Harman To Add Fourth Division Next Quarter as Software Role Advances

Chief Technology Officer I.P. Park gave a glimpse into a few of the growth areas where Harman is focusing research and development efforts short and long term, breaking out the segments into three IoT growth areas: cloud, smart connectivity and user experience. “You’re probably sick of hearing IoT by now, but it is something that’s very, very important in many industry segments,” said Park, adding that it touches all of Harman’s reporting units. With 50 billion IoT devices forecast to be in the market by 2025, increasing connectivity will tie together home, car and enterprise user experiences in a “much bigger-scale ecosystem,” Park said.

Among the challenges Harman is addressing in the connected world are cybersecurity and road safety, including driver distraction, Park said. As software plays a greater role in the connected car experience, “cyber insecurity” issues will proliferate, Park said. Hacking tools have become “commoditized,” making it easy for anyone to hack into someone else’s computer, Park said, and hundreds of millions of personal records are being stolen each year.

Park cited a recent Data Breach Investigations Report by Verizon revealing that only 6 percent of all cyberattacks are ever discovered by companies’ IT departments, which he called “alarming.” Taking that to the automotive world where 250 million connected cars will be on the road by 2020, Park called cybersecurity a “huge challenge for everyone who is involved in the automotive space.”

The car is increasingly vulnerable to attacks as they’ve become more sophisticated, and that will continue, Park said. Eight to 10 years ago, content was brought into the car in the form of CDs or DVDs or beamed to a radio in a controlled, “easy to maintain” model, he said. Today, content is also brought in through smartphones and apps, which can introduce security risks, and software and firmware updates are sent out over the air, making a car’s network of computers “inherently insecure,” he said.

Harman has designed a multilayer security solution based around hardware, a hypervisor, operating system access control, application sandboxing and network protection, Park said. A vehicle’s computer system has to be continuously updated to guard against security vulnerabilities, and Harman’s five-layer approach mitigates security threats, he said.

The vast amount of entertainment, diagnostic and communications data coming into the vehicle is not only a security threat but also a distraction to drivers and a threat to safety, too, Park said. Harman is working on solutions that combine data from various sources -- real-time traffic and weather, cameras, laser radar, vehicle sensors, GPS, digital mapping and electronic horizon technology providing data such as road curvature -- to provide “the best connected safety when it comes to cars interacting with the road and other cars,” he said.

Even with hands-free technology that allows drivers to answer a phone or read a text with hands on the wheel, drivers are still distracted by a multitude of activities, and Harman is working on technologies to keep drivers aware of their surroundings, Park said. “Just because you have your hands free and are looking ahead, that doesn’t mean you’re not distracted,” he said. “You can be daydreaming and miss an exit.” One of the technologies Harman is researching to guard against distraction is eye-gaze tracking. “Without taking your eyes off the road, it will be possible in the future to control everything by your eye gaze through the head-up display,” Park said. That technology can help drivers avoid various mishaps, including missing an upcoming exit, he said. By determining whether a driver is “looking at the road or looking at the sign,” the car can issue an alert to the driver to prevent a mishap, he said.

Harman is a member of a seven-company consortium that’s part of the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program working on cognitive load detection, Park said. The consortium is studying technologies that can be used to measure the cognitive load of a driver so that the vehicle can “appropriately alert the driver or actively change the setting in the car to reduce the load of the driver’s cognition,” he said.

Also part of Harman’s future: smart hearing. Calling sound management the future of the car experience, Park said technology on the drawing board will allow users to tune out noises they don’t want to hear and substitute more pleasant sounds. In a car, each seating position would have its own sound zone that doesn’t interfere with another zone, he said. The technology would also extend to Harman’s Lifestyle division, where it could be integrated into headphones, Park said. He gave the example of jogging by a construction site and being able to replace noisy construction sounds with the soothing sound of ocean waves.

In response to a question in Q&A on competition in the connected space, Park said Apple and Google are both competitors and partners, but “I like to think of them as partners, especially as we move into the world of connected cars.” With 250 million connected cars expected in five years, that’s a universe that’s much larger than Harman or any one company, he said. “There has to be a healthy, collaborative ecosystem” between OEMs, tier-one car companies, software firms, telecommunications providers and Internet companies, he said.