Mountain View tech showcase amazes crowds

Lasers, self-driving cars and chess-playing robots were on prominent display at Mountain View’s 11th annual Technology Showcase on July 30, which gave residents a glimpse of the innovations being worked on throughout the city and exhibited resources they can use for their own purposes.

More than 500 visitors flitted in and out of the free showcase at Civic Center Plaza, co-hosted by the city and Mountain View Chamber of Commerce. Visitors could peruse 37 exhibits featuring dozens of interactive and demonstrative technologies, followed by a two-hour panel on artificial intelligence’s uses for small businesses in the evening.

There was a broad variety between the exhibits. NASA’s Ames Research Center brought stacks of a futuristic block known as “voxels” and the machines that assemble them into structures in outer space. A Waymo was parked just across the street, showcasing the autonomous driving technology.

In the plaza, visitors were challenged to a game of chess against smAiT’s social robots, and invited to engrave messages on metal with XTOOL’s laser cutters.

To Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Peter Katz, the variety shows how much is going on across the city, from established companies to inventors working in their garages.

“We are still one of the centers of innovation,” Katz said. “We are still an attractive hub to bring it in and export it to the world. We’re a small city that changes the world.”

Grant Xu, a rising sophomore at Prospect High School, attended the showcase with Verilog-Meetup, an educational group focused on teaching teenagers and children the basic principles of circuit boards. While he was there to present his own work on field programmable gate arrays, or FPGAs, Xu said he was interested in seeing the other exhibits.

“You get to present the cool stuff you made, and you get to see all the other cool stuff other people made,” Xu said.

As a hobby chess player, Xu was especially interested in smAiT’s chess-playing robot. While he lost his match against it, he said he wasn’t surprised, and appreciated the amount of effort and innovation in its creation.

These interactions are why smAiT founder and CEO Fan Tan Smith was excited to bring the robots out to this event. She launched smAiT two years ago to manage the full lifecycle of robots as a workforce, everything from the manufacturing to the programming and fleet management. Along with its social robots, Smith said smAiT offers a hospitality robot and a security robot, performing tasks associated with those industries, such as reception work or patroling.

Smith said the robots were launched about six months ago in businesses around Silicon Valley, including some in Mountain View, and they’ve seen a big demand as businesses face a labor shortage and rising costs. At events like this, she’s glad to see visitors interact with the robots, she said.

“It’s good to interact with people,” Smith said. “In the end, it’s to serve the people, so this is a great opportunity.”

The showcase’s panel featured representatives from LinkedIn and Intuit, along with Ryan Keenan, director at the educational platform DeepLearning.AI, and Danny Barry, store manager of St. Stephens Green, located on Castro Street.

The panelists discussed how people are interacting with AI, especially when it comes to running a business. Barry described an example of how he used AI to build a reservation tracker for his restaurant, catered to its specific needs. But they agreed users need to approach AI thoughtfully as a tool, not a replacement.

“AI can absolutely be there to help you, but if you lose sight of your individual point of view, your ideas, your core content, that’s probably when you’ve taken it too far,” Judy Nam, vice president of small business marketing for LinkedIn, said.