Jillian Talks Tech: Recent Episodes
Jillian
Whether you're about to graduate college or are in a job that's not fulfilling and are ready to switch in into the tech industry, this podcast is for you. Jillian breaks down emerging tech trends and what that means to you for landing a job in a company that is changing the way that people live, how long they live and societies around the world. Robotics, AI, Sustainability, Web3 are some of the topics that will be talked about in this show.
Wearables bring the possibility of a future where our health is continuously monitored so we can have the best quality of life, whether that's preventing disease, living healthier or alleviating symptoms of disease. The wearables market grew 22% in 2022 yet only 1 in 5 Americans use wearable. In this podcast, I explore the research that being done on wearables and the gaps in wearables becoming as widely adopted as a mobile phone.
Generative Ai is the hottest tech trend at the moment because it can be applied to almost every industry. I interviewed Chanchal Chatterjee because he has been in the AI field for 6 years and has a PHD in machine learning from Purdue University. Chanchal is a Senior Deep Learning Software lead at Nvidia where he leads software development for Nvidia’s deep learning enterprise server platform. Previously he was a Senior AI infrastructure lead at Meta and before that an AI and Industry Solutions Lead at Google.
Topics covered in this episode:
- How to learn generative AI
- Use cases for generative AI
- Should there be regulation of generative AI?
- Will there be Artificial General Intelligence?
Taxis where there isn't a human driver are starting to make their way onto the streets. On February 13th, Zoox launched the world's first robotaxi on public roads in Foster City California.
You might be wondering:
- How safe are these cars?
- What does it take for a car to make it on the road?
Anything that is new usually sparks some fear, especially when we feel like we're losing control. That's why I interviewed an engineer at Zoox to explain how Zoox cars work. Olivier is a Principal Software Engineer at Zoox on the Planning and Control team where he helps build the infrastructure that allows Zoox's robotaxis to drive autonomously. He has been supporting the development of autonomous vehicles at Zoox for the past 8 years. Previously, Olivier was a supervisor at NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) where he worked on technologies to enhance the autonomy of unmanned vehicles, such as the Mars exploration rovers. Olivier holds a M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from MIT and a M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from SUPAERO (France).
This episode is different from the usual format but I wanted to share this conversation because I'm a big believer in importance of agricultural practices shaping the health of our food which results in the health of our bodies. I interviewed Karen Hildebrand who is a Global Leader for the Partner Solutions Architecture team at Amazon Web Services. Previously she was the World Wide Tech Leader for Agriculture at Amazon Web Services where she worked with agriculture companies to help them utilize technology to solve their business and agricultural challenges. Karen is a fourth generation farmer and has a doctorate in artificial intelligence so she really understands the technology and farming industry!
Karen talks about the future of food and how we can learn more about how our food is produced so we can make the best decisions for our health.
The electric vehicle market is expected to grow to 23% by the year 2032. I wanted to find out what the future of electric vehicles looks like which is why I interviewed Charlie Fraser. Charlie has been in the automotive industry for over 10 years and has previously worked at Tesla. He is also the founder of Zero Carbon Racing Driver which is a new motorsport league solely for electric vehicles. He's a fantastic example of someone who has identified an emerging trend and is combining it with his passion to serve an unmet need in a market.
Topics covered in this interview:
- Will there be a safe and carbon neutral way of disposing car batteries?
- Will electric vehicles replace vehicles fueled by gasoline?
- How could electric vehicles and self driving capabilities give us access to any car that we want at any time?
If you're not deep into the web3 world, it feels like one day the price of NFTs are up and then the next they're down by a lot. Trades for NFTs in February 2023 surpassed $2.04 billion. Is it all just a bunch of overpriced ape doodles on JPEG's? I wanted to find out so I interviewed Forrest Colyer. Forrest is a Senior Blockchain Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services where he helps businesses utilize the blockchain. Previously, Forrest was a Blockchain Architect and Developer at Deloitte.
43 billion devices are expected to be connected to the internet this year. What possibilities does this unlock? What controls over your data do you have? I asked these questions to Seibo Gounteni. Seibo is a Senior IOT Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services where he helps businesses build their IOT strategy. Previously Seibo was an industrial IOT consultant at Accenture and an Industrial IOT engineer at GE Power.
If there are any tech trends that you want to learn about, let me know on twitter @missjillforde!
What's the best way to learn AI? How will AI improve how we learn new information? These are topics that we explore with a woman who has extensive experience in AI and teaching AI. Rachel is an applied scientist at AWS Machine Learning University where she teaches machine learning courses to internal and external engineers. She has been leading a few course designs including ML Operations, Accelerated Computer Vision, etc. Rachel is also an AWS senior speaker and she has spoken at top conferenes including AWS re:Invent, Nvidia GTC, KDD, MLOps Summit, etc. Before joining Amazon, Rachel recieved her masters degree of statistics from University of California Berkeley and her bachelors of math from the University of Waterloo.
Rachel Hu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelsonghu/
By 2030, the metaverse could generate $5 trillion in value. What is the metaverse? Are we in the metaverse? When will all experiences have elements of the metaverse? Find out in this interview with David Randle. David is the Global Head of GTM for Spatial Computing at Amazon Web Services, helping people create immersive experiences at scale. He brings 17 years of experience marketing 3D as a high value communication medium. Having democratized real time rendering at a startup called Bunkspeed and subsequently 3D design after an exit to Dassault Systems SolidWorks, he is intimately familiar with the value chain of immersive experiences.
Feedback and topics for future episodes? Let me know @missjillforde on Twitter!
Resources mentioned:
AWS spatial computing blog
The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything
Companies have been working on self driving cars for years now. In this episode, you'll learn how far along are companies on achieving fully self driving cars and the type of automation we'll see in the short term to assist drivers on the road. I interviewed Jeremy who is a senior specialist for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) at Amazon Web Services where he helps companies in the automotive industry to solve their advanced driver assistance system challenges in the AWS cloud. Previously, Jeremy was the Head of Technology Research at Elektrobit.
Let me know what tech trends you want to see on Twitter @missjillforde!
The field of natural language processing (NLP), and specifically large language models (LLM), has proven to be a disruptive technology. I spoke to Sireesha who has been in this industry for over 5 years to break down what NLP and LLMs are, their use cases from healthcare to warfare, and how much of people's concerns about natural language processing is valid. Sireesha is the Director of Engineering at Primer AI where she leads the engineering team building NLP workflows. Previously Sireesha was a Principal Machine Learning Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services where she helped Fortune 1000 customers utilize AI in the AWS cloud. She is an author of the machine learning textbook Amazon SageMaker Best Practices: Proven tips and tricks to build successful machine learning solutions on Amazon SageMaker. Sireesha has a PHD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado.
Links to topics discussed
- White House framework on AI
-AI in warfare
Will there be a robot that can do everything? Fold laundry, do the dishes, cook dinner, and clean your home? I wanted to find out so I spoke to Erica Aduh, a robotics research scientist at Amazon. Erica is in the robotics team where she focuses on advancing how robots transport and move packages. She develops the analytical models for robotic item manipulation. Erica received her bachelors and masters in Engineering and Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania.
The punch line from this interview is that there's more work that needs to be done since most companies have been focusing on robots solving a single task. You can check out the full interview on your favorite podcast.
Are there any tech trends that you want to learn more about? Let me know on Twitter @missjillforde!
There has been some fascinating innovations in AI the past three years around image and video generation. 2020 was the year of deepfakes. 2022 was the year of image to text. Wondering how it works and what the future looks like? That's why I interviewed an expert on this topic. Rohith is a Principal Applied Scientist at Amazon Prime Video team. He has worked in areas of computer vision, video synthesis, and generative models. Rohith received is PHD in Philosophy and Computer science from the University of Delaware. He has since worked in areas of machine vision for consumer devices and video understanding.
Let me know what tech trends you want to learn about by DMing me on Twitter @missjillforde!
If you want to understand if you should be using Etherium for your own personal or professional use, then listen to this episode where I talk to Everton. Everton is a Senior Blockchain and Web3 Specialist Solutions Architect at Amazon Web Services, where he advises businesses on how to leverage blockchain in the cloud. Prior to joining Amazon, Everton was a software engineer at the Ethereum Foundation where he worked on the Ethereum virtual machine. He has taught classes to people of all technical skill levels on the Ethereum blockchain at Blockchain Academy.Everton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evertonfraga/ Etherium foundation: https://ethereum.org/en/
If you want to understand AI this year, you've got to understand neural networks since that is the foundation to AI. I interviewed Mia Mayer to understand conceptually what neural networks are without getting into the math. Mia is a Data scientist at Amazon where she teaches machine learning courses to Amazon employees. Mia is researching Responsible AI, which we get into in this podcast. She has a course on responsible AI on the Machine Learning University (MLU) YouTube channel. Prior to Amazon, Mia was a senior data scientist at Capgemini.Resources that Mia recommends to learn more about machine learning:https://www.youtube.com/@machinelearninguniversity1942/featuredhttps://www.responsible.ai/ https://mlu-explain.github.io/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/ https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/https://mlu-explain.github.iohttps://artificialintelligenceact.euhttps://oecd.ai/en/ai-pri
In this episode, I talk about the three tech trends that I anticipate seeing more of in 2023: autonomous vehicles, web3 utilization by web2 based businesses, and AI that more closely resembles human level intelligence.If you have any questions or if there are any tech trends you want me to cover, let me know on Twitter @missjillforde!Resources mentioned: SageMaker Canvas Open AI ChatGPT Stability Stable Diffusion Research paper from Google Brain and University of Toronto States with autonomous vehicles laws Waymo Motional
Quantum Computing are said to be able to solve problems that the computers used today cannot solve like finding cures for rare diseases and drug discovery. That is because the way that they are designed allows faster computational speed. This year has been a massive year in innovations in AI, and quantum computers would be able to reduce the time that it would take to train a machine learning model, which would mean greater innovations in challenging AI problems like autonomous vehicles and robotics.
I had a lot of questions on how quantum computers work which is why I spoke to Jordan Sullivan. Jordan is a Tech Evangelist for Amazon Braket at Amazon Web Services, which is Amazon Web Service’s Quantum Computing service in the cloud. At AWS, Jordan helps companies and researchers understand and utilize the latest in quantum computing. Previously, they were a quantum architect at PsiQuantum, a series D startup that has raised $665 million in funding to build a commercially viable quantum computer. Jordan studied physics at UC Berkeley where they did theoretical research in quantum chemistry and superconducting qubits, which is a basic unit of quantum information in a quantum computer.
Resources Jordan mentions to learn more:
https://thequantuminsider.com/
https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/quantum-computing/#:~:text=Quantum%20computing%20is%20a%20multidisciplinary,hardware%20research%20and%20application%20development.
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Quantum-Computers-Essential-Algorithms/dp/1492039683/ref=asc_df_1492039683/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=366282014808&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10963098266681064658&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9003435&hvtargid=pla-629791076767&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=79033899031&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=366282014808&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10963098266681064658&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9003435&hvtargid=pla-629791076767
The release and buzz around ChatGPT shows that this is just the beginning of human like AI chatbots. I think more companies will release their own AI chatbots and that these models will improve over time. Since OpenAI has been publishing their research, I decided to read through it and explain how it works without getting into any of the math.
Resources to learn more:
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ChatGPT
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AWS DeepRacer: This was my first introduction to reinforcement learning and the reinforcement learning algorithm that DeepRacer uses is the same algorithm that ChatGPT uses.
-Clear visual of how words are translated into numbers
-Overview of how ChatGPT works
Any tech trends that you want me to cover? Let me know on Twitter @missjillforde!
If you want to understand what web3 is all about then you’ve got to understand the fundamentals of blockchain. That’s why I interviewed Charles Okochu on this topic because he knows a ton! Charles is a Senior Worldwide Go-To-Market Specialist for Amazon Managed Blockchain at Amazon Web Services where Charles advises businesses on how to implement blockchain in the cloud. Charles has been in the tech industry for over 10 years and brings a lot of wisdom in explaining what makes blockchain different from other databases. Charles has a bachelors in engineering from City College of New York and an MBA from Columbia Business School.
Topics that we get into:
- What is blockchain?
- What is a node?
- Why are their different blockchains?
- The future of blockchain adoption
Which trending tech topics are you most interested in learning? Let me know on Twitter @missjillforde!
We're at a fascinating time in history with space: space travel, space exploration and using satellites to provide internet access to over 2 billion people are actually happening. If you're curious to understand what's going on in space and how space will improve the quality of our lives, listen to this episode. I interview Dylan Ellsworth. Dylan is a senior research and development satellite technician at Project Kuiper, which is Amazon's satellite internet project currently being developed that will provide internet service all over the world. Dylan started his career working as a submariner and still serves the US Navy as a reservist working on unmanned underwater vehicles. Since leaving active duty, Dylan has worked at Blue Origin on the New Shepard and New Glenn rockets, and Leostella where he built and tested several small earth imaging satellites that are currently in orbit.
Where people can watch space launches: https://www.discovery.com/shows/space-launch-live
If you have any topics you want me to cover, message me on twitter @missjillforde!
Most of the news around web3 makes it sound like the world is going to be drastically different from how it is today. What you'll learn from this interview with Shai Perednik is that the world in web3 is a lot more like the world as it is today than you think. Shai is a Global Tech and Segment Lead for Web3 and Blockchain at Amazon Web Services where he advises web2 and web3 businesses on their tech strategy. When he’s not advising businesses, he’s teaching web3 technical concepts to employees at Amazon Web Services and researching the future of blended reality and sovereign digital societies.
Shai breaks down how web3 is being built and what that means to anyone that wants to start a business that uses web3.
Topics that you'll learn about after listening to this episode:
- What is web3 and the metaverse?
- The difference between public and private blockchains
- What is mainnet and testnet in the Etherium blockchain?
- What does "consensus" mean in a blockchain network?
- How does the blockchain network get stronger as more ETH is staked?
- What is needed to make blockchain mainstream?
If there are any topics that you'd like to learn about in this podcast, let me know! Hit me up on Twitter @missjillforde!
AI that can understand what we want, when we want it is the direction AI is heading. In this episode, I go over the major use cases for AI that understands us through spoken and written words, many of which are called "Large Language models". I also break down how this industry works so if you're looking for a job in this industry or want to use a large language model for your business, listen to this episode.
NOTE: This podcast is completely separate from my work at AWS. All opinions mentioned in this podcast are strictly of my own and do not reflect the opinions of AWS or my previous employers.
Large language models and other text/spoken word AI models:
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Free to use (open source software): https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers/main/en/index
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Write a text description and the AI creates an image: https://platform.stability.ai/docs/features/text-to-image
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Conversational chat bots: https://aws.amazon.com/lex/
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Spoken words to text: https://aws.amazon.com/polly/
A lot of the hype around crypto is around what the power of crypto could be. In this episode, I talk to Erica Salinas about the use cases that are currently being used for crypto and blockchain and what needs to happen to make crypto and blockchain mainstream. Erica is a Principal Tech Leader for Web3 at Amazon where she helps accelerate web3 projects across the different business lines in Amazon. Previously, Erica was advising central banks, financial regulators, and financial institutions on their blockchain and digital currency projects. She has a masters in engineering and computer science from MIT and development economics from American University.
Erica also gives tips on how anyone can take their existing skills and apply it to a job in the web3 space.
You can follow Erica on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericamsalinas
Podcast Erica mentions: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/
If want to switch jobs into a new industry, then the robotics industry is worth keeping on your radar. Robots are going to CREATE MORE JOBS THAN THEY DESTROY! This industry is expected to grow to $81.4 billion by 2028.
And the best part is you don't have to have technical skills to get a job in it.
My guest, Jess Mckenna, is a Technical Program Manager at Amazon in their Robotics team. She studied Robotics Engineering at the Wocester Polytechnic Institute.
You're going to think differently about Robots after this episode and get tips on what you can do now to transition into this industry. The clickbait headlines make robots sound like they are going to take over all of our jobs. But the truth is they are going to take the jobs that WE DON'T LIKE DOING!
We get into...
...what robots are really good at now
... the skills and kinds of jobs needed now and in the future
Resources:
Hands on learning with an Arduino kit
Learn C++ the programming language used most in robotics
The robotics industry is approximately a $30 billion industry, but we've only scratched the surface of the potential for robots in our society. If you want to switch careers into a high growth industry or are just curious to understand how robots work, this is the episode for you. You'll learn the basics of how a robot can grasp certain objects, move and walk.
If there are certain topics that you want me to cover, contact me on Twitter @missjillforde!
The self driving car industry is forecasted to reach $21.4 billion by 2030. There's a lot that goes into making a car drive by itself. In this episode, I explain how self driving cars work and the companies that you should look out for if you're looking to get into the self driving car industry.
Are there any topics that you'd like me to explore? You can leave me a message on LinkedIn or on Instagram @missjillforde.
DAOs aka Decentralized Autonomous Organizations are a key component to the web3 ecosystem. In this episode, you'll learn what they are and what are possible use cases in the future.
Questions or topics you want to learn about - send them to Jillian @missjillforde on Instagram.
With the recent crypto market downturn, you might be wondering if it’s smart to get a job in a web3 company after college. In this episode, I’m going to help you decide if it’s worth getting your first job out of college at a web3 based company. If the answer is hell yes then I’ll also help you decide if should work at a startup or a bigger tech company.
My name is Jillian Forde and I’ve been in the tech industry for the past 5 years at Amazon Web Services where I get to help companies build businesses in the cutting edge of tech trends. I've worked with fast growing startups and companies as large as Disney, Sony Music and Comcast. This podcast is completely separate from the work I do at AWS and all opinions here are my own.
If you have any questions, feedback or topics that you want me to go over, leave me a message @missjillforde on Instagram.