How AI Happens

Academic turned entrepreneur Michel Valstar joins How AI Happens to explain how his behaviomedics company, Blueskeye AI, prioritizes building trust with their users. Much of the approach features data opt-ins and on-device processing, which necessarily results in less data collection. Michel explains how his team is able to continue gleaning meaningful insight from smaller portions of data than your average AI practitioner is used to.

Michel Valstar on LinkedIn

Blueskeye AI

In this episode, we talk to Stefan Scherer (CTO of Embodied) about why he decided to focus on the more nuanced challenge of developing children’s social-emotional skills. Stefan takes us through how encouraging children to mentor Moxie (a friendly robot) through social interaction helps them develop their interpersonal relationships. We dive into the relevance of scripted versus unscripted conversation in different AI technologies, and how Embodied taught Moxie to define abstract concepts such as "kindness".

Key Points From This Episode:

• Welcome to Stefan Scherer, CTO of Embodied and lead researcher and developer of Embodied's SocialXTM technology, Moxie.
• The goal of Embodied: using a natural mode of communication to support children’s social development.
• Mentoring Moxie: how Moxie teaches children social-emotional learning without being a teacher.
• Why Stefan and Embodied focused on the challenge of social-emotional skills, not STEM.
• Developing a technology that captures the infinite answers to social-emotional questions: using neural networks and sentiment analysis.
• How using Few-shot learning reduced the amount of data needed to train Moxie.
• Why it's important to make the transition between freer- and scripted conversations seamless.
• How the percentage of scripted versus non-scripted conversation differs based on the context of the technology.
• Discover how Moxie adapts to children’s changing needs and desires.
• How Moxie as a springboard in teaching children to form long-term relationships.
• The hardware behind Moxie: the ethical considerations around home devices, and data protection.
• Why Moxie looks the way it does: making it affordable.

Tweetables:

“Human behavior is very complex, and it gives us a window into our soul. We can understand so much more than just language from human behavior, we can understand an individual's wellbeing and their abilities to communicate with others.” — Stefan Scherer [0:01:04]

"It is not sufficient to work on the easy challenges at first and then expand from there. No, as a startup you have to tackle the hard ones first because that's where you set yourself apart from the rest." — Stefan Scherer [0:04:53]

“Moxie comes into the world of the child with the mission to basically learn how to be a good friend to humans. And Moxie puts the child into this position of teaching Moxie about how to do that.” — Stefan Scherer [0:17:40]

"One of the most important aspects of Moxie is that Moxie doesn't serve as the destination, Moxie is really a springboard into life." — Stefan Scherer [0:18:29]

“We did not want to overengineer Moxie, we really wanted to basically afford the ability to have a conversation, to be able to multimodally interact, and yet be as frugal with the amount of concepts that we added or the amount of capabilities that we added.” — Stefan Scherer [0:27:17]

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

See Moxie in Action

Stefan Scherer on LinkedIn

Embodied Website

Kelvin Wursten, leader of PointClickCare's Data Science team, explains how they are utilizing AI to help solve complicated supply vs. demand calculations in hospital emergency departments, as well as the challenge of balancing building awesome technology while still prioritizing the user's needs.

Walmart's SVP of Global Technology Anshu Bhardwaj and VP of Emerging Technology Desirée Gosby join Sama CEO Wendy Gonzalez for a roundtable discussion about representation in AI, explainable & ethical AI, and how representative teams are a key way to reduce biases in AI technology.

Sama CEO Wendy Gonzalez explains how the Sama Digital Basics program teaches AI skills to individuals in Africa's largest slum, and reflects on the findings of MIT's 6 year study measuring the program's effect.

RCT Results from MIT: Evaluating the Impact of Sama’s Training and Job Programs