Roberto Sicconi

Entrepreneur

IBM Stilnovo, IBM Watson, Conversational UI for Honda and Acura

I want to change the world.

Slack, Anki, SoundHound, Drive.ai, Element AI, The Puffin, Boundlsss, Finnest, Mycroft AI, Oomf, SleepBox, Clevot

The need to make miracles happen every day, using one-tenth of the time and financial resources that existing players would allocate to achieve the results.

Estimating time (in developing a real product, acquiring customers, securing funding, ...)

believe in yourself especially in the dark days, always listen to criticisms and be ready to question all your assumptions, funding does not bring happiness (but helps a lot)

Current roles

• CTO and Co-Founder of Dreyev LLC

Dreyev is a real-time driver attention monitoring, coaching and management system to prevent distracted and drowsy driving. Safer driving behavior prevents crashes and enables fairer and more accurate risk-based insurance policy pricing. Loss prevention, risk mitigation, driving coaching bot.

• CTO and Co-Founder of TeleLingo LLC

Live interactive, remote one-on-one tutoring of foreign languages, English as a Second Language, pronunciation and negotiation skills refinement for business professionals). Smart videoconferencing, blended learning, tools for cadenced practice and automated progress monitoring.

• CSO and Co-Founder at Infermedica Inc.

Infermedica empowers Healthcare Companies with Artificial Intelligence and Smart Heath Advisory Bots.

• Board Advisor at SoundBite Inc.

SoundBite Inc. is aiming to end social isolation in the mobile world by re-establishing the human connection with your friends and family.

Background

Extensive knowledge of Computer Architectures, Mobile and Interactive Entertainment devices for access to information anytime, anywhere, via human-friendly interfaces.

Leadership role in Automotive sector, directing key projects with top OEMs and Tier-1s to advance state of the art of Driver Safety, Navigation, Infotainment, Connected-Car Telematics and Location-based Services.

Extensive experience in launching and managing new business initiatives around IBM Watson Question-Answering Technology to address multi-$B level opportunities in Healthcare and Automated Customer Support.

Over two decades of experience in establishing multi-year multi-million customer engagements across Europe/Asia/ US, leveraging multiple IBM and Customer R&D organizations.

Past roles at IBM

• Program Director, DeepQA / Watson at IBM Research, Yorktown Heights. NY
• 2013: Led architecture for dialog-based conversational capabilities in information retrieval for self-assist information retrieval systems.
• 2012: Led a new initiative (Watson for Contact Centers) aimed at significantly improving quality and efficiency of technical support centers by providing human agents with fast and interactive access to relevancy-ranked information and troubleshooting procedures.
• 2010-2011: Incubated and Managed business opportunities for the DeepQA technology developed for the Jeopardy!/Watson Grand Challenge. Launched Pilot implementation of a Virtual Assistant for Clinical Decision Support for specialists and Primary Care Physicians in collaboration with Columbia University and University of Maryland.
• 2011: Started new research activity in secure mobile transactions using fusion of biometrics technologies, distributed between Cloud and mobile clients. First application in Trusted Security Authentication Management to protect access to patient information by physicians on their smartphones and tablets (iOS, Android).
• 2009-2010: Directed speech UI integration as part of the Watson avatar in the Jeopardy! Grand Challenge.

• Program Director, Consumer Speech Market at IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY
• 2000-2009: Led two projects with leading car manufacturers in Japan and Italy: in-car prototypes of natural speech input solutions, context- and environment-aware communication with the user to provide ease-to-use and safe access to information services, together with dialog-based guidance, for destination/ POI/ music selection, fuzzy search, one-shot destination entry and smart help.
• 2006-2009: Led a 3-year FP6 EU-funded advanced project (DICIT) of hands-free remote control for entertainment centers in the living room (far-field mike-array operation and smart dialogs to supported multi-speaker scenarios, for natural browsing of Internet-based video content).
• 2005-2009: Pioneered voice search, SMS dictation, social networking and fully automated mail transcription services in the mobile market by launching partnerships with select US start-ups.
• 2002-2009: Managed development of advanced conversational dialog systems for use in telematics applications and mobile phone services by leading Japanese car manufacturer. Led research and implementation of a visual speech activity detection system: first prototype worldwide of Audio-Visual speech recognition, combined with head-pose detection, eye-gaze monitoring and lip-motion feature extraction for improved robustness in challenging noisy environments.
• 1996-2004: Coordinated development between IBM Research and Speech Product division. Single-chip Embedded Speech Recognition solution for handheld devices (Pilot PDA and smart-phones).

• Executive Assistant of General Manager IBM Microelectronics, Fishkill, NY
• 1998-1999: Led design of a single-chip speech recognition prototype that ended in PowerPC 403 hw acceleration product for PDAs. Orchestrated and directed meetings with top executives, presentation pitches to Customer CEOs/CTOs. Joint development of Embedded Speech solutions with all leading chip providers for the wireless phone industry. Launched IBM Microelectronics involvement in Bluetooth.

• Manager, Multimedia Products Development at IBM Italy, Vimercate
• 1985 – 1998: Led strategic partnerships with Eutelsat (France) and Philips for Europe-wide Satellite Data Broadcasting Services (DVB/MPEG2 TS) for high-speed Internet access. Launched joint project with Qualcomm (USA) on Speech Recognition forwireless handsets and SGS-Thomson (Italy) for Speech Recognition in car dashboard. Managed collaboration with IBM Research labs in USA on 8 projects: Image compression, speech recognition, Media Processor GPU, video streaming, video conferencing, low-power wireless communications, first WW FIPS-4 Crypto PCI card Worlwide for secure banking. Managed technology transfer from IBM Research and designed products for the European market: PowerPC 601- 604 Multimedia Motherboards, first WW PC Card for Video/Audio Capture/Playback on laptops, TV-Teletext-VBI/DataVideo, PC subsystem Videoconferencing PC Card, High-speed Bank Checks Scanner, first High-quality Film and Slide Scanner with automated dust/defects removal, RS/6000 Video Processing Card, PC real-time Image Processing System. Managed design of hw-assist cards for Speech Recognition: first IBM Speech Recognition product (1991 Italy, 1992 Europe, 1993 Worldwide) for Radiologists/Patologists. Managed European operations for PowerPC and OS/2 Technical Support in Europe. Created a high-performance Image Processing board and associated SW: IBM’s First textile CAD product (StilNovo 1989)