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Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
Darryll DiPietro President and CEO at Coincierge Club join host Juliet Lemar on Future Tech Podcast. Coincierge offers three very unique products designed to interact with each other, yet provide value independently.
Club – service backed cryptocurrency built on the Waves blockchain
Wallet – mobile private key cryptocurrency wallet capable of holding
over 18,000 different cryptocurrencies
Pro – point of sale application built on Android designed to provide
secure, chargeback proof transactions for free to the vendor.
Mat Piaggi, community manager at Lisk (lisk.io), delivers a detailed overview of his company's open-source project work in the ever-expanding blockchain space. In Piaggi's work with Lisk, he seeks to build strong connections and bridges between brands, consumers, and communities. He has a broad range of experience with emerging startups in Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, and as community manager, he strives to bring parties together to form a global community-based movement built upon Lisk's methods and tech advances. Piaggi's interest in cryptocurrency in regard to market trading increased his desire to learn how blockchain could benefit many types of industries. Piaggi earned his bachelors degree in communications from the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.
The blockchain is a type of add-only transaction in regard to a collection of accounts. Specifically, this collection, or ledger, can only be written onto, or added onto, with new information, while previous information that is stored in blocks cannot be mutated, edited, or even adjusted. Blockchain utilizes cryptography to bring together contents of the new blocks with each currently existing block, such that a change to the contents of a block in the chain would nullify the data in all subsequent blocks.
Piaggi's company, Lisk, is comprised of 50 plus people who are technology experts from all over the globe. Lisk seeks to create scalable, customizable solutions for applications businesses and industry leaders can utilize. Piaggi discusses how his goal is to lower the barrier of entry for the technology, making it more accessible to everyone, and to facilitate the user experience, making it easier to use for anyone irrespective of how tech-savvy they may be. Piaggi discusses how their platform is easy to use for developers who already have a basic understanding of JavaScript, which is the widest used coding language in the world.
The blockchain expert provides an overview of Lisk's major technology products—Lisk Core, Lisk Elements, and Lisk Commander. As he explains, on the network side, List Core is essentially the "brain" of their products. Lisk Core is a tool for technical users who choose to access Lisk's primary network blockchain data, to secure network infrastructure or succeed in achieving delegate forging access. Lisk Elements is a collection of libraries that will allow developers to customize their own sidechain. And Lisk Commander allows developers to conduct their sidechain development and start up their projects.
Additionally, Piaggi details the user-interface side of Lisk's development products such as Lisk Hub, which functions as a wallet and allows users to interact with a wider ecosystem. Piaggi explains that as Lisk is an open source project, there is greater transparency and trust, better community engagement, and higher security due to extensive testing.
Piaggi discusses some of the future developments that will be on the horizon in the coming months and years, such as bringing Lisk Core over to the main net and lifting the entire sidechain development kit over the hump, adding features, as they move to and past their 1.0 iterations. And as the close of 2018 approaches, Lisk will be involved in many international conferences and community development meetings to expand their reach further.
Davis Sawyer, co-founder and chief product officer at Deeplite (deeplite.ai), delivers a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the many ways in which deep learning is enabling AI to bring faster, more efficient technology to our low-power devices.
Sawyer's company, Deeplite, seeks to implement their patented technology to allow industries to maximize the productivity of deep learning systems and to enable AI for new opportunities on low-power devices. Deeplite's AI-driven optimizer accelerates deep neural network processing and makes it more energy-efficient. Their faster, leaner neural networks enable AI to be more accessible, easier to scale, and more economical as well.
From translating speech to text automatically, to powerful photo classification and recognition, AI has enhanced our daily lives in an increasingly data-driven world. However, as Sawyer describes, there are still many fundamental challenges that must be addressed to fully integrate AI into our lives for maximum productivity. One challenge Sawyer discusses is how to put sophisticated computation on low-end devices such as smartphones, to bring the tech to the edge of computing.
Deeplite's mission is to fully integrate the AI technology so smartphone users can get the most powerful tech and computational processing for whatever their business or industry endeavors may be. Sawyer states that you can make a world fit for AI or you can make AI fit into the world. And at Deeplite, Sawyer's team takes the approach that it is best to look under the hood so to speak, to look at the fundamental calculations to see if there can be improvements in order to do a better job of delivering solid results.
Deeplite is working to optimize deep learning models to assist companies that are using these models in their business structure. Through reinforcement learning, Sawyer's product essentially provides a means to compress models automatically for a more cost-effective, faster path to usable AI solutions for business. Sawyer discusses the many areas in which Deeplite's technology can increase productivity and efficiency.
Sawyer discusses robustness, privacy, and latency concerns in regard to advancing AI in business and daily life, and he details how autonomous vehicles are one industry area in which Deeplite is lending a hand. Deeplite's engine can produce optimized models that cut down AI computational time, which increases the efficiency significantly. With sometimes as many as six hundred million parameters and huge data sets, the problems, as Sawyer details, are sometimes scalability, and the need to create algorithms where understanding is not sacrificed, but is in fact enhanced.
Sawyer discusses informational resiliency in deep neural networks. He explains the process of stressing a network, forcing it to meet constraints, etc., putting environmental pressure on intelligent systems, and seeing how they successfully adapt. It is this kind of discovery that pushes Sawyer and his team at Deeplite to dig deeper into the methods of utilization for deep learning systems, to enable them to continue developing better tech products to advance the many ways we use and benefit from technology.
Mahek A. Shah, MD, senior researcher and faculty member at Harvard Business School, discusses the shift in healthcare to a value-based system. Dr. Shah's background in investment banking, solving large-scale problems for clients, stimulated a passion to take a similar mindset and approach to healthcare improvements. Dr. Shah's mission is to bring more humanity to the healthcare system by creating higher value for patients, providers, payers, and people worldwide—bridging the business world with health care delivery.
As a senior project leader and senior researcher at Harvard Business School, Dr. Shah oversees Harvard's Value Measurement for Health Care projects, which critically analyze time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) globally in order to fully grasp the true, actual costs of healthcare delivery. Additionally, Dr. Shah advises executives who manage large health systems and companies, educating and arming them with tools to measure their outcomes and overall costs.
By working for improvements at the patient level, on the front lines of healthcare delivery, Dr. Shah hopes to make big strides in the advancement of healthcare systems. Shah's team works specifically with individual conditions, from chronic to acute, and by studying the way patients are managed they can offer advice and consultation for dramatic improvements. Their critical analysis of procedures and processes can provide key insight to healthcare managers, etc. helping them to understand how they can create value in their system. As Dr. Shah explains, true value exists at the patient level, and healthcare systems need to focus more intently on the needs of their customers—the patients. Dr. Shah details how the current model incentivizes based on 'fee for services' such that physicians are rewarded for selling services, but this model does not ensure that the patient's needs are truly serviced. The key is to get systems to move forward to a value-based healthcare platform, much like other industries have implemented with great success.
While Dr. Shah believes that most people in healthcare have chosen that path in order to provide what is best for patients, the system of providing that care can be complex. Dr. Shah underscores that it's a very important time in healthcare as there are so many moving parts. As he explains, if value is defined as the outcome that matters to patients over the cost of delivering that outcome then an analysis of this will make it is possible to find ways to increase the value equation from a directional standpoint.
Success, as Shah states, is measured by functional outcomes, and systems should be looking at what the true cost is to deliver those outcomes, at the patient level. He discusses the importance of regular follow-ups after procedures and during recovery, and how costs can increase when follow up is not part of the system's plan. Dr. Shah details three criteria he looks for in healthcare-based projects, to ensure that they are meaningful, actionable, and hopefully replicable to other areas of a system's organization. As healthcare systems improve it will be the analytics that can deliver valuable insights into their operations, and most importantly, at the point of care for the patient.
K.D. Edwards has had a passion for writing for as long as he can remember, and has earned a reputation as a master at worldbuilding by authoring The Last Sun, the first of what will eventually be a nine-book series called The Tarot Sequence. Right around the corner is the release of the second book in the series, The Hanged Man, and fans can't seem to wait. Edwards joins the podcast to discuss what drew him to the modern sci-fi genre, his writing style, and process, authors who've influenced and encouraged him in his work, and fan feedback--a lot of which is in the form of artwork inspired by his stories.
Tune in for the full discussion, and reach out to K.D. Edwards through Twitter @KDEdwards_NC.
Despite huge successes in issuing over 110 patents and having 250 pending licenses, Leigh Rothschild says his latest venture is the most exciting one yet: Qmage, a free app that will revolutionize the way we interact with digital images. By incorporating audio, video, text files, URL links, and e-commerce links into tens of thousands of digital images, Qmage is allowing anyone with an iOS device or QR code scanner to access it all at with a single click.
With applications in the photo, greeting card, automobile, real estate, and retail industries, this technology has the potential to find its way into almost every aspect of our lives. Imagine being able to scan a greeting card and immediately hear audio or watch a video created and uploaded by your loved one, or scanning an image of a house for sale and immediately experiencing a virtual tour or communicating with the realtor. Rothschild also discusses plans to incorporate an augmented reality feature, which would allow users to scan an item of clothing and not only receive all of the associated information, but actually see what it would look like on them, and get suggestions for accessories that might go well with it.
The Qmage app is currently in the beta form of development and is expected to be released soon. Learn more at www.qmage.com and reach out to Rothschild at leigh@qmage.com.
Jim Segermark is the CEO of InSitu Biologics, a biotech company using hydrogel technology to offer post-operative patients with the option of a non-opioid regional painkiller. Composed of three compounds found naturally in the body, the gel is injected with bupivacaine, which is then pushed out by water over time and released into the body, providing for three to five days of a complete analgesic effect on the area of pain. Once the bupivacaine has been released entirely, the body easily metabolizes the gel within about two weeks.
Though it has not yet been tested in human clinical trials, this biohydrogel has shown to be effective in the laboratory and holds promise for post-op patients who want fast, effective, long-lasting, and opioid-free pain relief.
Segermark discusses the potential applications of this new product, which include using the gel as a vehicle for birth control and erectile dysfunction medication rather than bupivacaine, and custom-tailoring the gel to release multiple medications at certain times and for specific durations, thereby meeting the needs of patients on an individual basis.
Tune in for the full conversation, and visit www.insitubiologics.com to learn more.
For almost 10 years now, Jagannath Padmanabhan has been conducting interdisciplinary biomedical research focused on how our bodies react to biomedical devices, why these devices are almost always ultimately rejected, and the role of mechanical forces in the rejection process.
More recently, Padmanabhan has been working as a post-doctoral research fellow in the surgery department at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he collaborates with surgeons to collect a variety of biomedical implant devices that have been rejected by and removed from the human body. By studying the cells on these devices, the team at Stanford is gaining insight into the types of cells that are involved in the rejection process and how to go about increasing the amount of time before the rejection process sets in.
Among other topics, Padmanabhan discusses the link between wound healing, scar formation, and implant rejection, how the manipulation of implant device surfaces could increase their lifespan in the human body, and the role of mechanical stimulation in accelerating the rejection process. Tune in to learn more about his current research and its potential applications in clinical medicine, and reach out to him by email at himjaganpa@standford.edu.
Steven Morris, CEO, president, board member, and founding partner of BIOLIFE4D, provides a thorough overview of the biological and technological advances that are revolutionizing modern healthcare. Morris's company, BIOLIFE4D, is a trailblazing biotech company with a mission to utilize advanced life sciences and tissue engineering to 3D bioprint viable human hearts, using a patient's own cells, that are suitable for transplant.
Morris has over 20 years of experience in precision machining and manufacturing, which includes 15 years as president of Inland Midwest Corporation (IMC) that specifically caters to the medical technologies industry. IMC completed a merger with MedTorque Inc. in 2015. In addition to his successes at IMC, Morris launched Creative Manufacturing Consulting Solutions (CMCS), a company focused in the areas of operational optimization, industry and regulatory compliance, as well as quality system optimization and development.
While at CMCS, Morris led over two years of in-depth research into the technology of 3D bioprinting and regenerative medicine. Combining his medical manufacturing experience with intensive research, and partnering with experts in the field, he created BIOLIFE4D with the goal of bioprinting usable human organs for human transplantation. As heart disease is the leading cause of death in the USA and nearly all developed countries, the life-saving technology of BIOLIFE4D is clearly in great demand. Morris discusses the alarming statistical numbers that give credence to the serious state of heart disease globally, and as he explains there are several key issues his team at BIOLIFE4D seeks to tackle, such as increasing the supply because many people die annually simply from their inability to be granted a transplant. Additionally, Morris discusses the high rejection rate for human heart transplants and the many dangers patients face. For as patients up their intake of immunosuppressants in hopes their bodies will accept the new organs, they also increase their risks for developing a disease, etc.
The regenerative medicine expert delivers a detailed overview of the bioprinting process BIOLIFE4D uses. He explains the means in which they build their bioprinted organs layer by layer with essential cells. As the cell layers fuse the DNA informs the cells that they should function as heart cells and so the process begins toward the formation of a solid organ. He discusses the importance of vascularization to provide blood and nutrients to the organs, and how his company is leading the way to major releases coming soon, with a fully functional miniature heart for human drug trials possibly emerging as early as next year. Morris explains the compassionate exemption, which is a regulation that allows for those who are in immediate need for an organ, facing death without a transplant, to go forward with alternative options such as bioprinted organs.
Morris outlines the inherent problem of scarcity that exists in the organ donor world. For as the list of patients in need, waiting for an available organ, is long, the amount of available organs is scarce. He explains that many people who hope to get on lists to wait for an organ may be excluded due to other medical conditions or age, as the medical community makes assessments to give the available organs to the candidates with the highest chance for organ acceptance and recovery. Due to these stringent requirements, potentially millions are left with no options, but Morris is committed to change this disturbing reality and is pushing his company to bring a bioprinted human heart option to everyone in need. Morris hopes to deliver a fully functional human heart for transplant within the coming years, and hopefully within three to five years.
Noted science fiction writer, Yoon Ha Lee, author of Revenant Gun and other works, delivers an interesting analysis of the science fiction world in which he thrives. Yoon Ha received a B.A. in mathematics from Cornell University as well as an M.A. in math education from Stanford University. His work in fiction has appeared in publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction; the popular online sci-fi magazine, Tor.com; and Clarkesworld Magazine, as well as many anthologies.
Yoon Ha was inspired to become a writer by his very passionate 3rd grade teacher who challenged students to be creative. Learning about the craft of writing at such an early age pushed Yoon Ha to try his hand at it, and by the end of middle school he had completed his first novel. And while Yoon Ha recounts that this first effort was not very good, he continued to work at his craft and wrote several more through his high school years. Yoon Ha discusses his work and the technical merits of writing that he sought to improve as he was cutting his teeth in those early years as a burgeoning young writer. From improving his prose to world building, Yoon Ha sought to enhance his work in every way possible. He details how characterization is an important aspect of novel writing, as readers like to relate to the characters personally, through the characters' eyes. And he explains that while world building is important, perhaps the building of characters is the most important task of writing novels.
Yoon Ha discusses his first successful novel, Ninefox Gambit, and the reasons he feels the novel worked, and why it was commercially successful. Yoon Ha describes the unusual world that he built in that novel and the physics elements, as well as the cat and mouse dynamic, all of which he felt contributed to the popular interest in the book. The sci-fi author outlines his road to commercial success in the publishing world and he acknowledges that the many years he spent improving his craft helped get him there. As he built a significant following for his creative short stories through the years, his publisher sought to take his work to the obvious next level—marketable books. Yoon Ha speaks about his own personal reading lists and how the reading and study of a broad range of disparate topics helps to expand his own mind and ultimately expand his creativity. From military to math, Yoon Ha found that literally any subject matter could help to broaden his mind as a reader, which of course helped to improve his craft. He talks about some notable authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, David Eddings and others, and recounts how their work impacted him as a young reader, and how his experience growing up as a Korean-American affected his perception and connection to some works. And as the work he was devouring as a young reader was largely from a western perspective, Yoon Ha thought to bring an East Asian influence to the sci-fi genre.
As the publishing field expands, Yoon Ha states that diversity is increasing, which allows more types of stories to be told, which in turn allows a larger audience to see themselves represented. The popular author describes some of the relative differences he sees between Korean culture and classically typical American culture, and the symbolic elements of both. Wrapping up, Yoon Ha provides an overview of the elements of his latest work, the novel, Revenant Gun. And he talks about his website (yoonhalee.com) and the many samples that interested readers can browse there for free.
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