Coworking with Grzegorz Mrukwa

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I’m helping enterprise and fast-growing companies to make fact-based decisions on a large scale. It requires a surprising amount of effort to gather the facts at a very granular level and draw reliable high-level conclusions out of it. There are both technological and scientific challenges to doing it well.

What’s your favorite emerging-tech project you’ve worked on?

AI for detecting brain tumors. It automatically analyzes MRI scans and, within a few minutes, supports the doctor with suggestions of where the suspected regions are. This delineation and a few supporting metrics may be used to assess cancer severity or adjust therapy for specific patient needs.

What emerging tech are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

That’s a tough choice. For most optimistic, I see two:

• Low/No-code “modern” data stacks. They introduce a lot of simplicity and require much less maintenance. This will decrease the barrier for large-scale data utilization.
• Recent self-supervised and unsupervised NLP breakthroughs. Their utility is often confirmed far beyond text in images, audio, and other kinds of data. Moreover, a major part of model training can be conducted without massively annotated data, like with Wikipedia.

I’m least optimistic about some ideas around NFTs in the metaverse. Digital goods are in most cases almost infinitely replicable. Building an NFT-only metaverse would introduce serious limits to that and would change the digital reality forever.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

It may sound like a slogan, but I strongly believe that changes related to emerging tech need to be designed with people in mind. A lot of engineers designing data/ML/other solutions focus on technological integrations only, but forget about the people that will actually be influenced by the developed system. At the same time, these people will be crucial for the success of the solution.