Oskar Mencer
Maxeler Technologies and Imperial College London

About the talk:

We live in a world of seemingly increasing numbers of types of conflicts and less and less time and energy for each one. Chip Wars, Internet vs Democracy, and Flat Earthers,... At the same time, Technology reduces the information difference around the world, predicting what can be predicted, leaving the unpredictable as our future. Recently, as Enterprise Champion at Imperial College London, I started thinking more about the innovation challenge in a broader context. Each innovation addresses one or multiple pain points. Each time a possible solution to a pain point succeeds, there is a chance for a new pain point to arise from the new solution. The successfull entrepreneur finds him or herself constantly chasing solutions to problems created by their success. I will complement the above journey with examples from building fast computers with FPGAs.

Curator Comment:

This investigation, initiated to scratch a particular itch, has grown rapidly in scope and significance. Oskar is researching the signifiicance of conflict in hardware, software, and the social aspects of computing. He is currently working on a draft of a book covering this material in depth. To be informed when the book is available for pre-order or to offer your comments to the author, send us your name and physical address along with your comments.

Slides

Slides for the talk in PDF format will be available here a day or two following the talk.

Video:

To access the live webcast of the talk (active at 16:28 of the day of the presentation) and the archived version of the talk, use the URL SU-EE380-20190925. This is a first class reference and can be transmitted by email, Twitter, etc.

A URL referencing a YouTube view of the lecture will be posted to HERE a week or so following the presentation.

About the Speaker:

Oskar Mencer is CEO of Maxeler Technologies, a software company for FPGAs, a research company with results in particle physics, brain simulation, and AI, a Dataflow computing company, or a financial technology services company. Oskar is also Professor of Practice and Enterprise Champion at Imperial College London, and Member of Academia Europaea. His 4 minutes of fame happened when showing an FPGA computing card to David Cameron and Angela Merkel at Cebit in 2014.

Contact information:

Oskar Mencer: oskar (at) maxeler.com