Macro Micro Michael Marco & Startups at the Edge (M4Edge) - Graph Analytics in the Cloak & Dagger (and also humdrum) World, with Leo Meyerovich of Graphistry

Graph Analytics in the Cloak & Dagger (and also humdrum) World, with Leo Meyerovich of Graphistry

01/21/19 • 91 min

Macro Micro Michael Marco & Startups at the Edge (M4Edge)

We are inundated by data, in our professional and personal lives. How do we make sense of it, extract the insights we need? An image is worth a thousand words, but can you visualize a complex dataset with multiple variables and scores of datapoints? This is what Leo Meyerovich of Graphistry set out to do, building on his PhD research at Berkeley. Graphistry uses Artificial Intelligence to trace patterns and correlations, helping the analyst in her investigation of the data.

In some cases, we are in fact talking of true investigations, the stuff of cloak and dagger movies. In this episode you will hear about financial fraud, election influencing, drug and human trafficking. Leo describes how AI-driven data visualization helps uncover shady webs of unsavory communications and illegal money flows, even as the criminals carefully try to cover their tracks. The same techniques can help a company better understand the behavior of its customers and how to reach them and serve them more effectively. You will also hear how Graphistry can help capture the experience and tricks of senior analysts and make them available to younger recruits—an important feature as rapid staff turnover becomes a more pressing challenge for many organizations.

At the end of the episode, Michael and Marco discuss future potential applications and debate whether future data analysis will still have a ‘human in the loop’ or evolve towards a pure black box approach.
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Previous Episode

Building the Future of Healthcare IT, with Kevin Desai of Tafi.io

We all know the beautiful vision of our healthcare future: wearable tech tracking our heart rate, glucose levels, cholesterol and so forth; doctors and nurses who ask the right questions while our answers are input easily into a smart and safe database; powerful machine learning algorithms that can not only diagnose our conditions, but predict when we'll contract our next illness, and offer suggestions for avoidance; seamless transition between and communication among different healthcare providers and insurers; all leading to better quality of care and better health. We also all know the current state of affairs in the healthcare system which, well, isn't quite as beautiful as the future. Between now and then, companies like Tafi have a lot of work to do to build the infrastructure to get us there.
Tafi's work isn't glamorous, but it's vital. In the episode we explore some of the reason why healthcare IT looks the way it does, we talk about privacy, we discuss some of the arcana of electronic medical records and interoperability, and we even make all of this into a really interesting discussion. As we've done with the previous two episodes, we also have tacked on the conversation between Michael and Marco at the end. We hope you enjoy it!
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Next Episode

How to incentivize and verify a carbon-free future, with Evan Caron of Swytch.io

We all know we need to accelerate the transition to renewable sources of energy. But on a global scale we are doing it in a way that is haphazard and inefficient. Governments experiment with subsidy schemes for renewable energy, with various degrees of success. Countries discuss targets, negotiate commitments, fight about who should shoulder more of the cost. What if we were able to reliably record and measure every action that reduces the carbon footprint—and agree on which steps have the greatest impact?

Swytch.io wants to make this possible. In this episode, co-founder Evan Caron argues that it all starts (as always) with data: Swytch provides a device-agnostic platform that can collect data from a wind farm, a solar panel, a smart meter...pretty much any device in the energy ecosystem. It uses blockchain—and in the episode we debate whether blockchain is really needed here.

That’s only the first step. Swytch will then enable energy and climate experts to access the data and use it to assess with competing models the climate impact of different energy investments around the world. Once you know where the investment should go, how do you create the right incentives to direct where it will have the greatest impact? The models in the Swytch ecosystem will determine the value of different carbon-offsetting or carbon-displacing actions and ultimately, actions which have a greater positive impact on energy sustainability should be commensurately compensated. The hope is that the system could provide the basis to set the right incentives for a faster transition to GHG reductions. It’s a tall order, that makes for a very intense conversation.
One exciting note: About midway through the conversation with Evan, we'll break in for a surprise for our listeners, a new, regular segment called Ricky's Reports from the Edge, with our friend Ricky Buch. You have to listen to see what it's all about.
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