AI Podcast Interviews Articles and Reports

With a burning desire to combine his passions for digital fabrication, biology and computer science, Charles Fracchia came to MIT and Harvard eager to learn. Going to "bio to bits" (gleaning meaningful information from biological data) is something that Charles had never had an opportunity to do at such a high level, and he had high expectations. "I though: Oh, surely, I'm coming to these awesome labs here in Boston... I'm sure I'll come in and have an awesome dashboard to work with, like the movie Iron Man. I'll have my cell growth rate here, heart rate here... you know... something fantastic."

The Jetsons cartoon show of the 1960's portrayed a "futuristic" household that admittedly seems humorous to us today. An all-capable robotic maid, moving sidewalks and jet packs might have seemed realistic then, but didn't end up being the picture that seems to have taken shape.

Some entrepreneurs hop into the game without an academic pedigree, and some hit the books before they hit the street with a product or service. In fields like robotics, biotech, and artificial intelligence, the latter is usually the case, as the specialized knowledge required to form a company is pretty slim outside of an institution.

I can't write code to save my life, so taking apart an iPhone is out of the question. My academic experience consisted of "keyboarding" class in high school, and everything after that was scrambling to build businesses and websites from scratch.

I've been fortunate as of late to communicate with many young and budding emerging tech entrepreneurs in the past month (despite everything else going on here), and Sagie Davidovich is certainly counted among them. Still a young man, Sagie is founder and CTO of multiple companies (most recently in the domain of the "semantic web"), he's now founder and CEO of SparkBeyond, a company aiming to revolutionize software and it's adaptability.

Peter Voss was blessed with a ten-year sabbatical. Not from academia, but from business.

After listing his first commercial software company on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (he lived in South Africa at the time), Peter sold it, and the next ten years were dedicated to learning about... learning.

On the surface, it might be easy to make the argument that the farthest thing from business operations is science fiction. Star Trek and IPOs aren't known for having any kind of direct correlation, and unless you're making futuristic video games, there doesn't seem to be any explicit reason to study Ray Bradbury or Isaac Assimov.

In the 21st century, our privacy doesn't have much to do with our "paper trail," but instead involves our "digital trail." From cell phone GPS to email to Google Glass, secrets are harder to keep than ever - and private is beginning to lose it's "private-ness." Dr. Ashraf Aboshosha, Editor-in-Chief at of the International Congress for Global Science and Technology (ICGST), believes that this transition to transparency may be necessary in order for us to create a better world.