Sensors Converge last week was a resounding success for streaming and in-person attendees and me personally. That’s partly because a team of amazing Fierce Electronics and Questex  folks pulled off a content-crammed live in-person event at the San Jose Convention Center  alongside a streaming  component.

It was great seeing people in person again without needing to adjust the connection on a Zoom call.

The hybrid model showed off especially well when Christian Bauer of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab appeared in a livestream keynote on quantum computing that was projected on an enormous video screen for the in-person crowd. Using slides and animations, he took us through a clear explanation of quantum physics and quantum computing in 30 minutes. It will doubtless  prove to be a good primer for physics classes.

I was especially reassured when he reported in a  News Desk interview that we (mainly I) should not be overly concerned whether  quantum computing would be able to break encryption as some have predicted in recent years. Some U.S. government officials have been worried that China or another adversary could break our military encryption, eventually, wreaking havoc.  Coming from a world-class physicist, his reassurance was a relief, although we need to see if his prediction bears out.  Here’s what Bauer said with the full News Desk video replay just below:

“If encryption standards would stay the way they are, then that should freak everybody out. However, it takes longer for a quantum computer to get to the point where it breaks encryption than it takes to develop a new encryption mechanism. I’m not really concerned. I’m pretty sure when get to point we can break [today’s encryption], we’ll have something else in place."

 

WiSe panel on diversity and inclusion 

One of the biggest content highlights of the expo and conference was a Women in Sensors (WiSe) panel discussion that included four stellar women talking about the need for diversity and inclusion in engineering and design teams to develop better products. See the full video here:

 

 

The panelists' examples of design deficiencies (and ways to surmount them) ranged from improvements for crash dummies, breast pumps, twin baby strollers, shotguns used for shooting sports  by women, and AR/AV goggles that early on caused nausea especially for  women, children and the elderly. They also  discussed deficiencies in accurate facial recognition with dark-skinned people.

Noting that women influence 85% of consumer spending and companies are more likely to increase their profitability with diverse executive teams, moderator Meeta Roy asked, “What can we do to make sure we’re not designing biases into our technology?”  Roy serves as enterprise technology chief of staff for Peloton Interactive.

She put a premium on building mentorship in organizations to encourage women and minorities to work together on common concerns. “It’s a two-way street,” she said. “Make yourself available to anybody who has a need…It’s always great to talk it through.”

Lina Colucci, founder and data scientist for Edge Analytics, boosted weekend-long hackathons as a powerful way to include a diverse array of engineers and potential end users (not always engineers)  in product development. She related one success story while  working with others at MIT in 2018 on  the “Make the breast pump not suck hackathon” inspired by two moms who wondered, “Why is a Prius quieter than a breast pump?”

Hackathons don’t have to be about healthcare products. “It’s about bringing all the stakeholders to work together and ideating and working solutions,” Colucci said.

Another panelist, Chrissy Meyer, formerly of Apple and Square, now works as a partner at Root Ventures, a seed-stage hard tech VC firm. Recognizing that just 10% of partners  in VCs are women, she said some women have  begun  working together “forming cohorts…to amplify each others’ voices in the VC community” and tech, through an organization called All Raise.

Meyer, a shooting sports enthusiast, related the time she searched through thousands of shotguns to find just two models that are designed to fit women, including one with an easy-to-push button on the side for closing the shotgun chamber that could help eliminate broken fingernails. “Sometimes all it takes it being really intentional about [being more accommodating to all groups] in the early stages of product design and not just your primary user.”

She advised, “Don’t wait until a product is fully baked before going out there for prototype testing.”  Organizations such as Center Code and Beta Bound can help, she said.  “It’s their job to recruit a really diverse set of users.”

Panelist Karthi Gopalan, executive director of the mobile power business unit at Maxim Integrated now part of Analog Devices, said the goal of creating diverse teams to create products for women and other underrepresented groups is serious business indeed.

Crash dummies used in testing vehicles were at one point years ago based only on the size of the average male when women had a higher mortality rate in crashes, she noted.   In the 2000s, engineers came up with a female dummy model that was too short and lightweight for 95% of women. Later, the European Union created a more representative female crash dummy that was not being tested in the driver’s seat, even as women were influential in the purchase of cars.

Even with successful women leading several nations in Europe, there was “unconscious bias” in crash dummies, Gopalan said. “It’s kind of a head-scratcher. It’s the dark side of gender bias. It’s about the fatality rate.”

Post-script:   With the chip shortage, there are widespread examples of chipmakers charging well above the price of 18 months ago for a single chip.  But 30 times as much?  Yashar Shahabi, senior vice president of digital solutions for Sourceability, a distributor, said during a chip shortage panel discussion that he knew of one well-known chipmaker charging more than $230 for a single chip that formerly cost about $7. Gouging or fair trade?

I look forward to seeing all of you at the next Sensors Converge, June 27-29, 2022, in San Jose and streaming globally.

Matt Hamblen is editor of Fierce Electronics.