Stretching collaboration with Embodied Social Proxies

My wife and I are spending Christmas this year at home in Montross, and I’m sad that we’re not visiting with family in North Carolina or California.  But I’ve been looking at some new Microsoft research efforts on how to keep in touch with people in more natural ways, particularly valuable for teams working across geographic distances, which is how our Microsoft Institute works.

The question of how distributed teams can work collaboratively is only going to get more challenging, with out-sourcing and crowd-sourcing. Last week the Institute had a great visitor to our Reston digs: Tony Hey, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of External Research.  Tony’s bio on Wikipedia mentions his thirty years as a leading European academic (particle physics was his game), along with the excellent books he’s authored: Einstein’s Mirror, and Feynman and Computation.

My bold decision to withdraw from consideration as Obama’s CTO

To: President-Elect Barack Obama

From: Lewis Shepherd

RE: My Imminent Selection as Chief Technology Officer for the United States

Mr. President-Elect, I am hereby reluctantly but insistently withdrawing my name from consideration as your appointment to the newly created position of Chief Technology Officer for our nation.

No, no, please don’t try to persuade me otherwise. My decision is final.

Analysis: My earlier post about John Brennan being President-elect Obama’s “imminent” selection as CIA director is now a curio, given Brennan’s decision yesterday to withdraw from consideration. 

Like any good intelligence analyst writing a balanced assessment, I had included the caveat that the only thing standing between Brennan and the appointment was the likelihood of a last-minute political squabble or contretemps.

This being Washington we’re talking about, that is precisely what happened. 

Google, Microsoft, and Medical Research

Fact: Two stark numbers are published today about Google co-founder Sergey Brin. First, the annual update of the “Forbes 400” wealthiest billionaires reports that Brin’s personal net worth is $15.9 billion (though that’s down some $2.7 billion from last year, due to the decline of Google’s stock price by 40% since last November).  More importantly, Brin himself wrote in his personal blog today that by having genetic research done on himself, “I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation… it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.”

Analysis: Sergey Brin’s own blog account of his discovery is a remarkably personal and touching piece, dealing with his mother and her own belated diagnosis of Parkinson’s, and the scientific boundaries of current genetic research and the implications one can draw from this immature field of science.

(c) AP Photo, Paul Sakuma

This was only the second post on Sergey’s new blog; the blog’s name is “Too” – and the first post merely stated the rationale for that name (“Welcome to my personal blog. While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number – two. It also means ‘in addition,’ as this blog reflects my life outside of work”). 

If his refreshing honesty and thoughtfulness today are going to be the calibre of his writing, I’m going to be a regular reader. 

His piece reminds me of Steve Jobs’ modern classic, his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address.  If you’ve never read that, then stop reading my words right now, and go read that. You’ll find yourself over the weekend thinking about your own approach to life.

But back to Brin and genetic research.  It will be interesting to watch what Google’s research arm is able to do in the area of medical and health research.  To make progress in bioengineering and genetics, “organizing the world’s information” is absolutely paramount and of course that’s Google’s mission statement.