Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Festival brings AI, VR to the Valley

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Anjali Nennelli is the founder of the Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Festival, a conference on the latest emerging technologies. Learn about new emerging technologies that are going to change the way we live such as self-driving vehicles.

Ted Simons: The phoenix mobile and emerging tech festival. Give me a better definition of what this is about.

Anjali Nennelli: It is a conference where you get to talk about the latest emerging technologies. We are at the point where things are changing so fast. You get to hear about what changes are happening and how you can be part of it and understand and use it in everyday life. It is a conference made for the technology enthusiast and entrepreneurs and designers and ent enterprises and businesses coming together and exchanging information and getting understanding what that means to me.

Ted Simons: Define mobility. I notice mobility in the title. What are you talking about here?

Anjali Nennelli: About how our mobility in general in Tucson one is mobile phones and how it is part of your life. And also now the latest thing which everybody is so excited about is the self-driving car. How is it going to help us move the mobility and what it means to us.

Ted Simons: Self-driving cars. These things work? You are telling me that is okay? Every time I see one on the road I get nervous. I don't know what they are going to do.

Anjali Nennelli: I do drive a tesla and use the autopilot. First I was scared letting go of the steering but then later on it did good so I am like yeah, I can trust it. So, it is there. It is coming. It is real.

Ted Simons: I was going to say -- and that really is the future? The state of mobility now and the future of mobility, what are you seeing out there? Besides the self-driving cars what else is out there?

Anjali Nennelli: For us, the DVR and artificial intelligence and combining those with the self-driving things you can see amazing things. Like you know help you start off at a point where you are no more doing the trivial things like one of them is driving. You are not sitting there concentrating hours. You are doing work actually. Let's say you are going there while this is driving you are actually taking your calls.

Ted Simons: And virtual reality is you can be doing a job anywhere.

Anjali Nennelli: Anywhere, yes. It helps many industries like the medical industries, PTSD guys, helping them. It helps them come get over those things and enterprises train the employees better. There they spend days in training and now it can be in hours. And bringing this happiness of visiting other places right in your living room; right? So I can go visit this museum in Paris right here without actually having to travel. You are mobile. You are seeing stuff right here.

Ted Simons: And this kind of stuff is advancing all the time.

Anjali Nennelli: It is advancing so much VR is not mainstream yet because of the hardware it needs but it will come just like self-driving cars. They were not a reality a few years ago.

Ted Simons: And cell phones used to be bricks you held to your ear.

Anjali Nennelli: Yes, we started implementing what we learn into use and there you go.

Ted Simons: I noticed machine learning was mentioned as a possible topic. What does machine learning mean?

Anjali Nennelli: Machines are basically our computer guardians. We say you learn about the computer garden. It learns your behavior; right? And it understands like self-driving cars use it a lot. I am using the self-driving because it is easy to give example. It looks at the pictures while driving and takes it and goes okay these are, let's say it is looking at building and also some pets on the street. It looks at those and accumulates this data and tries to process and understand. It is learning this is an animal. This looks like a dog so it is a dog not a cat. That is the learning it needs to do with these data points.

Ted Simons: So all these data points not only have to teach us they have to teach the machines?

Anjali Nennelli: They learn faster than us.

Ted Simons: I bet they do. I am not surprised by that. As far as this conference is concerned what you got guest speakers? Industry leaders? Good chance for networking?

Anjali Nennelli: It is. Now we have tech giants like Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, Google, Intel, all speakers from these companies coming in and talking about what they are working on and how their products are making progress and the regular attendees, developers mostly, they can come in and listen to these things and get access to the platform like the AR kit and understand how to use them. We do work in VR and bringing this emerging technology of field together so one day you sit back and listen to these and maybe you find the networking and I always wanted to work in this side of the industry. What are the things available to me? How can I go connect to that speaker and learn more about it? Every day we do so many things but there is so more things you want to do. It gives that opportunity of future or your dreams to come to life.

Ted Simons: I would imagine the idea of advancing our own ideas is an idea. The Phoenix Tech Festival. Give me a date? A place? Give me the particulars.

Anjali Nennelli: Phoenix mobile and emerging technology is going to be at ASU on September 23rd. We have a pretty good line of speakers that start at 9:00 but we are open for registration at 8:00 and it goes all day long until 5:00 p.m.

Anjali Nennelli: Phxmobilfestival.com.

Ted Simons: We look forward to have you -- to having you back.

Anjali Nennelli: Thank you for having me.

Anjali Nennelli: Founder, Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Festival

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