New List, New Job, New Year

MIT’s world-famous economist Robert Solow died this month at 99, nearly seven decades after his earliest remarkable scholarship which won him the Nobel Prize in Economics. We owe him for much of our understanding of the underlying dynamics of our modern digital economy. Solow’s initial scholarship in the 1950s was radical and complex, but he summarized it neatly: “I discovered to my great surprise that the main source of growth was not capital investment but technological change.” As the Nobel Committee observed, “he developed a mathematical model illustrating how various factors can contribute to sustained national economic growth. From the 1960s on, Solow’s studies helped persuade governments to channel funds into technological research and development to spur economic growth.”

As 2023 closes we are still accelerating into the multi-decade technological propulsion of the U.S. economy, resulting in a seismic shift you may not have noticed. There’s a dramatic new look to the list of 10 Largest American Companies. They’re all tech companies! Sort of… and I’ve joined the newest member of the list.

If you didn’t notice, slipping in under the radar late this year was the completion of the largest IT corporate acquisition in history: Broadcom has finalized its acquisition of software giant VMware for $69 Billion. As an executive at VMware I have accepted an offer to join in the new combined company, to help lead “VMware by Broadcom” operations as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Public Sector, meaning our efforts for government, education, national security etc. That’s a substantial area of work in a large company, and to see just how large let’s take a look at how Broadcom has shaken up that Top-Ten U.S. companies list, which fluctuates daily based on market-cap (this data is from the last trading-day before Christmas):

Top Ten U.S. public companies by market capitalization as of 12/22/2023, source companiesmarketcap.com

Keep in mind that’s not a “Silicon Valley leaders” list, that’s the largest companies in the United States overall. From the three-trillion-dollar behemoth Apple on down to the half-trillion-dollar Broadcom, you see the dominance of tech firms. Eight of the ten are now straight-up hardware-software companies, including Tesla, an auto manufacturer of course but definitionally one marked by its unique technologies in energy, robotics, and digital engineering. Lilly is a pharmaceutical giant founded by Eli Lilly over a century ago which today invests billions in technological research advancement, as recently seen in its COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines.

And what about Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the seeming outlier? The “value-investing” conglomerate is broadly based, relying on Buffett’s mantra that “Diversification is a protection against ignorance,” but there’s no escaping that its full portfolio is indeed 53% in technology.

When Broadcom joined this Top Ten list by virtue of the VMware addition, it nudged down the finance giant Visa, which is remaking itself with a “fintech” focus and says it has been using machine-learning for thirty years as “the first AI-powered payments network.” More tech firms are sprinkled further down in the Top 50 Companies of course (Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce, Netflix, SAP, AMD). Other fast-growing tech companies will certainly rise, and many established giants continue to morph along Solow’s prescription toward tech-enabled growth.

Back to the Future

The technological shape of the future has been clear, even before Marc Andreesen wrote in 2011 in the Wall Street Journal that “Software is eating the world.” I have written and spoken often about the transformational history of Silicon Valley, stretching back to the first half of the twentieth century. That history is exemplified in VMware’s origin story, in a computer science classroom in 1998 on the campus of Stanford University, and now even more so in combination with Broadcom’s even deeper, more fascinating combinatorial technology roots. Not a flashy company, not a marketing megaphone, just a foundational inventor/manufacturer of tech infrastructure and mission-critical software underlying the digital era.

Broadcom’s roots stretch back through mergers and acquisitions to combine the legendary transistor or silicon or optical or networking or software divisions of AT&T’s famous Bell Labs, Hewlett-Packard‘s semiconductor business, digital engineering trailblazers LSI Logic, all added over the years to the pioneers of video streaming at “Classic” Broadcom, mainframe software at CA, cybersecurity software at Symantec, and now virtualization at VMware… all now joined in the same powerhouse Broadcom. It’s a striking lineage of technological audacity and strategic foresight.

Barreling into 2024 using Robert Solow’s growth equation, with VMware’s previous $3 Billion per year in R&D investment supplementing Broadcom’s existing $5 Billion a year in R&D – and with CEO Hock Tan’s plan to increase our R&D substantially – we intend to enable new advances in foundational infrastructure across the technological landscape (for example see my new colleague Clayton Donley‘s recent piece “Generative AI and the Reinvigoration of AIOps“).

Don’t expect hype. Broadcom’s formula focuses quietly on sustained strategic growth. As we were finalizing the merging of our two organizations I learned quite a bit reading a deeply-researched piece by a semiconductor-industry analyst: “the fact is that in 2023, no one besides NVIDIA will generate even $1B revenue from chips that run large language models. Scratch that, there is one other player. Often overlooked is that Broadcom is the second largest AI chip company in the world in terms of revenue behind NVIDIA, with multiple billions of dollars of accelerator sales… Broadcom, the Silent Giant in the AI Chip Revolution.”

As a CTO in this new software/hardware dynamo I couldn’t be more excited about the future fun. Maybe we can climb that Top Ten list even higher by this time next year – stay tuned.

#newjob #TopTen #SiliconValley #technology #AI #research #government #future

Coming to DC, One-Day Delivery from Jeff Bezos

If you read this blog you care about government and technology. And whether you’re a technologist or not, you can see the tech forces shaping and sharpening the uses of digital capabilities in accomplishing the ends of government, whether that’s citizen-service delivery and local law enforcement, or global diplomacy and nation-state combat. I’ve worked on and written about them all – from intelligence to space to AI, or the quantification of Supreme Court humor, even “Punk Rock and Moore’s Law.”

Understanding and forecasting that radical pace of external change is difficult for government professionals, and they need help doing that. Let’s say you wanted to tap someone to offer insight. Who’d be on your dream list? At the top of my dream list – my absolute “if-only-I-could-ask” list – would be Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin.

So I’m going to sit down with Jeff Bezos on stage later this month, at the annual AFCEA Intelligence Symposium, for a conversation about areas where technology critically intersects with the nation’s response to enduring challenges and opportunities, such as artificial intelligence, digital innovation, the revolution in cloud computing, and commercial space operations. (I serve as national Vice Chairman of the Intelligence Committee at AFCEA, the 35,000-member Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association.)

The 2017 Symposium features, as usual, a stellar line-up of top leaders in national security, with panels on Advanced Conventional Threats, the Contested Environment of Space, Terrorism, Cyber Threats from Nation-States and Non-State Entities, and Gray-Zone Conflicts/Hybrid Warfare (topic of last year’s Defense Science Board study on which I sat). All sessions feature senior thought-leaders from government and industry.

Jeff Bezos might be new in that particular mix, but you can understand why we invited him. He has been TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year (early in his career in 1999), Fortune Magazine’s Businessperson of the Year, topped the Forbes annual list of “World’s Greatest Leaders,” and our rationale for this conversation is his long track record of revolutionary contributions to international technological/economic advance, as well as to US national security. AWS is now of central importance to the public sector (including intelligence), and the broader contributions of Amazon and Blue Origin to the nation’s economic future and success are incalculable.

 

If you have a Top Secret/SI/TK clearance, you can attend the Symposium – register. [Update: sorry, 2017 Symposium = sold out]

There’s a longstanding meme that government should be “run like a business.” I typically don’t think in precisely those terms, having been on both sides and recognizing the significant differences in intent and stakeholders.

Panel on Defense Innovation and DIUx

I’ve been more interested in helping each sector understand the unique contributions of the other, and the complexities inherent in their relationship. (See for example my recent post on DoD Innovation and DIUx in Silicon Valley.)

But the “run government like a business” impetus is understandable here in the United States as a reflection of dissatisfaction with government performance in meeting its own goals, and the expectations of the citizens it serves. President Trump recently assigned Jared Kushner to lead a new White House Office of American Innovation, and Kushner told the Washington Post “We should have excellence in government. The government should be run like a great American company.” The Washington Post (coincidentally owned by, yes, Jeff Bezos) ran a piece exploring the history of that thinking, dating its surge in popularity to the early 1980s under President Reagan – a timeline borne out by running the phrase through Google’s Ngram Viewer (see chart).

The last time I invited a smart young billionaire to come speak to Intelligence Community leaders, it worked out pretty well for the audience (see “Burning Man and AI: What Elon Musk told me and the role of Art“). So I’m aiming even higher this year…

If you don’t have a Top Secret clearance, you can’t get into the Symposium, and won’t be able to hear Bezos firsthand on April 27. But here’s a substitute, nearly as good: this week Bezos published his annual Letter to Shareholders of Amazon. Most people in the business world know about his legendary 1997 “first annual letter to shareholders” in which he laid out an extraordinary long-term vision for his company. The 2017 version is also extraordinary, and I urge you to read it in full. My friend Jeff Jonas, former IBM Chief Scientist for Context Computing and now founder/Chief Scientist at Senzing, calls it “the most impressive annual letter to shareholders I’ve ever read; this line of thinking leads to greatness.”

– – – – –

For some parting eye-candy, here’s video from last week’s annual Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, where attendees got a first-hand look at the historic Blue Origin New Shepard rocket booster (first to land vertically after spaceflight, first to relaunch again, and now a five-time-reuse trophy), and an inside tour of the crew capsule with “the largest windows in space travel.”

 

 

Bullshit Detector Prototype Goes Live

I like writing about cool applications of technology that are so pregnant with the promise of the future, that they have to be seen to be believed, and here’s another one that’s almost ready for prime time.

The Washington Post today launched an exciting new technology prototype invoking powerful new technologies for journalism and democratic accountability in politics and government. As you can see from the screenshot (left), it runs an automated fact-checking algorithm against the streaming video of politicians or other talking heads and displays in real time a “True” or “False” label as they’re speaking.

Called “Truth Teller,” the system uses technologies from Microsoft Research and Windows Azure cloud-computing services (I have included some of the technical details below).

But first, a digression on motivation. Back in the late 1970s I was living in Europe and was very taken with punk rock. Among my favorite bands were the UK’s anarcho-punk collective Crass, and in 1980 I bought their compilation LP “Bullshit Detector,” whose title certainly appealed to me because of my equally avid interest in politics 🙂

Today, my driving interests are in the use of novel or increasingly powerful technologies for the public good, by government agencies or in the effort to improve the performance of government functions. Because of my Jeffersonian tendencies (I did after all take a degree in Government at Mr. Jefferson’s University of Virginia), I am even more interested in improving government accountability and popular control over the political process itself, and I’ve written or spoken often about the “Government 2.0” movement.

In an interview with GovFresh several years ago, I was asked: “What’s the killer app that will make Gov 2.0 the norm instead of the exception?”

My answer then looked to systems that might “maintain the representative aspect (the elected official, exercising his or her judgment) while incorporating real-time, structured, unfiltered but managed visualizations of popular opinion and advice… I’m also a big proponent of semantic computing – called Web 3.0 by some – and that should lead the worlds of crowdsourcing, prediction markets, and open government data movements to unfold in dramatic, previously unexpected ways. We’re working on cool stuff like that.”

The Truth Teller prototype is an attempt to construct a rudimentary automated Political Bullshit Detector, and addresses each of those factors I mentioned in GovFresh – recognizing the importance of political leadership and its public communication, incorporating iterative aspects of public opinion and crowd wisdom, all while imbuing automated systems with semantic sense-making technology to operate at the speed of today’s real world.

Real-time politics? Real-time truth detection.  Or at least that’s the goal; this is just a budding prototype, built in three months.

Cory Haik, who is the Post’s Executive Producer for Digital News, says it “aims to fact-check speeches in as close to real time as possible” in speeches, TV ads, or interviews. Here’s how it works:

The Truth Teller prototype was built and runs with a combination of several technologies — some new, some very familiar. We’ve combined video and audio extraction with a speech-to-text technology to search a database of facts and fact checks. We are effectively taking in video, converting the audio to text (the rough transcript below the video), matching that text to our database, and then displaying, in real time, what’s true and what’s false.

We are transcribing videos using Microsoft Audio Video indexing service (MAVIS) technology. MAVIS is a Windows Azure application which uses State of the Art of Deep Neural Net (DNN) based speech recognition technology to convert audio signals into words. Using this service, we are extracting audio from videos and saving the information in our Lucene search index as a transcript. We are then looking for the facts in the transcription. Finding distinct phrases to match is difficult. That’s why we are focusing on patterns instead.

We are using approximate string matching or a fuzzy string searching algorithm. We are implementing a modified version Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance algorithm as our first implementation. This will be modified to recognize paraphrasing, negative connotations in the future.

What you see in the prototype is actual live fact checking — each time the video is played the fact checking starts anew.

 – Washington Post, “Debuting Truth Teller“

The prototype was built with funding from a Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund grant, and you can read more about the motivation and future plans over on the Knight Blog, and you can read TechCrunch discussing some of the political ramifications of the prototype based on the fact-checking movement in recent campaigns.

Even better, you can actually give Truth Teller a try here, in its infancy.

What other uses could be made of semantic “truth detection” or fact-checking, in other aspects of the relationship between the government and the governed?

Could the justice system use something like Truth Teller, or will human judges and  juries always have a preeminent role in determining the veracity of testimony? Will police officers and detectives be able to use cloud-based mobile services like Truth Teller in real time during criminal investigations as they’re evaluating witness accounts? Should the Intelligence Community be running intercepts of foreign terrorist suspects’ communications through a massive look-up system like Truth Teller?

Perhaps, and time will tell how valuable – or error-prone – these systems can be. But in the next couple of years we will be developing (and be able to assess the adoption of) increasingly powerful semantic systems against big-data collections, using faster and faster cloud-based computing architectures.

In the meantime, watch for further refinements and innovation from The Washington Post’s prototyping efforts; after all, we just had a big national U.S.  election but congressional elections in 2014 and the presidential race in 2016 are just around the corner. Like my fellow citizens, I will be grateful for any help in keeping candidates accountable to something resembling “the truth.”

2012 Year in Review for Microsoft Research

The year draws to a close… and while the banality and divisiveness of politics and government has been on full display around the world during the past twelve months, the past year has been rewarding for me personally when I can retreat into the world of research. Fortunately there’s a great deal of it going on among my colleagues.

2012 has been a great year for Microsoft Research, and I thought I’d link you to a quick set of year-in-review summaries of some of the exciting work that’s been performed and the advances made:

Microsoft Research 2012 Year in Review

The work ranges from our Silicon Valley lab work in “erasure code” to social-media research at the New England lab in Cambridge, MA; from “transcending the architecture of quantum computers” at our Station Q in Santa Barbara, to work on cloud data systems and analytics by the eXtreme Computing Group (XCG) in Redmond itself.

Across global boundaries we have seen “work towards a formal proof of the Feit-Thompson Theorem” at Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK), and improvements for Bing search in Arab countries made at our Advanced Technology Labs in Cairo, Egypt.

All in all, an impressive array of research advance, benefiting from an increasing amount of collaboration with academic and other researchers as well. The record is one more fitting tribute to our just-departing Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, who is turning over his reins including MSR oversight to Eric Rudder (see his bio here), while Craig focuses for the next two years on special work reporting to CEO Steve Ballmer. Eric’s a great guy and a savvy technologist, and has been a supporter of our Microsoft Institute’s work as well … I did say he’s savvy 🙂

There’s a lot of hard work already going on in projects that should pay off in 2013, and the New Year promises to be a great one for technologists and scientists everywhere – with the possible exception of any remaining Mayan-apocalypse/ancient-alien-astronaut-theorists. But even to them, and perhaps most poignantly to them, I say Happy New Year!

Tech Trip to Argentina

With Luis Ruvira, President of the Argentine American Dialogue Foundation, after my speech at the Argentine Council on International Relations

I’m traveling in Argentina this week, on a trip sponsored by the U.S. Department of State in their official Speaker’s Program. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires had requested of DoS an American technology speaker “who can talk about technology innovation and bleeding edge kinds of things.  The goal is to highlight the role that innovation and technology plays in creating a better society.” I was delighted to accept the invitation when asked by my friend Lovisa Williams of the State Department’s Internet Steering Committee.

Most of the trip is being spent in Buenos Aires, second largest city in South America – so large it is constitutionally recognized as an autonomous federal entity alongside the 23 Argentinian provinces, with its own government ministers and municipal administration. I am also enjoying side visits to Rosario and La Plata, large cities and provincial capitals. I’ll write about several aspects of the trip separately.

Working together to cram in a series of whirlwind meetings have been my excellent co-hosts, the U.S. Embassy and the respected Argentine American Dialogue Foundation. Below are the highlights of the visit, plucked from my official agenda:

Monday 9/19: Meeting with the Minister of Education for Buenos Aires city and visit to the Escuela Gauchos de Guemes school which is studying the social and educational benefits of having given each child their own netbook. Tour of the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (UAI) (the Open InterAmerican University), visiting their robotics labs, meetings with engineering students, and a separate meeting with authorities from the university and national civil servants. Meeting with Pedro Janices, National Director at the National Office for Information Technologies (executive-branch component of the President’s Office; Pedro has been called “the Argentine CIO,” and has worked with the first U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra.)

Tuesday 9/20: Public speech at the Argentina Council for International Relations (CARI, one of the most important think tanks in Latin America), topic: “Governments 2.0 and the impact of new technologies.” Lecture at the American Club of Buenos Aires, with participating companies from the American Chamber of Commerce of Argentina, members from the academic sector and public servants (including the Head of International Relations of the National Ministry in Science and Technology). Tour of the Supreme Court of Argentina, meeting with Deputy Chief Justice Highton, who was the first woman appointed to the Court (under a democratic government).  Videoconference lecture on “Innovation and Government” at the National Technological University (UTN), transmitted live to 13 campuses of the University in the interior of the country.

Wednesday 9/21: Trip to Rosario, second largest city in Argentina and capital of Santa Fe Province. Visit and tour of largest tech firm in Rosario, Neoris; lunch with Neoris Latin American President Martin Mendez.  Meeting with the Secretary of Production and Local Development for the city of Rosario, subject “Creating conditions for local technology-industry growth.” Meeting with Rocio Rius of the Fundacion Nueva Generación Argentina (Argentina New Generation Foundation). Lecture at the Universidad Abierto Interamericana (UAI) campus in Rosario on new technologies and their impact on government; audience of authorities and students from UAI and other universities, faculty from the Engineering School, and also local public servants.

Thursday 9/22: Trip to La Plata, capital city of Buenos Aires Province.  Meeting with Governor Daniel Scioli (Vice President of Argentina 2003-2007) and other provincial civil servants, including Undersecretary of Institutional Relations, Director of Interministerial Relations, and Chief of Cabinet.  Public Lecture at the National University of La Plata, guest of Dean of the Informatics Faculty.

Friday 9/23: Participate in opening ceremonies in Buenos Aires of the IX Congreso Internacional en Innovación Tecnológica Informática (CIITI, Ninth International Congress on IT Innovation). Visit to Universidad Argentina de la Empresa, (UADE, Argentine University of Enterprise), meetings with faculty/students from Government, Law, and Engineering departments, and tours of laboratories. Lecture at the American Club of Buenos Aires. Meeting with Director of the Business School at Argentine Catholic University, and Dean of the Faculty of Economic Sciences. Private meeting at Embassy with U.S. Ambassador Vilma Martinez. Panel speaker on “Ciberculture Y Gobierno” (Cyber-culture and Government) at the IX Congreso CIITI with international panel.

I’ve been on several other State Department-sponsored trips before (to Mexico and, many years ago near the end of the Cold War, to the Soviet Union), but I must say that this frenetically busy jaunt through lovely Argentina may be my favorite. I’ll write more over the next few days.

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MSR gets wired, WIRED gets MSR

MSR natural-user-interaction immersive technologies

WIRED Magazine’s online site ran a great long profile of Microsoft Research late yesterday, with interviews and project features: “How Microsoft Researchers Might Invent a Holodeck.”

I have written about or mentioned all of the individual projects or technologies on my blog before, but the writing at WIRED is so much better than my own – and the photographs so cool – that I thought I should post a link to the story.

Virtual recipe stirs in Apple iPad, Microsoft Kinect

Who says Apple and Microsoft can’t work together?  They certainly do, at least when it involves the ingenuity of their users, the more inventive of whom use technologies from both companies (and others).

Here’s a neat example, “a just-for-fun experiment from the guys at Laan Labs” where they whip up a neat Augmented Reality recipe: take one iPad, one Kinect, and stir:

Some technical detail from the Brothers Laan, the engineers who did the work:

We used the String Augmented Reality SDK to display real-time 3d video+audio recorded from the Kinect. Libfreenect from http://openkinect.org/ project was used for recording the data coming from the Kinect. A textured mesh was created from the calibrated depth+rgb data for each frame and played back in real-time. A simple depth cutoff allowed us isolate the person in the video from the walls and other objects. Using the String SDK, we projected it back onto a printed image marker in the real world.” – source, Laan Labs blog.

As always, check out http://www.kinecthacks.com/ for the latest and greatest Kinect hacks – or more accurately now, the latest cool uses of the openly released free Kinect SDK, available here.

There are several quiet projects underway around the DC Beltway to make use of the SDK, testing non-commercial but government-relevant deployments – more detail and examples at the appropriate time. We will eventually release a commercial SDK with even more functionality and higher-level programming controls, which will directly benefit government early adopters.

In the meantime, I may report on some of the new advances being made by our research group on Computational User Experiences, who “apply expertise in machine learning, visualization, mobile computing, sensors and devices, and quantitative and qualitative evaluation techniques to improve the state of the art in physiological computing, healthcare, home technologies, computer-assisted creativity, and entertainment.” That’s a rich agenda, and the group is in the very forefront of defining how Natural User Interaction (NUI) will enhance our personal and professional lives….

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The almighty ampersand linking R and D

According to Wikipedia, the lowly ampersand or “&” is a logogram representing the conjunction word “and” using “a ligature of the letters in et,” which is of course the Latin word for “and.”

In my line of work I most frequently encounter the ampersand in the common phrase “R&D” for research and development, although I notice that with texting and short-form social media the ampersand is making something of a comeback in frequency of use anyway.

Kinecting Communities

On April 16 I will be speaking at the Mobile Citizen Summit in Washington DC (registration still open), which brings together “practitioners across the  government, nonprofit, advocacy, and political spaces—the kinds of  people who develop the strategy and the tools to reach, engage, educate,  and enable citizens across the country and around the world.”

But I’m going to be talking about “mobile” in a different way than others still use the term, i.e. they focus on a handheld device, while I will be focusing on the mobile citizen. As I have said before I don’t believe our future involves experiencing “augmented reality” by always holding up little 3-inch plastic screens in front of our faces. Natural user interfaces and immersive computing offer much more to how we access computational resources – and how technology will help us interact with one another. Here’s an example, in a story from the past week.

Air Everything

Like many people, I was very impressed by a video over the weekend of the Word Lens real-time translation app for iPhone.  It struck with a viral bang, and within a few days racked up over 2 million YouTube views. What particularly made me smile was digging backwards through the twitter stream of a key Word Lens developer whom I follow, John DeWeese, and finding this pearl of a tweet (right) from several months ago, as he was banging out the app out in my old stomping grounds of the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s a hacker mentality for you 🙂

But one thought I had in watching the video was, why do I need to be holding the little device in front of me, to get the benefit of its computational resources and display? I’ve seen the studies and predictions that “everything’s going mobile,” but I believe that’s taking too literally the device itself, the form-factor of a little handheld box of magic.