🇬🇧 Hannah Luxenberg-Tono for Inspiration Valley - Director @ Computational Design Institute

Unlock the insights from our webinar with Silicon Valley Study Tour and Silicon Valley Fellowship, where Hannah shared her experience as Director @ Computational Design Institute.

Hannah is the Director of the Computational Design Institute (CDI), with over 10 years of experience driving 0-to-1 innovation across gaming, healthcare, and AR/VR. Throughout her career, she has delivered products to over 70 million users and pioneered generative AI applications for therapeutic use. She is a dedicated advocate for inclusive design, previously leading major accessibility initiatives within the gaming industry to ensure technology is reachable for all.

A long-time friend and host of the Silicon Valley Study Tour, Hannah has consulted for prestigious neuroscientific institutes. She holds an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and is the founder of a nonprofit organization focused on emerging technologies for pediatric healthcare. Her expertise lies at the intersection of emerging tech and human-centered design.

Don’t miss the upcoming sessions of Inspiration Valley, a virtual journey where you’ll hear the stories of Italians working in Silicon Valley and around the world.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Yeah, it is such a pleasure to be here. Thank you so much for having me. And I have a few slides. I think some visuals are really fun to share. So I'm going to go ahead and share that as well.

SPEAKER_03 0:14

Yes, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Right. Great. So yes, uh, my name is Hannah Luxemburg-Tono, and uh it's a very interesting name. My family was originally German-Russian, and I grew up in a very artsy household. A lot of music, dancing, singing, acting, they really pushed the creative side of everything, which very much impacted my life, which is very funny because I work in technology. So I will tie in the importance of creativity and what the future of technology is really looking like from what I see after being in Hollywood, after getting into the tech industry in Silicon Valley, and spending time in all of these different places. So I did start in the film industry. I was a writer, producer, and a director originally from San Diego. I was very close to Los Angeles. So I started at a very young age. I knew exactly that I wanted to be in film, so I just went for it. My father was a professional surfer. Funny enough, that's a very fun fact. So he was connected to a really great entertainment community in Los Angeles. So I was very fortunate to get an early start working in that area, very creative space. So I was on a lot of sets, and I worked on a lot of independent type of science fiction films, and then I somehow ended up working within music, within hip hop specifically. A lot of hip hop artists, such as Digital Underground, sort of an older legendary group, and Eric Morillo and some others working on some documentary pieces. So it was really about taking the technology. I was very interested in the cameras and the lighting and everything that went into telling that story. That was really the interest that I had connecting those two worlds together. So Los Angeles is a very fast-paced sort of place. It's very focused on the entertainment side of things. But I knew that I wanted to get my hands on more technology. I knew that there had to be a lot more to the way that we were telling stories than what back in the day we used to call them flatties. It's just basically a flat screen. It's not spatial. So that was before 360 came around. And I wanted to try and explore what was next. So the only thing that I knew what I need to do next was to go ahead and go to San Francisco. I wanted to try out Silicon Valley and I wanted to understand how I could make the vision larger because I knew there must have been something more to it. And so that industry started calling me over there. So I ended up getting into technology. It's sort of inevitable when you get to San Francisco and the Bay Area, because when you're in Hollywood, you're surrounded by entertainment and artists. When you get into San Francisco, you are completely surrounded by innovators, by people who come from all over the world to really bring all the visions that we have into the next, the next step, the next evolution in where it's going, making it usually more accessible to people through the technology. And I really love and I thrived in that community space of people. I think that was where it really propelled me forward because of the community. I may not have known too much yet about the technology or artificial intelligence at that point. But when you go and you join these communities, you just learn from other people and you attend all these events. And that's all you got you want to do all the time. So I started working with a group basically learning and teaching and giving presentations at a Google Launchpad space. And that was where I ended up meeting my future team, where I worked at Tactic. So I kind of put here, I was really interested in understanding the audience and what what if an audience were in a film themselves? And what if an audience can can actually start to persuade and change the narrative inside of a film? So I entered into Silicon Valley very much with this background that I had in film and storytelling and really looking at how we can make these visuals and technology be really in more control of the user, the audience members, where they're interacting and feeling the story. So when I got into tactic, it was using game engines to bring a lot of marketing products to life. And I think that this is where I'm very much known more so in the XR space than the film space because the industry was going very well. And we did the 19 Crimes series, where you basically have a wine bottle, and then you can take your phone and you can put it over the bottle, and then the label comes to life. Uh, we did this for a lot of products, and the 19 Crimes is probably the most popular one. There are a few interviews that I had done within Italy, wine to wine, showing off some of these bottles, and then eventually working with some Italian wineries to bring some of those labels to life or inform people about the brand. We actually coined it brand-in-hand marketing. And people can interact as well. So through their phones, you can tap, you can go through a game to really bring that whole experience to life and bring whole new meetings to the product space. But what that product space started to teach me was a little bit more about business, a little bit more about the consumer market and data. So I started to combine these areas of technology and iterating very, very fast because I was in a startup type of environment. So there are long hours, a lot of working very closely with your team and just having a ton of fun doing it and not being afraid to break the rules. And that was very important to me during this time of growth that I had. And this is a picture of me, yes, during COVID. So I'm wearing a mask at the Microsoft uh studio in Los Angeles. We ended up going back to LA uh filming holographic content. Basically, you can capture a person on the soundstage and then make them into a little 3D model, and then we would put them in front of the bottles. So you would have real people in front of this uh simulated experience. It was it was really great and it was part of 19 crimes. And I'll just show a little video just so it makes a little bit more sense in case that you haven't seen it. We had the chance to work with Snoop Dogg and his wonderful company that he was with a cashmere to produce a series on his wine bottles with 19 crimes. So I can share this and hopefully it there we go. So that's very fun, and he did uh quite a few of these different uh cases with the wine, and I think Martha Stewart ended up doing one as well. So you can do all sorts of really great things, and it was funny because it combined my Hollywood experience with my tech experience, so it was all extremely helpful going through those, and you can look up all sorts of very, very fun experiences or through my Instagram. I have all those videos and some behind-the-scene videos of Snoop doing his thing. No, no more. Okay, all right. Well, technology, it wasn't only about the job for me. I I literally married into XR, V R and AR. I did the very first AR wedding. My husband, Alberto Tono, who is also a wonderful part of this entire industry. Uh, we were, we are actually still today partners in all of this tech. And so when we met at one of these community events, we actually met at Unity Technologies, the game engine for creating different games and ARVR. We ended up starting a lot of ventures together as well. And one of the most important ventures is partners in life. So he did the very first AR wedding proposal as well. And we it was uh cutting edge. We used the original Meta headset before Facebook ended up taking Meta as their name and used leap motion. It was the very first time that an AR device was using hand motion technology to grab an object in in space. Now it seems like all of that is so easy to do, but it was very cutting edge back then. And so I was basically moving these little blocks around. You can see in the picture there's an M for Meta, the original name of that company, doing headsets, and I would pull the blocks away and then it would reveal a wedding ring. So we went ahead and we did the AR wedding as well. So I act I did say my vows while I was in augmented reality. Yes. And it was using the prototype of the Magic Leap One headset. If you're interested in that history of things, it wasn't even released to the market yet. And so we ended up getting married, doing that. It was it was incredible. So that's a big part of my life, too. Then together, we created the Computational Design Institute. It is a nonprofit that we work on. We've done quite a bit of amazing things. You can see here, we're actually at the University of Padova giving a talk to uh doctors, students, engineers all together in one room about the mission that we had. And I would go on to give a few talks at the university. It's a wonderful place. And so the idea was that we were loving the technology and how fast it was growing in the industry. We had a lot of access to really wonderful programs, software, and hardware. And there was a deep, deep passion in making sure that we connected the human value to the technology. So that was the start of the nonprofit, making sure that we kept the human intention, the art, design, and tech together. Part of that was the Dreamship program, which a lot of people know about, which falls within CDI as a program. And that one is actually dedicated to using emerging technologies that does include XR or even artificial intelligence for patients. Specifically, we were working with children who were in end-of-life care, so hospice care, to use these technologies to help bring down pain, anxiety for them as well as their families and the physicians working long hours in the hospitals. So it has been going very well. And we do go into hospitals around the world to see if it helps the children feel a little bit more calm during treatments, and it does have lasting benefits to being to have that kind of relaxation time. A lot of really great stories that I can give about the results of that work. So I've I've had the chance to work with many, many great people on this initiative. So I think that's a it's a very big question that I want to ask and continue to ask any of the future leaders is how can you also make a difference with technology? Because right now in the industry, there's a lot of growth, a lot of of money going on, I think, in the tech industry. And I think that it's always important to go back and think, well, well, how is my tech making a difference in in somebody's life? So it's always nice to be able to think back. And then if it's a if it's a startup, if it's volunteering, I think that those are good ways to always give back in this world that is accelerating very, very fast. A part of this initiative that we launched is actually called the Dreamathon. And we launched a large workshop, a week-long workshop in South Africa with the University of Johannesburg, where we taught young computer scientists and designers and aspiring medical students to develop a virtual reality experience for children who were in their local area. And we had a wonderful group of speakers from the University of Johannesburg, from a pediatric palliative care unit in Umda Duse, from Stanford professors, people from NVIDIA, Unity, Meta, all speaking about these things. And then students would build for an entire week a prototype for what that looks like and deploy it in a local area. So this was a huge, wonderful thing. And I, you know, think about how you can also bring people together to create. I would have to say that hackathons are a very big part of that Silicon Valley community and a part of discovery that people do here. And those can be formed as workshops or learning opportunities. I think it's very important in this digital age to always come together to iterate ideas with each other. So there's a lot of continuous human value in these things. And again, who who does it serve and who does it help? In this case, it helps students who are looking to build their portfolios to learn how to do something new. And then it also helps the physicians working in palliative care to gain access to knowledge about the need that's in this area and to get their hands on some technology. I did actually end up going back to school. After working in film and tech, I decided to go back to get my MBA. I chose the Johns Hopkins University Kerry Business School, which was such an amazing decision for me. I actually did consider some schools in Italy. I considered Boconi. Um, but I ended up staying in the US, actually choosing the East Coast, which was very different for me because it was in the intersection of healthcare and also policy. Their campus is in Baltimore and in Washington, DC. So I knew that that was a special place that I wanted to learn more about for several different reasons. And one of those is that they had specializations. So I studied entrepreneurship, new technology innovation, and also new health technology innovation, along with my MBA. And it gave me a sense of credibility so that for the nonprofit or work that I'm involved in, it I would say that it does help to belong to a school and say, you know, I did my master's, I belong to this cohort of people who belong to the Johns Hopkins. I got a lot of hands-on experience being within Johns Hopkins. And I'm sure a lot of MBA programs do different experiences where you get to be hands-on within a company. So in this case, I did consulting within the healthcare area. So I was helping, you know, the NIH with different consulting experiences, such as blood biopsies, was very new for me to do, to have that kind of experience. And of course, I would say that out of any MBA program, probably any program that you may be a part of, the professional connections uh could could be the largest thing because I do belong to that group of people from Johns Hopkins, and I continue to be a part of that group. So my alum group that I'm a part of, I constantly see those people, and they have connections to different things as well as I do for them. So we stay very close together. And there's just a picture of us. We ended up going to Germany, and then we were studying finance and how do we bring innovation to other areas around the world, very much like Silicon Valley. So I think that when you when you touch many places like this with a group in that way, it is extremely beneficial. So I ended up working on my MBA while I was still working, it was very, very challenging. And finally, uh, where I am today, of course, I'm I'm still running the Computational Design Institute, and I am currently also a producer within electronic arts. I'm working on the SimS4 game, so that's where I am today. This is a picture of our office. I know a lot of people who come to the Silicon Valley Study Tour get a chance to actually be right here and take a picture at this very spot, as well as many others. We have a lot of fun showing them around the office, and that's where I am today. So I've moved really around quite a bit in that work and also gaming technology because it does draw everything together. And I work on yeah, the Sims. So what it comes down to, and the main thing that I would have to say after all of the experiences that I've had is understand the tech, play with technology. I'm still playing with technology and trying to stay up with everything that's moving so fast. So, like on the weekends, I play with things, you know, playing with world models, playing with the new, the new interfaces and thinking about ways that we connect them to other humans interface. Understand the market, understand what people like and what they dislike, and make sure that you always tapped into your own personal lived experiences because that can never be duplicated. You have your own experience. Creativity and connection are key to the future. That just means whichever technology is being developed. I feel like what really matters and what's going to push everything in the right direction is that creativity, because we need that to move something that is just happening or automating into a real story. And those stories are is what helps human beings. And that's the connection is what connection can I actually make and empathize with if I'm using a technology. And again, yeah, your creative background. This is your competitive edge in the industry as a whole, what makes you you. That is all I have in terms of a presentation. It's a very, very quick dive into everything that I've done, and I'm happy if if there's QA to go over anything more in-depth that I can.

SPEAKER_04 21:25

Thank you so much, Hannah. It was really an inspiring story. It was there were lots of points which were really nice to talk about, like you know, uh, of course, all about creativity, but also when you talk about uh um hackathons where they can where people can uh work together to find a solution, it's really a beautiful thing. Lots of uh really interesting stuff. So if anyone has some questions for Hannah, just the time for you, so If you're interested, just activate your microphone, open your webcam, hopefully, and ask your question directly to Hannah. Maybe people are a little bit shy. Are they tired of after work? We just in it, we just finished the work. Hello? Hello.

SPEAKER_05 22:33

So you talked a lot about how did you actually end up so technical after the uh such uh reading uh background I would say Yeah, my my transition from Hollywood specifically into tech yeah wasn't it after the NBA or before uh the slides, sorry if I rejoin later, but maybe we can deepen a little bit about that part.

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Yeah, it was so I actually ended up going straight out of Hollywood and moved to San Francisco. I I didn't really have any information about why I should move to San Francisco. It was actually a lot of intuition that drove me to go there, and I didn't really know what I was doing. I I had no roadmap for what I was going to do. I just expected that I would go there, I would be getting film industry gigs in the Bay Area, which I did. I did a lot of filmmaking in the Bay Area, and I think it was when I ended up going to events because I was going to filmmaking events as well. I just wanted to meet people. And people in all these events were talking about technology, and that specific technology they were talking about was the 360 cameras. So that was very popular at the time. And as a filmmaker, I knew that I wanted to tap into that specifically, but it wasn't very easy to do because you would have to film it, and then you would have to stitch all of that content together. It was sort of a technical process, and then you ended up going, there were tech events that were interested in seeing the work that you did. And I knew that I wanted it also get into health. I had a strong desire to be helping children in in pediatric care. So while I was I was new in the Bay Area in San Francisco, I ended up volunteering at the University of Southern California hospital. So I was working as a volunteer in the children's ICU ward, just listening to children and what they were going through because I knew I wanted to build something. But I thought that I was going to be building 360 content for the kids to watch in the ICU units, intensive care units. So when I was going to all of these different trade shows talking about what I was creating and showing off, I got in contact with Kodak cameras because they had a new 360 camera. They had the Pix Pro and they got wind of what I was doing. And that was when they invited me to CES. CES is the consumer electronic show that happens every year in Las Vegas. Wow. It's huge. Um, it's the largest technology show. And I think that for me, it was a huge, a huge look at at tech. I mean, they they have such incredible things. They they have like flying taxis, they have like all kinds of crazy things that you were your mind just explodes being there. And they had virtual reality, and I was there talking to people, showing off the films that I had done in 360. It was just the discovery that I had a virtual reality through all of these people. And then it was when I started when I joined that group, it was actually a Stanford alum that I was working with, a girl. Uh, we started the ARCD, uh augmented reality computer vision AI group, where we just wanted to host events. We basically wanted to get people who were leaders in the tech industry to talk to other people about what they were building. And I think that, and I think it's still like this today, a lot of people, regardless of their level or title, they're willing to talk to people who are eager to learn. And so at Google, we were hosting these events that were really large, and I had the chance to learn from these people. And a lot of it was about computer vision and artificial intelligence that was coming up. And that that was specifically where I met my future boss, who was the CEO of Tactic, uh, Peter, who is incredible and still a good friend of mine today. And it wasn't until after all of that that I decided to get my MBA. I I was working through things a million miles a minute because it was fun, because I couldn't get enough. And then when I met Alberto, he couldn't get enough. So everything became late night hacking, um, going to events and meeting entrepreneurs and founders. It was just consuming so much and loving it. The technology and learning about it fell into place very well. So it was a very organic move for me into tech. And then it wasn't until after my work at Tactic, way after working in the film industry, that I knew that I wanted to pursue a higher degree. And I knew that it was business because I I love entrepreneurship, which can mean a lot of things. It can mean you're starting an initiative and innovating within a company, within an organization, or starting your own company. And that was something I was always very drawn to and interested in. And I knew that I needed a cohort of people to sort of back me up and I needed to speak about business in a different way, a little bit more of a quantitative way rather than a qualitative way, because that the qualitative was where I was more born into, and I needed to do a little bit more on that data-driven side of things, even though I did it at tactic, I just needed more grounding in that area, and so I ended up doing it in 2021 for two years, and that that was sort of that shift that I had. But I think before that, anything else in tech was very self-initiated, very go out and learn it, go out and just do it. If you want to learn something, even we didn't have LLMs back then to guide us through like coding something new. So it was a very interesting process of finding out how to do things and how to build these things. So I hope I hope that answers your question a bit. It was a very interesting sort of step that I did in this place, but I would say that a part of it is because I was very social and I went out every single night in San Francisco, not to clubs, but these tech events, which was like the best place to be.

SPEAKER_05 30:56

So you would say that's mostly because of networking that you that you that it's allowed you to make the switch between those two very paths.

SPEAKER_01 31:07

Absolutely. Absolutely. I that was how I met my manager at Tactic, was directly at an event when I saw him. I hosted him at our Google location, and he started showing off these early wine bottles that were telling stories. He was showing off um, oh, what was it, The Walking Dead, the Walking Dead off a wine label. And I was so blown away and I was so in awe when I went up to him after the show, he saw and felt the passion that I had for what he was doing. And it would not, I would not have gotten that opportunity if I hadn't been there speaking with him. And that was my first official, like very high-tech job where where I was building with a team inside the place. Everything else was very early Silicon Valley, we know where we're we're editing and we're shooting film and and we're doing tech things in the hotel room, you know, kind of thing. That was the official jump that I had and it propelled me forward in my career.

SPEAKER_04 32:23

Of course. Any other questions?

SPEAKER_02 32:34

I tried to ask something to add. Anna, thank you for this amazing uh description of your life. It was really fantastic. Uh it's funny because uh uh you talked about Alberto, Alberto Tono, uh, we uh we know very well. We know we knew him a little bit uh uh before you uh when he was uh it's funny the story of Alberto, this is the husband of uh Anna. Uh Alberto comes from the University of Padova, uh, but he was an architect, so it's uh a degree that is absolutely uncommon in our people of in the clinical body study tour. I think I can say that he's the only one in 20 years that we met. But the funny thing is that Alberto we met the first time uh in San Francisco because I found MMAB on LinkedIn, I think, and he was uh working in a uh company that uh absolutely unknown for me before, that is OKOK, that uh I think that was also like a big uh architectural uh company, uh American with uh site, not only in San Francisco. What I am interested in for you, Anna, is uh how you met uh Alberto that has such a different story of yours. And also I am uh really uh interested in the fact that Alberto changed totally its path from building uh uh constructing building uh in concrete to uh deep minding Google like he is now. Tell us something about him, and then maybe in the future we have also him as a host, as a speaker in the inspiration valley.

SPEAKER_01 34:33

Yeah, of course. And this this actually goes even further into what I just spoke about and how I ended up getting my first real job in tech, is I would not have met Alberto if there was not this community in San Francisco. We met at a community event, and it was at Unity Technologies. That's why Unity is so involved also in the proposal. The proposal was also at Unity Technology headquarters in San Francisco, just off Market Street. And it was even before I started developing in Unity myself that we met there, and it was a holiday panel about the emerging tech in VR. And there, I was hosting events during that time, and so the lady who was hosting this event, Sherry, I knew her very well, and they had asked me to come over that night. Basically, everyone working in VR was there that night. It was a really great panel, and so Alberto was there as well with our friend Damon, uh, who also does really wonderful, or he had done wonderful AEC hackathons in the area. So Alberto was working at HOK, and we knew that we were both interested in, I think we were talking quite a bit that night about artificial intelligence, and that ended up being a huge part of where we are today and where the industry is today. So we were basically inseparable, of course, after that night and meeting each other, but he's had a wonderful journey as well, very interesting journey. And I think we've also done, we've done the Padova TED Talks also together before. But yes, he is in the the process of completing his PhD now, so we do have very strong ties to Stanford University as well. That's another huge hub I will call out and a great place to be to meet people. It's another place where I have I've met a lot of of great innovators and entrepreneurs. And I've also I would have to also shout out and say that learning never stops and to always push yourself to continue learning as much as possible. I also mentioned earlier, just like never stop playing with things and think about it in a fun way. But learning and doing classes and different opportunities where you get to learn, I think is something Alberto and I are constantly doing and acting as students in a way because we're we're always going to be students learning from other people. You know, we're not like the best expert ever that knows everything. You know, we're here to learn from other people constantly. And so I would audit, I mean, I would still audit classes from Stanford, for example. You can go there and you can sit in on a lecture, you can meet these people who have done extraordinary things. Just put yourself there and interact with people. And so he's finishing his PhD from Stanford right now in computer science and environmental civil engineering. So, but but basically computer science, yes. I won't go into too many details about where he is right now. I'll let him speak more to that in a future presentation. But he he also has an amazing journey and he is from Padova. We've had the chance to meet a lot of other people in this area from Padova, Padova University, uh, including the wonderful Federico Fagin, who is also just very uh well known and important to this.

unknown 38:25

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 38:26

Yeah, Federico Fagin from Vicenza, very close to the city of Alberto. We we met in Milano, Federico Fagin, this week. Uh last week, he made a conference in Milano uh crowded of uh people, uh young people was fantastic. And Fajin told us that he he came back to Italy, definitively. We say that he wants to, yeah, you you come uh with his uh uh wife uh to the to the to the route uh we moved from the Silicon Valley. Well, one question I would like to give to um Milagros, because uh we have this uh nice uh Argentina uh uh World Is girl engineer that uh joined us just this evening with Anna, but we we met just a couple of weeks ago because she's coming with the Silicon Valley Study Tour in August. So uh Milagros, what do you want to tell something about you? And uh maybe if you have a question for Anna, but also knowing you, it's nice.

SPEAKER_00 39:34

Hello, nice to meet you. Uh I think that's what I mean that you say. Um, I have a question now that you mentioned the importance of uh being a lifelong learner. Um nowadays uh in such a fast technique, especially with the AI, emotion it so quickly. How do you personally stay up to date without feeling overwhelmed? Do you have habits, resource, strategies that help you to learn fast and identify what is truly relevant?

SPEAKER_01 40:16

Oh yeah, that's a wonderful question. It the industry has changed so much recently with the boom of AI. And so, really, what I do, and I've really thought about this as well, is how how do I stay caught up on everything? I think I'm going to go back and talk again about community, is the best place where I learn about things because there are subscriptions I can connect to. TLDR is one of them where I can learn the cutting-edge news about technology and what's happening. But I only look at those things or like Crunch Base to look at new companies that are coming up, because um, startups are really important right now, too, to look at, who are competing with actually the larger companies right now. So you have all the larger companies like OpenAI and Google, Meta, Microsoft competing on LLMs and everything there, Claude. And you also have a lot of startups who are challenging those bigger companies too. And right now it's it's sort of an open question about who's going to have that best model. And so I want to also look into startups. So I do spend some time looking into what's new, and I want to just try it out. I take time during the weekend to test new models. And right now, what's very right now it's very popular are agents and world models. I'm very interested in the world models because it does play into filmmaking and it plays into video games too. Um, and you know, this work that I do is very separate from my day job. You know, I do all of these things on the side, um, in addition to working a day job and working on things here. But on the weekends, I really enjoy looking into those things. And then what I do is I look at events that are happening to see where I can go to an event, where can I hear about someone speaking about what they're building, because that's really interesting. I go to a lot of company pitches, so really young entrepreneurs who want to pitch their company and they show a pitch deck that's really informative about really the problem that they want to solve and who they want to reach. A good place I go to for that is Stanford University. They have pitch events all the time that I go to. And they're free. You just sign up and you go and you listen and meet people. And then there's also, so Stanford has a group called HAI, human-centered artificial intelligence group run by or started by Fei Fee. And that's a great place to hear from industry professionals talk about AI and problems that they're solving that span across everything from data, from the job force to commerce. I just I think everything, and I choose which one I'm interested in, and then I go over there for a lunch and learn. I have a good lunch, I hear some interesting things, I learn a lot. And then San Francisco, the Bay Area, they have a lot of events that I just I go to and I network. And one of those events I'm going to this week, actually on Thursday, is by Innovates, which is the Italian group that they host a lot of entrepreneurs from Italy and put them through a boot camp. And then they have this sort of event where they also show their pitch decks, they do a really quick pitch. And so I am going to that this Thursday, and then they have an aperativo at the very end that I enjoy very much, and just get to know that community, and I get to know about innovations happening also from. Italia as well. So that that's sort of what I do and how I stay up to date with the cutting edge, but it it can be very fast. And I benchmark what the differences are between all of those different programs that I have been seeing. So that's basically that's basically what what I have been doing recently. And then the ability. So I'm not I'm not a computer engineer, but now we all have the ability to sort of try out those shoes a little bit using an LLM such as um quad or even Chat GPT to also code our own programs so that you can actually use a lot more of these models. And and I it's so funny because we were just speaking about well, the real power is in the prompter, right? The real power is is how you're prompting to all of these things. So how do you even become a better prompter? How do you tell a better story? It all always comes back to that. But that that's that's what's been helping me stay afloat. And I'm I'm lucky to be in Silicon Valley where you have so many of these learning opportunities to be in communities that are all over the place. Conferences are another thing as well. They just finished with GTC, which is a conference run by Nvidia that shows off the GPUs and a lot of gaming technology. Um there's also GDC that's a little bit more on the gaming side. Those two conferences happen at the same time. And even if you don't go to the conference, you can still go to all of the events around the conferences that are still very informative to go to. So I try to I try to go to those every time that I can.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 45:59

It's funny that you mentioned GTC because uh in our office in Milan, we had like a night pizza event where we stayed all later, eat pizza, and watch uh the NVIDIA direct about the GTC. So yeah, it was funny to talk about it on the opposite sides, even of the ocean.

SPEAKER_01 46:18

Uh oh yes.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

Yeah, so to uh summarize your answer is you do a lot to stay to stay up to date, and I uh I to try, but like I think I am subscribed to like eight different newsletters about AI and tech. Mainly AI because I work in the AI in this industry, so I try to keep up to date, but of course it's really complicated because like you just don't watch your phone uh for a couple of days and a new incredible model changing everything has been released.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

Uh yeah, exactly. I think they must have charts showing um like who's in the lead.

SPEAKER_04 47:03

Have you seen those those videos where it shows some um there have been a lot of leaderboards in the past? Uh I tried to use one of them because uh for a client we were trying to understand how to optimize some LLMs to host it locally under HPC, and we try to like replicate the leaderboard data. So we try to benchmark on the quality of models, and so we were trying to say, okay, this is the model on the leaderboard, this is our the our optimized model, how it says so like uh once there was just one um leaderboard, but uh a game phase which was really famous, but like for now there are that they closed that saying uh it's not enough to valid to validate uh the best LLM, and so like now there are thousands. Each one is focused on different aspects, like uh there are the ones for coding, there are the ones for coding autocompletion, there are the ones for function calling, there are one about mathematics, about arts, about visual language. There is yeah, it's really complicated.

SPEAKER_01 48:20

Just not everything.

SPEAKER_04 48:23

It's very difficult to uh keep up to date. Anyway, we have still five minutes less, four. So if anyone has there is time for one last question. If anyone has one for Hannah, she's here, so please try to use as much as possible her time. That's right.

SPEAKER_06 48:45

Hi Hannah. Can you hear me? Yes, yeah. Um, you talked about uh your wonderful past experiences and also recent experiences. Um how do you see yourself in in the future? So what what what uh what will you do? So that's that's the question.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

Really a simple uh home uh with no pressure, please.

SPEAKER_01 49:12

No, absolutely. So for the future, I am looking towards what sort of entity or venture could there be again to connect humans to to technology. So I mean, right now I'm I'm working quite a bit and enjoying where I am inside of electronic arts, but again, things are moving very quickly. And one day I'll probably end up putting a lot more into CDI. I do foresee that our foundation and nonprofit will grow because we've been opening up chapters around the world. So our chapter in the US, in in Italy, and then also we have the one that opened up in South Africa. A lot of time goes into opening those chapters because we facilitate groups who run those chapters in different areas of the world. So it does take quite a bit of time to do those, and we'll likely do more workshops in the future. I've been eyeing doing one in Peru in the future. So I imagine that we'll be doing a lot more work expanding the nonprofit and being able to do a lot more within that space, especially as the XR industry is also changing very much. But then again, there are a lot of companies working on new hardware, such as smart glasses, that are that are evolving that industry too. So I imagine myself looking very much into the venture space, whether that's the nonprofit or an additional venture, looking at ways that we can create this sort of technology with a storytelling base. And it could be very well healthcare because that is an area very near and dear to my heart. So I would just have to say that I would be building out CDI and Dreamship. And if it ever became anything else, like for example, if it needed some kind of half nonprofit and half-profit kind of thing, um, open AI has done something a little bit similar. But then it would evolve, I believe, from there. It just depends on the opportunities that come along and the technologies and really what we can do to serve, I believe, other people. So that's sort of that's sort of what would be happening, I believe, is yeah, I'm gonna go with expanding CDI. So if anyone's ever interested in CDI, that's also open too.

SPEAKER_04 51:51

Thanks a lot. As usual, uh I always say that unfortunately our time is very limited, but luckily almost all of our guests have uh LinkedIn, so I always say if you have any more questions, you can just go there and stalk the guests. Uh I was nicely stalking, it was like gently stalk the guest. There was one uh one guest uh like six months ago. So she's a really beautiful person working in NASA, and she said that she obtained her job like uh gently uh stalking uh her current professor. So it was a really funny way to put it. But anyway, as always, I say guys, if you have any more questions for Anna, be free to use LinkedIn, contact her, and hopefully, uh and maybe some of you will be so lucky, like Mila Girls, to meet her in directly in Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_01 52:55

You can always ask me a lot more questions in person, and I can I can go deeper into questions if you visit in a place where it's not registered, so like you can maybe also talk like more freely.

SPEAKER_04 53:07

I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 53:08

Off the record.

SPEAKER_04 53:11

Anyway, unfortunately, our and our time with Hannah has finished it. I really thank you a lot, Hannah, for joining us today. Uh thank you all you guys to join our small webinar, and uh hope to see you all in the next episode of Inspiration Valley. Thank you all.

SPEAKER_02 53:31

Ciao, Anna Gracias, Mila T.