A pivotal moment in my early career as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University was when I saw a demonstration of the first soccer-playing robots in the summer of 1994. They were from Alan Mackworth's lab at the University of British Columbia, and I became immediately inspired to try to understand the intelligence required to play soccer. At the time, most AI researchers were focused on much more abstract planning tasks, or short-time-duration skills for individual robots. I saw the opportunity to use the game of soccer to, for the first time, investigate new methods for enabling collaborative (with teammates) and adversarial (against opponents) multi-robot planning in relatively complex domains. It so happened that one of the few other people in the world at the time who was thinking about robot soccer as a challenge domain for AI was Hiroaki Kitano at Sony (currently the CTO of Sony and CEO of Sony AI).

I have been interested in computers and their capability to solve problems since high school when I started writing software for electrophoresis analysis using the Apple II I had been using for gaming. I've been involved with digital pathology since finishing medical school. After growing a company focused on digitizing pathology slides, which was ultimately acquired by Carl Zeiss, the utilization and complete harvesting of the information contained in those images became a clear next step. I believe that Artificial Intelligence is the key to unlocking the potential of this vast trove of data contained in Pathology slides, PreciseDx, was borne out of this belief. AI is the cornerstone of our technology.

Opt-in doomsayers believe this legislation could cripple the entire advertising industry because consumers will have more meaningful control over their privacy, and authenticated audiences will shrink as a result. However, the trends that have shaped the market can be bucked, and publishers and advertisers have an exciting opportunity to create a new ecosystem in compliance with the opt-in marketplace that benefits everyone involved – including consumers. Further, the browser and device manufacturer changes that are already in-progress are already moving the industry towards a more logged-in environment, in which it becomes easier for consumers to opt in as they authenticate. As we look towards an opt-in era in the future, it's important that publishers and marketers consider how the industry arrived at this point, and the lessons they can take away from this journey. Under the opt-out default, it's easy to see that the consumer experience has been lacking, and a lot of that falls on technology. The opt-out default enabled the propagation of third-party cookies, and the collection of data – often in a way that was not as transparent as it could have been for consumers.

Rikki is responsible for the acquisition of new businesses, overseeing & scaling business operations, and upholding & furthering the mission of Blink Digital.