Congratulations Team Emora! Amazon announced today that Emory University and their Emora socialbot are the winners of the 2020 Alexa Prize. Second Place was awarded to Stanford’s Chirpy Cardinal bot and Third Place was Alquist developed by the team from Czech Technical University. Emory won with a 3.81 average rating […]
Not surprisingly, the book launch of Future Minds at Town Hall Seattle had to be postponed, a decision I wholeheartedly support in the interest of public safety. But in lieu of that presentation (at least for now), the good folks at THS did an interview with me to offer a […]
Fifty years ago, I had the life changing experience of being introduced to Future Shock, Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s pivotal 1970 book. Putting forth the premise that too much change was happening in too short a time, Future Shock explored the psychological and societal impacts of continuous and disruptive progress. […]
What is the Future of the Global Marketplace? How will demographic shifts, climate change and continued increases in urbanization affect trade between different parts of our world? I had the amazing opportunity to speak about these topics at the U.S Embassy in Hanoi a few weeks ago. The audience of […]
Few topics are as personal as our health and based on the current trends in healthcare, things are going to be getting a whole lot more personal very soon. I had the pleasure of presenting the closing plenary last week for the NW Regional Primary Care Association’s 2019 Fall Primary […]
I just returned from an exciting and memorable week in Helsinki and Turku, Finland. As one of the keynote speakers for the annual two-day SHIFT Business Festival, I spoke about the future of human-machine interfaces. Now in its fourth year, SHIFT’s mission is “to help radical innovators shape a better […]
A world of virtual assistants Over the past few years, virtual assistants have become increasingly prevalent in our homes and offices. Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana and Apple Siri are a few of the predominant virtual assistant programs that are being run on an ever-growing number of platforms. For […]
It was an honor to be a judge for the 2018 Alexa Prize Finals. The work being done by Amazon and these teams in the rapidly advancing field of conversational artificial intelligence is exciting and I’m can’t wait to see what comes next! It’s my opinion that this is a […]
On Tuesday, I had the honor of kicking off Edmonds Community College’s “Kickoff Week”, addressing the professors and administrators there about “Educating Our Workforce in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” We continued with an hour-long Q&A/conversation following the presentation and I really enjoyed seeing how proactive and engaged everyone was. […]
I spent an amazing couple of hours with a few dozen students at the University of Washington’s “Smart Machines & The Future of Humanity” course on Monday. While not focused on focused on futures methodology, I’m really pleased to see college courses focused on trying to anticipate and understand the […]