The 2018 Tech.AD USA Awards

The Tech.AD USA took place for the 5th time on November 13-14, 2018 and presented a fully packed program comprising icebreaker roundtable discussions, case studies, streams, interactive World Café and Challenge Your Peers sessions, Auto Scale start-up lounge, a post-conference workshop as well as the launch of the Tech.AD Driving Days. The event is North America’s leading knowledge exchange platform bringing together 150+ stakeholders who are playing an active role in the vehicle automation scene discussing technical challenges for vehicle automation L4+.

With the 5th anniversary of the Tech.AD USA, we’ve taken the opportunity to launch the Tech.AD award and have received tremendous feedback and inspiring award applications. Presented by we.CONECT and moderated by Jamie Smith, (Director of Global Automotive Strategy, National Instruments) the award evening took place on Thursday, November 13, 2018. Prior to the event, we have received many outstanding applications, which were carefully reviewed.

This year, the Tech.AD USA award exclusively honors exceptional projects in the category:
Most Innovative Active Safety or ADAS Technology/Product/Service

Each of the nominees presented their AD project/ solution via a short video. The attendees of the award dinner had then to choose their favorite project, showing outstanding effort in taking autonomous driving to the next level.

Proud winner of the Tech.AD Award 2018 in the category ‘Most Innovative Active Safety or ADAS Solution’ was Algolux and their CANA full-stack deep neural network (DNN). The solution full perception stack applies a novel end-to-end DNN to significantly improve accuracy versus today’s alternative state of the art approaches across these challenging scenarios.

“We are honored to win the Automotive Tech.AD Award for the Most Innovative Autonomous Driving Solution for our CANA robust perception DNN stack. This acknowledgment from industry experts once again validates our novel application of artificial intelligence as a unique approach to address the challenges of accurate perception under the most difficult imaging conditions,” said Allan Benchetrit, Algolux President and CEO.

Runner-up in the same category was Valeo with their project ‘Scala Scanner’ - The world’s first automotive grade Laser Scanner, which combines long detection range, wide field of view, accuracy and precision. TomToms ‘AutoStream’ solution came in third.

All Tech.AD award winners received an exclusive trophy and certificate as recognition for their outstanding performance. In addition we.CONECT also donated 1,000 $ on behalf of the winners to support a charity project. This year we selected the Art & Scraps organization in Detroit.