RE.WORK Connect Summit San Francisco schedule

Augmenting Human Capabilities with AI - Towards Digital Companions

Florian Michahelles heads the Artificial & Human Intelligence research group focused on creating digital companions for industry with the aim to augment human capabilities. He will present the potential and limitations of AI and present examples of how to complement human capabilities rather than replacing them. Additionally, he will introduce corporate cross-functional initiatives of how to upscale workers in the digital age. Florian will present results and reflect on the lessons learned on the journey.

Florian Michahelles is the head of research group of Artificial & Human Intelligence at Siemens Corporation in Berkeley. Together with his team he focuses on the creation of Digital Companions for Industry. A Digital Companion is an entity that enhances human capabilities. It digests, integrates, and shares information with humans so they can focus on meaningful tasks. According to the user needs, a Digital Companion can act as a guardian, assistant, or partner. The Digital Companion embodiment adapts to what best suits the current user context and needs.

Prior his engagement with Siemens, Florian has been working as a director of the Auto-ID lab and lecturer at ETH Zurich. Florian has published 100+ academic papers in international conferences and journals and is actively supporting the research community by voluntary roles as program chair, research proposal evaluator and guest lecturer.

As the Mayor’s Chief Innovation Officer for San Francisco and White House Champion of Change, Jay Nath works with the tech community and the public to help make government more effective, efficient, and responsive. Jay applies modern, agile thinking to government administration, focusing on “lean government” as a platform for innovation. Under his leadership, the Mayor’s Office of Civic Innovation launched the first of its kind Startup in Residence program in collaboration with the White House, offering an on-premises incubator at City Hall, meant to apply startup ingenuity directly to pain points within government itself. Inspired by the Presidential Innovation Fellows, Nath created the Mayor’s Senior Fellowship program where cross-sector leaders spend one year in City Hall working on high impact projects. He also established the nation’s first open source software policy for a city government and authored open data legislation that requires City departments to make nearly all non-confidential datasets available to the public, mandates department-level data coordinators, and creates a chief data officer position for the city. Prior to public service, Nath worked at a San Francisco startup as a VP of product and at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a senior consultant.

User Experience for Predictive Machine Learning in the Consumer IoT

A big promise of the Internet of Things is that by analyzing millions of new sources of data from embedded, networked devices our experience of the world becomes better and more efficient. The environment automatically predicts our behavior and adjusts to it, anticipating problems and intercepting them before they occur. The notion is seductive and almost magical: an automatic espresso machine that starts a fresh latte as you’re thinking it’s a good time for coffee; office lights that dim when it’s sunny and electricity is expensive; a taco truck that arrives just as the crowd in the park is getting peckish. Exciting in theory, this promise is rather unspecific in the details. Exactly how will our experience of the world, our ability to use all the collected data, become more efficient and more pleasurable? However, we don’t have good examples for designing user experiences of predictive analytics. This walk will discuss the importance of predictive behavior to consumer Internet of Things products and services, describe UX challenges to creating such behavioral systems, and suggest patterns for addressing those challenges.

Mike Kuniavsky is a user experience designer, researcher, and author. A twenty-year veteran of digital product development, Mike designs products, business processes, and services at the leading edge of technological change. Prior to joining PARC, he co-founded several successful user experience centered companies, including ThingM, which designs and manufactures ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things products, and Adaptive Path, a well-known design consultancy. He specializes in multi-device interactions, cloud-based service design, and design of hardware products connected to cloud-based services. His background includes design for social analytics, consumer electronics, appliances, image retrieval, RGB LEDs, and financial services.

A City of Intelligent Machines

The work of Future Cities Lab forecasts a coming world in which intelligent machines become key building blocks of the next city. The lab is at the forefront of exploring what Johnson calls "robotic ecologies" - places where biology and machine intelligence merge, evolve and co-create. The work of the lab explores how these revolutions will profoundly transform how we live, work, communicate and play in the future. As a part of the lab's core research they interrogate and dissect the cities we live in now, and then re-imagine and recast them into radically new and innovative forms. During Jason Kelly Johnson's talk, he will discuss the current work of the lab and situate it within larger cultural, social and ecological trends.

Jason Kelly Johnson is a founding design partner of Future Cities Lab, an experimental design and research office based in San Francisco, California. Since 2009 Jason has authored a range of award-winning projects exploring the intersections of design with advanced fabrication technologies, robotics, responsive building systems and public space. Future Cities Lab is at the forefront of exploring how advanced technologies, social media and the internet of things will profoundly affect how we live, work, communicate and play in the future. Their approach to design and making, which has been described as “high performance craft”, is also deeply experiential, interactive and materially rich. Future Cities Lab is an interdisciplinary studio employing an adventurous team of designers, architects, technologists, digital craftspeople, urban ecologists and more. Recent projects include "LIGHTSWARM" - an interactive LED facade recently installed at the YBCA in San Francisco, and the "DATAGROVE" - a social media whispering wall for Zero1 in San Jose. Jason also teaches and leads the Digital Craft Lab at the CCA.

Vision AI for Augmented Human Machine Interaction

This session will unveil the latest vision AI technologies that ensure safe and efficient human machine interactions in the industrial automation context. Today’s human-facing industrial AI applications lack a key element for Human Behavior Understanding (HBU) that is critical for augmented safety and enhancing productivity. The second part of this session will detail how real-world applications can benefit from a comprehensive suite of visual behavior analytics that are readily available today.

Modar is a serial entrepreneur and expert in AI-based vision software development. He is currently founder and CEO at Eyeris, developer of a Deep Learning-based emotion recognition software, EmoVu, that reads facial micro-expressions. Eyeris uses Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN's) as a Deep Learning architecture to train and deploy its algorithm in to a number of today’s commercial applications. Modar combines a decade of experience between Human Machine Interaction (HMI) and Audience Behavioral Measurement. He is a frequent keynoter on “Ambient Intelligence”, a winner of several technology and innovation awards and has been featured in many major publications for his work.

Data-Driven: Enabling the Road Ahead with Big Data from the Connected Car

The car is quickly being transformed by technology, becoming one more of the hyper-connected devices in our lives. Autonomous driving is becoming more and more of a reality, with many technology innovators stepping to the plate with new strategies to bring this reality to fruition. The fluidity of data between cars, smartphones and our entire personal and professional network will become seamless. However, this is not possible without Big Data from the Connected Car. How can today’s Big Data technologies prepare us and gain our trust for tomorrow’s autonomous driving world? How will this change cars, driving and traffic as we know it and what are some of the advances we'll see as a result? In this session, Steve Banfield with give us insights on cutting-edge car technologies and how these technologies will enable automakers, transportation agencies and enterprises alike prepare for the brave new world of autonomous driving and how quickly it is becoming a reality.

Steve Banfield is a 20-year technology industry veteran who has led teams to build and market digital products and services used by millions worldwide. Prior to INRIX, Steve served as SVP & GM, Registrar Services at Rightside, where he was responsible for the second largest domain registrar worldwide and helped launch the new generation of top level domains (TLDs) into the market. He has held senior leadership roles at premier technology companies including Sony, Microsoft, Paramount Pictures (Screenlife) and RealNetworks. Steve has an MBA from Harvard Business School and received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Transylvania University.

Connected Ecologies

Over the past few decades, an emerging suite of miniaturized, networked, and pervasive digital technologies has woven itself into our urban environment. These technologies are creating a digital ‘nervous system’ in our cities with which we interact on a daily basis. The MIT Senseable City Lab explores this emerging condition and investigates the opportunity for embedded technologies to transform the analysis, design, and ultimately the quality of urban space. Illustrating this, Newsha will present Underworlds: a cyber-physical platform in which sewage is mined to reveal in real-time biochemical data for monitoring urban health patterns, shaping more inclusive public health strategies, and pushing the boundaries of urban epidemiology.

Newsha Ghaeli is a Research Fellow at MIT where she is Project Lead on Underworlds at the Senseable City Laboratory. Her work involves the creative application of sensor-based technologies in urban systems to promote resilient cities. An architect by training, Newsha has collaborated with the U.S. Department of Energy, the United Nations Climate Change Summit, the American Samoan government, and as an innovation and strategy consultant for the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-CARE). Newsha holds degrees from the University of Waterloo and McGill University in Canada. In 2013 she was awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Henry Adams Award, and recognized by the Canada Council for the Arts Prix de Rome in Architecture for Emerging Practitioner.

The Flying Internet of Things

Andreas Raptopoulos and his colleagues at Matternet are building the flying internet of things, using drones to carry essential goods through the air, completely autonomously. Andreas will talk about Matternet’s technology and their work in the developing world, where drones can leapfrog traditional road infrastructure, and in our cities and megacities, where drone networks will move essential goods much faster and at a much lower cost than road transportation.

Andreas Raptopoulos is an award-winning designer, inventor and entrepreneur. He's co-founder and CEO of Matternet, pioneering drone logistics networks since 2011. He holds a BS & MS in Aeronautics Engineering, he is a Royal College of Art graduate in Design and holds several US and international patents. Prior to Matternet, he founded FutureAcoustic, a music platform that listens and adjusts to the listener's environment. Andreas is driven by the desire to change the world and the belief that technology can be a force for immensely positive, widespread change. @andreasx

As the world enters an era defined by machine learning, connectivity and big data, Ford is driving the future of innovation from within the automotive industry by bridging the gap between cars and the Internet of Things. Through its experiments at the Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto, the Blue Oval is studying applications and implications of transforming the car from merely an engine on four wheels to a system capable of communicating and coordinating with any device hooked to the cloud. In this talk, Ford research scientist Adi Singh provides insights into how Ford is researching the Internet of Things to develop platforms that tackle the most pertinent problems in urban mobility today.

Adi Singh is a scientist at the Research & Advanced Engineering division of Ford, where he leads explorations into software and system architectures that support the company's work in IoT and mobility. A product of Stanford University, Adi completed his graduate work in Aeronautics & Astronautics focusing on UAVs. Adi's interests lie in bringing the most cutting-edge technology solutions into the automotive industry, and in demonstrating how these technologies can enable the industry to tackle the biggest challenges in mobility, sustainability and connectivity faced by our generation.

The large amount of multi-sensory data available for autonomous intelligent systems is just astounding. The power of deep architectures to model these practically unlimited datasets is limited by only two factors: computational resources and labels for supervised learning. While horizontal scalability of training is still being improved, computational resources are just a Cap-Ex issue. I argue the need for accurate labels is more than a Cap-Ex problem, as it requires careful interpretation of what to label and how, especially in complex and multi-sensory settings. At the risk of stating the obvious, we just want unsupervised learning to work for everything we do, right now. While this has been a "want" of the AI/Machine-Learning community for quite some time, unsupervised learning just made an impressive leap during the last year. I will discuss the latest breakthroughs and highlight the massive potential for autonomous systems, as well as present latest results from our team.

My belief is that intelligent software, based on AI / Machine-Learning, will take over the world, and that Autonomous-Systems, made up of autonomous agents, vehicles, robots and drones, are just around the corner. My focus is to give these machines a human touch and give humans access to their raw power without the hurdles of talking their language. I like to start from real user problems and leverage machine-learning to design solutions that tie software, hardware and sensors and achieve an high degree of autonomy as well as a high level of usability and satisfaction.

David is an investor with Amplify Partners, a $125M early stage fund focused on cloud infrastructure, security and data-intensive companies. He began his career in technology as the co-founder and CEO of Chartio.com, a pioneering provider of cloud-based data visualization and analytics. He was subsequently part of the founding team at Patients Know Best, one of the world's leading cloud-based Personal Health Record (PHR) companies. Before joining venture full time, he personally invested in a range of companies, including Teespring, Skycatch, Zymergen, Caribou Biosciences, Change.org and others.

Sudha Jamthe is the author of "2030 The Driverless World: Business Transformation from Autonomous Vehicles" and 3 IoT books. She teaches IoT Business at Stanford Continuing studies and aspires to bring Cognitive IoT and Autonomous Vehicles together.

Mark is a reporter for Bloomberg News where he covers Google and its Alphabet siblings, and dabbles in other topics, including self-driving cars, robotics and AI. He has reported on technology from Silicon Valley, New York, India and China.

Mark is a reporter for Bloomberg News where he covers Google and its Alphabet siblings, and dabbles in other topics, including self-driving cars, robotics and AI. He has reported on technology from Silicon Valley, New York, India and China.

Robert Vamosi is a CISSP, co-founder of SparkSpotter.com, contributor to Forbes.com, and author of "When Gadgets Betray Us: The Dark Side of our Infatuation with New Technologies." As an award-winning journalist, he has been writing about information security for more than 15 years for sites including ZDNet, CNET, CBS News, PC World and Security Ledger.

Deep Learning in A Dumpster

Compology uses software & rugged, internet connected, sensors in commercial dumpsters to increase garbage truck productivity by minimizing the amount they drive. Join Compology co-founder, Jason Gates, to discuss the challenges of building Industrial Internet of Things (I2oT) applications for the waste industry.

Jason Gates is currently a founder at Compology where he focuses on business development & strategy. Learn more at compology.com and follow us @compology. Prior to Compology Jason developed manufacturing processes for naval radar systems and managed infrastructure construction projects.

I will talk about our recent progress in applying Deep Learning to traditionally hard problems such as Machine Vision and Speech Understanding. This has been achieved using one simple algorithm, without hand-crafted features. I will explain why such algorithm can be directly applied to improve automatic learning and adaptation for smart devices.

Quoc Le is research scientist at Google Brain. At Google, Quoc works on large scale deep learning. He led the team that simulated a neural network which learned the concept of "cat" by watching YouTube videos. His work has made breakthroughs in object recognition, speech recognition and language understanding. Quoc obtained his PhD at Stanford, undergraduate degree with First Class Honors and Distinguished Scholar at the Australian National University, and was a researcher at National ICT Australia, Microsoft Research and Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics.

Ahmed Banafa has extensive experience in operations and management, as well as a research background in a variety of techniques and analysis. He has served as a reviewer and technical contributor for the publication of several business and technical books. His experience includes serving as an instructor in business and technology at several universities and colleges, including the University of California, Berkeley, California State University-East Bay, San Jose State University and University of Massachusetts. He is the recipient of several awards, including Distinguished Tenured Staff Award of 2013, Business Program Instructor of the year for 2013 and 2014 and the Parthenon award for best instructor in 2012, 2010 and 2003, and Certificate of Honor for Instructor from the City and County of San Francisco. Banafa is included in the 2000 to 2001 "Who’s Who in Finance and Industry."

Paul is a Principal at Method who is working to help define the future of experience design. He has been a designer for 20 years, with work ranging from visual, interaction and service design, to programming, to industrial design and architecture, to strategy and brand development. He works to develop lasting partnerships with clients and to establish a strong strategic spine to all projects. Paul has been involved with Method for over 12 years.

Prior to joining Method Paul worked on a diverse group of projects. He co-founded 8020 Publishing, a venture-funded media company that produced the reader-created magazines JPG and Everywhere, designed and launched Current TV’s groundbreaking user generated TV network, launched the innovation group within Macy’s and Bloomingdales, and spent several years as the managing director of the San Francisco studio of Deepend, the award winning UK based digital agency. Outside of work he enjoys vintage cars, making cocktails, cooking, and travel. He owns a restored vintage RV and returned recently from a yearlong road trip around the US.

Putting Sensors on Closed Economies, Global Oil Supply and Deforestation

The future of the Internet of Things promises a whole new wealth of data on all of the "things" we own. But what about the things we don't own, like deforestation, global oil supply, and even closed economies? The view from space lets us take a step back and see the world through a macroscope. Remote sensing – the analysis of satellite images at scale – is the technology behind the macroscope. Orbital Insight applies advanced artificial intelligence and big data analytical technologies to satellite imagery to deliver actionable intelligence for investors, governments and environmental groups alike. This session will explore how remote sensing can deliver new insights for decision-makers across all industries. There are many reasons for why we need access to data on things we don't own directly – national security, sustainability, stability, and growth – but it all comes down to the desire to make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

Jeff Stein is an entrepreneur who is passionate about building a better world – a more open, transparent, civil society. His company, Orbital Insight, is leading the way through big data analysis of satellite imagery and other remote sensing data sources. Jeff’s career prior to Orbital Insight has been focused on bringing transparency to society through policy reforms and software technology. As co-founder of the Water Protection Network, he led a nationwide grassroots campaign to reform the Army Corps of Engineers, which resulted in Congress passing into law landmark transparency and accountability reforms. As founder of Open Data Registry, a venture backed software company, he developed technology to track the environmental impacts of manufacturing consumer goods across complex global supply chains, working with major Fortune 500 companies.

As Chief Platform Officer, Dora leads SmartThings’ developer platform product and engineering, developer relations and evangelism, and certification programs to help create intuitive smart home products and easy-to-adopt connected IoT experiences around the world. She believes that people’s lives can be enhanced when a broad developer community works together to create innovative applications on the open platform. Prior to joining SmartThings, Dora was at Google since 2001 in various leadership and executive management roles where she was instrumental in transitioning the company to a profitable global business. Most recently, she was Senior Director of Google Cloud Solution for the Google Cloud Platform business, where she focused on building and leading technical teams to drive platform adoption amongst partners and developers with significant results. Prior to that, she founded and led Google’s technology team responsible for driving product adoptions among top strategic partners across all Google products worldwide. Dora is an avid traveler, bold explorer, enthusiastic soul cyclist, and has an unyielding passion for interior design with automation. She currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and is based out of the SmartThings HQ in Palo Alto.

Mark currently works at Google developing intelligent devices for the connected home and IoT. Mark is the founder iotlist.co, a platform for discovering connected products, and currently serves as the President of the Internet of Things Consortium, a consortium of leading IoT companies focused on market development and consumer awareness. Prior to joining Google, Mark was Head of Connected Home Platform at Logitech.

Beyond the Headless Map

Many of today’s maps are traditional, giving you a full picture of a particular space, like your current location on a Google Map. But there’s a growing trend of headless maps. Consider Tinder which is a giant map of potential partners where you never see a map. With IoT we can imagine going beyond the headless map into a world of no maps at all. For example, you say “ok car, let’s go to LA” and it maps out the best way to get there from streams of real-time sensor data from roads, satellites, traffic, weather, etc. In this talk we explore a future where we might stop looking at our maps altogether, because IoT is the map.

Aaron Steele is Sr. Vice President of Technical Business Development at CartoDB where he thinks creatively about the future and is responsible for company growth. Aaron holds a degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before CartoDB, Aaron was CTO and Principal Software Engineer at World Resources Institute. His career started in academia, bridging gaps between biodiversity science, big data, and the web.