Richard Yim - The Battle of Tech for Social Good

What is Tech for good? In this digital age, innovating for good needs to be more firmly and deeply fixed among all Canadian industries, companies and organizations. Richard Yim, CEO of Dehmine Robotics breaks down his experience in the battle of Tech for social good.

truenorthwaterloo.com

Building on last year, our conversations at #TrueNorth19 will focus on how tech can be used for good. From last year's show, here's Marilyn Ma talking about the story of AI and how it's still being written.

*The Leaders Prize, unveiled at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, will be awarded to a winning team solving a problem of global significance using artificial intelligence (AI). The detailed problem statement will be revealed at True North Conference 2019, with the winner declared one year later at the 2020 edition of the conference.

https://truenorthwaterloo.com/

AI promises an exciting future. The upside is massive. It has the potential to help us solve the most obnoxious problems plaguing humanity. We could see giant leaps forward in medicine, manufacturing, transportation, biotech, agriculture, government, and on and on. No more crappy jobs. Maybe we’ll even get those flying cars we were promised.

But we have concerns.

It’s not killer robots that scare us, though that is terrifying. We’re afraid of AI nobody understands making life and death decisions for us. We’re afraid of economy-destroying, human value-displacing tech, controlled by a handful of people with all-too-human motives. We are afraid that, if there is a bug -- because there are always bugs -- we won’t be able patch it before it’s too late.

Can we take a minute to talk this through?

Welcome - John Kelleher

Marylin Ma: The True Story of AI is Still Being Written

Joseph Fung: Working Among the Machines

Suzanne Gildert: Ultra-Human-Like Robots - Bringing Science Fiction to Life

Ali Asaria: The Role of Human Workers in a Post Automation, Post AI World

Marcel O'Gorman: AI Beyond Ethics

Francois Gand: Unlocking Communication with AI

Closing Remarks - John Kelleher

Brian Tossan, Director of Engineering for General Motors of Canada, is obsessed with the future of personal transportation. Tossan has been with GM since 2000, and has watched as disruptive technologies have transformed the company and its priorities, fundamentally reshaping the way GM thinks about the car.

Tossan oversaw the creation of GM’s latest software product, Maven. Maven is a car sharing service that uses smartphones for a seamless, connected experience: download the app, pick a car to rent, and it will work as soon as you’re inside it. Trips are started, tracked, and ended with a user experience reminiscent of Uber or Lyft.

Nimble Hippo Radio caught up with Tossan to discuss the massive opportunities that lie in the current shifting landscape of transportation technology. For more Nimble Hippo, and other stories from the Waterloo Region tech ecosystem, subscribe to the Communitech Podcast.

Hillary Hartley is Ontario’s new Chief Digital Officer, hired to make Ontario’s online government services streamlined and easy to use.

A veteran of the Obama Administration and one of the co-founders of digital services company 18F, Hartley talked to Nimble Hippo Radio about how technology can improve every Ontarian’s experience of government.

Anthony Bartolo — Senior Audience Evangelism Manager at Microsoft — has a unique approach to engaging with the hackers and developers in the Microsoft ecosystem: he wants to learn from them. It might not sound radical, but in the modern world of corporate innovation, hackathons are often seen exclusively as a source of talent. Since it’s virtually impossible to build a robust, working prototype in 36 hours, enterprises are usually looking for potential, not learning about product.

For Bartolo, hackathons are much more than a farm team for engineers. Hackathons are where you learn about the problems you didn’t even know you had.

Sarah Prevette is the founder and CEO of Future Design School. Future Design School helps large organizations get everyone thinking through the lens of design, and works in education to advocate for youth entrepreneurship and innovation. The organization has design and innovation curricula, a teacher training program and is building a network of “micro-schools” across North America.

Prevette told the Nimble Hippo about how large organizations can use design thinking to align themselves around the needs of their customers, and why they need to be brave like a five-year-old.

Subscribe to the Communitech Podcast for more Nimble Hippo Radio.

Billy Beane is the baseball general manager portrayed in the bestselling book and feature film, “Moneyball.”

Beane’s story – of implementing a statistical methodology that led the Oakland A’s, one of the worst teams in baseball with one of the lowest payrolls, to six American League West division titles – inspired the world with the possibilities of big data analytics.

Listen on iTunes.

Learn about how Beane pulled off an innovation overhaul in the extremely traditional industry of professional baseball, and share with us your tricks for getting emotional distance from data using the hashtag #NimbleHippo on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Ali Asaria is the founder and CEO of Tulip Retail, a mobile software platform for in-store salespeople; he is also the founder and former CEO of Well.ca, an online retailer of health, beauty and baby products. Previous to that, Asaria worked at BlackBerry in various roles and was best known for making BrickBreaker, one of the most popular mobile games of its time.

Asaria spoke to Nimble Hippo Radio about the changing landscape of retail and the future of work in the 21st century. See more from the Nimble Hippo on Communitech News.

Patty McCord has spent many years working with companies to help people realize and practice leadership, pushing the boundaries of thinking about the way we all work.

McCord served as Chief Talent Officer of Netflix for 14 years, where — with the management team — she helped to create the Netflix culture deck. When it was posted on the Web, the culture deck took on a life of its own, with Sheryl Sandberg saying it “may be the most important document ever to come out of Silicon Valley.” The presentation has been viewed more than five million times.

McCord now coaches and advises a small group of companies and entrepreneurs on culture and leadership as the Principal of Patty McCord Consulting. She speaks to groups and teams around the world, and was a keynote speaker at this year’s Communitech Tech Leadership Conference. Read more about TLC on Communitech News.