AI and the Future of Food

Ken Fricklas, Faculty Member at Denver University, spoke to members of Naturally Colorado’s Sustainability Forum on August 11th at the New Hope Network office about the sustainable challenges, opportunities, and controversies about AI.

Please view the presentation and presenter notes here.

Ken Fricklas Bio:

My current focus is on AI and Ethics – you may have seen my panel at the AI Peaks conference, or heard me speak at number of other meetings. I’ve been involved in using entrepreneurship and innovation to solve wicked problems as Design and Curriculum lead at 10.10.10, at Google, and elsewhere, and I currently lead training and facilitation around ideation and safety in AI, including a practice in governance and due diligence for AI in all types of companies.

I’m passionate about Cleantech and Sustainability, and am the innovation and entrepreneurship chair of the Colorado Cleantech Consortium, as well as having advised literally 100’s of companies as a technical advisor, board member, and mentor (TechStars, NVC, RVC, CU InWorks, etc.).

With over 20 years of CTO, VP of Development, and Innovation Lead experience, I have been bringing a combination of lean strategy and UX, technical depth, and startup management and mentoring experience to a wide variety of companies. I also teach Lean Startup management and techniques and Google Sprint at a number of local accelerators, incubators, and on a consulting basis.

I am expert at creating stakeholder communities, and led the Big Data, and Internet of Things (including Smart Home and Smart Cities) communities among the cable television community at CableLabs. I was one of the founders of TEDxBoulder, Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group and (a really long time ago) the Boulder Amiga Users Group. During COVID, I advised Make4COVID (makers addressing the PPE shortage) and co-founded COVIDCheckColorado (which tested and vaccinated millions in Colorado).

I’ve been an instructor and curriculum developer for Adobe, RMCAD, and Regis College on a variety of web development and design areas (including Dreamweaver, HTML/CSS, programming, and internet technology and strategy), and have written many articles and books for Adobe and others. I’m also a frequent speaker at conferences, including AIPeaks, CableLabs, Internet World, Adobe MAX, IOT-Week.eu, the Telcom Council, SXSW and elsewhere. My most recent book (Sr. Technical Editor) is “Machine Learning with Tensorflow” (with Nishant Shukla) from Manning Publications.

Smart Cities, Machine Learning, Smart Health, Entrepreneurship, Lean Startup. Specialties: Software Architecture and design, Product Management, SoA, Cloud, corporate training and curriculum development, public speaking, strategy, technical management and oversight, board experience.