Data Science Salon Podcast

Formulated.by’s Senior Content Advisor, Q McCallum, caught up with Linda Liu (Hyrecar) and Giacomo Vianello (Cape Analytics). Our guests explored the techniques and tools for the various data projects they are running, some of the challenges of working with geospatial data, and how their companies approach data-related research efforts.

Ben Dubow studied the Middle East during his undergrad and took a job tracking terrorist groups. After a brief stint at a large tech company, he launched Omelas, a company that combines AI and subject matter expertise to deliver intelligence to national security professionals.In today's episode, our Senior Content Advisor Q McCallum caught up with Ben to learn more about what Omelas is up to and how the company applies AI and data analysis to its mission.Along the way they explore the value of data in context; why it's important to ask the right questions of the right data, and not just the whole pool; the power of involving humans in the data pipeline; and what it takes to do NLP and NER at scale. The two also talk about the impact of generative AI on democracy and authoritarianism. A topic which, interestingly enough, holds lessons for corporations that plan to release AI chatbots.Links mentioned in this episode:

• Ben's LinkedIn profile
• Omelas website
• Ben's writing on the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) website
• Article in Les Echos describing the project "Le Monde in English": "« Le Monde » parie sur l'étranger pour stimuler sa croissance"
• Q's write-up on "Risk Management for Generative AI Bots" is available on both his O'Reilly Radar page and his blog.

This discussion also explores the context around which we collect data, polysocial reality, design individualism, and contextual integrity. (Yes, we covered a lot of ground in just 45 minutes.)

Because of our tight schedule, Chris and Q had to stop before they could get to their second topic. That’s why Chris will be back in the next episode to talk about communal computing and what that means for AI.

bio: Chris Butler is a product manager, writer, and speaker with over 20 years of product management leadership at Microsoft, Waze, KAYAK, and Facebook Reality Labs. He facilitates critical decision making for teams that build new and innovative products and created techniques like Empathy Mapping for the Machine and Confusion Mapping to create cross-team alignment while building AI products.

He is now Assistant Vice President, Head of Product Operations, at Cognizant where he PM’s the PM experience.Learn more about Chris and his work through his Linkedin, Twitter, by reading some of his articles on Medium or watching some of his past talks on YouTube.

• Article: “Our Favorite Questions”
• Chris’s Product Mindset talk from Cognizant Softvision Product Day
• Chris’s Prototyping for AI/ML at the AI for PMs Summit
• At the end, we mentioned Chris’s articles on communal computing. You can read these to get a head start on our next episode:
• Communal Computing intro
• Communal Computing’s Many Problems
• A Way Forward with Communal Computing
• AIxDesign Communal Computing workshop with animistic design mapping