The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

The search is on! All over the internet, in conference rooms, on ill-lit Zoom calls, anxious executives are straining to understand the still-obscure concept of Web3. The term dares you to define it and to explain why organizations should care—and that’s what we're here for, on the latest episode of *Silo Busting.* Our experts, Alexandra "Sasha" Pitkevich, EPAM’s Blockchain Lead, and Érica Moreti, Head of Strategy & Innovation and Physical Experience for EMEA for EPAM Continuum, answer some essential questions from Producer Ken Gordon about the technical and business implications of Web3. They begin by building off of Gavin Wood’s famed definitional haiku: “Less trust, more truth.” Pitkevich talks about Web3 as a place “where the infrastructure and the data are owned by the creators of this infrastructure.” Moreti sees it as a “decentralized ecosystem based on the blockchain” in which platforms and apps aren’t “owned by a central gatekeeper anymore but rather by the users themselves, who would earn their ownership stake by helping develop and maintain those services.” They dig into those often-tossed-around terms *centralization* and *decentralization.* Pitkevich says that our internet is current running on a “centralized concept, where the majority of the users are coming to one server, one database.” As for decentralization, Moreti talks about a system that’s “distributed in the homogenous way to a connected network of people and devices.” Together, they address the confusion people have between Web3 and the metaverse. “When we're speaking about multiverse, we are speaking about a huge interactive presentation layer of internet,” says Pitkevitch, adding: “When we speak about Web3, we are speaking to the complete internet infrastructure,” in which all the layers—presentation layer, middleware, the back end—are, you guessed it, *decentralized.* It’s a good, useful dialogue. Their conversation addresses the essential context around Web3: the economic implications and business opportunities, the challenges of digital identity, and the power of communities. If you need an introduction to Web3, you must listen to these two. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“Therapy is always conducted at a distance,” writes Hannah Zeavin in her original, unusual new book, *The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy.* The volume is an historical closeup on teletherapy, a term she defines as “those therapies facilitated by a class of techniques and tools that allow patients to communicate with clinicians or volunteers or machines, not in their physical proximity at the time of communication.” With this subject, it seemed natural for our Boston-bound producer, Ken Gordon, to record a digital, long-distance conversation with Zeavin (who spoke to us from Oakland, California). Zeavin reports that teletherapy is hardly a new phenomenon; the first analytic encounter involved Freud himself, in his written correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess. It has, she says, “accompanied the entire history of clinical psychology in many forms.” She catalogues the various forms of teletherapy—radio broadcasts, call-in shows, e-therapy—but insists we remember that “no matter what, communication is nearly impossible, whether it's two-way and synchronous or one-way and asynchronous, and that's really at the core of what people deal with in psychodynamic treatment.” Zeavin notes that communication issues are, generally speaking, “also what we deal with as daily habitual users of media.” Zeavin and Gordon probe the ways in which teletherapy has threatened the expertise of therapists and empowered patients, experimented with artificial intelligence, raised issues of privacy and confidentiality, given the vulnerable more access and made them vulnerable, and changed the participants in and business model of therapy (“teletherapy has long been free and low fee and therefore served a sort of larger group of patients, including those who are marginalized and traditionally underserved”). They talk of Winnicott, Freudmania, the anxiety of mediation, Shakespeare, Harold Bloom, even Fran Lebowitz! So what kind of progress have we made? Well, Zeavin had this to say this about how Microsoft Teams can record and instantly transcribe meetings: “It can really arrest creativity and spontaneity to have that much feedback. There's a reason why the analyst is enjoined not to interpret immediately but to allow for a kind of free association, and that to me sounds like the death of it.” One of Zeavin’s central concepts is auto-intimacy, which is “a closed-circuit of self-communication, ruth through a relationship to a media object.” She says it “has been increasingly encouraged. It's part of gamification, right?” But can that kind of auto-intimacy lead to deep psychological healing? Not really. “All of the kinds of therapies that rely on this kind of auto-intimacy, don't care,” she says. “They're not interested at all, in something called the unconscious or interested in that kind of psychodynamic work.” We think Zeavin's work will help both therapists and their patients move forward in this blended century. People are, she says, “in and out of their offices, and they're really looking for some guidance as to how to do that. It really changes almost everything about therapy.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In 2022, you aren’t just what you eat. You’re also where and how and why and when and with whom you do so. It’s a whole new integrated experience, as we learned from Stage 2 of our *Consumers Unmasked* research project. To enrich the study’s palate of insights, and help restaurateurs better understand their diners and employees, we convened three experts—Buck Sleeper, Head of Retail Experience Consulting in EPAM Continuum’s North American Digital Engagement Practice; Barbara Castiglia, Executive Editor of *Modern Restaurant Management* magazine and host of *The Main Course* podcast; and Nicole France, Product Marketing Evangelist at Contentful—to consider report’s findings. The conversation provides a full menu of insights. For starters, freshness matters to diners, in a holistic sense. “Freshness is not only in the ingredient itself but it's in the entire meal that you're having,” says Sleeper. And ghost kitchens are here to stay—and are the drivers of new food ventures, according to Castiglia. “For a little bit of investment, you could have some new restauranteurs out there.” “You don't even need a taco truck,” says France. The group chewed over the idea of data—both the importance of big data for restaurants, and for small data as well. “Sometimes you really don't know what customers want unless you have a conversation,” says France. France also talked about making data relevant and legible for employees: “It's all about interpreting that data into something meaningful, and honestly, that's a hell of a lot easier to share than big data sets.” Sleeper notes that a quarter of *Consumers Unmasked’s* US respondents are watching food and video tutorials. Castiglia replies that, for restauranteurs, “Your digital footprint is very, very important now. So you have to examine which of these channels make the most sense for your brand and spend the time to put together an effort to engage with your guests.” But the truth is, those guests might be difficult to reach. France says that many young people have are completely comfortable with delivery apps and online ordering but also have “this strange but very deeply held fear of actually interacting with people. So whether that's picking food up or eating in a restaurant, I think there's going to have to be something that adapts to that trend.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

In the brand-new book, *SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future,* David Rose writes: “*SuperSight is this decade’s convergence technology.* It inherits the last thirty-plus years of enabling technologies like machine learning, computer vision, wearables, edge computing, 5G wireless, deep personalization, affective computing, and new interaction paradigms like gesture and voice—packaged in the familiar wear-all-day form of glasses.” In the brand-new episode of *The Resonance Test,* Rose—a friend and former EPAM Continuum colleague—unpacks that statement with producer Ken Gordon, pulling out a long chain of colorful conversational insights. SuperSight is an integrated technology, Rose says, that can “orchestrate and help simplify and tune and customize a lot of other systems, as long as there's open standards for how things talk to each other.” Operating at systems level can help us with in a variety of almost magical ways, such as personalized digital coaching, enhanced accurate medical diagnosis, and augmented learning. But it’s not all good news—or a simple story. Rose walks through though the garden of dramatically named SuperSight Hazards—Social Insulation, State of Surveillance, Cognitive Crutches, Persuasive Persuasion, Training Bias, and SuperSight for Some—taking the time to explain the real dangers of this developing tech. Rose shuttles us all around the SuperSight universe, talking about creating prototypes to help people with handwashing during the pandemic (one of which involved “using cuteness to seduce people into washing for 20 seconds”), the possibilities of glanceable commerce (will we go from eye tracking to the shopping cart?), the challenges of diminished reality, SuperSight city planning, even using AR to read his book. So listen to this SuperSight-flavored conversation. It’ll augment your intelligence. Host: Kenji Ross Editor: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

What does it mean to be at the vanguard of leadership training? To find out, listen to Vanguard’s Michael Gunn. He’s the investment management company’s Global IT Audit Department Head—and the guy responsible for the firm’s unique leadership training program. In the latest episode of *The Resonance Test,* Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM, grills Gunn all about Vanguard’s A+ Leadership Program for IT. “It's something that I haven't seen before,” she says, noting its “comprehensive, 360, whole-organization approach.” Gunn tells the pedagogic tale of how he gleaned, from listening closely to colleagues, that they prefer experiential learning and then set up a program that blocked of sections of time to provide such content *and* focused, small-group follow-up discussions (“Where leaders *really* like to dive deeper into the conversation and share more insights is in these six, seven, eight person IT leadership cadres,” says Gunn). This enabled leaders to connect with each other, reflect on what they’d learned, and ask: “How are you actually infusing learning into your day-to-day responsibility, both personally as well as with your team?” The networked approach allows Vanguard’s leader-learners to focus on implementation, which is something that Loughlin and this podcast heartily endorse. It is a living, evolving process; as Gunn says: “It's not just one event. It's not just one conversation. It's this iteration on a topic.” Listen closely and Gunn will teach you that when it comes to learning, it’s smart to think like a product owner and work to understand product-market fit. So if your organization could stand to improve its learning process, feel free to eavesdrop on the Gunn-Loughlin back-and-forth. You might just pick up an A+ insight or two. Host: Toby Bottorf Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s playtime on *The Resonance Test.* Let’s welcome Ricardo Álvarez, MIT researcher and co-author, with Fábio Duarte, of *Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space,* into the magic circle of our podcast. We’re going to talk about how playing with new technologies is what enables real transformations to happen. Ken Gordon, our producer, goes hyper-ludic for this conversation and jumps with Álvarez on the big podcasting trampoline. They get into the interactive narrative of Disneyland (“This is storytelling in physical form,” says Álvarez), the co-designing of video games (“You effectively give players the tools not just to play the game, but ultimately to hack the game and express themselves through gameplay”), and the extremely flexible nature of the metaverse: “Because it's virtual it comes with the advantages of virtuality, which means not only can it be infinite, but it can be whatever you want. It doesn't need to subscribe to the laws of physics, the laws of nature.” At one point, Gordon actually pretends to be an annoyed client, an inveterate optimizer, who doubts the value of all this playfulness. “When you push for optimization, you're pushing towards specialization of these technologies, which means that your evolutionary path for that technology becomes constrained,” replies Álvarez, cool as a whole salad of cucumbers. Álvarez brings up the idea that playfulness “is the attitude that helps us differentiate between ethical self-deception and sheer manipulation” and the challenges of going beyond prototypes in Fab Labs (“How do you move output for a Fab Lab to scale?”). He also chews on the fact that we’re at an inflection point in VR history: “We're sitting at a moment in time when we are fundamentally designing the language of the new medium” and the responsibilities this creates for those at the table. Well, what are you waiting for? Join the fun. Leap in. Hit Play. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s easy enough to talk about ESG in the board room, at a town hall, even on a podcast. The tough part is making it real, *comme on dit.* Which brings us to today’s guest, Xavier Houot, Senior Vice President of Sustainable Business and Operations at Schneider Electric—an organization that was recently named the world’s most sustainable corporation. In a spirited dialogue with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, Houot explains Schneider Electric’s comprehensive and holistic approach to ESG. “We start with looking at the challenges outside of ourselves,” says Houot, adding that Schneider Electric views itself “from an outside-in perspective.” They consider the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. They compare themselves with the best performers in each category of ESG—the best on safety, the best on circularity—and of course they consider their performance in relation to their performance of the previous six months. “It's not very important to please ourselves saying we are better than we were [six months before]…. If we are better but it's not enough, that frankly doesn't make the world a better place.” Houot and Shekhter’s conversation swerves in a variety of interesting directions: Straight into Schneider Electric’s Zero Carbon Project, over toward building the business case for sustainability, and high up into the issue of organizational leadership, with informative excursions into the challenges of measurement, the role of partnerships, and the meaning of COP26. Most importantly, they take a *realistic* approach to ESG. Shekhter, for instance, insists on keeping it real when she asks: “How do you know that decarbonization is the right focus?” and Houot responds with full and informed candor. To hear the answer, and many other important points about ESG, click the link below. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

To make the most of data, you need to understand that it requires more than an obvious linear process, with discrete handoffs and dashboards and such. It’s about properly viewing data in its living ecosystem, about seeing data as a *loop. * The data loop, in fact, is the central focus of our most recent episode of *The Resonance Test.* John Reardon, VP & Senior Director of Global Risk Solutions Technology at Liberty Mutual Insurance, mixes it up with Val Tsitlik, EPAM’s Head of Big Data Practice and VP of Technology Solutions. Also looped in: Dmitry Grinberg, Managing Principal of Technology Solutions at EPAM, who lobs some great questions at these two data-driven men. Reardon says that Liberty Mutual uses the data loop as a framework that “helps us shape our priorities and technical approaches, ensuring that we can realize incremental value and make it real along the way.” He then walks us through the key elements of the loop: unlocking data, making it accessible, providing “good, modern, self-service tooling whenever wherever possible,” and finally operationalizing all the insights the process produces. One of the great advantages, Tsitlik notes, of the data loop is that it focuses the business conversation: Once an organization starts talking about data loops, they stop talking about *data projects.* It’s a mindset that looks at the situation “holistically… as a continuous process,” one that involves “ingesting more data” and “providing more access to various customer users.” When they discuss how Liberty Mutual operationalized machine learning, Reardon says: “The more that we can build our models and our capabilities with a simple API approach, the more we can easily integrate those insights into different parts of our environment.” Reardon emphasizes building simple models and deploying and iterating quickly. Everyone agrees that culture change is important and can be challenging. He says: “You can easily understate or even miss, you know, the cultural aspect that's required to head down this path, and we spent a lot of time in our business group educating our leaders first.” But right now it’s time for *your* education. Enjoy the conversation. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Let’s talk experience! In business today, we speak endlessly about digital experience, customer experience, employee experience, patient experience, provider experience, and so on. But one of the newest forms of experience to walk on the scene is still somewhat obscure: developer experience. With an increased focus on digital business, it’s really important for organizations to think about the professional and personal well-being of the people developing software for them. The latest episode of Silo Busting double-clicks on this highly relevant topic. Listen up, and you’ll get the full download from Pavel Azaletskiy, EPAM’s Director of Technology Consulting and Head of Engineering Excellence Consulting in North America. He’s in conversation with Sandra Loughlin, Managing Principal and Head of Client Learning & Talent Enablement at EPAM. Loughlin says: “Developer experience is about keeping developers happy and successful in their jobs” and that it involves various components: tools, culture, belief in job, and organizational vision. Azaletskiy concurs and notes that developer experience isn’t just for companies exclusively focused on tech. “Every company right now is a technology company,” he adds. “Without efficient delivery and good developer experience it’s very hard to compete.” This plugged-in conversation examines he cultural aspects of DevX, the interesting idea of citizen development, the essential elements that developers seek in a job, the relevant benchmarks companies should consider, and more. Experience it for yourself! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

People don’t normally visit our Boston studio with a rack of superhero outfits. But this is exactly what happened on a recent Thursday afternoon: Sergei Nossoff, CEO of Teslasuit, and Andrei Pyko, who runs the company’s research team, dropped by to demo their sleek black haptic feedback garments. After permitting a few lucky people to suit up, get calibrated, and venture into VR land, they conducted a spirited conversation with Elaina Shekhter, EPAM’s Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer. The trio talked about how the suit was originally conceived of as a video game accessory (Nossoff said that his CTO originally sought to “create a suit that would provide extra sensations during gaming”) but it’s currently used for (1) XR training and motion capture; and (2) medical and healthcare applications. The task of the technology, said Pyko, is to get people deeply involved and forget that they’re zipped into a suit or a VR environment. “There are a lot of emotions just wearing the suit,” he said and added that donning the suit can prompt people to ask, “Am I a superhero?” Zooming out, Shekhter noted that EPAM’s investment in Teslasuit, like our other recent investments, focuses on "identifying unique, technologically driven propositions that present an opportunity for EPAM to accelerate the company either through our own product development expertise or to act as a channel or as an integrator for a large number of our portfolio customers across multiple verticals.” The portfolio of this conversation included such topics as Teslasuit’s current business model (B2G and B2B enterprise training services), their partnership with the Hospital for Special Surgery (Nossoff said the aim of the HSS partnership is to “create a product to allow patients to be treated remotely as well as be diagnosed remotely”), and how PII data and privacy factors in here (“So far, we do not have medical certification but we are working towards it,” said Pyko). Where might Teslasuit be walking in the near future? “In the longer term, we can really use this technology for the consumer market,” said Nossoff. He’s not necessarily thinking about video games, but fitness and wellbeing and yoga. Shekhter joked about Teslasuit working with Louis Vuitton on yoga clothing, and Nossoff talked about pajamas for older people to take biometric parameters to prevent heart attacks during sleep and industrial PPE use. All agreed that deep tech smart wearables have a future. And it might be a luxurious future at that. “I wasn’t actually kidding about Louis Vuitton yoga wear,” said Shekhter. “We work with a lot of retailers who’d absolutely love to brand your black superhero suits.” Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon