O'Reilly Radar tracks the technologies and people that will shape our world in the years to come. Each episode of O'Reilly Radar features an interview with an industry thought leader, with topics touching on everything from programming to data to experience design. We also take a step back from the breathless pace of the latest tech news to examine why new developments are important and what they might mean down the road.

O'Reilly Radar Podcast

This week's episode features two conversations I've had recently centered around smart cities. First, I chat with Daniele Quercia, research team lead at Bell Labs. We talk about research he's working on now; the launch of goodcitylife.org (including smelly maps and happy maps); why our use of technology shouldn't just aim to make a city smart, but to improve the day-to-day quality of life of it's citizens; and about the emerging areas of urban informatics he's finding most compelling.

In our second segment, I chat with Frank Cuypers, associate professor at the University of Antwerp and strategist at Destination Think! We chat about the importance of urban DNA, his nonprofit project Why Your City, and why there's no such thing as a smart city.



Smart Cities Need to Inject a Dose of Humanity to be Truly Great Cities

This week, I chat with Othman Laraki, co-founder of Color Genomics. We chat about challenges and opportunities in genetic testing, the future of precision medicine, and the hurdles medicine and health care are currently facing (and how we can overcome them).

Othman Laraki on Achieving the Long-Tail Distribution of Genetic Insights

This week's episode features a special cross-over conversation from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud, or RSS. O'Reilly's Courtney Nash chats with Eleanor Saitta, a security architect at Etsy. They talk about the importance of thinking of security in a human context and the increasingly critical relationship between security and design.

Designing Better Security Outcomes for Human Beings

This week, I talk with Alyona Medelyan, co-founder and CEO at Thematic and founder and CEO at Entopix. We talk about natural language understanding, the challenges of analyzing unstructured text, and her open source indexing tool Maui that she's been working on for the past 10 years.

Alyona Medelyan on Applications of NLU

This week's Radar Podcast episode is a special cross-over edition from the O'Reilly Security Podcast, which you can find on iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, or SoundCloud. O'Reilly strategic content director Courtney Nash chats with Cory Doctorow, a journalist, activist and science fiction writer. They talk about nascent pro-security industries, the EFF's lawsuit against the U.S. government, and the new W3C DRM specification.

Cory Doctorow on Nascent Pro-Security Industries

This week on the Radar Podcast, we're featuring the first episode of the newly launched O'Reilly Bots Podcast, which you can find on Stitcher, iTunes, SoundCloud and RSS. O'Reilly's Jon Bruner is joined by Pete Skomoroch, the co-founder and CEO of Skipflag, to talk about bots—about what's driving the sudden interest, what we can expect from the technology, and some interesting emerging applications.

Pete Skomoroch on the Current State and Future Potential of Bots

In this Radar Podcast episode, I chat with Haakon Faste, a design educator and innovation consultant. We talk about his interesting career path, including his perceptual robotics work, his teaching approaches, and his mission with the Ralf A. Faste Foundation. We also talk about navigating our way to a "post-human" world and the importance of designing to make the world a more human-centered place.

Haakon Faste on Designing for a Post-Human World

In this episode of the Radar Podcast, I chat with John Bassett III, chairman of the board of the Vaughan-Bassett Furniture Company. We talk about globalization and the effect it's had on the furniture industry, the international trade battle he waged (which was written about by Beth Macy in her book Factory Man), Bassett's book Making it in America, and what entrepreneurs need to know to succeed in business today.

John Bassett III on the Global Economy, the Power of People, and How to Make It in America

On this week's episode, I chat with Sam Wang, professor of neuroscience and molecular biology at Princeton. Wang is also a co-founder of the Princeton Election Consortium, a site focused on analyzing and predicting U.S. national elections. We talk about the site's prediction algorithm and this crazy election cycle, and the role neuroscience may have played. We also talk about the current research Wang and his team are working on, the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, and the powerful role governments play in academic research.

Sam Wang on Predicting the Election, Finding Truth in Mass Media, and a New Role for the Cerebellum

In this week's episode, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum sits down with Richard Cook and David Woods. Cook is a physician, researcher, and educator, who is currently a research scientist in the Department of Integrated Systems Engineering at Ohio State University, and emeritus professor of health care systems safety at Sweden’s KTH. Woods also is a professor at Ohio State University and is leading the Initiative on Complexity in Natural, Social, and Engineered Systems, and he's the co-director of Ohio State University’s Cognitive Systems Engineering Laboratory. They chat about SNAFU Catchers; anomaly response; and the importance of not only understanding how things fail, but how things normally work.

Richard Cook and David Woods on Successful Anomaly Response

This week, I sit down with Hilary Mason, who is a data scientist in residence at Accel Partners and founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs. We chat about current research projects at Fast Forward Labs, adoption hurdles companies face with emerging technologies, and the AI technology ecosystem—what's most intriguing for the short term and what will have the biggest long-term impact.

Hilary Mason on the Wisdom Missing in the AI Conversation

This week, I sit down with Fang Yu, cofounder and CTO of DataVisor, where she focuses on big data for security. We talk about the current state of the fraud landscape, how fraudsters are evolving, and how data analytics and behavior analysis can help defend against—and prevent—attacks.

Fang Yu on Using Data Analytics to Catch Constantly Evolving Fraudsters

In this episode, I sit down with Brad Knox, founder and CEO of Emoters, a startup building a product called bots_alive—animal-like robots that have a strong illusion of life. We chat about the approach the company is taking, why robots or agents that pass themselves off as human without any transparency should be illegal, and some challenges and applications of reinforcement learning and interactive machine learning.

Brad Knox on Creating a Strong Illusion of Life

This week we're featuring a conversation from earlier this year—O'Reilly's Mary Treseler chats with Giles Colborne, managing director of cxpartners. They talk about the transformative effects of AI on design, designing for natural language interactions, and why designers need to nurture the ability to reinvent themselves.

Giles Colborne on AI's Move From Academic Curiosity to Mainstream Tech

On this week's episode of the Radar Podcast, O'Reilly's Mac Slocum chats with award-winning author Pagan Kennedy about the art and science of serendipity—how people find, invent, and see opportunities nobody else sees, and why serendipity is actually a skill rather than just dumb luck.

Pagan Kennedy on How People Find, Invent, and See Opportunities Nobody Else Sees

This week, I sit down with anthropologist, futurist, Intel Fellow, and director of interaction and experience research at Intel, Genevieve Bell. We talk about what she’s learning from current AI research, why the resurgence of AI is different this time, and five things that are missing from the AI conversation.

Genevieve Bell on Moving From Human-Computer Interactions to Human-Computer Relationships

This week, I sit down with Tom Davenport. Davenport is a professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, the co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a fellow at the MIT Center for Digital Business, and a senior advisor for Deloitte Analytics. He also pioneered the concept of “competing on analytics.” We talk about how his ideas have evolved since writing the seminal work on that topic, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning; his new book Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines, which looks at how AI is impacting businesses; and we talk more broadly about how AI is impacting society and what we need to do to keep ourselves on a utopian path.

Tom Davenport on Mitigating AI's Impact on Jobs and Business

In this week's Radar Podcast, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum chats with Sara Watson, a technology critic and writer in residence at Digital Asia Hub. Watson is also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and an affiliate with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. They talk about how to optimize personalized experience for consumers, the role of machine learning in this space, and what will drive the evolution of personalized experiences.

Sara Watson on Optimizing Personalized Experiences

This week, I sit down with David Beyer, an investor with Amplify Partners. We talk about machine learning and artificial intelligence, the challenges he’s seeing in AI adoption, and what he thinks is missing from the AI conversation.

AI Adoption at the Atomic Level of Jobs and Work

This week, I sit down with Aman Naimat, senior vice president of technology at Demandbase, and co-founder and CTO of Spiderbook. We talk about his project to build a knowledge graph of the entire business world using natural language processing and deep learning. We also talk about the role AI is playing in those companies today and what’s going to drive AI adoption in the future.

Aman Naimat on Building a Knowlege Graph of the Entire Business World

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.