etc., recall the word
resoldered here
in a pane of sand.
— R. Kenney

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May 16, 2011

The kind of innovation Chicago is

The economist Edward Glaeser has called Chicago "a city built upon corn in porcine form". He's referring to the city's remarkable 19th century transmutation of the natural bounty of prairie agriculture into a higher value form of commerce, pigs. The innovation necessary for the cold storage and transportation of which would help Chicago become the central node in a nation-spanning rail network. It was the beginning of greatness.

We can effect this transformation again. Our natural bounty today is data, knowledge, and ideas -- their "form" the establishment of new businesses and a more livable Chicago.

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Standard for height measurement in Chicago, NW corner of LaSalle and Monroe.

Today Chicago gets a new mayor and a new administration. I'm proud to be its Chief Technology Officer, a role I took for a single, simple reason. For the last three years I have traveled the world consulting with cities on strategies for making them smarter, more efficient, and more responsive to citizens. Many of these talks and projects were fruitful, but none of them mattered to me personally. None of them, in short, mattered to the city I love most.

The coming of the web, you may recall, was cause for all kinds of pronouncements that we'd move away from each other, tied only by network communications, happily introverted in electronic cocoons. This has not happened (indeed the reverse is happening). If anything the ubiquity of network technologies has proven that place matters. Mobile computing and "checking-in"-style apps are ascendant because we are creatures of place. And my place, the place of four generations of my family, is Chicago. It's time to focus my effort here.

The transition report published last week is a roadmap for the change the Emanuel administration will undertake. All of the initiatives are exciting and important, but one speaks directly to remaking Chicago as a hub of information that leads to insight and growth.

Set high standards for open, participatory government to involve all Chicagoans
Why do this?
Without access to information, Chicagoans cannot effectively find services, build businesses, or understand how well City government is performing and hold it accountable for results.
How will we do this?
The City will post on-line and in easy-to-use formats the information that Chicagoans need most. For example, complete budget documents - currently only retrievable as massive PDF documents - will be available in straightforward and searchable formats. The City's web site will allow anyone to track and find information on lobbyists and what they are lobbying for as well as which government officials they have lobbied. The City will out-perform the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act and publicly report delays and denials in providing access to public records.
The City will also place on-line information about permitting, zoning, and business licenses, including status of applications and requests. And Chicagoans will be asked to participate in Open311, an easy and transparent means for all residents to submit and monitor service requests, such as potholes and broken street lights. Chicagoans will be invited to develop their own "apps" to interpret and use City data in ways that most help the public.

Participatory government isn't the only use of the wealth of information the city can publish. We intend data-driven decision-making, powered by deep analytics of our services and city vital signs, to be central to the day-to-day business of running Chicago.

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0,0 on the X-Y axis that is the Chicago street grid. Madison and State.

A data-centric philosophy is more than transparency and efficiency, too. It is about fostering innovation. Business is built on local resources. Where once we transformed grain into pigs into commodities, we can now provide data that serves as a kind of raw material for new business and new markets.

(One example of this -- and proof that the talent to do great things is right here, right now -- is the design of a "smart intersection" by the students from George Aye's Living In A Smart City class at the School of the Art Institute this semester.)

There's plenty more in store for technology to assist in Chicago's growth and livability. It's suffused throughout the transition report: promoting entrepreneurship, increasing access to broadband, treating the street as a platform for interaction itself (more of which on all these in future posts). But the foundation is data. Access is an important first step, followed quickly by the tools and policies for taking action on it.

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A network of moving things prompts the establishment of a national standard time.

Chicago knows how to do all this. We've been doing it for over a century. We have the talent in the private sector, in academia, and in our non-profits to capitalize on any impetus city government can give. Let's get going.

Posted at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Chicago

May 12, 2011

On leaving IBM

Today, May 12, is my last working day with IBM, my employer for the last 13 years. It's tough to adequately express how many opportunities IBM has afforded me and how difficult it was to make the decision to depart.

What follows is my shot at the first. I'll let you guess at the second. (Hint: If you're looking for a juicy exposé or vindictive exit letter, this ain't it.)

1998, Georgia Tech: I was finishing up a masters degree that didn't exist three years prior. The tech bubble had not burst and everyone in the circles I moved in was decamping for the world of stock options, foosball tables, and the promise of becoming the next Netscape.

I had two offers on the table, one from a classic dotcom agency, and one from IBM, a classic old person company. I struggled mightily with the decision and frankly I still don't know exactly why I chose IBM. Might have been the I in the acronym -- the suggestion of a career spent globetrotting and doing business in different cultures. But I do know that the other company ceased to exist only a few years later.

IBM then was a resurgent corporation back from the brink of death. Atlanta was the home to its Interactive Media organization, a kind of skunkworks dotcom agency -- which I joined as a producer. (We had so few models internally for the web work we were doing that we borrowed titles from flim: producer, executive producer, even continuity director.) It was frenetic, design-oriented, and full of lots of people who very definitely were not old. (And neither was I. Dig the hair!)

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Inside IBM: Internet Business Machines
Businessweek cover story, Dec. 13, 1999

I lucked into the part of Interactive Media that was building systems for live event coverage of the sports properties that IBM sponsored, primarily pro tennis, golf, and the Olympics. This was the world before cacheing and the cloud and so a certain amount of terror accompanied the task of running websites that could handle the load of sports fans worldwide checking scores covertly from work.

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We were "webcasting," crammed into windowless rooms or awful rented trailers, but let's face it, I was onsite at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Ryder Cup. And loving it. The stories and friendships from those days are some of the most cherished of my career. (Someday ask me about a sopping-wet Brooke Shields hiding out in our nerd bunker during a rain delay at Flushing Meadows.)

The moment that established the trajectory that would basically define my career at IBM -- diving way deep, obsessively even, into the subject matter surrounding my projects -- arrived with the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. I had been tagged by colleagues as "the guy who likes books" given my undergraduate pursuits, so I suppose it is not surprising that I would be given the lead on a cultural project. It was a massive undertaking, digitizing thousands of works of art, presenting it on a still-nascent web, and working across cultural and linguistic differences. It was, in short, a template for much of the work to follow.

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With one interlude. In 2000 I somehow finagled my way onto the cruise ship IBM had rented as living quarters for its guests to the Sydney Olympics. A pal and I provided tech support in the computer lab for IBM customers to check e-mail and download digital photos. (It was the era before ubiquitous laptops and connectivity, you see.) It was also, perhaps, the greatest gig of all time.

Over the course of the next many years I had the privilege of leading a number of increasingly complex projects in cultural heritage. Eternal Egypt applied the concept of an online museum to an entire country, across multiple institutions, and nearly all historical eras. Add in mobile phone and PDA access (hey, it was 2003!) and a History Channel documentary and you had the making of something great.

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Moving away from material culture and into the realm of society and history, I was honored to lead the team that built the website for the newest Smithsonian museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, something not set to open on the mall for several years. The NMAAHC Memory Book was one of the first citizen-curated content projects for the Smithsonian and is a great foundation for the museum's bottom-up presentation of the African-American experience.

More directly in the lineage of the Hermitage and Eternal Egypt, The Forbidden City: Beyond Space and Time took IBM's cultural heritage work away from the web and into multi-user 3D space. Modeling the square kilometer of the Ming-Qing era complex was my first taste of city design and crafting spatial interactions, a foreshadowing of relatively great import.

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Interspersed among the cultural work were a few important projects that were both responses to world events. The Katrina disaster mobilized a crack team in IBM to develop Jobs4Recovery, a site that aggregated and geo-located employment opportunity in the states hit by the hurricane. This was particularly meaningful to me as my wife's family was directly, sadly affected by the disaster and its aftermath.

Working in Egypt before and after the 9/11 attacks gave me a perspective (and friendships) for which I am eternally grateful. So it was a real pleasure to work on Meedan, a news aggregrator/social network for current events in the Middle East and North Africa. Working with the non-profit of the same name, Meedan was built to use IBM machine translation and human volunteer editors and curators to provide English and Arabic translations of news stories and comments. I had worked much of my career presenting the treasures of the world's material culture to broader audiences; Meedan was my opportunity to widen the definition of culture that we were hoping to bridge to others.

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Perhaps the most transformative moment of my career came upon being accepted to the fledgling Corporate Service Corps, IBM's internal "peace corps", a hybrid leadership development and philanthropic program that sent small teams of IBM'ers to areas of the world that IBM does not currently do business. I joined the first team to West Africa and was thrilled to head to Kumasi, Ghana with nine other IBM'ers from around the world. We worked with small businesses to help them on all manner of problems. Being jolted out of a comfortable office setting to find common ground with colleagues from different lines of business and other countries was amazing enough, but I had the great fortune of our former nanny in Chicago, a native of Kumasi, returning to her family there and ensuring that I not only worked in Ghana but felt a part of the community there. It changed my life.

I got my first dose of what would become a full-on obsession in modeling complex systems for better decision-making when I inherited Rivers for Tomorrow from a retiring colleague. Rivers, a partnership with The Nature Conservancy, permits users to simulate different land use scenarios in river watersheds to see what the effects are downstream, so to speak, on water quality. It was a fun set of systems to model, but much hairier problems came shortly.

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The project that I end on, whose roots I trace to the Forbidden City project, is City Forward. I consider it a kind of simulator of cities using data in the same way that the Virtual Forbidden City was one in 3D graphics. You can read all about the project -- heaven knows I have talked about it enough here and elsewhere, but the key thing is the world of urbanism that it opened to me. City Forward set me on a path to relationships with people making real change in cities around the world and showed me the promise of technology embedded in the everyday lives of city-dwellers. It is, in a word, the springboard that has launched me into my new role.

I realize that's a pretty me-focused list of experiences and I will admit that this blog post is as much a personal retrospective as anything else. But I think it does a good job of making it clear how important IBM has been to my professional development, personal growth, and intellectual satisfaction. I could not have asked for a more fulfilling past 13 years and I leave with nothing but respect and thanks for what the company has done for my family and me.

And yet the list above glaringly lacks the most important thing that I am leaving. My colleagues in IBM have, to the person, been the most meaningful aspect of my career. To list everyone who made me a smarter person, a better colleague, a more understanding manager, a more collaborative partner, or better world citizen would take several blog posts, but suffice to say that I met some of my very best friends, a few mentors, and even a few professional idols in my time with IBM. My gratitude for my colleagues at IBM exceeds my capacity to express. Thank you.

So what now? I am off to the role of Chief Technology Officer for the City of Chicago under our new mayor, Rahm Emanuel. That's a post for another time, but it's fair to say now that it was an offer I could not pass up. I have been preaching smarter cities for a very long time; to let an opportunity go by to take real action in the city I love most would have filled me with regret. It is time to put my money where my mouth is.

IBM turns 100 years old this summer -- a fairly amazing accomplishment for any company, let alone an IT company. I'm proud of what IBM has achieved, but even more proud of the people who have done the work. I'll leave you with this extraordinary video, the best portrait of the people of IBM that I know. And the very essence of what I will miss most.

Posted at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Work

February 28, 2011

Upcomings

Spring's nowhere near Chicago right now, but the seasonal onslaught of conferences seems not to heed nature's cycles. I'm going to be in a bunch of places coming up. Would love to meet up if you will be near.

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Photo by billypalooza on Flickr

Transportation Camp East
New York, NY
March 5-6

South by Southwest Interactive (+ new day after Technology Summit)
"Smarter Cities: Driving Sustainable Growth"
Austin, TX
March 12 - 16

APA National Planning Conference
"Technology Infrastructure and Planning"
Boston, MA
April 11-12

RPA Regional Assembly
"Smart Cities, Smart Citizens"
New York, NY
April 15

National Mayor's Summit on City Design
"Design and 21st Century Challenges"
Chicago, IL
April 27-29

Urban Systems Symposium
"Defining Urban Systems"
New York, NY
May 11-12

Full travel schedule here, for those interested. (There's a good chance I will be in DC a bunch too.)

Posted at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Travel

What it's like to match wits with a supercomputer

I spent most of the May 1997 rematch between chess world champion Garry Kasparov and IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer sitting in a grad school classroom. I think it was Intro to Human-Computer Interaction, ironically enough. The professor projected a clunky Java-powered chess board "webcast" (the term was new, as was the web) so we could follow the match. The pace of chess being deliberative and glacial, it really wasn't a distraction. Not to mention that, at the time, I didn't know how to play chess. But I do remember people caring deeply about the outcome. I went to work for IBM the following year.

Deep Blue's descendant, if not in code or microchips then in the style of its coming-out party, is Watson, a massively parallel assemblage of Power 7 processors and natural language-parsing algorithms. Watson, if you're not a geek or a game show enthusiast, was the computer that played Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy Feb. 14-16 of this year. Watson won.

Wednesday of last week I got a chance to play Watson on the Jeopardy set built at our research facility for the show. I did not win.

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But I did hold the lead for a time and, in fact, I beat Watson during an unrecorded practice round. Honest!

Jeffrey Plaut of Global Strategy and I were the two human competitors selected to go up against Watson in a demonstration match. We did so at the culmination of a few hours of discussion with leaders from the humanitarian sector on how to expand Watson's repertoire to put it to work in areas that matter. (More on that in a bit.)

IBM built a complete Jeopardy set for the actual televised match. Sony has lots of experience with this, as Jeopardy often goes on the road. But it's clearly a hack: TV made the set look a lot bigger that it really is and the show's producers had to jump through hoops to provide dressing room space and keep the contestants segregated from interacting with IBM'ers (to avoid claims of collusion, I suppose). Ken Jennings has some typically humorous insight on this.

Trebek was long gone, so we had the project manager for Watson host the session I competed in. He's actually very good, as Watson went through a year of training with past winners and stand-in hosts. I was to play one round of Jeopardy. The rules were the same as the real game and Watson was at full computing capacity, with two exceptions. We were told that we could ring in and then appeal to the audience for help and, most importantly, Watson's ring-in time was slowed down by a quarter second. The first I took as an insult -- if I was going to compete against a computer I was going to do it myself -- the second was a blessing.

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Standing at the podium is certainly nerve-wracking. There's a small screen and light pen for scrawling your name and then the buzzer. I stood in Jennings' spot and it was striking to see how worn the paint was on the buzzer. From sweat? Who knows, but that thing looked like it had been squeezed to death. Contestants can see the clue board and the host, of course, but there's also a blue bar of light underneath the clues which is triggered manually by a producer once the host finishes reading the last syllable of the clue. This is the most important moment, as ringing in before the blue bar appears locks you out temporarily. Watson had to wait a quarter second at this point and I am convinced it is the only reason we humans were able to get an answer in edgewise.

In a way, this moment is as much human-versus-human as anything. You're trying to predict exactly when the producer will trigger the go light. Factor in some electrical delay for the plunger and it can be a real crapshoot. This is why past champions perfect their buzzer technique and ring in no matter what. They just assume they will know the answer and be able to retrieve it in the three seconds they are given.

I got a bit of a roll in the category called "Saints Be Praised". My Catholic upbringing, study in Rome, and fascination with weird forms of martyrhood finally paid dividends. (I also learned after the match that my human competitor was Jewish and largely clueless about the category.) The video above shows me answering a question correctly -- something that seems to have shocked my colleagues and the audience. (And I would have disgraced every facet of personal heritage had I messed up a question about an Italian Catholic from Chicago.)

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This clue was more interesting as Watson and I both got it wrong. The category was "What are you ... chicken?" about chicken-based foods. Maybe my brain was still in Italian mode as I incorrectly responded "Marsala", but Watson's answer -- "What is sauce?" -- was way wrong, categorically so. This is insightful. For one, the answer, "What is Chicken A La King," if Watson had come across it at all, was likely confusing since "king" can have so many other contexts in natural language. But Watson was confident enough to ring in anyway and its answer was basically a description of what makes Chicken A La King different from regular chicken. Note that the word "sauce" does not exist in the clue. Watson was finishing the sentence.

What's most important and too-infrequently mentioned is that Watson is not connected to the Internet. And even if it were, because of the puns, word play, and often contorted syntax of Jeopardy clues, Google wouldn't be very useful anyway. Try searching on the clue above and you'll get one hit -- and that only because we were apparently playing a category that had already been played and logged online by Jeopardy fans. The actual match questions during the Jennings-Rutter match were brand new. The Internet is no lifeline for questions posed in natural language.

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At one point I had less than zero (I blew a Daily Double) while Jeff got on a roll asking the audience for help. And the audience was nearly always right. Call it human parallel processing. But if I was going to go down in flames to a computer I was damn sure not going to lose to another bag of carbon and water. I did squeak out a victory with a small "v" -- and Watson was even gracious about it.

Thinking back it is interesting to note that nearly all my correct answers were from things I had learned through experience, not book-ingested facts. I would not have known the components of Chicken Tetrazini did I not love to eat it. I would probably not know Mother Cabrini if I didn't take the L past the Cabrini-Green housing project every day on the way to work. This is the biggest difference between human intelligence and Watson, it seems to me. Watson does learn and make connections between concepts -- and this is clearly what makes it so unique -- but it does not learn in an embodied way. That is, it does not experience anything. It has no capacity for a fact to be strongly imprinted on it because of physical sensation, or habit, or happenstance -- all major factors in human act of learning.

In Watson's most-discussed screw-up on the actual show, where it answered "Toronto" when given two clues about Chicago's airports, there's IBM's very valid explanation (weak category indicator, cities in the US called Toronto, difficult phrasing), but it was also noted that Watson has never been stuck at O'Hare, as virtually every air traveler has. (The UK-born author of this piece has actually be stranded for so long that he wandered around the airport and learned that it was named for the WWII aviator Butch O'Hare.) Which isn't to say that a computer could never achieve embodied knowledge, but that's not where we are now.

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But all of it was just icing on the cake. The audience was not there to see me make a fool of myself (though perhaps a few co-workers were). We were there to discuss the practical, socially-relevant applications of Watson's natural-language processing in fields directly benefiting humanity.

Healthcare is a primary focus. It isn't a huge leap to see a patient's own description of what ails him or her as the (vague, weakly-indicating) clue in Jeopardy. Run the matching algorithm against the huge corpus of medical literature and you have a diagnostic aid. This is especially useful in that Watson could provide the physician its confidence level and the logical chain of "evidence" that it used to arrive at the possible diagnoses. Work to create a "Doctor" Watson is well underway.

As interesting to my colleagues and I are applications of Watson to social services, education, and city management. Imagine setting Watson to work on the huge database of past 311 service call requests. We could potentially move beyond interesting visualizations and correlations to more efficient ways to deploy resources. This isn't about replacing call centers but about enabling them to view 311 requests -- a kind of massive, hyperlocal index of what a city cares about -- as an interconnected system of causes and effects. And that's merely the application most interesting to me. There are dozens of areas to apply Watson, immediately.

The cover story of The Atlantic this month, Mind vs. Machine, is all about humanity's half-century attempt to create a computer that would pass the Turing Test -- which would, in other words, be able to pass itself off as a human, convincingly. (We're not there yet, though we've come tantalizingly close.) Watson does not pass the Turing test, for all sorts of reasons, but the truth is that what we've learned from it -- what I learned personally in a single round of Jeopardy -- is that the closer we get to creating human-like intelligence in a machine, the more finely-nuanced our understanding of our own cognitive faculties becomes. The last mile to true AI will be the most difficult, primarily because we're simultaneously trying to crack a technical problem and figure out what, in the end, makes human intelligence human.

Posted at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Topic: Science/Tech

February 21, 2011

All good things.

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It's been two months now since we wrapped it all up. Could be that my lateness in writing about it was just to make sure that we really did mean that it was over. Or maybe I didn't want to think about it being over. Most likely, it was sheer exhaustion and a house that needed putting back together.

In any event, certain parts of our final holiday party do need to be told. Sweet damnation, it was an amazing way to go out.

I've detailed the evolution of this particular fête previously, so I'll just lay out the specifics. On December 11 my wife and I hosted the last event, completing an unintended triad of "world"-based themes that began two years ago with Around the World, continued last year with Out of This World, and culminated in this event, decisively, as The End of the World.

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Newsflash: apocalypse isn't the classiest theme for what is essentially a Christmas party. New Years Eve sorta has that tipsy tinge of impending end, but it's never really the end, just a marker. (Except when the millennium flips, of course, and full-on pandemonium is acceptable.) We toyed with "at world's end" as a physical location, ala Shel Silverstein's sidewalk or cartographical terra incognita. But neither of these worked as well as the pure mayhem of doomsday.

Eschatology, it turns out, is a wonderfully flexible concept, so we went with it. Mad Max meets the Four Horsemen by way of Al Gore. With lasers and martinis.

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The favor was a special challenge. The party takeaway has traditionally been some form of music-delivery medium and, though I have long since stopped considering compact discs adequate to this task, the truth is that they did lend themselves astonishingly well to what we came up with. See, it's a clock. Tick tock, tick tock, time's up. Get it?

We figured most people wouldn't make the connection to the doomsday clock, though there is something wonderfully creepy about a bunch of clocks ticking out of time with one another (cf., Orbital's "The Box" remix, part of the audio excerpt below).

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The clock face was composed of two CD's -- Doomsday and Rebirth -- which were smooshed together and bolted onto the clock axle, as below. To listen to the discs you had to dismantle the clock, which consisted of unscrewing a single nut.

The clock sat in small frame which itself rested on a small "time capsule" that contained a scroll with holiday wishes and a reminder not to come back next year.

The last piece, really the only thing having to do with rebirth, was a small (live) spruce sapling hooked to the back of the clock rig. It all looked rather nice, festive even, though it was awfully time-consuming to assemble and frightfully delicate. I'd love to know how many clocks made it in working shape back to partygoers' homes at the end of the night.

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At the end of the world we will eat pork, a sign declared. We're still not sure what that means, but the porktacular was a hit. With a nod to our stockyards, I'll note that we used everything but the oink. Faves included the Bacon Waffles with Spicy Chicken and Maple Cream and the Red Velvet Cake Ball Meteoroids. (Here's the full spread.)

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Fingers the One-Handed Bartender returned this year and was responsible for much mirth, day-after illness, and possibly one pregnancy. We had intended to enlarge his veal pen of a bar area but never got around to it. We did however rig a display above his head that gave details on the custom drink menu. And the DJ booth had a special trigger for thirst, below.

Possibly my favorite new addition to the party was the DJ outfits. Last year we donned jackets festooned with electroluminescent wire, a tough thing to upstage -- but in the intervening year the iPad had been released. And of course it wasn't difficult to find shirts custom-reinforced to accommodate an iPad slid right into it. It was great fun. We had disaster video, spectrum analyzers, music-appropriate imagery, and all manner of screensavery stuff.

But the most fun was a LED ticker-tape app that allowed tweeting directly to it so that the crowd could scroll their own messages right across our chests. (Pretty sure that snippet below is "And the DJ is doing a great job" a brief interlude between what-a-bunch-of-nerds themed tweets.) The account's still live, by the way. Maybe you'll catch me wearing the iPad at work?

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Other new additions this year included a drink shelf below the perishable electronics in the DJ booth. Call it a lesson learned from last year. The mirrored tree cones, staple of most past parties, also got custom spinners to throw disco ball shards of light around the room to remind everyone that they were, in fact, in a post-apocalyptic hell. And the popular photo booth had all manner of goodbye-cruel-world props.

Custom posters inspired by Britain's wonderful WWII anti-panic propaganda decorated the house. (If you have not tried the Keep Calm and Carry On Calm-O-Matic, you really should.)

Lastly in the new things category, we went low-tech with a "memory board" for people to scrawl their thoughts about the last decade of bashes. It remained remarkably free of crude comments for much (but not all) of the night.

And yet it is the music and dancing that defines and prolongs this party. We didn't have much luck recording the full set of Jesse Kriss, Michael Tolva and I this year, but this self-contained set does exist.

End of the World - Test Mix (Holiday Party 2010) by

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