Andy Chen spent 30 years inside Ontario Power Generation, Canada's largest electricity producer — starting as a trainee and retiring as Chief Technology Officer. Along the way he led the first successful replacement of obsolete direct-control computers at a nuclear station, a first for the entire industry, and helped prepare the plant through the Y2K transition. He later served as President of IEEE TEMS (2020–2021), led the IEEE Systems Council through its growth from 20 to 25 member societies, and co-founded REDDS Capital — a venture fund built with three billionaire partners to bet on unproven, disruptive technology.

In this episode, host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja sits down with Andy for a wide-ranging conversation on what three decades in the highest-stakes engineering environment there is taught him about making decisions when the cost of being wrong is either catastrophic or just expensive.

They cover:

— Why "risk is easy to mitigate but hard to escape" — and why the word that matters in that sentence is mitigate, not escape
— The billboard image that shaped Andy's entire decision-making philosophy, and why he refuses to make a decision with only one option on the table
— Inside the first-ever replacement of a nuclear station's direct-control computers — and the "defense in depth" design principle the industry adopted after Fukushima's flooding failure exposed a blind spot no one had designed for
— Why speed matters more than people think: the 30-second difference between a small fire and a big fire, and why solving a problem today keeps it smaller than solving it tomorrow
— The one due-diligence question Andy asks before funding any startup — not "what's the technology," but "who's on the team," and why he'd rather back people with grit than people who've never failed
— What a $10,000 360-degree leadership assessment revealed about his own biggest blind spot — and the one-sentence verdict his wife delivered for free
— The single action Andy wants every leader listening to take this week: treat every interaction, however brief, as a chance to leave someone better off than you found them

Connect with Andy Chen:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chenatl/
REDDS Capital: reddscapital.com/investors/andy-chen/
IEEE Systems Council: ieeesystemscouncil.org/contact/andy-chen

Connect with your host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/
IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee | Irving, Texas, USA

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

Usually the president answers the questions. This time he asks them.

IEEE TEMS Radio launches a new format - the Reverse Podcast - where IEEE TEMS President Dr. Sudeendra Koushik turns the microphone around and interviews the volunteers who make the Society work. In this inaugural installment, he sits down with three senior practitioners who came to TEMS after building careers in industry first.

Jaya Kandaswamy (IEEE DFW, Region 5) works at the intersection of the IEEE Standards Association and TEMS - a published author and SA working committee member focused on how AI gets adopted safely.

Harshavardhan Peddireddy (IEEE Central Tennessee and Cincinnati Sections, Region 3) is a Platform Architect at Meijer Inc. with 18+ years in enterprise data, AI governance, and privacy engineering. IEEE Senior Member, Ph.D. scholar, and reviewer for IEEE, Springer Nature, and Wiley.

Nirdesh Pachoriya (IEEE Fort Worth, Region 4) brings close to 19 years in performance engineering and software quality, contributing as reviewer, session chair, and conference coordinator while exploring how AI-assisted tooling is reshaping engineering practice.

The questions are deceptively simple, and the answers are anything but. What actually pulled each of them into IEEE - and into TEMS specifically? What did they expect when they raised their hand, and what did they actually get? A common thread emerges: none of them came for a title. They came to share what they knew — and stayed because of the rooms it put them in.

Dr. Koushik does more than moderate. As the conversation unfolds, he maps each story onto the wider set of opportunities inside IEEE TEMS - the committees, programs, and communities most members never discover because nobody told them where to look. The result is part oral history, part practical roadmap for anyone wondering how to move from paying dues to actually belonging.

Essential listening for members considering a volunteer role, mid-career engineers and managers weighing where to invest time outside work, chapter and section leaders focused on recruitment and retention, and anyone curious what a technical society looks like from the inside.

Want to be featured in a future Reverse Podcast? IEEE TEMS volunteers can self-nominate here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfT9oZh5BZQcDcKI2IGIf5X81gyA5BQ8dSHZImf_eU24JjSdw/viewform

Host / Producer: Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja, IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee Contributor | Irving, Texas, USA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja/

IEEE TEMS Radio - Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.

Stephen Ibaraki has been building at the intersection of AI and global impact since before most people had heard the term. He built his first AI-enabled computer in 1965. He co-created the networked AI medical database that took a Canadian industry to 80% global market share — all under NDA. He spent over a year working weekly with ITU leadership before the UN ITU AI for Good Global Summit launched in 2017, bringing in speakers, sponsors, and funding largely from his own network. He advises a community of 38,000 CEOs representing $22 million employees across 150 countries. And more than 90% of what he does today, you will never read about.

In this episode, host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja sits down with Stephen — Chairman of REDDS Capital, Founder of AI for Good, IEEE TEMS board member, and IEEE Systems Council Industry Ambassador — for a candid conversation on what it actually takes to close the gap between AI adoption and real-world impact.

They cover:

— Why 88% of organizations use AI but fewer than 40% show a measurable result — and the specific leadership failure at the root of that gap, drawn from Stephen's experience at a private summit of 38,000 CEOs in Sydney
— The structured, step-by-step process that separates organizations getting quantifiable AI results from those stuck in pilot theater
— What builders and innovators should stop doing (overcomplicating what they can't control) and start doing (Cognitorial thinking — free, combinatorial idea generation — and reading on the edge daily)
— Why 2026 is the year CEOs must personally use AI every day, shorten their planning cycles to 90-day windows, and think in 10x innovation terms
— Human in the loop as the irreducible governance floor — and why responsible AI frameworks from IEEE, UNESCO, and Microsoft all converge on the same principle
— The S11: Stephen's framework of 11 converging technologies to monitor between now and 2028 — from Zetta-scale computing and 6G to quantum utility, autonomous AI scientists, biomedical rejuvenation, and the energy flywheel that underpins all of it
— The one action every engineering manager should take this week: read on the edge — IEEE Spectrum, ACM news, and the outlier signals that most leaders miss

Connect with Stephen Ibaraki:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/sibaraki
Twitter / X: @sibaraki
IEEE Systems Council Interview Series: ieeesystemscouncil.org/education/tech-vision-interviews-stephen-ibaraki

Connect with your host Madhusudan Bangalore Nagaraja:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/madhusudannagaraja
IEEE Senior Member, Technical Delivery Manager, eSystems Inc. | PMI Infinity Advisory Committee | Researcher, Agentic AI Systems | Irving, Texas, USA

IEEE TEMS Radio — Engaging Conversations in Education, Engineering, Management and Technology.

Produced by: IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society
Please write to us at ieeetemsemail@gmail.com to share your feedback.