CGE’s Past — Take 1, The Director’s Cut…
Welcome!
I am SUPER excited to launch Canada Green ESCO (CGE) video series and I would like to offer to all of you my warmest & sincerest welcome!
Over the last 5 years, I posted over 100+ articles and all the chapters of my “AI Boogeyman” book on LinkedIn, Medium, and CGE’s website. And now I would like to introduce you to the “Coles-Notes” videos of all my past and future posts — to further emphasize my “advisory wisdom”.
In many cases, I will include a personal story from 40+ years of my entrepreneurial experiences. And I will cover both: Technology and Business. Video presentations will allow me to expand and elaborate on such stories and offer a unique reflection on what transpired…
The Past
But as with every great story, there must be a link to the Past, the Present, and the Future. So, I will follow a similar blueprint in my videos — in earnest and sincerity…
Since I can remember, Computer Technology always excited me and fascinated my creativity. And it probably explains why already 40+ years ago, I developed Computer Control Units (CCUs) using 128-bit instruction sets. My CCUs were built from AMD’s bit-slice ICs. At that time, Intel was still successfully marketing 8-bit and 16-bit microprocessors…
But my true love affair with technology began 30+ years ago. It occurred, when I discovered Cognitive Computing based on neural networks — which is now widely referred to as Artificial Intelligence.
MIT Books
When MIT Press published its Parallel Distributed Processing books back in 1986 — the world of neurocomputing has forever changed. The books and the software that came with them served as a blueprint. Thousands of scientists and developers used the books to build their own AI systems.
I still remember the excitement of coding a few elegant math equations from these books — using “C” language. What followed, was the creation of my version of the back-propagation neural network — the most popular and the most intuitive pattern recognition framework that existed.
OCR
And this is how my AI journey started at NCR Corporation, where I’ve been working on using neural networks in recognizing hand-written and magnetic ink characters on bank cheques.
I’m also extremely proud of the work I did at the Microelectronics and Computer Consortium (MCC) in Austin, Texas. MCC was at that time one of the largest, computer industry research and development consortia in the United States, headed by Navy Admiral, Bobby Inman.
At its peak, MCC housed over 400 PhDs under one roof, and I was interacting for 3 years with a large group of the world’s brightest neural network and Artificial Intelligence researchers — on behalf of $7B NCR. It even included David Rumelhart, the author of the MIT books…
Some of my patents from such time became the most widely used and the most frequently translated publications into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, etc. And I believe that the elegance and the simplicity of my inventions applied toward the training of neural networks — changed the world of Pattern Recognition, forever.
More importantly, it also gave birth to the International Neural Machines Inc. (INM). And by the ’90s, INM was the only product-oriented neural network AI company in Canada. So, for the next 10 years, I dealt with the complexities of risk management developing a whole slew of Fraud & Money Laundering Detection applications at financial institutions around the world.
Our Visa Fraud and Defalcation Detections at Canadian banks were extremely fast and very accurate. So was the World Bank’s Money Laundering Detection in Estonia, and the Workers Safety & Insurance Board (WSIB) insurance fraud analytics.
NRC
As our AI competence grew, INM was awarded significant grants to develop applications aimed at speech recognition, and in particular — at “keyword spotting”. With the support of the Canadian Police Research Center (CPRC) and the National Research Council — we developed a very accurate recognition of specific words within an unconstrained audio recording.
Keyword Spotting
Our task was to build a product that would recognize the keywords such as “Chemical Spill” — and retrieve the pertinent information from the police manual. No time is wasted, as the cop sitting in a cruiser is being debriefed through a speech synthesizer — while rushing to the scene of an accident.
And to turn our prototypes into a successful business offering, I identified Verizon as a key partner and a key distribution channel. At that time, the company was known as Bell Atlantic.
Verizon
Verizon liked our innovative technology quite a lot and arranged for the demonstration to one of their clients in Maryland — a maximum-security prison.
All prisons at that time had a big problem:
• The inmates were only allowed to make collect calls from within the prison — using a small number of public phones installed at each institution
• Since many of the inmates used jails as “an office without the overhead” — all the outgoing calls were recorded to intercept the illegal activities
• Unfortunately, each prison ended up with hundreds of hours of audio recordings daily — but they had no manpower to analyze the calls and identify crime-related activities
Our presentation went very well and the warden was genuinely impressed. He understood that our software would automatically scan all the daily audio in minutes and mark the suspicious segments for an offline review by the prison staff. The productivity gain was enormous and the ability to zero-in on criminal information — uncanny. One could review all the daily suspicions in just 20 minutes!
VoiceIQ…
By 2001, our AI potencies were widely recognized and INM was acquired by VoiceIQ Inc. (VIQ). The company provided commercially accepted applications in Court, Legislative, and Healthcare markets — whose functions included capture, compression, storage, retrieval, routing, and annotation of voice. INM expanded VIQ’s products and developed advanced synchronization solutions for multi-modal searches of video, audio, and text information using speech, natural language processing, and Artificial Intelligence…
For More Information…
For more information about CGE’s past, please see my posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium and CGE’s website.
My Book
You can also find additional info in my book on amazon: “AI Boogeyman — Dispelling Fake News About Job Losses”
I offer hands-on AI investment advice to Venture Capital & Private Equity portfolio companies. My goal: to boost the ROIs of AI acquisitions & deployments. Hence, I am in the business of joining Advisory Boards (ABs) with a single mission: to ensure Corporate Prosperity.
A good Advisory Board improves the decision-making process by helping the CEOs to consider different perspectives. Many advisers become the proverbial Sounding Boards to the CEO. They help to avoid bad decisions and make good decisions, better.
There is not a single top athlete who does not have a coach. And yet, regretfully — only 20% of CEOs are coached by Advisors. The other 80% — may never become the top performers they could have been. So, every CEO should have one…
I used BusinessAI™ in Technology, Finance, & Renewable Energy for 30+ yrs. Now, I help VC/CVC/PE funds to maximize their returns in Healthcare, Fintech, Transportation, Construction & Manufacturing. And I apply the same structured finance expertise I acquired through financing over $1B of Renewable Energy projects.
As a 30-yr BusinessAI™ veteran, I Propose, Design, Structure, Finance, and Deploy state-of-the-art Joint Ventures to bring RAPID & SUSTAINABLE REVENUES. And as a coach & mentor, I bring business savvy to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is a process to beat the odds, just as I did w/ Verizon 20 years ago.
What I learned over the years is that it is not just technology innovation, but also the exponential increase in the value offered to clients at a much lower cost — that makes all the difference. Business Model Innovation is as disruptive as Technology Innovation and yet I see too many companies focused on pushing their product out the door — while losing ~70% of untapped revenue streams.
My LeanBOD™ recommendation? Mandate CEO Advisory Boards and create a pool of viable Co-CEOs to be chosen by the BODs. Co-CEOs offer the fastest way to accelerate Scale-Up & Expansion, Revenue Growth, Margin Enhancement & Opening New Channels. Unique pattern recognition abilities allow me to see what is still missing & how to maximize business offerings & profitability.
SELECT ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Using AI in CT medical diagnostic, financial fraud detection, solar PV, wind, WTE, energy efficiency, etc. Finance skills: equity, non-recourse debt, balance sheet financing, and tax equity. I also took a tiny startup public, building a $135MM enterprise & received funding from NRC & DND. Academic R&D collaborations included: UW, UofG, UofT, and MCC Consortium in Texas…
