Did you miss a session from the Future of Work Summit? During the pandemic, a growing number of manufacturers have begun to pilot -- or fully embraced -- AI in their organizations. While technical and human roadblocks threaten to slow adoption, manufacturers are deploying AI across a range of maintenance, quality assurance, and production processes. Ninety-three percent of enterprises believe that AI will be a pivotal technology to drive growth and innovation in the manufacturing sector, according to Deloitte. And manufacturing companies are expected to spend $13.2 billion on AI software, hardware, and services in 2025, up from $2.9 billion in 2018.

Police Officer aims his Lidar, towards drivers that may be speeding (PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty ... [ ] Images) As LiDAR matures into a critical sensor for ADAS and Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), balancing the styling aspects of vehicle integration with functionality is becoming increasingly important. In this sense, LiDAR is simply following in the footsteps of legacy sensors like radar, cameras, and ultrasonic. They were highly visible in early deployments, but are generally invisible today. In the absence of this, components like the laser, detector, and scanner will heat up and cause performance and reliability issues. Solid-state LiDAR (either flash or using solid-state scanning) has clear advantages in this regard.

WIRE)--WekaIO (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced that Innoviz, a leading manufacturer of high-performance, solid-state Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors and Perception Software that enables the mass-production of autonomous vehicles, has selected the Weka File System (WekaFS) to accelerate its Artificial Intelligence (AI) and deep learning workflows. WekaFS has been chosen by Innoviz to improve application performance at scale and deliver high bandwidth I/O to its GPU cluster. Innoviz's solid-state LiDAR sensors are key to the future of autonomous cars. The sensors and Perception Software, which identifies, classifies, segments, and tracks objects to give autonomous vehicles a better understanding of the 3D driving scene, rely heavily on AI. Having recently closed its Series C funding round with $170M secured, Innoviz is choosing and developing the right technologies to empower it to realize its expansion plans and enhance its manufacturing capabilities.

Autonomous vehicles rely on several advanced technologies to self-navigate. We unbundle the AV to see how these technologies work together and which companies are driving them forward. Autonomous vehicles rely on a set of complementary technologies to understand and respond to their surroundings. Some AV companies are focusing on these specific components and partnering with automakers and Tier-1 suppliers to help bring their products to scale while others, such as Zoox and Nuro, are designing their vehicles from the ground up. Technology is disrupting the auto industry from all sides. Get the free report PDF to learn more.

With the notable exception of Elon Musk's Tesla Inc, most automakers have said their self-driving cars will rely on a detection system known as lidar. The state of the art sensors use laser light pulses to render precise images of the environment around the car. Pressure to launch self-driving cars is already pushing many players to place bets on the technology. General Motors Co, Ford Motor Co and BMW are expected to deploy sensors from well-funded lidar startups Velodyne and Innoviz on their initial self-driving cars over the next two years. More than $1 billion in corporate and private investment has been plowed into some 50 lidar startups over the past three years, including a record $420 million in 2018, according to a Reuters analysis of publicly available investment data.

Seven Israeli and Israeli-founded companies were among over 400 firms featured by US business magazine Fast Company on its annual "World's Most Innovative Companies" for 2019. The monthly publication's editors and writers said they sought out groundbreaking businesses across 35 industries in every world region, listing the top 10 in 41 categories such as AI, Biotech, Branding, Health, Robotics, Food, Security, and Middle East, for a total of 410 organizations. Fast Company also released its annual "50 Most Innovative Companies" but no Israeli firms made that list. In 2018, Israeli-founded navigational app Waze was featured in the top 50 alongside giants such as Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify, and Israel had its own category with 10 top startups. An additional 5 Israeli companies and startups were featured in other categories.

Building a self-driving car, it turns out, is a bit like planning a wedding. No matter how much time you give yourself, you risk being overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that need doing. In 2016, when BMW said it would deliver fully self-driving cars, as part of a ride-hailing service, by 2021, it seemed to have plenty of time. But now it has just three years left; in an industry where developing a new car can take seven years, it's a good thing the automaker has gotten around to picking its lidar supplier. Today, BMW struck a deal with industry supplier Magna, and Magna's partner Innoviz, to provide the lidar laser scanners for its self-driving cars.

When you ask Ety Zohar what fascinates her about automated driving, she thinks back to her childhood and the science fiction books she used to binge on. "It's like all the books I read as a child are suddenly being brought to life. It's a revolution," she says. A revolution that Zohar finds herself right in the middle of – because she is actively shaping it. Ety Zohar works as senior project manager at Innoviz, a thriving Israeli start-up company that is developing LiDAR sensors – a technology considered crucial for autonomous driving to prevail.

For the past decade, the easiest way to spot a self-driving car was to look for the distinctive spinning bucket mounted to its roof. The classic lidar design pioneered by Velodyne spins 64 lasers through 360 degrees, producing a three-dimensional view of the car's surroundings from the reflected laser beams. That complicated and bulky set-up has traditionally also been expensive. Velodyne's US $75,000 lidar famously cost several times the sticker price of the Toyota Priuses that formed the nucleus of Google's original self-driving car fleet. Those days are long gone.

If you worked for a startup in the 1990s, chances were you were figuring out how to make money on the brand spankin' new World Wide Web. Leap forward 10 years, and the typical startup was all about apps on your smartphone, to do everything from touching up selfies, to booking flights, to getting your laundry picked up. Now, we're in the decade of the startup launched to remake transportation--the electric cars, ride sharing networks, and personal flying machines that will transform the way people get around. Lyft, formed in 2012, joined Uber and others in persuading people that's it's fine to get into strangers' cars. Zipline started national drone delivery networks, dropping medical supplies in Rwanda and Tanzania. Tesla made electric propulsion, once the province of eco-warriors, fast and cool.