O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Recent Episodes
O'Reilly Radar
O'Reilly Radar tracks the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come. Each episode of O'Reilly Radar features an interview with an industry thought leader, with topics touching on everything from programming to data to experience design. We also take a step back from the breathless pace of the latest tech news to examine why new developments are important and what they might mean down the road.
This week, I sit down with Aman Naimat, senior vice president of technology at Demandbase, and co-founder and CTO of Spiderbook. We talk about his project to build a knowledge graph of the entire business world using natural language processing and deep learning. We also talk about the role AI is playing in those companies today and what’s going to drive AI adoption in the future.
This week, I sit down with David Beyer, an investor with Amplify Partners. We talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence, the challenges he’s seeing in AI adoption, and what he thinks is missing from the AI conversation.
In this week's Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum chats with Sara Watson, a technology critic and writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub. Watson is also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. They talk about how to optimize personalized experience for consumers, the role of machine learning in this space, and what will drive the evolution of personalized experiences.
This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.
This week, I sit down with anthropologist, futurist, Intel Fellow, and director of interaction and experience research at Intel, Genevieve Bell. We talk about what she’s learning from current AI research, why the resurgence of AI is different this time, and five things that are missing from the AI conversation.
On this week's episode of the Radar Podcast, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with award-winning author Pagan Kennedy about the art and science of serendipity—how people find, invent, and see opportunities nobody else sees, and why serendipity is actually a skill rather than just dumb luck.
This week we're featuring a conversation from earlier this year—O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Giles Colborne, managing director of cxpartners. They talk about the transformative effects of AI on design, designing for natural language interactions, and why designers need to nurture the ability to reinvent themselves.
In this episode, I sit down with Brad Knox, founder and CEO of Emoters, a startup building a product called bots_alive—animal-like robots that have a strong illusion of life. We chat about the approach the company is taking, why robots or agents that pass themselves off as human without any transparency should be illegal, and some challenges and applications of reinforcement learning and interactive machine learning.
This week, I sit down with Fang Yu, cofounder and CTO of DataVisor, where she focuses on big data for security. We talk about the current state of the fraud landscape, how fraudsters are evolving, and how data analytics and behavior analysis can help defend against—and prevent—attacks.
This week, I sit down with Hilary Mason, who is a data scientist in residence at Accel Partners and founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs. We chat about current research projects at Fast Forward Labs, adoption hurdles companies face with emerging technologies, and the AI technology ecosystem—what's most intriguing for the short term and what will have the biggest long-term impact.
In this week's episode, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum sits down with Richard Cook and David Woods. Cook is a physician, researcher, and educator, who is currently a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University, and emeritus professor of health care systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. Woods also is a professor at Ohio State University and is leading the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems, and he's the co-director of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. They chat about SNAFU Catchers; anomaly response; and the importance of not only understanding how things fail, but how things normally work.
On this week's episode, I chat with Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton. Wang is also a co-founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, a site focused on analyzing and predicting U.S. national elections. We talk about the site's prediction algorithm and this crazy election cycle, and the role neuroscience may have played. We also talk about the current research Wang and his team are working on, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the powerful role governments play in academic research.
In this episode of the Radar Podcast, I chat with John Bassett III, chairman of the board of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. We talk about globalization and the effect it's had on the furniture industry, the international trade battle he waged (which was written about by Beth Macy in her book Factory Man), Bassett's book Making it in America, and what entrepreneurs need to know to succeed in business today.
In this Radar Podcast episode, I chat with Haakon Faste, a design educator and innovation consultant. We talk about his interesting career path, including his perceptual robotics work, his teaching approaches, and his mission with the Ralf A. Faste Foundation. We also talk about navigating our way to a "post-human" world and the importance of designing to make the world a more human-centered place.
This week on the Radar Podcast, we're featuring the first episode of the newly launched O'Reilly Bots Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. O'Reilly's Jon Bruner is joined by Pete Skomoroch, the co-founder and CEO of Skipflag, to talk about bots—about what's driving the sudden interest, what we can expect from the technology, and some interesting emerging applications.
This week's Radar Podcast episode is a special cross-over edition from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or SoundCloud. O'Reilly strategic content director Courtney Nash chats with Cory Doctorow, a journalist, activist and science fiction writer. They talk about nascent pro-security industries, the EFF's lawsuit against the U.S. government, and the new W3C DRM specification.
This week, I talk with Alyona Medelyan, co-founder and CEO at Thematic and founder and CEO at Entopix. We talk about natural language understanding, the challenges of analyzing unstructured text, and her open source indexing tool Maui that she's been working on for the past 10 years.
This week's episode features a special cross-over conversation from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, or RSS. O'Reilly's Courtney Nash chats with Eleanor Saitta, a security architect at Etsy. They talk about the importance of thinking of security in a human context and the increasingly critical relationship between security and design.
This week, I chat with Othman Laraki, co-founder of Color Genomics. We chat about challenges and opportunities in genetic testing, the future of precision medicine, and the hurdles medicine and health care are currently facing (and how we can overcome them).
This week's episode features two conversations I've had recently centered around smart cities. First, I chat with Daniele Quercia, research team lead at Bell Labs. We talk about research he's working on now; the launch of goodcitylife.org (including smelly maps and happy maps); why our use of technology shouldn't just aim to make a city smart, but to improve the day-to-day quality of life of it's citizens; and about the emerging areas of urban informatics he's finding most compelling.
In our second segment, I chat with Frank Cuypers, associate professor at the University of Antwerp and strategist at Destination Think! We chat about the importance of urban DNA, his nonprofit project Why Your City, and why there's no such thing as a smart city.
This week's episode is a cross-post from the O'Reilly Design Podcast. O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Ame Elliott, design director at Simply Secure. They talk about security and privacy design, with a focus on the end user experience, and how to give designers a voice in changing the shape of a product and getting the right values out in the world. Elliott also talks about how architecture inspires her work and why problem finding is a better approach then problem solving.
This week, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Ben Lorica, O'Reilly's chief data scientist and host of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast. Lorica talks about emerging themes in the data space, from machine learning to deep learning to artificial intelligence, and how those technologies relate to one another and how they're fueling real-time data applications. Lorica also talks about how the concept of a data center is evolving, the importance of open source big data components, and the rise in interest of big data ethics.
This week, we're featuring a special crossover podcast from our O'Reilly Design Podcast. O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product, Ben Yoskovitz. Yoskovitz talks about product design strategy and the benefits of lean approaches, where product teams tend to fall down, and why a bottom-up approach to product design is more successful—and more scalable—than a top-down approach.
In this episode, I chat with Marc Warner, CEO of ASI, a data science and business analytics consultancy and training organization in London. We talk about artificial intelligence, speculating about the future and looking at current real-world business applications of AI. We also talk about a survey Warner recently conducted with data science companies in London, where he uncovered a data scientist skills cap.
This week, O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with designer, creative coder, and artist Scott Murray about coding and computation in design, his book "Interactive Data Visualization for the Web" and his new book coming out soon "Creative Coding and Data Visualization with p5.js."
In this week's episode of the Radar Podcast, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Christine Park, senior product designer at Basis, and John Alderman, director of Supereverywhere. They talk about multi-modal design, which is an approach to design that takes into consideration the physical senses and the role they play in the user experience, and they also chat about how multi-modal design applies to the Web.
In this week's episode, I sit down with Alyssa Ravasio, founder and CEO of Hipcamp. We chat about navigating the challenges of founding a company, mining government data, and the role the sharing economy will play in the future.
In this week's episode, Hannah Grenade, a tech entrepreneur and former partner at McKinsey, chats with Matt Harris, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. They talk about the most interesting areas in fintech innovation, taking a look at some hits and misses, and potential untapped areas of opportunity. Harris also talks about why the merchants payment battleground is no longer a great space for startups and why insurance is poised to be the final frontier for fintech innovation.
David Beyer, co-founder and CEO of Chart.io, principal at Amplify Partners, and part of the founding team at Patients Know Best, chats with Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science and neuroscience at the University of Texas at Austin. They chat about evolutionary computation, its applications in deep learning, and how it’s inspired by biology.
O’Reilly’s Jenn Webb chats with Eric McNulty, a consultant, writer, speaker, and catalyst for positive leadership. McNulty talks about real-time disaster response, the connections between disaster response and organizational leadership, and how today’s leaders can achieve order beyond control and influence beyond authority. McNulty will talk more about instituting effective leadership at the Cultivate leadership training at Strata + Hadoop World in San Jose in March.
In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, Aneel Lakhani, director of marketing at SignalFx, chats with Mark Burgess, professor emeritus of network and system administration, former founder and CTO of CFEngine, and now an independent technologist and researcher. They talk about the new edition of Burgess’ book, "In Search of Certainty," Promise Theory and how promises are a kind of service model, and ways of applying promise-oriented thinking to networks.
In this special holiday episode of the Radar Pocast, we’re featuring a podcast cross-over of the O’Reilly Design Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or SoundCloud. O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler host’s the Design Podcast, and in this episode, she chats with Airbnb’s head of experience design Katie Dill about the values that drive design at Airbnb, the triforce structure of the company, and the process of journey mapping their users’ experience.
In this special holiday episode of the Radar Podcast, we’re featuring a cross-over of the O’Reilly Data Show Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or SoundCloud. O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica hosts that podcast, and in this episode, he chats with Apache Spark release manager and Databricks co-founder Patrick Wendell about the roadmap of Spark and where it’s headed, and interesting applications he’s seeing in the growing Spark ecosystem.
In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum delves into the economy with two speakers from our recent Next:Economy conference. First, Slocum talks with Leah Busque, founder of TaskRabbit, about service networking, TaskRabbit’s goals, and issues facing the peer economy. In the second segment, Slocum talks with Dan Teran, co-founder of Managed by Q, about the on-demand economy and the future of work.
Dave Zwieback, head of engineering at Next Big Sound and CTO of Lotus Outreach, talks about his new book, "Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success," the framework for conducting a “learning review,” and how humans can keep pace with the growing complexity of the systems we’re building.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Jeff Jonas, an IBM fellow and chief scientist of context computing, Ironman triathlete, and contributing author to the new book, "Privacy in the Modern Age: The Search for Solutions." Jonas talks about applications of context-aware computing, his new G2 software, and astroid hunting with astronomers at the University of Honolulu.
Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science’s chief scientist, on Natural Language Generation, Narrative Science’s shift into the world of business data, and evolving beyond the dashboard.
Mike Kuniavsky, a principal scientist in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, on designing for the Internet of Things ecosystem and why the most interesting thing about the IoT isn’t the “things” but the sensors. He also talks about his deep-seated love for appliances and furniture, and how intelligence will affect those industries.
Mary Yoko Brannen is an expert in ethnomethodology and qualitative studies of complex cultural organizational phenomena. She spends a lot of time focused on how changing cultural contexts affect technology and how to leverage cultural identity in the global workplace. We unpack all that in this episode and talk about how her proposed “ethnographic thinking” approach can address language and culture gaps in the global marketplace.
O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler chats with Aaron Irizarry, director of user experience for Nasdaq product design, about Nasdaq’s journey to become a design-driven organization.
Irizarry also talks about the best ways to have solid conversations about the designs you’re working on, and why getting a seat at the proverbial table isn’t the endgame.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb sits down with Google engineering site lead Ben Collins-Sussman and Tock founder and CTO Brian Fitzpatrick. The two have just released a new book, "Debugging Teams," a follow-up to their earlier book, "Team Geek." They talk about the new edition, how managing is a lot like being a psychotherapist, and how all their great advice plays out in their own lives.
Cellist, composer, and performer Zoe Keating talks about why she chooses to retain total control over her music as opposed to signing with a label, she shares her thoughts on the changing landscape of how artists get paid, and she talks about why she’s optimistic about the future of music.
Suw Charman-Anderson, journalist, consultant, and founder of Ada Lovelace Day, on why she founded Ada Lovelace Day and why it’s been so successful. She also talks about the state of social media, and the past, present, and future of blogging.
Rajiv Maheswaran on the science of moving dots, and Claudia Perlich on big data in advertising.
Poppy Crum, senior principal scientist at Dolby Laboratories and a consulting professor at Stanford, on sensory perception, algorithm design, and fundamental changes in music.
Alistair Croll chats with musician and performer Amanda Palmer about the current state of the music industry and how she's navigating her way through new platforms, crowdfunding, and an ever-increasing amount of data.
O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Suzanne Pellican, VP and executive creative director at Intuit, about three core principles of design thinking and about Intuit’s journey to become a design-driven organization.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Simon King, design director at IDEO, about bringing design to his farming roots, his new book "Understanding Industrial Design," and the synergies between industrial design and interaction design.
O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum chats with Bradley Voytek about using data-driven approaches in his neuroscience work, the brain scanner project, and applying cognitive neuroscience to the zombie brain.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Cory Doctorow about pitfalls in the Internet of Things and his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), including work to reform the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) — the source of many of those IoT pitfalls. Doctorow also talks about why we should treat human beings as things that are good at sensing as opposed to things that need to be sensed.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with David Rose, entrepreneur, MIT Media Lab instructor, and author of "Enchanted Objects," about cognitive overload, our future with AI, and how the IoT will shake out.
O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Alasdair Allan, director at Babilim Light Industries, about the data coming out of the New Horizons Pluto flyby, the future of “personal space programs,” and why Bluetooth LE is cracking open the Internet of Things.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Robert Brunner, founder of Ammunition design studio, about how design can help mitigate IoT pitfalls, what drove him to found Ammunition, and why he's fascinated with design's role in the movement toward automation.
O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Fjord's Andy Goodman about zero UI and the move toward intangible interfaces, and Cory Doctorow addresses the problems inherent in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act .
O'Reilly's Mike Hendrickson chats with Autodesk research fellow Mickey McManus about engaging with extreme users and what's going to happen when we have trillions of things sending billions of messages. McManus also talked about how we can prepare for the coming era of unbounded malignant complexity.
Tim O'Reilly chats with Google X's Astro Teller about moonshots, the relationship between technology and society, the learning process for hardware, and more.
O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with AlertMe founder Pilgrim Beart about why the scale of the Internet of Things creates as many challenges as it does opportunities. He also talked about the “gnarly problems” emerging from consumer wants and behaviors.
O'Reilly's Mike Hendrickson chats with database pioneer and 2014 Turing Award recipient Michael Stonebraker about winning the award, the future of data science, and the importance — and difficulty — of data curation.
Dan Shapiro, author of "Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook," discusses the importance of startup co-founders and why startups are hotbeds for imposter syndrome (and why that's OK).
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb talks with Digitteria founder Dele Atanda and Squirrel CEO and co-founder Mutaz Qubbaj about their startup platforms and the disruption in fintech.
O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Josh Clark, founder of Big Medium, about the changing nature of his work as the world itself becomes more of an interface, how to avoid "data rash," and why in this time of rapid technology growth it's essential for designers to splash in the puddles.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Cait O’Riordan, VP of product, music and platforms at Shazam, about the current state of predictive analytics and how Shazam is able to predict the success of a song, and how the Internet of Things affects Shazam’s product life cycles as well as the behaviors of their users. Jenn also chats with Francine Bennett, CEO and cofounder of Mastodon C, about unintentional uses of data for evil and how data scientists can ensure their work stays on the data for good side of that line.
O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Rachel Andrew, founder of edgeofmyseat.com, about CSS Grid Layout and the role responsive design is playing in emerging Web technologies. Slocum also chats with open Web evangelist Kyle Simpson, who defends JavaScript Coercion’s negative reputation and contemplates the past, present, and future of the Web.
O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Filament co-founder and CEO Eric Jennings about how a decentralized Internet would work, what we need to do to get there, and why it will become necessary as the Internet of Things begins to scale. Eric also talks about why his company recently shifted its focus from the maker community to industrial manufacturing.