How was the NVIDIA event?
On October 9, 10, and 11, Pervasive Technologies had the opportunity to be present at NVIDIA Europe GTC 2018, the most important summit on Artificial Intelligence in Europe, held this year in Munich, Germany.
Pervasive Technologies was selected to actively participate in the event with one of its most outstanding projects last year, focused on the application of Deep Learning in the Retail sector.
Our Chief Data Scientist Albert Climent was there to give a lecture on the project to all the attendees. Likewise, some selected projects were also exposed through a large infographic so that everyone could enjoy a written explanation during the days of the event.
We had the opportunity to hear Albert Climent, Pervasive’s representative at NVIDIA Europe GTC, tell us what it was like to participate in this experience first hand.
Interview with Albert Climent, Chief Data Scientist of PervasiveTechnologies
Q: What were your impressions of the NVIDIA GTC event?
A: The event was well organized, starting with a talk by NVIDIA CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang showing what’s new, focused on three blocks: Autonomous Drive, Real Time Light Rendering, and a new module aimed at developing Deep Learning and Machine Learning models.
There were many talks, oriented both to people with technical profiles and to more business-oriented profiles. Some talks were very interesting, although attending all of them was impossible.
Q: What theme or trend was the protagonist of the event?
A: The main theme of the event was autonomous vehicles, from children’s coaches to racing cars, including trucks and cars for daily use. Deep Learning technologies will not only allow for autonomous cars, but also add safety systems to existing cars. For example, identifying driver fatigue and warning them to avoid accidents.
Q: What do these types of events contribute to Artificial Intelligence Startups?
A: These types of events provide vision of new technologies, allow you to find business opportunities, seek funding and cooperation for new products and solutions.
Q: Which lecture did you find most interesting and why?
A: At a particular level and knowing the cost for the generation of Datasets, I opt for the talk “Object Detection Training: An Online Learning Pipeline for Humanoid Robots”, where a robot was trained to locate and detect new objects in a very short time.
Q: What was the space for the posters like and what was their function?
A: The space was a little bit reduced and the truth is that not many people stopped there as it was more of a transit area. Even so, on the first day in the afternoon we were invited to be near the posters to resolve doubts or to give talks about the posters in this area.
Pervasive Technologies and the next editions of the event
Q: What did participating in NVIDIA Europe GTC mean to you personally?
A: I think it is an enriching experience on a personal level. To be able to understand the speed at which technology evolves giving solutions that were unimaginable until now and allows the mind to imagine the future. In addition, it is very satisfying to be able to expose and defend the work done by the team.
Q: Do you recommend both attending and participating?
A: I think I would recommend more participation than assisting those who want to expose their solutions to the world. Still, being able to attend also helps to see what others are doing, to learn about jobs and technologies applicable in our sector.
Q: Would you repeat in the next edition?
A: Without hesitation. Having a space to present success stories based on cutting-edge technologies while learning about other approaches and solutions is very enriching.
Q: Any anecdotes?
A: There were two curious points: an ice cream shop and a popcorn shop with flavors (caramel, wasabi, coffee, apple,…), but the surprising thing happened on the last day, when the event closed. There was a truck at the entrance, without a cabin or driver, totally autonomous. To remove it they used a radio control, as if it were a toy. The problem came when they wanted to put it on a trailer of a truck with a driver to take it away: the toy didn’t have enough strength to get on the platform and they needed about a dozen people to push it. A whole odyssey of new technologies.