David Orban dnsee interview

[dnsee] [Interactive Thinking] [[email protected]] [24-25 Ottobre 2013 - MiCo, Milano] [David Orban, Chief Executive Officer, Dotsub] [female interviewer] Hello, David, very nice to meet you. [David Orban] Hi. [interviewer] I'll start by asking you what is Singularity University's mission. [Orban] Singularity University at NASA Ames campus in California aims to empower and inspire leaders that can change the world through understanding the power of exponential change and accelerating technological change. We have courses during the summer and during the year where our students come and learn about intertwining technological tracks— artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, space, transportation, food, health, biotechnology, entrepreneurship, finance, ethics, and so on. We believe that these technologies can really change the world, and we want to teach techniques and new ways of understanding how to apply this for the betterment of humanity. [interviewer] What kind of people are you looking for for the Singularity programs? [Orban] We are looking for passionate people who are self starters who have leadership experience who have excellent academic track records and who really want to learn in order to apply what they have learned for the good of humanity, for the good of society. Our motto is create ideas that can change the lives of a billion people or more in 10 years or less. [interviewer] What do you think is the one characteristic a game changer must have? [Orban] Passion. [interviewer] What or who do you think will be the next big game changer today? [Orban] Computers are all around us, and we have learned to make them easy to use. That doesn't mean that they cannot overwhelm what we do everyday because there are just too many of them. So the two important game changers in the near future that necessarily those people who can make things happen need to implement and quickly are making computers as autonomous as possible so that they can do things without us supervising them and to make computers emotional. Emotional computing—for computers to understand human emotions— is going to be the next step so that they become more intuitive with regard to our needs, with regard to our attitudes, both on a daily basis and as society and our computing platforms merge even more intimately. [interviewer] I'd love to know more about your other project, Dotsub. [Orban] Dotsub is a New York-based startup. I am privileged to be the CEO of this company, and we apply language technologies in order to make the most emotionally inclusive and exciting medium on the Internet today— online videos—more accessible to both search engines and to people. Using captions and translated subtitles, we allow videos to be indexed so that they can be easily discovered and through the translations understood by anybody all over the world. [interviewer] Thank you very much. [Orban] Thank you. [dnsee] [Interactive Thinking.]