2021 BRN Discussion, page-8547

I have listened to the podcast with Rod Lincourt from Dell Technologies a number of times and considered it to be of such significance that it should be transcribed. Below is my transcription of the the podcast. It is not an authorised transcription so you should treat it as an aid to your listening to the podcast.
My opinion only DYOR
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AKIDA Ballista

This is the Brainchip podcast. Hear from ourthought leaders about neuromorphic computing, beneficial Ai and how Brainchip’sAKIDA is pushing Ai to the Edge. This podcast is for investors, practitionersand anyone interested in the future of Ai – MAY, 2021
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Hi all I’m Rob Telson Vice President of Sales andMarketing at Brainchip. Welcome and thankyou for joining our sixthepisode of our Brainchip podcast series. These events are structured toprovide current and future investors and those interesting in Brainchiptechnology as a path to better understand who we are, what we are doing, andwhere we are going.

Just to recap our first four episodes focused onBrainchip our company history, who we are, where we are going and theperspectives from our founders, the BRAIN Peter van der Made, and the CHIP AnilMankar. Our fifth episode we journeyed into the ecosystem and focused on theoutside looking in, in a discussion with Alex Divinsky also known as ‘TickerSymbol U the channel that invests in you’ based on YouTube.

If you have not listened to any of these podcastsplease go to our website at www.brainchip.com clickon the Learn tab and select podcasts. You can also listen to any of thesepodcasts on your favourite PC Platform.

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Rob Telson: Today we will continue with our outsidelooking in theme by having a discussion with Rob Lincourt distinguishedengineer at Dell Technologies. Rob has spent over 20 years with Dell andfocused on new technology introduction.

Rob on behalf of Brainchip and our listeners thankyou very much for being with us today.

Rob Lincourt: Thankyou for the invitation and having me. It’s apleasure.

Rob Telson: Well you know I can only imagine the types oftechnology and types of innovations you have experienced in your career. You are a true technologist who has been involved in over a dozen patents andtruly epitomises the phrase “out of the box thinker.’ I had theopportunity to read your paper titled ‘Security reshaped in the DigitalTransformation Era’. It provided great insight on how we can protectourselves going through these rapidly evolving times. Rob why don’t you take amoment and provide our listeners with a bit of background on yourself?

Rob Lincourt: I work in the Global CTO Office and what wedo there is all about looking at emerging technologies, understanding them,understanding the impact to the industry as well as to Dell technology. So I am here today with you from a Dell Technology point of view not a specificDell product line view and we won’t talk anything about the product lines orany of the other Dell Technologies companies so it will just strictly be a viewof the technology of where the industry is and the impact that we have. Againthe roll here is at Dell is about understanding how new technology is going toaffect us the people and that where we are going to going forward from, fromhere is what’s new. There are a bunch of strategic areas that Dell islooking at and we will try to tie some of those into, to what we are talkingabout today.

Rob Telson: That’s great and I think its exciting that you havethat opportunity to focus on some of those strategic areas. As you look at thetechnology and how everything is evolving what aspects currently have yourinterest and why?

Rob Lincourt: The list is long for this short conversation werehaving and I guess its really about the intersection of a lot of theseverticals and horizontals that people have are talking in the world betweenedge computing and Ai.

Ai is really the driver of why we are doing Edgecomputing. It is so important to act on the data and get the decisions, getactions out of it as soon as you can. Especially when you start thinkingabout autonomous vehicles. When your start thinking about how hospitals of thefuture will work and how we are going to interact with it. I was just at aconference MTac, the technology Review from MIT and we spent awhole afternoon just talking about how people are going to consume Ai and sohow do I have to interact with the Ai to get you Rob to believe me and tounderstand the result, and trust in the results that I am giving you. Sothere is this whole new human dynamic coming into the Ai space so all of thosespaces together are going to need obviously now of this can happen withoutcloud in some way shape or form but we feel that data can’t move all the wayback to the cloud every single time for every single decision. The latenciesjust aren’t there. Now the cloud might slide out a little bit right,there is going to be this huge concept of the Edge and these notions that Edgeis everywhere. And the funny thing is a lot of the topics we talk aboutis all about perspective. Where is the Edge from where I am standing? Is it atthe device and the device can be a sensor, camera, monitor, a microphone. Theit can go all the way back to a car. So imagine a car being a device and nowmoving all the way back to the Telco network you know I can do processing therefor now especially with 5G and the ability to move data and segment date andall this other fun stuff. Smart cities start to become a reality, smartbuildings all these things acting together are all Edges so depends on whereyou are standing what you see.

Rob Telson: This is a really good point and this is one ofthose areas where Brainchip would differentiate ourselves from our opinion andwhere the market is today and where Ai is moving very fast as you havehighlighted then the fact Edge becomes a really big part of thediscussion. And a lot of companies with their deep learning acceleratorslook at the Edge, the Edge of the cloud and the Edge of the data centre andwith Brainchip and our AKIDA product were focused on the Edge at the sensor, orthe device and there would be billions and billions of IOT devices out thereright now and its only increasing at a rapid rate each year and we look at theEdge and focus on that in a different fashion than what most companies nowapproach the Edge as it is today. How do you see neuromorphic processingchanging the face of Ai?

Rob Lincourt: So I think it’s going to change the way we look,like you said, at the big neural nets and the amount of training involved andthe data that’s needed. If I can start to minimise that traffic or learn alittle bit at the Edge, transfer some of that back or share it throughout anecosystem its going to help tremendously. The other big part of it is theone thing you didn’t mention is the power constraint at all those differentpoints that we talked about you know we have to now start concerningourselves what ca we consume at different steps at that Edge environmentand I think everything I have been seeing about neuromorphic is it is very lowpowered because I can get a couple of cores or I can geta chip with a couplemore cores and I can start to stitch them together that to me is theinteresting thing and I also get the ability to reconfigure it so I use it forone set of things and then I can bring and almost I don’t want to say instantlythats a precise word but very quickly I can switch it to now startrunning a different neural net. You know I get all those benefits out of itthat and that’s what I look to start seeing the benefits of neuromorphic isthat power in having a very nice linear power as we add more cores.

Rob Telson: Great points and power is definitely an area wefeel very strongly that we can make a massive impact and the results that wereseeing our current chip and some of the analysis that we have done so far it isworking out that way that there is going to be this massive power reductionwhich is going to end up giving companies a lot of flexibility how they want tomove forward with Ai and what they want to do. What is it about Brainchipthat interests you?

Rob Lincourt: So again it was that power, so you published somepower numbers very early on and those were very encouraging and intriguing tous and again Dell Technologies has a plethora of products that are throughoutthat Edge ecosystem and yea to me that having Brainchip as potentially as partof that environment one it gives us a coupe of advantages.

One, power again, right, I don’t want to drainbatteries I want to operate more on batteries you know the other this is of theother environmental aspects. I don’t want to use a lot of power. I don’t wantto create a lot of heat I will be able to do all these other environmental Ihave to interact with or worry about.

The other thing is again that reconfigurabilityand, right, that ability to move it back and forth and again at DellTechnologies we really want to understand where things are going and wherethese different technologies can be useful and where they can’t be you alsohave to look at that as well you know if you want to look at what you can dowith neuromorphic just look at what the M5 has from Apple. Look at whatSnapdragon has for Qualcomm they all have these little neuro sectionswhatever they want to call it but their starting to learn that they can now offload all sorts of new functionality to it that they didn’t really think itwould matter before so to me Brainchip either being a companion chip to acamera where I can do some of that object detection, face detection fordoorbells, automatic doors, for whatever you want then it allows me to go intoa whole new space where I have this heterogeneous computer where its on thesame die or spread throughout multiple systems. It just depends on the scale thatyou can operate at and again that what we ‘kinda’ feel and that’s ‘kinda’ whatwe have been trying to play around with what is that scale that we can achieve.

Rob Telson: That’s an area where we see a lot of opportunitiesand it expands from as you said helping out being an engine that helps out in alarger processing area, as a companion as you called it, all the way throughand being the lead engine and processing the data on the Edge as we see Aievolve and we see companies such as Dell start to make progress and move downthese paths we will just have to see how a lot of these Ai technologies evolvewith it right?

Rob Lincourt: Yep.

Rob Telson: So here at Brainchip we talk a lot about ways thatour technology can be beneficial for society at large. We call it beneficialAi, and through our approach of focusing on the five sensing modalities. Don’tknow if you have seen our robot slide its vision, hearing, touch, smell andtaste. What areas do you feel Ai can have the most beneficial impact on society?

Rob Lincourt: Interesting question that can go a lot of differentways. Beneficial to society its all going to come down to understanding if wewant to accept our bias, our own bias, and I think this is going to be thehardest part for people and there is plenty of examples as recent examples ofover the last few years of just not understanding the data that we have, the processes we have in place that create bias, we just didn’t know we neverlooked at the data so I am always hesitant to talk about beneficial impact tosociety because it might have a negative impact first overall I think itstotally interesting as to what we can now achieve and if we can start toreplace some mundane tasks can I now do something else. Can I start a whole newart renaissance right with this concept of a 4th industrial revolution. But ifI go back to those sensing capabilities its not them individually its themcombined as a whole because now if I can start to I don’t need to necessarilyhave sensors to detect on a manufacturing line if something going wrong if wecan now sense with smelling sensors in some way shape or form thatsomething is starting to burn, a conveyor belt, or a rota or something you knowwith vision again going back to manufacturing can I detect that something is alittle bit out of skew in a car or as its being built or that door being laidsown in a perfect position there are all sorts of things that we can do but Ithink we have to understand how can we bring the human back into that the humannow understands the sensors and can they take what that system is telling itand do something to help. Then again just as a side note a little bit of a jokebut if you look right now there are so many car recalls happening. I mean inthe millions of them all the manufacturers. Could we start to detect some ofthese problems if we had a little bit better sensors going down right inside oftheir testing and inside of their manufacturing. So again it was just Iread something this morning on the vast number of them growing, right, and youcould be beneficial that way. But you could also be beneficial in helpingsomeone see if now we can start being in some of the transplanting chips intopeople. We have all sorts of things we could do but I also know there is going tobe a lot of negative impact and I think we have to balance that and understandthat the way it is I learn from it moving forward.

Rob Telson: Yes it’s a broad horizon out there, Glad youbrought up the point on industrial and manufacturing and the impact thatyou can have throughout the whole supply chain and how there can be thesepositive attributes for being beneficial no pun intended but your right theoutlook on AI in almost every, it does have that social media feel to it.I remember when I logged onto FaceBook which was eons ago put up somepictures of my family right and look at social media today its got a lotof positive attributes but its got a lot of challenges to it aswell. As we evolve and Ai is going to have some of that and Ilike the fact that you brought up transplantable devices and how we canhelp people better, or touch or sense, I should say more effectively. There’s alot of dynamics to it we will take it one step at a time but I think thatas we see it evolve there is a lot of good things that aregoing to come out of it as long as we get that human layer dialled in. SoRob with cyber crime continuing to grow there are new techniques in cybersecurity which are Introduced to mitigate the increased levels of risk thisis an area where you have been involved in analysing and educating theindustry being able to process on the device without the dependency on thecloud can provide another layer of device security. What other areas do youfeel Edge based Ai processors can make a positive impact on devicesecurity?

Rob Lincourt: I think there’s a lot right, I mean if you thinkabout it today were throwing in, and you made the reference to thesebillions of IOT devices, into the environment and its growing evenmore rapidly. Think of all the sensing you now have in a car. If you lookat some of the car platforms they actually have cameras on the driver todetect if the driver is paying attention and how they interact is aseparate issue but imagine if somebody could take control of that and imaginenow if that had to travel all the way back through the, a network,even if it’s a 5G network all the way back to a public cloudget routed all through the public cloud firewalls, all the way back toyour system. Your service has to call 3 or 4 other servicesincluding the service that does the object detection and, and kinda theunderstanding a view of my face and my eyes to determine if I am distracted andthen come back that could take even if it’s a second or two seconds if yourtravelling at 80 mph on the highway that’s still a pretty good distance rightso you have to worry about that now the car itself can protect it using othersensors but again what if someone got into that car, can anyone now push codedown to your car and execute it. You’ve got to be very cautious with how thatmoves around. You have to start building out this concept of trust.Trust in compute environment all the way from the car all the way back to thecloud and everything else but it I can push models down onto the car that havebeen trained and up dated with different weights and coefficients and to notsend back true data with coefficients you could tweak, but if they get out ofrange you just don’t have the system acceptance so there’s other ways you cando it you know even going back to the camera and the doorbell if you now canlean my face do you have to send my image back to the cloud or can you sendweights and coefficients or kind of data that makes up my face whether that’spoint cloud however whatever type of camera you want to use there are so manydifferent ways of doing it that doesn’t mean you don’t go into how Ai now canbe imbedded in infrastructure to actually look for and you know detectanomalies, detect unauthorised access from different pattern uses and even theway I type on my keyboard if something’s wrong something like that so there area lot of things you can do in that space so its limitless right now.

RobTelson: Itotally agree with you. You brought up right there at the end embedding Ai andchecking patterns out and looking at behaviours its going to play a key role insecurity through the ecosystem as we continue to evolve.

The last couple, If you could be a super hero whowould it be and have one Ai super power what would it be?

Rob Lincourt:Answer not transcribed

Pod castconcludes with thankyou to Rob Lincourt for participating and confirmation thatthe next podcast in the series will be next month.