 Okay, we're back live here inside theCUBE. theCUBE is SiliconANGLE.com's SiliconANGLE.tv Productions exclusive broadcast of the top tech events. We go out to the events, talk to the smartest people who can find CEOs, executives, entrepreneurs, researchers. Whoever they are, we want to extract the signal from the noise and share that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. I'm joined by my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org and we're here with April Mitchell, who's a senior engineer of HP Labs. John, we've really been looking forward to this segment. April, welcome. Thank you, I'm excited to be here. April, you're essentially, for the lack of a better description, I guess a data scientist too, because you love data and you're talking about collaboration, social data, all kinds of stuff going on in this area. So, tell us, what's your definition of big data? Big data, I actually consider myself, while data scientist provides us with the information, I actually consider myself a user experience researcher. I like starting with the person. What is it that their needs are? What do they value? What does it take to get your job done, to get your job done well? I think big data can help support that and gives us the information that we need to do it, but really starting from the experience angle, I like going in the approach when I'm doing my research and understanding, you as a user, what are your needs? What are you struggling with right now? What's working well for you? And then how can we take that and turn that into solutions that can help you? And right now I'm focusing on collaboration. So, how do you do that? What's your process? I mean, just go belly to belly. Do you analyze data? I mean, talk about how you... I do that by asking questions and that number one question is why? As soon as you, I mean, even with my friends, you know, I'm pulling out the latest technology gadget or they're telling me about what new social network they started using. I'm like, oh, you know, why do you like that? Oh, I love this about it. I love that. Why do you love that about it? I say for any user experience inquiry you're supposed to do, you have to follow up a question with three whys because then you really get to the details. Often when you're trying... Why, why and really why? Yeah, why, why and really are you, you know, and not the question of are you sure, you know, to lead them a different direction but really getting to the root of what they're saying. You know, when you think of innovation, it's kind of, you know, it's up there. It's everything. I want to do something new. How do you ground that in something? I think starting with that user and understanding what it can be and what their problems are, that why helps you get there. So talk about some of the projects you're working on. So HP Labs is renowned. We just had HP Labs in earlier. Colin Bass, who's working on a lot of the data center stuff, which is so cool. It's like holistic operating system. It's big data, but what are you working on? First of all, we're all really excited to be here at HP Discover. Having all of us from HP Labs here and the area and the opportunity to speak with folks like yourselves to really talk with our customers and other partners within the businesses, it's been quite an exciting week. A roller coaster for days, but very engaging. Right now I am talking about HP Labs Compass and this is an enterprise social collaboration tool, a project that we're working on within HP Labs. And our goal for Compass was to say, can we help orient employees within their organization? Can we help navigate them to the people and information that they need to know? And how do we do that? Often when you think social collaboration's hot right now, especially in the consumer space, it's really taking off. But within the enterprise, everybody's waiting to see, is it going to solve all of our problems? Is it going to help us do work better? Help us solve. It's going to solve many of our problems. And we're seeing a bit of lackluster adoption. And one of the reasons I think that lack of adoption is because it really takes a lot of effort interacting with these new tools before you get value in return. You have to build up these communities. And so we said, hmm, let's approach this. Let's see what kind of analytics we can use. Let's see what kind of harvesting and knowledge management we can use that we can launch a service that'll deliver value to you the first day you use it. What kind of tech are you working on there? I mean, to find those analytics, is it using in-house vertical stuff, using Hadoop? What are you using for code or to code with? Yeah, well, we're labs. We like to write a lot of it ourselves. But it was an exciting time. We launched this as part of the demonstrator program within HP Labs. And if you aren't familiar with the demonstrator program, it's like a startup within HP Labs. There's a pool of funding. And the goal of it is for us to go pitch our ideas and for them to essentially fund an idea that is research that is at the stage where it's really ready to begin that transition into product or into the HP businesses. So when we pitched this idea, the whole reason we were able to do it is because of the global teams that we had working on it. We have folks in HP Labs, India. We have folks in HP Labs, Israel, where the analytics expertise is. Those of us in Palo Alto, who are working on the data mining and the graph analysis, bringing together all of those and then layering on top of it, new user experience innovations, is where we can fund them. How big of it is that team? We are a team of about 12, and we literally span five different countries. Is that part of the social computing lab? We have folks in the social computing lab that we absolutely work with. It's the analytics lab, it's the services lab, and it's team members that are in Bristol and Guadalajara, Mexico too. So we're working across teams, which global collaboration is something I'm excited and passionate about. And our meetings are pretty interesting. We do a lot online. We actually have some calls where we're all online at the same time and talking to one another and we communicate a lot via email and video. What do you think about the user experience? We've been talking on theCUBE here all week, and all the time about user experience, right? So user experience is one of the elements that we put in our formula when massive change happens, like inflection points, like big data, or the PC revolution. The user experience is changing and the expectations of the user, the preferred way to do something with market change and then value creation. What are you seeing right there for user experience? Because people now that they're connected, the smartphone has really kind of codified that notion that I can connect. So connections is the social paradigm of like I'm not connected crowd sourcing, you're seeing new funding techniques, we have crowd sourcing and other tools like what we have and what you guys have. What is the user experience mindset these days? I think when I think of user experience, when we were specifically looking at this for enterprise collaboration, what we were interested in is you want to launch a tool, you think it's going to provide value, you've asked those why questions and you've developed something as a result of that, but you can't just tell users, this is the greatest thing ever, come try it. There has to be a reason, there has to be that need that you're meeting that gets them there. With Compass in particular, what we're doing is providing them a service that they need right now, an ability to easily share content within the enterprise. I have a PowerPoint presentation I want to send you, I can put it in an email, I can send it to you, only you'll be able to see it. Sometimes those presentations get really big, maybe it's too much for you to actually pull out your phone, it takes a while for it to download, for you to actually be able to view it. So through this tool, drag and drop a presentation, share it with, you get a custom URL, you can send that URL to someone, they can look at it on their smartphone, they can look at it online, we're able to track who's seeing it, we're all within the same enterprise, so I can actually tell that you've downloaded it and looked at it, but where the real hook is, is that now because we're running on top of this connected knowledge graph that's within your whole organization, I can not just show you the content that you're viewing in particular, because I know you're viewing it, I can show you recommended content that exists within your own enterprise. I can show you people that are working in that area that would be relevant for you to see. So through this custom analytics, we're able to make recommendations to you that help improve that experience where you didn't have to go out and search for that, but just by someone sharing you that presentation, you see the information. Are you testing this within HP? We are, yeah. So how you roll it out and how many people are actually using it? We are showing it for the first time right now at HP Discover, we'll be launching this summer within HP. My goal as an experienced researcher is to see how people use it, how the growth is, what features they like, what features we're missing, but our game is really customer number one. For that, we're partnering with our partner in autonomy and we're moving forward and talking with them about the next generation and what we can do for enterprise. How do you guys handle the big database problem? I mean, the old days, structured databases were great if you knew first name, last name, we heard that on theCUBE today. But now you have all kinds of other loose data that could help filter and create insight around the collaboration mentioned, things like social graphs and interest graphs. So how do you handle the database problem? Our challenge, our opportunity. It's a challenge, absolutely, because we want to build this graph that runs within your whole enterprise and the whole value of that is that that graph needs to explode. We want that graph to explode. So how does it scale? How do you deliver in an environment where you are ready for it to grow? You're ready to deal with that growth and spurts. We're also looking at the challenge of how to deploy this on the cloud. It's got to be accessible. It's got to be on all the time. So it's unstructured? It's both unstructured and structured. We're doing, through the analytics that we want to do, I don't think it's ever going to be one or the other. I don't think we want a solution, especially an enterprise collaboration solution that's completely automated, that we, right now we are tagging automatically. We are describing automatically. We are extracting authorship information to create that graph. But we also have a feature that lets users add some organization to that as well. We call it collections. So I could just send you an email and you get that and you know a little bit about that PowerPoint that I attached that I'd email. But through Compass, I can create a collection. I can add that presentation. I can add a document I wrote about it. I could add a link to a news article. I could add my video that I have on YouTube describing Compass. Now you see this collection and you get a much broader context. You could follow it. You may just be interested in that video. You add it to your own collection about videos I saw at HP Discover. Now all of a sudden others within the organization can see why my content is important to you. Giving more context in an audience to your work product. Now as people put together the pieces of that puzzle and it gets richer and richer and richer, are you able to extract more data out of that and more context? Is that part of the initiative? Yeah, we wanted to go both ways. We're really working hard on crawling information that's already there, harvesting the information that already exists within your enterprise. One of our goals that we set out at the beginning was to say just because you start using a new tool or a new service such as Compass doesn't mean you started working here yesterday. There's a lot of work and a lot of information that you've already created as part of your everyday workflow. So we want to harvest that information. We want to showcase that to you through the services we launch, but we want the other as well. The organization that you do, the publishing that you do on the front end, we want that to go back down into the graph so that we can then use that to make better recommendations to you and your colleagues that can help find you. What are you most excited about learning about when you roll this out? What are the questions that you're dying to answer? Yeah, whenever you launch a new service, it's that always that dreaded day. We wait to see for the first person to log in and they're like, yay, and then 10 people log in and then a thousand people and you're like, okay, now it can slow down just for a little while and let us see how it's going. I think I'm most interested to see what really drives people to begin interacting with it. I think my hypothesis right now will that it'll be, hey, it's so easy to share a PowerPoint this way or we're looking at this article that just came out and I'm interested in it. I can actually take that URL and have a private conversation about it within my organization. I think that will be the first reason people come there, but as I've been showing it and talking to customers here, they're coming up with a lot of new reasons and I'm anxious to see which one of those takes off. How important, April, do you think it is to connect to tools outside? You mentioned in the whole consumer piece and is that part of the vision? It is. One thing we're doing right now is we can crawl your enterprise directory, for example, to find out your name, your location, your title. We can pull a photo if you have that there. If you don't have that photo there, we can go to LinkedIn. If you give us that connection and find your photo there. So many of us, there's this crossover between our personal lives and our work lives. What we want to do is try to find line and make sure that you have control over that information so that that information can be pulled in if you wanted to or it can be taken down if you wanted to and give the user that option. Tell us about your background. Where'd you go to school? How did you get to where you are? Absolutely. I grew up, I should test you based on my accent and see if you can guess where I'm from. I actually grew up in Mississippi. I'm from Madison, Mississippi. I went to a liberal arts college called Milsep College and I majored in computer science there. Yeah, I was one of those people who- Do you have a computer science degree? I do have a computer science degree. Do you want your resume? Oh, that is a great point. It is in computer science, not accounting. Yeah, absolutely. From there, I went to the University of Rochester where I got my masters of science in computer science and at that point I found an internship at a great company called Compact and I flew out to the Bay Area the day after they merged with HP. So I joined HP. It was actually a DEC research lab that had just become compact so they were still getting used to compact when we became HP. But I landed in the Bay Area, worked for three months on a really cool project that was actually a mobile remote telepresence robot. And it was just super exciting. I fell in love with Silicon Valley and I've now made my life there. I've been out there for 10 years. I have a wonderful husband and a beautiful daughter. You have a great team over there at HP Labs and the facility is the original headquarters of Bill and Dave where we had the cube for the Moonshot, which is the arm and the processor base, the new stuff we had Chandra Khan on and a bunch of other folks. But a great facility. They renovated it recently and it's absolutely gorgeous. It is, it's lovely. How am I? Kind of feels like 300 megs up stream. My cube was right next to Bill and Dave's cube. I mean, it's really inspiring walking into that office and knowing that their offices were still there and so much of the legacy that they left is definitely very strong in HP. When I first came to the Valley and started working at HP Labs, I had no idea how lucky I was to be at a company that has that sense of innovation all the way through to its core and with the amazing people that I get to work with. What are some of the share with folks out there how HP Labs interfaces with the external world because I'll see you're here. You're excited to be out in the field and the event here. But also you guys do a lot of work with academics. I've interviewed you guys before about you got relationship with the universities. With open source becoming such a big phenomenon, we see a dupe and a patch is growing like crazy. You got open stack out that you guys are involved in. How much open source stuff do you guys contribute and work with or is that on the? No, open source is absolutely, I mean open source is a big part of the project that I'm working on. We HP, our role in HP Labs is really threefold. It's to be an example of that thought leadership and we do that through the IP that we file through the co-innovation opportunities that we have through the publishing that we do at academic and industry conferences. It's also to deliver business value in partnership with the businesses that we have and directly with customers. And it's really to be that thought leadership in that example and to co-innovate and co-collaborate to solve real world problems that we're working on today. And Chandra Kron was candid last time I talked to him. He's like, you know, and he always iterates. But I love to ask the question because he always says, we want to solve the hard problems that can help HP's business. So with that statement in mind, what are some of the hard problems that you've got your hands on right now with Compass and other projects? Well, with Compass and Enterprise Collaboration, I think it's a hard problem, but it's going to be an exciting problem to solve. I know it's coming. It's understanding what's going to be that tipping point that really brings Enterprise Collaboration. What specifically is the hard problem? Is it the handling the data? Is it the multiple schemas, non-scheme as unstructured? Is there a couple of areas you could point to that saying that's a hard problem and we're solving it? I'd say the hard problem that I'm working on solving right now is understanding the incentive and reason behind why people collaborate. I have to approach it from a user experience point of view. It's not just collaborate because that's the way you have to do it. It's not just, oh, I love collaboration. I'm going to tell everybody everything. It's understanding for each enterprise, for taking this out of a completely social and turning this into a work experience, how and why are people going to collaborate? I love what you do. In fact, when we launched SiliconANGLE.com two and a half years ago, our philosophy was it's where computer science meets social science, and that kind of also kind of riffs off technology and liberal arts has Steve Jobs had. So social science is a big part of it because there are new things that are going on right now in the world that have never been done before. People are connected, more data, different motives. So we love it. And my feeling is, my observation is that people want to belong to something. They want to feel a part of something. And finding out how that's translated into a product is extremely hard. It is, it is. And there are many different types of people and there's been a lot of articles recently and the focus on valuing the introverts and the people who can sit along and be very productive in that space. You don't want collaboration to leave them behind, but you don't want to hold collaboration back. They're not interested in it, which is why I think there's a real opportunity in deriving these networks of people, deriving these connections, helping make these discoveries without every single person having to go through the effort to say, this is me, this is my profile, this is who I am. One thing that we think a lot about at SiliconANGLE and we have our little lab team and with Wikibon the research, we look at social network interaction and one of the things that we are constantly thinking about is the problem of face-to-face communications, which is natural, we're here doing theCUBE, and then virtual chat, kind of non-face-to-face, but then these other things like Second Life where you actually see that kind of commitment. So it's an interesting, these are variables that you just take for granted, because when you're face-to-face, you can see all the gestures, but when you're online, there's different meaning, right? People take things differently, context. Absolutely. You know, this is a space that's close to my heart. I worked for many years on HP's Halo video collaboration studios and it was funny because we would be in meetings, we would all be on a conference call and we'd be sitting there typing away on our computers and we're listening, but we're talking, all of a sudden you got in a Halo room and everybody started closing their laptops because they're like, they are looking at me, and the conversations change, the way you interact to change. There's a really cool little project. Everyone's been in a meeting where there's been like this back channel on chat, like, I can't believe you're saying that. I mean, people are doing a lot of talking. Yeah, the IM conversation going on on the side, you know. It's like three conversations going on at the same time. Well, and then you bring mobile into it. You're texting and talking to someone right now and posting on Twitter, oh my gosh, I can't believe, but you know, it's all, it's- It just comes up in the CUBE conversation a lot too about the new generation of workers, right? So this affects the HB's core business problem is that one of the things that's changing the business is that the new people entering the workforce, things like telesales, the phone, email, that's a foreign concept to a 22-year-old coming out of college. That's my primary tool. No, I'm on social, I'm on the web, I'm moving. I think that's where enterprise collaboration can be very impactful when you consider it at the beginning of a career, the onboarding process, as well as the offboarding process at the end. When you have a team, you're going back to look at a project or a proposal that you were working on five, 10 years ago, all of a sudden that team has changed, that group has changed. You really need to find someone that has that piece of information you're looking for. Right now it's all about your network. It's all about knowing that one person a call. How can we enable you to see who the colleagues were, somebody that you may know that you can reach out and find that information you need? April, I have one last question, John, if I may. You know, I have to ask you. So the HP's logo, right, the HP Invent, right? The roots of HP Invent, you're at the heart of Invent. What does that mean to you, HP Invent? Can HP get back to its roots, its culture, or is it just too big of a company now to do that? I think we're there. I definitely know in HP Labs we're there. We are here to work in partnership with our business units to help deliver innovations that will solve our customer needs today and that will create new business opportunities for them in the future. And I'm telling you, the passion is alive and well at HP Labs. All right, April Mitchell, HP Labs, senior research engineer, collaboration, social, using data, all kinds of new stuff, human interaction, user experience, user expectations. Big trend, very relevant. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.