For the 3rd straight year, the New Jersey Tech Council (NJTC) has held a day-long forum on various technology topics at Bell Works in Holmdel. This year’s Future Forum, on May 7th, featured a panel, ‘AI: The Challenges Ahead,’ in which I participated, with moderator Steve LeVine, from Axios, and featuring K.P. (Suba) Subbalakshmi, from Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence; Anastassia Loukina, from Educational Testing Service, and Brian McLaughlin, from Rutgers University. It was great to discuss AI topics with academics, since I have worked with several researchers from European universities in the AI field. This was one of those sessions that could have gone on for much longer, and it was great to finally meet Steve LeVine in person. It was also great to see how much progress has been made on Bell Works, which has grown immeasurably in the past two years. The event concluded with a reception and award ceremony on the Bell Works palazzo, complete with aerialists and characters from ‘Game of Thrones’ (the Night King was quite evident). The old Bell Labs space that I knew so well from the late 1990s has become a thriving hub for innovation and commerce – a minor miracle considering its overwhelming size.

Steve LeVine, from Axios; Suba Subbalakshmi from Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence; Chris Pfaff; Anastasia Loukina, from Educational Testing Service, and Brian McLaughlin, from Rutgers University, on the ‘AI: The Challenges Ahead’ panel at the NJTC Future Forum

(from left to right) Steve Socolof, from Tech Council Ventures speaks with attendee; Sid Ahuja, from Yorktel, and Chris White, from Nokia Bell Labs, before Chris White’s keynote presentation at the NJTC Future Forum

Chris Pfaff, Sid Ahuja, and Steve Socolof, after the event: the old Lucent New Ventures Group gang has a reunion

Sanjay Macwan (with microphone), from Vonage, speaks on the AI Perspectives panel, with Kurt Bettenhausen, from Siemens; Merwan Mereby, from Panasonic, Dan Tinkoff, from McKinsey, and Ibrahim Mohamed, from Google

Chris Pfaff and Sanjay Macwan, at the NJTC Future Forum reception

Chris Pfaff encounters the Night King at the NJTC Future Forum reception

The stilt lady at the NJTC Future Forum reception: I have always looked up to her; she has always looked down on me

The old transistor-inspired water tower at the entrance to Bell Works, Holmdel, NJ

On the first morning of IBC 2017, Chris Pfaff Tech Media and Integer 1 hosted the IBC Video Content Innovation Summit at the Rockstart Accelerator in Amsterdam, which featured some of the leading innovators in the broadcast technology space today, including Vimond; Verizon envrmnt; HCL, and Valossa.

Emceed by Chris Pfaff, the breakfast event, held in the main event room at Rockstart, featured a technology keynote from Sanjay Macwan, focused on the shifting landscape for content distribution and consumption, and presented the audience of 55 producers, distributors, and vendors a view into where global content behaviors are headed. Macwan moderated a panel with Helge Hoibraaten, CEO of Vimond, Mika Rautiainen, CEO of Valossa, and Raheel Khalid, CTO of Verizon envrmnt (Kanwaldeep Kalsi, VP of Media for HCL, could not make the event, due to a delayed flight). The event literally presented some of the leading figures in OTT (Vimond), VR and AR (Verizon envrmnt), AI (Valossa), and cloud infrastructure (HCL).

Chris Pfaff emcees the IBC Video Content Innovation Summit

Sanjay Macwan, CEO of Integer 1, presents his keynote 

Sanjay gets into discussing the Muybridge experiment

Poster on front door of Rockstart Accelerator, Amsterdam

Raheel Khalid, CTO of Verizon envrmnt

Helge Hoibraaten, CEO of Vimond

Sanjay Macwan, left, and Mika Rautiainen, right

Long shot of the event room at Rockstart Accelerator

Sanjay poses a question to the panel

Raheel Khalid, Verizon envrmnt           Helge Hoibraaten, Vimond                   Mika Rautiainen, Valossa                     AI, OTT, and VR/AR all-stars

Highlights from the panel discussion included Helge’s discussion regarding content consumption (“we now have all the content we would ever want – in some ways, we don’t have to produce any more”) and content behaviors (“we interviewed teenagers about TV and they said ‘I have everything that I need in my phone'”). Raheel discussed the issue of every-cinreasing on -demand behaviors, in that people will “not wait for large files to download.” he said that Verizon envrmnt can now stream large-file content by taking game logic and running it on the fly. In this sense, VR and AR content is seamlessly distributed. He discussed Verizon envrmnt’s mobile edge compute strategy – which takes 20 milliseconds for a round trip. With 5G coming in, 1 gigabit bandwidth will enable VR content to be flawlessly streamed. Mika talked about the need to understand how video can be read and how machine learning can train to enable smarter questions around content itself.

See the promo highlight video at: https://youtu.be/lfZPjMLZa-w

The event was a swan song for Rockstart, as it was the last event in the main room at their 182 Herengracht location (they have since moved slightly north to a larger facility). But, it was a kickstart for IBC 2017, and in addition to a good meal, the crowd feasted on some hearty discussion.

This year’s IBC will likely have more content producers and distributors seeking solutions in AI, VR/AR, OTT, and cloud management. So, in order to help kick off this year’s show right, we have curated some of the leading players in media innovation today, and they are all at IBC 2017 at our Video Content Innovation Summit.