(electronic music)
>> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube.
Covering South By Southwest 2017.
Brought to you by Intel.
Now, here's John Furrier.
>> Hey, welcome back, everyone,
we're here live in Austin, Texas,
for South By Southwest Cube coverage
at the Intel AI Lounge,
#IntelAI if you're watching, put it out on Twitter.
I'm John Furrier of Silicon Angle for the Cube.
Our next guest is Alison Yu who's with Cloudera.
And in the news today, although they won't comment on it.
It's great to see you, social media manager at Cloudera.
>> Yes, it's nice to see you as well.
>> Great to see you.
So, Cloudera has a strategic relationship with Intel.
You guys have a strategic investment, Intel,
and you guys partner up,
so it's well-known in the industry.
But what's going on here is interesting,
AI for social good is our theme.
>> Alison: Yes.
>> Cloudera has always been a pay-it-forward company.
And I've known the founders, Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah.
>> Really all about the community and paying it forward.
So Alison, talk about what you guys are working on.
Because you're involved in a panel,
but also Cloudera Cares.
And you guys have teamed up with Thorn,
doing some interesting things.
>> Alison: Yeah (laughing).
>> Take it away!
>> Sure, thanks. Thanks for the great intro.
So I'll give you a little bit of a brief introduction
to Cloudera Cares.
Cloudera Cares was founded roughly about three years ago.
It was really an employee-driven and -led effort.
I kind of stepped into the role
and ended up being a little bit more of the leader
just by the way it worked out.
So we've really gone from, going from, you know,
we're just doing soup kitchens and everything else,
to strategic partnerships, donating software,
professional service hours, things along those lines.
>> Which has been very exciting to see
our nonprofit partnerships grow in that way.
So it really went from almost grass-root efforts
to an organized organization now.
And we start stepping up our strategic partnerships
about a year and a half ago.
We started with DataKind, is our initial one.
About two years ago, we initiated that.
Then we a year ago, about in September,
we finalized our donation of an enterprise data hub
to Thorn, which if you're not aware of
they're all about using technology
and innovation to stop child-trafficking.
So last year, around September or so,
we announced the partnership
and we donated professional service hours.
And then in October, we went with them to Grace Hopper,
which is obviously the largest Women in Tech Conference
in North America.
And we hosted a hackathon and we helped mentor women
entering into the tech workforce,
and trying to come up with
some really cool innovative solutions
for them to track and see what's going on with the dark web,
so we had quite a few interesting ideas coming out of that.
>> Okay, awesome.
We had Frederico Gomez Suarez on,
who was the technical advisor.
>> Alison: Yeah.
>> A Microsoft employee, but he's volunteering at Thorn,
and this is interesting because this is not just
donating to the soup kitchens and what not.
>> Alison: Yeah.
>> You're starting to see a community approach
to philanthropy that's coding RENN.
>> Yeah.
>> Hackathons turning into community galvanizing communities,
and actually taking it to the next level.
>> Yeah.
So, I think one of the things we realize
is tech, while it's so great,
we have actually introduced a lot of new problems.
So, I don't know if everyone's aware,
but in the '80s and '90s, child exploitation
had almost completely died.
They had almost resolved the issue.
With the introduction of technology and the Internet,
it opened up a lot more ways
for people to go ahead and exploit children,
arrange things, in the dark web.
So we're trying to figure out a way to use technology
to combat a problem that technology kind of created as well,
but not only solving it,
but rescuing people.
>> It's a classic security problem,
the surface area has increased for this kind of thing.
But big data, which is where you guys were founded on
in the cloud era that we live in.
>> Alison: Yeah. >> Pun intended.
(laughing)
Using the machine learning now
you start with some scale now involved.
>> Yes, exactly, and that's what we're really hoping,
so we're partnering with Intel in
the National Center of Missing Exploited Children.
We're actually kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow,
and our hope is we can figure out some different
innovative ways that AI can be applied to
scraping data and finding children.
A lot of times we'll see there's not a lot of clues,
but for example, if we can upload,
if there can be a tool that can upload
three or four different angles of a child's face
when they go missing,
maybe what happens is someone posts a picture
on Instagram or Twitter that has a geo tag
and this kid is in the background.
That would be an amazing way of using AI
and machine learning-- >> Yeah.
>> Alison: To find a child, right.
>> Well, I'll give you guy a plug for Cloudera.
And I'll reference Dr. Naveen Rao,
who's the GM of Intel's AI group, was on earlier.
And he was talking about
how there's a lot of storage available,
not a lot of compute.
Now, Cloudera, you guys have really pioneered
the data lake, data hub concept
where storage is critical. >> Yeah.
>> Now, you got this compute power and machine learning,
that's kind of where it comes together.
Did I get that right?
>> Yeah, and I think it's great that
with the partnership with Intel
we're able to integrate our technology directly
into the hardware, which makes it so much more efficient.
You're able to compute massive amounts
of data in a very short amount of time,
and really come up with real results.
And with this partnership,
specifically with Thorn and NCMEC,
we're seeing that it's real impact
for thousands of people last year, I think.
In the 2016 impact report,
Thorn said they identified over 6,000 trafficking victims,
of which over 2,000 were children.
Right, so that tool that they use
is actually built on Cloudera.
So, it's great seeing our technology put into place.
>> Yeah, that's awesome.
I was talking to an Intel person the other day,
they have 72 cores now on a processor,
on the high-end Xeons.
Let's get down to some other things that you're working on.
What are you doing here at the show?
Do you have things that you're doing?
You have a panel?
>> Yeah, so at the show, at South by Southwest,
we're kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow
at our Austin offices for South by Southwest.
Everyone's welcome to come.
I just did the liquor order, so yes, everyone please come.
(laughing)
>> You just came from Austin's office,
you're just coming there.
>> Yeah, exactly. So we've--
>> Unlimited Red Bull, pizza, food.
(laughing)
>> Well, we'll be doing lots and lots tomorrow,
but we're kicking that off,
we have representatives from Thorn, NCMEC, Google,
Intel, all on site to answer questions.
That's kind of our kickoff
of this month-long virtual hackathon.
You don't need to be in Austin to participate,
but that is one of the things that we are kicking off.
>> And then on Sunday,
actually here at the Intel AI Lounge
we're doing a panel on AI for Good,
and using artificial intelligence
to solve problems.
>> And we'll be broadcasting that live here on The Cube.
So, folks, SiliconAngle.tv will carry that.
Alison, talk about the trend that, you weren't here
when we were talking about how there's now
a new counterculture developing in a good way
around community and social change.
How real is the trend that you're starting
to see these hackathons evolve from
what used to be recruiting sessions
to people just jamming together to meet each other.
Now, you're starting to see the next level of
formation where people are organizing collectively--
>> Yeah. >> To impact real issues.
>> Yeah. >> Is this a real trend or
where is that trend, can you speak to that?
>> Sure, so from what I've seen from the hackathons
what we've been seeing before was
it's very company-specific.
Only one company wanted to do it,
and they would kind of silo themselves, right?
Now, we're kind of seeing this coming together of
companies that are generally competitors,
but they see a great social cause
and they decide that they want to
band together, regardless of their differences
in technology, product, et cetera, for a common good.
And, so.
>> Like a Thorn.
>> For Thorn, you'll see a lot of competitors,
so you'll see Facebook and Twitter or Google
and Amazon, right?
>> John: Yeah. >> And we'll see all these
different competitors come together,
lend their workforce to us,
and have them code for one great project.
>> So, you see it as a real trend.
>> I do see it as a trend.
I saw Thorn last year did a great one with Facebook
and on-site with Facebook.
This year as we started to introduce this hackathon,
we decided that we wanted to do a hackathon series
versus just a one-off hackathon.
So we're seeing people being able to
share code, contribute,
work on top of other code, right,
and it's very much a sharing community,
so we're very excited for that.
>> All right, so I got to ask you
what's they culture like at Cloudera these days,
as you guys prepare to go public?
What's the vibe internally of the company,
obviously Mike Olson, the founder,
is still around, Amr's around.
You guys have been growing really fast.
Got your new space.
What's the vibe like in Cloudera now?
>> Honestly, the culture at Cloudera hasn't really changed.
So, when I joined three years ago we were much smaller
than we are now.
But I think one thing that we're really excited about
is everyone's still so collaborative,
and everyone makes sure to help one another out.
So, I think our common goal is really more along the lines
of we're one team, and let's put out
the best product we can.
>> Awesome.
So, what's South by Southwest mean to you this year?
If you had to kind of zoom out and say, okay.
What's the theme?
We heard Robert Scoble earlier say it's a VR theme.
We hear at Intel it's AI.
So, there's a plethora of different touchpoints here.
What do you see?
>> Yeah, so I actually went to the opening keynote
this morning, which was great.
There was an introduction,
and then I don't know if you realized,
but Cory Booker was on as well, which is great.
>> John: Yep.
>> But I think a lot of what we had seen was
they called out on stage that artificial intelligence
is something that will be a trend for the next year.
And I think that's very exciting
that Intel really hit the nail on the head
with the AI Lounge, right?
>> Cory Booker, I'm a big fan.
He's from my neighborhood, went to the same school
I went to, that my family.
So in Northern Valley, Old Tappan.
Cory, if you're watching, retweet us, hashtag #IntelAI.
So AI's there.
>> AI is definitely there. >> No doubt, it's on stage.
>> Yes, but I think we're also seeing a very large,
just community around how can we make our community better
versus let's try to go in these different silos,
and just be hyper-aware of
what's only in front of us, right?
So, we're seeing a lot more from the community as well,
just being interested in things that are not
immediately in front of us,
the wider, either nation, global, et cetera.
So, I think that's very exciting people are
stepping out of just their own little bubbles, right?
And looking and having more compassion
for other people,
and figuring out how they can give back.
>> And, of course, open source at the center
of all the innovation as always.
(laughing)
>> I would like to think so, right?
>> It is!
I would testify.
Machine learning is just a great example,
how that's now going up into the cloud.
We started to see that really being part of
all the apps coming out,
which is great because you guys are in the
big data business.
>> Alison: Yeah.
>> Okay, Alison, thanks so much for taking the time.
Real quick plug for your panel on Sunday here.
>> Yeah.
>> What are you going to talk about?
>> So we're going to be talking a lot about AI for good.
We're really going to be talking about the NCMEC, Thorn,
Google, Intel, Cloudera partnership.
How we've been able to do that,
and a lot of what we're going to also concentrate on is
how the everyday tech worker can really
get involved and give back and contribute.
I think there is generally a misconception of
if there's not a program at my company,
how do I give back?
>> John: Yeah.
>> And I think Cloudera's a shining example of
how a few employees can really enact
a lot of change.
We went from grassroots, just a few employees,
to a global program pretty quickly, so.
>> And it's organically grown,
which is the formula for success
versus some sort of structured company program (laughing).
>> Exactly, so we definitely gone from
soup kitchen to strategic partnerships,
and being able to donate our own time,
our engineers' times,
and obviously our software, so.
>> Thanks for taking the time to come on our Cube.
It's getting crowded in here.
It's rocking the house,
the house is rocking here at the Intel AI Lounge.
If you're watching, check out the hashtag #IntelAI
or South by Southwest.
I'm John Furrie.
I'll be back with more after this short break.
(electronic music)