Dr. Jeff Welser, so great to meet you and thank you for
talking to me. PhD graduate from Stanford, Director of IBM Research Lab Almaden
and Vice President. It’s all very intimidating
Hahah
Just to humanise you, would you be able to tell us what your
favourite movie, your favourite food and your favourite hobby just to kick
things off?
So I'll start with my favourite hobby which is actually
cooking. I love to cook, it is by far my favourite thing
Well that works well with your favourite food
Exactly. For foods I love sushi in general but if i’m
cooking something I really like to make braised meats, like a piece of beef or a
piece of pork and cook them for for hours and hours in the stove with a really
thick sauce, oh that's great. And favourite movie, favourite movie. Well my
favourite classic movie is probably Harold
and Maude which is back from the 60s. Something that is more more modern
that I have enjoyed recently, well I have to say I watch a lot of kids movies
right now because my son is 10 years old, so I'm deep in the middle of the
Marvel Heroes series which are hardly arts films but they are kind of fun
Awesome awesome. So you went to Stanford University and did
electrical engineering at your bachelor?
Yes that's right
And you decided that wasn't enough and that you wanted to do
your masters in electrical engineering?
Yep haha
Aand that still didn't satisfy you and so you decided you
wanted to do your PhD
Haha correct
So looking back on your younger self, what made you decide
to wanted to do a PhD and did you know at that age that research was what you
wanted to go into?
So I think two things. First of all actually, growing up
like my father was a professor. My mom also taught at a university. So everyone
I knew around me had PhDs. I lived in a very educated area, everyone had at
least a masters
Right so it was like an arms race
Yeah exactly I always joke my father “it wasn't until I
got to college that I realised I didn't have to go, I thought I had to”. So I
got to college, I really was really going to computer science and programming
but I really got interested in the hardware the physics side of the world. Yeah.
So starting an engineering and when I finished the bachelor I realised I wanted
to get at least a masters because I really wanted to get into some of the
material stuff and that that point I got into the PhD program but took a year
off and went worked for IBM.2
There was a guy there who liked to take in students when they're somewhere in
the graduate program
Like an internship?
Sort of but it was a year long so it was sort of like a
postdoc but like, before you're a doc. Right. So did a year at Yorktown Heights
and really loved doing research. Thought it was great so yeah that solidified
it, go back to school, get the PhD
And that ticked that box that you wanted to go into research
Exactly, although interestingly though when I finished the
PhD I was kind of on the edge about going into research at someplace like AT&T
Bell Labs or IBM, like an industrial research lab or going to be a professor
Yeah traditional sort of research
Exactly so I was kinda on the edge and one of the things
that drew me to IBM was when I started there in 95 they let me also teach at
Columbia University for a couple of years. So I like to kind of test the waters
for a while before I decide on something
Yeah so that allowed you to balance both of your desires
Exactly. I realised that I loved and still love working
with students, I get to continue to work a lot with universities, but I liked
doing the industrial side of research
Having business value for what you are you doing?
Exactly
Awesome, and now you're become the Vice President and Lab
Director of IBM Research Almaden, not just any research lab but the one in the
tech hub of the world. From starting your first position at IBM Research T.J.
Watson, what was your journey from there to getting to where you are today?
Well first of all I think like most people I didn't ever
see that I would be an IBM this long. I had the idea it would be for a few years
and then I would try a new job but I kept finding new opportunities, actually
one of the things I always encourage people at IBM to do is that there are so
many different things you can do at this company. So for me I was a researcher I
loved it. After about four or five years I started managing the group which I
also enjoyed and I realised I liked being a manager as I could see more of the
research rather than just my little slice
What was your slice?
I was a device to device person so I focused on how you
create the next generation Moore's Law chips, new materials, new device
structures. So a lot of physics and fabrication in the lab
I suppose there is a big overlap between the electrical
engineering and the physics
That's exactly right. Actually my group in grad school was
applied physics and half electrical engineering. So I like that part, like doing
the management and then I started talking to my managers about the fact that I
thought I might want to go for more of a managerial track rather than a
technical track
And that was just to continue to have that overview?
Yeah. I like the breadth. I like being able to get lots of
different things even rather than just doing my one thing. So I got an
opportunity actually be a technical assistance to one of our general managers at
the time. John Kelly who's now a senior V.P. He was at the time the general
manager for the micro electronics division, the chip division. So I spent a year
shadowing him and that was a great role to help me understand, you know, what
the real business of IBM is about. I was amazed at how they don’t really spend
much time with the technology they assume the technology and are like - How are
you gonna market? Who are your partners going to be? Who are your clients going
to be? Understanding all of that was really cool
Shadowing, that’s interesting you brought that up because
back in Australia New Zealand there is discussions going on about changing the
graduate program to include shadowing opportunities for the graduates. How would
you describe it, was that one of your most pivotal experiences do you think
along your journey?
Absolutely, because it really has in many ways. First of
all it solidified my mind that I do like idea of going into management but also
realise that I really had to think more suddenly about what is managing? what do
I actually want to do? There’s development and consulting and lots of areas to
go into. Yes so I think that a T.A. position is great. Tends to be a full year
so it a lot of commitment to your career. Yeah I think just seeing with like a
week or two of shadowing would be helpful to get some ideas on things. So from
there I went back and did a management development so I got out of research for
a while and I enjoyed that, it was a great experience. I do highly recommend
getting out of your division, try other divisions of IBM at some point because
you get a better view
And just to keep things interesting
Exactly exactly. And then I came back into research. I
spent several years actually in a role where I was managing a consortium of
companies, with IBM being one of them of course, that funded university research
on electronics. So I got a lot of time there working with university professors,
working with executives of other companies that we can be pleased are our
competitors like Intel, etc and then also the government, trying to get funding
from the government to fund universities to do work that we thought was
interesting. It was a very different experience. I loved it. That was really
interesting for me. I actually then moved out of my comfort zone yet again to
start managing software, which was not my area. That was I was a director so I
would say that was an interesting challenge because I'd always been used to
being in the area that I knew really well, so when I talk to my employees I knew
that area very deeply. I don’t know software. I can program but i’m not a
software guy. So it was very interesting, how do you manage a team when these
guys all have PhDs and are all these experts in their field. How do you manage
them and really help them if you can't actually help them technically?
When you do when you're at the depth that they might have
Exactly. So really its much more than about strategy and
figuring out your resources and how to allocate those resources
And trust?
And trust, a lot of trust. Also getting better about
understanding when people are talking to you, if you do not understand the
details, when something needs to be poked down a bit maybe. Is that really going
that well? or are we having some trouble here? So you kind of learn that skill.
But I think mostly it's about hiring good people, watching for results and
trusting that you get good results
Awesome and then that led you into your role today then?
Exactly. I did that and then in 2013 I moved from that
role and took my old boss’s role to take over the lab
What's that like?
That is the best job in IBM. I think running a research
lab, particularly one of the big labs like Zurich, Haifa, Almaden, the ones that
are a fairly large and somewhat independent is great. The lab is a good size,
I've got about 300 researchers so it's big enough we can really do cool things,
but it's also small enough you really feel like a family and you get to know
everybody and interact with them. So yeah it's a fantastic, and the breadth of
stuff we do. We've got material science, which is my area, there are guys in the
basement who literally move individual atoms around to create materials and
structures. It's just fascinating. We’ve got a lot of work on quantum computing,
polymer chemistry, hardcore science for the future chips that we do. And then
there’s software and AI, storage system software like scale storage and cloud.
We do a lot of work in medical imaging, and health in general, a lot of
healthcare work. Also natural language processing, like the stuff that goes into
the Project Debater although we weren't really big
in the debater part itself, but some of the underlying technologies we work on.
So yeah it's a great lab
Awesome, you stole the next question
Hahah
There's so much exciting stuff going on in that lab and then
even beyond that, globally as well. Is there any particular field that
fascinates you right now?
Quantum computing is by far the most
fascinating thing that is going on in technology today, hands down. Even just
the actual hardware I appreciate as well because it's very complicated, but
putting that aside, just the software and the programming paradigm is so
different than anything we've ever seen before. And it combines so many
different fields of math and physics. We also need software developers, hardcore
software developers who are willing to learn enough about quantum so we can
start to apply it in new areas. So I think you know if I were starting my
career, if it were 1995 again I would be spending a lot of my time focussing on
quantum, I think it is really interesting
So in the lab do you guys have the coolers?
We have some of the coolers, we did some work, we mostly do
the software work, a lot of the hardware work goes on in York Town Heights
So I'm of the mindset that we live in a very exciting time as a
human race. I mean looking at the last 120 thousand years, you know nothing really
happened until a couple hundred years ago, like 200 years ago we were still firing
cannonballs. And since we have had electricity, the industry evolution, space
travel, the internet and computers. And now you know everything going on now, with
AI, virtual reality, robotics, we’re going to be able to book holidays to Mars you know potentially in the next
50 to 100 years. What are you my most excited for us as a human civilisation for say
the next 50 to 100 years?
So I got to say, it sounds very mundane but I cannot wait for
self-driving cars to become real. Unfortunately I think we are further away than we
think they are because I think it's really hard to get this right. Myself, I want to
stop driving when I am in my 70s and not get behind the wheel. I do think it would
be amazing to have that freedom, where we will actually get to where we want without
having to drive
Yeah, so you could read the paper?
Exactly. Insinuating that I'll be old and senile I will want
the car driving me around
That's actually a big thing, I remember at a speaking event I
did about self-driving cars, a lot of the senior people felt strongly for it because
they feel less confident driving as they get older
Absolutely, I think a still driving car would already be
better than me today
Haha yeah and might cost less on insurance. When the day comes
where you will look back on your career, what would be the one thing or what would
want you’d want to say that you did?
Well look I have to say two things because I'm actually very
proud of the work I did when I first was in grad school and what came out of strain
silicon which became a basis for a lot of what we do for our computer chips today.
So just from a technical standpoint I was really proud of being able to be part of
that time. Yeah but if I think about my career afterwards…
And you may have already achieved it
Haha well I think, well I hope that I will be able to identify
those things we could have real impact and fostering and growing them. Because once
you go into management you aren’t ding it yourself anymore. But I want to be able to
look back and say wow, you know it was because I said let's go do this
That you picked the right things to pursue
Right and I don’t know which one of those it’s going to be
yet, which ones are going to be the ones that I remember the fondest, but thats what
I hope to look back on
Awesome. Is there anything that you wish you'd known when
started out, if you could go back and talk to a younger version of yourself, what
would it be?
Yeah. I would have I would told myself to stick with the
programming and computer science longer. I would never change my actual major and
where I did it, but when I got into electrical engineering I kinda just got enough
programming under my belt to be able to use it. I don't think I realised, or any of
us did in the late 80s early 90s, how all-pervasive software would become to
everything we do. So now I mean obviously Ive picked up Python, Java and I can pick
up some things along the way but I wish I'd stuck with that longer. I would say for
people today, no matter what you are you going into, make sure you learn software
If you could recommend one book to somebody what would it be?
Gödel, Escher, Bach. It's a treatise on
Gödel who a famous mathematician, Escher of course the artist and Bach the musician
and it really is just a treaty on intelligence, what is intelligence, what is
consciousness like, from all different aspects. I just found it fascinating
A mathematician, an artist and a musician? Wow
It's written a series of little parable like stories and then
some more depth behind it as well. I find it fascinating. For a fiction book I love
Cloud Atlas. Its not a light read but its a
fun read
Jeff. Thank you so much
Absolutely
