Member News

November 10, 2016

Stan Schneider is the CEO of RTI, or Real-Time Innovations, and has led the development of “fog” technologies for a diverse range of industries. Beyond his passion for improving industrial systems, however, Schneider has a wealth of insights from his unusual experiences growing up in Michigan during a time of intense racial division.

You have children approaching driving age; how do you see better car technologies impacting their lives?

Impacting?

Not impacting. Influencing.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist that. My son just turned 15. When he was 13, he brought home not such a great report card and I asked him, “What do you want to do with your life?” He said without missing a beat, “I want to be a pet of the robot overlords,” which was an interesting statement, to say the least. And I started to go, “Well, you don’t want to do that.” Then I realized that, with the way the future is headed, everybody is going to be very dependent on intelligent machines that can take on a lot of the things that humans don’t do so well and humans don’t want to do. If you want to be a good pet, that’s probably not such a bad career aspiration.
 
What sort of device workflow do you imagine with fog computing?

Fog is a “cloud” that is closer to the “things.” What’s the cloud? The “cloud” is an elastic computing environment in multibillion-dollar data centers. ... The “things” are any physical device that has computing, which will very soon be anything that’s man-made....

The problem is you need to have intelligence that’s close to the things because you can’t have all the intelligence in the cloud. It’s too far away. It’s too slow to get there. ...

Intelligent medical systems are a great example of fog technology. The “things” are ventilators and respirators and oximeters and ECG monitors and incubators and all the things you’d see in a hospital. And the fog is intelligent nodes that can watch a patient and say, “Hey this patient’s got a heart rate that’s dropping and shallow respiration. The patient’s in trouble, and maybe we should get help or even turn off the morphine drip or something like that to keep the patient alive.” That’s the fog. It’s the more intelligent layer of computing that’s not miles away in a cloud somewhere, it’s right there in the hospital.

What book are you into right now?

“Selling the Wheel (by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens).” ... It’s about Salesforce and what kind of sales techniques you need at different stages of the growth of a company. It’s told as a story of somebody who invents the wheel back in ancient Egypt and is trying to sell into the industries of the day. And as the wheel technology gets better and turns from stone wheels to wooden wheels to spoked wheels, the different kinds of sales forces you need in an early market versus a middle market versus a late market. It’s funny the way they put it

What might someone be surprised to know about you?

My mom was a big visionary for racial equality and put together a plan with a black dentist she knew ... to build the idealistic, integrated community of tomorrow in Michigan in inner-city Grand Rapids. This was during the race riots of Michigan, during nasty times. We moved into that neighborhood and so did he.

We were the first white family in and the last white family in, so I grew up in a 100 percent black neighborhood, which I think was a growing experience.

I went through discrimination. Even though I’m a middle-aged white guy, I certainly have been in an environment where I understand what discrimination is all about, both subtly and not so subtly. ...

One of the reasons that I moved to the Bay Area: I love the intercultural mix here. It’s amazing. I grew up in an area that was defined by race. I completely understand that problem. But you come out here, Sunnyvale, especially south Sunnyvale and Cupertino, we’re a small minority out there. My kids are completely blind to it. They just grew up in this wonderful, multicultural environment where everybody’s equal, and it really is an integrated community. I think that is a huge power of the Bay Area.