HumAIn: Empowering Inclusion with Technology (Noelle Silver Russell)

um hi everybody nice to meet you uh Noelle silver Russell I just got married so I'm getting used to that's why I had to do Noelle silver wrestle like it reminds me to say the last name otherwise I'm like Noel I'm outside again no I'm just kidding just kidding me uh when he catches us on the replay uh super excited to be here I'm going to actually do a couple things this morning um let me switch over oh no I may need someone to come and help me with a passport um thank you so much if you could just take that long yeah sorry um so oh here we'll just put this back while you're doing that um so one of the reasons why I got I don't know I think they asked me yes they asked me to come to speak to you all one was because of the wonderful way the world works when you do something cool and you're excited about it people they don't like excited people so one of my friends who saw me speak was like oh my gosh you should come do it over here the same thing happens in music and art um when you are good at something and then passionate about it and you aren't afraid to kind of take a stage you get a chance to do it well as much as you want to so today I travel the world um speaking about artificial intelligence and I'll share with you as we get going yay um thank you so much oh can you play that in there but one of the things that I want to share with you first we mentioned Alexa in the beginning how many of you know what Alexa is right this is just a practice like just getting in in the motion so good most of you know Alexa thank goodness well I had one of those moments I don't know if you know um or I've ever had this moment when you get an idea and you're like or you get invited to listen in on an idea and you're like oh my gosh this is the one we could do this and you get super excited about it and then you have one or two choices you could do that thing which often is scary and something you've never done before and then oftentimes I've ever done before and so you could go and do it or you could wish you had done it and many times I mean I hear people all the time looking at TV seeing some commercial and go about that 10 years ago our parents say it all the time that was my idea I thought about that but they of course didn't do the building well I was at Amazon I was working as a cloud architect at the time nowhere near artificial intelligence this was just I'd say seven years ago when Alexa before Alexa was born and I had an opportunity I got an email and the emails from Jeff Bezos I know it wasn't directed at me it would have been cool but it was it was like to the whole company it was like we were looking for people who are passionate about this area to come and join this new team in artificial intelligence at the time it was not launched right nobody knew it as a matter of fact at Amazon we had just come off one of the largest failures Amazon has ever had which is called the fire phone I don't know if any of you remember it was cool advice um but it was a cool device but it failed and everyone on that project was like I don't really want to do another thing that's going to fail I don't want to stick to things that work um and of course at the beginning this thing called Alexa did not work by the way um but I I thought it would be really cool so before I tell you why I thought I'd be cool I want to introduce you to my people this is why I do what I do um I have four children my firstborn son though has a Down syndrome if you're familiar with the condition um and when he was born it was very interesting I was a first-time mom a young mom never did any of the things you do when you think you might have a child with special needs like I didn't know anything I have my child it's normal birth only after do they like say I think something might be wrong and in that moment I know a lot of people of course it's very nerve-wracking but it was interesting the solution they had my child in Knoxville Tennessee and the geneticists came out old lady like in my mind I remember her being like this though I don't think she was but that's how I picture her like crutch the old lady and she said you have two options the world's not built for people like your son but we've created little pockets for him to be successful one is an institution there's lots of them worldwide and the others you can give them up to an adoptive family who will take really good care of him now I don't know if any of you know Latinas but I'm a Latina and I wasn't about to like just be like oh sure I mean take him good I hope he has a good life that was not the direction I chose to go but I'm also a technologist and so 17 years ago he's about to be 18 which is crazy um but 17 years ago I decided to embark on a journey of accessible technology of how do I work for companies not little companies big companies that would move the needle forward to make a world that's better for him and that's him right there in the pool Max um so really cool but so that was my lens right when I got this email from Jeff Bezos My Lens was like oh my gosh my son who's now 12. this could be cool now I am a cloud architect I knew nothing about artificial intelligence so I go to my manager which you will do one day you will get a cool idea and you'll go to your manager and you'll say I want to do this thing and they will look at you some of you will have awesome managers who will be like rock on go do your thing be successful go forth and prosper but my manager patted me on the head not physically but I definitely felt it like that you're so cute no you should that's not for you you're not an AI person oh I didn't graduate from high school oh yeah and I didn't graduate from college I went to both the and put in very good effort it just wasn't for me um so my manager was like no way there's no way you're going to be successful in a world like that and I being a naive middle career person was like maybe maybe you're right a lot of us get advice like this from people we trust our parents our teachers our um in this case my first line manager but something in me said this is different this is that one idea that if I don't do something I'm going to regret it and so I jumped I jumped I went around this person I went to the hiring manager of the Alexa team I said I know nothing I'm I'm completely transparent about my inequities as an AI professional and he was like that's okay we actually need people with the desire to learn because it's all new and an attitude of enthusiasm because the number one thing that makes AI successful is getting other people to use it and that's what they needed someone who was excited about it and could think about things in a different way so I joined the team that year I built over a hundred applications for Alexa today some of my most popular applications I mean I have over 2 million unique users of the applications that I've built I'm not a developer I don't have a development team it's just lowly old me on a Friday night coding some of you might be this person um it's it was fun but I built these applications and at the time I built them I literally was trying to think about like my son or me what would a mom was a kid with special needs one well the year that Alexa was created uh first I had my third child the like the week Alexa went live um I might have had my phone with me like in delivery ew don't do that but it was Alexa who's being born I had two children that week um this is my dad and he the year we launched Alexa something really interesting happened um terrible but trajectory changing he was hit by a car as a pedestrian he's a Marine so he's fine of course now kind of um but he was running he ran 11 to 15 miles every day 68 years old was running across the street a distracted driver um was of course driving and not paying attention he was in a crosswalk and he got hit and in a second he aged 20 years he went from being 68 to like whatever 20 plus 60. no I'm just kidding I did learn that much in high school but he got old he couldn't use a phone he couldn't use a computer all of a sudden nothing was accessible to him he couldn't go to he couldn't go to the bank he couldn't do anything he became someone like I was like you have to go into and you know an aging person facility a nursing home he's 68 years old so I did I put him in a nursing home I gave him Alexa he was the coolest kid by the way at school at the nursing home everyone wanted to be in his room because everything was voice activated but the interesting thing about that was that he didn't do well there because he was too young to be there so I got very focused on how to use the technology we're talking about today to not just serve the affluent to not just serve the one person or the one percent who are going to buy a device you could talk to in your kitchen but how do we repurpose this technology how do we think about that technology in a different way so in that email that Jeff Bezos sent out he said to all of us you're going to join a team that's going to build the Star Trek computer do you know what I mean when I say that because what that means is that you can ask for team and team will be made for you or you could ask for anything and it'll just magically appear um and I was excited about that but the reality was is that today the technology allows you to do exactly that you can do literally anything that you can write a piece of software for you can now call with your voice problem with developers didn't know how to make the connection the person building the solution didn't know how to use the technology that's available so an opportunity was created however I worked on some of the largest AI models in the world Alexa being one of them we're now an over a hundred million ohms it has I think where I have two billion devices worldwide that have Alexa enabled on them that's that's very large numbers right B billion like very large numbers um and I spent a bunch of time asking hard questions and the reason I ask these hard questions was because one day I got off a stage like this one and a woman came up to me and she said why would you name a device after a girl why would you do that and I was like I don't know I I didn't that wasn't my response I didn't do that I'm just a messenger I say that all the time I don't say that anymore I'm just a messenger um and this woman who is a mom she exposed me to a whole world of hurt people that I wasn't aware of and it kind of comes to the heart of what we're going to talk about all day today is that even though like I'm going around having a good time I'm getting Awards I'm talking about AI I'm building the largest AI models in the world meanwhile this woman represents a hundreds of thousands of people that are that care about the fact that Alexa was named Alexa and the reason they care is because just interestingly enough a bunch of young women girls moms I guess moms named their daughters Alexis or any alexas in the house because you feel probably like I'm talking all to you okay um not surprising they may have changed their name right now um but Alexa there was a bunch about seven years before Alexa was uh in its highest sales ever this was around 2015. we were selling a million devices a year like crazy um and fastest growing AI technology on the planet at that point but there was this little group of women little hundred thousand had to name their daughter Alexa five years six years before this year that Alexa became part of almost all of our households as you saw when we all raised our hands those kids were going into first and second grade do you know anything about first and second grade do you remember it's like when the Mean Gene kicks in the bleaching the like I'm gonna make you feel bad about yourself I don't know why it doesn't happen to all of us I was the nice kid I think you all look like nice kids but you know it when you see it right when you see a person you're like oh yeah I'm not that's not we're not going to hang out that person but it happens right at this age and I used to think it happened later but now I have data ew so now I have data that shows me that actually this happens quite a bit at this age six to seven and here's what ended up happening for these young women in drove so much that a class action lawsuit is being planned against Amazon as a result but these young girls would go to school and someone we won't name names we'll come by and knock their books out of their hand or knock their pencil off their desk or you know um drop their blue and they will command that girl like a robot to pick it up Alexa pick up my pencil Alexa pick up your stuff Alexa go to the bathroom all day long like where they think of course bullies always think they're funny um but it got to the point where these little girls didn't want to go to school anymore they not only did they not want to go to school they started asking their parents to change their name how's that that's sad to not be able to own your identity because some group of data scientists were like yeah Alex is really good because of the Lexicon and canonical phrase that does not cause false wakes we should use that did any of us think about the little girl who would get bullied in second grade no we didn't even ask the question it didn't even occur to us the kids would even be involved as a matter of fact when we started on Alexa we never thought anyone would buy more than one we built it for one and when you started buying two all of our systems crashed because they didn't we didn't know how to disambiguate two devices in the same house so yeah no we never even thought about the name there is a cool story about the name though Alexa is the name was actually a bunch of reasons it is a great lexicon based name which means it's got these consonants and vowels that don't show up often in the human language unless it's your name um so that was a good reason but the other reason why is it was named after Alexandria the largest library in the world and was meant to be this Noble thing and that's just one that's just one of the very sad stories that I get to tell not all today don't worry um but another example and and the only reason why I think that happened and even to this day I can't do anything about that right I don't work for Amazon anymore um I can't do anything about it but I can take responsibility right and the only thing I can do from my very humble perspective and taking responsibility is to let you know that the fact that I didn't have anyone on my team raise their hand and go did we think about all the kids that are going to be named Alexa we didn't have them all I mean I was a mom but I didn't think about that I was focused on my son I didn't have a daughter again so it's just really interesting right how how that happens anyway I'll share with you a couple other stories about this but though I've gotten a lot of awards and it's been a very good ride it's been pretty painful too to see how my just very simple oversight very simple lack of critical thinking can actually cause pain to a significant group of people and this only happens because we're leveraging artificial intelligence and automating scale getting what we're doing out to hundreds hundreds of millions billions of people at one time and you're going to hear lots of examples of this over the next you know throughout the day all across different domains which will be really fun different Industries but I want to start with something that I've worked for some of the best okay some of the coolest no um most rich CEOs on the planet um and here's the good news they all referenced this quote Jeff Bezos Satya Nadella it's pretty cool he's Microsoft's CEO if you don't know um arvind at IBM Jim Whitehurst used to run red hat and open source company now bought by IBM but all of them mentioned as Jeff Bezos actually tweeted this out and said I have my kids read this it's on our fridge and he took a picture of this quote on the fridge it's a pretty interesting story so I want to share it with you um I'm going to read it I know you're not supposed to read it but I'm gonna read it because it has a good story okay here we go so what is success to laugh often and Munch to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the Betrayal of false friends to appreciate Beauty to find the best in others to leave the world a bit better together whether by a healthy child a garden patch or a redeemed a social condition to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived this is to have succeeded this makes me happy that the biggest Tech Moguls in the world are even aware that a quote like this exists let alone trying to teach their children that the barometer for success is different but that's not the only story I want to share with you here you'll know notice Ralph Waldo Emerson are you familiar with him if not he's cool guy like Poet Laureate American metaphysician really nice author you can Google him he's pretty popular very popular he's quoted as being the author of this quote and when I got off one of the stages that I was on a man came up to me and he's like you should research that a little bit just do you know go to page two of Google and so I did I'm coachable right on my pay if you say okay I'll go look and I go and find out that the author actually isn't Ralph Waldo Emerson the cool looking white guy who does poetry and stuff it actually was this lesser-known woman Bessie Anderson Stanley and at the beginning she was well attributed which is why she's on Google she was well attributed at the beginning but as Ralph Waldo Emerson got more and more famous using this quote her attribution was lost the lineage of her ideas were lost in the Fanfare of Ralph Waldo Emerson and so now of course I give her credit but this is one of the best AI stories I know is that as we move into a world you're going to hear a lot about how do you create visualizations of data how do you do good storytelling with data how do you use AI to tell a good story great you can tell an amazing story but don't forget the lineage that is part of ethical AI how do we remember the Bessie Anderson Stanley how do we make sure that as we start telling this story and it gets handed down from one billion devices to two billion devices how do we make sure that the data that we collected who gave it to us the rights they gave us how long we can have it how are they getting paid that none of that gets lost as we get excited about its velocity I will tell you no one thought Alexa would do what it ended up doing except Jeff Bezos maybe I'm sure he thought it would um but we all right we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants we were kind of like oh my gosh this is amazing I can't believe I just got a hundred thousand users oh my gosh it's not a million it's a million five I was an indie Dev like I had no idea what we were we didn't ask the right questions and so now I take it upon myself to make sure that one of the measurements for success is that we preserve the lineage of data we preserve where your data comes from it's why blockchain is so cool and interesting to me now right within five ten years we'll see blockchain provide this preservation tool we're not there yet we're still figuring it out but that is what it does it creates a smart Ledger it allows Bessie to never lose credit for the song for the art for the content for the code you get to preserve the lineage of who owns the data and that is one of my biggest ethical responsibilities as a data scientist so I have learned a few things along the way of course I'm going to share with you um there's over a hundred AI models today that is accessible to you through a few lines of code how many of you would call yourself a coder be proud it's a good profession all right a few of you that's good I like it um the reality is I mean almost everyone I know thinks programmatically about something and what that means is that code is usually a process a procedure a way of doing things and yes you do have to learn a language but that's only temporary we are now moving into the world of low code and no code and what that means is that you don't actually have to learn a programming language to leverage the technology I'm going to show you in the next 20 minutes or so so that's the good news you don't have to Leverage code like learn Java node.js type script you don't have to know all of that you can actually build it in a browser and then once you've got a proof of concept give it to somebody else and they can code it or you can have the code generated AI which is the world we're moving towards so the code part I'm less worried about I'm glad we've got some coders in here because you're extremely useful knowledge and excitement that's good but it's not necessary to do what we did and to build however with these hundreds of models that are available today hundreds of them so there's models that can translate on the fly if you want to build an app a mobile app and in that mobile app you want to be able to speak in 90 languages you can do it with three lines of code and you again you don't necessarily have to know those three lines of code you just have to know that they exist and partner up with one of those people that we looked around in the raised hands people get one of them and Link it up so we've got more capability than ever Beyond generations of capability right so like my parents their parents the parents before them like we've got more capability than all those Generations combined which is incredible however I will see if we're all like friends or something right now um but there's a quote that I often use and maybe you all know it um with great power comes oh a few okay we're friends now okay I can relax yes anyone remember or know who said it or who they think said Uncle Ben that's right Spider-Man good okay we're on the same page yes so and Uncle Ben had something to say for the you know other people Voltaire also said it I know I looked it up it's fine it's fine um there are other people who have said this phrase but Uncle Ben made it famous kind of like um but with great power comes great responsibility and what that means is that you are now going to be able to accelerate the development of any idea that you have if you have an idea for a mobile app you can build it in a couple of days without learning a programming language if you want to learn to program you could hop on freecodecamp.org and learn to code in

about six weeks on your own or in a hundred days on Twitter like it is more accessible than ever so as soon as you start doing this though I'm going to encourage you to start asking questions not just and my friend Renee will come up and talk more about this later but it's not just about who will you serve right it's not just about Jeff Bezos going we are going to make the affluent so much happier in their kitchen that was the original hope make the affluent rich people happy kitchen because they will be able to set a timer without touching it they'll be able to play music while they cook but our job our job is to think differently our job is to think okay yeah cool I get the kitchen but what about the classroom what about the nursing home what about the speech pathologist what about health care what about retail our job is to think more deeply about who we can serve and then it's also to think more deeply about who will hurt and this is hard because almost always when we're building something Alexa Microsoft every AI model I've built I'm always thinking I'm doing the right thing it's always my intention to do the right thing and yet still people come up to me and go by the way that thing will hurt me will it I didn't know that so how do we stop that we stop it by asking better questions and by following a few simple principles so the first principle um is around well I'll give you some context first so as you know I worked at Alexa that was fun four years I call it I got my MBA at Amazon I didn't really but I felt like it I learned a lot about everything being in that startup and growing it to the size that we grew it I then went to Microsoft and built uh and was part of a team that created 17 research projects fun little projects I'm going to show you them now they're teenagers now um but when I was with them they were little babies and we took these research projects and we productized them which means we put them in a situation where people could call them anyone could call them I called it AI for everyone I used to say that AI for everyone everyone can use it and then I realized I actually don't mean everyone I mean only nice good people all right I don't really want Bad actors to use this technology to create systems that'll destroy Healthcare I really don't want that but it's interesting these are the ethical considerations of democratization when you create a democratized framework when you decide to make something available to everyone do you really mean it and is it okay if you don't there's no right answer Microsoft was one of the first to take a stand on actually evaluating use cases for its technology and it will shut you down if it's not confident you're doing AI for good think that's awesome some people would call that censorship right it just depends on who the person is what they're doing um it depends on where you come from what your history is but in all of these massive projects I learned some pretty key uh principles and I'm going to share these with you and I think you'll see them as you move through your career hopefully it'll get better because it's pretty dismal right now the first one is inclusive engineering and this is known rather than you'd probably have heard the term include inclusion right you've heard this term it's pretty popular inclusion which often when we say it we typically think brown people girls women um but I actually believe in something a little bit more I don't know maybe elaborate than that I call it a symphony of talent or a symphony of data I'm looking for when I for example built the technical management team that created four languages on Alexa when I did that work for them I realized that I needed to have a mom I needed to have a single dad I needed to have someone who went to school someone didn't go to school someone who went to Ivy League someone went to State I needed someone who represented a cat lover and a dog lover a kid lover I wanted someone who represented teachers someone who represented uh people like me who cared for their parents their aging parents I needed to create a symphony of life experience so that when we ask the question who could this hurt there would be people in the room who were like have we thought about grandparents have we thought about kids with Down Syndrome have we thought about you know any Divergent community and so that's number one is I have to have people in the room that actually know to ask the question that have lived a life experience that says I want to protect the interests of everyone in my life and that means oh guess what I never asked you where you went to school specifically or what you studied some of my best favorite data people data scientists data engineers actually started off in a totally different field one of them is a record producer turned data engineer one of them is an artist turned uh like a oil painting I don't even know what they're called but oil painting art as a person another one was a sociologist I had an endocrinologist right these people yes maybe technical inclined for some of those fields but for the most part had nothing to do with AI had everything to do with humanity and that was really the Gap we were facing so inclusive engineering doesn't just mean though having a table full of people with unique thoughts a symphony of talents it also means a symphony of data you have to actually get a diverse data set to give you an example one day I had a woman come up to me and she asked this is early like maybe 20 uh it doesn't matter but early in the days of Alexa she's like why does Alexa listen to my husband more than it listens to me and like marital struggles ensue when Alexa listens to one spouse over another um or if I am screaming at Alexa and my husband walks in and says one more like the same thing and it like instantly does what that's not okay like bad things happen so I um immediately was like I know what's wrong does anyone know why that happened yes indeeda we didn't trade it on women you why here is the sneaky part did we want to train it with female data absolutely guess what we did to collect data we sent out an email to everyone in Amazon lots and lots of people and we asked them in their spare time to supply data guess who the only people were that could come in early stay late use their lunch hour guess what they happen to all be a shared demographic not because our whole company was that demographic it's a lot but no we had a relatively good level of diversity in the email that went out but we framed the participation in that data collection in a way that limited the diversity of the data inherently oh we didn't even know to look we were like we asked everybody it's not our fault that only these people showed up we didn't even think to ask about fault we were just like awesome we got 250 000 people to give us data that's our data set let's go it seemed great until the customer tells us we missed it I always tell people you do not want to find out about the good or bad part of your product on subreddits it's not the way to go like that's the worst place to find out that your product stinks or hurts people at least it exists though so use it because at least it exists and I know to go there and I can go oh my gosh we we messed up another one oh my gosh how many of you know who Marshawn Lynch is he's a football player there's a few of you so pretend you know about football and Marshawn Lynch he's a character like a character he's on Skittles commercials I think he I don't know got sponsored by Skittles at one point um he's on a lot of different commercials today uh I don't know if he's retired it changes all the time but back then he was on Seattle Seahawks football team and they had just I think one then lost the Super Bowl or something and Alexa wasn't working for him so he calls up Jeff Bezos I don't know exactly someone asked me once like does he have his number I don't know all I know is Jeff Bezos came to us and said Marshawn Lynch says that Alex was broken so what they did is they asked the whole room there was I don't know 60 of us and they're like who knows Marshawn Lynch now everyone in the room raised their hand except a few of us I was one who was like I don't like some of you in here like I don't know I don't watch football anyway they were like great Noel you're going right because they didn't want someone I guess who's gonna be like oh my gosh can I take a picture with you I couldn't care less about the football um did I say that I love football if anyway um if you're a football person I did watch the Packers game so the the whole time I'm there I'm you know trying to understand what he's doing so I ask him okay just call Alexa right now just call me so I can see what's wrong and he's like Alexis and I was like oh all right I hope we can fix this I was like no problem okay Marshawn it's Alexa and he's like okay Alexis and I was like no no it's Alexa and he's like Alexis I know that's what I'm saying and I was like Roger that man okay cool good I will get this fixed right away guess what I did I took that data back to my Bunches of data scientists and I said he's saying Alexis there's actually a whole SNL skit on this um uh he said Alexis they trained I took recordings of his voice they trained Alexa on his pronunciation and today if you say Alexis to your device it will work that's how data Works how crazy is that this one-off thing and who knows how many people who are saying Alexis and it never worked for it started working for but like is that the way to build a product for six billion people I don't know we don't know when we're building a product for the world when you're Building Solutions you hope we'll touch everyone the only thing you can do is have a mindset and openness that says all right if somebody says it doesn't work I'm going to run on over find out why it doesn't work and then fix it seven years later we've made hundreds of thousands of these little fixes and now Alexa kind of works okay so it gives us an opportunity to just kind of see that nothing I mean this is Alexa a lot of people think Alexa was a well-funded project it wasn't it was like a startup we were fighting for our existence every day we were in the red forever in the red meaning right like we didn't make money for the company I still don't know if Alexa makes money for the company but it was a dream a dream of Mr Duff Bezos now he's on to other dreams rockets and stuff but at that time that was it but the reason that Alexa is the way it is now is because we are very inclusive and deciding right and figuring out what data sets do we need to make Alexa better and that data set could be for one person who represents a constituency today there is a model being built a speech model that is specific to kids who have you could actually Google it I think an article recently came out for kids who have special needs who have um cognitive and speech delays and because they speak differently there's actually a machine learning model that's being created to help Alexa understand them I actually loved Alexa for my son because it forced him to repeat what he was saying over and over and over again until Alexa understood him and that actually improved his speech so he didn't need a special model he didn't need to be accommodated in that way some do but he actually benefited from having to say it and here's the kicker when he would say it wrong Alexa never got mad never got frustrated never got like it's Tuesday Max like you never said it like that um I say the same thing about my dad like oh you know my dad has um uh he's like Dory Finding Dory do you know it or 50 First Dates anyway he's he's not as bad as 10 Minute Tom but it's pretty bad every morning he doesn't remember what he did the day before so he'll be like asking me the same questions and now I just tell him to ask Alexa because Alexa never gets frustrated with the 15th time he's asked what day it is what county we live in um the numbers for Coronavirus during Corona like he asked me that question every day how many new cases I don't know you're a data person right yes ask Alexa and Alexa every time would with a smile answer the same question over and over again and it created a level of companionship for both my son and my dad of a Persona that wasn't frustrated and as caregivers let's face it we're human sometimes we get frustrated and it actually helped I think improve their growth so the second to last thing I want to talk to you about is the multimodal development this is the world we're moving into and what it means is that we want to not just think when I went to Amazon Jeff Bezos was always saying voice first voice everywhere voice everything and then he changed it to Alexa first Alexa everywhere Alexa everything he wanted right dominion over all things voice activated what I found out though is that voice is great but it's immediately how many of you are familiar with Clubhouse do you know that app right it's a audio app um immediately Clubhouse alienated everyone who couldn't hear right or speak right and so you instantly when you say anything if you use the word all none everywhere everything you instantly become exclusive which is okay maybe at first but I'm a believer that you want to open the funnel open the doors to your software as possible and the way to do that is through multimodal development what that means is that different modalities for different people all pointing to the same Tech so the first one right is of course yes I think if you write technology you should make it so that I can talk to it why do I have to use my phone or my computer if I could just use my voice I would wait for it and study shows about 78 of the at least American people would agree they'd rather just talk to their Tech and that's the world we're moving to too but I might also want to use gesture control or maybe I want to use a typical device so I went to National Public Radio if you know it they have like cool podcasts and stuff um but I went to national public radio and I became their head of engineering and they had a multimodal approach which I loved they had a web app team they had a mobile app team two of them one on Android one on iOS they had a voice team and soon to be voice on Google and voice on Alexa and now right they're thinking about the metaverse and how do we create an experiential Community as part of our product how do you go in and listen to a podcast for example by walking into the medical or sitting in an audience just like this but it's virtual and be able to talk to some of the people that you've been listening to for years so this is pretty cool but the benefit is is that the funnel of people using your technology widens you get more customers and more customers means more revenue and almost everybody likes that if you're running a business so multimodal does one of two things it helps you increase accessibility for your technology but then two it actually also improves the productivity and profitability of any effort you take on so multimodal development is a huge part of what I have found made solutions successful and of course today is all about ethics and I in my professional life I have to be very careful about ethics you don't hear so I'm going to encourage you to dive on into like have you ever seen the trolley video from the good place yeah some of you have um it's super graphic like trigger warnings super graphic I did not know and I was intimidated by the amount of four but for those of you interested there's a video trolley video it's an Ethics video from the good place on YouTube very popular but it basically talks through the scenario of let's say autonomous vehicles right and this is a true story autonomous vehicles we won't call we'll call them Teslas right these veslas were being created hypothetically and the uh computer vision model had to make a decision when approached with the opportunity to collide with something right a small dog or a human anyone care to guess what it chose all right it sounds like a dog um so at like that's a simple kind of mathematical equation right small dog not human human okay we should probably save the human um however what happens if it's your dog right some people when asked this in a study actually hesitated on the human when it came to their dogs like I'm not going to judge them oh you know their family dogs are people too I guess but how interesting is that right when asked if someone if you ask the driver what would you rather me do if it's their dog their ethics change and that's what the trolley video also demonstrates if it's personal to you that's why I all of my technology choices have been around my son and my dad that that's the ethics that drives my choices so interestingly enough we have to kind of figure out how we acknowledge the ethics uh in any conversation in any decision to make software um but also how do we take responsibility for that right so the way that besla hypothetically decided to take responsibility you can imagine them having this conversation is that they said to themselves all right what's the most important thing the most important thing is the driver so we will do whatever it takes to preserve the driver in this case it worked out because if you hit a human it's much more likely something bad will happen to you and your vehicle than if you hit a small dog so it worked out but that's not always the case deers humans anyway but they decided to model build the machine learning model the predictive model against thousands of variables right there's lots of variables but one of the variables was on the security of the driver and that was a ethical decision that the company had to make and those are decisions that you'll have to make I will say I'm a little bit worried today about companies that aren't even having these ethical conversations most companies are not even asking the question about the dog and the human they don't realize the impact that their technology will have on humanity and that's why these discussions in this room in your small groups are going to be so important so finally today is all about I'm hoping learning by doing we have a bunch of different breakout sessions um I think okay we have a bunch of different breakout sessions that are happening and you'll get a chance to get some practical experience doing this I'm going to be leading one there's a really cool one coming up but in the afternoon when we break out that's going to be what we we get to do we are going to have a chance to actually put not necessarily fingers to a keyboard but definitely practical applications so I want to bring up somebody to say something okay

2023-01-20 02:22

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