In 
connected car news are Qualcomm, Mercedes-Benz, Wejo, NIRA, Smart Eye, Marvell & CMT.
In this Article
Qualcomm Invests in Automotive & Mercedes-Benz
Qualcomm Incorporated announced at its inaugural Automotive Investor Day that the Company’s automotive design-win pipeline has grown to $30 billion1, driven by increased adoption of its Snapdragon® Digital Chassis™ solutions across the auto industry. The increase represents a greater than $10 billion expansion since the Company’s fiscal third quarter results were announced. Specifically, the expanded pipeline is a result of significant design wins with automakers and Tier-1 suppliers as Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. becomes the automotive industry’s partner of choice for next-generation vehicles.
Qualcomm Technologies and Mercedes-Benz also announced a collaboration to power upcoming Mercedes vehicles with Snapdragon Digital Chassis solutions.
Wejo & NIRA Intro Road Health & Winter Road Insights
Wejo Group Limited (NASDAQ: WEJO), a global leader in Smart Mobility for Good™ and cloud and software solutions for connected, electric and autonomous vehicle data, today launches two new solutions, Road Health and Winter Road Insights powered by NIRA Dynamics. NIRA is a vehicle onboard analytics and road perception company specializing in sensor fusion and road surface monitoring systems. It is also a subsidiary of CARIAD, an automotive software company within the Volkswagen Group. Road Health and Winter Road Insights are transformative solutions that aggregate data insights across roads so that governments can shift from reactive to proactive road safety and make informed lifesaving decisions. Implementing these solutions aligns with Wejo’s values to ensure data accuracy and integrity, and speed of visibility, while boosting operational efficiency and driving innovation and revenue opportunities.
Road Health collects road information, combining road friction, roughness, potholes and road bumps in real-time to create a detailed view of road surface conditions across towns and cities. Preserving and maintaining community transportation infrastructure is a necessary and expensive endeavor. With the insights from Road Health, transportation departments can analyze the conditions of vehicles, causes of maintenance needs, and reasons for structural deterioration on roads to get a clear view of what has happened before and now, ultimately improving road safety and decreasing maintenance and asset management costs.
Winter Road Insights enables governments to effectively treat road networks and make life-saving decisions during the winter. By monitoring the performance of the road networks during potentially dangerous weather conditions, Winter Road Insights compiles road temperature data, slippery alerts to better inform salting, road closures and snow removal plans. This cost-effective solution provides winter road network status updates and the ability to understand the effectiveness of road treatments, saving vital resources when needed the most. With Winter Road Insights, commuters can travel safely by understanding which roads are affected by weather and can guarantee better incident response times.
New Smart Eye Affectiva Insights
Smart Eye announces new capabilities in its category-defining Affectiva Emotion AI, that provide deeper insights for online qualitative research not available before. This release adds conversational engagement and valence metrics that use facial expression analysis to understand the emotional states and reactions of participants speaking in online qualitative research studies, such as focus groups and verbatim video feedback.
The new conversational engagement and valence metrics augment the “human touch” of study moderators, who can now gain additional insight more quickly and effectively during online studies. This has become critically important during the pandemic, where research studies, that were previously conducted in person, moved online.
Affectiva’s Emotion AI technology is used by 70 percent of the world’s largest advertisers and 28 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies to understand viewers’ emotional reactions to content and experiences, maximizing brand ROI. With the help of Emotion AI, clients can test the unbiased and unfiltered emotional responses that consumers have with brand content, such as video ad content and longer TV programming. Affectiva’s technology has validated exclusive measures to give confidence in market performance, giving companies clear guidance on the emotional role of their brand. The device-agnostic system works across mobile, tablet, desktop and physical environments, and works with optical sensors, standard webcams, and near-infrared and RGB cameras. Today’s announcement expands the capabilities and uses of the company’s market-leading Affectiva Emotion AI.
While Affectiva’s Emotion AI for Media Analytics has traditionally worked on people watching content and expressing emotional responses to that content, this announcement brings an interactive element to the technology. In a world that has moved, and is expected to largely stay an online testing experience, it’s important for focus study group moderators to be able to pick up on the subtle discrepancies between what is said and felt in a virtual environment.
The Conversational Engagement and Conversational Valence metrics have been developed to augment the research community whose business it is to talk directly to users of services. Built on deep learning, the new metrics allow for the distortions in facial expression produced when people speak— thus allowing more accurate, and inference of responses based on those expressions. An adaptive version of the metrics is particularly suited for focus group discussion videos with multiple participants. Using a speech detector, it applies the new conversation metrics only to those sequences and individuals who are speaking – allowing the optimal measures to be deployed whether people are speaking, or reacting to the speech of others, as demonstrated in this video. See this video for more detail.
Smart Eye customers that augment their qualitative research using this Affectiva technology will provide validation to the “gut feel” their moderators have when conducting their research with participants. Conversational engagement and valence measurements can be used as an efficient tool to analyze study data in order to quickly identify emotional moments. These metrics can also provide more compelling evidence in debriefs of the emotional power of topics tested.
These metrics can be applied to most areas of qualitative research, and no other facial expression analysis tool offers this capability yet. While the focus remains on facial expressions of response, these metrics add a unique additional dimension which is designed to be used alongside the verbal responses given by respondents for a more complete picture of people’s responses.
Conversational Engagement and Conversational Valence will be made available to Affectiva Emotion AI customers this September in both the Affectiva SDK and the core media analytics product.
Additionally, Global Managing Director of Affectiva Media Analytics Graham Page will be presenting in more detail about this at the Neuromarketing Web Forum on September 29th in Berlin. In his session, he will share how in-the-moment emotional reactions to content have been able to help businesses understand how consumers’ emotional responses to campaigns are changing in the face of a changing world. See more about his session here.
Marvell & OE Solutions ofr 100G Backhaul
Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) and OE Solutions announced the industry’s first commercially available 100G QSFP-DD optical modules supporting industrial temperature (I-Temp) for 5G backhaul and aggregation applications. The production ramp of the OE Solutions Coherent Transceiver with the Marvell® Deneb™ Coherent DSP (CDSP) is enabling carriers to transition their existing fiber infrastructure to next-generation networks with 100G speeds and support for use cases requiring reliable operation at industrial temperature. The OE Solutions modules with Marvell Deneb CDSPs include an innovative offering with high optical output power designed to bring leading-edge density and performance optimization advantages to existing networks and facilitate the transition from 10G to 100G.
With wireless traffic and data center bandwidth both growing at approximately 40% per year1, carriers are driving a transition from 10G NRZ to 100G coherent solutions in backhaul and access infrastructure to support high bandwidth requirements. Coherent technology maximizes capacity per fiber by 10x compared to 10G NRZ solutions. 100G coherent solutions also offer the flexibility to extend the reach of 10G Tunable SFP+ solutions by more than 5x. By leveraging widely available existing ROADM infrastructure, carriers can deploy coherent optics to enable faster speed, larger capacity and enhanced user experiences across aggregation networks.
OE Solutions and Marvell are providing solutions that offer the form factor, density and cost optimization needed for the 100G transition. In addition, to provide better broadband service, some next-generation access/aggregation boxes will need to reside outdoors, often in extreme temperature environments where ruggedness, endurance and reliability are critical. As the industry’s first I-Temp 100G coherent transceiver, the OE Solutions modules with Marvell CDSPs enable this type of network deployment.
“Through our strategic collaboration with OE Solutions, we have brought to market an optimized coherent pluggable DSP solution for carriers transitioning to 100G networks that scales with their emerging 5G infrastructure needs while also providing industrial temperature support,” said Samuel Liu, Sr. Director, Product Line Management at Marvell. “Marvell’s Deneb coherent DSP offers technology innovation to global carriers supported by a large ecosystem for flexibility and ease of implementation.”
“Global 5G momentum has accentuated the need for expanded fiber optic connectivity in the wireless infrastructure and the critical need for optical pluggable modules to operate reliably in outdoor conditions at fast data speeds,” said Kyu Kim, CTO Coherent Technology at OE Solutions. “Through our collaboration with Marvell, we have provided the market with a new 100G coherent transceiver that addresses the fast growing access/aggregation network requirements.”
“Using OE Solutions 100 Coherent QSFP-DD transceivers, the Edgecore AGR420 router can reach up to 500km for IPoDWDM service aggregation applications. It removes the range limitation of other 100G QSFP28 optics (max 40-80km),” said Heimdall Siao, President at Edgecore Networks.
The OE Solutions 100G QSFP-DD Coherent Transceiver with the Marvell Deneb Coherent DSP (CDSP) is being showcased at Marvell’s booth (#219) and OE Solutions’ booth (#56) at ECOC in Basel, Switzerland, September 19-21, 2022.
CMT Intros Phone-Based Solution
Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT), the world’s largest telematics service provider, announced a new solution to change driver behavior and reduce crash frequency. Traditionally, insurers and fleets have used hardware devices that alert drivers to unsafe driving behaviors in real-time. The problem is that these hardware solutions are expensive. CMT’s new Hard Brake Alerts provides the same real-time feedback and frequency reductions only using a driver’s phone — no hardware required.
“Auto insurers have been using hardware in their safe driving programs for years to alert drivers in real-time when they brake too quickly. Drivers react positively to the feedback and change their behavior, reducing their crash risk. But these programs are hard to scale because of the hardware costs and logistical challenges,” said Arash Hadipanah, Senior Principal Product Manager at CMT. “Hard Brake Alerts puts the power of real-time audio feedback into the driver’s phone, removing the challenges of hardware, and enabling insurers and others to scale the solution as quickly as they’d like. And we think they’ll want to move fast — drivers with Hard Brake Alerts have reduced their hard braking by 14%.”
Hard Brake Alerts is proven to significantly reduce hard braking. CMT tested the impact of Hard Brake Alerts across nearly 30,000 drivers on its car crash assistance app, Openroad. Within just 30 days, drivers with Hard Brake Alerts reduced their hard braking by 14%. For an auto insurer, this reduction in hard braking could mean a loss ratio improvement of up to 3.78 points.
Hard Brake Alerts is an industry breakthrough. It leverages real-time on-phone machine learning and background audio, with high accuracy and near-zero latency alerting. CMT programmatically adjusts the volume to ensure drivers hear the alert — either through their phone or their vehicle’s speakers.
Hard Brake Alerts has proven popular with consumers. Of the drivers who have experienced Hard Brake Alerts, 72% said the alert positively influenced their driving behaviors. Hard Brake Alerts is an optional feature — drivers can opt out at any time.