it a goal to DELIVER (not just strategize or think, which is often the case). This is the only way you can have the DCOC be owner of its future and the transformation that comes with it.
WHY IT MATTERS: when you create a digital center of competence (which McKinsey suggests and I agree in most organizations), then you must equip it with a budget (seems obvious but rarely is) and give it a goal to DELIVER (not just strategize or think, which is often the case). This is the only way you can have the DCOC be owner of its future and the transformation that comes with it.
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WHY IT MATTERS: this list of technology questions for 2022 feels like an answer to the question "what is digital disruption?".
We have reached a moment in time where old technologies - eCommerce or videoconferencing for example - are finally breaking into established industries. And the impact, at scale, cannot be found in technology but rather in every single industry it disrupts.
Very thoughtful piece, very good questions.