Tilek Mamutov, X employee, visits his Alma Mater and talks innovatio

July 29, 2016

On July 27, 2016, Tilek Mamutov, Software Engineering class of 2005, came back to AUCA to share his experience working at X (formerly known as GoogleX), including his most exciting projects and how his team strives toward game-changing innovation on a daily basis. At the chance to hear the AUCA alum and Google Employee, over a hundred people from both in and out of the AUCA community came out to the new campus building.

 AUCA has no lack of exceptional alumni, but Tilek Mamutov has set himself apart. Not only does Tilek work for X, he was also the first Kyrgyz employee at Google.

The lecture began with a question: what makes for a groundbreaking idea? If you improve a car’s design, Tilek explained, you can expect to improve transportation by 10%. If you stop thinking about cars, if you start asking yourself How do I change the way we move? That’s when you can invent the airplane, and that’s how you can change transportation by an order of magnitude. This “10x” factor is at the center of X’s mission. Tilek elaborated that his team “looks for problems that affect millions, or even billions of people […] we work at the cutting edge of technology [and] we look for radical solutions.”

 But what really impressed the audience was a glimpse into Tilek’s high-profile (and some, recently top-secret) projects at X.

 Tilek’s major project is titled “Loon”, which aims to help the “two-thirds of the world’s population [that] does not yet have Internet access. Project Loon is a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, help fill coverage gaps, and bring people back online after disasters,” as per the project’s website. A personal cell phone video and a selfie showed an excited Tilek launching one of his team’s high-tech internet balloons at a windy test.

Tilek went on to talk about Google’s well-known self-driving car project. His presentation emphasized the radical ways self-driving cars could change how we do transportation: increasing mobility for the visually impaired, building a network of artificially intelligent cars, and drastically reducing the number human error automobile accidents (currently, an estimated 94% of accidents are caused by human error). The crux of the project is an extremely accurate high-precision sensor mounted to the top of the car, effectively making the car more aware of its surroundings than a person would be. To show the impact the self-driving car project has already made, Tilek played a video of people’s unanimously positive reaction to taking their first ride in the driverless car.

 Tilek has also been involved with projects innovating on how people harvest wind energy (Makani Energy Kites [www.google.com/makani/]) and changing how emergency aid can be delivered (Project Wing). X is additionally involved in several completed and ongoing projects which can be found on their website.

The presentation finished on a personal note. Tilek talked about the value of his team at X. From fashion experts to former Chilean professors to Turkish laser experts, Tilek cited intellectual and general diversity as a crucial part of X’s success. The more the team supported “crazy,” “out there,” or even “bad” ideas among themselves, the more they found they could generate actually new ideas. Seeing a “uni-yurt” on Tilek’s desk at work, one of his coworkers decided to help Tilek build a full-size yurt one Saturday morning. As a testament to X’s commitment to diverse and unorthodox solutions, the yurt is still in place today and is regularly used as a company meeting room. Through Tilek, AUCA and Kyrgyzstan have clearly left a meaningful impact on Google.

 To close, Tilek announced that he would be holding a X-style innovation workshop at Ololohaus on July 28, 2016.

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