Pandemic Accelerated 'Digital Revolution,' Verizon CEO Tells CES

Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg in a CES keynote highlighted 5G and the technology made possible by the new generation of wireless: "You’re seeing change right before your eyes.”

“In 2020, one thing became very obvious very quickly,” Vestberg said. “As COVID-19 began to spread around the world, we leapfrogged five to seven years in the digital revolution,” speeding up the timeline for working from home, distance learning and telemedicine, he said. “We knew it was coming, but it was closer than we realized.” Mobile edge computing “places unprecedented levels of computing power right at the edge of Verizon’s 5G network,” he said.

As is the tradition for these big keynotes, Vestberg had guests Monday, starting with NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. Through a partnership with the league, Verizon will provide seven different camera angles during games and the presentation of player statistics for viewers, the company announced. Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband will be available in 28 NFL stadiums this year, it said.

Agriculture is high tech, said Jahmy Hindman, Deere chief technology officer. Hindman stood in front of a giant planter Tuesday. The FCC launched a Precision Agriculture Task Force in 2019 (see 1912090047).

Self-driving tractors are an important part of ag, Hindman said. “To the extent it takes some of the mental burden of having to drive in a very straight line off of the farmer, it just makes the whole operation more effective,” he said. A time when tractors won’t need a driver is “very close," he said.

Planting has to be precise, Hindman said: All the plants need to come out of the ground at the same time so they compete equally for sunlight, moisture and nutrients. A farmer usually has 10 days to plant a crop, he said. “We not only need to be precise and accurate, but we have to be able to do it really, really fast and do it at scale.” Farmers need up to 100 Mbps, he said, noting tractors include hundreds of sensors.

Diversity is emerging as a big issue for artificial intelligence, speakers said on a separate panel discussion Tuesday. AI is a top theme at the conference this year, as it was last year.

“Lack of representational role models is a huge problem, because you cannot be what you cannot see,” said Taniya Mishra, CEO of SureStart, an AI company. Voice recognition technology was historically developed based on “newsreader speech,” she said. Most newsreaders were white and spoke with “standard” American accents, she said. The result was a system that didn’t understand anyone who didn’t speak like a newsreader, she said. Datasets are now larger, “yet some of the issues around not being understood continue to persist,” she said: Current voice recognition systems often don’t work well for children or the elderly.

Inclusion can’t be “a checklist or a one-off-type thing,” said Annie Jean-Baptiste, Google head-product inclusion. “This is a commitment -- long-term, ongoing -- and you’re always iterating.” Diversity “really fuels innovation” and has to include “voices that are at the margin,” she said.

“If you don’t have diverse datasets built on diverse populations … you end up coming up with bad models,” said Kimberly Sterling, senior director-health economics and outcomes research at ResMed, a cloud-connectable medical devices company. Conversations are happening, and not just at shows like CES, she said.