Communications of the ACM

motive sector, Nvidia is the leader in AI chipsets that are used to power computer vision technology, and many automotive companies use them along with a wide variety of other sensors to enable autonomous driving and advanced driver-assistance systems.

However, applications for full-sized 3D sensors are not limited to smartphones or other consumer devices; the technology can be used for any type of 3D scanning in which an object must be mapped with precision. Applications exist or are in the works involving 3D printing, design, mapping, object recognition, facial recognition, gesture-based control, and other industrial or commercial applications.

Jae-Yong Lee, a venture capital in-
vestment manager with ReWired, a
$100-million robotic-focused venture
studio based in London, says he sees
great potential for the technology in
retail analytics. “If you could install
affordable [3D] sensors within a store
so you could really measure the traf-
fic—where the people are, where
they’re walking toward, where they
are hesitating—you could really opti-
mize how you display your items and
how you can redesign the store for
more sales.”
In the near term, the potential for
3D sensors beyond consumer devices
is likely to develop within the bur-
geoning autonomous vehicle market,
says Pier-Olivier Hamel, a product
manager with Leddartech, a Quebec,
Canada-based company that manu-
factures LiDAR technology for the au-
tomotive market. The company’s
technology is currently focused on us-
ing LiDAR to accurately capture the
3D profile of objects perceived by the
sensor, and making this technology
available to automobile OEMs and Ti-
er-One suppliers to classify objects
that can be used to train autonomous
and semi-autonomous driving sys-
tems. While the company is not focus-
ing on creating LiDAR technology for
smaller devices now, it certainly is a
possibility for the future.

“We can see with the miniaturiza-
tion of everything,” Hamel explains.
“I’m sure that there will be applica-
tions for personal devices and smart-
phones or augmented reality; those
are all possibilities.”
With all this activity, it is no sur-
prise the market for 3D sensors and
components is likely to rise. Tractica,
which released its 3D Imaging Hard-
ware and Software market study in
early 2016, projected the market for
3D imaging technology would reach
$24.9 billion globally by 2024, up
from $3.2 billion in 2014, which re-
flects a compound annual growth rate
(CAGR) of 23%.

Joshi, the study’s author, says that while the $24.9-billion market value may be overly bullish, as the technology did not take off quite as quickly as originally predicted, the consumer and mobile market will continue to be the largest sectors for 3D imaging technology, accounting for about $10.1 billion of the overall market by 2024.

In the near term,
the potential
for 3D sensors
beyond consumer
devices is likely
to develop in
the burgeoning
autonomous
vehicle market.
ACM
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A FASCINATION FOCUSED ON SUSTAINABILITY

”I have always
been inclined
toward math,
and was
fascinated by
computers very
early on,” says
Carla Gomes, a professor of
computer science and the
director of the Institute for
Computational Sustainability at
Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.
“I have always known I would be
doing something around this.”

Gomes earned her master’s degree in applied mathematics from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal in 1987, and her Ph. D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, U. K., in 1993.

She did postdoctoral research at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory for five years before joining Cornell University in

1998, where she has been ever since.

Her main area of interest lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and operations research. Currently, her focus is on computational sustainability, an emerging field that studies and develops solutions to computational problems for balancing environmental, economic, and societal needs for a sustainable future. Gomes feels AI and computer science can make a real difference in addressing sustainability challenges.

She explains, people often think of sustainability as referring solely to the environment, but sustainable development is about balancing environmental, economic, and societal issues, with the ultimate goal of assuring the well-being of current and future generations. Gomes is passionate about developing intelligent systems that can help across a variety of domains to address this.

“If you inject computational thinking and methodologies,” Gomes says, “we can come up with creative solutions to some of the biggest challenges we are facing today.”