Visual 1st, the annual Silicon-Valley imaging conference for industry leaders and upstarts, once again brought together a worldwide audience for a day-and-a-half executive conference. The event, held Oct. 2-3 at the Golden Gate Club in San Francisco, addresses topics as far-reaching as artificial intelligence and as every day as printing. As with most conferences, the real meat of the event is the hallway discussions and informal meetings over a beer or wine at the reception. Below are some photos from the conference, courtesy of sponsor, Sweet Escapes. Each year, a panel of high-powered industry experts presented the four Visual 1st Awards to the most outstanding among 30 products competing in this year's show-and-tell demo sessions.

Visual 1st, the executive conference focused on promoting innovation and partnerships in the photo and video ecosystem, will bring AI, AR, computational photography, and the future of digital cameras to the center stage, Oct. 3-4, at the Golden Gate Club, San Francisco, Calif. AI is already everywhere in imaging, from recognition to enhancement to auto-editing – and of course, there's much more to come. In parallel, AR solutions are proliferating at a rapid pace, serving use cases ranging from having lots of fun to being highly productive. As these two technologies evolve in mutually reinforcing ways, we, as an industry, must take the imaging solutions they enable to the next level of value and profitability, while also keeping things safe, secure and private for our customers – but how? Alexander Schiffhauer recently left his role as Technical Advisor to Google's CEO Sundar Pichai to take product management responsibility for the company's computational photography teams. Under his leadership, these teams have pioneered innovation on Pixel Camera, leveraging AI and computer vision techniques to create photos unimaginable only a few years ago.