Tom Gruber on RAI theater

Live + Virtual Keynotes

Tom enjoys public speaking about topics that matter today, such as the impact of AI on society, what makes a successful startup, and how to save the ocean. In talks to conferences and private audiences, he offers insights from his experience in technology research, design, startups, and travel. He loves interactive Q&A, and can tailor presentations to the interests of any audience. 

As an innovator, researcher, and serial startup entrepreneur, Tom gives audiences a front-row seat to what it means to envision the future, then set about building it. If you use Siri on your phone, learn from a threaded discussion on the Web, collaborate with colleagues in a virtual workspace, or use a computer to help you speak, it is likely that Tom helped invent it, influenced its development, or was designing an early version of it before it entered the mainstream.  As an Impact Advisor to over a dozen companies in Humanistic AI, he keeps his finger on the pulse of innovation. As a result, Tom adapts his talks to the latest findings and topics of interest to business audiences.

Topics


AI and Humanity Today: The Promise and Problems of Generative AI

Almost overnight, the world has come to see that the new technology of large language models and generative AI could change the nature of knowledge work. Trained on the cultural legacy of humanity, these systems can now do many tasks involving language, images, and information that are the expertise of educated professionals. In this overview of modern AI, which is updated with fresh insights every time it is given, Tom explains how these systems are created, what they are great at, what to be careful with, and the exciting applications that they enable.  He brings to bear decades of experience in designing AI systems and advising AI companies. Applications include education, creative services, software engineering, knowledge management, mental health care, and augmented cognition. He offers insights into the potential risks to individuals and society from ungoverned applications, and a positive vision for the future of truly personal AI.

Sample presentation: AI, Big Data, and Humanity in 2024: Our new relationship with AI

AI, Big Data, and Humanity: Risks and Opportunities

Artificial Intelligence, operating on big data, opens a world of possibilities to improve how we work, play, learn, and take care of ourselves. What is the proper role of AI in relation to humanity? How do we build AI-driven systems that deliver outcomes we want while avoiding unintended consequences? In this thought-provoking talk, Tom lays out a clear ethical choice. The key lies in aligning the objective of the machine with human values: engineering the AI systems to augment and collaborate with us for the betterment of humanity. Drawing from his direct experience building planetary-scale AI and advising a new generation of Humanistic AI companies, Tom offers insights to entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers navigating the high-stakes decisions of AI today.

Sample presentation: What AI and Big Data Can Do for Humanity

How to Build the Future: Practical Principles for Startup Founders

In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than a billion times every day. But in late 2007 when Tom and his co-founders launched their fledgling startup, none of this was guaranteed. Why did top VC firms first invest in the company, even as the sky was falling in financial markets? Tom outlines four key factors that led to Siri’s success — factors that are essential to any successful startup. He shares insider details of Siri’s trajectory, while providing real-world examples from other companies, showing how attendees can put these principles into practice with their own ventures.

Sample presentation: Navigating the Startup Ecosystem

Colorful Lives: Photographic Stories from the Ocean

Experience the colorful lives of underwater animals through the lens of art photography. Learn about the surprising sex lives of famous animated fish, the bizarre mating habits of punk-rock nudibranchs, and the majestic grace of the largest fish in the ocean. See the adorable playfulness of sea lions up close, and then consider the message they have for us about our relationship to the ocean. Tom is in love with life in the ocean, and is privileged to travel around the world to dive in places where marine life still thrives. With his underwater photography and video, he hopes to bring back and share what he sees to create empathy and connection with the ocean.

Sample presentation: Colorful Lives: Photographic Stories From the Ocean

Booking

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Media Kit

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Presentation Archive

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AI, Big Data, and Humanity in 2024: Our new relationship with AI

Keynote at the Amsterdam RAI Center | February 2024

The latest AI models based on planetary scale LLMs with intelligent interfaces such as ChatGPT are changing our relationship with AI. This presentation is an excellent overview of the latest models, what makes them possible, how they are created, what they are great at, what to be careful with, and the exciting applications that they enable.  Gruber brings decades of experience in large scale AI systems whose mastery of language changes the game.  Topics covered in this presentation include:

  • How to think about AI chatbots and use them in your life
  • How Siri, Deep Learning, Transformers, and GPU hardware led to the current generation
  • Application of these models to industries such as software engineering, creative services, education, health care, and mental health care.
  • The potential risks to individuals and society from ungoverned applications
  • The future of Personalized AI

Included is a Q&A session with things to think about how this technology could impact your life.

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Colorful Lives: Photographic Stories From the Ocean

EG Conference, Carmel, CA | May 2015

Experience the colorful lives of underwater animals through the lens of art photography. Learn about the surprising sex lives of famous animated fish, the bizarre mating habits of punk-rock nudibranchs, and the majestic grace of the largest fish in the ocean. Witness the playfulness of sea lions up close, and then consider the messages they have for us about our relationship to the ocean.

Tom is in love with life in the ocean, and is privileged to travel around the world to dive in places where marine life still thrives. With his underwater photography and video, he hopes to bring back and share what he sees, to create empathy and connection with the ocean.

Presented at the EG conference, an amazing gathering of thinkers, creators, and change makers.

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Tom Gruber Media Kit Photos Main Stage TED 2017 Hi Rez Download

How AI Can Enhance Our Memory, Work, and Social Lives

Main Stage TED, Vancouver, BC | April 2017

How smart can our machines make us? In his talk at TED 2017, Tom introduces the idea of Humanistic AI that augments and collaborates with us instead of competing with or replacing us. He shares his vision for a future where AI helps us achieve superhuman performance in perception, creativity and cognitive function — from turbocharging our design skills to helping us remember everything we’ve ever read. The idea of an AI-powered personal memory also extends to relationships, with the machine helping us reflect on our interactions with people over time. The upside? “Every time a machine gets smarter, we all get smarter.”

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Tom Gruber at AI.x 2019

What Can AI Do for Humanity?

Keynote | AI.X Conference, Seoul, South Korea | June 25, 2019

In this talk to a gathering of over 1,000 AI practitioners, Tom showed how the misuse of AI by social media has led to over unprecedented addiction and harm to society. He gave a technical analysis of how the technology is involved and how it might be deployed differently to avoid unintended consequences. He then described several new areas in which Humanistic AI applications, applying the AI with different objectives, can produce intended consequences for human benefit, including health care, mental health care, augmentative communication, and memory enhancement.  He has given versions of this talk to business leaders who are interested in double and triple bottom line governance and forging a new contact between technology and society.

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Navigating the Startup Eco-system

Navigating the Startup Ecosystem

Virtual Keynote | December 2020

In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than a billion time a day in over 30 countries around the world. But in late 2007 when Tom and his co-founders launched their fledgling startup, none of this was guaranteed. Why did top VC firms first invest in the company, even as the sky was falling in financial markets? In this virtual keynote, Tom outlines four key factors that led to Siri’s success — factors that are essential to any successful startup. He shares insider details of Siri’s trajectory, while providing real-world examples, showing how viewers can put these principles into practice with their own ventures.

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What AI and Big Data Can Do for Humanity

Virtual Keynote | TechfestNW | December 4, 2020

In this keynote, Tom shares his insights into the power and potential of big data and AI, with examples of how things can go wrong — and the potential for doing things right.  He reveals the role of AI within social media platforms and details how its misuse has led to over-optimization for profit and unintended consequences for humanity.  To counter this concerning trend, Tom offers examples of AI that is optimized for human mental health and well being.  Followed by an interview with John Markoff at the virtual TechFest conference.

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Intelligence at the Interface: The Virtual Assistant Paradigm for Human Computer Interaction

Keynote | BayCHI, San Francisco | December 10, 2019

BayCHI is the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

This talk explores the virtual assistant metaphor as an interaction paradigm, like mouse-and-menu or multi-touch.  What does it enable? Who does it empower?  What are the drivers of usability and utility? What makes it work and where can it falter? And how might the assistant metaphor serve us in a world of services powered by artificial intelligence?

The speaker led the team that designed Siri and the interaction paradigm it brought to the mainstream.

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The Generation That Will Save the Ocean

TEDx Mountain View | April 28, 2016

This talk was aimed at high school students in Silicon Valley, calling on them to join in the fight to save the ocean.

Earth’s oceans are in immediate peril from climate change, pollution, and unsustainable fishing. We have one generation left to save them. Who will be the ones to change the attitudes and behaviors of billions around the world?

They are the next generation of scientists, engineers, artists, and activists who were born digital and raised social. What will they need to do to save our oceans? Tom applies his inventor’s mind for innovation with his entrepreneur’s penchant for leadership, and lays out a roadmap for how we can move our relationship to the ocean from exploitation by the few to stewardship by us all.

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Big Think Small Screen: How Semantic Computing in the Cloud Will Revolutionize the Consumer Experience on the Phone

Keynote | Web 3.0 Conference | January 27, 2010

A week before Siri was released to the Apple app store, Tom gave a keynote address at the Web 3.0 conference, which was about intelligent applications on the web.  In this forward-looking talk, he explains why intelligent apps like Siri were about to burst on the scene. Using the metaphor of the “perfect storm”, he explained how the “big think” of computing in the cloud combined with broadband connectivity to the new class of “small screen” computers (smartphones) would enable intelligence at the interface, and a whole new way for consumers to interact with the rapidly expanding universe of services on the web. He explains how Siri takes advantage of this moment in history, and relates to other vanguard technologies of the time including Yelp, Pandora, Shazam, Google Goggles, and Wolfram Alpha.

A journalist for Wired saw the talk and wrote this insightful piece: Web 3.0: Rosie, Jeeves & That Thing in Your Pocket

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Siri: A Virtual Personal Assistant (2009)

Keynote | Semantic Technologies Conference (SemTech) | June 16, 2009

In 2009 — a year before Siri was launched — Tom introduced Siri to a technical audience, laying out the key problems to be solved and the technologies involved. The talk includes an early demo of the working system, which had not yet been released to the public. A classic!

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Intelligence at the Interface: Semantic Technology and the Consumer Internet Experience

Semantic Technologies Conference (SemTech) | May 20, 2008.

This keynote set the stage for the idea of applying AI to the user interface, grounding it in the context of semantic computing and the work on collective intelligence. The Siri startup was still in stealth mode, only a few months old. It is interesting to see the revelation of the paradigm shift to come without showing the product being worked on. Also includes historical tidbits of Siri’s predecessor at SRI by co-founder Adam Cheyer.

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Despite our Best Efforts, Ontologies are not the Hard Part

Presentation at AAAI Spring Symposium, March 26, 2008.
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Cobblies: Mashups of the Future

European GeoInformatics Workshop, Edinburgh University | March 9, 2007

Offers a vision of a framework for semantically enabled compositional applications called cobblies, the new mashups, based on geospatial data and the semantic web.

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Ontologies, Web 2.0 and Beyond

Tom Gruber (2007). Ontologies, Web 2.0 and Beyond. Keynote presentation at the Ontology Summit 2007 – Ontology, Taxonomy, Folksonomy: Understanding the Distinctions, March 1, 2007.

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Grande Challenges for Ontology Design

Presentation to Ontolog, March 1, 2007

Why bother with ontology design, particularly when it involves the trouble of collaborating with other people and their peculiar ideas? How does one guide a design process with any kind of objective notion of a Good Result? I think that if we do not start from this question, we are wasting our time. Outside the context of some shared goals, even arguing about what “ontology is” is, at best, ironic.

In this session I will frame a discussion about ontology design, using the model of engineering design that has brought tremendous success to electronic and physical engineering disciplines, and to some extent software engineering. My goal for the session is to identify some important and practical problems with objective engineering requirements that can motivate and guide the work of this community.

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Where the Social Web Meets the Semantic Web

Keynote | ISWC, The 5th International Semantic Web Conference | November 7, 2006

The Semantic Web is an ecosystem of interactions among computer systems. The social web is an ecosystem of conversation among people. Both are enabled by conventions for layered services and data exchange. Both are driven by human-generated content and made scalable by machine-readable data. Yet there is a popular misconception that the two worlds are alternative, opposing ideologies about how the web ought to be. Folksonomy vs. ontology. Practical vs. formalistic. Humans vs. machines.

It is time to embrace a unified view. In this talk Tom outlines what he believes is the best shot we have of collective intelligence in our lifetimes: large, distributed human-computer systems. The best way to get there is to harness the “people power” of the Web with the techniques of the Semantic Web.

 

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Avoiding the Travesty of the Commons

New Paradigms for User Computing (NPUC) | IBM Almaden Research Center | July 24, 2006

Presents ways to avoid the failure of user-contributed social web sites, including techniques for integrating structured and unstructured data.

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TagOntology – A Way to Agree on the Semantics of Tagging Data

Presentation to Tag Camp, tagcamp.org | October 29, 2005.

Presentation at Tag Camp, proposing an approach and straw man for defining and ontology that would enable the exchange of tag data and the building of tagging systems that can compositionally interact with other systems.

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Helping Organizations Collaborate, Communicate, and Learn

Presented to NASA Ames Research, Mountain View, CA | March 2003

Describes why collaboration is an inherent problem for organizational intelligence, and how technology can be applied appropriately to help improve the performance and collective knowledge of organizations. Also presented to business and technical audiences, in variations, over the years 2002-2003.

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The Pragmatics of Ontology as Language, Contract, and Content

Keynote | Third Annual Bio-Ontologies Meeting (Bio-Ontologies 2000) San Diego, CA | August 24, 2000.

Another for-real ontology creation group.

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A Guiding Philosophy for Artificial Intelligence Entrepreneurs and Investors

Virtual Keynote | Skolkovo Technopark Conference, Russia | May 21, 2020

In this talk, Tom reviews key projects in his career and offers the principals on which they were chosen and factors that led to success.  He describes a key insight he learned from inventor Doug Engelbart, the formulation of a guiding philosophy, which can help entrepreneurs, researchers, and investors make decisions in their careers.

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Collaborating around Shared Content on the WWW

W3C Workshop on WWW and Collaboration, Cambridge, MA | Sept 11, 1995.

Presentation at a W3C-sponsored workshop where many of the early web collaboration people demonstrated their work.

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