Poppy Crum, PhD
Neuroscientist and Technologist
Poppy Crum an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. She is the former Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories and CTO of Trimble Inc.
Dr. Poppy Crum is a visionary futurist, neuroscientist, and technologist who is at the cutting-edge of developing empathetic technologies that are changing the world and the way we do business.
Throughout her career, she has spearheaded innovation at companies that are reshaping our world and leading humanity into the future, and has advised many of the world’s top organizations on navigating and leading the evolution of their industries.
She has built and led high-powered tech innovation teams and is highly regarded among the leading executives, academics, and pioneers in her field whose groundbreaking work sits at the intersection of technology advancement, data, and human evolution.
Watch Poppy's TED Talk
Poppy's Latest Writing:
AI That Understands Your Body Language
The listening and sensing devices in our homes that choose music, manage thermostats, and look up recipes may soon know more about your state of mental and physical wellness than your primary physician.
Ubiquitous sensing, paired with machine learning, can amalgamate all of the signals we give off—from the timbre of our voice to the dilation of our pupils—to detect signs of conditions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, years before a traditional diagnosis.
Soon, Your Focus Will Find You—Where You Need It
It wasn’t that many years ago that sage parents advised their boundary-pushing offspring to never communicate with strangers on the internet and to never step foot in a vehicle with someone they didn’t know really well.
What was once considered illogical—reckless, even—is now considered a best practice. Look at the likes of Lyft and Uber, and you can see how technology shifted culture, broke down preconceived notions and ushered us into a reality where we now use the internet to do precisely this: summon strangers on the internet to pick us up in their unfamiliar vehicles —and we climb right in.
Let’s Make it Personal: How Empathetic Technology Can Protect Individuality
As humans, we like to think we keep our internal states, well, internal. We have a “poker face” that helps us shield certain thoughts and feelings from the outside world. Or so we think.
The truth is, we give away our internal states all the time. The way we breathe, the way our bodies distribute heat, the timing dynamics of our speech, the way our pupils dilate — all expose the emotions and feelings we think we are keeping to ourselves.
When the walls can talk – space is the next frontier in personalisation
“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom”. Soon, however, that wisdom will not come from watches and rings that we wrap on our bodies, but the very walls and spaces we inhabit.
Previously, information such as heart-rate, emotional state and cognitive and physical stress was collected by wearable devices – now we are able to measure them via sensors in the space itself.
Hearables Will Monitor Your Brain and Body to Augment Your Life
The eyes, it’s been said, are windows to the soul. I’d argue that the real portals are the ears.
Consider that, at this very moment, a cacophony of biological conversations is blasting through dime-size patches of skin just inside and outside the openings to your ear canals. There, blood is coursing through your veins, its pressure rising and falling as you react to stress and excitement, its levels of oxygen changing in response to the air around you and the way your body is using the air you breathe. Here we can also detect the electrical signals that zip through the cortex as it responds to the sensory information around us. And in that patch of skin itself, changing electrical conductivity signals moments of anticipation and emotional intensity.