11/06/17
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Yoshua Bengio is one of the foremost thinkers in a field within artificial intelligence known as artifical neural networks and deep learning. Although significant progress has been made in recent years due to (among other factors) the combination of the proliferation of data, the decreasing cost of compute, and the tremendous amount of money and talent now devoted to artificial intelligence, Bengio chose this as a field of study during the 1980s, in the throes of what some referred to as the AI winter, seeing through a period when money and enthusiasm for artificial intelligence had dried up.
Bengio is the co-author (with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville) of Deep Learning, a book that Elon Musk referred to as “the definitive textbook on deep learning.” On top of his growing influence in this field, he has also been enormously influential in shaping Montreal to become a hotbed for artificial intelligence. Bengio co-founded Element AI in 2016, which has a stated mission to “turn the world’s leading AI research into transformative business applications.” Element AI aims to foster partnership between the private sector and academia to help push the expansion of AI.
Bengio believes Montreal has emerged as a powerhouse due to the combination of great universities, great companies (including a number of Silicon Valley companies who have established offices in Montreal), and Canada’s ethos of cooperation among elite minds. We cover all of the above and more herein.
Peter High: Where does the field of deep neural networks currently stand in your estimation?
Yoshua Bengio: We have made amazing progress, but we are far from human level intelligence with computers. Most of the progress has been with supervised learning, which means machines are taught by essentially imitating humans. With supervised learning, humans provide the high-level concepts that the computer learns, which can be tedious and limits the ability of computers to discover things by themselves. Unsupervised learning, or what we call reinforcement learning, is when the learner is not merely passively observing the world, or how humans do things, but interacts with the environment and gets feedback. Humans are good at this. Combining unsupervised deep learning and reinforcement learning is one of the things that I am working on.
High: What steps are needed to reach the more fully realized version of unsupervised learning?
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10/30/17
Andrew Moore’s career path at Carnegie Mellon has become emblematic of the way the University fosters its star talent. He became a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon in 2000. In 2006, Moore joined Google, where he was responsible for building a new engineering office. As a vice president of engineering, Andrew was responsible for Google Shopping, the company’s retail segment. Moore returned to Carnegie Mellon in 2014 as the Dean of the Computer Science department. In that role and given his experience, Moore is among the most influential people in the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence.
In the past, Moore has described the poaching problem that the Computer Science department has, given its stable of extraordinary talent in fields such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and others that are high in demand. Of course, he recognizes himself in those professors and students who would choose to follow their passions into lucrative positions in the private sector. The department allows professors to leave and come back in many cases, and is hiring at higher rates in anticipation of this trend continuing.
In this interview, Moore offers insights into the evolving field of artificial intelligence, what is likely to be the factors to determine the companies who will win or lose in this space, as well as insights into what makes Carnegie Mellon specifically and Pittsburgh more generally a hot test bed for cutting edge technology.
Peter High: Andrew, you are the Dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Please describe your purview.
Andrew Moore: Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science has a couple of hundred strong faculty members who are working on every aspect of computer technology. We also have a few thousand amazing students. My role as Dean is to make sure the whole organization gets to move forward. I see my role as helping to clear the way for these geniuses to get to do what they want to do.
High: You have said that being at CMU is like being at Hogwarts Academy. That when you walk around the School of Computer Science, the College of Engineering, and the university at large, you see a great number of smart people working on a variety of things that will change the technology landscape, and ultimately our lives. What was the origin of Carnegie Mellon’s influence?
Moore: It all comes down to two visionaries, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon. They were two of the four people who, in 1956, took part in the Dartmouth Artificial Intelligence Conference, where they discussed what might be possible with computers in the future. These two gentlemen were in the business school at Carnegie Tech, which later became Carnegie Mellon University. There was, of course, not a computer science school in the 1960s. Newell and Simon used their passion and extreme intellect to speculate and bring together a team of people who looked at, not what computers would do in the next five to 10 years, but what it would mean to live in a world where there are thinking machines. They inspired so many other thinkers through that period that it snowballed over the decades. Today, we have 250 faculty members in the School of Computer Science. They work on everything from the lowest level details of how photons move and how you count them up, to the highest level details of what it means to have an emotional relationship with a talking machine. It was Newell’s and Simon’s initial interest that sparked this and shaped our computer science department.
On the commercial side, through our digital channels, we continue to advance our product suite to allow our commercial customers to have access to the technology portals that house all of the capabilities and resources of the bank that they use. This includes things like wires, accounts receivable transactions, etc. Many of our interactions with our commercial customers also occur through our digital channels. This will continue to evolve as our customers work to become more efficient, and we develop new ways to help them achieve that. This transformation has been underway for some time, but it has accelerated in the last two or three years.
10/23/17
When Greg Carmichael joined Fifth Third Bancorp in June of 2003, it was a chief information officer, a role he held at his prior company, Emerson Electric. He thought joining Fifth Third would provide an opportunity to learn a new industry, to face new challenges, and to return to his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. What he did not realize at that time was that he was beginning a journey that would take him from CIO to CEO of the company.
His path began even before he joined Emerson, he was an IT leader at General Electric. He saw at an early age the power that the CIO could have in as much as it touched ever employee of the company, and increasingly most customers, as well. As such he recognized how strategic IT truly could be. He thought about the revenue implications of IT much earlier than the average CIO. This continued at Fifth Third, and by 2006, he was offered the COO role. He became President in 2012 and would ascend to the top post three years later. In this interview, he reflects on his remarkable journey.
Peter High: As the President and Chief Executive Officer of Fifth Third Bank, please describe the business as it currently stands?
Greg Carmichael: Fifth Third has been around for 158 years. We have roughly $142 billion in assets and about 18,000 employees. We operate approximately 1,160 retail banking centers across 10 different states and have commercial and consumer lending presences throughout the United States. Fifth Third consists of four main businesses: Commercial Banking, Branch Banking, Consumer Lending, and Wealth and Asset Management.
High: Fifth Third spans business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C) sales. What role does technology play in each?
Carmichael: Technology plays a major role in everything we do; from the products we build, to our distribution channels, to how we service our customers. Our customers want to bank anywhere, any time. We enable them to do that. On the customer side, 60 percent of our financial transactions come through our digital channels, which include our web channel, our mobile channels, and our digital ATM channels. Additionally, 90 percent of our interactions and touch points with our customers occur through our digital channels. Over the last four or five years, as it became possible to transact with a digital image of a check, a significant proportion of transactions, like depositing a check, have transitioned to our mobile platforms.
High: Is there a member of your team who shepherds the evolution of digital channels, digital business, the use of technologies, and so on? Or, is it the responsibility of the broader leadership of the organization?
10-23-17
Suren Gupta has worn many hats over the course of his career, but has ultimately found success by combining his technology and business acumen to tackle IT and operational challenges. In his current role as Executive Vice President of Allstate Technology and Strategic Ventures, he has demonstrated an incredible ability to seize competitive advantage through his commitment to innovation. In an earlier interview, Gupta comments on a company transformation and increased focus on customer service at Allstate. Since then, he and his team have developed and launched Good Hands Rescue Mobile, a service available through their app that connects stranded motorists with emergency roadside service providers. This innovation is responsible for helping around 25,000 stranded drivers a month and providing the company an eight digit revenue lift, and for that reason. Gupta is a recipient of the 2017 New York Summit Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Gupta’s contribution, Pam Dufour, president of Allstate Roadside Services said, “Allstate is leading the way in the digital evolution of the roadside industry. Mobile devices are part of most Americans’ everyday lives. The Good Hands Rescue mobile app and website leverage technology to connect people with roadside services using their smartphones. We’re making it easy for people to do business with us anytime, anywhere and in any way.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
Suren Gupta: Allstate’s mission is to protect customers from life’s uncertainty. In 2015, it launched Good Hands Rescue Mobile, an innovative digital solution that makes it easier for stranded motorists to get the help they need. This mobile application and website enables drivers to easily request roadside assistance anywhere in America through their smartphones. And to expand that promise and the potential usage, the application was not limited to just Allstate’s customers.
When Good Hands Rescue Network launched in markets across the United States, Allstate saw rescue times were still too high as they were dependent on the amount of available service providers in each area. Allstate once again disrupted the roadside services industry with a new product to address those high wait times. Good Hands Rescue Network facilitates the digital exchange of customer requests for emergency roadside assistance. It enables a fully digital network of more than 1,000 skilled crowdsourced rescuers to safely, quickly and reliably rescue customers in less than 30 minutes on average. This cuts down on customer wait times by at least 15 to 30 minutes.
Good Hands Rescue Network was built on a platform as a service infrastructure, and includes state-of-the-art mobile applications for iOS and Android users as well as complementing web applications. It also includes a sophisticated virtual assistant, which is capable of providing roadside assistance using natural language over text message. This is a new model for customer service, the “Talk. Tap. Text” model, where customers can request assistance by calling roadside services, utilizing the Good Hands Rescue application, or texting the roadside virtual assistant.
The development of GHRN is a part of Allstate’s CompoZed initiative. Under this initiative, digital products are developed using agile XP as a software development methodology with paired programming, test driven development, continuous integration, collaborative cross-functional product teams, continuous delivery, and our own Cloud infrastructure Platform as a Service.
High: What opportunity or issue to be resolved led to this IT-led innovation?
Over the past four years, James Swanson has been leading a digital transformation in the agriculture industry. In is current role as Chief Information Officer at Monsanto, Swanson has been trying to develop ways to make use of Monsanto’s vast pools of data and derive insights that can inform company strategy. In a previous interview, he explains that this digital transformation is focused around five pillars that define the digital opportunity: operational excellence, business productivity, customer centricity, revenue enablement, and disruptive innovation. Since then, Swanson and his team have launched “science@scale,” their internally branded cloud analytics ecosystem. This highly scalable data science platform has drastically increased the speed of data analysis driving a cost savings increase of over $15MM and sales revenue increase of $17MM in the U.S. by completing months of scientific work in a matter of hours. As he notes in this interview, the results have been thrilling, and for that reason Swanson is a recipient of the 2017 New York Summit Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Swanson’s contribution, Monsanto CEO and Chairman Hugh Grant noted, “At Monsanto, collaboration is our competitive advantage. Collaboration with scientists across R&D was essential to the successful development and launch of science@scale. By marrying extremely talented big data and cloud analytics engineering team with skilled scientists, the team created a unique partnership to drive innovative thinking.”
James Swanson: Monsanto’s IT division wanted to provide our data scientists the ability to collaborate and share analytics models on a global scale and enable our scientists to take full advantage of our ever-expanding information assets. With this goal in mind, the team developed “science@scale,” our internally branded cloud analytics ecosystem. Since its release, this platform has proven to accelerate the development of analytics-driven decision models by turning data into actionable insights across our R&D pipeline and Commercial and Global Supply Chain, paving the way by transforming data science from exploration to full production implementation.
Our science@scale combines the best-in-class data science tools, like R/Sparklyr, Python/PySpark, OR/OPL, and Java/Scala, with scalable big data and cloud analytics infrastructure, like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform, to support high performance computing and memory intensive data analyses to solve complex agricultural challenges for Monsanto’s next-generation plant genomics research.
Lynden Tennison has spent the majority of his career leading and staying on top of technological developments within the railroad industry. In his current role as Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Union Pacific, Tennison has been working to commercialize internal software and leverage corporate assets to secure advantage in a competitive industry. To this end he and his team have developed PS Technology, a subsidiary built to tap into and market internal software, and launched Breeze Broadband Communications, a new wireless ISP company. These efforts have been extremely successful, bringing in an additional $50 million in revenue, and for that reason, Tennison is a recipient of the 2017 New York Forbes CIO Innovation Award.
When asked about Tennison’s contribution, Union Pacific CEO Lance Fritz said, “Union Pacific has a six-track strategy that drives value for our four key stakeholders: customers, shareholders, employees, and communities. Leveraging our technology assets through subsidiary companies is a great example of how our IT team helps foster innovation with new products and services, focuses on resource productivity by leveraging corporate assets, and maximizes the overall value of the Union Pacific franchise for all stakeholders.”
Lynden Tennison: We commercialized much of our internally developed software through a separate technology subsidiary company, PS Technology, plus we leveraged other corporate assets to launch a new wireless ISP company targeting rural America, called Breeze Broadband Communications.
The software subsidiary, PS Technology, leverages internal R&D within the railroad IT department and also reinvests 15 percent of their revenue in new product R&D.
The new wireless ISP business, Breeze Broadband Communications, is using communications infrastructure, including our towers and other transmission assets, originally built to support the railroad to deliver wireless broadband services to rural markets. Breeze was conceptualized within the IT department and a thorough market study was done, including full business case development, prior to launch in 2017.
For the third time, I have the privilege of announcing the Forbes CIO Innovation Award winners, recently announced at our Forbes CIO Summit in New York City. As in previous iterations, the award focuses on chief information officers who are making some of the biggest impacts on revenue growth through innovation. We focus on these individuals and their teams because they are pushing the boundaries and expanding the domain of the CIO; a position that has historically not lead revenue augmenting innovation activities. The 2017 New York Summit winners of the Forbes CIO Innovation Award have each driven significant revenue through their commitment to innovation and leadership in the information technology division of their companies.
The 2017 New York Summit winners are:
Suren Gupta, Executive Vice President of Allstate Technology and Strategic Ventures, who has helped to launch Good Hands Rescue Mobile, an innovative digital solution that makes it easier for stranded motorists to get the help they need. This innovation is responsible for helping around 25,000 stranded drivers a month and providing the company an eight digit revenue lift.
James Swanson, Chief Information Officer of Monsanto, has lead his team in developing “science@scale,” a cloud-based, highly scalable data science platform. This analytics ecosystem has driven a cost savings increase of over $15MM and sales revenue increase of $17MM in the U.S. by completing months of scientific work in a matter of hours.
Lynden Tennison, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Union Pacific, and his team have worked to commercialize much of their internally developed software through a separate technology subsidiary company, PS Technology, while leveraging other corporate assets to launch a new wireless ISP company, called Breeze Broadband Communications. These efforts have generated over $50 million in revenue, growing at double digits annually.
Earlier in 2017, the award was bestowed upon Lidia Fonseca, the CIO of Quest Diagnostics, Jim Fowler, CIO of General Electric, and Trevor Schulze, the CIO of Micron Technology.
10/17/17
When Cerner Chief Information Officer Bill Graff joined the company in 2005, he was attracted to the fact that it felt like an entrepreneurial company. The company’s growth since that would certainly back up that assumption. in 2005, Cerner earned roughly $1 billion in revenue. Today, the company is a $5 billion revenue company. In that same period, associate count has grown from roughly 6,000 to over 25,000, and Graff’s team has grown from 35 people to over 1,500.
Graff has run the company’s hosting business for a number of years, growing that part of the business from 30 to 40 clients to over 500 clients today. His CIO responsibilities were added to his hosting responsibilities a year and a half ago, and he has brought that same revenue-centricity and customer focus to IT, as he highlights in this interview, among other topics we covered.
Peter High: Bill, you joined Cerner in 2005 as a senior manager of Infrastructure Operations. You have been the Chief Information Officer of Cerner for about a year and a half. Can you describe your thirteen-year journey, rising through the ranks, to become CIO?
Bill Graff: Prior to coming to Cerner, I held different roles in IT ranging from software engineering to operational responsibilities like running datacenters. When I joined Cerner, I took over the datacenter infrastructure for the hosting site. As we dramatically grew that business from a small startup business inside of Cerner, to a large-scale business across the board, my responsibilities expanded as well. As Cerner grew, it made sense to combine the infrastructure organization and the corporate IT organization. In 2010, many of the infrastructure components from corporate IT, things like the networks and server storage platforms, came into my organization. Soon after that, it also made sense, from operating and cost modeling perspectives, to pull some of the applications into my organization. This was because on the hosting side, we had built processes for a lot of tools, things like automation, ticket tracking, and support services. That was about a three-year process. For the past three years, I have had responsibility for corporate IT, as well as on the hosting side responsibility for all of the global datacenter operations and infrastructure. I have spent a lot of time, both globally and working in the trenches, leveraging technology to enable our associates to be more productive, to deliver great service to our clients, and to help build Cerner.
High: How has the business grown in the time that you have been with Cerner?
Graff: When I joined Cerner, in early 2005, revenue was right around $1 billion dollars. Today, we are a nearly $5 billion revenue company. In 2005, our associate count was around 6,000. Now we are at a little over 25,000 people, worldwide. One of the reasons I came to Cerner was because I had spent a lot of time working at startups, and Cerner felt like a startup company. You were expected to be entrepreneurial and to deliver results. The exciting thing about Cerner was we had good business leaders and the funding to do entrepreneurial things. Through US legislation and hard work on our part to deliver, the company has grown dramatically. I have had a great career over the last 13 years.
High: Can you describe your purview as CIO?
10/10/17
It has been a remarkably eventful couple of years for Symantec. In early 2016, the company went through one of the largest corporate divestitures when it spun out its Veritas business. In June of 2016 the company acquired Blue Coat, and then followed that up with the acquisition of LifeLock in early 2017. The rationale was to focus on being a pure play cyber security company, with end-to-end solutions. In the process Symantec has built itself into the largest cyber security company in the world by revenue.
Sheila Jordan has been chief information officer of the company throughout the journey. She came to the company nearly four years ago from Cisco. The latter is a legendarily acquisitive company, and Jordan has leveraged her experience to develop a playbook of sorts for the team at Symantec to integrate each of the major companies it has acquired. She also has developed the company’s CustomerONE program, highlighting her team’s use of the company’s products. Jordan discusses all of the above and more in this interview.
Peter High: Symantec recently acquired Blue Coat and LifeLock. What advantages was Symantec trying to garner for the enterprise, your partners, and your customers through those acquisitions?
Sheila Jordan: With the Blue Coat acquisition, we were able to retain Greg Clark, who is our CEO, and Mike Fay, who is our president and COO. They came in and quickly established the vision and overall strategy for the company, which is what we call our Integrated Cyber Defense Platform. An integrated platform is important for CIOs and chief information security officers (CISOs) because fragmentation and lack of integration generate risk by creating white spaces where the bad guys hang out and cause damage. Acquiring Blue Coat gave us the opportunity to improve the security posture of our small, medium, and enterprise customers.
Improving operational efficiencies also reduces costs. Fixing technology sprawl by using an integrated solution, which allows you to remove some products, drives a lot of value. We have been implementing the transformation on cloud products and on-prem. We just had our earnings reports, the positive results tell us it is resonating with our customers across verticals and with small, medium, and enterprise organizations.
From an IT perspective, we want to make sure we are enabling the organization. It is important that CIOs think about run, change, and grow. You have to run the company and be efficient and effective, but that is table stakes. You also want to position yourself with the new technology to be able to help the CEO and the C-suite change and grow. The acquisitions of Blue Coat and LifeLock gave us the opportunity to not only integrate, but also to transform how we do our work and think about the future.
The combination of us moving into cloud products and IT having a stake in driving integration and transformation, allowed us to think about taking our global subscription platform to a new level. One of the things we thought about was: How do we make sure our customers can consume their products the way they want to? We created an end-to-end reference architecture for our global subscription platform. It starts with our engineering products; they have provisioning, metering, and monitoring in the cloud products. Then it goes all the way through to how we quote an order, configure an order, how we do quote-to-cash, and, ultimately, to distribution. We want our products to be widely distributed and our global subscription platform to be frictionless. Our goal is a process that only takes a few clicks. We are accomplishing that through the integration of our cloud products with our subscription platform.
High: Your clients are often IT departments. To what extent do you and your team spend time in the field working with CIOs and learning about issues that you can help solve?
10-04-17
Gartner Symposium is currently under way in Orlando, and the company has identified a top ten strategic technology trends for the year ahead. Gartner defines “strategic” as those technologies that will have significant disruptive potential over the next five years.” Here is a summary of the trends:
Intelligent:
1. AI Foundation
AI has massive potential to enhance decision making, reinvent business models and ecosystems, and remake the customer experience. Many organizations have already taken notice of this, with a recent Gartner survey indicating that 59% or organizations are gathering information to build an AI strategy, while the rest are piloting or adopting AI programs. Given that AI techniques are rapidly evolving, and organizations will need to invest heavily in skills, processes and tools, it is suggested that business focus on tightly scoped solutions targeting specific tasks. With Gartner estimating that by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top 5 investment priorities, now is the time to invest in data preparation, integration, algorithm and training methodology selection, and model creation.
2. Intelligent Apps & Analytics
AI has become a major battleground for software and service vendors, with AI expected to be incorporated into every application, app and service, at least on some level. Gartner highlights augmented analytics, which uses machine learning to automate data preparation, insight discovery and insight sharing as an area of growing strategic importance. Organizations should explore intelligent apps that augment human activity, and identify use cases across advanced analytics, intelligent processes and new user experiences
3. Intelligent Things
