From potentially revolutionary computer chips to tiny micro drones, our editorial staff spent the past week investigating some of the most interesting and fun emerging technology on the planet at this year’s CES conference in Las Vegas.
With 184,000 people in attendance, the expo halls and meeting rooms at this year’s show were jam-packed not only with people, but with compelling and unique technology that will provide entertainment, fuel industries, and shape the world of the future. With so many intriguing products to investigate, we rely heavily on the experts from our editorial team to seek out, try, and report back on the best of the bunch.
This year’s conference was special in many ways, but perhaps most so when it came to our top tech pick. Though we typically choose a consumer-facing product like our best-of-2017 winner, the Samsung Chromebook Plus, this year we picked a product that most people will never lay eyes on, the Nvidia Xavier processor. We believe the lightning-fast in-car computer will play a pivotal role in the next generation of intelligent cars, allowing you to travel quicker, safer, and perhaps without even touching a steering wheel.
As part of our best of CES coverage, Digital Trends’ Editor-in-Chief Jeremy Kaplan and Managing Editor Nick Mokey sat down to discuss our picks for the best of CES, sharing our choices and elaborating on why we made them.
“We have 15 to 20 journalists running around the floor, exploring everything there is too see — and there’s a lot to see,” said Kaplan about the way the awards were chosen, “Everyone scrambles to see as much as they can see, and we all get together in a little room, and eventually decide what the best products are from the show.”
Watch the full video to learn why we picked each of our favorite items at this year’s CES conference, and be sure to check out our full article detailing our choices.
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.