Forget about easing into the new year––come the first full week of January, we’ll be headed to Vegas for CES, the tech industry’s biggest trade show.

The 2025 show runs from January 7–10 and, as usual, the week is jam-packed with keynote speeches, informational sessions, and exhibits on the latest tech innovations. Some of the keynote speakers this year are Delta CEO Ed Bastian, Volvo Group CEO Martin Lundstedt, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet, and Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang.

Tech Brew is sending its transportation reporter to CES this year, so we’ve rounded up some of the mobility tech themes we’ll be keeping an eye on.

Get with the program: Major manufacturers––from Tier 1 automotive suppliers like Continental and Magna to OEMs like Honda and Toyota to industrial equipment bigwigs like John Deere and Caterpillar––will be there.

Hundreds of other exhibitors in the vehicle tech and advanced mobility sector will be there, too, from EV charging companies to AV sensor startups.

Keep reading here.—JG

From traffic light timing to flood forecasting, Google’s research arm is bringing AI to a slew of real-world problems that might seem far afield from the company’s core search business.

Yossi Matias, who took over as head of Google Research this May, is hoping to tap into what he calls a new “golden age” of tech research to make progress across these varied projects. Matias said the time between research findings and their practical application—something he calls the “magic cycle”—is shrinking, which could open new doors in a host of different fields.

We spoke with Matias about how he chooses investment priorities, the future of LLM progress, and his goals for 2025.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Google’s research projects cover everything from flood and wildfire forecasting to weather systems and LLMs. How do you decide where you focus resources?

So you mentioned flooding—let me pick on that for a moment…I’ve been overseeing what we call Google Crisis Response, which is essentially how to respond to people turning to Google for information or trusting Google with information when something happens. We just had an earthquake in California, so immediately, people want to know what’s going on and what they should be doing. And as part of that, I was leading the development of what we call SOS Alerts, which provided actionable information to people—quite often within an hour or minutes of when something happens…We’ve had over 4 billion views of SOS Alerts since we launched it, anything from natural disasters to terror attacks to even Covid alerts.

One thing we discovered early on is that if our mission was making sure that any available information that can be helpful is given to people right away, there were certain things that we could not be helpful because nobody had information.

Keep reading here.—PK

CES—one of the biggest tech conferences in the US that brings together nearly 140,000 people—is coming up quickly. As usual, the conference has a designated digital health section, and Healthcare Brew will be on the ground in Las Vegas between January 6 and 10 to keep you posted on all you’ll need to know.

But in the meantime, we thought we could give you a little preview of what to expect—especially considering more than 19,000 industry attendees reported being interested in digital health programming under Consumer Technology Association (CTA)’s theme for this year, “The future of health,” according to René Quashie, VP of digital health at CTA, the organization that runs CES.

The planned conference programming covers a wide range of topics from artificial intelligence to digital therapeutics to workforce. Here’s what to expect for CES 2025.

Keep reading here.—CM