Sony at Maker Faire Rome 2021: an event to be experienced these days as a Gold Partner to show alternative solutions.
The opening ceremony of the 9th edition of the Maker Faire Rome was held yesterday, 7 October, at 5.00 pm. During the three days of the event, Sony is showing and will show its innovative projects through different exhibition areas and a full program of events, including the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris Open House.
Dr. Hiroaki Kitano, President and CEO of Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL), spoke at the opening ceremony of the Maker Faire which is one of the most anticipated innovation events in Europe. This year Sony CSL also celebrates the 25th anniversary of the founding of the Parisian office and also the opening of the new office in Rome.
Sony CSL Paris will have a central importance within the vast Sony exhibition area showing the public some of the most innovative projects developed by the 4 main teams of the laboratory Language, Music, Creativity and Sustainability. They will be joined by two other Sony Europe divisions: Sony Semiconductor Solutions Europe and Sony Professional Solutions Europe, respectively with an installation dedicated to flow detection, which uses Sony vision sensors, and with an AV and archive production solution. , which will host talks and panels throughout the duration of the event.
He team Sustainability will present its robotics solutions for micro farms: ROMI Rover e ROMI Plant Imager. The first is an open source autonomous robot designed to assist micro farms in operations such as weed reduction and crop monitoring, decreasing manual labor and costs and improving productivity. The second is a robotic platform for 3D image acquisition of plants, which will allow small laboratories to have easy and cost-effective access to phenotyping technology in the laboratory.
Inside the area dedicated to the team Creativity, will cover multiple themes, with projects such as Descartes, which studies the online information system and aims to understand how social phenomena are perceived by citizens, how information is evaluated and what are the priority topics for citizens, in full respect of privacy. There will be then We Write, which aims to create a flexible platform for text editing, able to overcome the limitations of classic text editors, allowing users to develop non-linear texts and facilitate editing operations, and Foremusic, an online platform based on a machine learning model capable of predicting the success of a piece of music.
The exhibition also includes areas dedicated to new urban concepts, such as for example 15minCity, which illustrates a whatif-machine platform, based on the concept of “city of 15 minutes” proposed by Carlos Moreno. This project makes it possible to verify how far different European cities differ from the famous model according to which our cities should be designed so that citizens can reach their places of interest on foot or by bicycle in no more than 15 minutes. You can also interact with Pencil City, where visitors will be invited to design and build an imaginary city with LEGO® bricks, exploring solutions to problems such as employment, education and citizens’ quality of life.
He team Music will show projects that offer a new approach to music creation, such as ALSO (Piano Inpainting Application), a virtual assistant that allows you to interactively compose complex piano pieces in a variety of styles. Another project will be NOTONO, an open-source web interface for sound design that, using machine learning models, helps generate and transform the sounds of musical instruments through painting-like operations. Finally, there will also be a space dedicated to Flow Machines e DrumNet, both AI tools designed to support musicians: the first is dedicated to music production to offer musicians an inspiration for new melodies, chords and bass lines, the second is designed for drums and quickly offers a vast number of custom patterns for your music track.
TV studio:
Many also the events that will take place in the area set up as an AV production and archive solution and which will be broadcast in live streaming on the Sony CSL Paris YouTube channel. The program includes interviews with CSL researchers, panels dedicated to various topics, a morning connection with Sony Computer Science Laboratories Tokyo and a daily information strip in the morning.
Image Sensing Solutions:
During the event, innovative services will be provided to control the flow of people within Maker Faire in real time, using the smart infrastructures built in the fair area, in absolute respect for privacy. The aggregate metadata relating to the number and flow of people will be generated by Ulysses technology, which leverages Sony Semiconductor Solutions’ intelligent vision sensors, integrated into smart poles and Envision’s Urbanvision software platform. A space within the exhibition area is also dedicated to these technologies and to the IMX500 image sensors, the first in the world to integrate a processing function based on artificial intelligence.
AV Production and Archive Solutions:
Several products from Sony’s professional AV storage and production solution will be showcased in the broadcast studio.
The REA-C1000 Edge Analytics Appliance is an advanced audiovisual communication tool that leverages AI-based technology to create impactful and highly engaging video presentations for the audience.
The family cameras Cinema Line ILME-FX6 and ILME-FX3, offer Full Frame shooting solutions to capture the emotion in every frame and unleash the power of visual storytelling with the help of AI functions. Finally, ODS-D380U, the third generation drive of Sony’s Optical Disc Archive (ODA) technology, a system aimed at the long-term archiving segment for Big Data storage.