Stringify co-founder and CTO Dave Evans, the guy who coined the term “Internet of Everything” at Cisco, will deliver the opening keynote at CEDIA 2017, the trade show for home-technology specialists.

During a “CEDIA Talk” last year (below), Evans noted that in the coming years, “the power of your smart phone will fit inside a red blood cell,” with massive implications for “what we connect and how we connect it.”

We won't be asking, “What is connected?” Instead, we'll be asking, “What is not connected,” he suggests.

“We now create more new data every 10 minutes than we did in all of human history as of just a few years ago,” Evans says. “All of this data has huge implications for deep learning. … The more data you put into these systems, the more they can learn.”

He points to IBM Watson, which now can teach college courses and soon could replace lawyers with its ability to process 65 million pages of text “with a linguistic understanding” per second.

As further example of deep learning, Evans points to machines that can learn to see, given massive amounts of images and descriptions scraped from numerous sources.

In one illustration (above), a computer auto-generates the correct description, “Woman in white dress standing with tennis racket with two people in green behind her.” 

Video: Stringify's Dave Evans, CEDIA Talk, 2017

Not only can machines learn to see, Evans says, “They can also see things we can’t see.”

For example, MIT’s work in Eulerian Video Magnification allows a system to determine a person’s heartbeat by amplifying frames in a video and analyzing minute changes in their skin color.

He asks the audience to “imagine the implications” of this technology for things such as baby cams and health checks for elders.

Today it is used in applications such as language translation (point your phone at foreign text) and math calculations (point your phone at an equation).

With all of the processing occurring in the cloud these days, dumb devices can become pretty smart, says Evans: “The cloud and connectivity bring super-computing capabilities to anything with a connection.”

So then there’s the issue of connectivity. Indeed, that critical component of IoT is making great strides. Today we’re seeing faster speeds, lower power requirements and new ways of communicating, for example over LED light waves (Li-Fi).

Should Home-Tech Channel Care?

All this futurism stuff – Evans was chief futurist at Cisco – does it really matter to home-technology specialists today?

Sure, it’s interesting to see where things are headed, but many lessons can be gleaned from developments along the way.

For example, you know that Photomath application that calculates complex mathematic equations via the camera on a smart phone?

How can we apply similar technology today, for example, to identify A/V components and connections?

What could we do with facial recognition? Lots of products in the channel today feature cameras that could be used to identify people, emotions, health (e.g., anomalies in movement) and much more. How might a home-automation system respond?

At the same time, many of “our” products include microphones that could be used to detect if someone falls, if a resident yells “help,” if an occupant is distressed, or if an assault is occurring … or likely to occur.

Evans will expose the industry to some new ways of thinking about the (really) smart home.

Dave Evans Keynote
Wed., Sept. 6
5:30 pm – 6:30 pm
San Diego Convention Cente

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