Semiconductor C-level Executives Explore the Seventh Sense!

The GSA US Executive Forum is in its 5[SUP]th[/SUP] year. It is a time for top level semiconductor executives to meet and try to make sense of a very complex and fast moving industry that has tremendous influence on modern day life. You can see a list of attendees with bios and pictures HERE. There is a lot to talk about (The Future of Drones and Cloud Robotics, The Truth about Deep Learning, Connected Vehicles in Smart Cities…) but let’s first talk about the location.

The event is held at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel in Menlo Park for a reason. Sand Hill is the Silicon Valley version of Wall Street due to the concentration of venture capitalists who funded the majority of semiconductor companies that we all benefit from today. It is also a five star hotel on 16 acres of sweeping Northern California landscape and offers the best food on the conference circuit, absolutely!

The content of this conference is a bit overwhelming but let me tell you this, the key takeaway is that the data flow to and from the cloud is growing exponentially so Intel and the entire cloud supply chain, specifically TSMC, will continue to post record growth numbers for sure.

The most entertaining talk came from Dr. Peter Stone (Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin) and his presentation on Autonomous Learning Agents. Dr. Stone used his RoboCup championship soccer team as an example. SoftBank (which acquired ARM) is also a RoboCup competitor so you can probably expect ARM to start talking more about robotics. These robots are connected through the cloud so they can work as a team. The goal is for robots to beat humans in soccer by 2025 but as you can see by these clips they have quite a ways to go:

The international RoboCup community fosters the development of intelligent robots by defining and executing competitions that are used by scientists and students from all over the world to test and demonstrate their robots in attractive, realistic scenarios. See for yourself what RoboCup teams have achieved in the past 20 years. Meet more than 3,500 dedicated scientists and developers from more than 40 countries. Be inspired by the contests, and become part of the RoboCup network.

For those of you who, like me, grew up with the Jetsons, the robotic revolution should not surprise you at all.

The keynote was based on the book “The Seventh Sense” by Joshua Cooper Ramo and was absolutely incredible. I am reading his book now but I do not have the space here to do it justice so I found a clip that does:

Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? What if you could understand why?

In this groundbreaking new book, Joshua Cooper Ramo examines the historic force now shaking our world – and explains how each of us can master it. The Seventh Sense won’t merely change the way you see the world. It will also give you the power to change it.

Also read: Robots could eventually replace soldiers in warfare. Is that a good thing?