For four days in early January, the world’s biggest brands gathered in Las Vegas to do business, meet new partners and showcase their latest innovations. CES® is the most influential tech event in the world — the proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators. More than 3,200 exhibitors as well as 323 Fortune Global 500 companies attended the 2023 event representing 174 countries in 41 different technology categories.
YPO’s CEO Insights caught up with YPO member and Deputy Chief Executive Officer at Smart Eye, Rana el Kaliouby, for her takeaways from this year’s CES. The one thing attendees could not ignore: electric vehicles. “They are everywhere,” she says. “We had Polestar in our booth. Vinfast had a big presence (the Vietnamese EV), and even Togg from Turkey is building an EV.”
Driver monitoring is a must-have. Several car manufacturers featured vehicles with Smart Eye’s driver monitoring systems (DMS) including the brand new Polestar 3 (which was showcased for the first time in North America). These are programs we won several years ago, so it is great to finally see those in production.
Your car is becoming emotionally intelligent, and it’s your next wellness center! At CES 2023, we saw a growing intersection between wellness, mobility, and AI – specifically, the application of a multitude of sensors and AI to understand and support drivers’ physical, emotional and mental health, all to improve safety on the road. Smart Eye showcased a complete interior sensing solution as well as radar-based breathing rate monitoring.
Vehicles and emotions are the trend. BMW released a show car called I Vision Dee (Digital Emotional Experience). The car has the next level human-machine interaction and is designed to serve as the driver’s companion.
In 2023, interior sensing solutions will combine driver monitoring and cabin monitoring to gain a complete view of what happens to people in a vehicle. This will unlock new, advanced safety use cases such as driver intoxication, sudden illness, or a child left behind unattended. “Imagine if a vehicle could measure your facial expressions, your heart rate and heart rate variability to understand your stress level,” says El Kaliouby. “Using that insight, the car could personalize and tailor the in-vehicle experience to your needs in the moment — for instance, adjusting the lighting or heating conditions, or playing calming music.” Mercedes is heavily investing in their cars as wellness hubs, and HARMAN Automotive is investing in in-vehicle heart rate monitoring.
“I met with Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), and I am so excited about the opportunity to make a difference here with our technology,” El Kaliouby says.
Generative AI will disrupt every industry as we know it today! “I was on a panel about trends in AI, and of course, generative AI is the hottest topic around AI. Large language models such as ChatGPT and generative AI such as Dall-E and stability will transform creative industries, education, even what it means to be a computer scientist or software engineer because ChatGPT can now write code too!”
Mitigating data and algorithmic bias. Ethics and data bias kept coming up. In 2023, synthetic data will be a game-changer in accelerating the development and deployment of AI, while guarding against algorithmic bias. “One of the significant challenges in developing AI is getting the right amount and diversity of data to train machine learning-based algorithms,” says El Kaliouby.
These algorithms require massive amounts of data that are representative of the different people that will interact with it and the contexts in which it will be used. It is difficult, time-consuming, and costly to acquire this breadth and depth of data. Data synthesis enables AI companies to rapidly augment their existing datasets and simulate scenarios that are difficult to generate in the real world.
For example, el Kaliouby says synthetic data tools can use a source image of a driver to create synthetic variations that use varying lighting conditions or head movements. It could even simulate a driver falling asleep behind the wheel – data that is rare and very dangerous to capture in real life. “Deploying synthetic data tools is key to not only solving these complex challenges of data collection, but also to combat algorithmic bias, by ensuring datasets are truly diverse,” she adds.
