by Steve Hoffenberg | 01/14/2020

In the first week of the new year CES once again invaded Las Vegas, and among the vast range of products and services was a plethora of automotive and transportation-related technology. (See our blog post CES2020: Automotive and Transportation Highlights for a broader overview of automotive and transportation tech at the show.)

Among the many automotive vendors, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a prominent presence in the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. Last year, Amazon’s focus was on Alexa voice-enabled services for vehicles, and this year Alexa remained a topic of interest, but the Amazon Automotive booth was oriented toward a wider range of AWS automotive services. Demonstrations in the booth included:

• WeRide’s autonomous vehicle fleet (operating in China), using AWS SageMaker machine learning and cloud services

• Unity’s AWS cloud-based simulation of autonomous vehicle imaging data, which simulates roadways and surrounding environments under different lighting and weather conditions, to train autonomous vehicle systems without requiring vehicles to experience every condition in real-world driving (see photo below)

• Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) automotive test simulation, using Dell EMC Isilon storage servers for on-premise caching for terabytes of data from AWS S3 cloud storage as input to National Instruments’ test hardware

• Two demos in partnership with BlackBerry/QNX and Karma: using AI and machine learning to monitor and optimize the health of electric vehicle batteries; and to recognize individual drivers by their unique driving traits, i.e. patterns in how they use steering, braking, acceleration, etc.

• Accenture’s “journey experience personalization” to enable monetization of in-trip services to vehicle drivers while maintaining data privacy

• A “future mobility experience” demo in partnership with Continental’s Elektrobit, showcasing digital dash displays, entertainment options, suspension setting, seat heating, and other vehicle characteristics customized for the machine learned preferences of each driver.

• And a vehicle retailing project with Cadillac and ZeroLight, providing 3D visualization of car configurations customized to each viewer (see photo below). This enables prospective car buyers to see their preferred exterior and interior colors, trim packages, wheel choices, etc., which can then carry through to advertising and marketing campaigns targeted to that individual, and even all the way through to the dealership when making an in-person visit. A key aspect of the program is for buyers to opt-in and maintain control over the visualizations, which avoids the creepiness factor that can sometimes pervade such targeting.

For these and other related activities, VDC is pleased to award AWS our Embeddy Award “Best of Show” for IoT Automotive Services at CES2020. Congratulations to AWS.

View Part 2 of this blog post, CES2020: Automotive and Transportation Highlights.