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HP celebrates anniversary by looking to the future powered by reinvention

By Shane Wall, Chief Technology Officer, HP, and Global Head of HP Labs — November 2, 2017

Courtesy of HP

Today marks our second anniversary as HP Inc. To celebrate this milestone, and our role as an innovation leader and founder of Silicon Valley, HP has invited thought leaders from organizations as diverse as IDEO, SoundHound Inc. and Wisdom VC to reimagine new possibilities in the way that people design and create, secure and protect, sustain and explore. The ‘Future Powered by Reinvention’ event will showcase technology shaping the future while reinventing the human experience today.  

 

With like-minded creative thinkers, influential visionaries, and business leaders, we’ll spark conversations about the rapid pace of the world around us and how we stay ahead of change to innovate, adapt, reinvent, and engineer experiences for a future that promises to look very different from today. To guide us into the future, we look to major socio-economic, demographic and technological trends occurring across the globe. These "megatrends" will have a sustained, transformative impact on the world in the years ahead and will influencer how we:   

 

Design and create with digital manufacturing. For the last 150 years or so, we’ve approached manufacturing in basically the same centralized way: design in one location, manufacture in a low-cost geography or in large automated facilities, then load goods on container ships and sent around the world. Not a scalable model in a world of rapid growth and urbanization.  

 

Digital manufacturing will drive profound changes in the business landscape. Digitally designed, digitally printed or manufactured on demand for industries including healthcare, consumer goods, automotive, and aerospace. No staging, no warehouses. HP and channel partners are in a unique position with regard to 3D print technology, which is at the heart of this manufacturing transformation. HP’s Multi Jet Fusion—alone among leading 3D contenders—has end-to-end digital capability and a growing range of printable materials is rapidly expanding across manufacturing applications. In five-years, we’ll see an increasing number of parts and objects manufactured in this way, at or near the point of use.  

Courtesy of HP

 

Secure and protect with cyber trust and security. Innovation is not the exclusive domain of the good guys. Security threats on the horizon are going to force a fundamental change in the way we approach development and design, driving a need for cyber security into places you’d never expect to need it. It’s at the cellular level, literally, when we are looking at hacked pacemakers and the ability to edit DNA.  

 

It’s our responsibility as technologists, and as humans, to focus on security and on how we can get to a new model for a safer future. Cyber-resiliency is a proactive security concept that, much like a healthy immune system provides a barrier against disease, would start with barriers to intrusion. Beyond that, the focus is on immediate detection and auto-response to isolate and neutralize the threat, extract it and come back to a known state. Cyber-resilient design is already fundamental to building the world’s most advanced security into HP’s current personal systems and printers.  

 

Sustain and explore with AI and machine learning. The notion of artificial intelligence is hardly new; our industry has been pursuing the potential of AI for almost 40 years. We're now at a point where the algorithms, compute capabilities, and exponentially increasing flow of data are turning the AI vision into reality. We’re at the tip of the iceberg with big data—collecting immense amounts of information, and using advanced analytics to sift through and find insights.  

 

Courtesy of HP

Where AI will gain game-changing traction, however, is in the rise of machine learning. Machine learning helps AI to actually digest that data: identifying patterns that help us see meaning. Early AI applications are arriving in the form of bots, already in customer service engines, and collecting information to continuously refine their performance.    

 

In education, we’ll see commercial virtual reality, but also learning analytics and adaptive learning based on AI; in healthcare, we’ll see chatbots, virtual assistants, and bionics that use AI; and in aerospace, we’ll see exploring robots and space probes that will go where no man has been before.  

 

The ‘Future Powered by Reinvention’  

At our headquarters in Palo Alto, we’ll offer a unique tour of HP’s labs and bring together visionaries working on what's next. In addition to megatrends, a compelling experiential event will highlight HP breakthrough innovation from our labs focused on immersive experiences, 3D, and emerging compute including virtual and augmented reality, 3D printing and artificial intelligence.  

 

A panel, moderated by Fast Company, will spotlight the most important technologies influencing the human experience today—and which ones will be most important the next five to ten years. Panellists include David Webster, Head of Product and Technology at IDEO, Josh Kauffman, Founder of Wisdom VC, Rachel Sibley, Futurist, Kathleen McMahon, VP and GM, SoundHound and Chandrakant Patel, HP Senior Fellow and Chief Engineer.

 

More on today’s news and event can be found here.