Tech

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

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O'Reilly Big Data Podcast

Simon St. Laurent, O’Reilly’s strategic content director for our web space and co-chair of our Fluent Conference, recently launched an investigation looking into the web’s potential to change not only computing, but the world in general. O'Reilly's Jenn Webb caught up with St. Laurent to talk about the timing, what he’s exploring, and why the web isn’t dead.

In the second segment, O’Reilly’s Nick Lombardi talks with Tom Greever, UX director at Bitovi, about the evolution of experience design and how today’s designers are not only solving design problems, but business problems as well.

The web is a critical part of the IoT story

We often talk about designing security into a product from the get go, but we don't often discuss what that means. In today's podcast John Kestner, a principle with Supermechanical, the company behind the Twine sensor and the Range thermometer, shares his thoughts on how he designed Twine and range to be more secure but also how we might design our devices to indicate that what was once a humble lock is now a connected computer with all the pros and cons that entails.

Before Kestner and I dig into security, Kevin Tofel and I talk about my experience playing with the Logitech Harmony Ultimate Remote and home hub and then we dig into CSRMesh and the Bluetooth SIG's creation of a working group to add mesh networking to the Bluetooth Smart standard. That could put Bluetooth in closer competition with thread, Zigbee and Z-wave. So kick back and listen up.

Hosts: Stacey Higginbotham and Kevin Tofel
Guests: John Kestner, principal with Supermechanical

Thoughts on the Logitech Harmony Hub and remote (it's pretty nifty, guys)
The Bluetooth SIG is forming a working group on mesh technologies. Why this is cool!
Should you rely on security by obscurity or hope your device doesn't do much that's scary as a way to be secure?
Thinking about how to convey connectedness in design

How to design security into your connected product

O'Reilly's Mary Treseler talks with Andy Goodman, designer and group director of Fjord’s US studios, about service design, embeddables, and predictive analytics.

Designing On A System Level

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica chats with David Blei, co-author of the seminal paper on topic models, and who remains one of the leading researchers in the field. They talk about the origins of topic models, their applications, improvements to the underlying algorithms, and his new role in training data scientists at Columbia University.

Topic models: Past, present, and future

The Internet of Things is challenging designers to rethink their craft. I recently sat down with Claire Rowland, independent designer and author of the forthcoming book Designing Connected Products to talk about the changing design landscape.

During our interview, Rowland brought up three points that resonated with me: interoperability and the Internet of Things, experience designers and networks, and the IoT’s latency problem.

For more on our interview and for related links, check out the related post on O’Reilly Radar: oreil.ly/1EoyfUV

The complexity of the IoT requires experience design solutions

O'Reilly's Ben Lorica talks with Angie Ma, co-founder and president of ASI, about the concept of the ASI, the structure of their training programs, and the data and startup scene in the UK.

Turning Ph.D.s Into Industrial Data Scientists and Data Engineers

Joe Biron, VP of IoT technology at ThingWorx, on how the IoT entails a flexible platform approach to accommodate new applications that haven’t been conceived yet.

Joe Biron on Whats New About the IoT

Katie Dill on designing for seven billion people, hiring good people, and the triforce.

Airbnb's Design Approach

Mike Kuniavsky, a principal scientist in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, on designing for the Internet of Things ecosystem and why the most interesting thing about the IoT isn’t the “things” but the sensors. He also talks about his deep-seated love for appliances and furniture, and how intelligence will affect those industries.

Mike Kuniavsky on the Tectonic Shift of the IoT

Our guest on this week’s episode of the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast is Robert Brunner. Brunner was director of industrial design at Apple from 1989 to 1996, overseeing the design of the PowerBook. He was the chief designer of Beats by Dr. Dre, the design-driven line of headphones that Apple acquired for $3 billion last year. And he’s the founder of Ammunition, which has worked with startups and large companies on a wide range of innovative consumer products.

Robert Brunner on Designing and Building Great Products

This episode of the Hardware Podcast features Jon Bruner's second discussion with Joe Biron, VP of IoT technology at ThingWorx, a PTC business that offers a platform for rapid deployment of Internet of Things applications.

Joe Biron on IoT Platforms

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

Jon Bruner and Mike Loukides talk about the classical music publishing industry and how it's being disrupted by projects like the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/) that make public-domain scores available online.

The future of classical music

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis. Leave questions and comments for us at http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/05/talking-about-in-memory.html

Talking about in-memory

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Software and the physical world

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Related blog post: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-anthropology-big-data-and-the-importance-of-context.html

Anthropology, big data, and the importance of context

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

For more on these topics, and links to the things we talked about, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-the-internet-of-things-prism-and-defense-technology-that-goes-civilian.html.

The Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

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.