Emerging Technologies

Taking a Leap of Faith: My Career Path

This is the story of a woman who graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering (CSE) degree in India and started her career at Accenture. After feeling unsatisfied with her consultant projects, she decided to take a leap of faith and search for opportunities. She ended up at HP Labs and was offered to present in international conferences if she did well in her day-to-day work. She worked on a product that would allow connectivity without the Internet in developing countries and presented it in multiple international conferences. She then went to the University of Pittsburgh to do her Master’s and worked on transfer rule learning and biomarkers discovery research. Despite facing challenges from her family and visa issues, she kept learning and eventually found success in the AI field. Her lessons learned include challenging yourself, finding the balance between going deeper into one field and going broader, and keeping your hunger for knowledge alive.

Navigating Partnerships with Unicorns and Large Enterprises: Protecting AI Startups' Interests

This article explores the challenges faced by AI startups when partnering with unicorns and large enterprises, and provides strategies to protect their interests. It suggests engaging legal expertise to negotiate favorable terms and review contractual agreements, implementing NDAs and non-compete agreements, and considering jurisdiction and governing law. On the technical side, it recommends encryption, access controls, authorization, watermarking, model protection, federated learning, secure collaboration frameworks, and regular auditing and monitoring. By combining legal and technical safeguards, AI startups can mitigate the risks of theft or unauthorized usage of their AI models.

Finding the Career Path for You

This article discusses the importance of pivoting through different roles in order to achieve personal and professional satisfaction in a product management career path. The author shares their experience of transitioning from a product development and engineering career path to a product management leadership role, only to find that the added responsibilities were not what they had expected. They eventually downsized to an individual contributor role, where they could focus on technology innovation. The article emphasizes the importance of taking risks and measuring success/failures in order to achieve transformative success.

Managing Customer Expectations in the Age of AI

Working at an AI startup can be challenging due to customers having unrealistic expectations from AI, which are often based on what they have seen in Sci-fi movies. To manage expectations, AI experts should put a thorough disclaimer, create an SDK to protect the system from wrong inputs, and embed an explainable AI into the system. This will help to bridge the gap between the system and the user, and provide logical reasoning behind any unexpected events.

Building Effective Test Frameworks: Lessons from My Experience

In today's agile software development era, building and maintaining effective test automation is crucial for delivering high-quality software products. Building a test framework can be complex and challenging, but with the right approach and mindset, it can be a rewarding endeavor. To navigate through the complexities, it is important to understand the architecture of your application, identify the tools and skill sets of your team, design for reusability and maintainability, implement a robust test data strategy, utilize CI/CD pipelines, and implement effective logging and reporting mechanisms. Documenting your approach and seeking input from stakeholders is also essential. After implementing the framework, thorough documentation and knowledge sharing within the team are important for adoption and maintenance. Continuous learning and enhancement, overcoming frustration and self-doubt, and embracing others' opinions and feedback are also key factors in building an effective test framework. By following these strategies, you can successfully build a test framework that contributes to the success of your team and organization.

Taking a Product from Inception to Market

This is a story of a successful product launch from idea to market in three months. The product was an advertising technology company, a demand-side platform, that allowed customers to buy ad space in real-time bidding exchanges. The team needed to prove to advertisers that the investment was worth it from an ROI perspective, so they studied foot traffic measurements and built a proof-of-concept of their own foot traffic measurement product. After validating the findings, they created training and pitch materials to present to potential clients. They imposed budget constraints to get the ideal volume of use and traffic for their study. Ultimately, they were able to get the product to market before they ran out of resources.