 Welcome back to SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of Stanford Excel Symposium. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. This is theCUBE, our flagship program, where we go out to the events, extract the silver from the noise. theCUBE is part of SiliconANGLE TV's new format. We bring live coverage at the events, where all the social media is happening, all the social interactions, and we're proud in our fourth year. My next guest, I'm really excited to have here, Martha Russell, who's the executive director of MediaX at Stanford University. Martha, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. We're very happy to have Excel partners here with us today at Stanford University. This is the 17th year that Stanford Excel Symposium has taken place on campus. MediaX and Excel have been partners since the creation of MediaX about 11 years ago. So, obviously, this event is about this symposium. Talk about what you were announcing up here today. You also kicked it off and introduced Excel. Talk about a little bit about this event, and then we can dig into all the amazing things that MediaX is doing. Well, this event brings together the thought leadership of Stanford University with the interest that Excel partners has in understanding the kind of grassroots-driven, high-value, high-impact businesses that are created not only in Silicon Valley but around the world. The focus for this meeting on transforming the 21st century enterprise is an especially relevant topic for us because at MediaX we have been working for the past couple of years on research that will help to inform, produce new insights on how we measure and improve the productivity of knowledge workers. Very seminal to the conversations that we've had today. So, one of the things I've been very impressed with about MediaX is it's the future of media. It's the future of work. It's the future of play. Stanford has a great reputation of having this kind of interdisciplinary and partnership. So, you're not just a think tank. You're not just an academic component. Talk about the unique nature of MediaX because you bring expertise in research. You bring some partnering with the industry and how does that all work? Explain to the folks about the formula. Let me say that we... Or did I get that right? We tap the expertise of Stanford Labs and the thought leaders at Stanford University. We tap them with questions that come from the business community. We're looking three to five years out to say what do we want to start studying now so that in three to five years we'll be smart. We'll have the fundamental science with broad applicability that will allow us to create the insights that the products and technologies of the future will require. So, our process is you're right in a way that we tap the Stanford thought leaders but we challenge them with questions about the future. We want to do science that's relevant to business and it turns out that in the course of doing that some new technologies, some new insights are created that benefit both our strategic partners, our members and that some of the students take with them out into new startups as they graduate. So, it's a melting pot of kind of everything kind of coming together, right? It's a catalyst. Catalyst, okay. Yes, it is. I've given an example for the folks out there something recently that you can point to that would be. Well, one example that I can mention is one of the projects that was sponsored by, funded by Mediacs under the challenge of how do you measure and increase the productivity of knowledge workers. And one of the graduate students had the idea that if you look at the way that the files that are stored on an enterprise server are used and accessed by team members who are co-dependent on information you get an idea of the way that they're working together and there might be a way to use it to track that data and to be able to identify whether predictors of whether the group was going to complete a project on time on budget. And in fact, there was. And so that particular capability of looking at the way that files are shared by team members who are co-dependent on each other for information has become the basis for a company called Cloud Leaps which is now providing services especially to the construction industry where you have designers, you have engineers, you have architects, you have people from a wide variety of disciplines and you hope that they're all thinking about the same building. That's exciting. So for the folks out there, go to mediax.standford.edu. You can go to that's their website. So it's a standford.edu website but it's mediax, mediax.standford.edu. I have just some themes here is I just want to share the folks out there. Image speech and language processing, natural language research, video processing, human machine interaction and sensing, collaboration, participant online media content which is headlinda.com on earlier. I mean this is cutting edge stuff. This is not like how to get someone to get better Twitter followers or how to get liked on Facebook. This is like really kind of changed the world. We're looking for the best questions and in order to get the best questions we partner with industry. Our industry members, our strategic partners talk to us about how they see the future. We listen very closely, we listen deeply for that and we take out of that some of the questions, some of the uncertainties about the future and challenge the labs at Stanford to find new ways of addressing those uncertainties with research activities. Now in the course of doing that, students get PhDs. Postdocs are engaged in activities. There are project-based courses that are working on assignments. And so education happens. We're contributing to the fund of science, contributing to new knowledge but we're also with that creating insights that have business relevance. And people are, you said catalysts, so they're starting companies. That's one of the best ways that our insights leave the university is in the minds of graduates as they take those ideas either into their employers or into companies that they start. How do companies get involved? So I'm Mr. Big Public Company and I've been cutting R&D for a while and during the down times and before the, during the financial crisis in 2008 or before, there's been a big discussion around R&D being cut. I want to invest because we're seeing a lot of investment now in mobile cloud social, kind of new transformation, new user experiences. How do I get involved with MediaX? There is a program for companies, right? So please explain that. We're a membership organization and we have several levels of membership. The associate membership gives a company the opportunity to bring, to identify a theme that's of interest to them and to bring a number of people from the company to campus for presentations from faculty, applying faculty expertise to some of the questions that are brought. And we also have a strategic partner program in which our strategic partners team with us and we collaborate on framing a question that goes out as an RFP to the Stanford labs. Well, I'm excited. Obviously at Silicon Angle, Wikibon, we're, we want to change the media business we think we're inventing the future, applying big data, open source like content. We'll see if our experiment works but you guys certainly doing some amazing work out there. Really impressive looking forward to talking further. There are some great stories that are on our website, mediax.stanford.edu. I will tell you that recently Stanford has established a new lab that we're very excited about. It's called the Litix Lab after analytics. And we've heard a lot of conversations about big data today about the way that personalization and enterprise services are coming together or at least the challenges are identified in the same symposium today. And so the Litix Lab has teams of students drawn interdisciplinary from communication, computer science, education, engineering that are looking at ways to attack and leverage the data that's being collected, for example, in the massively open online courses that Stanford has been a leader in establishing. And- Like what are they looking for in there? The data of the people taking the classes or is it? Well, you know, so much is unknown about who's taking them, what their motives are and how they progress with various levels of engagement over the course, over the period of course. Yeah, and that's been a hugely successful program. I mean, many, many people have taken classes at Stanford that never did intend it. So there's a lot of data and some of the early work that's research that's been done on it and a really brilliant conference paper that was presented by three students, computer science, education, and communication looked at the different types of learners that are moving through a course, a MOOC, and what their motives are and how they engage, disengage, re-engage over the course of- You said that information's on the FAQs on the website? That particular information is not yet. It has just barely been presented. Okay. You mean the paper at Lytics Lab or both? Both. There is some information on the Lytics Lab online and I think it's Lytics, L-Y-T-I-C-S.stanford.edu. And more information will be available. We're very excited about that. And who's running that lab? It's run by Roy P. and John Mitchell. Roy P. is the faculty director of MediaX and is in graduate school of education. John Mitchell is in the vice provost's office responsible for online learning at Stanford. Like I was telling Susanna, you guys have a treasure trove of information. You are certainly a catalyst. Very impressive. We love your charter. SiliconANGLE just bumped into you guys from working with Excel for this event. And I was like, wow, this is really an amazing group and something that we hope to get some content with. Thank you. And you know it changes all the time. We want to come in. You might get the latest story today, but you have to come back next week because there'll be another story. I want to come back in and talk to some of the researchers. We shouldn't fall in the Lytics Lab. Our motto when I started SiliconANGLE four years ago was we're computer science meets social science. It's been the bedrock of our mission. I'll say that if we're the first media company to cover cloud mobile and social, we use predictive analysts. We love this new market. We share a lot of interest then. We have a lot of good stories for you. We're happy to come in and mine all that content and get it out and free it and make it fly and frictionless around the world as Mark Hopkins would say. So, Martha, thanks for coming on theCUBE. And we're looking forward to talking further. This is SiliconANGLE.com, the exclusive coverage of Stanford Excel Symposium here in Stanford University in Stanford, California. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.