People

Eric E. Schmidt

Eric E. Schmidt

Former CEO and Chairman, Google/Co-founder, Schmidt Futures

Biography

Eric Schmidt is an accomplished technologist, entrepreneur and philanthropist. As Google’s Chief Executive Officer, he pioneered Google’s transformation from a Silicon Valley startup to a global leader in technology. He served as Google’s Chief Executive Officer and Chairman from 2001-2011, Executive Chairman from 2011-2018 and most recently as Technical Advisor from 2018-2020. Under his leadership Google dramatically scaled its infrastructure and diversified its product offerings while maintaining a strong culture of innovation. Prior to his career at Google, Eric held leadership roles at Novell and Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Eric has received numerous accolades and supports a variety of esteemed organizations. He was a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and served as the Chairman of the Department of Defense’s Innovation Board for four years in which he was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Public Service by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter. He was also a member of NASA’s National Space Council User Advisory Group for two years which was chaired by the Vice President. He currently serves on the boards of The Broad Institute, The Mayo Clinic, on the Advisory Board at UC Berkeley, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Board of Overseers. He is currently the Chairman of the US National Security Commission for Artificial Intelligence and remains a member of the Defense Innovation Board.

An accomplished author, he has co-authored three New York Times best sellers, The New Digital Age, How Google Works, Trillion Dollar Coach. He is a Gulfstream pilot, and his philanthropic efforts through The Schmidt Family Foundation and Schmidt Ocean Institute focus on climate change, including the support of ocean and marine life studies at sea, as well as education and cutting-edge research and technology in the natural sciences and engineering space.

Inspired to continue to give back, he co-founded Schmidt Futures in 2017, which helps exceptional people do more for others by applying science and technology thoughtfully and working together across fields. In 2019, Eric and his wife Wendy announced a new $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify and support talent across disciplines and around the globe. As part of this effort, Schmidt Futures, in partnership with the Rhodes Trust, launched Rise, the anchor initiative focused on increasing opportunity for extraordinary young people worldwide and empowering them to serve their communities. Most recently, Eric and Schmidt Futures were selected by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to lead the state’s 16-member Blue Ribbon Commission, which will employ lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve and modernize state systems for the future. Eric holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Schmidt was previously a member of the 21st Century Council and Think Long California.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE