Michael E. Stewart
Michael E. Stewart - has enjoyed a 40+ year career as a successful technology entrepreneur and business innovator, starting his first business (Diff’Rent Spokes – a moped rental business for college students) while still an undergraduate student at Baylor University. Michael is now the Founder/Chairman of Lucid.ai and Krisis.ai, pioneering integrators of hyper-edge AI technologies, enabling scaled ensembles of AI capabilities which transcend the various AI components individually.
Michael’s long history in Artificial Intelligence began more than three decades ago in the early 1990’s with his late-stage leadership of the Carnot Project (focused on enabling logically-unified inter-operability between widely disparate systems) at the MCC Research Consortium in Austin, Texas. Michael was tasked with continuing guiding that important research while also shifting the project from its initial stages at MCC into full productized commercialization. Mr. Stewart was recruited to MCC by its Chairman, Admiral Bobby Inman - a former Director of the US National Security Agency – in part to collaborate with Dr. Doug Lenat in using Lenat’s pioneering creation of commonsensical AI (via the Cyc Project also at MCC), exploring together interesting integrations between the Carnot, Cyc, and other disparate AI technologies to enable ensembles of higher-ordered AI capabilities.
From the late 1980s thru 2004, while founding several successful software and consulting companies, Michael also served as a specialist in advanced system design for the U.S. government/DoD, envisioning and helping architect next-generation software systems spanning government agencies, both in the US and abroad.
Reflecting his passion for the many risks and responsibilities inherent in the design and deployment of AI technologies, Mr. Stewart is also the originating co-founder and current Board Member of the Responsible AI Institute (RAII - see www.responsible.ai, the world’s leading non-profit organization focusing on the challenges of Responsible/Ethical certifications of AI systems) alongside cofounder Kay Firth-Butterfield, now Global Head of AI at World Economic Forum, and cofounder Manoj Saxena who led the IBM Watson Project and now has served as the visionary Executive Chairman building this extraordinary organization since its earliest days). RAII’s many partners now include IBM, Amazon AWS, Anthem, the US-DoD, along with multiple international governments, major global corporations, and a plethora of leading US, Canada, and European universities.
Prior to starting Lucid.ai’s parent company in 2008, Michael was Senior Partner of the Torii Group (2001 - 2004), delivering C-suite consulting services in organizational change management, enterprise risk management and scaled IT systems for the commercial real estate and property/casualty insurance industries. During this period, Torii assisted its clients and the US Congress in motivating the writing and passage of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA), and designed/built an off-shore, AAA-rated insurance captive for America’s largest REITs to safely underwrite their terrorism coverages.
Mr. Stewart’s earlier forays into the real estate/insurance industries broadened in 1999 when he launched, built and successfully exited SiteStuff.com, the world’s original e-marketplace for commercial real estate owners/operators, enabling aggregated online purchasing of op-ex/cap-ex goods and services for their portfolio properties, featuring the three largest real estate portfolio management companies (CH Richard-Ellis, Jones Lang LaSalle, and Trammel Crow Companies) as SiteStuff’s strategic partners and with their CEOs serving as SiteStuff board members.
Prior to creating SiteStuff, as Founder/CEO of Express Star Systems from 1988 to 1998, Michael pioneered some of the first commercial integrations between CAD/GIS imaging systems, relational databases, and other business and analytic systems for real estate portfolio optimization and computer-assisted-facilities-management (CAFM) software applications. Express Star featured the America’s top 3 investment banks and the US and foreign governments as its clients for those newly-pioneered integrated technologies.
