In this blog series, we asked employees three questions about each of our seven core values.
Here’s what Senior Architect Eric Galluzzo said about our core value “strive to innovate.”
“I think innovation is vital for technologists like me. If we don’t continue to learn and innovate, we’ll become irrelevant.”
What does the core value mean to you?
To me, innovation means doing something new or doing something old in a new way. “New” can mean a lot of things, of course. It doesn’t necessarily mean that no one has ever done it before. Instead, it may just mean that I haven’t done it before, or that my client hasn’t done it before. Either way, I think innovation is vital for technologists like me. If we don’t continue to learn and innovate, we’ll become irrelevant.
How do you exhibit the core value in your work?
Innovation happens all the time at Centric. I’ll highlight two examples that stand out to me:
Camp IO is one of the best examples of innovation at Centric. For those who are not familiar with Camp IO, it’s our yearly technical conference. We encourage our technologists to get out of their comfort zones and undertake some interesting, innovative projects over the summer. At our annual summer meeting, typically held in September, they present their experiences in front of a crowd so they can learn, too.
Camp IO is an absolute blast. The projects usually reflect our technologists’ personal passions, never client work. We geek out for a day, see people we haven’t seen in person in a while, and learn a lot. Plus, the best presentations get prizes. In recent years, we’ve had a plethora of excellent presentations, ranging from:
- Controlling a meat smoker remotely using a Raspberry Pi hooked up to servo motors and Bluetooth thermometers, fronted by a Power BI dashboard and app.
- Planning a day at Disney using big data analytics to reduce wait time and maximize enjoyment.
- Fine-tuning Stable Diffusion models to generate pictures of your kids.
- Writing VR games where you get to play boss fights against . . . well, your boss.
Secondly, although many innovative projects happen at Centric all the time, Shawn Wallace leads specific “innovation projects” every year. For these projects, a group of volunteers from all over Centric gets together to decide what cool and innovative project they want to work on, and then they do so.
Participants often take on roles that they don’t get to play in their day-to-day work. They not only learn new technologies, but they also learn entirely new soft skills.
This year, Centric team members in the United States and India implemented a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system in Azure to generate statements of work from existing Centric documents.
RAG is an information retrieval architecture that provides grounding data to large language models, enabling them to answer questions about information they were not trained on without fine-tuning the models. The RAG architecture allowed us to limit ChatGPT’s input to relevant segments of Centric documents we had placed in a vector database, providing a model for how we could generate statements of work in the future.
How do you exhibit the core value in your personal life?
In my personal life, I read various newsletters and articles to stay up to date on what’s happening in the world of technology. I also tinker with various things on the side, as do many of my peers.
In addition, those who know me know that writing music for media and the concert hall is my primary hobby. To that end, I try to keep up with the latest in music technology, whether it’s AI tools like Udio, sample libraries that work in interesting new ways, or new techniques that composers are inventing to write new music.
I learn from some composer friends online, and I run a YouTube channel where I teach others some of the basic skills required to write music. And of course, I learn by doing: I write lots of music!