O'reilly Radar Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: UX for security, architectural inspirations, and problem finding over problem solving.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 than problem solving.Here are a few highlights from their chat: Problem finding What makes architecture interesting are some properties of what are called 'wicked problems.' A professor in the architecture department at UC Berkeley before my time had a whole lot of things to say about why defining the problem is really congruent with solving it. What that means is by the time you completely write an exhaustive, functional specific

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Emerging themes in the data space.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. Here are a few highlights: Human-in-the-loop recommendations Stitch Fix is a company that I like to talk about. They use machine learning recommendations. This is a company that basically recommends clothing and fashion apparel to women. They use machine learning to generate a series of recommendations but then, human fashion experts actually take those recommendations and filter them further. In ma

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Ben Yoskovitz on a bottom-up approach to building products and the importance of poking holes in the reality distortion field.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.Here are some highlights from their discussion: Experiment and test I think we all appreciate that it is certainly getting easier to build stuff. At the end of the day, most of the risk for most companies is not can we build it. The risk is, market risk. Will anybody pay for this thing? Does anybody care? Can we build this piece of software or build this feature, usually the answer is yes. Most of us are not buil

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The short-term and long-term future of artificial intelligence.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.Here are some highlights from our chat: The last problem we ever solve If we create a general intelligence in a safe and beneficial manner, the gains to humanity could be absolutely enormous; it really could be the last problem we ever have to solve. After that, we spin up our AGI in the cloud and basically everything else is taken care of. Having said that, if we mess up this transition somehow and things go badly, then it could end up being literally the last problem we ever solve and terrible thin

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Scott Murray on creative coding, data visualization, and STEAM.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.Here are some highlights from their chat: Design, code, and computation I use to call myself a code artist but I really struggled with that title, and I think other people in my position feel similarly—those who are doing data visualization, or generative art, computationally based art or design work. I was kind of uncomfortable with the word art. I don't show work in galleries, I don't participate in the traditional art economy, so maybe I'm not an artist but more of a designer. I get excited about design as a problem-solving process. I'm totally a process geek; I get excited about design systems and consistency, so thinking about

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Designing a framework to shape how humans experience technology in the physical world.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.Here are a few highlights: Christine: A lot of the focus on human factors in design that influences technology is really based on human factors that were developed for industrial design, how we use physical objects in environments. We're entering a new stage in design where we have to think about how we actually use physical information. Multi-modal design is asking the questions, "How do we experience information in our environment? What does it take? What are the limitations? What are

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: VR UX hurdles, bringing VR mainstream, and preparing for user behavior.This week, I chat with Timoni West, the principal designer at Unity Labs, where she specializes in virtual reality (VR) user experience. We talk about VR, the UX hurdles designers are tackling, what will drive mainstream adoption, and what we can expect from VR in the future.West will be talking more about VR at Strata + Hadoop World San Jose 2016 in her session "Virtual reality in 2016 and in the future." Here are some highlights from our chat: UX hurdles in VR The biggest UX challenges I've seen people tackling in various ways are, first, locomotion: how do you move around a space if the space is larger than the physical space you have available to you? If you're going to use some sort of movement mechanic to move the user's camera forward, how do you do that without getting them sick? There's a couple of really brilliant solutions to this already, so I think long term maybe that won

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Alyssa Ravasio on founding a company, mining government data, and the future of the sharing economy.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.Here are some highlights: Mining government data Some states don't have any database we can query, and in that case, we actually have a team of researchers who are reading the websites and creating our own data sets. That's actually how we do almost all of our work. There are some cases where—Oregon has a really cool API for their state parks with photos, and they were really helpful. The static data is readily available and publicly accessible. One of the biggest challenges, though, has been accessing the real-time data, specifically about availability—is the campground booked next weekend or are there two spots left? This is public data. It h

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The maturing payments battleground, bitcoin and blockchain, and insurance innovation.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.Here are some highlights from their chat: Elephants in the dance hall Many of those [payments] battles are kind of reaching a conclusion, and that the entry of players like Facebook, and perhaps most notably Apple, have signaled that perhaps this merchants payments battleground is not the best place for startups to be choosing as the market opportunity, that there's a maturity happening, and there

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Evolutionary computation, its applications in deep learning, and how it's inspired by biology.In this week’s episode, David Beyer, principal at Amplify Partners, co-founder of Chart.io, 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. Also note, David Beyer's new free report "The Future of Machine Intelligence" is now available for download.Here are some highlights from their conversation: Finding optimal solutions We talk about evolutionary computation as a way of solving problems, discovering solutions that are optimal or as good as possible. In these complex domains like, maybe, simulated multi-legged robots that are walking in challenging conditions—a slippery slope or a field with obstacles—there are probably many different

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: FEMA's Innovation Team and practicing leadership as if it's an Olympic sport.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. Here are a few highlights: Right after Hurricane Sandy, I was here in New York and New Jersey, and FEMA deployed their first ever Innovation Team, which meant they were trying to innovate in the midst of disaster response. ... They were coming together and building mesh networks in some cases. They were crowdsourcing evaluation of photographs. They would get the Civilian Air Patrol to do overviews of the effected areas. They'd

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: "In Search of Certainty," Promise Theory, and scaling the computational net.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.Here are a few highlights from their chat: We tend to separate our narrative about computer science from the narrative of physics and biology and these other sciences. Many of the ideas of course, all of the ideas, that computers are based on originate in these other sciences. I felt it was important to weave computer science into that historical narrative and write the kind of book that I loved to read when I was a teenager, a popular science book explaining ideas, and popularizing some of

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The merging worlds of software, hardware, and biology.In this new episode of the Hardware Podcast—which features our first discussion focusing specifically on synthetic biology—David Cranor and I talk with Charles Fracchia, an IBM Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the synthetic biology company BioBright.Discussion points: The blurring of the lines between biology, software development, hardware engineering, and electrical engineering BioBright’s efforts to create hardware and software tools to reinvent the way biology is done in a lab The most prominent market forces in biology today (especially healthcare) How experiments conducted using Arduino or Raspberry Pi devices are impacting synthetic biology Pembient’s synthetic rhino horns This week’s click spirals Studies on the effects of oxytocin Dafen, a Chinese village where co

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: A triforce company structure, the power of storyboards, and designing business strategy.O'Reilly's Mary Treseler 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.Here are a few snippets from their conversation: That triforce of product management, engineering, and design, working together from point zero on the process of what problems we are trying to solve, and how we might solve that, and why we might solve it, and what the road map should be in getting there, is a process that is facilitated through design thinking. It's a process that includes all those voices in a way that we think gets us to some solutions that are a little bit more creative than we otherwise would have gotten to, but also thoughtfully considered in terms of the technology and the business impact. We literally use that storyboard fo

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: A special holiday cross-over of the O'Reilly Data Show Podcast.O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with Apache Spark release manager and Databricks co-founder Patrick Wendell about Spark's roadmap and interesting applications he's seeing in the growing Spark ecosystem.Here are some highlights from their chat: We were really trying to solve research problems, so we were trying to work with the early users of Spark, getting feedback on what issues it had and what types of problems they were trying to solve with Spark, and then use that to influence the roadmap. It was definitely a more informal process, but from the very beginning, we were expressly user driven in the way we thought about building Spark, which is quite different than a lot of other open source projects. … From the beginning, we were focused on empowering other people and building platforms for other developers. One of the early users was Conviva, a company that does analytics for real-time video distrib

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Service networking, employees vs contractors, and turning the world into a luxury hotel.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.Here are a few highlights from Busque: As a technologist myself, I became really passionate about how we mash up social and location technologies to connect real people, in the real world, to get real things done. I'd say in the last two years, it's become real time, and that's really the idea about where service networking was born. It's certainly our job to create a platform where demand is generated so that our tasker community, our suppliers, can find work, but I think even more than that, it is ab

O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Learning from both failure and success to make our systems more resilient.O'Reilly's Jenn Webb chats with Dave Zwieback, head of engineering at Next Big Sound and CTO of Lotus Outreach. Zwieback is the author of a new book, Beyond Blame: Learning from Failure and Success, that outlines an approach to make postmortems not only blameless, but to turn them into a productive learning process. We talk about his book, the framework for conducting a "learning review," and how humans can keep pace with the growing complexity of the systems we're building.When you add scale to anything, it becomes sort of its own problem. Meaning, let's say you have a single computer, right? The mean time to failure of the hard drive or the computer is actually fairly lengthy. When you have 10,000 of them or 10 million of them, you're having tens if not hundreds of failures every single day. That certainly changes how you go about designing systems. Again, whenever I say systems, I also mean organizations. To m

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Context-aware computing, privacy by design, and predicting astroid collisions.O'Reilly's Jenn Webb sits down with Jeff Jonas, an IBM fellow and chief scientist of context computing, Ironman triathlete, and contributing author to 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. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The definition I'm using of context is this: to better understand something by taking into account the things around it. Context computing is taking a new piece of data that arrived in the enterprise as a puzzle piece and finding other pieces of data that had been previously seen and see how it fits. Instead of using algorithms staring at puzzle pieces, you end up with whole chunks of the puzzle and it's much easier to make a high-quality prediction. The purpose of G2 is to be a

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Narrative Science's foray into proprietary business data and humanizing machines to bridge the data gap.O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with Kristian Hammond, Narrative Science's chief scientist. Hammond talks about Natural Language Generation, Narrative Science's shift into the world of business data, and evolving beyond the dashboard.Here are a few highlights: We're not telling people what the data are; we're telling people what has happened in the world through a view of that data. I don't care what the numbers are; I care about who are my best salespeople, where are my logistical bottlenecks. Quill can do that analysis and then tell you — not make you fight with it, but just tell you — and tell you in a way that is understandable and includes an explanation about why it believes this to be the case. Our focus is entirely, a little bit in media, but almost entirely in proprietary business data, and in particular we really focus on financial services right now.

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: The Internet of Things ecosystem, predictive machine learning superpowers, and deep-seated love for appliances and furniture.O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Mike Kuniavsky, a principal scientist in the Innovation Services Group at PARC. Kuniavsky talks about 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.Here are some highlights from their conversation: Wearables as a class is really weird. It describes where the thing is, not what it is. It's like referring to kitchenables. 'Oh, I'm making a kitchenable.' What does that mean? What does it do for you? There's this slippery slope between service design and UX design. I think UX design is more digital and service design allows itself to include things like a poster that's on a wall in a lobby, or a little