thejigsawpuzzles puzzle day classic living room jigsaw puzzle

- welcome. glad you're all continuing to hang out and listen to the panel here. this is a panel wherewe're gonna be talking about how academia and industry are going to deal with innovation, and particularly, whatacademia can do to provide for the changing needs thatare associated with innovation which is happening veryrapidly in our society.

we as faculty are concernedwith making sure that the people coming outof our programs are able to cope with the worldas it changes rapidly. so we have three distinguished panelists who are gonna do most of the talking. and for my students in theroom, this will shock you, but i'm not actually goingto do most of the talking. the first panelist i'd like to introduce is dr. nicholas cain.

nick is a cofounder and deputydirector of atma connect. it's an award-winning socialimpact technology startup. at atma, nicholas isleading the development of community-based early warning system that uses local reports to generate disaster alerts and hazard maps. dr. cain is also an advisor to ... do you pronounce it g-i stat? gistrat, a think tankbased in washington, dc

that uses game theory toanalyze political decisions. in april, dr. cain presented a paper that correctly forecasted that the us under the current regime would withdraw from the paris accords. he has also published sixpeer-reviewed articles on energy, infrastructure, and the political economy of globalization that use econometrics,geographic information systems,

and computational methods,the kind of stuff we do. (nick speaks off mic) that's right, 'causeyou're a phd from cgu. i was gonna mention that. dr. cain's phd is in environmentalpolicy and world politics from claremont graduate university, and he also has an mba inenvironmental science and policy from columbia university. our next panelist is mr. fred leichter,

and he's a founding director of the rick and susan sontag center for collaborative creativityat the claremont colleges, which is also known as the hive. the hive provides a place where students can form creative teams, be intellectually daring, and work collaboratively toaddress complex challenges. it serves the five undergraduateclaremont colleges,

that's to say pomona,scripps, claremont mckenna, harvey mudd, and pitzer. prior to this role, fred spent 25 years at fidelity investments atboston, most recently in the role of senior vice president ofdesign thinking and innovation. fred has also served as the head of userexperience design at fidelity, leading fidelity's first website in 1996. he is also active in the sport of curling.

- [man in audience] yay! - one of the canadians speaks up, okay. (audience laughs) last year, he coached his son's team at the world universitygames in almaty, kazakhstan. our third panelist, mr. matt muga. he's the founding and managing director of muga consulting group in san diego. his group specializes instrategic technology planning,

partnering with companiesto increase revenue, decrease costs, optimizemarketing, and improve operations using a customized approach. he received an ms from carnegie mellon in information technology, and an ms from the university of san diego school of business in global leadership. he's currently one of our jones fellows at cgu here at cisat wherehe's completing his phd.

20-year veteran of qualcomm incorporated. matt held executive positions in the areas of engineering operationsand project management for over a decade. prior to that, he was headof international operations for qualcomm's corporate it department. he has extensive fieldexperience, having led complex multimillion dollarglobal technology programs in over 34 countriesacross six continents.

this goes on to say he's lectured in all kinds of different things at all kinds of different places and he's led technicaland training workshops for a bunch of bigcompanies you'd recognize. he's a long standing member ofproject management institute, the institute of electricaland electronics engineers, yay, and he currently lectures at san diego state in information systems

in some of the areas that i like to teach, system development, project management, also technical architectureand global operations. so, our panelists came up with a few questions whichwe're gonna go through. they're gonna take turns discussing. after we've been throughquestions that they came up with, we'll probably addressquestions from the floor, but we'd be open topeople asking questions

as we go along, right? okay, so with that, i'm going to, i'm going to hand themicrophone over to these guys. and they have two to share, so we'll witness how they negotiate the sharing of two microphonesbetween three panelists. - hi. all right. first of all, pleasure to be here.

thank you so much. so, i just wanna saythat i think the first, just to respond to thisprompt, and i think that from hearing the presentationsthat kicked off this night that we're all singingon the same hymnal here, and that is to even, to put this prompt up to get students and technologists and people in the corporate world to think about this questionis, i think, the first step.

because it's easy ... i mean, we're not a pure computer science, computer engineering program here, but it's easy when you startworking with those people that the stack and the technologyand the angular plugins and that we got a cool new way to do this and we're gonna minify your site and we're gonna use the amp plugins, i mean, that stuff is really important.

atma connect builds mobile applications. we care about all that stuff. we have a website builtin angular and on and on. but i think that continuingto think about the problem, fred and i talked for a few minutes beforethe panel started, and we're both adherentsto the ideo mantra of human centered design. so i think just having that,

this prompt, having this question at the start of thetechnological endeavors we do is just a really greatway to get students, to get technologists, to get professionals to think about those issuesfrom that important perspective. so that's a great first step. that's what i would say on that. - yeah. thanks. thanks for inviting me tonight.

it's really great as a newbieto the claremont colleges. the program that i lead atthe hive, at the five c's, is all about human centered design and taking students from diverse programs, diverse backgrounds fromthe seven colleges actually, not just the five, andputting them together to, as this says, fall inlove with the problem, not the solution. just a quick example frommy professional background.

i grew up in information technology, which is why i feel verycomfortable in this room, but when i was at fidelity, one of the things that i was pushing on, there were lots and lots ofpeople who were interested in what was the technology and how we would deploy technology. and i was always tryingto bring us back to, what are the needs thatour customers have ordered,

the change they need? so one of the problems thati spearheaded the work on, and what is changing in our environment, was around understanding better the needs of an aging population, and especially people with aging parents. how many people in thisroom have aging parents or have had aging parents orare becoming aging parents? all of them, and so youknow what those needs are.

and so we were really digging in to understand that more deeply and not just say as an investment company we've got the solution, it's an annuity, or we've got a solution, it's technology, but to dig in deeper andreally try to understand the emotional needs that people have and teach our associatesand our technologists and our developers to work together

to better understand those needs and be more subtle about it. and then i would alwaysask the question also, what alternatives have we tried? how do we know this is a good solution, and what have we tried thatis a non-technical solution before we just investin a technical solution? - i like this particular question, because it's one of those things

that the further you aredown the technology road and the more you consideryourself the technologist, the harder it is for youto break away from that. and one of the things that ialways like doing with my teams as well as educating with my clients is really taken a stance ofbeing technology agnostic. and by that, that means that yes, you might know everythingabout salesforce.com, you might know everything about oracle,

you might know everything about the latest and greatest hp servers, but at the same time, if you can't properlyarticulate to me what it is, the business problem isthat you're trying to solve, then you really know nothing. and taking a technology agnostic approach where you are forcing individuals to really focus on the problem.

anytime you get in a roomand people start spouting off things about different os this, different mobile client that, basically you just stop them, and just continue toforce the conversation onto the problem. and once you get peoplein the habit of that, i found it to be, it's justreally, really elevating for the group as a whole,and it's worked well for me.

- to the next question. what do you believe to be the single most importantthing academia could be doing in order to continue supportingtechnology innovation? - i believe this was my question. so, interesting enoughactually, professor chatterjee actually already answeredthis, is that in my opinion, the single most importantthing that academic be doing is continue to form and develop

strong partnerships with the industry. all of us here know thattech is changing just so, just so crazily fast. i mean, the pace thattechnology is changing, it's nuts, it's nuts. and of course, the most cutting-edge stuff is really still happeningout in the industry. obviously in academia with our research, we're doing a number offantastic things out there,

but in order to reallystay ahead of the curve and make sure that studentsare properly trained and ready to go outthere and do good things, it has to be a strongpartnership with industry. - yeah, so my answer to thatis that we need to get students to stop believing that they live in a world with right answers. they get into these colleges by circling a lot of the correctanswers on a lot of tests

and scoring really well at things. and i'm also on the engineeringfaculty at harvey mudd, and we as a school give out a lot a lot of problem setsthat people are filling out, but they're mostly problemswith right answers. and in the world, the real world, the one that we all live in, there are less problems like that than there are problems that are broader.

so one of the exercises thatwe do at the hive sometimes is i put people into groupsand give them jigsaw puzzles to assemble in groups of four. and you can barely get the words, "whoever gets it done first wins," out and then people are on that problem. but a jigsaw puzzle is veryfamiliar kind of problem for the world of right answers. but then we take them out of that room

and bring them into another room where there are scrapsof fabric on the floor, and we say make a quilt. and people pause and they say, "of what? "how? where?" and we say, "that's it." and so i would contend there are many more problems that are like the quilt than there are like the jigsaw puzzle.

and furthermore, the jigsaw puzzles are getting increasingly automated. and so if we teach peopleto solve jigsaw puzzles, their jobs will be replaced by automation, and so we need to get peopleout of that mindset and realize that they need to experiencetrial and error and failure and learn about problems thatdon't have right answers. - yeah, i mean i think this is a really interesting question.

i think that actuallycisat set is well ahead of where the social sciencesare with this question, because design thinking,iteration, experimentation, to me these are the bestways to promote innovation. the social sciences, which i love dearly, and i'm a political scientist,through all my education, we're still very muchin a deductive mindset. i remember very clearly ... i don't think ...

well, brian was on my committee, but he wasn't here for this conversation. when a member of mycommittee who's not here told me that i was ... because i was doing some statistical deductive, inductive, deductive stuff, and she upbraided me and said, "listen, you cannot be model shopping. "you cannot be running your regressors

"through various models,seeing which model fits best. "you have to know aheadof time from your theory. "you have to justifywhat model is gonna work, "what your variables are, et cetera, "and then run theregression agnostically." now i graduated, so i wasable to pull that off, but i think for those of us who are more steeped in technology, i think you know that the iteration,

that's where the magic happens. because if you could deduce everything from first principles, then the world would be alot simpler place, right? we'd be dealing more with clock problems than quilt problems, or as i've also heard themcalled, cloud problems. so i think in general across academia, i'd love to see moreproject-based learning.

i'd love to see moreiteration, experimentation, and use of transdisciplinary stuff, which of course is all common here. it is challenging, though. as someone who's studied atuc, at columbia, new york, and here, there is stillresistance among many academics to a transdisciplinary lens, because they kind of feellike, "hey, this discipline," pick any subfield within a discipline,

"has so much in it. "how are you going to master," say, world politics andyour other subfield, public policy in my case, "and learn about gis andbring them all together "in a satisfying way?" so perhaps there's some automation. i don't know, maybe we canautomate some part of that, learn faster and be able

to jump together thisknowledge in a better way. but i think from a social perspective, we may be innovating fast enough. so i think keeping up withindustries is a lot of work for us on the academic side. - i said i wasn't gonna say much, but some of the work thatwe're doing to do that is the idea that if yourestrict your thinking to having one person who'sdone all the learning

and is the one who knows it all, that you're not probablyleaving yourself open to distributed memory and shared knowledge and shared learning. technology (speaking off mic) - [woman in audience] actually,i just want to echo that. i think one thing, actually,i feel this question very closely relates to the first one, so in a sense, i see (speakingoff mic) teach students

(speaking off mic) problem solving, to really identify problems and try to (speaking off mic) solve them. i think that problem solving skill leads to innovation (speaking off mic) - we should be having questions and interaction as we go along. - yeah, sure, yeah. - there's a lot of good mindsin here, so feel free to --

- [man in audience] so one of the things that is interesting to me about hopeless questions is really it forces us into a mindset of humility, kind of an intellectual humility, of not saying, "i know theanswer to that solution," but maybe i'm still trying to(speaking off mic) question. - definitely, and i thinkfor the public policy issues that i work on in the environmental space,

sustainability space,community development space, just defining the problem, i mean, they are really wicked problems, as i think dr. chatterjeeused that term earlier. they're very hard to define. and i would just say one thing also that i've learned from theideo work that i've done, engagement we've done with them, is getting outside the building.

i mean, i think that's one lesson that maybe could be actionable here, even though we do a lot of iteration and a lot of experimentation. but taking that even a step further and going outside the building, when i go to penjaringan in north jakarta, which is a low income kind of ad hoc, some would say slum community,

and you start talking withpeople one on one in their homes and observing how they're using your app or struggling to use your app, i mean, you're gonna learn more in that hour you spendwith the person than ... i mean the lecture stuff is important. i don't want to count it out, because i certainly benefited from it, but getting outside the building

to experiment further is great. - [man in audience] justwant to add to that, i had mixed background of academia as well as in many industry, so i find it's interestinghow both these entities handle problem solvinga very different way. like in academia, i see that we learn thingsso we'll have knowledge then try to desperately search a problem,

like, where can i apply this? this is what i'm doing research on. what is the question? you know? in the industry, when i was in industry, it was just opposite. you say, "here's a problem. "how can you solve it?" so we're coming through different angles.

i think there's an opportunityto converge them together, and that itself might bringthe academia and industry together in more common path. i think there is separation of approach, and i think more realize that, implement those in academicprograms, in industry programs, we can collaborate better and converge in a more common, meaningful way. - yeah.

i think it's a great point, and part of why i am here comingfrom industry into academia is that one of the things we learned when i was at fidelity is, i spent a lot of time atstanford at the d school and that the problems we worked on a lot, that we gained enormously by putting them in front of a set of fresheyes, and especially at a place where there was aninterdisciplinary program.

so at the stanford d school,there would be students from the business school, the law school, the medical school,the engineering school, and we would give them problems, like, how do you helppeople plan for dying? tough problems like that. and, "how do you getpeople to communicate?" and ones we thought wekinda knew the answer to, and we would get more depth.

the expression that comesfrom ideo and design thinking is that innovation comesfrom problem finding more than problem solving,but sometimes new eyes see the problem differentlythan experienced eyes. and so there's a waythat industry benefits from the academic and thestudent approach and vice versa. - [man in audience] so, iwant to bring this question. probably a little bit (speaking off mic) because you're doingthis in this college here

but open to everyone. and my concern is that i've spent a lot of time on design thinking, not only in this university, i also do that regularly down at usc. and it's a collaborativeteam building exercise. if you look at ideo lab, thereason they're so successful is that their team brings in different disciplinary perspective.

there's an mba, there's a psychologist, there's a computer scientist, an engineer. unfortunately, academia is still siloed. these are all isit students. the drucker school is not talking to us. you're not talking tothe psychology school. and in that context, doyou think that the student that comes to hive orthe student comes here, is everybody okay to get this?

is there a particular mindset of students that actually gets thisinterdisciplinary approach? and there is a mindset who are very siloed and they'll never get it. is that something, challenge you face? because i see that. - i think that's a great question. i think that's the irony of education in liberal arts education,

is that it's being done in silos, and that is the justificationand a lot of the mindset that we bring to our work at the hive and why this is such aperfect place to do it, because between the fiveundergraduate colleges and the two graduate schools,this is a richness of people. so on the projects, in the class that i teachon human centered design, we have students, undergraduate students

from all five colleges and we're able to createproject teams that have students from all five colleges, teams of five. we have several instancesof this where teams of five, and there's a business studentfrom claremont mckenna, there's a biology student from pomona, there's an engineer from harvey mudd, there's a philosophy student from pitzer, there's a literature student from scripps,

not that that's all they doin each of those schools, and they are absolutely,learn to be more interested in the perspectives that eachother bring to the problem. so i think the earlier the better. the more used to thewalls that we live within, the more, the stronger they become. that's why i love doing thisat an undergraduate level. that doesn't mean peoplecan't be saved in grad school or saved in industry and business

and brought to seeother perspectives but-- - [woman in audience] how manyyou watch big bang theory? - [woman in audience] yeah,you watched it, right? so i just, a recent episode (mumbles), sheldon is a physicist, and sheldon just absolutelydisrespect for geographers, so the actual scientist there. then the geographer oneday approached a problem (mumbles) very interestingthat needs sheldon's skills.

sheldon just didn't want to be with him because of disciplinary boundary,but he loved the problem. so he sneaked in andworked on the project. but that means, again, soi think just like you said, bring problem to them (mumbles) people will be enjoying the problem, then they will solve it. (mumbles) we break downwall and get them involved. - and that puts us atthe forefront of comedy.

- [woman in audience]i love big bang theory. (man in audience speaking off mic) - [man in audience] if youwant to see more of sheldon, watch young sheldon. - matt, do you want to - - actually, i think we havea question in the back. - oh, sure. - [man in audience] so, one of the things that was actually interesting

about getting together like this is we're talking about tryingto find problems (mumbles) when really, maybe weshould try to switch it and make it more like the urgent care for people that have problemsthey need to have solved. they have things up in sanfrancisco and in other cities (mumbles) amazon webservices called pop-ups. you have an idea, you wantto start a small business, you can walk in and say,

"how would i do this with your technology? "i don't know of anythinglike that that exists." well, we can come in andsay, a few people and say, "well, we thought of this idea, "but we have no idea how to make it work." wouldn't it be kind of cool tohave an urgent care facility for idea generation? - definitely. i mean, let me just say that

i first want to give a lot of credit to cisat and to the advanced gis lab, because they kind of are that way. as a social scientist, they welcomed me and they let me basicallylive there for a year. i think that, i'm gonna say something a little odd as a cgu graduate, i really enjoyed the tndy class. i know from talking with otherpeople that a lot of people,

(audience applauds) when i've said that tosome friends of mine here, the program, they kindof roll their eyes at me, but i thought it was great. i think it gets to all these issues. but i mean, if you're really asking from a nuts and bolts perspective,"how do we improve this?" and i think this is deeplylinked to innovation, is you have to make it required, right?

we're also busy mastering thematerial in our disciplines and the tools and and all that stuff, again, there's nobody who'sstill going through the ... everyone here is like, atleast defend it, right? i think a tndy lab that goes along withit as a second semester would pick up on some of the comments that people made from the audience and force graduatestudents to work together

on a specific problem. i think that would bea hugely powerful tool. so just think about it, but don't blame me if anyone gets mad. - and you know, i thinki would echo the strength of more adoption of atransdisciplinary approach here. i know i teach down at san diego state, and with my particularundergrads that i teach, i do specifically look atwhat are declared majors

and try to mix it up with folks. one of the classes that i teach, it's not just information systems. i've got psych folks in there. i've got communications major, econ folks. and when we break into project teams, i specifically look to break them up, because otherwise, thereis nothing compelling them to go beyond major, right?

and it is just such awonderful thing you see when you have individuals of unlike backgrounds,unlike passions come together and really often use technologiesto bring it all together. - and there's a lot of learningthat way, i think, too. - absolutely there is, absolutely. - how are we doing on time? - [man in audience] we're okay. - we're okay.

let's switch to, just a little bit, related to all these, all thesequestions are a bit related, but let's switch a littlebit to this next topic, which, how should academics approach helping those harmed bytechnological innovations? how should we innovate socialwelfare policy and practices so they provide sustainable assistance to those displaced by automation and helping people learn new skills

in the face of new technology? clearly, this is atransdisciplinary question. panel? - might be a bit much for 7:45 in the ... i could kick this off, 'causei generated this question. i think that from a policy perspective that this is somethingimportant to think about. i don't have a crisp, nice, clean answer, but i welcome ideas from the hive mind.

i think, again, thatjust posing the question to technologists, topeople in mis programs, in computer engineering programs,is a powerful first step. but i think innovation means different things to different people, and it affects people differently. and i think one of the mostpowerful, humbling lessons from the last presidential election and from looking at how people

in the us and around the world have reacted to globalization is to understand that theeconomists were wrong. right? because a vast majority, i mean an overwhelmingmajority of economists, when you surveyed them and you looked at the models and the quantitative data, they would say, "should we globalize?

"should we open the free trade?" and they said, "yes. "it lifts all boats and itcauses general welfare gains, "large, unimpeachable generalwelfare gains for a nation." when you look in a more targeted way, perhaps empowered by gisat a community-based level, you're going to see thatthere's winners and losers, and there's geographic, there's social. there's educational,there's economic reasons

why this happens. to me, when i look, it's what's happened with the uk, the united states, other major developing andindustrialized nations. i really see a lot of that as linked to globalization andthe impacts of globalization. well, automation is goingto replicate that pattern, but i think it's gonna be even stronger. while i was thinking about this question

a little bit over the last few days, i pulled in a few articles. there's a mckinsey report that came out i think earlier this year, and it said something like half of all jobs could beautomated the next 20 to 40 years. and so that -- - [male in audience] including teaching. - yeah, including teaching,

including a lot of research, right? - [moderator] moderating panels. - no, moderating takes ... no, moderating takes art. moderating takes art. but i mean, really, so muchof the work we do in research, in creating lit reviews, i mean, that would be something i'd be happy to farm out to computers.

so again, just let's at leastput the question out there as something to consider. even though we mightnot be social scientists or people involved in that field, i think from the technical perspective, it's really important, 'cause there are interestingthings we can do. it's around education ... obviously, many companieshave floated different ideas.

google, i know, is investing large amounts of money in training, and apple is trying to do the same thing, but i just, i do wonder whetherthose efforts will be enough if a fraction of what ispredicted comes to pass. so i think that thelearning about learning and teaching people remotely and teaching peoplethrough design science, i think those could be powerful tools

to help bring people up to speed and share the benefits ofautomation and globalization. - [man in audience] there is another interesting perspective on that, which is that people tend tocome here from other places, but we don't tend to go there. so if the jobs are there, why aren't people moving that way? they're rooted here.

so it may be a differentkind of education to say, "no, this isn't theonly place in the world. "there are there opportunitiesin other places." i think that sort of re-acceleration of immigration in different ways could be a really important thing. so i agree with you, and maybe there are evenother ways to think about it. - [man in audience] asan eternal optimist,

i will say that for every one job that will disappear dueto automation or ai, there'll be five new jobs created. the challenge is we don't knowwhich new five jobs, right? and i think this fieldhas always been around. when computing first came, banking said, "oh, there'll be no banks,no tellers, nothing." when atms came, "no onewill ever work in a bank. i think we have more peopleemployed in banks today

than during those times, right? so it'll be interesting. but going back to the globalization thing, nick, that you said, i really think, and i've seen enough data on this, globalization in the last 20years has pulled more people from lower economic status tomiddle-class and higher end. - of course, of course. - [man in audience] there'sno doubt about that.

and wherever this countryand uk is heading, i think they're headingin the wrong direction. i don't want to makethis a political comment, but i'm sorry. we are making some serious,serious mistakes right now. i'll just add one thought tothat, which i agree with you, but it gets a little bit backto how we're training people, and so it's the puzzles versus the quilts. and so the jobs are in creativity,

they are not in thingsthat can be automated, and that trend will not change. they're jobs that ... and for the most partarm, that will accelerate into teaching and medicineand all kinds of places. i would also say, though, that the human centerednessthat we talk about has to have an ethical side to it, also, so it's not just what'sgood for some people,

but what's good for more people, and to to shift our thought into broader populations and lead. and that can come frominstitutions like this one, lead with, what are the ethical things that we should be doingfor broader sets of people? (moderator speaks off mic) - [man in audience] yeah. i think it's a very serious question.

and i think the problemis also very serious. we can we can see thattechnology, automation does create newer jobs, makes us progress more, solve problems. we get better health, better education, better technology, we live longer, so we see all these benefits. at the same time, automationand progressing technology, we cannot deny that it changes

the skill set hierarchycompletely in the society. and we can say, "well,it happened centuries." when computers came in bank, a new generation of employees were required to take onthose jobs, and people who did not survive in thecomputer world perished. so again, the survival of the fittest. but (mumbles) social ethical issue here which i don't think we are able to solve.

if most jobs move to silicon valley or washington, dc or inaustin on those hotspots, there are only some spots of job growth, which we know in last eight years there had been (mumbles)reduction of unemployment rate. that means new jobs have been created. yet, we had seen manypatches of the country who did not see the benefit. they don't get the job.

they still (mumbles) unemployed. so i think it's a huge societal problem that is accelerated by the technology and all this progress that we make, and i don't think there's a straightforwardsolution to that. we live longer. we cannot just say, "well, you are not fitfor this job anymore,"

in new century or new era. we can't say that. i think we have people,father, grandfather, and uncles who live in area who justdon't fit the skill requirement of that newer job creation,new job category requires. so what do we do? they need to live a life, too. so what are we ... for example, like we'rehaving new energy jobs,

solar energy and other energy jobs in colorado and other areas, right? so, how do we create jobs in a population or a geographic area where such opportunity is not there? should we just say to them, "well, sorry. "you don't have skills. "you're unemployed. "go figured out (mumbles) social dollars."

so i think the seriousproblem this brings out, i don't even see a clearsolution in the future on this. - it's even more interesting as we discuss that here in california, because i just read a report the other day that was kind of, i don't want to say on the other side of the spectrum of this, but at the same time presenteda very unique opportunity for is to help better a number of folks,

and that's the fact that we have, we're starting to develop asevere shortage of tradesmen. there's starting to be verymuch a shortage of tradesmen. and so i know that when we talkabout traditional academia, we don't include tradesmen into that, but maybe there'ssomething in the days ahead where we need to start figuring out a way to educate a tradesman workforce to be the smart tradesmen.

because this is one of thosethings that we're seeing a huge problem coming up in this space, and i think there'spotential opportunities there for us to make some real difference. so i thought i saw a hand inthe back there, this gentleman. - [andy] hi. - [andy] for everybodythat i haven't met yet, my name is andy vosko,and i'm the director of the transdisciplinary studies program,

so i wanted to chime in asthat voice really quickly, but it specifically appliesto this issue, i think, in a way that hasn't been addressed yet. so firstly, just as aquick scale introduction of the way cgu workswith transdisciplinarity. we require all doctoral students to take a transdisciplinary course. we are the only school in theentire world that does that. that is quite unusual that we have that,

and there's certainly further to go. what is an important thing thatwe haven't talked about yet with how transdisciplinarity overlaps with these types of issues is that there's quite a bit ofoverlap with design thinking, there's quite a bit ofoverlap and applied research. the third area wheretransdisciplinarity really focuses on is systems thinking. and in the world of systems thinking,

you aren't looking at,"how did i screw up?" you're looking at, "how can i not haveunintended consequences "that'll be really harmfulfrom my decisions?" by looking at all of the ways my decision will be interconnectedwith the rest of the world. that's why we need that collaboration. that's why we need to work with people from other disciplines.

and so, while you will do things that have unintended consequences always, one of the ideas is on the front end, it's worth bringing in people, even if you don't anticipate any problems, to think through these things. and so, yes, technology will continue. there will be displacement of jobs. but there are ways toameliorate and to lessen

some of the negative impacts as a continuously iterative process as long as we'recontinuously looking at this in a systems level, as well. - can i just say one other quick thing, which is thank you for those comments, and thanks for the work youdo with the tndy program. the one other thing i wouldjust say is i think also that, in the policy space andthe government space,

that we as people who practice design thinkingand are trained in it can also bring a lot ofbenefit to government and to nonprofits and to agencies, because one thing thatspurred my interest in this is that the programs that wedo have in the united states are not at the scale. they're not effective enough. so the work we do at the graduate level

with evaluation, with systems thinking, with transdisciplinary, but also with bringingthose ideas to government and trying new things ithink is really critical. so there's no clean, clear answer, but i think that's certainlya good way forward. - [man in audience] onecomment, i think, to answer, tying back to exactly what you just said it ties into your (mumbles) which is the,

actually it goes back tothe title of your panel, which is disruptive innovation, which takes questiontwo and question three. disruption has impacts,positive and negative, and i think it's what youjust brought up, which is, and i think samir and ihave talked about this, too, design science, that approach is helping organizations and communitiesdeal with this change from the industrial economyto the information economy,

because there's differentmodels to play with. and organizations are strugglingto how to deal with it. so going back to your question, terry, which is, how do you help outthese people with changes - - next question. - [man in audience] what's that? - it's the next question. - [man in audience] oh, okay. i'm sorry. i was on two and three.

- our question, ourquestion, our question. - [man in audience] well, for example, if you looked in china recently, the last couple weeks or so, the prc has come outsaying, "we're going to have "20 to 30 percent efficiencyimprovements in our country "by 2020," whatever it is, or 2030. they're already baking insome of those improvements. so what i'm highlightingthat to be in society,

at a social level even,or the company level, i think how academia, and when you graduate the students here, and like lorne was talkingabout with design science, your focus here, that actually is critical to help this bridge, and you deal with thiseveryday with your customers. this mindset you guys have here is unique, and it's actually helping outpeople that are struggling,

grappling with it, and there'sa lot of disruption going on. and it's kind of also defining,what's the boundaries? what is it? we had the (mumbles) thing. when i came here, i kindof saw where it was going, it and ot were merging together. you have the commercial market. you have the enterprise market. you deal with this all thetime in your ecosystem.

then you have the heavy industrialists. and now those are clashing together, and there's a whole bunch of disruption. but i think design scienceor design thinking, in addition to systemsthinking, which you brought up, helps society, helps yourorganization, saying, "how do i be more competitive? "how do i apply someof these technologies? because i think everybody isdedicated to improve things,

but their mindsets aren't quite there yet. does that make sense? so the fatalistic saying, "i'm gonna be out of ajob," or, "i'm toast. "i can't program a computer," and you have otherpeople marching forward. and i think there's that middle ground. and i think a lot of ourgraduates are going to be stuck in organizations thatdon't know about design science,

that don't know about ideo, and that's the solutions they need so they can apply theirenergies to do that next step. 'cause you deal with, also,transformations inside, especially in the public sector. i know you can probablycomment more on that, too, but i think that's one ofthe strengths where academia, our graduates, ourresearch, can help people caught in this industrialinformation transition phase.

and going back to whatterry was saying is, you're displacingpeople, but these people, they want to work hard and figure it out but they just don't have that model yet. i mean, you and i talkedabout this before. - i mean, one big challengewith design thinking, i'll just say, as someone who writes a lot of grant applications, is q1, we're gonna dosome user assessments.

in q2, we're gonna figure out qs 3 and 4. that often doesn't really fly. so design thinking canbe a challenge to pitch, to sell to, in our casefoundations, ngos, other groups. so it's not a cure all, but ithink it is a powerful thing. - i'll just make a -- - how did you deal withthis at fidelity, right? - well, i mean, one of the things, you have to separateparts of an organization.

at fidelity, there'sthe performance engine. people don't want you to experiment with their money or their health. at the same time, ifyou're gonna innovate, you have to carve off apiece of your organization that is willing to play by different rules and take risks and try things. and so one of things we said, this is another design thinking phrase,

but the the cost of planning now exceeds the cost of experimentation. and so you need to set yourself up to consciously experiment and try things. and back to andy's point, also to think about, how do you understandand how do you look for and experiment aroundunintended consequences? and expect to be wrong ratherthan expect to be right,

and and how do you do that? and fundamentally, our currentlegislative process is broken because it is not that. it is craft, craft, craft,argue, argue, argue, 49% to 51%, and we lose sight of figuring out if we are meeting the need,if we're solving the problem. and so i think there's room to do that. and what if you could legislatethrough experimentation? if you could test a healthcare policy

before you implementedone and could try things, right, and do pilot projects. - [man in audience] youknow, the finnish government has a department of experimentation in the prime minister'sor president's office. and they're like doing27 different experiments, including basic income in different areas. in a small place like that,it's a little bit easier. - yeah, in a world thatis increasingly complex,

and you need it, i love that, a department of experimentation. it doesn't mean thingscan't be figured out, but things should be tried. - sounds like a newtransdisciplinary class to me. - [man in audience] but ithink what you're saying is, and i think (speaking off mic)systems (speaking off mic) because the other part isalso (speaking off mic) prc, the chinese (speakingoff mic) where they're going,

and you talk about ai, it's freeing innovationwithin your organization. it's for people to be creativelike (speaking off mic). so it's bringing in where ... i mean, obviously, if youlook to silicon valley, there's no hardware. things are working off the cloud now. all your startups, alot of them just have, it's all cloud based,

and it's just no large serversor infrastructures anymore. but what i've noticed is they're trying to freeup their human capital to be creative. and that's what i'm seeing. cpsr (speaking off mic)people, has a nice niche to get the organization and societies and (speaking off mic) freed up. so i think it takes

a lot of that creativityand innovation to happen and be part of that disruptionand part of that activity. and so anyway, that's (speaking off mic) i think ecosystems that you deal with where we're creating an environment that lorne was talkingabout that you ask ... we're just unlockingsome of that right now. we talk about silicon valley having it, but it's also taking thetalent that you've hired,

that you've spent 100k or200k to recruit some folks, you bring them to the organization -- - that's one person. - that's one person, literally. - [man in audience] whatever. i know you're crazy, youcan hire seven people, but that's releasing them(speaking off mic) right framework in terms of the risk management posture. we talk about new cash flow,

current cash flow, new cash flow, new business experimentation. that's also getting kind of hybrid, especially in the software side where you get these companiesare coming and going (speaking off mic) 18months if you don't hit some of those targets in silicon valley. it's moving pretty fast, so that failure ratethat you're talking about

is very much accelerated. so where we're challenged mostly is freeing up some of theyounger kids we're bringing in to have some of those good ideas and (speaking off mic) what'sthe tool to allow them, that creativity to blossomin the organization and the community (speaking off mic) also? - [man in audience] to me, it's around the notionthat there's a difference

between technology solving the problem and technology helping theperson solve the problem. and that becomes a fine linethat needs to be taught, because a lot of people jump into the former rather thanthe latter (speaking off mic) - the other thing that comesback to maps, which i love, is helping people see problemsthat they hadn't seen before. so that's where your visualizations,the maps are beautiful. the map in south carolinais a perfect example.

you don't see that problem until you look at it froma different perspective. - [man in audience] exactly,and that's the latter. it's technology enhancingthe person's ability, because ultimately, thatmap enhances policymakers, not a business person, who's going to make the transformation. i think that's one ofthe biggest challenges we've been seeing, isthat face to face funding

is a mechanism of governmentto solve problems, but it's usually gone to the wrong place. and that's exactly what youwere saying about this question, it's actually the perfect question, because it's causing you to pause and say, "how should i solve this problem?" imagine if the trinityproject had actually said, "well, no, we're notgonna solve that problem." i remember that being a debate,

and during that it was a debate, and going forward, but itwas able to move forward. i think just by youconsidering this question, causing that pause moment where a project or a design goes to build is the essence of what (speaking off mic) can do (speaking off mic) are we gonna be better off withthe solution to the problem than we were (speaking off mic)?

- a few years back, i wasinvited to attend a meeting at national science foundation because the cise program directorate was planning to starta new funding program for creativity and design. and alfred spector, who is a student of herbsimon, the godfather of design, i know he made a remarkable comment. he said academia does not accept failure,

and that is the biggest problem because you cannot be a trueentrepreneurial inventor if you don't fail. i think that academia isthe best place to fail because it doesn't hurt too many people. but if you're out there inthe real world and you fail, it affects too many people. so somewhere in our publishing system, somewhere in our journal boards,

and somewhere in this whole meritorious ways of promoting people, we have lost fact offailure is part of the game. and i keep telling my students that. and in the lab, if it doesn't work, fine. let's learn why it didn't work, right, and get better at it. but there's a rewardsystem that is lacking in the academic world, actually.

- [man in audience] well,or it has to be (mumbles) - [woman in audience] (mumbles) yeah. i just want to echo that. that's one thing i learnedfrom (mumbles) people when i first saw my advisor(mumbles) knowledge discovery. he always said, because we all learn inwriting clinic journals, it's (mumbles) they have to be p significant with our results,

or you (mumbles) statistician and say, "the solution has to work. "it has to be able to improvewhat i intended to do." my advisor always told me, but why? because even if it didn't work, you add to the knowledge base. it helps future peoplesay, "don't go this way. "i tried. it didn't work. "you go the other ways."

so he'd always tell students that. so he said, "it doesn't meanyou (mumbles) statistician. "your solution has to (speaking off mic) - i think, just to say one other thing, which is i think there'sactually something to take home and touse as a teaching tool, which is from the publicpolicy perspective, it is very hard to experiment with stuff without consequences,without serious consequences,

but when we do computational modeling of social systems and builtsystems and how they interact, then we can do some cool stuff. i did agent-based modeling aspart of my dissertation work. it goes very well with gis, and you're increasingly doing more. i know the platform is integrated. that can be a very powerful way to iterate, to fail, a million times

and not to kill anyonewhile you're doing it. that's fail, but don't hurt anyone, right? - [man in audience] can i make a couple of comments (mumbles)? i work for boeing company, and one of the things iworked on last year was automating the fuselage build. and if you know what thefuselage build look like, it's the huge fuselage,

and you're trying to put that together with several sections coming in, and with rivets you put them together. and it takes a lot of heavy musclepower to put that together and people who built like linebackers and linemen in football, they only last about three to six months, and then you have to replace them.

and so the robotics is going there. so it's an automation system we're trying to put together at boeing. and so what the professorsamir talked about was that, hey, when we try to do the automation, then you're gonna createmore jobs than less, because we're putting alot of people together to make that thing work, and rather than having severalmechanics just drilling holes

and putting rivets on the fuselage, right? and so it is true and do that. but my point, what i'm trying to say, is that even though that does that, we are going to have these problems. the mechanics who were drilling, they're gonna be out of work. and in fact this morning,i was talking to my uncle who's not an engineer altogether

and we were talking about something else, and we got to the topic, okay, there are self driving cars, 'cause somebody was cuttingright in front of me when i was talking to him. and he says, "what aboutall the truck drivers "who's driving right now? "in about 15, 20 years,they're gonna be out of work." so if they're out of work,then what can somebody do?

nick's question of this was great. so how can we as ... as an engineer, we don'teven think about that, right? as a ceo, we think about, "okay, we don't want people getting hurt," because that's a lot of money that we're going to haveto pay for workers' comp and all that kind ofstuff with automation. - lawsuits.

- [man in audience] but as asocial point, as an engineer, we don't talk about,"okay, it's great to have "self driving cars andself driving trucks, "and we have a whole industryfrom motels to casinos "to truck stops that cater to truckers, "and it's not only the truckers "that's gonna be out of business." it's gonna be the casinos, the motels, the truck stop diners or whatever.

they're all gonna be out of business. so how is this gonna help them, or what do they have to do for them? i think this is a very serious question, and i don't know if we can answer that. i think there'll be - - the good news is ifyou can map and model it, you're one step ahead. so the people in this room will be okay.

- [man in audience] we could always do modeling and simulation, right? that's one thing good about academic, is that we could always domodeling as a what-if basis. it doesn't cost us much. but as an engineer, iwouldn't think about, "hey, what about ..." i just want to get theself driving cars to work without bumping into anybody, right?

but what about all thosetaxi drivers and the truckers and all this kind of stuff? i don't think about that,but this is a great question. - [man in audience] yeah, ijust want to make a comment, because i really appreciated that you started offwith a slide that said, "love the problem, not the solution." thank you. - that was my fellow panelists,

by the way, so thank them.- oh, oh well. no, but ... i work for a nonprofit. we do a lot with environmental justice and water resources in los angeles. and the data is really clearwhere the problems are. finding students who arewilling to love those problems is really hard. and finding students that can,

or finding anybody to love those problems. so you talk about the self driving cars. we still have the unintended consequences of the ports of long beachand los angeles, right? in this area, you don'thave to go to jakarta. we don't have to go anywhere. in this area, we have 4.2 million people living with high pollution burdens that are as bad as anyplace else in the world.

so i'm not quite sure how we move from not finding problems to, in my view, there are more problems thancould possibly be solved by all the universities. but it's really hard to getstudents to engage with problems that they have a reallyhard time understanding. - i think if you can put thoseproblems in front of students certainly at a place like this. i know that there were people

involved with some nonprofitshere when i was studying. and then maybe the other solution is to get students from thosecommunities educated enough to come to a place like thisor a similar institution and to take them on. because i used to work for pacific institutedoing water policy stuff, so i certainly feel your interest in that and think it's critically important.

the ej stuff is soimportant and so easy to, even for environmentalists,to not think about that stuff. so thanks for bringing it forward. - let's have this be the last question, i think, since we've been going an hour. - [woman in audience] just one comment. regarding the students,not finding the students, i'm also teaching parttime at cal state la, and i originally camefrom utility industry.

we started that phd program. i was very interested in all the problems within the energy domain. when i came here, i didn'tknow any much about gis. i didn't know about design science. but, as we said, yeah, itwas great opportunity for me to learn about all thesetools, how we can use them. and i managed to work on veryinteresting projects here, and i also engaged many of my classmates,

of course, with the help offaculty, to work on these, and they were very engagedas well and interested. so i think the key is making students buyinto those problems, which is not an easy thing. it's not just in the class time. i remember, been spendingtalking about those problems, talking about the industry, why these are going to make,

these are big deal problem. in general, i think thebuy-in from students, that was the key, to help get them engaged and help them interestedand help them do the work. and certainly the same thing for me. the faculty managed to do that. same thing for me. - [man in audience]we'll take a short one.

- [man in audience] piggyback on (static) (mumbles) al hevner doing apresentation a couple weeks ago. it's nice to see the is&t embracing the concept of grand challenges other than academia and industry, we can also get the crowdsourcing. we can get a design teamonline and crank stuff out. and the grand challenge ofanswering your question, how do people embracesome of these problems?

i think the grand challenge is one vehicle that's finally been embraced by is&t that's been used in other communities like darpa, nsf, and things that get people aroundsome of the problems you were bringing up. you kind of get your nonprofit. we get a coalition of thewilling and interested and get some momentum, justlike crowdsourcing this.

- bring it to the hive. (mumbles) - [man in audience] no, exactly. - no, we are looking for a prompt. the one thing i would add to that is to humanize some of these problems. and so sometimes we look at problems and they are so big they're overwhelming, and maybe it's not thatthey're not challenging enough, they're just overwhelmingand you don't see

how you can make a difference, especially environmental issues, but to try to humanize those problems so that you're solving, if you're solving theproblem for a person, you're likely solving it formany people like that person. and to think about, what's the need of the truck stop owner? that's a really interestingone, and environmental issues.

i think some of it isstorytelling and humanizing and making the problems ... and that's another place where we can help asacademics or educators, is to help people figure out ways to spend longer understandingwhere the people are at the end of wickedproblems and other problems and take longer to think through what the people inside ofthose problems are needing.

- can we thank our panel? we're so glad you could join us.

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