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.

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.”

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.

In this dynamic roundtable, Tom joined fellow AI experts including Gary Marcus (NYU professor and founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence); Oren Etzioni (CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence), and Yoon Kim (CTO for AI of SK Group).

In 2010 Siri was purchased by Apple and remains central to the user experience of all Apple products. Today, Siri is used more than 25 billion times a month 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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Another for-real ontology creation group.

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