Chief Architect for Hewlett Packard Labs Kirk Bresniker took the stage during the THRIVE Innovation Summit to discuss Memory-Driven Computing and the future of agriculture. The THRIVE Innovation Summit is held annually in Silicon Valley, attracting upwards of 250 agribusiness leaders, investors, agtech and foodtech startups, and California and Midwest growers.
As I think about innovation today and how it will evolve in the future, I like to start by going back to the roots of Silicon Valley. Back in 1939, our founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard had just created their company, HP, out of a garage. In doing so, they laid the foundation for what would later become Silicon Valley. No one could have predicted the technology epicenter that we know today; in fact, at the time, the area was known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight because it was essentially an agricultural region.
From the very beginning, our company’s purpose was to enhance the way people live and work. Dave famously said that “a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile— they make a contribution to society.”
One way we continue on that mission is through Tech Impact 2030, an open collaboration with the World Economic Forum that brings together leaders across industry, technology, academia and government to solve a series of societal challenges. In September 2018, we launched our first challenge, to help solve world hunger, inspired by our work with Purdue University’s College of Agriculture and a nod to our geographic heritage.
Food security is one of the most critical issues facing society today. The United Nations forecasts the world’s population will grow to 8.5 billion by 2030, but globally, our food production is already falling short. HPE is exploring ways that technology can assist in feeding our rapidly growing population in ways that are equitable and sustainable.
The first step is to bring a global community together to have conversations like those we had at THRIVE Innovation Summit last week with leaders representing all aspects of the food production ecosystem..
During the Summit, we discussed the challenges companies, startups, and governments are facing and how technology can continue to evolve areas like automation and data collection and analysis to increase food production more efficiently. Agriculture of tomorrow will lean heavily on our ability to make sense of data – from crop data gathered in a field to plant genomics – and today’s computer architectures simply can’t scale to meet our needs. HPE’s Memory-Driven Computing approach addresses this demand and will enable critical leaps in performance.
While a fundamental piece of the solution, emerging technology is not the only consideration as we build an end-to-end solution to this challenge. That’s why we need an ecosystem to create public policy, establish the right infrastructure, train the next generation, and evaluate our future needs, holistically. Please join us as we step up to this global challenge and plant a different kind of seed to make a lasting contribution to society.
Click here to learn more about Tech Impact 2030, or contact TechImpact2030@hpe.com to find out how you can join us to help solve world hunger.
Kirk Bresniker
Chief Architect, Hewlett Packard Labs
Hewlett Packard Enterprise
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KirkBresniker
Kirk Bresniker is Chief Architect of Hewlett Packard Labs and an Hewlett Packard Enterprise Fellow. Prior to joining Labs, Kirk was Vice President and Chief Technologist in the HP Servers Global Business Unit representing 25 years of innovation leadership.
