Hitachi America R&D Presented on HSIF 2021 – Americas

Hitachi Social Innovation Forum is a collaborative creation with customers to serve as a venue to accelerate the collaboration and share vision for the society and business with customers / partners around the world. This year, the Hitachi Social Innovation Forum returned to the U.S. (HSIF 2021-Americas) and combined with Hitachi Vantara’s NEXT.

Hitachi America R&D domain leaders co-presented with Hitachi Vantara and external partners to address the challenges and trends in the critical digital transformation.

“Co-Creating a Digital Future for Industries” co-presenting by Harsha Badarinarayan Ph.D., VP of Hitachi America R&D and Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solution Officer of Hitachi Vantara on Day-1, kicked off the Business Track sessions. They outlined how data-driven leaders were embracing co-creation as a path to overcoming obstacles to digital acceleration. Harsha focused on Mobility vertical and the challenges around creating value proposition from the data generated by Connected & Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs).

Harsha emphasized that one of the key differentiations was based upon the fundamental knowhow and core expertise in Hitachi’s long history in automotive industry, particularly in vehicle control, ride comfort and safety aspects. He also highlighted the FALCON® platform, which can ingest metadata from sensors, vehicle & users to perform analytics and return actionable insights back in the form of operational command to the various vehicle systems such as powertrain, steering and chassis. In addition, the FALCON® platform also realized customer value in 3 main areas – environment, resilience, and safety & security.

On Day-2, Technology Track, Umeshwar Dayal, Ph.D., Corporate Scientist of Hitachi, Ltd. and SVP & Sr. Fellow of Hitachi America presented “The Role of Emerging Technologies in Accelerating Digitalization” joined by Aroop Zutshi, Sr. Partner of Frost & Sullivan.

Emerging Technologies such as AI, analytics, IoT, automation, blockchain, 5G, and others are driving the new wave of digitalization in nearly every sector. In this session, Umesh and Aroop focused on the Manufacturing, Mobility, and Energy sectors as they transform to embrace the concepts of Manufacturing to Zero, Connected Mobility, and Digital Energy through IoT framework.

Umesh highlighted the innovations from Hitachi R&D in these areas, how R&D team advanced the state of the art in industrial AI, applying to many areas such as maintenance and repair, forecast energy production, simulating the grid, as well as created the 5G test lab for industrial sensing and robotics application, etc.  Aroop shared his perspective on the importance and timeframe of emerging technologies in accelerating these transformations, and the future of work environment.

On Day-2, Business Track, Sudhanshu Gaur, Ph.D., VP & Head of IoT Edge Lab of Hitachi America R&D and Chief Architect of Hitachi Astemo, joined by Alan Minney, Global Lead Strategic Ventures & Partnerships, Industrial Business Development of Ericsson North America, moderated by Bjorn Andersson, Sr. Director of Industry Solution Marketing of Hitachi Vantara, discussed how “5G: Accelerating Transformation for Manufacturing”.

Private 5G mobile networks for manufacturing are poised to create economic value, improve worker safety and deliver more sustainable workplaces. In this session, Sudhanshu and Alan discussed the ecosystem and the partnership approach, maintaining momentum working through trials and getting to commercial success. They also introduced 5G industrial use cases value versus complexity to clarify which areas need to utilize 5G to enhance the experiences and benefit customers.

Sudhanshu highlighted the private 5G network set up in Hitachi America R&D, which acts as a sandbox and Hitachi researchers to explore the art of the possible and transform ideas into working prototypes addressing a variety of use cases. One such example use case is around flexible automation where 5G QoS features are used to make real-time collaboration between worker and robot possible. Apart from enabling future applications, IoT Edge Lab is also utilizing private 5G to test and validate existing Lumada solutions. Together with Ericsson, IoT Edge Lab of Hitachi America R&D is planning to conduct new application trials at one of Hitachi Astemo factories in North America. 

Sudhanshu and Alan addressed the collaboration has been playing an essential role to create viable ecosystems capable of delivery real solution to real customers.

The spectacular three-day online conference presented how data-driven strategies were transforming industries, predicting the future and contribute to the society as well as the environment. For more details, get the access to their stories and expertise (for FREE) at HSIF2021-Americas on-demand. (*Available for 60 days after the event.)

In Hitachi America R&D we strongly believe that collaborating with our partners and customers, we are well positioned as fast-movers in industry digitalization and empowering social innovation.