This week, we spent five minutes with Maria Spies, the co-CEO of education data giant HolonIQ, which is one of the leading platforms for “impact intelligence”. She tells The PIE about data in the era of AI, her first career as an artist and why Egypt was her favourite work trip.
Introduce in three words or phrases.
Organic innovator, creative processor and practical.
What do you like most about your job?
I think one of the things that’s really wonderful about what I do is that I get to interact in so many different contexts, and then really explore the patterns of not just differences, but similarity in data. I love to see how the same issue is tackled in a completely different way in multiple contexts through data as well.
What was your proudest career moment.
Here’s a spin on that; when I was younger, I built my first business as an artist, making my own work and selling it. It was really hard. I did it for five years and it taught me a lot. Then I went into university, did corporate education.
Coming all the way back to my work here at HolonIQ, you tend to forget how much you draw from the experiences you’ve had your whole life. You’re drawing on things that you learned when you were 20, that are still relevant even now. It’s not one moment for me.
What’s the biggest challenge to your profession?
The key challenge for HolonIQ is that there are so many layers of data, especially in international education – it’s all about trying to make sense of something that is so huge and so fragmented, and see through some of that. It is incredibly difficult to do.
When you’re using huge volumes of data, artificial intelligence can help – but the things we sometimes do and see with data as humans are about making novel connections and AI can’t do that. I’m not quite sure that’s a challenge yet, but it may become one in the future.
What’s the best work trip you’ve been on?
One of the most interesting was to Egypt. I’d not been there before, but it was the integration of work into the society and the environment.
What I found in that market is that the vibrancy and the connection between what they were doing and how they were doing it and their friends, life and work was all really interconnected in a way that was different than I’d seen before.
If you could learn one language instantly, what would it be?
“The things we sometimes do and see with data as humans are about making novel connections – and AI can’t do that”
That’s a tough one. There’s something very real and grounded about the Italian language – it’s expressive, and the cadence is very beautiful. When I think of Italian, it’s like a million pictures run through my mind; the people, the culture the history, the art, the creativity, the passion.
The other thing about it is that there isn’t a spoken word that doesn’t include a physical expression, and I love that.
What’s a book or podcast recommendation you have for the sector?
Well, I’ve been doing a doctorate in higher education so my reading has mostly just been papers on universities and higher education and such for the past five years. In terms of podcasts, the EdTech podcast, which interviews people from all different parts of the edtech ecosystem, is fascinating.
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