Kevin Roche | IBM Research & Spintronics at Almaden Lab

Speaker 1: Please join us for a conversation with Kevin Roche, an advisory engineer and scientist at IBM Research Almaden. He specializes in materials for magnetoelectronics, spintronics, and is an IBM Quantum Ambassador. Kevin is an expert in ultra- high vacuum systems, thin film deposition, data acquisition, and laboratory automation. In addition to his career in tech, he enjoys speaking to the public about science and technology, as well as making interesting projects that combine technology with his love for the arts and costuming. Notable projects include the Tiki Dalek and the ThinBot bartending robot. So without further ado, here is a conversation with Kevin Roche.

Kevin Roche: I am Kevin Roche, who is not the famous dead Irish architect. I actually have a bachelor's in physics from 1983 at UC Berkeley, and 37 years working in material science at San Jose Research, originally down at the old plant site and now up here at Almaden. I'm actually one of the senior employees, believe it or not, here at the building. My job title now is advisory engineer scientist, and what I am in many ways is the guy that makes things go in our labs. I work a lot in ultra- high vacuum and thin film deposition, and I do the laboratory automation, so that means I build the machine so that they work and I also write the software that controls them and the user interface so that my researchers can then run experiments without having to turn every knob themselves. Along the way, 15 or 16 years ago, I had an opportunity to talk about our work to the general public. It turns out I not only like it, but I'm really good at it, and so I've been doing that since, describing spintronics and some weird quantum mechanics to the general public. And as part of that, actually, in 2017 was privileged to start talking about IBM Q, and I'm actually one of the first class of IBM Q ambassadors. But all this is part of being a good science storyteller, which is a skill I'm really proud of. So I've got these two halves to my job, or rather three quarters and one quarter to my job, but I really love the fact that I'm recognized as an asset being able to tell the science as a story.

Speaker 1: I love it, and it's why it's a pleasure to talk with you, because these are such complex issues, and to be able to understand them and explain them, it reminds me a lot of, obviously, Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse. But personally you have to understand it well enough, but then also understand where other people are coming from, and how do you explain it to someone who isn't a physicist?

Kevin Roche: I was really lucky. Early on, as I was just starting to talk about things, we had the champion Lego robotics team. Part of their prize was they got to visit Almaden and visit some labs. And the big lab that you visited with me, it has the advantage it's got floor space, so you can bring visitors in and it's big and impressive and it makes noise and it moves and I can explain it. And so I knew there was a class of fifth graders coming to my lab, and so I made a handout for them, because I remembered going on field trips when I was in the fifth grade and there'd always be a quiz. What did you learn? Write a report. And so I did a little one page handout where I explained in fifth grade vocabulary, and where I had to use technical terms, explained what they were, and highlighted them for vocabulary in case the teacher actually did a quiz. And about two weeks later we had a science writer come to visit, and he came to see the lab and I gave him the usual introduction and showed him what it was doing, and I mentioned that I still had this handout, and he said, " I would love to have one, because when you're speaking to the general public, if you use fifth grade science vocabulary, almost everyone in the world can understand you because most people have made it at least that far. So even if they haven't gone further in technical education, they're not stupid. They just don't know the words. And so if you use words that are common, then you can explain almost anything to them." And I took that as my watchword for how I do my presentations and how I explain how things work, and it's been remarkably successful. Over and over I find people who believe they can't understand the physics we do can at least understand the story of what we're doing if I remember to not use words that they don't understand.

Speaker 1: Fascinating. And so for our listeners, you mentioned Almaden and where we are right now doing this interview in your office, and you mentioned your labs, so maybe we could just give our listeners a little overview. Where's Almaden and what's in these labs?

Kevin Roche: So IBM Research Almaden is the current location of San Jose Research, the San Jose lab, the IBM research division. And we have had a research building in San Jose, it was one of the first research labs actually. It's where the hard drive was invented. So a lot of our work when I first started with the company was based on magnetic storage, and in fact my group holds the patent for what's called the spin valve read head, and that's the thing that turned the hard drive industry on its head back in the late'80s, early'90s, and eventually led to IBM getting out of the hard drive business. But it's what made hard drive suddenly able to hold so much more data in so much smaller space. So if you paid attention to the size of hard drives and the capacity of hard drives, in the early'90s they suddenly shrank physically but held more and more data, and that was due almost 100% to that invention of ours, and then the inventions that have built on that. And that was also the first commercial spintronic technology sold in the world. So spintronics sounds like a buzzword. We used to call it magnetoelectronics, which is a big mouthful, but it's about building technology that harnesses the spin of electrons instead of just their charge. When I explain it in a talk, so electricity is moving electrons around, and if we use them to do work, I think of that as electrical devices. If we do it to do logical things or displays or things, then we are doing electronics. But at this point we're still just pushing electrons around. They're all identical as far as we care. They're actually two flavors of electrons. They have something called spin. They can be spin up or spin down. Spin is where magnetism comes from. If the spin is organized in a metal, then you get magnetism. So it turns out that if you can manipulate the spin of the electrons, you can do some things you can't do by just pushing charge around. One of them is detecting very small magnetic fields, hence the read head for hard drives. This whole field of spintronics and building spin engineered materials is we were in exactly the right place to do and to take on, and so we've done it very successfully for decades now. Our group here has a number of remarkable accomplishments to its credit. Right now we're working on a new kind of memory, and actually we're working under the point where we hope it's going to be hitting market soon. It's a project we're working on with Samsung.

Speaker 1: When we took the tour of the labs earlier, you showed me a whole series of machines, and while they're all still useful and being used, it shows a progression of process and technology. Could you maybe just give us a quick little rundown of what's going on?

Kevin Roche: So we make our spintronics materials using a technique called ultra- high vacuum thin film deposition, which is a mouthful. But ultra- high vacuum means we pump all the air out so it's clean. That's why we do it. We only want things to go on the wafer that we put on the wafer. So that's the ultra- high vacuum part. Thin film deposition is coating, and what we actually do is almost exactly spray painting with atoms. We make a plume by one of several different techniques that's like the spray coming out of your can of spray paint, and if we put a wafer in that it'll coat the surface, and it'll coat it very evenly. And we have been doing this long enough now we have the knack we can control it down to one atom or less thick in that layer, and our machines have multiple materials so we can stack up a sandwich of different materials. And when they're that thin, it's no longer like dealing with a block of iron or a chunk of tin. We're actually building an artificial material, because the electrons interact at the quantum level between all those layers, and so we create synthetic materials that would not exist otherwise. And specifically, we can control how electrons' spin is affected as they move through that stack. So this is how the spin valve head was built, this is how the magnetic tunnel junction memory works, and there's a whole field now of spintronics where building these spin engineered materials opens the possibility of making new devices that we couldn't make otherwise.

Speaker 1: That's really fascinating. And what I want to ask is, I know that a lot of electronics are made from rare earth minerals.

Kevin Roche: The rare earths are actually key to a lot of spintronic technology. We don't need a lot of them, but you do need a layer of them in there, because they have unique magnetic properties that we can use to grab onto the spin of electrons, and particularly materials that are what we call antiferromagnets. Their electrons order in a particular way, which then can affect how electrons moving through the stack will move and how their spin is affected. So the things like spintronics technology are one of the reasons that rare earths are so important. So they're used in other electronics technology, but these spintronic devices often rely on some of these materials as well. What we don't work with is semiconductors for the most part. We're working with metals and insulators, whether they're simple oxides or something more complicated. But the stacks we build, we typically are not working with organic materials or with semiconductors. We're working with metals and insulators and alloys of metals.

Speaker 1: I'm coming from the cloud perspective here. I was only recently aware that we even did this sort of work, and I started doing a little more research and I found out that in addition to what you're working on right now, there is this legacy of IBM doing all of these interesting technologies around tunneling microscope, and then someone here did some interesting stuff around first they wrote IBM with atoms and then they made an actual animation using atoms. So there's this whole section of research that's going on that has to do with these advanced technologies which are used in all kinds of science applications.

Kevin Roche: At this point, IBM is actually unique in its research division. While much of what we do is focused towards possible future technologies, there's always a chunk that's focused at looking out in what we call the white space, looking for new physics, new science, good science for the sake of science. Most of what we do has to be focused on things that may affect the bottom line, but it may not affect the bottom line for 10 or 15 years. But we're always looking for these things. Our discovery or our invention of that spin valve head was actually because we were exploring certain materials that happened to match a discovery someone announced. And because we were already working in them, we could pivot and do some experiments of our own, and not only match their results but match them in materials nobody had predicted. And the work we did there eventually led to the spin valve head. The work was just amazing. And one of the reasons I love working for research is that IBM is one of the few corporate entities that actually supports independent research that doesn't necessarily point directly at a product to come, and I think that's really important because the game changer technologies are often going to come from that white space, from something that you don't expect. My neighbors who do the atom moving, it's been so much fun to watch what they do. After they wrote IBM, one of their most iconic images for me was a thing they built called the quantum corral where they built a ring of atoms, and then when they scanned it you could actually see the electron wave forms. What they're actually measuring is a voltage that represents where a physical object is, and there was this ripple that went to a peak in the middle, which is where all of the electronic wave forms overlapped and they reinforced in the middle, which is described when you take quantum mechanics. You know learn about these, but to see it actually physically represented by this photograph of atoms in a ring and the effect of their electric fields around them was just amazing, and one of the best real world pictures of quantum mechanics at work I'd ever seen. So when they did the movie, it was great fun, and they got some good notoriety for it, I hope.

Speaker 1: Well, besides having seen some IBM PCs growing up, seeing that I remember having an effect on me. And even later, getting hired by IBM, I thought back to that film and also the Eames" Power of Ten" film also was in association with IBM, and it's an amazing little piece of media that IBM is involved with.

Kevin Roche: I actually did a reverse" Powers of Ten" animation for my first IBM Q talk, for my first quantum computing talk. The title was actually really" Weird Science", and I wanted to talk about how things get different at the quantum level. So instead of zooming out, I zoomed in from the edge of the galaxy to the Yorktown lab where IBM Q was into a tablet, and eventually to a animation and then a pictorial of what we call the Bohr atom, which is the atom as a solar system. Which then my screen glitched and it went all fuzzy, which of course is if you could visualize it, that's what you'd see, because atoms aren't little solar systems. They're these probabilistic clouds of where things might be. And that was the opening to my talk was this reverse" Powers of Ten". It was both an homage to that and to the spaceship of the mind from Carl Sagan's" Cosmos". So there actually was a view port as though you were in a ship diving down to the quantum level. It was a great deal of fun, and I hope to find an opportunity to use it in a future talk. It's not part of my standard IBM Q talk anymore, but it was very fun to have it for a while.

Speaker 1: Well, and I think the showmanship goes a long way everywhere, right? There's so much even in technical content. I think people want it to be entertaining, and a fun narrative actually helps us follow this maybe technological thread, which in itself is maybe a little uncomfortable or you don't know how to approach it, but when you have a nice story it helps.

Kevin Roche: I mentioned science storytelling before, and that's what I've finally realized, my best talks? That's what I'm doing. And if I have slides, the slides are the illustrations for the story I'm telling. But I should be actually be able to do it by waving my hands around a lot. And I actually have had to do it a couple times without slides, and have managed to get people to at least get an inkling of what's going on. So it really is if you can get the narrative in someone's mind, in their own language, they can build their own pictures based on what you're telling, and that's what good storytelling is about, and I think it makes education and teaching far more effective if you can build that kind of narrative in the listener's mind.

Speaker 1: You had mentioned the uniqueness of IBM's research, which brings to mind something when we were talking earlier that while when you think of IBM you think of software developers and maybe chip designers, but you're approaching this from a physics standpoint originally, and you've over the years taught yourself all sorts of programming and different technologies and hardware design and all sorts of things. Where I'm going with this is that it's interesting within IBM that there's opportunities for all of these other types of jobs from, like you're saying, a science perspective, physicists. And I imagine too, the same could be said for there's room for lawyers and PR people and all these other jobs, which a lot of folks might not really realize. When you think about IBM, you think just technology and maybe mainframes, but there's actually this wide variety of opportunity and need for these different talents.

Kevin Roche: It's a huge and diverse workforce in all the meanings of diverse, and that's another reason that I'm proud to be an IBM-er. I was actually one of the signatories to the original speak out letter for domestic partner benefits, and now I'm married to my husband. All of my coworkers know him, and he's routinely expected to show up at social events if there are work social events. The fact that I work for IBM, which most people think of as old and stodgy, got with it. They weren't the first company, but again, they actually surprised us, and the pivot was actually remarkably fast when it happened. And I was on our local diversity council for years and the level of outreach we did to all cultural and not just the protected classes, but encouraging cultural outreach and events all across the lab. It was a great deal of fun and also rewarding. It was a chance to get to know each other. It's very easy to assume in tech that the work is all that matters, but if we don't know each other's cultural backgrounds, we communicate poorly and then our stories don't get told, and so things go wrong. The more we understand where each other are coming from, the better it works. The fact that IBM understands that and keeps working on it, because it's always a process, is one of the reasons I'm still here and I'm proud to have had a part in that process.

Speaker 1: It's really interesting, too, especially hearing these two levels of your story, right? There's this technological progress as you're developing these instruments and technologies, but then, part of the transformation of organizations, it's also that cultural. And they need to happen together, because how are you going to keep the good people? And it's been proven, in addition to being the right thing, it's actually good for business to have diversity and respect for your culture.

Kevin Roche: There was a great poster someone put together about two employees, one of whom was married to a man, one of whom was married to a woman, and they come to work on Monday. " And so what did you do for the weekend?" So before being out was not only expected but encouraged the person, the gay husband would have to come up with an entire story about what they did with a fictitious partner, or dance around it, and the amount of just mental energy wasted to come up with that story just to such a casual question, imagine how much energy that's taking away from their workday. And these cultural things are small but important. And I can say I'm out here at the lab. If anybody doesn't know, I'm not sure why, but I routinely refer to my husband in conversation as often as other people do about their spouses, and I think that's important because it's important that it be normal. People expect it now. They ask, " What did you guys do over the weekend," and they mean me and Andy, and that means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: It's awesome that this is the way it is. I've noticed that the campuses have the different culture because it's a destination, where I feel like in the city, like in New York, you're just in the middle of the city and that's the feel you get. It's hard to get your beat on... I mean, you read what the company policy is and that we have code of conducts and these sorts of things, but when you walk out the street, you feel like you're on the street of New York City, whereas what I've noticed just having recently visited a bunch of campuses, that's where the proof is in the pudding and you can see the culture really manifest.

Kevin Roche: I also think it's really important as a global company, because some of the places we operate, some of the classes of employee that we protect internally, like GLBTQ, are not protected socially, and so having that campus be a safe space where they can relax and be themselves and work is really important. And that's also one of the ways that change happens, because if being yourself is normal around other people, then when they walk out of the campus into the general culture, they're taking a little bit of that normalization out with them, and I think that matters. I think that's how you make change happen incrementally in society. If you have centers where it's just expected, and then you expect that to continue in the rest of your life, that expectation actually drives some of that change.

Speaker 1: It also makes me think of stuff too, like the California environmental regulations or the GDPR, how even one domain doing it actually sets a standard.

Kevin Roche: I never quote the Bible, but the idea of being the shining beacon is something I really believe in, being a good example. And I think IBM tries hard to be a good example, to be a good corporate citizen, to be a good global corporate citizen as well. And again, that's one of the reasons I'm still here. I've talked to other companies on occasion, and I always come back here, because among other things, I can talk about my work. I can talk about why my work is important. I can't talk about trade secrets, that's obvious, but I can talk about what we're doing and how we're trying to make a difference. That means a lot to me. It means that the fact that I keep hearing there's a motivation other than just profit, that making a difference in making sustainable difference makes good corporate sense. That matters a lot.

Speaker 1: And I'd like to ask everybody this question about their tech origin story. So we had already alluded to the fact that you came into your career from a physics perspective and then added the software development and automation and hardware design to it, but take us back to what initially sparked it. So I know for me it was my family made entertainment lighting and I got a Commodore 64, and I just started BBSing and I was hooked as a Xennial. So what's your tech origin story? What kicked it off for you?

Kevin Roche: I lived in a house full of books. My parents taught us to always ask why to learn how. My dad was a civil engineer who was actually a competent do- it- yourselfer, which is sometimes a rare combination, but in his case he actually was good at it. So I learned the basics of wiring and basic mechanics from him. And we were always encouraged to make things, to play with as many different arts and crafts as we wanted to find the things we were good at, and really the idea of the Renaissance man, for want of a better term, was really something we were encouraged. It's just like find all the things you're good at, try all the things, and don't narrow down, especially as you're learning. And when you go to university, don't just focus on your degree, you're there to get an education, so take advantage of it. So at Berkeley I ended up in physics because the very first physics class I took was, " This is it. I love this. I want more." I was very lucky in the first lecture I had in physics was Charles Schwartz at UC Berkeley, who, among other things, ran a graduate seminar on ethics in science and routinely would be found blockading Lawrence Livermore Lab for the weapons work done there. So bit of a character, but a really good speaker, and I was very lucky that he was doing the physics 5A, the very first freshman physics the year I was there. That's what got me into physics, but along the way I was taking music theory and life drawing and comparative literature. I was at UC Berkeley, one of the most amazing educational institutions in the world. Both my parents were Berkeley grads, that's where they met. My godparents were Berkeley grads. And the word had come down on high from all four of them that if I didn't actually take advantage of Berkeley while I was there, they were going to be very disappointed. So I did and I had a great time. The fact that I could take off major courses, not for grade if I chose to, because the grade point averages were important, although most of them I still did take for a grade. I just had so much fun exploring. But physics is what grabbed me. I had originally hoped to do a dual degree in physics and biology, but the course requirements proved impossible. So I did biology and anatomy and vertebrate embryology on the side so I could learn about it, but I didn't have to worry about it as a minor or as a second degree. And then, my fourth year at Berkeley. It took me four and a half years to get my degree. Fourth year at Berkeley the American Physical Society was offering industrial summer internships, and it just required that you be a senior. It didn't require you be a graduating senior, so I applied and was accepted and was offered a couple of different internships. One at the San Jose research lab with a laser spectroscopy group, and then one with Varian, and I chose to go with the IBM group because lasers are cool. And that was the beginning. Actually, after my internship ended, they kept me on as a supplemental for better part of another year, and then I was hired on as a regular by another group at San Jose research in doing magnetic storage and thin film work. So that was the progression that got me here, and originally the idea was I might go back to grad school. I never found a need to. So I still have only a bachelor's in physics, but I have 37 years working in one of the best physics labs in the world, and have discovered I know things that most people don't because of that.

Speaker 1: And when you mentioned these labs, I mean, it feels otherworldly. I feel like I'm on a spaceship or something. It's just frenetic. There's buzzing and popping and whirling and valves and containers and materials and electron... We had talked, too, about that movie" Real Genius" from the'80s. Some of these labs, it really is, I mean, I don't know, laser tables and mirrors, and it's really interesting,

Kevin Roche: The machine that I showed you, we spent the longest time in, which is our big tool. It's a one of a kind thin film deposition system that we designed and built here. It actually has lasers and high voltage and vacuum and ion beams. We didn't mention ion beams. So all of those things that sound like science fiction we actually use as tools in my job. It makes it great fun, especially if I get another group of school kids in, and I'll say kids all the way up to freshmen in college who've never actually seen a big lab who come in and I can show them that we're doing all these things and things that sound like science fiction are actually being used for real work and it's something you can do and it's something they can do down the road. I really hope that what we do here at IBM research doesn't disappear, that it doesn't only become the domain of universities, because this odd niche of industrial research we do, advanced industrial research, is so unique that I would hate to see it go away. There's such a cross pollination here that you don't get sometimes in a university.

Speaker 1: I believe that. And not to put it down university research, but I know while there's a lot of great research, that tech transfer and actually getting it to product is often very difficult. So in a business, if you can have that pure research, I could see how it's an innovation booster, and the world needs it.

Kevin Roche: And innovation is one of our watchwords here. Now, it doesn't alway-

Speaker 1: Is that not a good word?

Kevin Roche: No, I mean it is. Watchwords as in one of the things we go by. Somewhere I still have the posters for Almaden Innovation Days. This is something my previous manager actually was one of the people who proposed the first time, and it was this amazing open house where you brought in people from all over and we showed off different projects. So innovation is one of the fundamental things we are working on here. Not every innovation actually is going to turn into a product, but the fact we're encouraged to keep innovative, again, it's one of the reasons I love to work here. We get to explore, we get to make mistakes, we get to explore some more, and along the way, if we do it well, we're also creating value for the company that can turn into future technology or change the way our existing technology is used or built. Sometimes that's just as important.

Speaker 1: Well, especially it's interesting, too, things that on themselves might not be an invention or you could do a startup on it, when you apply at scale to industry, all of a sudden huge, right? Something, though, I wanted to ask is, just so our listeners know that it's not all work, you actually do a lot of other really interesting side projects with technology having to do with robots and Maker Faire and different types of fun projects. And isn't there something with some cocktail making?

Kevin Roche: There is. So I am a four- time gold medal holder at the international RoboGames for cocktail robotics, bartending robots. And this happened because one year for our anniversary there was a Comic- Con happening up in San Francisco, and normally my husband and I, we would go for about two hours to this convention. It was all we could take. But we had friends who were staying up there, some of them were planning to enter the costume contest. It happened to be our anniversary weekend. And then one of them discovered there was this event called Barbot, Get Drinks from a Barbot, and so we said, " Well, it's our anniversary. Let's get a hotel room and we'll go to this event in the evening." So we get there and a couple of things happened just before we went up. Now, one of the things I do for fun is costuming, and I'm a big science fiction fan. I chaired the World Science Fiction Convention in 2018, and I've worked on many others, but I've been making costumes since I was eight years old. And one of my favorite TV shows is Dr. Who. The iconic monster in Dr. Who is the Dalek. If you've never seen a Dalek, it looks like a giant, very angry salt shaker. It's got a gun and a suction cup and it says exterminate a lot. And I, through a long complicated series of events, just got this brainstorm, and I built a Tiki Dalek. It's made of bamboo and coconuts. It has a grass skirt. It carries Mai Tai around. It doesn't say exterminate, it says exuberate, and it's all very fun and silly. And as it turned out, one of the people who organized the Barbot event was at a convention where I had taken the Tiki Dalek. And after I had climbed out of it, because it's like piloting a office stool around. I'm sitting on a little saddle and it's on wheels, so my legs power it and my hands worked the bits. So once I had climbed out of it, I was introduced to him, and I found out he was one people behind Barbot, and he said, " Oh yeah, we were planning to go." And so he tweeted to his wife, the other organizer, that, " Oh my god, the guy who built Tiki Dalek is coming to Barbot." She then retweeted to her thousands of followers, because she has a big Twitter following, that the Tiki Dalek was coming to Barbot. So we had to figure out a way to get the Tiki Dalek up to the event when we were just going for fun. So they actually sent somebody down in a van to collect it so that I didn't have to do the whole build onsite. And we get to the event. We got there early because we had to do the final assembly. And then I'm wondering around, and about halfway through the evening I looked around at all of these gadgets that made drinks with various amounts of success and various amounts of mess, and suddenly, " This is my day job. This is what I do for work. I could build one of these, and mine wouldn't drip all over the floor and you would not get the drags of the last person's drink in your glass." And so I set out to build one for the show the next year, not for the competition, which was a separate thing, just for this show, because I've learned that sometimes doing things for a prize diverts my energy the wrong way. If I'm doing it because I want to, it'll turn out better. So I managed to get ThinBot, my bot, put together in time for the Barbot event the next year, and was very well received. And several people said, " You have to enter the games, because the last several years CosmoBot keeps winning, and we think yours could beat it. And besides, it's beautiful." So I dutifully said, " All right," and I paid the money to enter the competition and I won. But there were some things I wasn't completely happy about with my robot, so I rebuilt it, and then, since it was version two, entered again and won again. I did this four times, and at that point I was happy with how it worked. I didn't see any need to make any more engineering changes. So I retired it from competition. It lives in three foot lockers and puts together about an hour. It still works. It makes 25 different drinks and is fun at a party. It's never going to be a commercial product, but it's a lot of fun and it still works and does exactly what it's supposed to. But I had learned how to do all the things I do with bigger scale here at work and do it on a hobbyist budget, which was an interesting challenge. But I could also take the technical skills I had learned here and the safety skills. So one of the reasons in fact it won the first time was all of the parts of my robot that actually touched the ingredients for the drink are food safe, which a lot of people don't bother to think of. And in the final version in particular, it's actually all USDA spec pipes and hoses, and everything's been tested to make sure that the coatings don't come off the metal parts when exposed to fruit juice, which are tests that most of the builders didn't think of. But since part of my job here is making sure our machines are safe both for themselves and for the people using them, it was part of the job. But I learned how to use these little tiny, very simple processors, whereas here I was used to using much fancier computers. And so I learned how to run an Arduino, and my biggest project is a 32 foot tall light tower, 3000 NeoPixels controlled by one Arduino and my cell phone. And when I started doing IBM Q, I had to learn how to deal with the Raspberry Pi because one of the things that we have for talking to IBM Q is a Python library called Qiskit, and I've actually managed to get it packaged onto an image that you can put on a Raspberry Pi so your Raspberry Pi can actually run quantum programs in IBM Q, and that's now one of the things that other ambassadors can use if they're doing workshops. So I find that what I learned at work rolled into my hobby, and then rolled right back out and let me do something more effectively at work. I love my job. I get to play with the big toys and the little toys, and I get to tell people great stories about science. I couldn't ask for a better career right now.

Speaker 1: That is fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. It's really interesting, and it's heartening to know that by following your genuine interests, it's something we all should do, right? It's almost like when you have a child or something. You want to feed those interests as they arise, because you don't know where it's going to take you. It feeds back and brings you to these unexpected places. So let me ask you this, are there any online resources? Do you do Twitter? Do you do Medium? Do you have maybe a blog post about some of the either IBM stuff or some of the fun stuff?

Kevin Roche: So I did do a couple posts when we were doing Maker Faire for IBM Q, and I think those are still out in the IBM research blog so we can find those. There is actually a webpage that shows off my tower, because it was one of our icons for the World Science Fiction Convention, and I'll happily share that address with you. You can see it. I also have a couple projects out on GitHub that I'm happy to share. One of them is a code I wrote for Raspberry Pi to talk to Qiskit, but the other is a wearable light project, and it's a animated belt, or you can also build it as a collar. You can build it whatever size you want. But the code is out there, and I'll give you all of those links because I have a knack for this, and buying these things... If you're a maker, you can see these beautiful things. It's like, " I could make that, but I don't know how to program it." I figured it out and I'm more than happy to share that, because it's just I would rather people explore and learn how to make things and then tweak it so it does exactly what they want than buy something flashy that actually isn't really what they want. So I'm a big believer in the maker culture, and I'm happy to share some of these things out there. So I can share all of those links. And the other thing is I keep mentioning IBM Quantum, because if you're interested in playing with a quantum computer, you can do so. You can actually learn to program and play with real quantum computers on IBM's website, and it's all web- based so you don't have to actually install anything on your laptop or anything. And I recommend that a lot, especially if you've always wondered what it is. And if nothing else, you can say, " I wrote a program on a quantum computer," and then all your friends will have to try it too, which is what I want as an ambassador to happen. I want as many people as possible playing with a quantum computer so the people who are really good at it learn they're good at it, and we have them as a resource in the future.

Speaker 1: That's fantastic. And one last question, and that question is there anything I didn't ask you that I should have or anything else that you would like to include?

Kevin Roche: I think we covered a lot of things.

Speaker 1: We covered a lot of things? All right. Well, thank you very much for taking the time to chat today. It's really been a pleasure.

Kevin Roche: You're welcome.