Augmented reality, virtual reality and machine learning might sound more like the sort of concepts you’d expect to hear about in Silicon Valley, but they’ve become a rapidly growing part of Clark County’s technology sector, with both new startups and longtime regional companies embracing the new technologies.
The Columbia River Economic Development Council hosted a panel on Thursday titled “GROW Clark County: Reimagining the Future of Tech,” examining some of the ways in which the technologies are being utilized in and around Vancouver. Panel participants included Deep Canopy CEO Nate Fuller, Go To My Apartment director of partnerships Barrie Buckner, DiscoverOrg’s director of business intelligence Erik Jones and Streem chief operating officer Jef Holove.
Panelists offered definitions for augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence and how they related to their businesses.
Virtual reality refers to technologies that present the user with an entirely separate view of something through a headset, said Buckner of Go To My Apartment. The company has been able to add to its marketing tools by employing VR technology to conduct virtual tours of buildings that don’t exist yet.
But it’s more than simply viewing a computer rendering of a building, he added — the technology can also allow viewers to manipulate aspects of the rendering in real time, in order to test the overall look when switching to different options for some of the components, such as countertops in an apartment.
“It’s not a novelty,” Buckner said. “It’s a tool for marketing.”
Augmented reality refers to technologies that present the user with additional information related to what they’re seeing or doing. The most well-known example is the video game Pok?mon GO, but Holove said Streem is focused on more practical applications.
The company’s software allows homeowners to connect with home service providers such as plumbers for video calls to help diagnose problems. The software augments the call by picking out specific pieces of information in the video feed such as machine serial numbers. The point is to save time, Holove said: it allows service providers to generate quotes and sometimes even resolve issues without having to visit a site.
“These guys spend up to 60 percent of their day in a truck going from job to job, quote to quote, mostly wasting their time,” he said. “We give them a tool to do the quote remotely.”
Artificial intelligence can be used to recognize patterns, Fuller said — Deep Canopy integrates AI software into its cameras, which are intended to monitor construction and industrial sites. The primary purposes are productivity and safety, he said. “Computer vision” would be able to notice, for example, if a worker inadvertently entered an unsafe area and notify a supervisor.
“There’s a huge need for this in the industry,” he said. “The whole renaissance in AI mostly came about in the past five years, due to (advances in) computing power.”
AI can also be used for data analysis, Jones added, which is where DiscoverOrg comes into the picture. The company has been working on ways to use AI to supplement its existing business-to-business contact services by analyzing new data and filling in gaps, such as inferring a contact’s email address based on their name and the format of other email addresses at the same company.
“We’re trying to discover patterns in the information that we do have, to discover data that we don’t have,” he said.
Moderator Ronda Closner asked the panelists about the potential for these emerging technologies to be abused, especially artificial intelligence and machine learning, which often require access to massive amounts of user data in order to function. All of the panelists acknowledged the potential for abuse, but portrayed the issue more as one of user choices rather than the software itself.
Some of the panelists also downplayed the risk of AI, arguing that the abilities of the technology are often overstated, or at least over-generalized. Most AI programs tend to be built and trained to recognize patterns within an extremely specific set of parameters, Holove said, and they can’t simply be switched to a new task and expected to perform effectively.
“You don’t get a system that’s great at recognizing everything, just what you train it for,” he said.
But not everyone agrees about the risks of machine learning and data collecting, Closner noted. The European Union employs much stricter laws about personal data retention than those in the U.S. Multiple panelists acknowledged that Europe presented a challenge for their business models, although they responded to it in different ways.
In the case of DiscoverOrg, Jones said the company has to train its system to flag and automatically delete European user data in order to stay in compliance with Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in May. The company’s database relies on existing user data to connect with new data, so the practical result is that the company has no clients in Europe.
“GDPR affects us every day, every hour, every minute,” he said.
Holove said his company has also had to grapple with European data retention rules — the company’s software needs prior data to help it learn to identify machines and components — but has taken the approach of using those rules as the basis for all of its systems to ensure that it’s always in compliance.
Closner also quizzed the panelists about the appeal of Vancouver as a place for technology development. Fuller cited the community and the low costs of operating in Washington. As a recent California transplant, Buckner said he appreciated Vancouver’s quality of life and talent pool.
Holove echoed Buckner’s comments, and said the fundraising environment in Vancouver can be tougher than in California, but the trade-off is that Vancouver companies have a better shot at retaining employees because there’s “less of an arms race for talent.”
