People of IOG: Dr. Mihaela Ulieru

Charles opens the People of IOG series and introduces Dr. Mihaela Ulieru, who has worked with IOG for a while.

Ulieru says she was born in Romania under a communist system that shaped her drive and her appreciation for freedom.

The communist environment, comparing it to North Korea, with only two hours of the dictator on TV, bread lines, and eating bread with mustard.

Despite having little to eat, education was the one thing valued and a distinguishing factor in a place where everyone was paid the same.

Recounts a disciplined K-12 with beatings, attending a special Italian-language math and physics school that took three buses and four hours round trip from age nine.

She was known as a poet on TV and won poetry Olympics, so everyone expected her to study literature.

In her last year a new math teacher showed her a Leibniz quote mocking a poet for lacking imagination for mathematics, sparking her eureka discovery of mathematical creativity.

She won the math Olympics and went on to study control engineering and robotics at Politehnica Bucharest in its first year, over limited competitive seats.

Women were often the valedictorians in the sciences with no gender differentiation she felt at the time.

Ceausescu made the Americans allies protecting Romania from the Soviet bloc, so she learned English not Russian, competing against strong Russians in math Olympics.

She could not pursue a PhD in Romania since only political-party loyalists could, as the dictator's wife headed the Romanian Academy.

She taught at university without a PhD and worked at Romania's biggest computer research center, whose director funded her travel to a conference in Tallinn.

On her first trip out of Romania, in Tallinn she met her future PhD supervisor Professor Rolf Isermann of Darmstadt, who offered her a PhD and a DAAD scholarship.

She spoke no German but had to defend her PhD in German, learning it at the Goethe Institute.

Her German teacher challenged her with articles on feminism and comparing religions, opening new worlds and making the language interesting.

As the first female PhD student in Isermann's department she faced hostility and jokes over her topic of diagnosis with fuzzy logic.

Control theory as an application of cybernetics using a feedback loop from output to input, like adjusting a shower's temperature with a controller.

Robots, pendulums, drones, and autonomous cars are all control problems, and she was drawn to robotics by Star Trek's Captain Kirk.

Fuzzy logic as an infinity of logic between zero and one, unlike Boolean logic, matching real-life vagueness like how hard to press a brake.

Her passion is diagnosing systems at any scale, inferring the why from symptoms, which fuzzy logic suits since symptoms are not crisp.

Her thesis, Diagnosis with Fuzzy Logic and Possibilistic Networks, challenged Judea Pearl's probabilistic reasoning.

At her first conference she met Lotfi Zadeh, the founder of fuzzy logic, who became her lifelong mentor and predicted a bright future for her.

Zadeh taught her to grow a thick skin and take criticism as a compliment, since ignorance is the thing to fear in academia.

Flying from Bucharest to Frankfurt as the hour from hell to heaven, and back again.

She earned summa cum laude in her German defense, then applied for scholarships and won the Fulbright.

At a Croatian wedding in London she met the head of Brunel University's computer science department, leading to a lecturer offer.

In the interview she charmed stiff British professors by explaining that life is not crisp, and got the offer within two hours.

She chose the Brunel lecturer job over a Fulbright postdoc, advised that a job is a job and a postdoc is a postdoc.

Recalls her first-ever class teaching databases to 500 students, panicking and stepping out to breathe before pushing through.

Her paper on the objectivity of knowledge and belief explored semantics and ontologies in the Prolog era of AI.

During her PhD in mechanical engineering she did hands-on robotics with a Daimler manufacturing project, then more theoretical software work at Brunel.

At a Berkeley conference her mentor Zadeh, then dean, opened a postdoc for her, drawing her to the US.

Zadeh revolutionized systems theory by realizing you can control the real world with simple if-then rules, much like smart contracts.

At Berkeley her colleague was Stuart Russell, and Peter Norvig, both students of Zadeh, who co-authored AI: A Modern Approach and popularized the AI control problem of making strong AI beneficial rather than a Terminator.

At Berkeley she worked on Japan's Intelligent Manufacturing Systems consortium, applying holonic manufacturing at DaimlerChrysler.

From Berkeley she took an offer from Dr. Nori in Canada to become an associate professor directly, over a Qualcomm offer.

In Calgary she went to the Stampede rodeo while chasing tenure on what she calls the tenure treadmill.

Her master student Garrett Camp co-founded Uber, his stigmergy search thesis becoming StumbleUpon.

She served on the Science, Technology and Innovation Council of Canada and Singapore's science council, then won a Canada Research Chair in e-society, moving to Fredericton, New Brunswick near the Bay of Fundy.

Recounts her mother's first flight to Canada and Hawaii, while her father would not fly after a World War II plane accident burned his hands.

Creativity is the common denominator of poetry and mathematics, an intrinsic property she has kept expressing.

Her favorite paper is on organic governance, viewing society as a holonic system like her earlier holonic manufacturing work.

A holonic system as a nested, not top-down, hierarchy where country, state, and city each handle governance functions while cooperating for the whole, tracing it to Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine.

Connects holonic structure to swarm intelligence, recalling a scientist telling her you do not need a god, just ants and stigmergy, citing Marco Dorigo's swarm robotics.

Charles shows an aluminum cast of a fire-ant hive and describes weaver ants building empires with bridges and larva-glue as emergent systems.

Charles says crypto inspired him because simple rules can build value, identity, and governance for a transnational economy, referencing the game Nomic where players change the rules.

Compares a crypto system to a resilient ant colony without central planning, a bazaar not a cathedral, avoiding cascading failures like 2008 through anti-fragility.

She led flagship projects like the matter compiler, a universal fabricator or second von Neumann machine, with Norman Packard and Steen Rasmussen of the Santa Fe Institute.

Maxeler Technologies, a Stanford spinoff doing some of the fastest computing, brought her to the US to lead its office, between London and America.

Her work brought her to the MIT Media Lab, where the MIT Bitcoin Club gave students free Bitcoin, introducing her to cryptocurrencies.

Satoshi as freedom after her fragile years in a dictatorship, and Alex Pentland as a wonderful person who chaired the World Economic Forum's Data Driven Development Council.

Recounts writing From Bitcoin to Burning Man with John Clippinger and the Windhover retreats where they helped early startups against the SEC.

Self-sovereign identity as a matter of dignity, controlling what you reveal, versus centralized identity owned by governments, banks, and Facebook.

Charles recounts Phil Zimmermann and Web of Trust and Manu Sporny's DID at the W3C taking nearly 10 years, calling identity a dangerous superpower like credit scores.

She set up an innovation lab at Freddie Mac in Washington DC around 2016, applying blockchain to reduce mortgage bureaucracy.

At IOG her title is strategic partnerships leader, but she calls herself an impact catalyst bringing high-impact niches like the UN project, renewable energy, and the SDGs.

She brought Ben Goertzel's SingularityNET into the orbit, and champions the e-Govern company for government as a service enabling organic governance.

Charles reveals a Cardano 2025 goal to run an entire country's back end on Cardano with a major DC consultancy, citing the Estonia project, a Carib ID system, and Ron Rivest's e-voting paper.

Charles contrasts India's bottom-up spectrum patchwork serving 1.4 billion people cheaply with America's top-down FCC, an ant system versus a cathedral.

Ulieru says DAOs are the ultimate answer for governance, recalling co-founding the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents and the principle that code is law.

Charles says IO Global will hire a full-time philosopher to explore the lex lata concept of code as law, since humans prefer malleable rules that a blockchain makes immutable.

Muses whether immutable social rules yield a more stable and resilient system than malleable human ones, while Ulieru notes her parents were philosophy and psychology professors.

Closing, she credits Star Trek for teaching her to dream and describes leading from the emerging future, having always lived in the future.

Her mission would be a social network that contains everyone regardless of belief or politics, helping people endure their differences and build together.

Charles closes that success would be putting Kiva on a blockchain for a peer-to-peer loan to a farmer in Africa, the mission behind his 2014 TED talk requiring identity, reputation, and payment systems.