I ran across an interesting lesson for the world of business from the world of technology: In an attempt to solve a technology problem, a company called CSEM built a camera that decides what's interesting. I'm not quite certain, however, if it's really more the case that the engineers at CSEM learned a lesson from the world of business.
CSEM wants to incorporate cameras into cars. The goal is to provide safety features: Is the car veering off the road? Is another car too close for comfort? Traditional digital cameras simply take a picture and send all the data back to a computer, which then processes the picture to find other cars, the edges of the road, and similar information. Usually this requires reading data off the light-sensor chip inside the digital camera; and since there's a lot of information on that chip, reading the data takes a lot of time, and processing all that data takes even more time as well as an expensive computer.
But CSEM takes a different approach. First, they've built some clever intelligence into the light-sensor chip itself; secondly, the light-sensor chip can decide on its own what data are interesting. For example, if the car is attempting to decide if the car is too close to the edge of the road, the light-sensor determines which data are most relevant or "interesting" for the task and sends those data first; the computer receives and processes those data and can turn off the flow of less-important data. With this "interesting data first" approach less data are sent, which means that the whole process runs more quickly, and the pre-processing on the chip means less work for the regular computer — which can then be a less powerful, less-expensive computer.
Although businesses can certainly learn a lesson from this clever idea, I wonder if the engineers of this system were inspired by the business community. After all, the business community fueled the decades-long expansion in rapid package delivery: depending on customer needs, some goods must be delivered immediately while others can take longer. I can just imagine one engineer saying to another, "Maybe we can find a way to FedEx just the important data and send the rest later..."
Topics: · technology
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