Walter De Brouwer is the founder and CEO of the Palo-Alto based computational linguistics company doc.ai. Doc.ai is building a robo-doctor, via medical dialog systems for personalized healthcare, a conversational AI that follows biological blood markers across the phenome and the genome.
Walter moved to Silicon Valley in 2011 to found Scanadu Inc. a $57m venture-backed mobile health company, with the mission to revolutionize consumer healthcare with people centric mobile medical devices using machine learning. He served as the CEO of the company until April 2016.
He sits on the board of Scanadu Inc. and the Hong Kong-based Generation Life Inc. (blockchain-enabled InsuranceTech). He is an advisor for Ubiome Inc. and Pat.inc.
Walter’s career as an entrepreneur started 27 years ago as the Publisher of Computer Magazine sold to VNU now 3i Group and Riverland Networks sold to Keyware Technologies.
Together with Nicholas Negroponte (founder and Chairman of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Media Lab) he founded Starlab SA, Europe’s premier Deep Future research lab on wearable computing, Quantum computation, computational genomics and MPEG-21 (IP was sold to Philips). In 1993 he co-founded the European internet backbone company PING out of the European UNIX Users Group later EUnet International Ltd. which merged with Qwest Communications and went from NASDAQ to NYSE now Centurylink. In 1994 he had cofounded one of the pioneers of online job boards in Europe called Jobscape which merged into Stepstone ASA and completed an IPO in March 2000. In 2002 he took over Patronale Capitalisation NV (in 2007 sold to Fork Capital NV) and made it into a Fintech Life insurer, specializing in synthetic risk. In 2007 Nicholas Negroponte appointed De Brouwer to set up the EMEA branch of MIT’s NGO One Laptop per Child (OLPC). De Brouwer negotiated with 14 Ministers of Finance and 9 Presidents in South and West Africa and eventually The Learning Center was transferred from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston to Kigali (Rwanda) Institute of Science and Technology (KIST). The XO was the first 802.11 mesh-driven device in Africa.
Walter earned a master’s degree in Formal Linguistics (University of Ghent, Belgium) and a Ph.D. in Computational Semantics (“Bio-semiotics: The Biology of Language. The search for the atomic unit of meaning”) from the Catholic University of Tilburg, the Netherlands. He started as academic lecturer at the Jesuit University of Antwerp, Belgium (Machine Translation and Chomsky’s TGG), but left in 1989 to become an entrepreneur.
Analytics + Data
Are we being replaced by machines? Not yet, but we’re working on it
In the 21st century brace yourself for algorithms made by algorithms. AI has suddenly become able to equal and soon to surpass homo sapiens in what we thought were unique human faculties that required consciousness: vision and language.
Analytics + Data
How the People Are Taking Over the World
The tool that we most use is data itself. We start to think of ourselves as data vessels. We are data. A new philosophy (dataism) is emerging that says people become the data they use and the companies that make filters also become part of one big, non-linear, complex adaptive dataset. One day it will be self-organizing thanks to new mathematical approaches we will pluck out of machine learning.
Health care
Artificially Intelligent Healthcare
Session Description: How will AI and analytics alter healthcare? What are the near-term impacts? The craziest possibilities? Will we need fewer doctors, or will AI give us a more complex understanding of “health” and what we can achieve? Below is an excerpt of the Artificially Intelligent Healthcare panel. The full transcript can be found here. […]
Faith in Data or Faith in the Crowd?
Morgan: Okay. Welcome, everybody. I know we’re probably going to have some more people coming in as they clear out, out front. And we’re going to spend the next 54 minutes or so talking about a pretty interesting topic—and, actually, some might say it’s two topics, and that’s really one of the things we’ll be […]
Everyone Wants To Go To Heaven, But No One Wants To Die
Walter de Brouwer discusses being an effective entrepreneur in today's competitive business market. Watch the video and read the full transcript here.
Bio + Life Sciences
What the Dormouse Says Now
If the counterculture of the late 50's and 60's was the progenitor of the PC industry and all it led to, what kind of "culture" is driving the evolution of information technology today? Are those revolutionary ideals still at play, or have those counterculture values grown up and become a complacent establishment? Stewart Brand of the Long Now Foundation, Scanadu's Walter De Brouwer, Ina Fried of AllThingsD, and Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick discuss at Techonomy 2013 in Tucson, Ariz. Watch video and read the full transcript here.
Conferences
Health 17
Techonomy Health was a wide-ranging, day-long conference on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 for leaders about how healthcare is changing fast. How will tech shape the future of healthcare and extend it beyond medical institutions into all our lives?
Conferences
Techonomy 16
MANkind’s evolving relationship with tools and MACHINES is nothing new. But the speed at which we, and everything around us, are becoming more closely connected and NETWORKed is.
Conferences
Bio 15
Techonomy Bio is a big-picture exploration of the transformative global social and economic benefits driven by the rapid advances being made in the biological and life sciences.
Conferences
Techonomy 14
This year Techonomy moves to the beautiful Ritz-Carlton Half Moon Bay, November 9-11, on the cliffs south of San Francisco, near Silicon Valley.
