Faces of Silicon Alley – Edan Soroker

My name is Eden Soroker, I grew up bilingual so as a young kid I lived in Israel, in Tel-Aviv, and as a teenager I moved to the US. I went to school at Cornell, I studied mechanical engineering, I also had some concentrations in applied math and music so kind of a wide gamut, but what really drew me, especially to engineering, was the idea of being able to break apart a very large problem into smaller digestible chunks in order to solve it properly, I’ve always been really drawn to that idea. And after school I want to work for Accenture initially on the west coast, so working with a lot of clients in Silicon Valley, in emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, wearable technology, also developing some mobile applications, and of course also in AI.

To me what’s really exciting about conversational AI is the idea of making the technology more human. Up until today when we interact with technology, with applications, everything is pretty rigid. You go through things step by step, you have a finite set of options, in essence we’ve had to adapt ourselves to the computers binary way of thinking and what conversational AI allows us to do is kind of flip that’s on, that on its head. So, for the first time the computer’s are actually thinking a little bit more like humans because when we interact with each other it’s not very linear, it can be chaotic and conversational AI allow us to really build applications with the same kind of utility and value that we come to expect from technology but in a much more human way.

At Pypestream I’m a solution designer on the Customer Experience team. So, what does that mean? That means, so, I’m working directly with our clients to customize our solution for each and every one of them. So, we take our clients from conception, strategy development, we work together to figure out key performance indicators in the business strategy for implementation. Then I actually build out all of the conversational flows and I also coordinate all the integration work. And then we take that all the way to go live and to analytics. So, I really, as a solution designer, I get to touch all of these different aspects. It’s the most interdisciplinary role I’ve ever had in my career and I love it.

To avoid sounding cliche I’m going to say that it’s actually the interdisciplinary nature of our makeup as a team and as a collection of individuals. Within the same kind of position, my position in fact, we’ve got a lot of different people who come from different academic and life backgrounds, and we all have our own weaknesses and strengths, we all contribute something different, we all learn from each other on a daily basis and I’m just loving it.

During my free time music, music all the way. I am a saxophone player and over the years I’ve had the pleasure of being able to perform and record with bands in R&B, hip hop, jazz, and funk, it’s been great. I also have a small hidden passion for playing deliberately in public so if you’re lucky you might even catch me playing in the New York City subways or maybe in Union Square on a nice Sunday afternoon.