 Live from Houston, Texas. It's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's celebration of women in computing. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Houston, Texas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined today by Isabel Moulinier. She is the Director of Innovation at Thomson Reuters. She's based in the Twin Cities. Welcome, Isabel. Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us here. I'm happy to be here. So let's talk a little bit about your career and where you got to be where you are today. Okay. You grew up in Paris. I did. And did you always think that you would become an engineer? Was that always part of the plan? Not at all. When I was a little girl, I was building birdhouses. My father was in woodworking. That is early engineering stuff, I'd say. I guess so, but not computer engineering. Okay, fair enough. I did get my fingers quite a bit with blades and things like that. So I decided it might be a little bit too difficult for me or too dangerous, I would say. And so then I was a studious person and I liked math and physics, not so much language. So I ended up going into an engineering school that was focused on computer science, economics and math. It was a bit of an accident. In France, they have a system where you took your national exam and if you're a genius, you can pick wherever you want. I'm not a genius. And so I picked whatever I had the best access to. And that was engineering? And that was engineering. Okay, okay. So then you graduated from engineering school and did you go right into, where did you land from there? So during my last year of engineering school, I got lucky. I got to do a semester at Oxford University. And that's where I discovered what research might be like. So I was in the masters of computation there and I really liked it. So when I went back to France, I decided to do a masters in programming languages. And then I landed an internship at IBM. They had a research center in Paris at the time. And after that internship, I also landed a PhD grant from them. And so that's how I got into graduate studies, just a little bit by accident because I was at IBM at the right time when they were giving their last grants for French students. So some deliberate decisions, a little bit of being in the right place at the right time. Exactly. So now you are here at Thompson Reuters, director of innovation, product innovation. And you're also a research scientist. Tell me, what do you do? What are you working on? So right now I'm working on looking at the possibilities of blockchain. Blockchain, very hot topic. Super hot topic. Explain to our viewers out there, what is blockchain? To put it simply, I like a quote from Richard Brown at R3, blockchain is a technology that allows two parties to know that they share the same facts. Okay. And so that in practice, that is... In practice, if you look at the banks, it means that what they have on their ledger. So if bank A has the same information on their ledger, then bank B has. And you don't have to do reconciliation. And right now there is a lot of work in the reconciliation. And so that's why blockchain is so disruptive in financial services because they're kind of removing the middleman. What I focus on is not finance. It's our legal and tax and accounting businesses. And so on the tax and accounting business, we actually have a government entity, branch, sorry. And we look at land registry. Can we bring some anti-corruption aspects and transparency aspects to the land registry, especially in developing countries? So that's one of the projects that we've got going on. So automating contracts. Automating contracts that represent real properties. Okay. And then you can also track who changed the contract and the property so that the land cannot be stolen from other people. You said you're focusing specifically on the developing world. Is this a particular challenge in developing nations? It's, well, corruption is a challenge. Not everywhere. Don't get me wrong. In particular, the land issue. For the land issue, what we find is that land is a great drive for economic development in countries. And so if you can help with that, then people can then get financial security and then you can help development overall. Okay, okay. And that's what you're doing. We're looking at the technology part of it. Yes, I'm not going to save the world at this point in time. Okay, all right, fair enough. Talk to me a little bit about your leadership as a woman engineer at Thompson Reuters. Okay. And how you, I know that Thompson Reuters has a lot of programs, internal programs to mentor its employees and to retain them. How do you fit in? Because you're not an HR, you're not running these talent programs, but you are someone who's down in the trenches doing the work, has worked closely with women and mentored women. How do you approach it? So it's funny, you mentioned that because I just had lunch with a couple of women and we were trying to see how can we develop a program that technologists would adapt to themselves. And so we were talking about this idea of having technical leadership as opposed to people leadership and how do you develop technical leadership in an environment, especially for women? And so the idea is everyone can be a leader. You don't have to be a manager to be a leader. And I learned about that when I was part of one of those talent or HR programs that Susan Ali Davis, who's a part of ABI as well, has put together, it's called leadership one. And I was having a hard time figuring out what am I doing here? Because a lot of the people were managers and they were dealing with people's issues and I didn't have any reports or anything. And I was struggling with what does it mean to be a leader in technology if you don't have reports or if you don't have people? And then I realized it's all about the networking and how you learn the trust of the people you work with. And so really at Thomson Reuters we've got a culture where we talk about the shadow of a leader and the shadow that you cast is the respect you get from others basically. And so you can become a leader by earning trust and respect from others. And then you can share that by exposing younger people, making introductions all the time. So I'm always in the hole introducing people to each other that don't know people. So that's what I was going to ask you. That sounds like such good advice, such common sense advice, gain the trust of the people you work with, the people you work for you, the people who you work for. How do you do that? As you said, you work hard to just make sure that you are constantly introducing people and making sure that other voices are heard. What other ways do you build trust? Because that is something we keep hearing over and over again, the importance of trust. So one of the things is when you work with customers you have to deliver. If you don't deliver, you're not going to gain their trust. So delivering on what you promise is a great way to win trust. And it doesn't have to be a big delivery. It could just be by the end of this week I'll have this report for you. Or going out of your way to look at some area of technology that you're not very familiar with and then write a white paper about it. So there can be small steps. They don't have to be big steps at all. You're here at Grace Hopper, which is the best and brightest young minds in technology today, represented from 83 countries around the world. And we're here, Google is here and Snapchat is here and Microsoft and all the hot companies. How do you compete in the sense of what do you say about Thomson Reuters? In the sense of what would make someone want to work there and be a part of the problems that you're trying to solve? Very good question. We struggled with that a little bit from time to time. One of the things that we do very well at Thomson Reuters is we have the... One of our principle is the trust principle. So our new services are trusted. Our financial services... Because of the partnership with Reuters, yes, yes. Our lawyers trust our products to do their research and to go defend cases in court. We also have a foundation, the Thomson Reuters Foundation, that focuses on issues that are very important. So if you're somebody who wants to try to change the world, or you have very strong interest in women's rights, the Foundation has an event every year for that called Trust Women. If you want life balance, which sometimes is nice to have, it's a great place to be. We do have crazy hours from time to time, but usually we don't have crazy hours. It's really the exception because... Not the norm. One of the other things that is really good at Thomson Reuters is we're a multinational company. And so you get to work with people all over the world. In my own experience, I worked with Japan, Australia, China, Latin America, South America, Europe. So I get to interact with multiple cultures very frequently. And you're also doing some cool stuff. I mean, you talked a little bit about before we started, your history is in search engine. And you're also doing some neat partnerships with IBM. Right, exactly. So one of the things we are trying to do right now is we're setting up a new center, which is applied research in Toronto. We currently call it the Center for Cognitive Computing. And that's where we're going to take a new generation of products, where we rely more on the technologies like machine learning, natural language processing. And we currently have experiments going on with IBM Watson. And so we're partnering with... Can you talk a little bit about the experiments? What you're trying to figure out? Yeah, so we're trying to understand how we can apply that technology in order to deliver better products for our customers. So our customers are professionals. They're not end users. But as the new generation that has grown up with Google and Facebook comes along, they want their professional tools to look the same. Yes. And they have higher expectations. And they have higher expectations, exactly. And so one of the ways to do that, we cannot have a thousand researchers at Thomson Rider because our area is not research. So what we do instead is we partner with the best and brightest companies out there in order to amplify what we can do and use the technology to amplify what our customers can do as well. Can you give us an example of what that looks like in the sense of a tool for either a lawyer or a finance professional that has this amplified human knowledge? Sure. So to some extent what we did with our search engine was already a step in that direction. So when we reworked the Westo search engine, which was a legal search engine, what we did is we looked at all the information that we knew about our customers and then all the information that we've poured into our content because we have editors and we have machines extracting information from our documents. And then we merged the two and then it gave us a better search engine. More closely now, you've got all the virtual assistants, right? And so when it be cool if you're in a law firm and you need to build your customers, you don't need to type anything. You just talk to your Amazon Echo that's sitting on your desk and you integrate it with your billing system. Right, right, exactly. That makes perfect sense. So those are the types of experience that we want to provide to our customers. Finally, just your thoughts on this conference, 15,000 people from around the world, is this your first time here at Grace Hopper? No, it's my fourth time. Your fourth time, okay. So you're a veteran of this conference. I am, to some extent. How's the vibe this year and how does it compare to years past? Do you feel that we are, are people talking about the election or people talking about court cases that we've seen in Silicon Valley this year? I mean, what's the vibe? So people are definitely talking about the election, especially foreigners, which is quite interesting. You haven't been here 20 years. Are you really a foreigner? I'm not. No, but like some of my British colleagues and things like that. Yes, yes. Or British participants, not just my colleagues. Yes. So I want to say I'm really impressed by the growth of the conference. The first time I went was four years ago in Minneapolis and I think we were less than half this size and every year it's more and more young people, young women, more and more energy. And one of the things that I really appreciate with this year and last year is including male allies. Because one of the things is women won't be able to change what's happening in technologies. There are not enough of us, right? And so if we can bring male allies to the conference as well, that's a great asset. And there is a great keynote on Friday which I'm going to miss, unfortunately. So I will be watching the stream. Mark Benioff, yeah, that's Salesforce, exactly. And so once we have allies, I think we'll see an even bigger effort around the conference. So we need men too, if we're going to make a change, we need men too. Yeah, they all have daughters. Isabel Malignier, thank you so much for joining us. Director of Product Innovation at Thomson Reuters. We will be right back with the Cube's live coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference in Houston, Texas after the short break.