RED Talks

RED Talks

RED Talks are a CDIS event series designed to advance learning at the intersection of technology and humanity. RED Talks feature academic and industry leaders sharing their exciting work and offering insights into topics that are often interdisciplinary and always cutting edge.

Spring 2024

RED Talk-Fireside Chat

IT Integration in the Age of SaaS & AI

Wednesday, March 13

CS 1240

4:30 p.m.

Come meet and listen to Luke Anderson chat with CDIS Founding Director Tom Erickson about his career journey as a UW CS grad and his experience leading IT at a top five grocery chain. Food and beverages will be provided.

Previous RED Talks

Enabling the Digital Paradigm: Giving Your Company Fire

March 30, 2023

To create the next generation of digital experiences, Associated Bank went on a journey to transform how they designed, developed, and delivered their financial services. In a world where everything is software, Associated Bank had to create all new automation capabilities around infrastructure, data, and user experience. Matt Upstone, director of digital engineering, and Steve Lueck, director of data management, discussed how they gave their company fire.

Madison’s Tech Unicorn: The Highs and Lows of Growth

February 2, 2023

Wade Bruce, chief technology officer at Fetch, spoke on the highs and lows that come with extreme growth within the tech industry. He dove into scale and performance, the pains that come with growth, how to deliver projects during growth, and the personal development/growth that comes with it.

A Primer on the Metaverse: How and Why Roblox is Building the World’s First Large Scale Social Co-Experience Platform

November 10, 2022

The “Metaverse” is currently one of the hottest buzzwords in the internet technology space, but, as with many buzzwords, the concept is poorly defined and often misapplied to companies and products that are only tangentially related to the core concept. In this talk, Claus Moberg, Vice President of Engineering for Roblox, explained the key feature set that any platform must have to be competitive within the metaverse platform space. In doing so, he addressed several important issues that the industry as a whole is still grappling with: open source vs. vertical integration; monetization mechanisms and their impact on user safety; and how many triangles do you need to be truly immersive? Watch the recording of the presentation. 

How We Created $50 Billion of Value Using Machine Learning in Security

October 13,2022

At the first in-person RED Talk since the pandemic, Raj Rajamani took people on a time machine ride to explore the technology used by leading Cybersecurity products. Starting with some of the earliest products from the 90s (signature based detection) through the 2000s that saw the advent of Intrusion Prevention technology and whitelisting, the 2010s in which AI/ML was used in a pioneering manner to the state of the art in the 2020s. He also shared some person advice with the packed lecture hall. Watch the recording of the presentation. 

Livestock 4.0: The Digital Technology Revolution

Listen to Joao Dorea discussing the current and future perspectives of digital technologies and predictive analytics for livestock farms. 04/21/2022

Procter & Gamble (P&G) Tech Chat

Listen to P&G experts about how statistics and data science have become key ingredients for innovation, the types of skills needed for these roles, and P&G’s collaboration with academia. 04/14/2022

Data Science is on its Feet, Now Where is it Going? 

In this talk, Kyle Cranmer will talk about the collision of computational and statistical methodologies with real-world problems. 04/07/2022

Moving Toward Stronger Advising Practices

In this panel event, Brian and his students offer insights into the varied advising graduate students experience and introduce a new framework of care and wholeness for graduate advising. 03/31/2022

Kohler Tech Chat – Digital Transformation in a Global Manufacturing Company

In this virtual tech chat, Kohler discusses how this Wisconsin manufacturer is adapting to a global internet of things (IoT) and transforming its business for the future! 02/10/2022

Chris Stone, Executive Vice President, Oracle

Chris is joined by CDIS Founding Director Tom Erickson to discuss recent trends at Oracle, provide thoughts on paths for graduates in private sector, trends in AI and ML, and offer an insider’s view of the dynamics in this groundbreaking tech firm. 11/18/21

Sarada, Assistant Professor, Wisconsin School of Business

Sarada discusses the economic impact of technology and innovation on people around the world. 10/29/21

Garry Bowlin, Software Developer, Cosmos Team, Epic Systems

Bowlin discusses how Cosmos works, challenges around such a novel and massive dataset, and the promise of evidence-based medicine. 10/15/21

Dr. Lori Kido Lopez, University of Wisconsin Associate Professor Media & Cultural Studies

Lopez discusses the potentials & limits of technology & digital media through the lens of critical race theory. 4/23/21

Alex Hanna, PhD, Senior Research Scientist, Google

Hanna discusses algorithmic unfairness, bias in data, and its impact on our society. 4/16/21

Mark Schar, Senior Teaching & Research Fellow, Design School, Stanford University

Schar discusses design thinking, how it differs from other types of “thinking” & how it can be tracked in student progress. 3/8/21

Faisal Mushtaq, SVP & General Manager, Clinical Networks, Change Healthcare

Mushtaq discusses the ever-changing healthcare landscape & advancements in the industry which streamline operations. 2/26/21

Leng Tan, SVP, Oracle

Tan shares her personal experience on how she rose from being the sole woman engineer to Senior Vice President of Engineering. 2/12/21

Peter Commons, VP Engineering, Zendesk

Commons shares his experiences working in the software industry & helps provide you with questions you might not have asked yourself. 2/5/21

Nidhi Aggarwal, Tech Entrepreneur, Founder of QwikLabs

Aggarwal tells the story of her journey from a traditional Indian family to being an entrepreneur. 12/4/20

Steve Vranyes, Sr. Distinguished Engineer, Medtronic

Vranyes discusses data distribution in combination with AI/ML and other modern practices. 10/23/20

Rob Rutenbar, Sr. Vice Chancellor for Research, University of Pittsburgh

Rutenbar shows three classes of accelerators for MRF inference that yield orders of magnitude speedup over the state of the art. 10/15/20

Milo Medin, VP Networking, Google

Medin discusses the technological changes from LTE to 5G and the security and global ecosystem implications. 9/17/20

Mark Yearling, AI Operations Eng. Manager, Kohl’s

Yearling discusses the business and technical challenges presented to the engineering team that lead to Jarvis. 9/16/20