Cows and data centers: What HP’s chief engineer thinks about fusing the real world with technology

VB: Where do you think jobs are in the future, then? Running these micro-grids?

Patel: I’m always a believer that fundamentals never go away. Jobs are in fundamental skills – running the micro-grids, building the printing machines, whether ours or somebody else’s. When people ask me if we should get rid of the silos in engineering at the undergraduate level, I say absolutely not. Solid mechanics, mechanics of materials, that’s not changing. At the undergraduate level, keep the silos as they are. At the graduate level, create multidisciplinary curricula where you want to go.

The fundamentals we’ve had for generations don’t necessarily go away. They remain. As long as you’re strong in your fundamentals – physics, chemistry—trade skills are just as important.

Above: A huge touchscreen at HP Labs.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

VB: We have all the unicorns in Silicon Valley, the Ubers of the world. It seems like you’re also saying that the smokestack tech companies are very important.

Patel: Absolutely, in a cyber physical world. I was inducted into the hall of fame in 2014 and they asked me to give a talk. I said, “When I was a child growing up in India, I thought America was a land of tinkerers.” Children used to work on their parents’ cars. They delivered newspapers, made money, and bought radio-controlled planes. In India, when we wrote to our pen pals, no wonder those guys are ahead. They got to do things we didn’t have access to. My father had a Raleigh bicycle. There was no way we could work on a car. We were building gliders at best. They were steeped in fundamentals and they were hands-on. That’s why America was on top of the world. It was not a naïve perspective.

When I came to Silicon Valley I found myself in a valley of tinkerers. You’re sitting in the tinkerer’s home today. You saw the garage. Now I feel like we’re a valley of abstraction. We’ve abstracted the things below the internet. In the 21st century, the cyber age got us this abstraction. It was easy, because the abstraction is good. I like it, because you don’t have to know everything. But you can’t get carried away with abstraction and not question why, when you turn on this beautiful app, you also turn on a 100-kilowatt blower. You have to know how that blower works.

As long as you do the beautiful user interface and all that above the abstraction layer, and you know about the consequences at the bottom, then you’re good. But if you’re oblivious to the consequences below the internet layer, we’re in trouble.

VB: You can make your software 10 percent more energy-efficient, but then you might cause everything under that chain to consume a lot more energy.

Patel: Precisely. This cooling tower was exactly that. We wrote a paper and presented it in the data mining community. When you use a water-cooled tower, a water-cooled chiller in the data center, you save on electricity because you get more efficiency. Naturally people decided use that. But then you lose a lot of water through the cooling tower. Gallons and gallons vaporize. There’s always a balance. You have to know. Maybe you saved on electricity, but you wasted a lot of water. What does the compromise look like? What does the composite equation look like?

You’re absolutely right. That’s what happens. People optimize one thing, which is good, but forget everything else. Whenever I talk to software people—I learned a lot in software, continuous integration, continuous development. I’m trying to bring their best practices into hardware. I respect that. I expect the software team to also respect the hardware.

In the cyber physical world—I tell all the software people to make friends with mechanical engineers. That’s how we’ve created our teams. That’s exactly what we do with our affinity groups. When the machine learning community meets, we take on cyber physical problems.

VB: You’re working on the seams between cyber and physical?

Patel: Yes, doing co-design. I’m also talking to universities. I taught at Chabot College, a junior college in Hayward, for 16 years. I’m a product of a junior college. I see a lot of promise in our students. A lot of them were very well-placed, going on to do master’s degrees and so on. I taught at San Jose State, Berkeley, and Santa Clara. I taught graduate and undergraduate classes. I taught statics and dynamics and so on.

What I see in the last 20 years and the next 20 years, I feel like we have a lot of talent that needs to be directed. When I talk to universities, I’m thinking about—what’s the curriculum for the cyber physical age. That’s why I say the silos are important. The foundation must be strong. Then, at a master’s level, how do you think of a multidisciplinary curriculum?

It’s high time Silicon Valley looked at the supply side of human capital. We may be over-provisioned in one area, above the internet layer, but we’re under-provisioned below the internet layer.

Above: Chandrakant Patel’s role as HP’s chief engineer.

Image Credit: HP

VB: Didn’t we steer everybody that way because that’s where the money was?

Patel: Exactly. That neighbor of mine—I was having a conversation with my son. He said he wanted to go into civil engineering. My neighbor said, “There’s no hope. You won’t make any money.”

My son went into civil engineering anyway, at UCLA. He wrote in an essay, “The internet has created a coffin for American innovation.” He talked about when the eastern span of the Oakland bay bridge was coming up. None of his friends went to see it. He went to see it, because it was the opportunity of a lifetime to see a suspension bridge coming up. I said, “Well, maybe they saw it on Snapchat.” [laughs]

But there’s some truth to that. We’ve built San Francisco, with all these skyscrapers. There’s a lot of physical stuff around us. We hear stories about physical designs gone wrong. I sometimes wonder if we’ve become too cavalier around physical designs.

VB: I suppose the Internet of things is forcing people to start understanding physical objects again.

Patel: That’s a good thing. My daughter is a mechanical engineer. She was going to Tesla for an interview. I said, “Ask how they size the motor in the car.” Start with physical. You’re going to a cyber physical company. Start with physical.

I keep a whiteboard in the family room of our hours. The kids used to call it whiteboarding, a play on waterboarding torture. [laughs] But I said, “Personify yourself as the vehicle. Feel the wind. Calculate the wind resistance. Feel the rolling friction. Calculate the rolling friction. The motor must overcome rolling friction and wind resistance. At 80 miles an hour, what dominates? At 20 miles an hour, what dominates? At 80 miles an hour, how much power is drawn? Wind is dominating, but rolling is very low. With an 80 kilowatt-hour battery, how long will that last? You’re going to southern California in 115-degree weather and the air conditioning is on as you go up the Grapevine. How much does energy consumption go up?” All of these are fundamentals. There have to be actuators, too, because this guy Elon wants an autopilot. What about sensors? There’s a 77Ghz radar. We understood the physical platform. Then I said, “Okay, now go the cloud.” I didn’t go to the cloud until we actually understood the physical fundamentals.

You’re absolutely right. The internet of things exists, but we must make people understand the physical principles. You don’t have to design the motor. You can do an internet search and find out why they chose to use an induction motor. Children today can be much better-read than I was 30 years ago. The only thing is, we have to make our children go back and do the fundamental research.

I was inspired by the Beechcraft Bonanza, with its V-tail. I saw it when I was a child. I wondered why it had a V-tail, when no other airplane did. Now you can just go to Wikipedia on your phone and understand why. That’s what we have to instill, to go below the internet abstraction layer.

VB: Maybe space and Mars will inspire people again?

Patel: And once again, you think in terms of the movies. People were inspired by The Martian. It’s a powerful movie. A lot of these things, we actually can—as long as they keep asking the questions.

I’m very excited, given the opportunities. The counsel I always give to our community is depth in fundamentals, multidisciplinary perspective, and systemic innovation through multidisciplinary collaboration. I’m excited about being at HP for those reasons. There are many companies out there that I respect, but we have both cyber and physical.

VB: Do you have any different message when you’re talking to students versus talking to your engineers?

Patel: When I talk to students, it’s always the fundamentals. Well, even when I talk to engineers—I recently recorded a module for Brain Candy called “Energy for Everyone.” I talked about the first and second laws of thermodynamics. It’s the same. I don’t think there’s a difference. I always start with the fundamentals.