Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Tech Festival 2017
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
Who said a city that is sunny for nearly 300 days is not a technology boom town? Come and see how much innovation is happening in this desert city. Just go to meetup.com and search for tech meetups in Phoenix. There is a tech meetup almost every day, and at times it’s more than one tech meetup taking place in the valley. There are 50+ tech meetups in Phoenix metropolitan area, and thousands of developers are actively attending these tech sessions every month.
Being the biggest community with 2000+ active members Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Tech group is the most active group in the valley, and their annual festival is attracting more and more mobile enthusiasts, developers, designers and entrepreneurs every year. Nearly 500 professionals came together on September 23rd at ASU (Arizona State University) Memorial Union to share the current state and their visions for the future direction of mobile and emerging technologies.
Kickoff and keynote
The Mayor of Tempe, Mark Mitchell kicked off the conference, by praising the political climate in Arizona under the guidance of our esteemed Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey, who has fostered the City of Tempe to become the test bed of the self-driving car companies like, Waymo, Uber, GM, Intel, Lyft and others.
Dr. Panch (Sethuraman Panchanathan) (left) and Mark Mitchell (Right)
It was then followed by the Keynote Speaker Dr. Panch (Sethuraman Panchanathan), Chief Research and Innovation Officer at ASU. Dr. Panch gave a fantastic keynote on the convergence of our time. He highlighted that it is the convergence of communications, computing, machine learning and intelligent interfaces that have made the Autonomous revolution that is upon us.
Sessions
There were four parallel tracks with talks ranging from machine learning, AR, VR, Mixed reality, AI, the future with autonomous cars, IOT among other topics that were very well received by the mobile enthusiasts that attended the conference.
Kiran Mudiam, co-organizer of the Phoenix mobile group kicking off the sessions.
Some of the highlights from the conference sessions:
• A lot of sessions on AI/ML and AR.
• AR explosion will happen soon, thanks to ARKit.
• VR will not take off near soon due to the cost and clunky headsets.
• More phones will be VR & AR Capable in the near future.
• Magic Leap might announce their headset soon.
• In 5 to 10 users, all laptops and cell phones are VR/AR Ready.
• MindMaze and Looxid Labs are tracking emotions with their headsets. Sensors on the headsets track electrical impulses from the face, eyeball movement, and brain waves. They analyze this data with proprietary algorithms to create a neural signature of an individual’s expressions without training or calibration.
• The Killer App will be telepresence for teleconferences & virtual hangouts. Check out Facebook spaces application for Oculus Rift.
• Automated cars, trucks and now airplanes - a startup called Pyka is working on self-flying planes.
• Robots will be common in next 10 to 20 years.
• Automation, AI causes mass unemployment.
• AI/ML is what developers need to focus on, and Unity is what AR/VR developers need to focus on.
State of self-driving cars - panel discussion
Steve Thompson, General Manager of Uber’s Southwest operations and Drena Kusari, General Manager for Lyft shared some insights during the panel discussion. Uber has already driven 1 million miles (30,000 rides) with their autonomous fleet of 200 cars in Pittsburgh and our backyard Tempe/Scottsdale. Lyft expects to reach level 5 (full autonomy) of driverless cars in ten years.
Uber brought one of their self-driving cars, and it became one of the major attraction at the festival. Vijaya Reethika Gottipati, a high school student posing in front of Uber self-driving car.
Speakers
The festival featured speakers from several big-name companies like Google, Intel, Microsoft, HERE, Intraedge, Clairvoyant, Prism, State Farm, Citrix, Mokriya, Kubra, ASU, Coplex, Lyft, Uber, T-Mobile, Trimble.
Conclusion
The conference ended with the tradition of raffling away devices like drones, Alexa Show, Fire TV, Echo Dots that were well received by the audience after a full day of very informative sessions and a wonderful spread of lunch provided for all the attendees.
Kudos to the Organizers of the #phxmobi Festival, Anjali Nennelli, Pranil Kanderi and Kiran Mudiam who have hosted the Festival 6 years in a row and have created the biggest tech festival here in Arizona. It was featured and covered by the Phoenix Business Journal and PBS’s Arizona Horizon program on TV.
Hari Gottipati is a tech evangelist based out of the Valley. Opinions expressed here are solely his own and do not express the views or opinions of his employer. His quotes can often be found in various technology magazines, GigaOM, CNN Money, WSJ, Bloomberg Business Week, etc. Follow him on Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn @harigottipati.