Dr. Lav Varshney, assistant professor of Computer & Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois’ Coordinated Science Lab, believes the holy grail of business productivity comes from maximizing the number of tasks that are given to qualified people in a company.
To discover which people are best suited to tackle certain problems, Varshney uses software coding, machine learning, complex computer algorithms, and crowdsourcing. Varshney has worked to help IBM optimize its internal crowdsourcing platform to divvy up work. Not surprisingly, the algorithms developed by Varshney and his team have wide applicability to other tech giants, crowdsourcing platforms, and freelance markets.
Varshney is now working with giants WalMart, Google, and Microsoft, but has also reached out to startups like Samasource, a company that has helped 31,000 people living in Kenya, Uganda, India, and Haiti receive job training in digital workplace technologies.
In the following video, Lav Varshney explains his motivation for helping create IBM’s Chef Watson and how Chef Watson was built.