Dr. Cerf watching the Intel Innovator PeopleSense Demo and Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick. (Harsh Verma/ACM Sacramento)

Future Worlds Symposium hosted at City Hall featuring celebrity Internet technology pioneer Dr. Vint Cerf and others.

The Sacramento Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) hosted a symposium on August 2, 2018, featuring Dr. Vint Cerf, American Internet pioneer and co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and one of the creators of the Internet. The Future Worlds Symposium aimed to enhance ability of attendees to raise awareness of important technical, educational, and social issues for anyone who is passionate about how we can apply technologies to shape our future world, in a 5G environment.

Sacramento City Mayor Darrell Steinberg gave a welcome address for Dr. Cerf, who is also known as a Father of the Internet and whose contributions have been acknowledged and lauded repeatedly with the National Medal of Technology, the Turing Award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Marconi Prize and membership in the National Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

(Above): Maria MacGunigal, CIO, Sacramento City, on IT Infra and Verizon 5G Partnership. (Harsh Verma/ACM Sacramento)

What is Sacramento’s special place in a future world with ubiquitous information technology and artificial intelligence?

Sean Harrington, vice president, Verizon, Smart City Solutions Group, talked about The Building Blocks for Tomorrow’s Future City with reference to 5G rollouts already happening in Sacramento and other cities in the U.S. and Verizon investment of $100M for first 5G Rollout in Sacramento. Maria MacGunigal, chief information officer, City of Sacramento, talked about the IT Infrastructure in the City of Sacramento.

Dr. Vinton Gray Cerf, in his opening keynote titled, “Are we facing a fragile digital future?” gave a reference to the future of IT and how Future Worlds will connect smart cities, autonomous cars and autonomous worlds, virtual reality, AI and machine learning, Internet of things, cloud, data analytics and cybersecurity.

He specifically talked about key desirable features for an IoT ecosystem. Dr. Cerf’s keynote reverberated the council chambers as he talked about the importance of cybersecurity and also in the lighter vein mentioned what could happen if IoT security is not given paramount importance.

A very lively Q&A following the keynote by Dr. Cerf was moderated by Louis Stewart, chief innovation officer, City of Sacramento, taking live questions on Twitter feed from the audience.

The afternoon session, focused on the enabling and implementing technologies of the future, including blockchain meets IoT for future world and AI and machine learning in an IoT world.

Prof Bebo White addressing attendees. (Harsh Verma/ACM Sacramento)

ACM distinguished speakers Prof. Bebo White of Stanford University SLAC, and Prof. Sven Koenig of University of Southern California and Chair of ACM Special Interest Group for Artificial Intelligence (SIGAI) presented very interesting sessions on above topics.

Bob Duffy, Intel’s Worldwide Developer Communities team manager and evangelist, talked passionately about Democratizing Innovation – the Intel Innovator Program – Ideas, Tools, and Technologies, which was followed by talks and presentations by Innovators Dr. Harsh Verma, Steve Favis, and Dr. Raiford Hann. The afternoon luncheon also featured parallel demonstrations on Intel Innovators, Steve Favis presenting the Septaer program and technology, Dr. Harsh Verma and Dr. Raiford Hann presenting the PeopleSense technology.

This was followed by a fireside chat and panel discussion with Prof. Sven Koenig, Prof. Bebo White, Sean Harrington, Robert Duffy, moderated by Dr. Harsh Verma.

Getting ready for opportunities and the challenges – as  5G and IoT co-evolve,  we will see smaller, more powerful chips leading to the next generation of embedded systems with AI and machine learning capabilities, can we architect an AI engine for a city, in the coming age of  5G?

Dr. Cerf watching the Intel Innovator Septaer Demo – raising a point. (Harsh Verma/ACM Sacramento)

Dr. Cerf was present for the entire day and gave his closing remarks and advice on how each one of us is contributing towards technology of the future.

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society delivers an abundance of resources that advance computing as a science and a profession. The ACM unites the world’s computing educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. ACM supports the professional growth of its more than 100,000 members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

Attendees at lunch, listening to Dr. Vinton Gray Cerf.

ACM Sacramento Chapter has been formed to help to bring together ACM members and computing community in great Sacramento area by providing a forum for discussion, debate, and dialogue about the issues facing our industry today.

More information on ACM Sacramento Chapter is available at http://sacramento.acm.org/, and ACM at: http://www.acm.org. Interested readers can contact ACM Sacramento Chapter via email at: sacramento@acm.org.