On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we'll be talking with the founders of one of Georgian's investments, a fascinating company with an absolutely wonderful name for a company in this space, Darrow. But, it's not the name that matters today. It's about an idea and the coming together of a vision.

You'll Hear About:

• The role of AI in legal tech and litigation.
• Darrow's mission and approach to justice.
• Building class action lawsuits with data and AI.
• Addressing data biases and fostering trust.
• The significance of Darrow's PlaintiffLink offering.
• Darrow's human-centric company culture and social impact.

Who are the Co-Founders of Darrow?

Evyatar Ben Artzi is the Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow.ai. Evyatar harnesses his legal and technological experience to improve legal systems and societies, empowering people to make better decisions and become the authors of their own story. Evyatar assumed leadership roles in the collaborative and dynamic teams he has led and worked with, whether as a Combat Officer in the IDF, a clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court, as a Co-Founder of Yahav – a progressive education program – or as Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow, using AI to unearth the legal implications of real-world events.

Gila Hayat is the Co-Founder and CEO at Darrow.ai. Prior to Darrow, she spent seven years in computer intelligence in the IDF, in part, focusing on classified projects on ethical issues of AI both in the military and police forces. She and her team earned presidential honors for their work.

On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, it is time to talk about GenAI and trust. Angeline Yasodhara, an Applied Research Scientist at Georgian, is here to discuss the new world of GenAI.

You'll Hear About:

• Differences between closed and open-source large language models (LLMs), advantages and disadvantages of each.
• Limitations and biases inherent in LLMs due to their training on Internet data.
• Treating LLMs as untrusted users and the need to restrict data access to minimize potential risks.
• The continuous learning process of LLMs through reinforcement learning from human feedback.
• Ethical issues and biases associated with LLMs, and the challenges of fostering creativity while avoiding misinformation.
• Collaboration between AI and security teams to identify and mitigate potential risks associated with LLM applications.

Who is Angelina Yasodhara?

Angeline Yasodhara is an Applied Research Scientist at Georgian, where she collaborates with companies to help accelerate their AI products. With expertise in the ethical and security implications of LLMs, she provides valuable insights into the advantages and challenges of closed vs. open-source LLMs.

On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we dive into the world of generative AI and its impact on coding, testing, and product design with guest Rodrigo Ceballos. Rodrigo is a Machine Learning Engineer at Georgian and provides firsthand experience and expertise, shedding light on the transformative power of AI in the tech industry. Exploring the exciting possibilities brought about by the fusion of human creativity and AI technology.

You’ll Hear About:

• The progression of software engineering from low-level to high-level languages, culminating in the use of natural language for coding.
• The daily integration of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, in automating tasks and writing code.
• The role of large language models (LLMs) as an intermediate layer and a translation layer between different pieces of software.
• The impact of generative AI in automating functions, unit testing, and API interaction in programming.
• Using generative AI to brainstorm and guide game design, showing the versatility of AI in enhancing human creativity.
• The potential upside and downside of leveraging generative AI in streamlining processes and increasing efficiency.

Who is Rodrigo Ceballos?

With over six years of experience in AI research and engineering, Rodrigo Ceballos is a dedicated Machine Learning Engineer at Georgian. In his current role, Rodrigo collaborates with portfolio companies to implement solutions in computer vision, natural language processing and generative AI. Before joining Georgian, he served as an AI Research Engineer at PAIGE.ai, where he played a pivotal role in developing PaigeProstate, the world's first FDA-approved AI-assisted pathology diagnostic tool.

On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we will be discussing the impact of generative AI and fine-tuning data strategy with Rohit Saha, an ML scientist at Georgian’s R&D team. Rohit will explore how large language models (LLMs) and fine-tuning are changing the AI landscape for businesses, the necessary skills for data science teams in the age of generative AI, and the pivotal role of dynamic data strategy in leveraging new technology effectively.

You’ll Hear About:

• The role of fine-tuning in tailoring foundational AI models to specific use cases.
• How the landscape of ML and AI has evolved with the emergence of LLMs.
• Leveraging LLMs to enhance productivity and build enterprise software.
• Evolution of skills and talent required in the era of generative AI.
• Creating a dynamic data strategy and leveraging open source models for fine-tuning.
• Identifying golden use cases and the impact of LLMs on classification tasks.

Who is Rohit Saha?

Rohit Saha is an ML Scientist at Georgian's R&D team. He works with the portfolio companies to accelerate their data science roadmap by assisting them in scoping research problems, writing machine learning or AI code, and putting solutions into production. Rohit has worked across various projects, specializing in computer vision, natural language processing and large language models. His expertise lies in helping companies fine-tune and leverage large language models for enterprise software solutions.

This is the first in a series of podcasts featuring our AI team, where they share their experiences on the generative AI work they've already done with more than 20 of our portfolio companies. In this episode, we are joined by two technical leaders of Georgian's R&D team Parinaz Sobhani and David Tingle. Parinaz is the Head of AI at Georgian and David is the team's Engagement Manager for our work with our customers. 

You’ll Hear About: 

• How generative AI is reshaping businesses by excelling in text, code, task execution, and image generation.
• The importance of a cross-functional collaboration approach and a top-down problem-solving strategy in technology development.
• An overview of the historical focus of Georgian's AI team on data and machine learning.
• Exploration of the starting points for companies, including the use of foundational models from big tech companies and the role of first-party data in differentiation.
• Discussion on the crawl, walk, run stages of generative AI adoption, highlighting the importance of finding a golden use case and the need for a "trust-first" approach for future-proofing.

Paul is the author of several books on marketing and AI, including Marketing Artificial Intelligence, and he's the creator of the Marketing AI Conference.

You'll Hear About:

• The evolution of generative AI tools in marketing.
• The role of AI in ideation and strategy, rather than writing.
• The adoption and integration of AI tools into marketing workflows.
• The impact of generative AI on content creation and strategy.
• Building an AI council within organizations.
• Developing responsible AI principles and policies.
• The importance of a moral compass in AI application.
• Transparency and disclaimers for AI usage.
• The future of AI in entrepreneurship, creativity and scientific breakthroughs.
• Addressing fears and concerns related to AI in the workplace.

Mahan Salehi, AI and LLM product manager at NVIDIA, will explain how the space has evolved from his experience at NVIDIA working with AI. 

You’ll Hear About:

●  Machine learning vs. artificial intelligence.

●  The need for guidance for GenAI models.

●  Rules-based models vs. deep learning models.

●  The two pieces of generative AI.

●  How foundational models are trained.

●  The value of first-party data.

●  Mahan looking back and looking forward.

●  The impact on different industries.

In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Sonia Lagourgue, Georgian’s Head of Purpose & ESG and Emily Walsh, Lead Investor at Georgian. They will break down Georgian’s latest thesis area: Product-led Purpose. 

Simply put, Product-led Purpose is our view that the next generation of market-leading technology companies will not only deliver superior economic value but also a quantifiable positive impact on societal challenges.

You’ll Hear About:

●  Georgian’s purpose and what it takes to get the whole team engaged.

●  Where the purpose came from and its ties to Georgian’s history.

●  How Georgian’s Purpose Report holds us accountable. 

●  Why Georgian launched a Product-led Purpose thesis and what that really means.

●  How a strong top-level executive focus on purpose can motivate and drive a company forward.

●  The main pillars of the Product-led Purpose thesis.

●  The natural tension between pushing technology and purpose.

In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Tiffany Xingyu Wang, OpenWeb’s first-ever Chief Marketing Officer. 

With a mission to “save online conversations,” OpenWeb wants to improve the quality of conversations online while enabling conversation-based advertising, which allows brands to connect with their most active audiences. Through connecting with audiences, publishers can garner first-party data for ad targeting — a valuable tool as publishers prepare for the disappearance of third-party cookies. 

Hyperlane allows developers to connect their apps across blockchains and are dedicated to interchain singularity. Our goal is to understand the building blocks to make Web3 more usable and drive adoption, and to understand the real-world opportunities in the long term

PolyAI is a conversational AI company spun out of University of Cambridge research that builds voice assistants at scale in multiple languages. You'll get a helpful breakdown of the challenges of building conversational AI, what makes PolyAI different, and you’ll hear a demo of the tech in action.

You’ll Hear About:

●  Nikola Mrkšić and PolyAI’s vision 

●  The accuracy needed to ensure customers don’t become frustrated 

●  How PolyAI has surpassed previous generations of voice tech

●  Mapping non-linear customer journeys

●  How PolyAI develops conversation depth with their clients

●  How outbound calls differ

●  The ways in which PolyAI differentiates itself

●  Having the voice match the brand

●  Where Nikola sees voice tech going in five years  

You’ll Hear About:

●  Neha’s entrepreneurial journey and the beginning of Contentstack.

●  Working with the technical teams when you aren’t a technologist.

●  What does culture mean to Neha?

●  Neha’s lessons about entrepreneurship

●  Headless content management systems.

●  How customers have become more nimble using Contentstack.

●  Third-party integration and how it benefits Contentstack and its customers.

●  The MACH Alliance.

●  The importance of content as the heart of digital experiences.

In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Brian Ritz, Director of Data Science Solutions at SPINS. SPINS connects wellness brands to their retail and omnichannel data, and they've partnered with over 300 brick-and-mortar retailers so far. Bringing advanced analytics to their clients allowing for deep fact-based decision-making.

You’ll Hear About:

●  How Brian has seen tech develop over the past few decades.

●  Ways to improve at getting more useful information from data.

●  Ensuring you don’t get caught up in just the tech and data science side of product development.

●  Will we reach a point where there is too much data?

●  Data moats and how they can provide a competitive advantage.

●  The need for companies to change or pivot.

●  The importance of communication when striving to be a good leader.

●  Diversity in your data and data team.

There’s a lot of layers to self-sovereign identity, and it’s easy to get lost in the noise of it all. We try to make it easy for you.

In this episode, we cover it with Riley Hughes, Sovrin’s second employee and co-founder and CEO of Trinsic. Trinsic, which Georgian recently invested in, provides a cloud-based platform for credential verification and monitoring. 

You’ll Hear About:

●  What is identity?

●  The different ways Trinsic can be used by developers.

●  Ways to disrupt or democratize the current model of identity.

●  Decentralized identity and its many use cases.

●  The continued need for anonymity in a digital identity world.

●  How identity will evolve with web 3 and the metaverse.

You’ll Hear About:

● The Internet Identity Workshop that Kaliya co-founded in 2005.

● What it means to have open standards for digital identity and its importance. 

● What businesses would benefit most from SSI.

● Challenges in creating a user-centric digital identity.

● How data became siloed within a few companies.

● The link between digital identity and Web3.

● The need to create standards that reflect all backgrounds.

In part two, Maggie talks about how to get more underrepresented groups interested in Web3 and DeFi, what Maggie has learned about onboarding more people onto DeFi and the SheFi approach to education. 

In this podcast, you’ll hear about:

• How Maggie became interested in blockchain
• Challenges with onboarding more people onto Web3
• How SheFi makes it easier to break through Web3
• The importance of community in Web3

On this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we talk to Alwar Pillai, the CEO of Fable, a leading accessibility platform powered by people with disabilities. While many companies focus on trying to build for at least 80% of people, Alwar says, trying to build for people at the margins can lead to better design.

“You suddenly are creating a product that is adaptable, more personable, more usable, and more customizable, which in turn makes the products accessible to everyone.”

In our podcast, she talks about how companies can avoid just “checking a box” and actually get proactive about inclusive design. 

What you'll hear about:

• Alwar’s journey into accessible design 
• Why inclusive design builds better products
• Overcoming biases in UX design 
• The mindset and approach needed to build inclusivity into design 
• Case studies from Fable
• How Fable works with enterprise clients
• What Fable is doing with its Series A

In this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, we will be talking to Dr. Michele Mosca, CEO of evolutionQ. evolutionQ helps organizations work through all the various stages of getting ready secure as quantum technology advances.

You’ll Hear About:

●  The critical factors Dr. Mosca looks at when assessing risk.

●  The need for quantum risk assessments.

●  The current level of encryption available and how it performs.

●  Where Dr. Mosca sees the quantum industry going in the short term.

●  The new era we are entering into.

●  Does the hardware matter?

●  Where are quantum and encryption right now?

●  The importance of trust in the industry.

In part two, we’ll talk about how to get more underrepresented groups interested in Web3 and DeFi, what Maggie has learned about onboarding more people onto DeFi and the SheFi approach to education.

In this podcast, you’ll hear about:

●  How Maggie became interested in blockchain.

●  The evolution of blockchain into DeFi and Web3.

●  The challenges with scalability in blockchain.

●  How less friction around smart contracts would help with DeFi adoption.

●  The building blocks that can create the foundation for more mainstream adoption.

Lauren breaks down the problems Ceramic is trying to solve and how we should understand digital identity in this new world.  

You'll Hear About:

●  The difference in building Web3 applications compared to Web2.

●  Moving away from centralization and getting users back in control of their own data.

●  Different use cases for people building Web3.

●  The importance of identity in building Web3.

●  Where Ceramic lives in the ecosystem of Web3.

●  How protocols like Ceramic are helping to enable innovation.

●  Will existing data in Web2 move into Web3?

●  The role reputations will play in digital identity.

●  Crossover potential in centralized and decentralized projects. 

●  What a Web3 internet looks like.

You’ll Hear About:

● What trust means to Nadav.

● The need for transparency when dealing with data.

● Users taking back control of their data, preferences and ID.

● How advertising needs to change and adapt.

● Why conversations matter to Nadav and OpenWeb.

● Where is the line between moderation and censorship?

● How OpenWeb looks to encourage positive online interactions.

● Evolving comments into conversations.

● The balance of ML vs. people when it comes to moderation.

● How OpenWeb demonstrates value to advertisers and publishers

You’ll Hear About:

●   DuckDuckGo as an alternative option for consumers in a data-driven world.

●   Apple’s approach to data collection.

●   Consumer concerns surrounding data collection.

●   The evolving way the digital economy is regulated.

●   A potential shift in the gig economy with a focus on workers.

●   How mega-companies will impact start-ups and innovation.

●   The importance of radical incrementalism when it comes to regulation.

You’ll Hear About:

● What is self-sovereign identity?

● Digital trust and what falls under that umbrella.

● How issuers, holders and verifiers make up the trust triangle.

● Similarities and differences between SSI and crypto.

● The challenges with interoperability when establishing an ecosystem of digital trust.

● What it will take to get SSI into the mainstream.

● How this might create opportunities for tech founders.

You'll hear about:

• Cybersecurity attacks and how to prevent them
• Ways to spread out your risks
• Hiring security experts internally or externally
• Detecting potential security threats
• Drawing the line to protect the company while being mindful of legislation and employees' rights
• Responding to a DDoS attack
• What we can learn from the SolarWinds attack
• Anonymity and what it means for your data

In this episode of the Georgian Podcast, we’ll be talking to Mike Potter, Co-Founder & CEO of Rewind, to understand how cloud-based storage systems work and what it means for your data.

You’ll hear about:

·      How cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) storage providers backup their data and what that means for your information

·       Why third party applications can cause some issues

·      The benefits and inner workings of Rewind's cloud backup system

·      Building a culture within a company

In this episode of the Georgian Podcast, we’ll be talking to Zeze Peters, Founder & CEO of Beam.city DNA, to understand how digital advertising and AI go hand in hand.

You’ll hear about:

· How to spend your advertising budget effectively

· The future of A.I in digital advertising

· Striking a balance between the creative side and the business side of advertising

· The effects of COVID-19 on retailers and what retail is going to look like in the future

· Fundraising as a black entrepreneur

You’ll hear about digital ethics and how it fits with ESG, the need to engage with stakeholders and find out what matters to them and how the AI Act will affect those working in high-risk areas.

David Aponte and Demetrios Brinkmann are our guests on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. David is a Software Engineer at Microsoft with a focus on MLOps. Demetrios is the Community Coordinator for the MLOps Community and also works in the ethical AI space. Together they will break down MLOps and why it is so important.

You’ll Hear About:

• The MLOps community and how it has grown.
• How MLOps compares with other fields and what sets it apart.
• The challenges of integrating ML with product management.
• How the MLOps community works to address accuracy and bias.
• The need to diversify the community with not only technical side of things but also the ethical.
• How the cloud has influenced the rate of development.

Peter Poon and Yevgeniy Vahlis are our guests on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Peter is the head of Canadian Digital Product Management Capabilities and Innovation at BMO. Yevgeniy is the founder and head of BMO AI Labs and they will show you how a large enterprise can find that sweet spot between creating a small team of experts and building enthusiasm for emerging technology across an entire company.

You’ll Hear About:

• Establishing a team to drive AI across the enterprise.
• The challenges in figuring out how to apply AI to the vast amounts of data at BMO.
• Finding a basic use case that impacts many customers, alerting them to cash flow shortfalls.
• How they provide a nudge to change consumer behavior using a very simple interface with complex deep learning behind it.
• The need to set up privacy measures from the very beginning to clear a path for you to do great work.
• The overwhelmingly positive feedback and customer engagement to the recommendations.
• Other use cases across BMO and the other teams desire to get on the AI train.

Paul Roetzer is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the founder and CEO of Marketing AI Institute and PR 20/20. Paul helps transform marketing by focusing on the current and future potential of AI, machine learning, deep learning and cognitive computing.

You’ll Hear About:

• The marketing industry’s understanding and adoption rate of AI technology.     
• Making machine learning more approachable through demonstrating use cases.      
• The effectiveness of technology in elevating content strategies.      
• The value in having different perspectives and backgrounds on teams to avoid bias.     
• Ensuring that the tools you are using integrate with one another to avoid siloed data.     
• Different AI marketing roles that will be needed in the future.

You’ll Hear About:

• Jeff’s background in video game development and how it led to his startup Giant Otter.
• Why context is the key to conversations.
• Drift’s acquisition of Giant Otter and how the two benefitted each other.
• How using a “human in the loop” leads to smarter chatbots, and avoids pitfalls of the past.
• How Drift’s platform allows non-experts to build complex bots.
• The need for multidisciplinary and diverse teams when working on bots.

You’ll Hear About:

Vivian Byrwa, our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, discusses how cultural guardrails can reinforce policy and technical guardrails. Vivian is the privacy counsel at Spotify and has close to a decade of experience focusing on privacy and its implications for companies. 

You’ll Hear About:

• Privacy culture and how internal attitudes can affect data protection and privacy.
• The importance of policy and technical guardrails but also the need for cultural guardrails.
• The difference between being compliant and doing the right thing, when privacy and ethics intersect.

Resources:

• 50 Stats Showing Why Companies Need to Prioritize Privacy
• The Modern Privacy Program Needs Cultural Guardrails

Who is Vivian Byrwa?

Vivian Byrwa has spent nearly a decade focused on privacy and how it affects companies. Her focus on privacy began while working at Herrick, Feinstein LLP and later at Davis & Gilbert LLP. She joined Spotify in 2019 as the first and only U.S. based privacy counsel and helps develop and maintain Spotify’s global privacy program with a focus on advertising and marketing, creator related issues and student data.

Drummond Reed is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is the Chief Trust Officer at Evernym - a company at the forefront of a rapidly growing movement to decentralize digital identity. Their approach is called Self Sovereign Identity or SSI, and it makes the process of proving your identity in a digital space much more straightforward.

You’ll Hear About:

• Self Sovereign Identity or SSI, and how a Digital Wallet and Digital Agent will streamline the process of sharing the necessary credentials within the digital realm.
• The role biometrics play as one piece of the “chain of trust” of authentication.
• How SSI differentiates itself from federated identity when it comes to privacy and security.
• The possibility to store not only your credentials in your digital wallet but also micro-credentials.
• The growth and adoption of verifiable credentials and SSI.
• The different roles of Evernym and Sovrin Foundation.

Who is Drummond Reed?

Drummond has spent over two decades working on Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust frameworks. He joined Evernym as Chief Trust Officer after Evernym’s acquisition of Respect Network, where he was CEO, co-founder, and co-author of the Respect Trust Framework. Drummond has served as co-chair of the OASIS XDI Technical Committee since 2004, the new semantic data interchange protocol that implements Privacy by Design. Prior to starting Respect Network, Drummond was Executive Director of two industry foundations: the Information Card Foundation and the Open Identity Exchange, the international not-for-profit clearinghouse for Internet trust frameworks. He has also served as a founding board member of the OpenID Foundation, ISTPA, XDI.org, and Identity Commons.

On this special edition of the Georgian Impact Podcast we’ll be getting insights on this fascinating topic from Alistar Croll, Beckie Wood, Leslie Fein, Harper Reed, and Jana Eggers. A group uniquely qualified to bring an expanded view of the role of an AI Project Manager.

You’ll hear about:

• The unique challenges of scale-stage growth, and what it means to software developers.
• How AI Product Managers must navigate between: ethics, technology, business acumen, statistics, design, and customer development.
• The importance of Product/Market fit, and how tools like V2MOM can help.
• How the wrong team, set of testers, or almost anything else can make ML and AI products behave badly.
• The need for a diverse team working towards a common goal, and why sometimes you need to step outside your comfortable tech bubble.

Who is Alistar Croll?

Alistar Croll is a visiting Professor at Harvard Business School and teaches a course entitled “Big Data and Critical Thinking.” Alistar has been directly involved in the launch of major conferences such as: O’Reilly’s Strata, Techweb’s Cloud Connect, and Interop’s Enterprise Cloud Summit. He graduated from Dalhousie University with a B.Com (Honours) and an advanced major in Strategic Marketing.

Who is Beckie Wood?

Becky Wood is an advisor at VSCO, and was recently Vice President of Product Management and Insights at Pandora. While there she led both music and non-music content strategic product expansion. Along with her team, Beckie helped launch podcasts for millions of listeners and deliver personalized recommendations. She also provided data-and-user research insights that drove product strategy and prioritization decisions.

Who is Leslie Fein?

Leslie Fein is an advisor at a firm based in San Francisco called Enjoy the Work. Leslie and Enjoy the Work partner with CEO’s and founders of startups through seed and even as far as series C and D funding, teaching the craft of entrepreneurship.

Who is Harper Reed?

Harper Reed is a technologist that predicts the future for a living. As the CTO of the Obama 2012 campaign Harper brought a tech mentality to a political level. As the co-founder of Modest Inc. Harper garnered the attention of PayPal with the technology he developed leading to PayPal acquiring them only a few years after launch. His roles as Head of Commerce and Entrepreneur-in-Residence at PayPal helped him guide his team into the future of e-commerce.

Harper is an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow, sits on the advisory board for IIT Computer Science and the Royal United Service Institute, and is on the Cornell College Board of Trustees. 

Who is Jana Eggers?

Jana Eggers is the CEO of Nara Logics, a neuroscience-based artificial intelligence company with a focus on turning big data into smart actions. Her understanding of customers and technology comes from technology and executive positions at Intuit, Blackbeard, Lycos and as CEO of Spreadshirt. Jana received her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science at Hendrix College, followed by graduate school at PRI and supercomputing research at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Jes Ellacott is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Jes manages the content marketing and creative services team at Fiix Software, which is upending the way companies track equipment maintenance. Fiix is on a mission to bring trust to the forefront of everything they do, and Jes is leveraging her background in journalism to build trust among customers, employees, and the broader community.

You’ll hear about:

• Why communicating trust as a core value internally is an important early step.
• How citing sources, talking to experts, avoiding clickbait titles, and adhering to journalistic ethics can build trust in marketing.
• Trust in the era of COVID-19, and how empathy in messaging is key.
• How a data driven company stepped back from hard metrics to build trust through culture change.
• The value of pointing out and encouraging trust building behaviours at all levels of a company.

Who is Jes Ellacott?

Jes Ellacott is Content Marketing Manager at Fiix Software, a cloud-based CMMS is disrupting the market by revolutionizing how thousands of companies worldwide schedule, organize, and track maintenance. She has a degree in Journalism from Carleton University, and a Graduate Certificate in Documentary Production from Algonquin College. Before Fiix she was Blog Editor and Content Manager for Technavio.

Dan Wu is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. Dan is a superstar commentator in the privacy and data governance space. He’s leveraging his Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Policy and his law degree to help protect people and their data. Dan believes that the best way to do that is through data strategies formed by cross-functional teams that include input from governance, analytics, marketing and product departments.

You’ll hear about:

• What we can learn from the botched launch of the Apple Credit Card
• Why every company needs a data strategy
• How regulation, like the Algorithmic Transparency Act, could add protections for consumers and accountability for business
• Offensive vs. defensive data strategy – HBR Article
• Where responsibility for inaction leading to data breaches should lie
• Data risks businesses face, including biased algorithms, sharing data with the wrong people, 3rd party data breaches, insider incidents, and technical mistakes
• Why data ethics need to go beyond what’s strictly legal in order to establish and maintain trust.
• AI Now’s 2019 report that touches on ethical inequality risk factors in AI

Who is Dan Wu?

Dan Wu is the Privacy Counsel & Legal Engineer at Immuta, a leading automated data governance platform for analytics. He writes about purposeful data strategy on TechCrunch and LinkedIn. He holds a J.D. & Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Kundan Kumar is our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast. He is co-founder of Lyrebird AI, and now heads up research at Descript. Descript is making it vastly easier for anyone to manipulate audio, even to the point of inserting words that were never actually said. This brings up obvious ethical, trust, and security questions. Fortunately that’s something Kundan and the company are putting a lot of thought into.

You’ll hear about:

• How anyone can create a voice-double, and the ethical questions that raises.
• Automating common audio editing tasks like removing ums and ah, and bleeping swear words.
• Georgian’s podcast production workflow – and how we manipulate what you hear.
• How these new technologies are, in many ways, evolutions of exiting machine-assistance features like auto-correct, and Google’s Smart Compose
• Maintaining trust when trickery is effortless and skepticism is ubiquitous.

Who is Kundan Kumar?

Kundan Kumar is Research Lead at Descript and co-founder of Lyrebird AI. He is a PHd student at Mila, Quebec’s artificial intelligence institute, where he works on generative models for sequences e.g. speech and music.

Our guest on this special edition of the Georgian Impact Podcast is Ben Wilde, our VP of Business Development & Marketing. Ben manages a team in Toronto from his home office in New Zealand. He’s been leading from afar for years, and shares his tips and insights with all those adapting to new ways of working during the global pandemic and beyond.

You’ll hear about:

• How work may change forever A.C. (After Coronavirus)
• Informal management of remote teams when you can’t pop by their desks
• Etiquette for video meetings and time-shifted communication
• Creating boundaries and structure when working from home
• Building trust through casual conversations and social bonding
• Being conscious about your approach to remote work

Who is Ben Wilde?

Ben Wilde is Vice President Business Development & Marketing at Georgian Partners and a member of the Georgian Impact team. He provides input to overall strategy including product management and product marketing.

Ben has more than 20  years of experience in the software industry, and has held senior product management and strategy roles at IBM, Informix, and a range of early and growth-stage startups. Ben holds a BTech (Hons) in product development from Massey University, New Zealand.

Our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast is Ji Chao Zhang. He says that data scientist may be the most important job of the 21st century – but also the least understood. Luckily, Ji Chao understands it better than most – he’s the Director of Software Engineering here at Georgian Partners, and he and his team have consulted with scores of companies around our thesis areas including Applied Artificial Intelligence.

You’ll hear about:

• Our in-house software development, including our work on TensorFlow Privacy
• How data scientists differ from data analysts
• Tips for building your in-house machine learning team
• Our Machine Learning Maturity Framework
• Andrew Ng’s AI Transformation Playbook
• The value of an iterative approach to ML

Who is Ji Chao Zhang?

Ji Chao Zhang is Georgian Partners’ Director of Software Engineering and a member of the Georgian Impact team. In that role he leads our internal software engineering efforts and supports portfolio engagements.

Prior to joining Georgian Partners, Ji Chao was a Software Development Engineer at Amazon, where he worked on the design and development of the data platform, business analytics and machine learning systems to support supply chain optimization and fulfillment.

Ji Chao holds a Master of Computer Science in computer software engineering from the University of Ottawa and a Bachelor of Engineering in computer science from Zhengzhou University.

Our guest on this episode of the Georgian Impact Podcast, Mary Gray, co-authored Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass and if you are growing your Machine Learning and AI investments Mary’s got some thoughts on the bad and the good behind what type of workers and workforce you might be needing to be able to proudly talk to your customers about the company you strive to be.

You’ll hear about: 

• The manual work behind many AI models 
• A new model for employment relations 
• How micro-employment platforms guarantee the skills you need
• How to do good by your contract employees 

Who is Mary Gray?

Mary Gray is Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and a fellow at the E.J. Safra Center for Ethics Fellow and Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Faculty Affiliate at Harvard University. 

Using the tools of anthropology and critical media studies, Mary looks at how material conditions and everyday uses of technologies transform people’s lives.

Her most recent book, "Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass," co-authored with computer scientist Siddharth Suri, explores the lives of people paid to train artificial intelligence and, increasingly, serve as “humans in the loop” delivering on-demand services. 

In this week’s podcast Jon Prial is joined by Tara Khazaei, Chief Data Scientist, National AI Team, Customer Success Unit at Microsoft. Jon and Tara talk about how domain knowledge, as well as statistical intuition, make for more successful outcomes in machine learning projects. They discuss performance through the lens of projects Tara and her team have led at Microsoft. 

In this episode you’ll hear: 

• Why you need enough, high-quality data 
• The importance of iterating and validating your approach to achieve the best performance
• The challenges bias and explainability pose to ML projects
• Why domain knowledge is crucial for successful outcomes
  
• How to decide when your model is ready to go into  production and why you need to go beyond accuracy 

Who is Taraneh Khazaei?

Taraneh Khazaei is Chief Data Scientist on the National AI Team,  Customer Success Unit at Microsoft. In this role, she advises Microsofts clients on how to adopt machine learning. Working with clients, Tara has researched the state of the art of speech to text methods and technologies, developed deep sequential modeling methods (e.g., use of embeddings, RNNs, and transformer networks) on terabytes of clickstream data to model and predict user online behavior and designed and developed an ML pipeline to predict the market price of a vehicle. 

You’ll hear about: 

• Developing a standard for personal data management 
• How to develop standards for products and services that are trustworthy 
• Why business models are the foundation of trust
• How consumers can manage their data across businesses 

Who is Lisa Levasseur?

Lisa Levasseur is the founder of the Me2BAlliance. Lisa has been a software professional for over 30 years, with her formative career years spent at Motorola, developing software for mobile phone infrastructure. M2B’s aim is to review technology products so you know right away if a product or service is treating you right.

You'll hear about:

• The basics of the blockchain as an infrastructure layer (1:10)
• The role of the ledger in the blockchain (3:27)
• Bitcoin and Ethereum as blockchain applications (5:12)
• The implications of this technology for security (8:03)
• The adoption of blockchain technology in the financial services industry (9:54)
• What developers and business professionals should be doing about blockchain (12:45)

Who Is William Mougayar?

William Mougayar is the leading blockchain industry analyst and thought leader. As a long time industry insider, William is a prolific researcher, writer and theorist who has been described as the most sophisticated blockchain business thinker. His views and insights are well respected worldwide.William is the General Partner at Virtual Capital Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund, and currently on the Board of Directors of OB1, the OpenBazaar open-source protocol that is pioneering decentralized peer-to-peer commerce, a Board Advisor to the Ethereum Foundation, a member of OMERS Ventures Board of Advisors, an Advisory Board member to the Coin Center and Bloq, and founder of Startup Management.

You’ll hear about:

• Why companies are building their own data science teams (1:56) -What data scientists actually do (3:18)
• The four skill sets necessary for data science (4:07)
• Why it’s important to start your data science team with a product manager (5:08)
• How to approach data to glean insights (6:46)
• How data science needs change as companies scale (9:15)
• Why companies struggle to find data scientists and build data science teams (11:10)
• How to find and vet data scientists (13:10)
• When it does and doesn’t make sense to outsource data science (16:01)
• What factors determine whether data science teams succeed or fail (22:07)

You'll hear about:

• Welltok and its anchor platform, CaféWell (0:39)
• The company’s partnership with IBM Watson (2:14)
• The insights Welltok has gathered from its artificial intelligence projects (4:17)
• How companies can leverage artificial intelligence effectively (8:56)
• How to combat skepticism about artificial intelligence within your organization(10:38)

You'll hear about:

• Why keeping development and production environments separate is essential (1:15)
• The role of developers in security (5:09)
• Working with third-party vendors for security (7:54)
• Key security trends that businesses should be focusing on (9:25)

You'll hear about:

• The origins of Real Ventures (0:53)
• How Real Ventures supports its portfolio companies (5:24)
• The tech trends affecting today’s startups (8:32)
• How machine learning is relevant for startups (9:10)
• Acquiring talent to do machine learning well (14:04)
• How the security equation is changing for young companies (19:28)

You’ll hear about:

• Jeremy’s definition of machine learning (5:42)
• The other areas of pattern recognition fall under machine learning (6:46)
• Why businesses should care about machine learning (9:17)
• How machine learning is evolving as a tool for solving business problems (12:45)
• Realistic applications for machine learning today versus expectations (13:39)
• The complexities of applying machine learning (16:27)
• The current state for ensuring model quality in production (19:16)
• Incorporating safeguards into systems (21:12)

You'll hear about:

• Why getting your value proposition right matters so much (1:50)
• The importance of having a truly defensible business (4:42)
• How scalability fits in (5:44)
• The implications of doubling your revenue (7:45)
• How churn can drive strategy (10:12)
• Competition and the rules of engagement (13:00)
• Being purposeful when working on renewals (15:32)
• The key elements of an exit (16:30)

You'll hear about:

• Why Montréal is one of the world’s most dynamic cities for machine learning (0:50)
• The types and stage of companies that Real Ventures typically invests in (7:51)
• What it takes to incorporate machine learning into an early stage company (8:53)
• Data acquisition and the transferability of deep learning models to other domains (12:04)
• The University of Montréal’s use of models for and research around image analysis (15:40)
• How the University’s research is coming to market and the opportunities that creates (19:17)
• The availability of data and its implications and opportunities are for early-stage companies (22:10)
• How deep learning can facilitate smarter decision-making (24:57)
• What the open sourcing of Google’s TensorFlow means for deep learning (27:40)
• Typical applications for Theano (29:45)