Imagine never worrying if you turned out the lights, locked the door, or left the gas on. Imagine a home that adjusts lighting and temperature so that you are always comfortable, whether working out or reading a book. Imagine a home that remembers your likes and dislikes … a home that can identify you and reacts defensively if it senses an intruder.

“The future of a smart home is actually something that is not just four walls and a roof, but actually something that is aware of you … knows your preferences and settings, and actually knows everything about you and wants to be an ally to you,” said Sce Pike (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of IOTAS Inc.

Pike spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio at the CloudNOW “Top Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards event in Menlo Park, California, where Pike was honored with a CloudNOW “Top Women in Cloud” innovation award. They discussed the IOTAS smart home platform and Pike’s journey from coding websites to CEO of IOTAS.

Creating digital communities optimized for comfort and efficiency

Smart housing a la IOTAS, which stands for “internet of things as a service,” is more than adding edge devices to your home. When she was approached by a real estate developer looking for differentiation for a proposed high-end apartment project, Pike saw an opportunity to revolutionize the multibillion-dollar housing market. With IOTAS, she and her team created a platform that combines intelligent hardware with machine learning software, digitizing the personal and common spaces of entire apartment communities.

“Everything is an experience versus just on, off,” Pike said.

Residents of an IOTA smart apartment download a mobile app that allows them to choose from a series of preprogrammed or user-defined options that activate a series of preprogrammed routine tasks. Known as “stories,” these could be anything from a “morning story” that activates with your alarm to switch on lights, television and coffee-maker; a “movie night story” that dims lights, switches on the entertainment system, and cues up Netflix; or an “away for the day” story that activates security measures and puts the apartment into energy-saving mode.

Tech jobs don’t always start in computer science

Graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles with a joint major in anthropology and electronic arts, Pike moved to Silicon Valley just in time to ride the boom of the late 1990s. Although she did not have a background in science, technology, engineering and math, her ability to both code and design made her the perfect candidate to create websites for the new e-commerce marketplace.

“I’ve always been curious about human nature, why people do things, and that actually led my career into this interesting path of user experience design,” Pike said.

As a liberal arts major turned tech CEO, Pike is an advocate of adding arts to the essential areas of study, transforming STEM to STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math)  “There’s so many different avenues to think about; how technology needs a different point of view from an art background or an anthropology background, and I think that’s where there’s an opportunity to bring in women or girls in a different way that still goes into [a technology field],” she said.

Being a woman has never registered as a barrier to Pike, who said of her mindset as she worked her way up the ladder: “You just need to do what you need to do to get it done. You don’t think about yourself as a female entrepreneur. I thought of myself as an entrepreneur. I think of myself as a CEO.”

This is empowering, but it has its downside. Pike had the epiphany: “My life is dependent on white men…. I’ve got to change something!” after realizing the lack of diversity within the IOTAS leadership. She recently added a female cybersecurity expert to the board of directors and is looking to recruit female chief financial and chief operating officers.

“I’m trying to change up my executive staff, change up my investors, change up my board,” she said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the CloudNOW “Top Women in Cloud” Innovation Awards event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE