Chris Yip  0:01  
Welcome to Tell Me More: Coffee with Chris Yip, the official podcast of the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Each month, I sit down with someone from our vibrant global community to talk about what places them at the heart of designing bold solutions for a better world. You'll meet students, professors and alumni who are making a difference across a range of fields, including some where you may not expect to find them. My guest today is Herman Colquhoun. Herman completed his master's degree in human factors here at U of T engineering and eventually went on to spend more than a decade at IBM, where he is a design principal leading the design of IBM's quantum premium partner experience. He is also a member of the leadership team for the Racial Equity in Design Initiative at the company, the co-chair of IBM Canada's Black Experience, and co-founder of the IBM Inclusive Design Guild. Herman, welcome to the podcast.

Herman Colquhoun  1:02  
Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

Chris Yip  1:04  
So I always start this with the classic question. Tell us about how and where you grew up and when you realize that engineering was for you.

Herman Colquhoun  1:14  
Okay, well, that goes way back. I was actually born and raised in an area of Toronto, known as Parkdale. My parents are from Jamaica, so they just emigrated from Jamaica. And, you know, between the ages of zero and 12, my two younger sisters and I lived there to two bedroom apartment with my parents until about the age of 12, as I said, and that's when we bought a house and what was at the time, a very newly developing town of Markham. Just a little bit about myself, I was always interested in playing sports, like basketball and track and field and I won medals and championships in both in the city. And however, you know, like many migrant families, my parents emphasized education over support for my athletic accomplishments so I think our move to Markham prompted me to place more focus on my academics, as I had not found so much of my childhood culture reflected in my new school or community. Alright, so I grew up in a community, which is full of Filipinos and Caribbean people and Slavic people so it was a it was a diverse mix of exciting cultures. And Markham is more of a predominantly white neighborhood so sports and academics became like my new social anchors, while I tried to adapt in my new environment. So I was always interested in math and science but I tended to excel even more now that I was in a new place, a strange place. And often when I was in my room, I would often used to dream up ideas and doodle sketches and dive into my collection of science fiction comics. So I eventually as I neared graduation, I began considering the professions that I might want to traverse into and it was during a conversation with my mother that I was prompted to pursue studies in engineering. I had heard of the profession before, but neither myself nor my parents were very familiar with the aspects of engineering until a colleague of my mother, at her workplace actually commented to her on my academic achievements, and suggested that I looked into the field. And that's exactly what I did.

Chris Yip  3:28  
Cool. So you're, I guess, first in your family that is, is that right? To be in engineering?

Herman Colquhoun  3:32  
I am the first in my family to graduate university as well [laughter].

Chris Yip  3:40  
That's, that's, that's very cool. We'll give a little bit of a pitch out to our friendly competitors at the University of Waterloo where I understand you did your undergrad, which is fine [laughter]. Where as they said, we're friendly competitors. It's an awesome school. Actually, quickly, the undergrad in engineering at Waterloo, what discipline did you pick there?

Herman Colquhoun  3:59  
I did my bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, which is, as you've mentioned, an excellent program. Most people go to Waterloo for engineering to take advantage of their co-op program. That program is particularly helpful, because it not only informed me as to the possibilities of what I could do as a mechanical engineer but it also exposed me to what I enjoyed and what I wasn't so interested in. When I graduated, I took a look at the job market for mechanical engineers, and most of the roles that were available were positions I kind of had experience in and I already knew that they weren't really of interest to me so I geared my studies later on in my undergrad years to focus on what I might combine in terms of my interests, in engineering with interest in human behavior and performance. That might be like that athletic persona in me creeping back out, right? So I took courses in things like kinesiology, biomedical sciences, psychology, etc. and I became interested in the area of ergonomics, which is how I actually came across the field of cognitive ergonomics, and human factors, so I'm not sure if the audience is well versed in what human factors and ergonomics is but if I look at it online, I pulled up a definition for y'all. So the application of psychological and physiological principles to the engineering and design of products, processes and systems, right? So, and it has four primary goals, which is to use learning to reduce human error, increase productivity, enhance safety, and systems availability and comfort, with specific focus on the interaction between the human and the engineered system. So tying it back to what my interests I considered the programs at both Loughborough University in the UK and the one at U of T, and applied to both for my master's program.

Chris Yip  5:56  
You pick U of T, you stay on this side of the Atlantic, you had to do your masters of human factors in the Department of Mechanical Industrial Engineering here and I think you worked for Professor Paul Milgram. Is that right?

Herman Colquhoun  6:08  
Yes, I elected to take the program with Professor Paul Milgram. His area was research in telerobotics and Ed stereopsis. So I was into 3d things as you can probably tell from my my science fiction background, I love things like that virtualization and augmented reality were the areas that clicked with the desires of that science fiction heart that I have. While I was in the program with Professor Milgram, I authored several papers, and a book chapter as I explored the intersection between you know, the perception in an augmented world and the control of a virtual avatar. My work was sponsored by Syncrude out in the...in our oil fields, and Spar Aerospace which they're no longer called Spar, but they, they're the company that are responsible for their...Canada's robotic arm on the space station and the space shuttle. My research was really around a concept that we dubbed the dynamic tether. What it is, really is, it's this effect that you sometimes see in video games, you might even see it in movies now, but it's that effect where you...the camera kind of follows the avatar that you're controlling. You can see your body that you're controlling move in relation to the camera, but then the camera readjusts itself. So I modeled that connection between the camera and the item or the avatar that you're controlling by a spring damper system. So that's my mechanical engineering. And you can vary that tether in length, if you imagine the tethers at zero length, now you're looking through the eyes of the avatar, you're egocentric, so from zero and then you could go off to infinity but infinity is not very useful in terms of controlling something so very like, maybe a shorter length than that, to give you an exocentric viewpoint, and control the avatar. So the dynamics of the system and situational awareness that you now have over your avatar being able to see things that are around it, not only through the eyes in front, but at the coming up from the back. Those are all increased, the human performance then varies with the length of that tether and it's dynamic response to say the velocities of the avatar and acceleration. So considering linear velocities and acceleration as well as angular velocities and its acceleration. I only studied two dimensions but a colleague of mine, carried forward my work and did all six dimensions.

Chris Yip  8:37  
All six [laugher}? 

Herman Colquhoun  8:39  
Oh! Linear, right? so linear distance...linear velocities and acceleration and angular velocities and accelerations. In our case, we were interested in those parameters in terms of controlling real systems. So whether we were modeling that robotic arm or modeling a backhoe off in the fields, we would be making use of the telemetry that's coming back and modeling the environment and being able to understand okay, what are the limits of your human perception? And what are optimal settings for, say, the stiffness or key values for the spring damper system, right? So, I think probably in the gaming world, they it's, it was probably trial and error, I'm guessing. And it just probably got better over time, they got better with the craft around setting those parameters, but in terms of taking scientific approaches with controlling real...real systems that are controlling really expensive equipment, where the risk is much higher, we took a more conservative approach.

Chris Yip  9:45  
I was going to say, you know, playing Halo versus grabbing a satellite that you're about to pull it out of the space shuttle and docking it into something, there's probably a little bit of...got a little more freedom on one side and a little more risk on the other side. So...so you did that, you went and did a number of other roles and eventually, you're now at IBM in this role as a design principal in this area of quantum integration. And so can you tell our audience a little bit about what that's like?

Herman Colquhoun  10:12  
So design is, first of all, what I am, who I am. You quickly identified with my human factors background that a lot of the principles that we apply are used in human computer interaction and, and designing systems. The quantum bit is a new field, obviously, and a lot of people are interested in it so I'll talk a little bit about that. So quantum computing is, you know, a rapidly emerging technology. It harnesses the laws of, say, quantum mechanics. And we use that the properties and principles of that to solve problems that are too complex for classical computers. Now, classical computers are computers that work on operate on classical bits, right? So you have ones and zeros. And then you have quantum computers, which operate on quantum bits. So also known as qubits, and they tend to represent ones and zeros at the same time. You probably like thinking, What are you talking about? How is this happening the same? It's really about the variation in the probability of being either one at any given time at any given time, right? So we don't know what it is until we've observed it. And it's quantum properties like superposition and entanglement that are used to kind of describe these systems and the characteristics and it's about the manipulation of these properties and predicting how they behave and what comes out on the other end that we can now use to do computations. We make the real hardware, IBM. It's fairly new when you think of computing because we've only began to imagine it three decades ago and now it's available to hundreds of thousands of developers, although many don't quite understand how to use it yet. But that's, that's okay. That's, that's where we start, right? So. But when I first joined the team, as a senior design leader, the scope of quantum integration was as broad as it is, kind of, it'll define what is quantum integration, right? So our journey year of work, we kind of looked forward and defined how we might bring quantum computing to the world of cloud developers, we looked at the integration between quantum computing and cloud delivery platforms. So in 2020, my team designed the first gateways to IBM Quantum, using our IBM Cloud. Now IBM Cloud is our cloud, commercial cloud offering. So we had, we had researchers access our quantum systems over the cloud in the past and to do the research. So we've been on the cloud, but we haven't been commercially accessible. The challenging parts of the project are not only the agreements on the integration on the technical side, you have to think about the consumer facing marketing sides. And both cloud IBM Cloud and IBM Quantum it's integration on both sides. And because we're talking about humans that need to consume this information and humans who need to consume the tools.

Chris Yip  13:06  
It's a complicated perspective, right? Because there's ones and zeros we all kind of get, we kind of get binary. But when you talk about something, which is fuzzy, in a sense, the potential is there, right? Of what it can impact. In particular, I think financial transactions is the big one that they want to apply quantum to, from the encryption side and my understanding is like, the quantum systems could break classic encryption codes really quickly because of how they work so you use a quantum system to encrypt. And there's a lot of opportunities, I think, coming down the pipe. 

Herman Colquhoun  13:36  
Yeah, there is a couple of things that we actually work on at IBM. So one of the things you mentioned with the encryption is Quantum Safe. So IBM launched Quantum Safe. How do we prepare for a world where quantum computing is coming and can break all of our encryptions? The quantum technology itself can help us solve what we call intractable problems. We think in a classical way, with quantum it's so non-intuitive that it's actually advantageous to have a number of people who don't think the same involved in your work because we're trying to reach this level of quantum intuition, which no one's born with, no one actually develops as they're growing in this classical world because we don't see it. The other things are like things like material science or drug development. Chemists  are researching medicines, and much of their work is done around testing hundreds of variables, thousands of variables. They are searching for desirable characteristics needed to treat illnesses or in terms of materials, maybe you need something that's lightweight, yet strong. And so what's more quantum than molecules. It's a one to one modeling of nature, and then supply chain logistics. Where do you send your planes, trains and automobiles? They all have to pass through the same nodes in the system. You know, you don't want planes passing through the same node at the same time. How do you solve that problem of logistics?

Chris Yip  15:10  
So let's switch gears a little bit and talk about another area I know that you're very heavily invested into and and that is in the area of initiatives or what we might call diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI or EI. How did you start to become involved in in this area, this super important area?

Herman Colquhoun  15:28  
Okay, well, how do I answer this? No, well, I guess, you know, I'm an engineer so I'm driven as an engineer and a designer to solve these complex problems and intractable problems and what's more complex or intractable than social justice? (Chris: Yep.) So no, but in all seriousness, for those who are not in the room and can't see me and are listening to this podcast, I am a member of a visible minority, some call it visible minority, but when we divide all the various groups, right, because really altogether, we're large minority, but I am a black man, right? I have a beard and I'm wearing a black turtleneck with a sandy, woodsy, brown cardigan sweater on top and, and I'm wearing a black knitted skullcap. Now that we've been somewhat more inclusive, I can say that I have been involved with this work since the day I was born. I was born into a society with a variety of real legacy of racial hatred, social biases, and deeply rooted systemic marginalization and related issues, right? So the work already includes me and so I am innately involved in the work.

Chris Yip  16:44  
Yeah, and I think that lived experience becomes part of, of what helps drive initiatives and helps us make important changes as we go through. So you're, you're involved in the Racial Equity in Design Initiative? Could you maybe explain what that is within the context of your work and involvement in that?

Herman Colquhoun  17:04  
Okay, so IBM Racial Equity in Design is a very highly focused initiative, obviously, on racial equity but also, we were looking at design because we have a group of designers or a community within IBM. That initiative emerged in 2020 as we black designers at IBM, we're kind of unified, and we activated towards diversity, equity and inclusion, and within IBM as well as across the industry, because we didn't notice that there was a bias built within the design industry itself. So the initiative is actually committed to ensuring that racial equity is instilled in the design culture inside and outside of IBM but how do we do this? We do this by driving change, through our interactions through the things we invest in, through our actions that impact the behaviors, the policies and, and the assumptions, deep seated assumptions, right? That we have within our industry. If we were to define racial equity, what is that? It's really, it's an outcome and it's also a process. So as an outcome, we're trying to achieve racial equity and we get there by getting to this point where race no longer is the thing that determines one's social economic outcomes. And when everyone has what they need to thrive, no matter where they live, that means we've gotten there. But if we think about it as a process, which is kind of what we're doing in racial equity and design, we're applying racial equity when those most impacted by structural racial inequity are meaningfully involved in the creation and the implementation of the institutional policies and practices that impact our lives, right? And it impacts everyone because we're all part of the same worldwide network. So what affects one part of the ecosystem always affects the other. That's why this is so important. One of our goals was also to change the industry in terms of, okay, well, why is there a disparity between the actual percentage population of black people or people from various minorities versus what you actually see in the industry, we looked at our systems and we understood that the biases in our systems are based on where we are and what we do and where we look for our pipeline. If we connect our pipeline to areas and systems or schools that have somewhat of a bias built into their systems, now we are adopting that bias. So the way we tackle that issue was to go where the black designers were. And so in partnering with organizations like the black design conference, there's a number of historically black colleges and universities that we worked with in the States and other programs. America by Design is another program that actually did coverage for us and then their TV show that covered design and made inclusivity one of the aspects, and then some of my colleagues at work at IBM became judges on that show, and would give guidance on what inclusivity meant. So that's how we saw the change in the influence and the impact that we can make as well as how we can help with other organizations making change.

Chris Yip  20:31  
I was looking at the other initiatives within IBM that are underway, including I mean, there's a Racial Equity in Design Initiative that you're leading, but then there's also the IBM Canada Black Experience and the Inclusive Design Guild. Can you give us some details on those?

Herman Colquhoun  20:45  
Yes, sure. So the IBM CanBE is what we call the Canadian Black Experience. It's an initiative that was launched simultaneously and when I say simultaneously, I'm talking about Racial Equity in Design. So that was a worldwide effort. So IBM Design worldwide, now IBM Canada, within Canada, we have within IBM in various areas of IBM. We have what we call business resource groups. One in particular in Canada is the African Caribbean networking group. And so we were looking at, well, this whole thing around George Floyd has now happened happening, what do we do? So we looked at the fact that we recognize that racial disparities exist within the Canadian system as well. A lot of people don't think so but it is a fact. It might not be as visible in candidates, it's less in your face than it is in across the border. So I was asked to kind of lead and assist with the Canadian cohort of valid volunteers and understanding their specific needs, and goals and driving timely and impactful solutions as their design coach, I'm using air quotes, right? So I'm the design coach and because design solves real problems, and that's what this group was formed to do. So we sought to tackle some of the main areas as our counterpart in design, such as transparency around the disparities in the company, and the lack of representation. Decolonizing at the employment pipeline, how do you do that? Addressing the low talent and acquisition flow, right? So establishing accountability and sustainability. This is not a new problem. This is something that's been happening over decades and decades, you've seen this before with civil rights, right? But what happens is it's not sustainable. So how do we make people accountable and create something that's sustainable? And that's around education and programming, and creating community connections. That's how you solve this. So then, if I twist a little, pivot a little, now talk about the IBM Inclusive Design Guild, the guild is really about bringing designers together from all sides and inclusivity really looks at beyond just race. We know that we've had a lot of lessons learned around race but we know the problem is, the real problem, the core problem is marginalization. This is the common thread between all groups that are oppressed in a way. And what is the oppression are really about, it's about this biased perception of traits. These traits can be inherent, right? You can be born with them, or you could acquire them and then we call them identities, and they impact your lived experience. So your lived experience that in turn impacts and becomes more amplified over time, and impacts future generations and then as you are biased and future generations become biased now, systems that they're building become biased. So that's how you get to systemic inequities. And so our goal as a guild is to understand how we might use what we've learned collectively, and leverage solutions to common marginalization related issues, and apply this to and through design. So for the last 11 months, our guild has grown from conception to about 250 plus IBMers strong and consisting of designers and others. And we are tackling projects that will be based on something I call before E so equity, right? So that's the E and EDI exposing the stories of marginalization that's important to build a sense of something beyond just empathy. Empathy is kind of like you can kind of get what somebody else is saying, because you've talked to them, you, you're relating with them in a way, you're building a sense of duty, but we want to verge on the sense of sympathy, almost like it connects with you so deep, that you feel like you are experiencing it yourself. And that deep rooted desire to create a world that is fairer than when we found it. And then there's another E, enabling, so enabling inclusive design, which is about activating designers and giving them the agency to actually create solutions that impact both the way we work and the things we create, and then finally, effect. So effecting a culture of inclusivity, both inside and outside of IBM, which is as much about change management as it is about creating culture, that we will be able to sustain this over time and make any advances and become more equitable as we go.

Chris Yip  25:23  
What you're doing in IBM is terrific. And it's all about in the workforce, in a sense, right? But then the universities are positioned to help supply the workforce for you. So I guess I'm wondering is what do you think are things that our faculty and staff and we'll talk about the students in a second, should be thinking about in the same context?

Herman Colquhoun  25:41  
Yeah, well, I'd like to pause and give you guys a shout out, right? So you all have had a tremendous program that you just executed not too long ago, and you employed two great professors. I don't think, are they the first black female...

Chris Yip  26:00  
...in engineering. Yeah. So right, and they're both in your home department. Myrtede Alfred and Enid Montague both joined...you woud say what? I think it's almost two years now, joined industrial engineering in your home subgroup kind of a human factors, which is exciting.

Herman Colquhoun  26:20  
That's part of the answer. Right? Greg Jamison reached out to me and asked me to help out with this, this effort that you all were having in terms of trying to find candidates who can help diversify the staff at U of T and so that's part of it. Know your network, use your network, I think you had a program called TIDE that we're being educated through and I think that's one of the things that sparked the initiative as well. But it's about diversifying your pipelines. And when you diversify your pipeline, now your pipeline might be about...could be students, but there's also a pipeline of staff. And why is it important to diversify your staff? Because you are going to attract who you are. Students, and youth are always looking to what they can be in the future. So they look to those who are around them. And they say, Oh, I can be the President of the United States, Barack Obama. But nobody thought that they could ever be the President of the United States. Maybe there were a few, but not a lot. But now, everyone probably thinks, oh, you know what, I could be the President of the United States, the color of my skin does not stop me from being that. So diversifying who you are, helps diversify your pipeline of who you attract. And then there's building a culture of inclusion within your programming in your classrooms, right? So you want to be able to help your students understand. But first, it has to be your staff's understanding of what inclusion is, and what that might look like in terms of your curriculum. Lastly, get involved with your institutions EDI efforts, right? So I know through working with you all at U of T, that there is that program and the TIDE program that I mentioned, they have practical tips on more inclusive recruitment. So the connections, they're all coming full circle, and this is what we need to make this sustainable.

Chris Yip  28:22  
For our listeners, we sort of mentioned this thing called TIDE. In the U of T vernacular, U of T likes creating lots of acronyms. The TIDE stands - actually stands for the Toronto Initiative for Diversity and Excellence. So T I D A and Maydianne Andrade out of U of T Scarborough was the original founder of that and I think it's a terrific Initiative. A full shout out to that program that started to grow and it's led to a number of other initiatives, whether it's the Black Founders Network here at U of T, or the Black Research Network at U of T and those spaces as part of this. So we this was about faculty and staff, what do you think [about] students? And you sort of hinted a little bit of this or sort of with your analogy to thinking about being the President of the United States? What do you think the key things are that students should be considering as well, in this particular space?

Herman Colquhoun  29:09  
Well, I think students, they have a much more natural path to this, because they're not so heavily burdened with the biases of the world. I mean, they've learned some, but those of us who have been in the world longer have much many more biases. So it's important that they be themselves and they bring their authentic self to both their school and their situation. We want them to be the change. So be different, be different from what's come before, challenge the status quo and challenge the way that systems are built. Ask questions, so be that change so that they can become the change.

Chris Yip  29:48  
So this leads me to kind of my last question, when you look at how things have changed with respect to EDI, or we'll just say a decade. What do you see for the next 10 years? How do you feel about about things changing and moving forward with respect to this?

Herman Colquhoun  30:06  
Yeah, that's a good question. You know, things move tremendously slowly. I gotta say that. (Chris: Yeah.) But they move quickly at the same time. Now, what does that mean? We've seen over time, that there has been incremental change. We've seen...I mentioned the civil rights movement. Diversity in terms of more women in the workforce, we've seen that change. But some of the change that we've seen has been, as I mentioned, unsustainable. So I think what we might see now is that it's so world wide, it's so engrained in our unified history. I think we got a peek at what might be sustainable change on the horizon. So and I think it's enabled by a few things. I think it's that we have a new, more empathetic generation of youth. This this generation, they're really caring, then they're asking questions, and they're like, they're, they're also rebelling, and they're saying, Well, why are you doing it that way? They're challenging the generations that have come before them. And then there's social media, which exposes the stories, right? So one of the Es, expose the stories. It does that with a greater speed than ever before witnessed. So I think that there's something to be said, because no one can control the narrative when it moves so quickly, (Chris: Right.) so it can't, there's not as much time for these narratives to be biased, because everyone starts to see the truth much more quickly. And then there's the cultural change that's has been sparked by this confluence of events, right? There's things we can never script to have happened that have happened in the last few years. (Chris: Right.) What's happening now has been fueled by a generation of people with whom these biases of racism really have no deep rooted hold, at least not as much as it did in the past and then they are hopefully going to be the beginning of the extinction of things like racism.

Chris Yip  32:04  
Right. As you said, we've got a generation that's keen for change and it's up to us to be listening and to be working with them, working together to really move the needle on this. Herman, thank you so much for taking the time today. A terrific conversation. Really enjoyed it and again, thank you so much for being part of this. 

Herman Colquhoun  32:26  
Thank you. 

Chris Yip  32:29  
Thanks again for listening to Coffee with Chris Yip. If you want to catch up on past episodes, or make sure that you don't miss the next one, please subscribe. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more. Just look for Coffee with Chris Yip. You can also check out @uoftengineering on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn for more stories about how our community is building a better world. And finally, if you'd be inspired to join us, we'd love to welcome you. Whether you're thinking of taking a degree or working with us on our research project, you can find us online at engineering.utoronto.ca or you can visit our beautiful campus in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I hope I can join you for coffee soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai