The University of Mississippi held its second technology summit yesterday.
Industry leaders from across the country came to discuss technology trends and STEM education.
“We are having some pretty lively feedback and talk about some key issues like how we can unleash our economic innovation in this state, how we can deal with some of the challenges in rural communities, especially expanding access to technology and then also a strong sense of protecting the homeland and the issues there,” said Jeffery Vitter, Chancellor at the University of Mississippi.
U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, who serves as chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation and the Internet, was the guest of honor at the technology summit and Vitter said Wicker was instrumental in starting the event last year.
“I often get a front-seat view of the innovative ways that technology is increasing productivity, creating jobs and driving our economy forward,” said Wicker. “Mississippi is continuing to lead with groundbreaking advances in technology, health care, and defense.”
Vitter added that robotics was a widely talked about topic among the panelists.
“Robotics was a pretty active topic of discussion today, especially around the homeland sense, but also the coming explosion of applications for machine learning and artificial intelligence in which we will do more and more with technology such as self-driving cars, but also ways that through artificial intelligence we will be provided with very fast information to allow us as human beings to make key decisions,” said Vitter. “There is more and more autonomy being developed artificially through robots and one of the challenges, quite frankly, is the negative potential of what robots could do from a defense point of view.”
Vitter said that the technology summit is something he hopes will catch on and in the process will make Mississippi grow.
