Autodesk is routinely lauded as a great place to work, and rightly so, not least because every four years each employee is given an opportunity not to work there for an extended period. The sabbatical is an opportunity to travel, to relax, and to retrain. I'm taking my first sabbatical this summer. I'll spend most of July in Iceland and the Netherlands, then return to build a treehouse before heading up to the Sierras in August. I'll be reading throughout.
Happily, I know what two projects I'll be working on when I return, so can focus my research accordingly. They are applying IBM's Watson (pictured below, in its big debut as Jeopardy! champion) to Autodesk's customer and partner support needs, which I have been asked to do, and turning the company into a global meter of sustainability, which I have not.
The key to the former is mastering the art of Natural Language Processing, so you'll see a good deal about that topic in the list below. My reading about sustainability is less focused: it's a huge field, a huge issue, and I'm only just beginning to take a structured approach to it. There's also some IoT literature there, just to keep my hand in, but the selection is limited. Capabilities, techniques, social impact...but enough preamble, here's the list:
NLP, Deep Learning, AI and the nature of work and the economy:
John E. Kelly III and Steve Hamm, Smart Machines: IBM's Watson and the Era of Cognitive Computing
Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby, Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
Pedro Domingos, The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World
Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
Daniel M. Bikel and Imed Zitouni, eds., Multilingual Natural Language Processing Applications: From Theory to Practice
Bruce Sterling, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years
Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape our Future
IoT:Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future
Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces that Will Shape our Future
Neil Gershenfeld, When Things Start to Think
Scott Burnham, Trust and the Internet of Things: An Introduction to Designing and Navigating Trust in a Hyper-Connected World
Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
Joe Barkai, The Outcome Economy: How the Industrial Internet of Things is Transforming Every Business
Sustainability:
Tim Flannery, Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis
David MacKay, Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air
Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen, Sustainable Materials without the Hot Air: Making Buildings, Vehicles and Products Efficiently and with Less New Material
E.O. Wilson, Half-earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life
E.O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence
E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth
Rebecca D. Costa, The Watchman's Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Life on a Hotter Planet
The hotlinks, above, go to a mix of synopses, full length pdf versions, and related explanatory material. Perhaps by next summer I'll be able to feed all this to Watson and let it write my blog for me thereafter.
Thanks to Catherine Wolf, David Thomasson, Doug Look, Creighton Hoke, and Dan Knightly for providing suggestions.
