TheBridge profile: Alka Roy
Name: Alka Roy
Current city: Bay Area, CA
Current job: Founder, The Responsible Innovation Project
Past job: Director, New Products & Emerging Technology, AT&T
Don't miss this recent report, "Responsible AI?", from The Responsible Innovation Project. The report is a survey of multi-disciplinary academic and industry leaders, practitioners, and researchers working on technology and AI or at the intersection of technology, policy, and social science. The goal was to leverage both quantitative and qualitative responses to arrive at a collective understanding of the challenges and strategies for building technology and AI responsibly.
Q. How are you currently bridging the gap between innovation and regulation? I am staying in my lane of technology and innovation. But politics and policy enter almost every decision, whether we explicitly admit it or not. We are all intertwined.
Q. Describe how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your current job. The need to keep learning and improvising to build trust and delight with inclusion and dependability. Lots of parallels between prototyping new innovative ideas for technology or creating art.
Q. Job advice in three words? Know your worth
Q. What can innovators learn from policymakers? How much harder and better an obvious solution becomes when we expand our view of the people and groups who are impacted.
Q. What can policymakers learn from innovators? How everything we design ultimately designs us.
Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting? For now, online :)
Q. Favorite book/podcast/long-form article you recommend? Ah, don't make me choose. I tend to prefer content that I can trust. Where the exploration is seeped in curiosity and a desire to understand something--deep and wide. And then share it with delightful clarity rather than cleverness. I'm in the middle of compiling a list so soon....
Q. Everyday is probably different, but can you describe a "day in the life" of your job? Coaching and helping startup founders, tech experts, tech students, researchers, non-profit who are trying to build awesome tech but are conflicted about the impact it may have. Or policy and business leaders who are trying to figure out how to choose the right stuff. We have also been gathering a multi-disciplinary community that is practice and inquiry based and lots of projects in motion. If someone has a question and wants to probe it, I look to connect with resources, give them a platform to be successful.
Q. Why are you part of TheBridge community? Or, why do you think it's important this community exists for tech, policy and political professionals? I am looking forward to learning but I think it’s important to break the silos and invite a wider group to be comfortable with probing into emerging tech. Tech leaders don’t shy away from disrupting social systems so it’s only fair :).
Q. Looking back, what advice would you give yourself in the beginning of your career? Be part of a community that accepts you, celebrates you, makes realistic demands on you and supports your growth
Q. What's one piece of advice you are still trying to master? Listen more deeply and clearly. Connect before correcting.
Q. Embarrassing work moment? Too many to recount. And they keep coming, keeps things interesting. Once you learn to laugh at yourself, you give yourself the freedom to be yourself.
We include leaders spotlights in out bi-weekly updates sent to the community. Sign up to stay up to date with events, people, jobs, info in tech, policy and politics: