Konnichiwa from Kognic Japan! We’re just through a very busy event calendar, culminating in our attendance at AEE Nagoya 2024 - the Automotive Engineering Exposition - where we welcomed many new industry contacts and hosted a seminar on dataset annotations for ADAS / AD.
In addition to the event, Kognic has also been featured in a leading automotive technical journal. We’ve been interviewed by Dr. Takada, of Nagoya University, who is an academic research and expert on autonomous driving. You can see the Japanese article here:
https://ligare.news/story/feature_kognic/
A few hot takes and observations as we grow the market:
- Japan clearly is still ultra-strong with automotive manufacturing. There's always that one company making something you need.
- However, there is a clear lack of industrial software. There were few companies in the entire tradeshow promoting industry-specific software and platforms. While some Japanese OEMs do seem to have their own in-house tooling for annotation, it’s very rudimentary and prone to critical feature gaps.
- A great amount of the AEE event attendees were talented young engineers and middle management seeking out what was “new” and important.
- One of the engineers said that a lot of them, as young university graduates, actually start off as annotators. The Japanese engineering mindset is that automation will only be part of the overall solution and there will always be a need for manual intervention - something we believe in at Kognic.
- It’s clear that Japanese OEMs are at a crossroads when it comes to software. Will they want to continue to develop and maintain software tooling themselves by having young engineers be their muscle? OR will they recognize that this method is too expensive, both from a human and development standpoint, and start to look outside.
Thanks for reading!
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