The Restless Ones

With over 45,000 flights and 2 million passengers flying each day, keeping the airline industry on schedule is a herculean task. From mechanics and maintenance crews to flight teams and agents, and the ever-unpredictable mother nature, any of these factors can create a cascading domino effect of delays and cancellations—causing stress for both passengers and airlines. That’s why advantages such as the enhanced connectivity of 5G are critical for airlines to track real-time issues and allow employees to quickly collaborate to keep flights on schedule. 

In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Vikram Baskaran, Vice President of IT Services at Alaska Airlines, who is spearheading this once regional airline towards becoming one of the technology pioneers of the industry. Vikram believes the key to his mission of providing safe, award-winning experiences to Alaska’s passengers is for his organization to act as a smart connector. With dozens of interdependent functions operating behind the scenes, Vikram has utilized 5G so Alaska employees can act as a “virtual flash mob,” working together as one. Beyond collaboration, multi-edge computing, VR, and increased automation capabilities are all on Vikram’s roadmap to greater efficiency in the skies.

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The technologies of today are shaping the cities of tomorrow, with highly beneficial infrastructure essential to local citizens, businesses, and economies alike. Those who are defining and prioritizing the problems, using technology and innovation as the solution, will have the greatest impact. For the first time, local governments and civil authorities are not only able to collect meaningful and accurate data at scale but analyze it in ways that yield improvements across their domain. Public priorities such as transportation safety and efficiency, air quality, climate change, public safety, accessibility, and narrowing the digital divide are all being addressed through the power of the connected city.

To hear more about how the public sector is building for the future, we sit with Tyler Svitak, Executive Director of the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance. To be successful at scale requires a partnership between both the public and private sector. Technologies such as vehicle-to-grid electrification, autonomous vehicle deployment, and air quality monitoring sensors are only efficiently and effectively deployed through the power of partnership, which is why the CSCA’s work to introduce new technologies and bring the brightest minds to the table is the smartest approach. 

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Many of the industries building the world around us experience common challenges across their process.  From architecture and engineering, to manufacturing and transportation, even media, and entertainment, the ability to intelligently shape data and foster collaboration is mission critical.  The need to unlock both in real-time has pushed each of these industries towards cloud and platform transformations, enabling their workforces to thrive.  One company sits at the center of many of these well-laid plans – Autodesk – a critical partner to any organization looking to increase their productivity through digital design.
 
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we had the opportunity to sit with Raji Arasu, Chief Technology Officer at Autodesk. Raji sits at the helm of the company’s own platform transformation, unifying the products and services it offers its clients.  She and her team prioritize three key areas for success: Creating the building blocks that all of their technology can grow from, strengthening the ecosystem of partners that can scale their offerings, and looking towards the future through the company’s research labs.  Their work, along with the strength of high speed 5G networks, allows terms like generative design, industrialized construction and adaptive manufacturing to be fully realized by their clients, and all of the world to enjoy their outputs.

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Human history shows that agriculture was one of the earliest innovations. It allowed populations to shift from a hunting and gathering to feeding the masses through organized efforts to grow crops. For decades, technology may have appeared to accelerate much faster in other industries, but advancements in equipment, seeds and planting tactics have continued to increase farm production. Now, 5G connectivity is about to unleash the next wave of innovation in farming, with smart equipment and backend data allowing farmers to do more with less, a critical need in an industry with finite resources. 

In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Igino Cafiero, CEO of Bear Flag Robotics—a subsidiary of industry-leader John Deere, and pioneer in bringing autonomy and intelligence to the world of tractors. From engineer to founder, Igino’s passion for solving problems—especially ones with such meaning as feeding the world—is palpable. Igino believes autonomy is just one part of a connectivity-enabled path to helping farmers increase yields through the use of smart sensors, data and machine learning. As we learned, the farm of the future may already be here.

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How does a company build for the quintessential duality of creating a product that is focused on unplugging from day-to-day life, and  their customers connected? Whether it’s our new “work from anywhere” reality, or keeping a lifeline available in case of an emergency, a connection to key information and opportunity is often necessary for even the most die-hard campers and nature lovers. Enter Airstream, the iconic 91 year-old RV company that has to face its own mission of staying true to the past, while building for the future, and harnessing the power of connectivity to make it happen.
 
In this episode of The Restless Ones, we have the pleasure of sitting with Bob Wheeler, President and CEO of Airstream, who has led his company to embrace the notion that connecting with nature no longer means you need to completely disconnect. For a product that seemingly never changes on the outside, Bob and team are making hundreds of innovations on the inside. From electrifying the fleet to enabling connectivity that can allow users to control and monitor the vehicle, stay connected, and let the company harness the data they need to continue to push the company to the future – innovation is at the core of this iconic company.

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With advancements in mobility and connectivity enabling new technologies at a faster rate than ever, staying ahead of the curve can be a challenge for even the most skilled of operators. From education to retail; mining to medical; all sectors face the common challenge of digitizing their workflows and offerings for an increasingly connected world. While these organizations may have a deep understanding of their own fields, even the most forward-thinking leaders rely on outside partners to bring them up to speed on the technology front, and Infosys is one of those leaders.
 
In this episode, we sit with Maddie Rajurs,  Associate Vice President of Infosys, who is helping her clients—and entire industries—transform via digitization. Maddie has seen her career span from helping light up the first wave of wireless cities to now harnessing the power of 5G to put her clients on the forefront of the digital age. Maddie and her team diligently work to stay ahead of the curve, partnering with start-ups, institutes, and other technology leaders to seek out and develop the latest technology solutions for their clients. A self-proclaimed techno-optimist, Maddie believes that her work will lead to improving efficiencies, productivity, and even lives in both the long and short run.

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It took a pandemic to highlight our dependence on transportation and logistics—but efforts to optimize the industry were gaining traction well before that. Today, the auto industry is in a state of complete disruption with technologies such as 5G connectivity, AI, and Machine Learning enabling smart vehicles, their manufacturers, and the smart cities they operate in and drive through.

To hear more about how these industries are being revolutionized, we sit with Lutz Beck, CIO of Daimler Truck North America, whose belief is that in a world where technology will inevitably be capable of everything, the only limit is ourselves and our abilities to think big. We’ll hear about his vision for the latest advances in autonomous vehicles and new connectivity-enabled services such as predictive maintenance, and how he is trying to change Daimler into a data-driven organization by using the company’s fleet of vehicles as digital assets.

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From smart factories to connected fleets, businesses have come to expect seamless operations at the push of a button, but there are millions of moving pieces and years of work behind powering up and connecting the hardware and software that makes their systems hum. The developments behind 5G act as a backbone that many of the latest technologies rely on. From the early strategies behind design to the creation of flourishing ecosystems, advancing any technology is difficult. One as critical and fast-moving as wireless communications is a gargantuan task.

In this episode of The Restless Ones, we sit with Durga Malladi, SVP and GM, Cellular Modems & Infrastructure, at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc, has spent his career advancing the technologies powering the wireless industry. In a world that has evolved from devices simply talking to humans to devices talking to millions of other devices, Durga and Qualcomm’s work to constantly increase throughput and reliability while lowering the latencies of these communications has brought us to point of the “Connected Intelligent Edge”. A space where, with the help of wireless networks, data can be consumed in ways we could never have imagined possible. They say “advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  Thanks to Durga and his team, this may be true.

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Imagine a world where students can sail on a WWII Battleship, study the inner details of a cadaver, and go for a spacewalk, all while never leaving the comfort of their classroom, workplace, or home. Thanks to the connected technologies of AR, VR, and 5G available now, this type of learning is no longer a far-off dream, it’s happening now. The cross-benefits of seamlessly being able to bring the world to the classroom, and the classroom to any part of the world are crucial in advancing society forward by training the minds of our youth in ways that were never before possible.  

Join us as we kick off Season Three of The Restless ones with the visionary Steve Grubbs, Founder, and CEO of VictoryXR who is utilizing his passion for education and technology to change the way we all learn. The latest developments in low-latency 5G connectivity, graphics technologies, and haptics have allowed Steve and the company to explore the key insight that engagement impacts the speed and way the brain interacts and processes information. At VictoryXR Metaversities, lesson plans no longer come to life on paper and whiteboards, instead, students are exposed to a 360 field of learning to stimulate their minds.

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Returning for season three of the Restless Ones, an original podcast from T-Mobile for Business and iHeartRadio, host, Jonathan Strickland, sits down with some of the most forward-thinking technology leaders—those at the intersection of technology and business—to explore their unique missions, challenges, and approaches to driving their organizations forward. Tune in to learn how these leaders think about building a bridge to what’s next and leveraging transformative technologies like 5G to create a more connected and meaningful future today.

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