Day Three
Agenda

Chris Cowart will share background on SRI along with key moments of major technology development over the past 50 years. He will provide insights on the organization and process which reinforces the continuous invention of the technology and spin out of influential startup ventures. He will also share a recent top 10 list of emerging applied research projects at SRI, which might represent the next decade of inventions.

Amit Mulgaonkar, PhD, will lead a unique and backstage visit to SRI robotics laboratory, which has been the wellspring of numerous industry creating inventions. He will also share closely held stories of how an audacious use case, emerging technology, breakthrough, and business context, all come together for a disruptive innovation. Participants will also have an opportunity for a hands-on session with a new SRI robotics platform driven by simple VR hardware.

After fifty years of factory based robots for the automotive industry,we’re now seeing an array of entirely new robotics technologiesentering the world. This isn’t simply a matter of quantity, in the lastdecade the fundamental way that robots operate in the real worldhas changed. Affordable computation has enabled a revolution inmachine learning and AI. When combined with affordable perception,there has been a revolution in robotics. Not only are robots farmore capable, opening up many new industry applications, theyare also capable of collaborative operation alongside people. Thissession walks through the underlying technologies and examples ofnew applications made possible in the last decade, finishing with apreview of the next wave of robotics innovation, soft robots, swarmrobots, micro and nanorobotics. Planning for robots used to be anovelty, but now it’s a reality for everyone.

Over the past decade, technology companies have been developing an entirely new paradigm of computing, often described using terms like augmented and virtual reality, the metaverse, or spatial computing. While the terms vary, they broadly refer to a shift in computer interfaces that make use of three-dimensional space.

Companies like Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA are now reorienting their entire enterprise strategies around these technologies.In this session, developed for DEEP, participants will get a foundational understanding of the development of these tools including mixed reality devices, industrial digital twins, and other types of virtual environment technologies. Situated within this context, we’ll explore specific use cases relevant for Aramco’s enterprise initiatives including efforts to integrate a variety of exponential technologies and innovation toward sustainability.

Discussions may explore topics including training and development,assisted reality for manufacturing, maintenance, and repair,and industrial simulation tools to augment future AI workflows. Participants will get a clear sense of what these technologies are andare not useful for and so this session will cut through the hype that surrounds these topics today.

Overall, we’ll explore an important paradigm shift in computing which promises to forever reshape the relationship between humans and machines.