Recent technological advances in legged robots are opening up a new era of mobile robotics. In particular, legged robots have a great potential to help during disaster situations or with elderly care services. To allow for dynamic physical interactions with environments, the hardware/software design requirements of mobile robots differ from manufacturing robots (which are designed for maximum stiffness to allow for accurate and rapid position tracking without contact). Events such as the Fukushima power plant explosion highlight the need for robots that can traverse various terrains and perform dynamic physical tasks in unpredictable environments. Kim will discuss the new mobile robot design paradigm, the control algorithms for Cheetah robot version 2 and version 3, and the role of bio-inspiration in designing legged robots. Finally, Kim will compare solutions from both an engineering and biological perspective.
Five years ago, Sharon Goh started collecting stories of drive, determination, and grit, beginning with the 15-person customer support team she managed. She asked questions about how they got there and found stories of loss, pain, fear, joy, and success. These were amazing stories that needed to be told and that deeply impacted her as an executive, opening her eyes to the future of work and the power that managers have to influence it. In this talk, she will share a preview of these stories, including common themes and some of the ah-ha moments during this process. Can you drive change starting from the ground up? How do you listen and how do you prepare today for what is coming tomorrow? Her hope is to inspire individuals to rethink the future of work.
Lightning Talks Catalant Technologies, Patrick Petitti, Cofounder and CEO Catalia Health, Cory D. Kidd, Cofounder & CEO Cogito, CTO and Cofounder, Ali Azarbayejani IQ3Connect, Ali Merchant, Founder Near Field Magnetics, David McManus, Cofounder and CEO serviceMob, Anuj Bhalla, Founder and CEO TVision Insights, Dan Schiffman, Cofounder & CRO
How can you know what you don’t know? What steps can you take to break out of your bubble and see the reality of what’s happening in the world and in your business? Professor Hal Gregersen will discuss concrete ways to help you ask the right questions so that you can gain access to information about your business and break out of the CEO bubble.
It’s easy to think that digital business success depends on becoming more mobile, social, and analytical. But that barely hints at how digital technologies are changing business. SMACIT (social, mobile, analytics, cloud, internet of things)—and more recent technology arrivals like artificial intelligence, robotics, and biometrics—are ridiculously affordable, easy to use, and powerful. Anyone can acquire and use these technologies—your customers, your employees, your partners, your competitors (and your future competitors). Consequently, you will never generate a competitive edge by simply adopting some digital technology. How will companies create competitive advantage digitally? Speed and integration—the antithesis of what most established companies are designed for. Thus to become more agile and integrated, companies must not only use digital technologies effectively, they must fundamentally redesign themselves. Drawing on examples such as Philips, LEGO, Schneider Electric, and BNY Mellon, we describe how big, old companies are designing themselves for digital success.
There are three major complexities facing those who manage last-mile distribution: increasing density in megacities, increasing fragmentation of urban demand, and ever-increasing customer expectations. How can technology and data improve last-mile logistics? What unique challenges do managers face? How can you understand shifting consumer expectations and the evolution of omni-channel retail and delivery in city environments? Join Matthias Winkenbach to explore how companies can reach customers on their own terms, where they live, work, shop, or play, anywhere on the globe.
The possession of rich amounts of data is hardly unique in today’s world. But the ability to monetize data effectively — and not simply hoard it — can be a source of competitive advantage in the digital economy. Join Professor Barb Wixom to discuss three ways to monetize your data: (1) improving internal business processes and decisions to get process lift, (2) wrapping information around core products and services to get product lift, and (3) selling information offerings to new and existing markets. Each method offers unique capabilities and commitments that may not work for every corporation.
As autonomous systems move out of the research laboratory into operational environments, they require ever deeper connections to their surroundings. Traditional notions of full autonomy have led to “clockwork” approaches where robots must be isolated from their human surroundings. Instead, we need precise, robust relationships with people and infrastructure. This situated autonomy appears in driverless cars' dependence on human-built infrastructure, the need for new systems of unmanned traffic management in the air, and the increasing importance of collaborative robotics in factories. How can we best design such systems to inhabit and enhance the human world? In this talk, David Mindell sketches a number of these emerging scenarios, traces new technologies to address the problems they raise, and envisions new approaches to human and robotic interaction that helps people and robots work together safely and collaboratively.
As in chess, the most perilous part of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) transition is the “middle game” – where the number of options to choose from is highest, yet visibility into the consequences of any individual decision or action is at its lowest. Fortunately, there are over fifty years of theory and experience in System Dynamics to help you make consistently better decisions as you lead your organization through the “quagmire of execution.” Join John Carrier to learn the fundamental system principles for managing the hundreds of “small decisions” that will ultimately determine the outcome of your IIoT initiative. Carrier will also highlight the cultural aspects of technological adoption within the context of an existing operation.
How does the work of running a successful company change when: * Algorithms outperform human experts in more and more domains? * Computers can be creative and personable? * Asset-light platforms spread across industries? * Even extremely sophisticated products become commoditized? * Many organizations can be bested at their core competence by an online crowd? * Blockchains, smart contracts, and other technologies of extreme decentralization promise the demise of the corporation? Drawing on insights from Machine | Platform | Crowd, his most recent book with Erik Brynjolfsson, Dr. McAfee will address these and other questions. He'll provide a vision, sure to spark lively discussion, of what successful companies will look like in as we move deeper into a time of brilliant technologies.