The 7th Annual SYNC conference was successfully held by PingWest on September 22, 2019, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The conference's theme, tailored to the Silicon Valley where many tech innovations originated in, was "Tech for Good."

The conference kicked off on Sunday morning with an entertaining speech by Alan Boehme, Global CTO of the world-renowned Procter & Gamble company. Covering the topics of how technology drives a better future and a more pleasant life, Mr. Boehme suggested that the public should stop undervaluing IT infrastructures and treat it more like the way VCs invest in companies: to make lots of small investments in great ideas, and while many will fail, the ones that hit will lead to huge returns.

Thomas Luo, Co-Founder and CEO of PingWest, said that "Tech for good should be the most important consensus in this divided world." His speech focused on the idea that the tech community should be proud of the achievements they made in making the world a better place, and continue to do better while bringing the things they were most bashed for, including privacy and diversity, into their attention.

Henry Evans, who is the Co-founder of Robots for Humanity and remotely joined the conference from his home in Los Altos, CA, was the highlight of the entire event. Mr. Evans, who is mute and quadriplegic after a massive stroke at the age of 40, operated a moving telepresence robot called Beam remotely in his bedroom and utilized computer-synthetic voice to deliver a moving speech. 

Though physically trapped inside his bed, Mr. Evans, now 56 years old and an ex-CFO in a Silicon Valley tech company, has become a frequent and energetic inventor and collaborator with robotics professionals throughout the world, and uses many robots he co-designed to travel the world and give speeches to inspire others. His song, The Measure of a Man, was played towards the end of his speech moved audience members.

A few feedback from the audience member with regard to Mr. Evans' speech after the event mentioned that it's rare to see a tech event organizer focusing on the touching stories, instead of tech buzzwords.

But the event isn't short of buzzwords. 5G, the up-and-coming generational innovation in telecommunications technology, is one of them, and is going to change the way human and nearly everything connects to each other very soon.

"With the super-low latency and massive capacity for unlimited data, the technology will expand the mobile ecosystem to new industries, transforming the wireless edge, delivering new and enhanced services with 5G + AI, addressing the growing needs of low-power, wide-area IoT use cases," said Dr. Tingfang Ji, Head of sub-6GHz 5G research at Qualcomm. 

Dr. Ji, who holds the position of Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm and is also a highly-respected member at 3GPP, the organization in charge of setting standards for telecommunication technologies 10 years ahead, said that all of the benefits 5G can bring isn't far from us anymore. He projected that by 2020, nearly all high-end handsets will support 5G connectivity, and people may not even be so attracted to their phones anymore. That's because XR, short for extended reality and is essentially a mix of virtual and augmented reality, will become easily accessible, highly competent, and ubiquitous because of the benefits from 5G.

Technology is not only advancing the way people communicate, but also making people purchase real estates more efficiently. From client-facing roles to data and technology, Flyhomes, the Seattle-headquartered startup backed by big names such as Andreessen Horowitz, is empowering homeowners with machine learning-driven services aimed at making the home buying more efficient. Sam Kalse, Head of Brokerage at the startup, highlighted that the company focuses on human relationships between sellers and buyers, instead of transactions.

Tagged with "lifesaver" in the Bay Area, Chinese cuisine supplier Nextdish also adopts hyped technologies like machine learning to improve their user experience. "Consequently, food waste and delivery cost are drastically decreased, while on-time delivery rate is significantly improved," said Sherry Liu, a co-founder at the company during her speech at SYNC 2019.

Academic big shots like Pieter Abbeel were among the prestigious speaker lineup at SYNC 2019. The University of California, Berkeley professor and OpenAI advisor gave audience members a quick but fun-infused recap on the recent trends in artificial intelligence and robotics, especially when the two are combined.

Prof. Abbeel's students are now advancing the research in reinforcement learning, a hot technique in the deep learning community, in different capacities such as university researchers or AI startup founders. One of his student's works, an algorithm that can turn any person into a dancing pro by using body tracking and deep learning, has proven to be a more novel use case for technologies similar to "deepfake", and while not necessarily making the world a better place, at least keeping people happy.

Ranjan Sinha, VP at IBM, YaXu, Head of Data Science at Linkedin, Davy Wang, Technical General Mnager of Tencent Cloud International, and Hansong Zhang, Chief Scientist at Niantic Inc. were among other distinguished guests.

The one-day event included three panels, covering topics from "Can we use AI for Global Good?", "How technology brings changes to the content business," to "Bigger than Global—Synergy of Mature and Emerging Markets.".

The conference wrapped up on Sunday afternoon with a keynote speech delivered by Kyum Kim, co-founder of Blind, an award-winning app-based community for verified professionals. Mr. Kim touched on how his app, and more generally, having an open, honest and anonymous platform for career-related discussions can lead to the betterment of the tech industry, specifically, how the app has been able to present first-hand data with regard to the current gender pay gap in tech companies, and that information is crucial in helping female and   to minorities to choose a suitable career path and avoid certain companies.

SYNC is PingWest's international event brand, bringing together the top tech entrepreneurs, investors and cross-field talents. It has been held in San Francisco, Beijing, HongKong, Taipei, Ho Chi Ming City, Bali and London in succession.

Since 2013, SYNC has been successfully held for 13 times and has become one of the most pre-eminent tech conferences in the Bay Area, providing a platform for dialogue between Chinese and American entrepreneurs, investors and talents.

Being a media platform with a Chinese background, but for the global innovators, PingWest is dedicated in bridging the knowledge and mindset gap throughout the world. Founded in the Silicon Valley in 2012, PingWest has been focusing on reporting on the most inspiring technology innovations, and always has a high regard for globalization, cooperation and mutual understanding. 

By hosting SYNC events and keeping this year's topic on "tech for good", it is the PingWest U.S. team's hope that the tech communities can go back to their cores, and give more attention to the good and innovative things, and continuously strive to use the power of technology to make the world a better place.