Column and Events WORLD EVENTS AI in AV: IFA Berlin 2018


31 August - 3 September 2018 Messe BerlinGermany


IFA in Berlin, the global trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances, presents the latest products and innovations in the heart of Europe‘s most important regional market. Only IFA offers such a comprehen- sive overview of the international market and attracts the attention of trade visitors each year from more than 100 countries. IFA is the main meeting place for key retailers, buyers, and experts from the industry and the media. Don't miss the opportunity to explore emerging trends and celebrate the premieres of new technologies and products. Web site: http://b2b.ifa-berlin.com/


CEDIA Expo 2018 4 - 8 September 2018


San Diego Convention Centre CA, USA


The Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association invites you to San Diego, California for CEDIA Expo. The Trade Sho takes place at San Diego Convention Center. CEDIA Expo 2018 is actually a stage where several primary solutions and products are to be put on show; these will be about Design, Electronics, Homes, Consumer Electronics, Multimedia Technologies, Installa- tion Technology, Household Appliances and Home Technology. This year more than 20000 industry leaders, and professionals are coming together in San Diego, California USA for CEDIA Expo 2018.


Connect: age of collaboration 26 – 27 September 2018 Design Museum Kensington London UK


‘Connect: People: age of collaboration’ is a new experiential event to be staged by Maverick AV Solutions at Kensington’s Design Museum on the 26th and 27th September this year. The mixed trade and end-user event will flag-up opportu- nities to conduct collaborative business in agile workspaces while supporting work-life integration. The interactive programme will use innovative technolo- gies to replicate efficient new business processes, and the new agile workspac- es and technologies of the contemporary enterprise. Register your interest at: www.connect-ageofcollaboration.com


Enterprise Business Collaboration 18 – 20 November 2018 Meliá Berlin Germany


Enterprise Business Collaboration offers you the unique opportunity to posi- tion your business in front of leading enterprise collaboration experts and is designed to maximise your time with your target audience and new business prospects. From the thought-provoking plenary and business stream sessions to networking at the Icebreaker and World Café sessions, your company will be front and center. Do you have a solution or product and would like to present, exhibit or meet active buyers?


threat or opportunity?


Lifesize has announced a partnership with Voicera to introduce the Eva virtual assistant to voice and video meetings. Eva uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a transcript of the meeting and to highlight actions points. Billionaire futurist Elon Musk has identified AI as “the greatest risk to the survival of the human race”, while at the same time acknowledging that: “If your competitor is rushing to develop AI and you are not, you will be crushed.” Bryan Denyer attempts to square the circle.


Environmentalist, entrepreneur and space pioneer Elon Musk has a real bee in his baseball cap about AI. One of his favou- rite stories, concerns the game of Go. Go is an abstract strate- gy board game for two players, in which the object is to sur- round more territory than your opponent. A few years ago, it was thought that no computer device could ever have the ca- pability of being a human play- er of Go. Then two years ago, a computer beat the human world champion of Go. Today a computer is capable of tak- ing on the world’s Top 50 Go players simultaneously, and the computer would beat them all. So what, you might ask? But Musk also cites a more seri- ous example. He describes


“If


your competitor is rushing to develop AI and you are not, you will be crushed.” Elon Musk


a theoretical AI solution for stock market investment opti- misation. The device could be programmed to go long on de- fence, short on consumer and then through a combination of fake news and spoof email ac- counts create conditions where war was the likely outcome – a great result for the AI technol- ogists and stock market inves- tors, but not so good for the planet.


Alert to the possible conse- quences of the machines tak- ing over, and the resulting job losses as humans are literally rendered redundant. Musk is using his celebrity profile to advocate regulation of the AI space “for the public good”. But isn’t that a bit draconi- an? Eva is designed to make notes and to try to improve post-meeting follow-up, rather than to poison the board and strip their bank accounts. Ultimately safeguards will be needed, but it is surely harsh


to strangle a new branch of technology before its is even partially formed? AI has some thigs that it already really good at – an example might be inter- preting big data in a digital sig- nage application. Or using Eva to distil interminable meetings into a list of action points that might actually be actioned? But, currently, there are some things that AI is not so good at, and that require much more work. Eric Horvitz, MD at Mi- crosoft Research, explains that it is not currently practical to “encode common-sense”. The human-machine interface is still somewhat stilted in terms of conversational flow, although this is largely a consequence of computational limitations. Hor- vitz says that: “Conversation is a difficult intellectual tango,” and while coding “compelling and engaging personalities is a possibility, the user is left with the feeling that the lights are on but there’s nobody at home.” For


the foreseeable future,


AI applications are likely to be concentrated on enhancing hu- man productivity and the qual-


ity of the human experience. In fact. AI is often defined as “the simulation of human intelli- gence processes by machines, especially computer systems. These processes include learn- ing (the acquisition of infor- mation and rules for using the information), reasoning (using the rules to reach approximate or definite conclusions) and self-correction. Particular ap- plications of AI include expert systems, speech recognition and machine vision.”


Nowhere does the definition


refer to destroying the human race.


But, just in case, Elon Musk is supporting his view that access AI technology should be democ- ratised by funding the OpenAI initiative. Musk argues that reg- ulation has to be proactive. rath- er than reactive, as we approach the point of ‘Singularity’ (where the power of computers exceeds the power of the human brain.) He argues that by the time we are reactive it will be too late. For now, most early adopters’ experience of AI is limited to commercial developments in- cluding IBM Watson, Google’s


Deep Learning, and conver- sational assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google’s Now and Microsoft’s Cortana. But there is another category of AI, already commonly in use, that has more short-term rel- evance for AV - AI solutions designed for specific tasks (so-called “narrow AI”). Exam- ples include systems that: can recommend things based on past behaviour; those that can learn to recognise images from other examples; and those that can make decisions based on the syntheses of evidence. While development since the term Artificial Intelligence was coined, as far back as 1956, has really accelerated recently, it is the ‘narrow AI’ thread that has received most attention – and arguably achieved the most in terms of the human experience. The convenience of a fridge placing an order with a store for the ingredients from a recipe is currently win- ning the battle with any con- cerns about the fridge ganging up with the waste processor to devastate the food chain.


Lifesize has announced a partnership with Voicera to introduce the Eva virtual assistant to voice and video meet- ings. Eva uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create a transcript of the meeting and to highlight actions points.


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