Detroit, Embracing New Auto Technologies, Seeks App Builders

Mr. Mulloy is part of a group of workers that Detroit is suddenly hungry for — software developers and information technology specialists who can create applications for the next generation of connected vehicles.

“You’re going to see developers set up shop in Detroit because they’re going to follow the money,” Mr. Mulloy said, “and there will be lots of money.”

Already, the money is flowing.

General Motors, newly flush with cash after emerging from bankruptcy, is on a hiring binge, quadrupling its information technology staff and recruiting software developers to create a spate of apps for its 2014 model-year vehicles. While the hiring is taking place across the country, many of the new recruits will be working out of the Detroit area.

The Ford Motor Company plans to fill 300 positions in information technology this year, said Laura Kurtz, Ford’s manager of United States recruiting. The Chrysler Group, which declined to specify its plans, said it would hire more entry-level workers and was focused on attracting a highly skilled work force.

For Detroit, the hiring is a rare bright spot in a city teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. For the state over all, the Michigan Department of Labor projects that job growth in software developers for applications is expected to grow 23.5 percent from 2010; for software developers for systems software, 36.9 percent, the highest of any technical job classification. Michigan’s overall average for selected technical occupations is 8.5 percent growth.

The demand for in-vehicle applications is a “substantial job generator with high-end pay,” said Donald R. Grimes, an economic researcher at the University of Michigan.

Beyond the three Detroit automakers, the push for the connected car is helping support homegrown technology businesses like Mr. Mulloy’s as well.

Detroit Labs, founded two years ago to create smartphone apps, is shifting to work with automakers to build in-vehicle apps. The company has grown tenfold since 2011, to 40 people, and aims for 60 workers by the end of the year.

“If you go to the coasts, you are one of thousands,” said Paul Glomski, one of its founders. “In Detroit, you have the opportunity to make an impact. It’s for real.”

Mr. Mulloy’s company, Apigee Labs, provides systems that help companies build applications for media ranging from phones and vehicles to fitness equipment and power grids. He chose to put Apigee in Detroit’s fledgling downtown technology hub, where he shares space with Detroit Labs, which uses Apigee’s products to build apps.

So far, the jobs are primarily attracting people who already live in the area and people like Mr. Mulloy, natives of Michigan who are drawn back to the area not only for the work but also for the lower cost of living. The next challenge will be to recruit developers without ties to Detroit, and that could be a tall order.

“In general,” Mr. Grimes said, “Michigan is not perceived as the hippest place for young technology geeks.”

Automakers are stressing the career opportunity: even though cars have had computer-controlled systems for years, software innovation is in its early stages and there will be a chance for a worker to stand out. G.M.’s 2014 models, for example, will be the first to include in-car apps.

“They view it as a new space to be creative,” said Nick Pudar, director of G.M.’s new developer ecosystems program, which was created to connect the automaker with developers in other cities. “The vehicles are becoming this new channel of innovation.”

Mr. Pudar travels to software developer hubs around the country — San Francisco, New York, Boston, Denver, Chicago and Austin, Tex., among them — to persuade developers to turn from developing phone apps to working on automotive apps.

Bill Vlasic contributed reporting from Detroit.

Competition Designed to Spread Basic Technologies

That changed after the directors of the school turned to a new technological tool to alert the authorities — and their watchdogs — to the problem. Shortly after they did so, the toilets, which had been out of order for months, were fixed.

“For us, it’s not just to show that there is a capacity in Africa to develop good applications,” said Daniel Annerose, chief executive of a mobile technology company in Dakar, called Manobi, which developed the reporting system, which lets teachers, students or parents report problems with sanitation facilities at more than 2,000 schools across Senegal.

The system, called mSchool, is one of three winners of a competition organized by the World Bank to identify promising solutions to address a striking discrepancy in access to high and low technologies in developing countries: Six billion of the seven billion people around the world have mobile phones, while only 4.5 billion have access to toilets, according to a recent United Nations report.

The winners of the Sanitation Hackathon, as the World Bank calls the project, are set to be honored on Friday in connection with the annual meetings of the bank and its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund. The other honorees are Sun-Clean, a computer game developed by students at the University of Indonesia, which teaches children about good hygiene; and Taarifa, a Web application developed by programmers in Britain, Germany, the United States and Tanzania, which uses “open source” technology, interactive mapping and other features to help public officials track sanitation problems.

Because of the rapid spread of cellular phones, mobile technology has previously been used to address a variety of problems in the developing world, including access to financial services, health care information and education. But toilets were another matter.

“People don’t want to talk about poo,” said Jaehyang So, manager of the Water and Sanitation Program, a fund administered by the World Bank. “There’s the ick factor.”

In addition to the deaths and health problems, Ms. So said, poor sanitation causes a variety of other problems. In places where schools lack working toilets, many girls drop out once they begin menstruating because of a lack of privacy, she said, causing a form of educational discrimination.

“We were saying, ‘Isn’t this awful,”’ Ms. So said. “Then we decided to say, ‘What can we learn from the tech industry?’ Why is it that pretty much everyone who wants an iPhone can get one? How do they get this kind of rapid scale-up?”

Building on a process that had previously been employed to address problems in supplying clean water to people in poor areas, the World Bank turned its attention to sanitation. Over six months last year, it solicited ideas from experts in the field, as well as software developers. The process culminated in early December with the actual hackathon — two days in which more than 1,000 developers gathered in 40 cities worldwide to work on their projects.

The project has been funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and supported by companies like Nokia, the mobile phone maker, and organizations like Toilet Hackers, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and others who are seeking solutions to the problem of poor sanitation.

“It’s something that can have a little more impact than helping someone find the nearest bar or restaurant,” said Gary Gale, director of global community programs in the location and commerce division of Nokia, which works with the company’s mapping technology.

After the event in Washington, the winners of the hackathon are set to travel to Silicon Valley for meetings with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs who are interested in the issue. The World Bank does not plan to invest in the projects, but hopes that others might.

“We would love it if Silicon Valley could take some of these applications and build them into sustainable businesses,” said Chris Vein, chief innovation officer for information and communications technology development at the bank. That way, he added, the projects could create jobs and economic growth, perhaps helping to ease the poverty that underlies poor sanitation.

John Kluge Jr., a New York venture capitalist who is a co-founder of Toilet Hackers, said mobile technology can help, but is “just one part of the equation.” If toilets are to be provided to more of the 2.5 billion people without them, new methods of financing — not just aid — will also be needed.

“Innovation isn’t just about technology and design,” Mr. Kluge said. “It’s also about the business model.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2013

An article on Friday about a World Bank competition aimed at solving sanitation problems in poor countries gave an incorrect operating base for John Kluge Jr., a venture capitalist who commented on the effort. He is based in New York, not in Silicon Valley.

Novelties: New Technologies Aim to Foil Online Course Cheating

But when those students take the final exam in calculus or genetics, how will their professors know that the test-takers on their distant laptops are doing their own work, and not asking Mr. Google for help?

The issue of online cheating concerns many educators, particularly as more students take MOOCs for college credit, and not just for personal enrichment. Already, five classes from Coursera, a major MOOC provider, offer the possibility of credit, and many more are expected.

One option is for students to travel to regional testing centers at exam time. But reaching such centers is next to impossible for many students, whether working adults who can’t take time off to travel, or others in far-flung places who can’t afford the trip.

But now eavesdropping technologies worthy of the C.I.A. can remotely track every mouse click and keystroke of test-taking students. Squads of eagle-eyed humans at computers can monitor faraway students via webcams, screen sharing and high-speed Internet connections, checking out their photo IDs, signatures and even their typing styles to be sure the test-taker is the student who registered for the class.

The developing technology for remote proctoring may end up being as good — or even better — than the live proctoring at bricks-and-mortar universities, said Douglas H. Fisher, a computer science and computer engineering professor at Vanderbilt University who was co-chairman of a recent workshop that included MOOC-related topics. “Having a camera watch you, and software keep track of your mouse clicks, that does smack of Big Brother,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem any worse than an instructor at the front constantly looking at you, and it may even be more efficient.”

Employees at ProctorU, a company that offers remote proctoring, watch test-takers by using screen sharing and webcam feeds at offices in Alabama and California. ProctorU recently signed an agreement to proctor new credit-bearing MOOCs from Coursera, including one in genetics and evolution offered at Duke and one in single-variable calculus at the University of Pennsylvania.

MOOC students who want to obtain credit will be charged a remote-proctoring fee of $60 to $90, depending on the class, said Dr. Andrew Ng, co-founder of Coursera, based in Mountain View, Calif.

Other remote proctoring services offer different solutions. At Software Secure in Newton, Mass., test-takers are recorded by camera and then, later, three proctors independently watch a faster-speed video of each student.

Compared with services where proctors are monitoring students in real time, this combination of recording first and viewing later “gives greater latitude for the institution to adjust the timing of exams to whenever they want,” said Allison Sands, Software Secure’s director of marketing. The cost is now $15 per exam.

Employees at ProctorU say they are well-versed in the sometimes ingenious tactics used to dodge testing rules. “We’ve seen it all,” said Matt Jaeh, vice president for operations. “After you’ve sat there a while watching people, the patterns of behavior for normal people versus the people trying to sneak in a cellphone to look up information are very clear.”

Each proctor can monitor up to six students at a time, watching three side-by-side camera feeds on each of two screens. If a student’s eyes start to wander, the proctor gives a warning via videoconferencing software, just as a classroom monitor might tell students to keep their eyes on their own papers. For an overwhelming majority of people, that warning suffices, said Jarrod Morgan, a co-founder.

With the system in place, “cheating usually isn’t a problem,” he said. But if it does occur, ProctorU follows the rules of the institution giving the exam. “Some schools ask us to cut off the exam on the spot if there’s a suspicious incident,” he said; others ask that the exam be continued and the incident reported.

Beyond the issue of proctoring, MOOCs are also addressing the problem of making sure that credit-seeking test-takers are the same students who enrolled in the course. In that effort, Coursera is offering a separate service, called Signature Track and costing $30 to $99, that confirms students’ identity by matching webcam photographs as well as pictures of acceptable photo IDs.

Students also type a short phrase, which is analyzed by a software program. It takes note of the typing rhythm and other characteristics, like how long the keys are pressed down. Then, when a student submits homework or takes a test, the algorithm compares a bit of new typing with the original sample. (And if you’ve broken your arm, there’s always your photo ID.)

Online classes are hardly new, but earlier courses typically didn’t have to handle exam proctoring on the scale required for vast MOOCs. The University of Florida in Gainesville, for example, has long offered many programs for students studying far from the campus, with some monitoring done by ProctorU, said W. Andrew McCollough, associate provost for teaching and technology.

Now the school has set up its first MOOC, on human nutrition (enrollment 47,000), and is working on four others, all through Coursera. The question of proctoring is being debated, he said, as faculty members worry about academic integrity amid the growth of open, online classes. “They don’t want any fooling around,” he said. “But as we get more experience and evidence, the faculty are getting familiar with ways technology can replicate a classroom experience.”

Corner Office: Kon Leong of ZL Technologies, on Encouraging Creativity

Q. Tell me about some important leadership lessons you’ve learned.

A. One of my early jobs was selling computer hardware. What I learned about selling was probably more valuable than my M.B.A. I had seen selling as a process just about logic. Then I realized that has nothing to do with it.

Q. What was the insight?

A. You have to present your story in their context, not yours. They don’t really care if you’re standing on top of a robot and quoting equations. If they’re in the deep part of the forest, you’ve got to talk the language of the deep forest. Salesmanship is more like a language unto itself. There is no right or wrong. It’s what you make of it, and what’s black can be gray, and what’s gray can be white. It depends on your framework. The challenge is to share the same framework so that you’re seeing the same page in the same way.

Q. How do you hire? If you were interviewing me for a job, what would you ask me?

A. I would want to know your goals for the job. Is it money? Learning? Fulfillment? What is it? I would try to figure out if our environment suits your goals. I would not try to sell you to get you to take the job. I also will ask, “How curious are you?”

Q. I imagine that most people simply say, “Very.”

A. But then I’d ask, “Outside the headlines, what were some of the most interesting things you’ve noted in the last couple of weeks, and tell me why, and what did you do about it?” That would reflect what you think is interesting, and that tells me a fair bit. If you can cite many disparate topics, that’s a step in the right direction. The point is, we’re trying to find the right fit. In a fast-changing environment, you need to learn more and more and more. There’s so much to learn, and you can’t be taught all the permutations and combinations of the answers, so you have to learn on your own. And to learn on your own, you need curiosity.

Q. What other questions?

A. I’ll ask: How willingly do you accept stuff, and how willing are you to question things? How creative are you in finding your own answers? For example, everyone knows in school that you cannot divide by zero. Why? I try to find if they’ve actually questioned things like that at any time. The point is, we’re usually handicapped by our own borders, and we will not think beyond them. I think there’s one rule of thumb in creativity: when you’re brainstorming, you have to suspend disbelief. That’s a key ingredient. There’s time enough to challenge it and poke holes, but not at the time of generation.

I’ll also change the subject to one where they have some expertise. So I’ll ask what their passions are, and then I’ll ask questions. If it’s ornithology, I’ll start talking about the evolution of birds and ask questions like, “How do you think reptiles got feathers?”

Q. What else do you look for when hiring?

A. Brains and drive. Those are the basics. Without them, it’s probably going to be a long shot. After we work through that, then it’s curiosity and attitude.

Q. How do you get at the question of attitude?

A. Are you willing to learn from your mistakes? Do you do that automatically? Are you willing to set the bar higher? Are you able to deal with failure? Can you bounce back from it?

Q. What’s your take on the standard interview question about strengths and weaknesses?

A. I never really ask about weaknesses, because it’s meaningless. I ask more about strengths, but I ask it from a different angle. I’m more interested in the answers from a more personal perspective as opposed to a professional environment. I’ll typically ask: How would you describe yourself in three words outside the work environment? And then: What do you consider your natural strength? What do you do that comes without any effort, that your peers struggle with and can’t even match? What is natural for you? Other skills emanate from that natural core. Someone once answered that question by saying, “People tend to just come and talk to me.” That really intrigued me.

Q. What’s your natural strength?

A. I can zoom in, zoom out.

Q. What’s it like to work for you day to day?

A. Certain aspects of my management style are extremely frustrating. There are many, many questions posed to me, many decisions asked of me. I try not to make them. I respond with more questions, because I want them to find the answer. It can be very frustrating to my employees, but I’m trying to get others to scale up and learn. They understand and accept my approach, but many still feel frustrated because they just want the answer.

Q. What is your advice for students who are graduating from college?

A. I tell all of them two things, and that goes for both undergrads and M.B.A.’s. First, experiment. If you’re 22 years old as an undergrad or if you’re 27 just out of your M.B.A., in both cases you’ve got a clean slate. You can go in any direction. So experiment. That can also mean taking a lower salary in order to experiment.

This is all in hindsight, of course, because I didn’t do it. I went to Wall Street after getting my M.B.A. If you experiment in different jobs and functions in those two or three years out of school, you will have a much better shot at finding your sweet spot. And the sweet spot is the intersection between what you’re really good at and what you love to do. If you can find that intersection, you are set. A lot of people would kill for that because, at 65, they’re retiring and never found it.

So don’t put so much emphasis on initial compensation. Don’t listen to all the harping from the family. Try to find your sweet spot and, once you find it, invest in that. You don’t want to get degrees just to do work you don’t really like. If you’re miserable, even if you make a lot of money, that’s still 40 years of your life.