UMSI Commencement Address

I had the rare privilege of going back to my alma mater, the University of Michigan, and addressing the University of Michigan School of Information. When graduated from Michigan, UMSI didn’t exist in it’s current, modern form — but it has been a great privilege to address the students, and understand more deeply the incredible impact that individuals skilled in information sciences will have on our future world. I want to thank the faculty of UMSI, the dean Tom Finholt, the staff, the students, and everyone who made this incredible opportunity possible.

The actual video presentation can be found here. I’ve included my remarks below for those interested!

I would like to congratulate the class of 2022 in their remarkable achievements in obtaining their University of Michigan school of information degrees. And I want to welcome and thank all the friends, family, and supporters of these graduates who have been so instrumental in their success.

I suspect for many of you this has been a long and challenging journey to get to this point of graduation — it hasn’t been an easy couple of years.

It’s taken me nearly 3 years to get to this day myself.

You see, I was first asked to give the commencement speech in early 2020. I was totally excited to give a commencement speech back at UM, my alma mater.

So I was going to talk about the “information economy” — how the raw materials of personal information are processed in the social media platforms, how algorithms that turned those raw materials into enormous wealth. I was going to note the insightful the similarities of the information economy with the industrial revolution. I was going to end with a grand call to action for the information sciences community. It was going to be great.

Of course, I never got to give that address.

By March, we all realized that we were entering a once in a century pandemic, and all in-person meetings — including the 2020 commencement — was cancelled. I didn’t get to give a commencement address but went about hording toilet paper and learning to make a sour-dough starter like everyone else. I thought the opportunity to give this commencement speech had passed.

So, in 2021 I was optimistic about the possibility of an in-person commencement. The vaccines were just being administered, I had mastered sour dough bread, and had gained the required covid-19 pounds from all that bread. Even though I was depressed that my sour dough starter eventually died, I was optimistic that with the vaccines, we’d get the virus under control, and we’d be able to get back to in person meetings. Including the 2021 commencement.

For the 2021 commencement, I was ready to talk about how these information economy platforms and algorithms were distorting the truth and spreading disinformation. I had all sorts of statistics, and anecdotes, and a really funny stories to tell you about bleach and horse worm pills.

But unfortunately, disinformation about the virus, slowing mitigation efforts to control the virus, and mistrust of the vaccine lead to a slowing of vaccination rates, a rise in infections and in viral variants, and…. the cancellation of the 2021 in person commencement. While I’m sure the first talk would have been good, I’m sure you would have enjoyed the stories about horse pills and bleach.

So like everyone else, I went back to hording toilet paper, trying to find KN95 masks, and working though 100s of zoom calls with my dress shirt on the top, and sweats on the bottom.

So, this talk represents the third commencement speech that I’ve written. And it’s hard after three years, a huge pandemic, and writing two great commencement speeches to think about what I’m going to say today. And frankly, I’m out of ideas. This will clearly be the least interesting of the talks.

So rather than something grand, and visionary, I’m going to just try to give you a few words of advice that have helped me after I finished school.

And I’m going to talk fast, because I don’t want a fire drill, or a flood, or a plague of frogs to keep me from giving this talk.

So my first word of advice is: Seek out the intersection of fields that don’t naturally overlap.

What I want to challenge you with is that the most innovative, creative, and impactful areas in which you can work are when you find two seemingly disparate fields and figure out how to make them overlap.

I am a physician, but I also have a computer science degree. And I got it at a time in which most of medicine was practiced with pen and paper and very little data was collected and used electronically. But I knew that somehow these two fields — the intersection of two fields that wouldn’t normally overlap — was going to be a critical part of health care in the future. And now we couldn’t imagine it any other way.

Finding those intersections forces you to think about how to take a solution in one area and apply it to a different problem. Climate change and healthcare. Energy independence and information sciences. The information economy and economic justice.

Find things you are passionate about and make them overlap. That’s where the best problems — and solutions — are.

My second word of advice: We will all make mistakes. Just try to make new ones

When I was at the office of the national coordinator for health IT we were charged with taking 20% of the largest GDP in the world, and changing it from paper records to electronic records in 5 years — something that took the financial industry 25 years to do. I was the chief science officer, so I had the hard task of all the technical work of figuring out the standards, the certification criteria, and trying to convert those technical specifications into regulations.

We studied lots of other countries — Germany and Canada and Australia and Denmark — to try to understand how they did things and learn from their experiences. Lots of different models and approaches, with varying success.

But we decided to do things a little bit different. We didn’t award contracts to build an electronic health record. We didn’t centralize the data into one giant record. We crowd-sourced the standards development process. We focused on the connections between systems, rather than the systems themselves. We build a stack of standards, modeled after the internet and the world wide web, that we hoped would be resilient to future changes.

See, when the WWW was first developed, no one imagined that we would eventually do most of our banking and holiday shopping on the WWW. And a system developed years ago to send email and files and academic documents, now has Netflix streaming accounting for over 50% of all internet traffic. And in the past year, those same standards supported all those zoom calls in all my sweats.

And I know that some of what we did ONC will work, and some of it won’t. And I know that someone some smart than me will find new uses that we never imagined for the standards that we developed. We specifically tried to chart a new path and a new direction that has so far — fingers crossed — created a new robust industry in health IT. We still have a long way to go with interoperability and health IT, but I hope our future mistakes are all new.

So learn from what others have done, take a chance on something different, make mistakes, but always try to make new ones.

Third — Take the path of least regret.

This has served me well in a couple of occasions. When I was an academic profession in Biomedical Informatics, I knew what my career path would be. I would be an assistant professor, then I would become an associate professor, then eventually a full professor and potentially the head of a department. It all seemed pretty predictable.

But when David Blumenthal called me in 2009 and asked me to join the office of the national coordinator for health IT, it was a big decision. I would mean leaving a tenure track position in a university and move to the federal government in which there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty.

I had never managed a $600,000 let alone a $60 million budget, and that the challenges that we had were daunting in terms of trying to get the United States to move to electronic health records. But I also knew, that if I didn’t take that job, that it didn’t if I didn’t move to Washington DC, that if I didn’t work on this problem that was big and hairy and hard, I would always wonder what if?

So I left my tenure-track job, I jumped into the federal government, and it has opened up opportunities that I never thought would have existed.

I used to use the same phrase when I was at ONC — and my colleagues would laugh at me, because I would also judge our initiatives on whether they represented a “path of least regret”. I knew that all the things that we thought were going to be relevant in 2010 were likely going to change in the next 10 or 15 years. And so we couldn’t lock ourselves into a particular approach — we had to be resilient to change. So just like the internet, we needed to create an infrastructure that could weather changes technology and medicine as well.

So I want to close with a final thought. One of resilience. These past 2 years have been hard. I made a lot of sour dough bread, I gained and lost a lot of weight, and I still have toilet paper that I haven’t used. But we’ve all gotten through the zoom calls, and the remote work, and the masks, and the vaccines, and all the changes that have forced us all to be resilient. You as a group, have demonstrated resilience to get to this point in your careers.

So my final thoughts comes from the late Madeline Albright in an article she wrote a few years ago. She had a brilliant career — she was smart, tenacious, successful, and had a broad impact on the people who came after her. But when she looked back at her life, she said:

“Genius is often defined as the ability to be right the first time”

But she went on to say ”No matter how smart we are, we can either allow sorrows and grievances to overwhelm us, or we can respond positively to setbacks — either by our own misjudgments or by forces beyond our control.”

And she was right. She was describing resilience.

So my final recommendations comes from Madeline Albright — If you have to choose, always choose resilience of spirit over brilliance of the mind. The past two years have made that so true — we have all had to show resilience in the face of political unrest, wars, the pandemic, and social injustice. And we will face more challenges in self-governance, climate change, and preventing advanced information technologies from causing more harm than good. And you, as a cohort, will be better prepared than previous generations to be resilient. Because you had to live it, these past 2 years.

So I don’t know if this is a better commencement speech than the other two that I wrote. But I want to leave you with this:

• seek out the intersection of fields that don’t naturally overlap.
• Make mistakes, but always make new ones.
• Take the path of least regret.
• And always chose resilience because it’s not whether you fall down, but how you get up.

Thank you for the honor of addressing you today and congratulations to you and your families for all your tremendous achievements in graduating today. Thank you.