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By Peter High, published on CIO Insight.
02-02-2017
Capital Power is a growth-oriented North American power producer headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta. The company develops, acquires, operates and optimizes power generation from a variety of energy sources. Capital Power owns more than 3,200 megawatts of power generation capacity at 18 facilities across North America. More than 700 megawatts of owned generation capacity is in advanced development in Alberta and Kansas.
Darryl Vleeming is the company’s vice president of information services and CIO. As such, he is responsible for all information services spend, excluding technology, connected directly to the company’s plant control systems. As he tells CIO Insight contributor Peter High, he also has to be a big contributor of the company’s bottom line.
Peter High: How have you organized your team in terms of direct reports and roles?
Darryl Vleeming: I have five direct reports. They are responsible for the following:
High: Please provide some examples of the strategic use of technology in the context of Capital Power.
Vleeming: Our team implemented energy management operations center software and a business intelligence solution that was so successful that we now offer it as a service to multiple other participants in the Alberta Power market. We also developed a custom business intelligence solution used to manage our wind farms in real time, and [another one] used to manage our long-term forecasts (everything from economic indicators to power prices) and analysis as it relates to acquisitions, divestures and new construction around North America.
Click here to read the full article on CIO Insight
By Peter High, published on Forbes
1/30/16
Peter Diamandis has lived his personal motto, which is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” He has founded or co-founded more than a dozen entrepreneurial ventures, including the X Prize Foundation and Singularity University. Additionally, he is the best selling author of a number of books, including Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World and Abundance: The Future is Better than You Think.
The common threads between these initiatives include his passion for space, longevity, and innovation, among other topics. He is also keenly aware of what his strengths and weaknesses. For example, he has found that he is better suited to develop an idea, build leadership teams, develop a vision, and then let them run things. He is less well suited to run businesses day-to-day. By assembling world class talent around his ideas, his impact will continue to be felt in many corners of the world.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please clickthis link. This is the 21st interview in the IT Influencers series. To listen to past interviews with the likes of former Mexican President Vicente Fox, Sal Khan, Sebastian Thrun, Steve Case, Craig Newmark, Stewart Butterfield, and Meg Whitman, please visitthis link. To read future posts from the series, please click the “Follow” link above, and follow me on Twitter.)
Peter High: Your personal motto is “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself,” and not so surprisingly, you are a serial entrepreneur. You have founded several companies including International Space University, XPRIZE, Singularity University, Human Longevity Inc., and Planetary Resources, just to name a few. What are the ties that bind your areas of interest and the companies that you have founded?
Peter Diamandis: I think the common theme that binds them together is my passion, which has evolved over time. My passion – as Juliann [Guthrie] so well described in her book[How to Make a Spaceship] – early on was space, and space has always been one of my core underlying passions.
I think it was during medical school a decade or two later that I became enamored with the idea of longevity as a theme in terms of trying to extend the healthy human lifespan. I was in medical school and I had been reading about species of life on Earth and in the oceans, such as whales, turtles and certain species of shark that had lifespans measured in hundreds of years. My feeling was that if they can live that long, why couldn’t we? This interest in longevity also stemmed from my interest in space, in the sense that there is a lot to explore, and if we can live longer, we will get to see more of it.
Space led to the XPRIZE, and the XPRIZE led to this real empowerment of the notion that we can do extraordinary things. Technology, in the hands of individuals today, is growing at such an extraordinary rate that we do not need to depend upon a few wealthy robber barons or government officials to solve our problems. Through technology, we are empowered more than ever before to solve our own problems. As a result, the XPRIZE grew from a focus on space to a focus on solving Grand Challenges.
That also tied into Singularity University. I had created International Space University as my first university, again driven by that space passion. As I became more enamored with the ability that individuals had to problem solve and became enamored with the implications of exponential technology and got to know Ray Kurzweil, the idea of creating a Singularity University that was focused on these technologies and focused on their ability to be leveraged to solve big problems became more clear.
All my companies weave together, they are all passion driven. They all tie back to that theme of “the best way to predict the future is to create it yourself.” It is about creating a future of abundance in the future of an exploring species and a future of healthy longevity. These are areas that I am excited about.
High: How do you divide your time, and how do you find your partners across these businesses? You only have so many hours in a day, and you have chosen your partners wisely. I am curious how often the idea comes up and you seek a partner or if it is in the partnership that the idea itself arises.
Diamandis: There are a couple of points to make there. One is that I have learned over the years to know what I love doing and what I am reasonably good at, and what I do not love doing and what I am not good at. I love the early creative phase, coming up with the idea, brainstorming the idea, laying out the vision, finding the formative team, raising the capital, and then stepping back and hiring a CEO to run it – or if I take the CEO position myself, as I have a few times, replacing myself. The hiring, the firing, and the detailed minutiae is not my forte. In the case with almost everything, I am proud to have a great CEO as a partner there. I typically will take a role as Executive Chairman because while I still am involved in some elements of the day-to-day, it is more the strategic partnerships, the capital and the long term, big picture, not the day-to-day operations of the company.
In the case of Planetary Resources, there is Chris Lewicki, at Human Longevity Inc., the CEO is Cynthia Collins, at Singularity University, Rob Nail is CEO, and XPRIZE has Marcus Shingles. The only place I keep a CEO role is in PhD Ventures, which is a company that manages my speaking, my book writing, and my Abundance 360 conference. It is my little think tank. I have a group of nine millennials, age 21 to 30, that support me across everything I do. It is my deployable team to support me in each of these companies.
I split my time equally in supporting my companies. If I had had a large exit 20 years ago, I might have built these things within a single company like [Richard] Branson has done and the Virgin Group or Larry Page has done inside of Alphabet. However, they have all been built independently to have them properly capitalized. For me, it is a joy – I love the constant freshness and the constant new challenges. I will either go from opportunity to opportunity or from challenge to challenge depending on what phase each company is in.
High: One of the central themes in your work is that the pace of technology change is accelerating, and you note that companies should disrupt themselves or risk being disrupted. We have just spoken about the companies you have founded, and in each case these were startups. That said, as you take the lessons that you learned, and you apply them in work with more traditional Fortune 500 organizations that are many decades old and have legacy technologies, to say nothing of legacy cultures and mentalities, I am curious if you have any lessons that separate those organizations that can adjust and can disrupt themselves versus those that are at risk of not doing so.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
1/24/17
Imagine Pittsburgh in 1979. The Steelers won the Super Bowl, the Pirates won the World Series, and the city nearly went bankrupt. Given the passage of time, it is easy to forget how deeply depressed the city was. Unemployment was nearly at 20 percent.
That same year, a seed was planted that would portend a great renaissance for the city. Carnegie Mellon University started its robotics program that same year. Additionally, a string of forward thinking city leaders were able to see past the end of Pittsburgh’s dominance as a steel town toward a brighter future as a technology-centric economy.
I recently spoke with Mayor William Peduto about this, and he offered many examples of the current administration’s progressive thinking about the union between city government, universities, and private industry. In September, Uber announced that they would pilot their driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh, for instance. Also, last year, Peduto’s chief innovation officer (a rare role in city government) announced the formation of PGH Lab, which provides government assistance to entrepreneurs. Additionally, in 2014, the city government signed an agreement with Carnegie Mellon to utilize that university as Pittsburgh’s own research and development department, while Carnegie Mellon can use the city as its own urban lab. Through it all, Pittsburgh has become a model city for others to learn from.
Peter High: In September of this year there was quite a splash made when Uber began its pilot driverless car initiative in Pittsburgh. How has it gone so far and what are the plans for the foreseeable future?
Bill Peduto: It was about two years in the making. The Uber team came to Pittsburgh with the intent to kick the tires to see if our city could become a global center for their autonomous vehicle research and development. There were not looking for government money or any type of subsidy. They were looking for a partner who was willing to create an urban lab. We had had a couple of decades of experience working with Carnegie Mellon [CMU] on autonomous vehicles in the city and had CMU’s cars already on our streets. It was not a big leap for us to be able to accommodate Uber.
Over the course of the past year and a half, Uber has employed over six-hundred employees in the city, and I expect that number to be over a thousand by the end of 2017. They are committed to spending up to one billion dollars within the city. Almost any time of the day, on numerous occasions, you can see the vehicles downtown within prescribed areas of the city. I expect that over the course of the next few years that geographical footprint will be expanding as well.
High: There are a lot of people who are pontificating as to how quickly driverless cars will become a reality. Given the city’s history with driverless cars, how has this informed your thoughts about how rapidly this might take off more generally for the public?
Peduto: I think if you asked anybody two years ago, “Do you anticipate driverless cars on the streets of an American city in the next 20 months?” there would have been few people who would have thought that that would be a reality. The technology has been there for over a decade, but the culture has not. We could have driverless planes. The technology exists, but the moment somebody would walk onto a plane and there would not be a pilot in the cabin, they would walk off the plane. I do not think the culture has caught up to the technology yet. The way that major automobile manufacturers are promoting their new lines of vehicles, they are doing it through increased autonomous technology. I think that within the next five years you will see a streamlining of different functions of the car which will contain autonomous ability. The sensors that will be utilized will allow the cars to talk to each other. It is not simply having an autonomous vehicle, but a series of vehicles that know exactly how far away to stay from each other, can anticipate what a car three cars ahead is doing and how to react to it before the human eye can even catch it, and then building that network into the public right of way with sensor detectors and cameras that can collect all this data and make our roads much more safe and efficient.
We are already rolling out the next phase of the smartest traffic signals in the world. Our partnership with Carnegie Mellon over a system called SureTrack allows us to capture information in real time and through a network of traffic signals and change the timing of the green lights and the red lights to increase efficiency by 31 percent. You do not have to add a new turning lane or build another roadway, you can use the existing roadways that you have, and through automation and sensors be able to make the system much more efficient and safe for bicyclists and pedestrians as well.
High: You have referenced the partnership the city of Pittsburgh has formed with Carnegie Mellon University. How do you see the lessons of the partnership between city governments, academia, and private business working together?
By Chris Davis, published on CIO Insight
9-12-16
The world is a big place, and despite what you, as an IT leader, think you know about the international digital heavy weights’ control of the market, there is still a lot of runway for your company to make its mark.
The first encouraging point that your digital future is not yet written comes from Dr. Peter Diamandis’ book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think, in which he estimates that by 2020, 3-5 billion new consumers will come online, adding tens of trillions of dollars to the global economy.
But let’s not oversimplify. The Asia market is multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and comes with digital (double-byte characters), political (Google being blocked) and competitive (Uber selling to Didi) challenges. A “one size fits all” approach didn’t work for Walmart the first go-around, and it is taking a new look at how it re-establishes its presence in China. To compete in the modern marketplace—where digital is or will be the medium of choice for commerce—all companies need to invest heavily in designing their global-local digital strategy.
Dipping your toe in the water won’t be enough.
1-4-17
As 2016 passes, and we look forward to the year ahead, here is my fourth annual list of the ten best long-form stories about technology from last year. (For my list of the best technology books of 2016, please click this link.)
What’s Next In Computing, by Chris Dixon, Medium, February 21, 2016
Andreessen Horowitz general partner, Chris Dixon, has written a number of compelling pieces on Medium this year, but my favorite is a great overview of “What’s Next in Computing”, in which he highlights how each product era has two phases, the gestation phase and the growth phase. He highlights how fast the growth is happening and why. As hardware becomes small, cheap, and ubiquitous, we all have access to sophisticated technology. He then offers predictions in a range of rising technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, wearables, virtual reality, augmented reality. The article has great charts, examples, and links throughout.
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team, By Charles Duhigg, New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2016
In 2012, Google—a company that spent millions of dollars analyzing worker productivity—launched a study of why some teams succeeded while others faltered. This New York Times Magazine article explains what they learned, and why certain group dynamics trumped others.
1/16/17
In 2011, Rob Nail thought he was retired. Never mind that he was only 15 years out of undergrad. He had co-founded Velocity 11, a robotics company that pioneered automation technology solutions for life science laboratories, and in late 2007, he sold it to Agilent Technologies. He had joined the board of Alite Designs, had become an angel investor, and generally enjoyed himself.
He elected to take one of the first executive programs at Singularity University (SU), the Silicon Valley think-tank that offers educational programs and that serves as a business incubator, founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. Whereas he thought he knew a lot about robotics, his exposure to the big thinkers at SU led him to realize that there was much he did not know, and that he was fortunate to have sold his company when he did because of competitive forces that would have made for tough going in the near-term.
Nail was so taken with SU that he invested time and money in it, and developed a number of ideas for the founders to pursue. Diamandis and Kurzweil were sufficiently impressed to ask him to come on as the organization’s chief executive officer, a role he has held since late 2011.
Today, he believes that the work of SU (among other institutions and enterprises) will lead to a world of abundance. He foresees a time in the next three decades where a middle-class existence in the western world will be accessible to all through exponential technologies. We cover his rationale among other things in this far ranging interview.
Peter High: I have had the chance to speak with multiple of your colleagues at Singularity University, though none with as broad a purview as you have. I thought maybe, given your high perch in the organization and your long tenure with it since its founding in 2008, you could talk a bit about the unmet need that led to the creation of Singularity University, especially at its founding; as well as how the organization has evolved in the eight plus years since.
Rob Nail: I met Peter Diamandis in 2009 after he and Ray Kurzweil had just started Singularity University. They ran that first program, and I met Peter at another event, and he said, “We just started this thing called Singularity University, and we are going to run these executive programs. You should come check it out.” I ended up attended one of the first executive programs at SU.
I had just had an exit after building a robotics company for drug and cancer research [Velocity 11] over 10 plus years. I sold it to Agilent Technologies, and worked at Agilent for a few years and then left. I basically walked into this executive program – I am a super tech geek so it sounded like fun –thinking I was the expert in robotics and biotech because I just had built a leading business and was in and out of pharma. In that week, I discovered all kinds of things happening in robotics and biotech that I had not known. That was an interesting epiphany. The second thing that hit me was that I learned about things happening in neuroscience and nanotechnology that were converging to potentially disrupt the robotics business that I had built. The second epiphany for me was that I left thinking, “Thank goodness I sold my business when I did because it was in trouble, and I did not even see it coming.”
That was a formative week for me. It was an interesting time when I was looking at broadening my horizons, and trying to find the next big thing for myself personally. I was fascinated by the faculty, the level of thought, the depth of thought, the meta-level of the philosophical conversation, and the potential of the ideas that were coming out of it. I pitched Peter Diamandis on a bunch of ideas: licensing what they were doing to start an online version, starting an accelerator program, and starting a fund to kick off and catalyze some of the ideas that were coming out of the programs. Peter’s response was, “Slow down, we just stated, but why don’t you come on and help.” At that time, I thought I was retired, and so I said I am happy to help, but I am definitely not taking the job.
Interestingly, where Peter and I aligned – and really the original reason that Peter and Ray started the University – was the insight that technology is moving far faster than most people realize, and the implications of that are extreme. Having an institution where you can go to understand the broad base of technology, but also go deep into understanding the implications on our lives, on our businesses, on our industries, on our society, and even on what it means to be human, is probably an important thing in the world. I took over as CEO about a year after that.
I think we find ourselves at a time where I believe the mission of Singularity University is more important than ever before. Just to give a quick narrative of where we are right now, we just had an interesting period with our election cycle here. We have seen Brexit. We just saw Italy go the way of Populism and sort of changing. I have a strong thesis that this is naturally expected to happen in a time that is rife with so much change. Most people have no idea about what is happening with technology, they just feel it changing every part of their lives. All we read in the front page of the paper is that Amazon Go is going to displace all cashier jobs. We are constantly bombarded with this horrific, negative news about the future. It keeps us in a constant state of anxiety and fear. When you are living in fear, you look for something to hold on to, something stable – and typically that looks like the past. So, I would suggest that Brexit, and Trump, and the Prime Minister stepping down in Italy; these are just examples of people not having a clear vision of a long-term future. They are just operating out of fear, and they are clinging to something that feels normal from the past because they are operating without anyone trying to articulate a long-term vision that we can agree upon, or even a vision that sounds positive, or any relative path towards it.
I believe that the mission of Singularity University is first and foremost to build an awareness of what is happening and what is available, but also to create a new narrative and a new lens for people to look at these technologies and breakthroughs with a long term, optimistic viewpoint. That view point is that exponential technologies are providing us with these capabilities that we never could have even imagined before, and they are going to allow us to solve problems that we never even remotely could have touched before. That can translate into us creating a world of abundance, as we like to call it.
If you look through Moore’s Law continuing for some time, through the works of Google Loon and Facebook drones and One Web satellite, everybody on the planet is going to be connected within the next five to 10 years. That means they will have access to the greatest education that ever existed. They can get a free degree from MIT today, imagine what five years from now is going to offer. The XPRIZE has this amazing global literacy prize that is a $50 million-dollar prize to build an app that will take someone from complete illiteracy to reading and writing proficiency with 18 months. They are pretty sure somebody will win this within the next two years. With access to IBM Watson, you get the best health care capabilities. Energy is getting cheaper on a 30-year timeline. It will mean that food and water can be cheap. Taken together, on a 30-year timeline, there is a real path towards us having an upper class, Western U.S.-based lifestyle as a baseline for everybody on the planet, all through exponential technologies.
Peter has a saying that we are going to move from a world of “haves and have nots” to a world of “haves and super-haves.” I think it is fundamentally possible, but it does not feel possible living in the time that we have because we have few visionaries, few people even able to discuss a vision of the future that sounds anything like this. It means drastic changes to the current system, and we know that change is scary and hard, especially when it means having to rewrite a lot of our existing infrastructure system, our economic system, our health care system, our insurance practices, and so on. All these things are being disrupted because of technology.
I would say that the one other thing that we are trying to provoke and inspire is getting more storytellers to think about this world of abundance, and how to fashion true narratives around that. This is critical because most people do not have good imaginations. We are fed these horrible things from the news, from the media, and from Hollywood, where almost any vision of the future that you see through these channels looks like a dystopian Hunger Games zombie apocalypse scenario. There are not many visions that are different for the future. Until we start telling ourselves better stories, we are going to manifest the ones that we are telling ourselves. We are working hard to change that narrative, and then show some credible path, and build a global community that is activated to take the steps to inspire the policymakers, to scale the startups, and to bring in the big development organizations and big corporations that have the wherewithal to make these things real.
High: One of the challenges you highlighted is that the pace of change has never been faster, and in many cases what we are seeing – in politics for one, among the examples you gave – is a reaction to that pace of change and maybe a desire to slow it a bit. As you are immersed in a world where that change is perhaps at its fastest, how do you think about strategy. You talked about the need for a bigger and better vision in some ways, but the substance of that vision, the reality of that is obviously changing to such a dramatic degree, I wonder what sort of time horizon you use for planning. Also, how do you incorporate flexibility and the ability to pivot relative to some of the ideas that you hold dearly as part of those strategies?
Nail: That is where the rubber hits the road. We have worked with enough corporations and startups, and we are based in Silicon Valley, so we have a particular bent around entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset. For big companies, we call this mindset of experimenting and trying stuff “intrapreneurship.” We see that mindset extending directly to these big societal problems as well.
First, you must have some risk takers. You must have an ecosystem that is supportive of risk takers and is catalyzing them, and then you have to protect and support those experiments and learn from them and keep experimenting. One critical insight that we have learned is the concept of scaling at the edges. Do not try to revamp the core business or the core systems that you have in place, do not try to hit those head on. Try to run experiments on the side where maybe it is completely stealth or unseen until you get a critical mass, or you have iterated enough to the point where you know what the path is. Once you find the right experiment that is working, and you scale it to a point, then you scale it from the edges and make it real, so it eventually displaces or replace the core. There is a lot of art to how you integrate that into business, or bring it back. That is a big part of the learning curve that we have explored. In Exponential Organizations, one of the books that came out of Singularity University, we looked at how you organize around these exponential technologies.
Another issueis that we have an extraordinary global community. We have more than 20,000 alumni out of our 110 countries who have come to our core programs, and more than 100,000 people interacting through different venues and online threads. We also have interacted with a lot of governments, a lot of Mayors of major cities, as well as Presidents and Prime Ministers around the world. There is a real hunger – largely based on fear – of what to do. They see this stuff coming but they do not know what to do, so we hope to leverage our community to inspire new experiments to be done.
For example, we say there is a big need in education to create a new skill set, and about three years ago, the President and the Vice President of Uruguay invited us to do a program for all the Ministers and Heads of State and others industry partners to inspired them about our vision for the long-term future. We got to meet all their industry leaders and startups that are there, and we came to discover that in Uruguay, 100 percent of the kids have laptops or tablets now in primary, secondary and technical schools. That was a huge public-private partnership to make sure there was connectivity and power and services. The next phase is teaching robotics classes in public schools in Uruguay to five-year-old kids. Imagine five and six-year-old kids learning coding and robotics. What will Uruguay look like 15 years from now? Seeing that as an interesting model, and then sharing that example with other regions that are testing different educational models is something that we can do quickly through the different venue and the different forms that we are taking.
Right now, we are trying to look for and classify the types of experiments that are being run by startups, by policy makers and by corporations that are tackling some of the grand challenges, and then spread those best practices as quickly as we can. It is about finding the ones that are working, finding ones that failed, and understanding why they fail. We try to take a little more of an academic approach to understand it, but then sharing best practices and getting behind and helping scale the ones that are good. That is where Singularity University becomes a platform for identifying and scaling amazing ideas that are going to tackle the most important problems long term, and doing so through a rapidly growing community of partners and individuals.
High: Core to Singularity University is the notion of exponential technological progress, accelerating change and the abundance mindset – the idea that there is no problem that cannot be solved with the right combination of technology, people and capital. I am curious, as you have seen larger more well established organizations begin to grasp some of these ideas and seek to implement them, what sorts of best practices have you seen? I can certainly understand that startups building their technologies and setting up their processes for the first time have an advantage, but what have you seen for larger organizations that need to reboot to some extent to realize the advantages that you have described?
Peter High
11/21/16
This is one in a series of interviews with financial services CIOs conducted in collaboration with CIO Straight Talk magazine. Read additional articles by other technology executives at www.straighttalkonline.com.
Susan has been the Chief Information Officer of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since 2012. As CIO she is responsible for the provision of information technology services and leadership in the application of technology to the mission of the IMF. Prior to joining the IMF, Susan served in the U.S. State Department and was its CIO from 2008 to 2012, leading the delivery of IT services to 280 Embassies, Consulates, and offices in 185 countries.
Susan holds a graduate degree in National Security Strategy from the National War College and an undergraduate degree in Management Information Systems from Virginia Commonwealth University.
I recently caught up with Susan in Washington, D.C. and our conversation covered World Class IT Principle One, People, as we discussed recruiting international and local talent and the organization of IT within the IMF, and Principle Five, as we discussed the development of engagements with new business partners. We also discussed items on her strategic roadmap and future trends, her path to becoming a successful female CIO, mentoring programs committed to creating more gender diversity in the organization, as well as a variety of other topics.
Peter High: Susan, you are the Chief Information Officer at the IMF. Can you set the stage and talk about some of the priorities you have on your strategic roadmap heading into 2017?
Susan Swart: Some of the priorities we have at a strategic level are to change the way IT delivers its services to the institution. We generally have positive feedback from our users on the basic services that the IT organization provides to the broader organization. However, the way we deliver some of those services is going to result in our inability to do new things in direct support of the business because we are crowding out our ability to invest in new technology. With that in mind, we evaluated what we were doing and how we were doing it. We came up with a series of initiatives that we are calling Transform IT that will cause us to deliver services differently by making space to do more of the things that will provide technology to the business. That will mean the business will do what it does better.
We are looking at moving to managed services for our infrastructure. We are changing the way we do some of our contracting—doing our projects with statements of work, as opposed to hiring individual people; focusing on what we are supposed to be delivering to the business, as opposed to how many people we need to hire. We are looking at knowledge management at a more specific level: how do we provide better knowledge management capabilities to the institution? It is a knowledge-based organization. How can people create knowledge and then find that knowledge and re-use it across the institution? Also data management and analytics: how can we take advantage of the data that we already have and use that more effectively across the organization, breaking down some of the stovepipes? And also new analytic capability and AI: how could that potentially be used to further the work of the Fund? Those are some of the high priorities.
High: As you think about more innovative, forward-looking type topics, how do you and your team carve out the time to think about those versus more business type activities?
Swart: Obviously, there is a lot of interest in doing new, innovative technology within IT. There is the realization in the business that new technologies can change the way they do what they do internally in the Fund, and also in Fintech. We need to understand how Fintech is operating in the world because it impacts some of the core functions of the Fund, that is, what is the impact of technology when looking over financial markets? We are involved in that area because we bring some technical expertise.
When you look at something like AI, how could we use AI and Big Data to better understand things that are happening in a way that we do not understand today? We are using a couple of methods to bring the business idea and technology together. We are implementing a series of challenges around Big Data where the business or IT could put forward some projects that would take advantage of Big Data, whether internal or external, using new technologies, for delivering a business value. They are small projects to start with. We have an innovation fund, so we are allowing minimal investment, and we are allowing them to fail, which I think is very significant in how we get more innovation into the organization. It takes some of the risk proposition out of it. We have a series of those going forward that are in the process now so we do not know the outcomes. We are also looking for other opportunities, even in our normal investment processes, where new technology could bring some value.
High: Given the scope of the IMF, a global organization, how do you organize IT to support such a broad purview?
Click here to read the full article
8/15/2016
Earlier this year at Facebook’s F8 conference, the company revealed three innovation pillars that make up the company’s ten-year vision: connectivity, artificial intelligence (AI), and virtual reality (VR). Facebook’s Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer is responsible for leading each of them. Despite the fact that the vision is ten-years in duration, the company has made significant progress in each.
Facebook’s progress in AI can been seen in everything from the company’s news feed to the way in which people are tagged. The virtual reality innovations are best demonstrated through the Oculus Rift, which I demo’d last Thursday. More recently, the company made a great flight forward on the connectivity pillar as Acquila, a long-endurance plane that will fly above commercial aircraft and the weather, took flight in Arizona. The goal is for this v-shaped aircraft that has a wingspan longer than a Boeing 737, but weighs under 1,000 pounds to bring basic internet access to the developing world.
I met with Schroepfer at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, and we discussed these three pillars and a variety of other topics, including the company’s recruiting methods, how the company maintains its innovative edge, and the logic behind its headquarters – one of the largest open-space offices in the world.
Peter High: Earlier this year at F8 2016, Facebook’s developer’s conference, you introduced three innovation pillars. Could you take a moment to highlight each of them?
Mike Schroepfer:We have been, I think pretty uniquely in the industry, very public about our ten-year vision and roadmap, and we have broken it down into three core areas:
High: With the abundant resources and brain power at Facebook, how did you choose those three as opposed to others?
Schroepfer: A lot of this derives directly from [Facebook CEO] Mark [Zuckerberg], and comes from the mission, which is to make the world more open and connected. I think of this simply as using technology to connect people. We sit down and say, “OK, if that is our goal, the thing we are uniquely suited for, what are the big problems of the world?” As you start breaking it down, these fall out quite naturally. The first problem is if a bunch of the world does not even have basic connectivity to the internet, that is a fundamental problem. Then you break it down and realize there are technological solutions to problems; there are things that can happen to dramatically reduce the cost of deploying infrastructure, which is the big limiting factor. It is just an economics problem. Once people are connected, you run into the problem you and I have, which is almost information overload. There is so much information out there, but I have limited time and so I may not be getting the best information. Then there is the realization that the only way to scale that is to start building intelligent systems in AI that can be my real-time assistant all the time, making sure that I do not miss anything that is critical to me and that I do not spend my time on stuff that is less important. The only way we know how to do that at the scale we operate at is artificial intelligence.
So there is connectivity and I am getting the right information, but most of us have friends or family who are not physically next to us all the time, and we cannot always be there for the most important moments in life. The state of the art technology we have for that right now is the video camera. If I want to capture a moment with my kids and remember it forever, that is the best we can do right now. The question is, ‘What if I want to be there live and record those moments in a way that I can relive them twenty years from now as if I was there?’ That is where virtual reality comes in. It gives you the capability of putting a headset on and experiencing it today, and you feel like you are in a real world somewhere else, wherever you want to be.
High: How do you think about those longer term goals, the things that are going to take a lot of stair steps to get to, versus the near-term exhaust of ideas that are going to be commercialized and commercial-ready?
9/12/2016
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. More than 250 companies have been hatched through CSAIL, including Akamai, iRobot, 3Com, and Meraki. CSAIL’s research activities are divided into seven areas of emphasis:
CSAIL’s Director is Daniela Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a 2002 MacArthur Fellow. She is the first female head of CSAIL, a distinction she has used to help inspire other women to follow in her footsteps into the fields emphasized by the laboratory. From her post, she has been able to witness and influence a number of rising trends in technology that are driving the current digital revolution, all of which we cover in this interview.
Peter High: Can you give some background on your lab?
Daniela Rus:For more than 50 years, CSAIL’s research has pushed the boundaries of computing and played a vital role in the digital revolution, from the first time-sharing systems and the first computer password to public key encryption and the free-software movement.
CSAIL has more than one thousand members, including five hundred PhD students and postdocs, making it the largest interdepartmental research lab at MIT. Members range from roboticists like myself, to experts in data security, computational biology, software design and predictive analytics. This diverse set of interests allows the lab to conduct important interdisciplinary research that we believe will make a major global impact.
CSAIL started as “Project MAC,” with the idea that two people could use the same computer at the same time, and that machine was about as big as a room. It is amazing to me that in just 50 years we moved from dreaming about multiple people using the same machine to a world where computing is indispensable.
High:What is the goal of CSAIL?
Rus:Our goal is to invent the future of computing. We want to use computer science to tackle major challenges in fields like healthcare and education, from creating better tools for medical diagnosis, to developing accident-free cars, to inspiring kids to learn to code.
Our founders set out to allow multiple users to compute simultaneously, seeing this as the first step to enable humans to use machines in a way that augments our intelligence. That’s the goal CSAIL has pursued ever since.
Of course, the most pressing problems in computing are always changing. Computers have shrunk right alongside our bell-bottom jeans, and today they are in our phones, cars, TVs, and even our washing machines! There are always new challenges on the horizon to think about how to make computing better, more powerful and more capable. We also want to use computing to solve important problems facing the world, for example in healthcare, education, and privacy. We strive to move the world of science fiction into science and then the realm of reality.
High:How do you set priorities for the lab?
10/11/2016
I first learned of Clara Labs co-founder and CEO Maran Nelson when she was among those noted as a Forbes 30 Under 30 Pioneering Woman:Forbes 30 under 30 Pioneering Woman. When a member of her extended communications team named Justin suggested I meet her, I told him that I would be in San Francisco – where Clara Labs is based – on a certain date. The next email I received was from Clara, herself. The message read,
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter. Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran. Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT? Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference. Best, Clara
Hi Justin, Thanks! I’ll get this set up with Peter.
Hi Peter, Happy to help get a meeting on the calendar for you and Maran.
Can you meet at Stable Cafe (2128 Folsom Street, San Francisco) on Friday (Sep 23) at 10am or Monday (Sep 26) at 11am PDT?
Also, what’s the best number for Maran to reach you? I’ll add it to the calendar event description for reference.
Best,
Clara
Clara Labs was a Y Combinator company that now boasts the likes of Sequoia Capital as investors.
There is a lot written about the paucity of women founders of Silicon Valley companies, for good reason. I was interested in learning more about what drew Nelson to entrepreneurship, why she focused on a digital personal assistant platform, and how she sees the offering evolving. We covered all of that in more in this interview.
Peter High: Maran, I thought we would begin with how the idea for Clara Labs came about. What was the need you saw that was not being met? Also, I am curious as to how much of what exists now was in your vision during the early stages.
Maran Nelson: Clara was conceived of when I first had to interact with email at a high volume. I thought I was going to be great at this professional stuff, and in the vast majority of cases I was. I started out trying to sell my product for a startup I previously had. I went right into Y Combinator right after earning my undergraduate degree. Every time we got on the phone, we were able to sell them our product. I remember looking back at the end of this very stressful, intense summer and thinking, “Where could I have been better? Where was I failing?” My intuition said – and my research confirmed – it was in the number of times I dropped the ball just on forgetting to send a calendar invitation, or did not follow up, or mis-converted a time zone. All of that was a huge cost to me, just over a few months of work. Outside of the time that I spent trying to build this new startup, get this thing off the ground, and invent something, the amount of that time that I spent coordinating was huge as well.
That stuck with me as an initial, deep frustration. Most business people at some point just accept it as part of doing business. That probably would have happened for me as well had it not been for an early introduction into entrepreneurship with that mindset, and my co-founder, who has been my longtime best friend, coming on and encouraging me in my obsession over several months with solving the scheduling problem.
Nelson: My mother named a company right after me when I was born because I pulled her out of the workforce. She called it “Maran Made Me,” because Maran made her stay at home. Both my parents are pretty entrepreneurial. [My co-founder] Michael [Akilian]’s family, though, is especially entrepreneurial. His dad has been building businesses since Michael was little. Michael and I both looked at our parents in this act of self-creation. It is a lot like writing where you get to take this empty space and a lot of you gets imprinted in that space – a lot of values. It was a model that we were lucky to get to watch. In our early relationship at 15 or 16, we were already pitching crappy startup ideas to Michael’s dad, who usually told us that reality did not work the way that we thought it did. But it was definitely core to both of us.
High: Why did you study psychology and neuroscience?
