This is the final interview in a four-part interview series where we explored Maria's considerable history from her early years and into her professional life of notable distinction, significant outstanding contributions in a number of fields including societal causes. In future interviews, we will continue to follow Maria's outstanding work impacting business, industry, governments, education, and society.

As a side note, while in California next week, I’m having lunch with Maria and I will have much to share from the experience. I’ll provide a Journal Blog about lessons and insights gained on my upcoming trips to Las Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Paris, Astana, Geneva, …

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Harvey Mudd College is led by Maria Klawe, HMC's fifth president who began her tenure in 2006. A renowned computer scientist and scholar, President Klawe is the first woman to lead the college since its founding in 1955. Prior to joining HMC, she served as Dean of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. During her time at Princeton, Maria led the School of Engineering and Applied Science through a strategic planning exercise that created an exciting and widely embraced vision for the school. At Harvey Mudd College, she led a similarly ambitious strategic planning initiative, "HMC 2020: Envisioning the Future."

Maria joined Princeton from the University of British Columbia where she served as Dean of Science from 1998 to 2002, Vice President of Student and Academic Services from 1995 to 1998 and head of the Department of Computer Science from 1988 to 1995. Prior to UBC, Maria spent eight years with IBM Research in California, and two years at the University of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. (1977) and B.Sc. (1973) in Mathematics from the University of Alberta.

Maria has made significant research contributions in several areas of mathematics and computer science including functional analysis, discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science, human-computer interaction, gender issues in information technology, and interactive-multimedia for mathematics education. Her current research focuses on discrete mathematics.

Maria is a past President of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York, past chair of the Board of Trustees of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology in Palo Alto, and a past trustee of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics in Los Angeles. Maria has held leadership positions with the American Mathematical Society, the Computing Research Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and the Canadian Mathematical Society.

Maria is one of the 10 members of the board of Microsoft Corporation, a board member of Broadcom Corporation and the nonprofit Math for America, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a trustee for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and a member of both the Stanford Engineering Advisory Council and the Advisory Council for the Computer Science Teachers Association. She was elected as a fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery in 1996 and as a founding fellow of the Canadian Information Processing Society in 2006. Other awards include Vancouver YWCA Women of Distinction Award in Science and Technology (1997), Wired Woman Pioneer (2001), Canadian New Media Educator of the Year (2001), BC Science Council Champion of the Year (2001), University of Alberta Distinguished Alumna (2003), Nico Habermann Award (2004), and honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (2011), the University of British Columbia (2010), Mount Saint Vincent University (2009), Acadia University (2006), Dalhousie University (2005), Queen's University (2004), the University of Waterloo (2003) and Ryerson University (2001).

To listen to this interview, click on this MP3 file link
[Click here to listen to Part 1 of this interview: Dr. Maria Klawe: Pioneering World-Renowned Computer Scientist and Executive Leader, shares her past to current career years — Part 1]

First two interviews in this series:

Dr. Maria Klawe: Pioneering World-Renowned Computer Scientist and Executive Leader, Shares her Early Career Years (20s’ to 30s’)

Dr. Maria Klawe: Pioneering World-Renowned Computer Scientist and Executive Leader, Shares her Early Years (childhood to 30)

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:36:
Maria, you are an icon in so many domains where your innovations and accomplishments laid foundations in science, education, leadership, innovation, and research. This is the last in an interview series where we explored your considerable history from your early years and into your professional life of notable distinction, significant outstanding contributions in a number of fields including societal causes. Thank you for sharing your considerable expertise, deep accumulated insights and wisdom with our audience. .
".....It's my pleasure Stephen, it's always a joy to talk with you...."

We've done a remarkable series of interviews detailing your past history. We only got half way through the interview in Dr. Maria Klawe: Pioneering World-Renowned Computer Scientist and Executive Leader Part 1, where Dr. Klawe shares her past to current career years). The purpose of this session here today is to complete the interview.

:02:37:
I'm going to continue now with that journey with this next question. Maria, can you further describe those years and several pivotal moments that shaped you?
"....I love to work with the community and create something new that wasn't there beforehand. If you build something with a set of values that faculty actually own themselves it will last because they will tend to hire people who have similar values to that so it will last long past the people who built it....Another thing is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to find solutions and how necessary it is that we educate people who really can collaborate across disciplines....Something that has become much more apparent to me as I get older is that it all works a lot better if you pick your day job to be something that helps you move forward with your life goals...."

:08:02:
You have accomplished so much — what sort of items do you have in your 'bucket list' of life goals?
"....The overall life goal is to fundamentally change the culture of science and engineering so that it becomes more supportive of people who are not the norm...."

:09:48:
Maria talks about her other industry contributions after her time with IBM and what motivated her during this period.
"....It was interesting to see the interplay between the tech culture in companies and what it means for the female employees...."

:21:47:
Earlier you talked about your entrepreneurial career and of course sitting on the boards of two Fortune companies. Is there anything else you would like to add about your entrepreneurial career - the good/bad/controversial? For example while you were on the board of Silicon Chalk you learned many things, and you were on the board of Brightside and learned other things about what to do and what not to do. Can you share any of that?
"....I had to learn to use things other than rational argument to get things to happen because in the view of some of the other board members I was just a nuisance....I run into this over and over again in my life. People meet you and think that all of my opinions are based solely on my academic experiences so they are not going to have any validity in the business world...."

:25:59:
What enduring lessons shape you today from your entrepreneurial work?
"....Timing really matters....If you're going to do something that is going to have a really big impact, you are probably going to start working on it well before you really know what the timing is going to be, so there's this big issue of luck as well....Pick the people you work with very carefully. It's one of the things I think very hard about when I take on a responsibility, whether it's on a board or deciding to do a joint project with a group or whatever, make sure it's a set of people that you really share your values with...."

:28:01:
Do you have any additional entrepreneurial aspirations for the future?
"....I enjoy collaborating with startups and I have one amazing initiative that I'm doing with a 12 person startup in Palo Alto. It's a startup called Piazza....I'm really enjoying the opportunity not to do my own startup, but to be helping out other startups. I also have a good relationship with a non-profit startup called Reasoning Mind that I probably mentioned before, that's doing a web-based approach to math education and I love working with them as well. It's fun to be in a place where you can actually help people do things...."

:38:21:
What are five lessons you want to pass on in regards to innovation?
"....Pick an important problem....Build a diverse team....Persist and work hard....Regularly re-evaluate your plan and strategy and change when you have to....Ask for help when you need it...."

:43:27:
Maria describes her involvement with the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and her various roles.
"....I really love the ACM, it's a great organization. Obviously it is a huge sponsor and disseminator of research in terms of what it does with conferences and with journals. It has had great people as president, on the council and great staff. I'm really proud of it as an organization to work with...."

:49:03:
Maria talks about her history with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) and shares why is this work is important.
"....I was on the board for 14 years; I went off a little more than a year ago partly because I'm a big believer that people should rotate off boards, and partly because Anita Borg Institute is doing incredibly well. As much as I love everything ABI does I felt like they didn't absolutely need me, and I think they have become the world's organization that focuses on the need to have more diverse teams (including gender diverse), and on the fact there are incredible career opportunities for everyone in IT...."

:59:59:
In your involvement with the Anita Borg Institute in other interviews you also talked about being involved with the Grace Hopper conference (keynoting and bringing teams there, etc). Can you talk about other parts of your involvement with the Grace Hopper conference and why does this work matter?
"....It's now run annually and I've attended every single one except for one....It's become a major place where companies recruit for interns and for regular positions. It's a complete mix of kinds of talks:....research....career professional development....mentoring....I think of it as personifying Anita's approach to life: work on hard things, make a difference, make sure you have fun while you're doing it...."

:01:03:08:
Can you share some of the keynotes that have occurred there?
"....the Imposter Panel...."

:01:05:45:
I guess that brings up the question then, where have you felt like an imposter and how did you manage it?
"....What I realized over time is that whenever I start something new....I just think I'm going to be a total failure at it. Of course the most important thing is to not stop yourself from doing things just because you think you are going to be a total failure, and the important thing is to just do it...."

:01:09:30:
You talked about the work you've done with regards to mathematics and your contributions there and also mathematical societies and mathematical research. Can you share your experiences and lessons with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley?
"....MSRI is the premiere one of all of the mathematical institutes and the model has established the idea of this kind of institute. It runs one or two themes a year and brings in a number of senior people as well as a number of post-docs, as well as workshops around those themes....It's one of those examples where I love the people on the board, I love what the institute does. It's really fun being part of that community and it's an opportunity to have my foot in the mathematic research community which I also really enjoy...."

:01:13:49:
What lessons can you share from your leadership position with the American Mathematical Society (AMS)?
"....The thing I learned from being a trustee for five years was that it was a ton of work, but it really gave me an education of how professional societies operate...."

:01:16:46:
What lessons can you share from your leadership position with the Computing Research Association?
"....Nancy Leveson and I proposed to the CRA board that we start a committee on the status of women in computing that would really try to look at what the issues were that affected the low participation of women in computing research careers. The board agreed, so the next year (1991) we had the first year of CRA-W....It's been a very active and very successful group and it has won one of the presidential mentoring awards a couple of years ago....One of the things I feel great about it is I was co-chair for three years, helped get it started and then it has run on its own since then...."

:01:24:22:
You are also a contributor to the nonprofit Math for America. Can you describe what your role is and what you hope to achieve?
"....I love Math for America...It's all about the teachers....Instead of complaining about teachers, it's all about giving teachers the kind of resources and the kind of support that they need to actually be successful...."

:01:31:26:
When we look at your history you have won so many awards and you've been recognized by so many different groups. Can you talk about some of those awards and your experiences with them?
"....I spend a lot of time these days nominating people for awards....I think it's incredibly important to recognize people who have made a difference in the world so it gives me a lot of pleasure to write nomination letters and to support nominations in various kinds of ways. I think it highlights great work, and people who do great work aren't doing it for the recognition obviously because it typically takes a decade of hard work before anyone's going to recognize it. But I think it makes a lot of sense to draw attention to it because I think it inspires others to do great work...."

:01:37:26:
You are so involved in societal impact initiatives and we talked about some of them here. Are there others that you can describe that we haven't discussed?
"....The Aphasia Project ran for about 8 years with most of that to be in the first 5 years....What we really discovered, but I don't think was fully recognized before we started working on it, is that it was very hard to design a system that was going to work for random people because with Aphasia (with its many cognitive disabilities), every individual is different....The other thing we realized is while there is lots of funding for children with speech defects or any kind of speech issues, there is no funding for adults....So it ended up being a little like Silicon Chalk, a research project that was ahead of its time, but I'm optimistic that somebody will manage to do something — one device is so much less expensive...."

:01:42:51:
Who are your mentors today and how do they influence you?
"....The number one mentor in my life is my husband, the love of my life, collaborator and all kinds of things — he's the person I talk to about pretty much everything. But I'm also fortunate to have a number of tech leaders who are either slightly older than me or slightly younger than me (or sometimes quite a bit younger), both male and female who I talk to about issues a lot....The approach that I tend to take is to get people with very different personalities and different viewpoints and who know me in different ways and get them to provide advice, perspective and it works really well....I also get a lot of advice from my children...."

:01:47:33:
Maria, I'm going to roll up a series of questions into one final question. You can choose how you want to answer this. You are always working on hard questions and challenges — what are they today and into the future? Or from mid-career to the present, what were/are the areas of controversy? And finally, if you were conducting this interview, what 3 questions would you ask, and then what would be your answers? You can pick among those three and determine how you want to answer them.
"....I'd say that the things that I do are controversial because I'm constantly pushing for change. Sometimes you do have to push, but the more you can get where people feel that they are making the change because they want to make the change, the more likely the change will succeed and last....If I were conducting the interview what 3 questions would I ask?....Why do I love Harvey Mudd College so much?.....What would I change in my career choices, if anything?....Where is my most favorite place in the world?...."

:01:54:07:
Maria, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

Music by Sunny Smith Productions and Shaun O'Leary

The most important attribute for successful executives is to keep up with trends as they will influence your work, strategy and success. We have a singular opportunity to hear from Andrew Ng uniquely being in the Time 100, CNN 10, Fortune 40 under 40, MIT TR35. Andrew’s work is impacting you through speech recognition systems, artificial intelligence applications, robotics, machine learning systems and much more. To provide an example of the utility of machine learning and neural nets, Skype recently demoed their real-time universal language translator which I will be using in business. In addition, Andrew pioneered the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement which will deeply influence your enterprise teams by obtaining quality skills through free online courses from the top universities and providers. In May, Andrew was made Baidu’s head of research which also involves overseeing their Silicon Valley AI lab.  There are partial extracts from the interview however it is best to listen to the full podcast.

Quoting extensively from his Stanford profile, ACM and Wikipedia, Andrew Ng is a co-founder of Coursera, the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and a Computer Science faculty member where he is a distinguished researcher in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and deep learning with over 100 publishing credits.

In 2011 he led the development of Stanford University's main MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, and also taught an online Machine Learning class that was offered to over 100,000 students, leading to the founding of Coursera with his partners. Their goal is to give everyone in the world access to a high quality education for free. Today their platform partners with top universities to offer high-quality, free, online courses. With over 100 partners, over 500 courses, and 7 million students, theirs is the largest MOOC platform in the world.

Ng's recent awards include being named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world; to the CNN 10: Thinkers list; Fortune 40 under 40; and being named by Business Insider as one of the top 10 professors across Stanford University. In 2008, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35. In 2007, Ng was awarded a Sloan Fellowship. For his work in Artificial Intelligence, he is also a recipient of the Computers and Thought Award.

Outside of online education, Ng's research work is in machine learning. Ng’s Stanford research group focuses on deep learning, which builds very large neural networks to learn from labeled and unlabeled data. Recently, a Stanford team (led by Adam Coates) built the world’s largest deep learning system with over 10 billion learnable parameters trained via back propagation using inexpensive GPU hardware. This work was presented in ICML 2013. In 2011, Ng founded the Google Brain project which involved a neural network trained using deep learning algorithms that learned to recognize higher-level concepts, and is currently used in the Android Operating System's speech recognition system. His early work includes the Stanford Autonomous Helicopter project, the STAIR (STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot) project, and ROS, a widely used open-source robotics software platform.

More information can be found here.

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

PARTIAL EXTRACTS AND QUOTES FROM THE EXTENSIVE DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:34:
In terms of your research what are the big research questions in machine learning and artificial intelligence and what are the ways and processes for answers?
"....I think the scene of AI and deep learning specifically (which I've been working in), has been taking off like crazy over the last few years. The number of academic research papers on deep learning and on the massive neural networks has been rising faster than almost anything on the scene and in industry too....Being at the center of some of this activity I feel like many causes of deep learning are still wide open and we don't really know where the future is going to go...."

:02:22:
I had a discussion with Tom Mitchell and he talked about the Never-ending Language Learner (NELL) Project, and I guess Carnegie Mellon also has their NEIL Project and the ramifications of that. Do you think it's going to go in the direction where we are going to have really useful, almost human-like capabilities that are on the Web?
"....I think Tom Mitchell's work is really inspiring because his vision about continuous learning software is inspiring....There are some things that computers vastly outperform humans just in terms of the sheer amount of text they can consume, but in terms of reasoning about the world and real human level AI (despite getting far more data, text or images or audio than any human could possibly get in their entire lifetime), our software still falls short. So to me this is a sign that we still don't have the right algorithms yet because whatever humans do we learn to be much more intelligent with much less data...."

:04:17:
What are some controversies in your field and why?
"....Deep learning is very exciting and one of the confusions in the discipline is that the term 'deep learning' encompasses really two ideas. The first idea is called Supervised Learning in which if you have a lot of labeled data, these algorithms are fantastic at soaking up the labels to make accurate predictions....But there's a second, not really unrelated body of ideas that also goes by the term deep learning that is very different, which is: 'can you get a piece of software to watch YouTube or read text on the internet or listen to audio for hours on end and without you telling it anything or tagging or labeling any data and have it figure it out for itself?'....I think the second unsupervised learning, learning from unlabeled or untagged data is maybe most human-like. I think most humans learn primarily from unlabeled data and I think that this unsupervised learning idea has tremendous potential for letting us make a lot of progress in machine perception...."

:07:36:
Do you see some value being applied to the deep learning work?
"....The world is so complex my instinct is to try to select incredibly flexible learning algorithms and let the learning algorithms examine data from the world and to sort out what is true or what is not true about the world for itself, so my instinct is to steer away from that body of work. But it would be interesting to see how the more traditional, the logical reasoning aspects of deep learning algorithms could come together some day...."

:09:00:
In the work that you do what are the practical applications for 2015 or 2016 and how do they impact things like business/government/media/education and society?
"....I think because of the work of the major tech companies using deep learning, many of us are already using deep learning algorithms....I think machine learning touches so many aspects of our lives, and I think what some of these organizations have done is create deep learning through the power engineered throughout their organizations in order to apply the deep learning algorithm to many different problems. I like to tell people that most of us use machine learning algorithms dozens of times a day without knowing it...."

:11:10:
In your opinion, what will computers and robots look like by 2020?
"....It's only in the last two or three years that there have been far more robotics startups than in the previous 3 or 5 or 10 years, but I really don't know where it's going to go. It's really exciting work and people are producing low cost robots for manipulation which is fantastic for researchers....I think if we want to make progress towards truly intelligent robots we have to be careful not to overhype the science. In order to make a little bit of progress towards AI or towards truly intelligent perception, I think there is tremendous potential in deep learning algorithms, especially the uncertified versions of learning algorithms...."

:14:52:
There are varying opinions of Kurzweil and his idea of singularity. Do you support it in any way or do you think it is too far out?
"....AI has tremendous potential that I think in the coming five or ten years we'll make tremendous progress in perception. I hope that deep learning will play a huge part of that but the discussion of the singularity I don't think is serving the science well, and I think it is far further out than the impression some popular media sometimes convey...."

:16:11:
You are a founder of Coursera (with Daphne Koller). Can you overview your projections for 2015, the key KPIs of success?
"....A couple things we care a lot about, one is growth....We want to give everyone access to great education so there is a lot of room to grow this season in our work on mobile apps to let learners access Coursera....A second one is credential value. The thing is that mobile learners around the world are getting credentials that they are earning from taking Coursera MOOCs and this is on their resume and are using them to find better employment opportunities....Another thing we are tracking is the degree to which employers understand the value of these MOOC credentials and we're seeing that grow rapidly already and I hope that continues to grow throughout the next couple of years...."

:19:09:
The concept of MOOCs is so controversial. There are people who rally behind it and say it's the greatest thing that ever happened and others that say it is an old story. What are your feelings about that controversy or do you think it's just a transition point?
"....The ability to deliver these highly scalable forms of education I think dramatically changes the economics of education. There is still a large upfront cost to producing the course content, then once you've done it the incremental cost of signing up new students is effectively zero so that's a change. Having said that I think the student experience isn't good enough. We haven't figured out the pedagogy, the software platform, the website needs a lot of work. I think it's still very early days...."

:21:40:
Is there a value to other market segments such as business, government or society?
"....In the broadest sense I think an education gives you super powers. With an education you can learn to write software, teach other people, learn to cook healthier food for your children, with an education you will live a longer life....At a societal level I think that we can accelerate the progress of civilization. Governments are looking to MOOCs as a way to level up their populations' skill set....The world today changes so fast that all of us need regular infusions of knowledge in order to stay current. Even though we work with universities and this is a project that the five of us had launched out of university, the biggest impact MOOCs is having today is not on college students, it is on continuing adult education. I think many businesses, either individuals, the working professionals or often management are coming or sending others to come to Coursera to take MOOCs in order to continue to develop their employees...."

:25:17:
What are the latest research findings on online education (MOOCs)?
"....By now we've had lots of things, dozens and dozens of studies done by Coursera or by our university partners. I will share one result that was surprising to me....this is just one example of the many dozens of studies that we and Coursera's university partners have done that I think are starting to allow us to more deeply understand student motivations and student learning...."

:28:10:
Can you add additional insight to some of your biggest challenges and controversies in this field?
"....I sometimes get asked, 'Will this replace professors? Will MOOCs replace professors?'....I think the opportunity is for technology to free up that favorite teacher of yours from the more routine, repetitive aspects of teaching so that they can spend even more time in the future in conversations, mentoring and coaching students, just as they did with you and just as my mentors did with me...."

:30:06:
Can you describe your most significant and influential research achievement and the practical outcomes seen today and forecast it into the future?
".....One of the things I'm quite proud of was the fact that we launched these MOOCs....I'm also proud of the deep learning work that my students and my Google team have done....It was really team work. I feel that because of my role I tend to get outside credit for a lot of the things that were really the work of my students or the work of my teammates....And one last thing. You asked about robots just now. One thing I didn't mention is that my Stanford students and I have been spending a long time looking at building self-driving cars using deep learning algorithms. I think that could be another economically important application...."

:34:05:
Can you generalize a little about what you see as the most difficult challenges in research in general and then some lessons that you can pass on to the audience?
"....One of the books that has influenced my thinking a lot is a book called the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and this is a philosophy to building startup companies, but it's a philosophy that I think applies well to research projects as well because I think there is a certain emphasis not on laying out grandiose multi-year plans that have huge assumptions and huge risks and may ever come to fruition, but an emphasis on staying humble and running experiments like crazy and learning and iterating....I think we should have a grand plan, we should have some idea of where we are going....But when we think about what happens day to day over those five or ten years I think there are little pieces of day to day learning. The faster you can learn the faster you can make progress in research because I think fundamentally research is learning about the unknown...."

:41:53:
Andrew, what are the greater burning challenges and research problems for today’s youth to solve to inspire them to go into computing?
"....I think that computer science is fundamentally about scale. I think that in many professions that individuals could choose to go into, there are few disciplines as scalable as engineering or as computer science specifically....Computer science is impacting so many ideas. I hope more people will join me to work on AI, but even outside of AI I think the ability of computer science to change the world is almost unlimited...."

:45:31:
There are a number of organizations, one of them is the ACM and it has a number of resources. How has the ACM and its resources supported your research?
"....I always look forward to receiving the ACM newsletter and the new ACM magazine in the mail and flipping through that in order to have another channel to learn about the latest computing trends. I've been grateful to the ACM for the events it organizes for bringing the technical computer together...."

:46:40:
In a broader way, including but even looking beyond computing, what do you see as the top challenges facing us and how do you propose they be solved?
"....I think our planet faces a lot of challenges — I think that global poverty and inequality are some of the major challenges facing our society...."

:50:15:
From your extensive experiences, speaking, travels and work, can you share any stories (perhaps something amusing, surprising, unexpected or amazing)?
"....A few months ago I was at a party at LinkedIn here in Silicon Valley and I met one of the students who had taken one of my Machine Learning MOOCs. He came up to me and said 'you must be Professor Andrew Ng'. He said one of the features he most liked was the ability to play video at 2x speed because it allowed him to blaze through the video and if he missed something he could just do an instant replay. But he said to me, 'I've listened to about 20 hours of video of you talking and all of these videos are of you talking at 2x speed, but now that I meet you in person, I'm really surprised that in person you talk....so....slow'...."

:54:14:
Andrew, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

Adam Cole (B. Math, I.S.P., ITCP, PMP)

My wife and two young daughters recently took a last minute trip to visit friends in North Carolina. They flew via Southwest Airlines. Southwest was the first (successful) discount airline ,  and continues to operate a no-frills operation to this day. What is taken for granted on other airlines is lacking on Southwest including reserved/assigned seating (yup, seating is a free for all; better show up earlier), meals (pack your own lunch), in-flight movies and TV (you are welcome to bring your own device), ...you get the picture. And yet, my three fine ladies loved their experience!

I should point out here that my eldest daughter was spoiled by her grandparents the month before with a first-class trip to France; one would think her flying expectations set the bar impossibly high for Southwest.

How and why can a discount, no-frills airline successfully compete with premium, first-class service???

Customer service.

This is important, increasingly so as our world becomes flatter, so indulge me while I repeat...

Customer service.

The Southwest airplane personnel have a great sense of humour. They have a lot of fun with their jobs, and that is contagious in a powerful way. When I picked up my family the first thing they told me was about their flight. I wasn't immediately regaled with stories of reuniting with best friends, or swimming in the ocean - a first for my youngest, or surprisingly being in the same city as President Obama. Apparently the most exciting experience was their discount flight. They couldn't get over the many humorous little interactions; from the captain joking upon touching down, "Phew! [pause] It was a pleasure serving most of you. [pause] Alright, all of you. Now get your things and get out!", to the flight attendants giving a basket of pretzels to two young overly-energetic boys to hand out, or a flight attendant announcing the following four legs of the flight and then suggesting that any of the passengers with them until the plane's final destination better have received a really good discount.

Sadly there are many (far too many) customer experience stories to the contrary to contrast this with.

Yet look at the cost-benefit of good customer service. Southwest now has three new loyal customers who will go forth and evangelize the brand -- and this cost them far less than a lousy little box lunch or a seat back entertainment system; and, the impact is far, far higher. What a brilliant business model. (Anyone at Air Canada reading this?)

In my career I have worked with multiple healthcare call centers and CRM environments. It is amazing how customers (patients, doctors) respond differently to motivated and engaged staff. The costs of motivating and training your staff to be personable, humorous, and pleasant is so little relative to the returns. Why doesn't every company get it?

Professors Silvio Micali (l) and Shafi Goldwasser (r) Turing Award Recipients in 2013.
Photo by Jason Dorfman, CSAIL/MIT

Silvio Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT and a Principal Investigator at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), is a recipient of the Gödel Prize from ACM SIGACT and EATCS. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, he is the recipient of the RSA Mathematics Award, the Berkeley Distinguished Alumnus of the Year Award, and the ISE (Information Security Executive) New England Rising Star Award. Micali is the editor (with Franco Preparata, Paris Kanellakis, Christoff Hoffmann, and Robert Hawkins) of a five-volume series of textbooks, "Advances in Computing Research", and has published more than one hundred scientific papers.

Micali is the co-founder and co-leader of the Information and Security Group at CSAIL

A graduate of the University of Rome with a degree in mathematics, he earned a Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

ACM Turing Awards announcement: http://www.acm.org/press-room/awards/turing-award-12

To listen to the interview, click on this MP3 file link

DISCUSSION:

Interview Time Index (MM:SS) and Topic

:00:54:
When did you hear of this extraordinary honour, recipient of what is widely considered the Nobel Prize in Computing, the 2012 ACM Turing Award? How did you feel at the time and what was the reaction from your colleagues and from your family?
"....I felt good and I felt good in particular to have won it with Shafi. We were graduate students together, we worked for many years, overcame many difficulties even multiple rejections of our work before we got an award....My colleagues were very happy....I felt overall it was very positive and my family was ecstatic...."

:03:30:
How will the Turing Award impact your work, your influence and your thinking?
"....On one side we should strive for absolute true novelty, but on the other side we should strive (at least I do strive) also for universal recognition....They can be antagonistic and in the short-term if you desire universal recognition it means you have to work on problems that everybody perceives to be important, in other words with the requirement of pursuing a more established, conservative line of research. What do I hope from the Turing? It takes care of some of the desire for recognition and leaves me free to go on a limb and take more scientific risks to explore new wildernesses so to speak....We work very hard to increase our reputation and my peers will continue to judge my work according to strict standards and they are right in doing so...."

:05:56:
What are your life goals you want to achieve and how will you achieve them?
"....It is so personal that if I answer truthfully I will be a little bit enigmatic. My goal is essentially one goal and that is to understand the world and to be understood and in my mind it is quite the same. How to achieve it?....You need the combination of supreme confidence and supreme doubt...."

:06:56:
Silvio talks about what led him to co-write one of the most influential papers in computer science, "Probabilistic Encryption", as a graduate student in 1983?
"....If you want me to outline the story of that work, I'll tell you it is a tale of fearlessness and shameless luck in and around everything combined...."

:17:30:
Can you provide additional details behind your approach, the simulation paradigm?
"....I remember when I was a kid I got an acute attack of classic solipsism, which is a fancy word to say that I started being fearful that there was no outside reality, it was all in my head, that I was alone and the world was a product of my imagination. It lasted only a few days....What impressed me at the timen is I remember distinctively how impossible it was to break the symmetry, to decide which was virtual and which was real. If I could not distinguish the real from the virtual, then in what sense could they be considered different? Somehow that thought stuck with me; fast-forward a few decades and now we have the simulation paradigm...."

:24:33:
Silvio describes his notions of encryption security, for example semantic security and indistinguishability and how these measures must be met for schemes to provide security across the wide range of cryptographic applications.
"....What we figured out is we actually developed computational indistinguishability as a pool to prove semantic security. We proved if we have the system which was computationally indistinguishable, that implied that it was actually semantically secure. Then we proved that the opposite was true, semantic security improved computational indistinguishability and there were other notions that we proved to all be equivalent to each other for this notion of security. This is the most reassuring thing that can be in science when you try and describe a new object and you go from one avenue to another avenue and to a third avenue and all these avenues become absolutely equivalent...."

:31:30:
Overall, how did your work revolutionize the study of cryptography and lay the foundation for the theory of cryptographic security?
"....Now we are dealing with scientific systems with the notion of security embedded and all these reductions. I believe that bringing proofs and replacing heuristic proofs and having these very sophisticated apples to oranges reduction was our contribution to the field...."

:35:28:
Can you talk about your work with knowledge complexity, "zero-knowledge" proofs?
"....The zero-knowledge proof is one that reveals only that the statement is true, without having any other pieces of knowledge to it. The question is how can you tell that nothing else has leaked? In some sense that is another application of the simulation paradigm because essentially you wanted to prove a theorem in a way that if somebody knew beforehand that the statement of a theorem was true, then he could reconstruct the proof you give to him in exactly the same way in which you provided it...."

:40:12:
What are the implications of this work? How does this work extend to other domains?
"....In a cryptographic protocol in an economic transaction you want to have both correctness and secrecy....If I can control the amount of privacy that I lose and I can confidently enter into many more transactions...that is an enabler not only of business transactions but personal transactions as well....At this point from just encryption, cryptography has become a science of adversarial computing and adversaries are everywhere. Because adversarial computing is so pervasive and allows us to model so many things there are many, many domains to which this work may apply...."

:45:40:
How does your work address important practical problems such as the protection of data from being viewed or modified, providing a secure means of communications and transactions over the internet?
"....We want a more stringent notion of security, we want signatures that are unlearnable, and that is crucial if you really want to have a theory of things that cannot be modified over the internet, and actually we do have a signature scheme with this property developed already...."

:50:59:
What is the impact of your work on computational complexity?
"....Proving a theorem is a most frustrating thing. They are frustrating to write down, they are frustrating to read and somehow interactive proofs actually transform this frustrating thing into a game with a prover and a verifier....If we very quickly interact (say) 100 times and you see that I win 100 times in a row, then the best explanation is that the theorem is actually true. This is important because you want to figure out which problems are efficiently proven and which are not, so interactive proofs are one impact of this work on complexity theory...."

:54:27:
What are your thoughts about things like quantum mechanics and the twin particle effect and the impact it's going to have perhaps on your field? You see the work of Judea Pearl on causality and counterfactualism and external validity and artificial intelligence. Do you see some kind of connection between some of the research you've done in those areas at all?
"....Let me address the more dangerous to my field, which is quantum computing. We need hard problems to base cryptography on. We want to take a purely computational problem, purely mathematical problem and actually use it to massage it around and transform it by magic in a very human problem. Of course what is easy computation and what it hard computation depends a lot on the computational model...."

:56:39:
What are the practical applications and implications of your work influencing our daily lives?
"....A simple example is one of a password....That would be the most practical application I can think of...."

:01:00:29:
Can you additionally profile your extensive research history, its lasting impact and some valuable lessons you wish to share from your top research areas that we haven't talked about yet?
"....My lesson would be: get rid of the details as much as possible, generalize your problem as much as possible, back up and then back farther up until you see the whole picture in its simplicity...."

:01:03:27:
You've talked about your past research and you've also talked about some of the other areas that you have researched. Can you get into more detail about your current research interests?
"....Somehow at a late age I came up with the beautiful notion that was put forward about a century ago by an economist, which is mechanism design. Essentially this is a way to choose an optimal outcome without data...."

:01:04:56:
What are the broad implications and applications of this current work?
"....In principle any decision maker, in particular any politician, would stand to benefit from mechanism design. If you really want to go one step farther that would be the best way to engineer a system like the internet that is very decentralized in which no one is in charge...I would not be surprised if mechanism design were to provide us with key insights for understanding existing and successful biological systems....."

:01:06:17:
What are your future research interests?
"....If you stress future the answer is the brain...."

:01:09:17:
What are your most difficult challenges in research and what valuable lessons do you wish to share?
"....My challenges are the inability to work alone and lack of knowledge. The lessons I would share are the same ones I use to cope with my challenges - collaboration and imagination...."

:01:10:03:
Every time you get a cohort together you are going to get a lot of discussion and different points of view, so what would you describe as additional areas of controversy in the areas that you research?
"....The main controversy, not only in my research area but in any area is the very definition of an area. Defining an area is both necessary and useful to focus an effort for future work, to flush out the problems, to attract fresh minds, etc., but it's always a constraint, a boundary that may always incarcerate us so we have to be very careful....I'm saddened by the fact that journals and conferences publish a disproportionate amount of small but declared big advances from the status quo. I believe that the incentives are misplaced and we can and must do better and never find a way to restrict any area...."

:01:16:07:
Describe the types of research being created or updated that will drive our experiences in five or ten years? What will this experience be like — paint a picture for our audience?
"....Frankly my prediction for future research can only be based on what I know so I expect more and better of the same....I look forward to more surprises and I must confess those I cannot anticipate...."

:01:16:46:
Silvio talks about specific challenges in his education at the University of Rome and then Berkeley which were catalysts to inflection points in his lifetime of contributions and how and why this happened.
"....I'd really like to give credit to the great educational systems both in Rome and in Berkeley and to the people behind them — they really shaped me. Both universities and in particular specific teachers had been very flexible, and this for me really shaped my attitude towards research...."

:01:41:00:
You had this very unique kind of program both at the University of Rome and at Berkeley where people have given you some agility and as you indicated some flexibility. Now do you pass that on in terms of your interaction with your students and so on? Has that influenced your interactions with potential researchers?
"....Absolutely it has influenced. The extent that I actually succeed giving back what I received I don't know but I certainly try, and I have my own rigidity to worry about of course. But you bet I try to be as flexible as my teachers have been to me...."

:01:42:18:
You've worked with your colleague Shafi for some time and anytime you collaborate with someone sometimes there can be tension. How do you manage that tension or if you disagree on something?
"....The best thing is not to manage and somehow tension gets resolved. Tension is good....When you are pulled in two directions I think you generate energy and long as there is goodwill this energy gets released in a positive direction...."

:01:43:58:
There's this idea that came out of Stanford which got more attention back in 2011, this whole idea of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS). What is your opinion of MOOCS — do you see that in conflict with the traditional side of teaching or do you see it aligned with how you were mentored and the kind of support that you received in your life?
"....We have to distinguish between what is good for me and what may be good for others. To tell you the truth I really believe that enabling a very large audience to get educated is something extremely beautiful and extremely useful. Ideally I would like to do this one-on-one, but if you cannot then these online courses are a very good alternative...."

:01:47:22:
You co-founded the Information and Security Group — can you detail your objectives in the short and long term?
"....It is to foster interest, education and research in cryptography — pure and simple...."

:01:48:03:
Why are you passionate about the "Advances in Computing Research", the five-volume textbook series?
"....First of all about this specific series, let me tell you right away that I'm very proud of them. They were dedicated to the randomness of computation and I believe the interplay of randomness and computation is crucial to our field. I'm proud of the confidence by its many contributors who by the way are great leaders in our field and the editor....As the saying goes, what we know is as important as how we know it and I could not agree more...."

:01:52:10:
Please share your valuable experiences and lessons from your prior awards and recognitions?
"....I find these are very special and motivating moments...."

:01:53:34:
Silvio, you laid many of the foundational pillars in your pioneering work. Distilling from your experiences, what are the greater burning challenges and research problems for today’s youth to solve to inspire them to go into computing?
"....Computation is everywhere in one way or another. The real question that I would like to know is to what extent can we use computation to understand physical, biological and social roles and can we perhaps use computation to influence some of these roles? I think these are very big questions and we need all of the manpower we can get to answer or to scratch at the answers...."

:01:56:15:
To our youth, with an interest in a future of computing but without the educational foundation, how would you explain your work?
"....We use computation to co-operate with others while retaining our individuality, our secrets and to efficiently convince others of what we laboriously found to be true. That is my aspect of computation that is the one I cherish and that's the one I develop. Our youth, every single one of you should find what your aspect is and develop that...."

:01:57:11:
What specific qualities make you excel and why?
"....The ability to convert emotions into science....Creativity....Admiration for the past, willingness to gamble the present, and yearning for the future...."

:01:57:45:
You already discussed this before when you profiled your journey at the University of Rome and at Berkeley, all these collaborators and people who mentored you and so on. Are there any additional people, past, present, and future who inspire you and why is this so?
"....I already mentioned a few names, but let it be known that we are not having this conversation without the tremendous influence of many other minds and friends. Ultimately we are the people who inspire but I have a few other people who I have not yet mentioned who really should be mentioned...."

:01:59:47:
You choose the topic area. What do you see as the top challenges facing us today and how do you propose they be solved?
"....The top challenge as I mentioned before is solving the mystery of the brain. I really believe that to go after the opportunity, education is going to be crucial. Now we have two challenges: the brain and education. If I can go on a limb and mention another challenge (that I think is more of a psychological challenge), it is living outside our planet very soon...."

:02:04:51:
Over your long and distinguished career, what are your top lessons you want to share with the broad audience?
"....I really think power is really the symbiosis of opposites. I believe our emotions are our ultimate power and that nothing boils down to one thing...."

:02:05:37:
Silvio, with your demanding schedule, we are indeed fortunate to have you come in to do this interview. Thank you for sharing your substantial wisdom with our audience.

I am vice-chair of IFIP IP3 and chair of the Global Industry Council. This explanation came forward from ISACA who sits on both. I thought a good explanation so I am quoting directly.

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There was a question posed about the connections/differences between COBIT and ITIL. Hope that the following is of assistance:

COBIT and ITIL have been used by information technology professionals in the IT service management (ITSM) space for many years. Used together, COBIT and ITIL provide guidance for the governance and management of IT-related services by enterprises, whether those services are provided in-house or obtained from third parties such as service providers or business partners.

Enterprises need to govern and manage their information and related technology assets and resources, and those arrangements customarily include both internal and external services to satisfy specific stakeholder needs. COBIT 5 aims primarily to guide enterprises on the implementation, operation and, where required, improvement of their overall arrangements relating to governance and management of enterprise IT (GEIT). ITIL provides guidance and good practice for IT service providers for the execution of IT service management from the perspective of enabling business value.

COBIT 5 describes the principles and enablers that support an enterprise in meeting stakeholder needs, specifically those related to the use of IT assets and resources across the whole enterprise. ITIL describes in more detail those parts of enterprise IT that are the service management enablers (process activities, organizational structures, etc.).

Generally speaking:

· COBIT is broader than ITIL in its scope of coverage (GEIT). It is based on five principles (meeting stakeholder needs; covering the enterprise end to end; applying a single, integrated framework; enabling a holistic approach; and separating governance from management) and seven enablers (principles, policies and frameworks; processes; organizational structures; culture, ethics and behavior; information; services, infrastructure and applications; people, skills and competencies).

· ITIL focuses on ITSM and provides much more in-depth guidance in this area, addressing five stages of the service life cycle:  service strategy, service design, service transition, service operation and continual service improvement.

Also, COBIT and ITIL are well aligned in their approach to ITSM. The COBIT 5 Process Reference Model, as documented in COBIT 5:  Enabling Processes, maps closely to the ITIL v3 2011 stages.

The distinction between the two is sometimes described as “COBIT provides the ‘why’; ITIL provides the ‘how.’” While catchy, that view is simplistic and seems to force a false “one or the other” choice. It is more accurate to state that enterprises and IT professionals who need to address business needs in the ITSM area would be well served to consider using both COBIT and ITIL guidance. Leveraging the strengths of both frameworks, and adapting them for their use as appropriate, will aid in solving business problems and supporting business goals achievement.