Austin, TX. “What inspires you?” That was the simple question put to a panel of technologists at the closing day of NIWeek Thursday morning. Dr. James Truchard, NI co-founder and chairman of the board, who stepped down as CEO at the end of last year, commented that not everyone will be working on autonomous vehicles, but all of us will be affected professionally and personally by the underlying technology. Radar, LiDAR, and other technologies used in autonomous vehicles will become available for other applications. “If you don’t want to be disrupted, you better understand how these technologies affect you, your company, and your job,” he said.
Scott Tomlinson, chief commercial officer and senior vice president for global sales marketing at Beyond Limits, commented that despite some hype, AI is inspiring. And finally, Bob O’Donnell, president, TECHnalysis Research, said he took inspiration from presentations he had seen during the previous two days of NIWeek—ranging from methane leak detection to satellite deployment.
O’Donnell further comment that ironically, as technology advances, it becomes contextual and recedes into the background—“as it gets better it gets less apparent.”
Duncan Hudson, chief platform officer at NI and moderator of the session, then asked what technologies and prototypes will emerge over the next five or ten years. Dr. Truchard said sensors will become pervasive, with distributed systems allocating processing of sensor at the edge and in the cloud for applications spanning medicine, transportation, and manufacturing.
O’Donnell said he expects to see a lot of development around various types of AI, raising attendant social issues—such as what happens to people making a living driving trucks when autonomous vehicles arrive. Further, he said, we are endanger of losing the touch and feel of the “ultrahigh-resolution analog world” in which we live.
Dr. Truchard added that research is looking at how humans fit into the equation—the “human in the loop.” Tomlinson added that we don’t want to lose “that sense of self.”
Hudson then asked how AI and machine learning are changing the way scientists and engineers implement test, measurement, and control. Tomlinson alluded to an “expert in a box”—one expert can’t inspect 30,000 oil wells, for example, but AI and machine learning can leverage that expert’s knowledge. Dr. Truchard said NI embraces a system’s complete design and control elements to predict what must be tested. And it’s not just the electronic elements but the “big picture” of the “physical world.”
O’Donnell noted that AI training has been the domain of the datacenter, but now a smartphone is capable of inferencing and even some training, opening the door to AI-based test and measurement happening in real time at the edge. Dr. Truchard re-emphasized a point he made earlier that a distributed view with TSN us critical. “You need to know when things happen to make sure the computation is done at the right time,” he said. “That’s where the action is as we go forward.”
The conversation then turned to the Internet of Things—and in particular, the industrial IoT. Panelists expressed skepticism with regard to the topic, although Dr. Truchard predicted a path forward of continuous change with incremental additions of functionality.
