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As the youngest founder in her Rice MBA cohort, Allison Knight ’10 knows a thing or two about blazing a trail.
At just 24 years old, she co-founded Rebellion Photonics, which used cutting-edge technology to identify and quantify gas leaks on oil rigs, preventing catastrophic explosions. Knight went on to sell Rebellion Photonics to Honeywell in 2019, and is now codifying blue collar genius through Alaris AI.
In this episode, Knight joins host Brian Jackson ’21 to discuss how Rebellion Photonics used early AI technology to improve hyperspectral imaging and revolutionize gas leak detection. She also opens up about her experience as a young woman founder in a predominantly male industry, her role as an adjunct professor at Rice Business and why she believes blue collar work is the next frontier for AI exploration.
Episode Guide:
00:00 Introduction to Allison Knight
01:09 Founding Rebellion Photonics
02:25 Challenges and Innovations in Gas Leak Detection
03:48 The Role of AI in Rebellion Photonics
04:26 Reflections on Being a Young Founder
12:44 Lessons From Startup Life
16:25 Introducing Alaris AI: AI for Blue Collar Workers
23:35 Teaching AI at Rice Business
27:52 The Future of AI in the Workforce
32:44 Final Thoughts and Reflections
The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:
On being a young entrepreneur
12:17: I was 24. I was the youngest student in the Rice MBA program, and I had gotten a prestigious, semi-prestigious investment banking job that I had accepted. And then I did the thing you’re not supposed to do under any circumstances, which is renege on a job. They do not like that. But I am a physicist more than I am an MBA. Science and tech still make me the happiest. So, I ended up, even at Rice, just hanging out with Rice techies, like other applied physicists. Yeah. And it was just too tempting. I knew I should do the investment banking job, but I just could not do it. I had to go for this crazy methane emissions monitoring company. And I loved it.
Allison’s first AI moment
On AI’s next frontier
17:20: Pretty much across the board, AI really sucks for blue-collar work. With white-collar work, we can just boop, boop, boop—take the generic ChatGPT, and it works beautifully. And that’s because we, white-collar workers, have been typing for a long time. We’ve got all their documents in different folders, new ones, and so it’s all been trained on that for the most part. So it’s really trained on white-collar documentation and meant for it. Blue-collar documentation—basically, manuals and SOPs—has inherently always been stinky. But more importantly, none of the documentation has been done on what’s in their head, what’s in the foreman’s head, the supervisor’s head, or the individual’s head. And so, when you don’t have that data documented, structured, codified, the AI will be useless.Show Links:
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