Tracking the Tour de France: Data and AI on the Road with Shahid Ahmed, EVP for New Ventures and Innovations at NTT

How does the Tour de France collect data and provide real time stats to viewers? Shahid Ahmed, EVP for New Ventures and Innovations at NTT, argues that the work they do to track the Tour de France is the ultimate edge use case. He also dives into small AI models and localized data at the edge, as well as educating for the future of jobs in tech. 

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Key Quotes:

“ I think [tracking the Tour de France] is one of the most fascinating edge use cases that I've seen in a while…. We’ve got cyclists going at north of 50 miles an hour, 60 miles an hour sometimes, and they're moving across a variety of different towns, villages, mountains, always a challenge from a network coverage perspective. It's a very difficult equation just from that movement part.”

“If you tune in to NBC, which covers the Tour de France, or USA Network, which is the sister network, you'll always see the live coverage of stats…. Live data is a must have and it has to have very small latency, meaning it can't be five seconds later when the cyclist has gone down or finished across the line.”

Timestamps: 

(01:32) How Shahid got started in tech 

(04:55) Innovations in 5G

(09:06) Challenges and innovations in the Tour de France

(18:01) Edge AI and industrial applications

(27:38) Lessons from a global role and regulatory challenges

(34:03) Teaching Industrial IoT and preparing the workforce

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Sponsor:

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Credits:

Over the Edge is hosted by Bill Pfeifer, and was created by Matt Trifiro and Ian Faison. Executive producers are Matt Trifiro, Ian Faison, Jon Libbey and Kyle Rusca. The show producer is Erin Stenhouse. The audio engineer is Brian Thomas. Additional production support from Elisabeth Plutko.

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Links:

Follow Shahid on LinkedIn

Follow Bill on LinkedIn