Thales is launching a new Speakers Bureau to give its in-house technology experts a chance to connect with people outside the company. The Bureau is a response to COVID-19, which has limited travel opportunities and made it more difficult to network in person.
The company is hoping that the Bureau will help make complex technologies more accessible, which will in turn generate more interest from both the general public and potential corporate customers. Roughly one-third of the company’s 83,000 employees will be involved in the Bureau in some capacity, and will collectively address technologies ranging from 5G and cybersecurity to biometrics, autonomous vehicles, and quantum tech.
The speakers will also discuss the practical and business impact of those technologies in industries like transportation, identity, and security, and the potential implications for important social issues like sustainable development and frugal AI. In doing so, Thales believes that they will make next-generation technology feel less foreign, and that it will then be easier for people to apply that technology to solve a variety of real world problems.
“Our objective is to explain, in simple words, a range of issues that may be complex or difficult to grasp by letting our in-house experts speak,” said Thales Communications VP Peggy Nahmany. “Behind every important topic, there are women and men working away unnoticed. We want to listen to what they have to say and share their unseen expertise as widely as we can, and we hope they will inspire new generations of women and men to be the researchers, engineers and architects of tomorrow’s world.”
Thales spends 4 billion euros on research and development on an annual basis. The company recently announced that it is trialing a new temperature detection system in collaboration with NHS Scotland, and released a new contactless document reader that can scan both sides of an identity document.
The Speakers Bureau should help address the networking shortfall in 2020. Most of the world’s top conferences were either canceled or migrated to a virtual format due to COVID-19.
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