Interview with DXY's Embedded Systems Engineer Chris Armenio
Hey Chris, good to meet you! To start, how would you describe yourself in less than 3 sentences?
I am a minimalist engineer. I'm always trying to figure out how things work, how they can be simplified, and how they can be made better.
What’s your position at DXY?
At a very high level, I am an Embedded Systems Engineer. Technically, that means that I've been classically trained in both Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. In actuality, that means that I work on projects that have some sort of interaction with the physical world. I design/debug electronics, program firmware (the software that exists on devices that you might not otherwise think have software), and provide interfaces to the "high-level" developers. When needed, I'll step in and write "high-level" user interfaces, but my "bread and butter" is down in the "bare metal".
Away from DXY, what is the current trend you’ve spotted related to “Interaction with the physical world“; do you have a best case you would die for?
I'd say the biggest underlying trend in the real-world interaction of computers is the ability to offload computing to "the cloud". Previously, if you wanted to perform processor intensive activities (voice recognition, computer vision, data/trend analysis) you had to do _all_ of that processing on the local device or computer. That usually led to significantly higher hardware requirements and a prohibitive rise in power consumption. Now, your end-devices are simply a "conduit" to the processing power of the cloud...this leads to drastically smaller, less power-hungry devices, while simultaneously yielding a smarter, more intuitive end-product.
What are the biggest challenges with communication between man and machine yet after more than 50 Years of ELIZA?
Sensors and data processing. The amount of data provided every second by all of our senses is incredibly huge. It's impossible to process _all_ of that data in real-time...even the brain does a large amount of filtering before anything even makes it to our consciousness. We're still playing catch-up in this area...in order to provide a compelling human-machine interaction, we need to fuse incredibly large amounts of data from several sources (computer vision, sound, depth-of-field sensors, previous interactions, stored knowledge, etc) into small chunks of actionable information. We're slowly making progress in this area, but we still have quite a ways to go.(Learn more about ELIZA here)
Looking into the future, let us know what you think about how we’ll coexist with self-thinking robots.
To a certain extent, we already are living with robots...we have automatic vacuum cleaners (Roomba), automatic dishwashers, thermostats that are aware of your daily schedule, and the list goes on. In the future, I think you'll start seeing less self-contained, individual systems, and more cooperative systems...almost to the point of one continuous, integrated system. Your phone will be connected with your car, which will be linked to your garage door and security system, which will be linked to your lights, and on, and on. Every electronic device in your life will eventually be linked to one large, overarching robotic system with multiple points of interaction and actuation...it's kind of scary if you think about it...
What’s your most ass kicking technology you are using personally and almost daily beside your Smartphone?
The office coffee machine. Not only does it grind the beans, it forms them into a "puck", pumps heated filtered water over it, then automatically discards it. The amount of engineering that went into each one of the stages/systems is pretty impressive. Plus, it makes a darn good cup of coffee...