During the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, there were multiple lessons provided to the world. In this talk, I set the stage for the discussion, highlight the issues we faced (and still face), I speak to an effort that contributed to help address one of those issues, then speak to future challenges and our responsibilities going forward.
3. • Chief Technology Officer, Hodos
Health
• Executive Leadership Advisor,
Democracy Works
• Chief Security Officer, Citizens for
Citizens
• VP of Data, U.Group
• Chief Technology Officer, Pearl Long
Term Care Solutions
• Chief Technology Officer, The
TeleHealth Market
• Chief Information Officer, Institute
for Health Metrics and Evaluation
• Deputy Chief Data Officer, US
Department of Commerce
• Presidential Innovation Fellow, US
White House (Obama
Administration)
• Researcher, IBM Almaden.
Background
• Fellow, Healthcare Information and
Management Systems Society
(HIMSS).
• Fellow, British Computer Society
• Innovator Fellow, Cambia Grove
• Distinguished Engineer, ACM
• Senior Member, IEEE
• IEEE Technical Achievement
Award for "pioneering contributions
to Secure and Private Data
Management"
• Master Inventor, IBM
• Invention Ambassador, AAAS-
Lemelson Foundation
• Founding Member, New Voices in
Sciences, Engineering and Medicine,
National Academy of Sciences
• Laureate, Global Young Academy
• Commissioner, Seattle Human Rights
Commission
6. Technology
• the application of scientific knowledge
for practical purposes, especially in
industry.
• machinery and equipment developed
from the application of scientific
knowledge.
7. Environment
A solution should factor in elements from each of these categories.
Some problems may not require a technical solution.
Business Legal
Technical Societal
8. The Nature of Technology
Tech X is Good Tech Y is Bad
16. Elders - the best predictive
indicator for the rest of us
17. 1. Decreased Standard of Living
• Lowering purchase power
2. Deteriorating Mental Health
• Increase in loneliness
3. Increased susceptibility
• To their echo chambers
• To misinformation
4. Increase in abuse and neglect
• People, substances, things
Immediate Problems:
The Rest Of Us
19. Jennifer for
COVID-19:
An NLP-Powered
Chatbot Built for the
People and by the
People to Combat
COVID-19
Misinformation
Yunyao Li, Tyrone Grandison, Patricia Silveyra, Ali Douraghy, Xinyu Guan, Thomas
Kieselbach, Chengkai Li, and Haiqi Zhang. 2020. Jennifer for COVID-19: An NLP-
Powered Chatbot Built for the People and by the People to Combat Misinformation.
In Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 at ACL 2020, Online.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
21. create a platform of evidence-based
information from reliable sources, curated
by scientists, that the public would find
easy to interact with.
22. Design Consideration Design Choices
Rapid Development
Ease of Access
Ease of Maintenance
Quality Assurance
Extensibility
Using an existing platform
Chatbot available on multiple
ways
Maintainable without
programming by crowd
Rigorous process with clear
separation of tasks with
different levels of oversights
Extensible without
programming
24. Juji Base System
• Expressive visual dialog flow design
• Maintainable directly via UI
• Deployable as Web and Facebook bots
• Extensible via QA pairs in spreadsheet
• IR-style QA to match a user question against an
existing question
[Xiao, et al CHI’2020]
Design
Teste
Deployment
Launch Develop
< 24 hours
March 7
March 8
25. Main Capabilities: QA Pairs
• Crowdsourced: Majority of the efforts
• Auto-Generation: With manually-curated templates +CDC/WHO data
Current focus: statisticson case and death#s.
28. Multilingual support
Plans to expand Jennifer to other languages were initiated.
Sofía (Spanish chatbot)
- QA pairs manually translated
from the Jennifer QA pairs.
- Maintained and manually
curated by a group of bilingual
Spanish-English certified medical
interpreters.
- Uses information from Spanish
language verified sources
29. Preliminary Results (as of June 18,2020)
• 1056 sessions
• 1,480 questions (excluding questions selected via menus)
• Answered 1,059 of them (response rate = 71%)
• Average engagement duration = 3 min 15 sec
• COVID-19 Question Bank (COQB)
https://www.newvoicesnasem.org/data-downloads
• 3,924 COVID-19-related questions in 944 groups
30. Lessons Learned
• People are eager to help.
• Process and communication are Important.
• Effective and dedicated management is critical.
• Human-machine conversation requires a
proactive design
31. Open Challenges
• Scalable Crowdsourced Fact Checking Platform
• Minimize human efforts without sacrificing quality
• Zero-Shot Empathetic Natural Language Generation
• Identify resources and compose answers
• Competing Information Sources and Public Trust
• Requires more than technical solutions
38. This is the best time to be ALIVE
Knowledge
Access
Drive
Commitment
39. What will YOU & GUST do?
To Solve the Most Pressing Problems Around You?
For the Community Around GUST?
For Kuwait?
40. • Mental Health
• There is a crisis looming globally
• How do we support?
• Misinformation and Disinformation
• It is easier to create an alternative reality than it is to
have evidence believed
• Proactive attack de-escalation
• Effective post-attack impact reduction
• Standard of Living
• What solutions can be deployed to improve Standard of
Living for everyone?
• It is a team effort
• Abuse & Neglect
• Elder abuse & neglect may not be cultural relevant
• Mechanisms to limit abuse & empower abused
41. • Equality for All
• Human Rights and Inclusion are non-negotiable
• Being a non-Kuwaiti living in Kuwait is hard
• It creates two separate worlds; one for ~30% of the population,
and another for the other ~70%.
• Roads and Traffic
• Smart roads? Identifying choke points and critical times?
Enabling smarter city planning and expansion?
• Educational Attainment
• 2018: Bachelors – 11.1%, Masters – 0.5% (Source: World
Bank)
• Land Use
• Technology can enable innovative uses of Kuwaiti land
• How can GUST Engineering, CS, and Data Science help?
Thank you to Dr Hussain and the entire organizing committee for inviting me.
I am inspired by the sessions, by the students, and by the discussions.
Today, I want to have a discussion. I am going to 1) share more about myself, 2) set the context on my perspective, 3) take you on a journey into the future, 4) tell you about a project I worked on during the first few months of the COVID-19 Global Pandemic, 5) Share some bad news, 6) share some good news, 7) issue a call to action, and finally share the lessons that I have learned during this time.
Let’s go.
First, people are normally confused when they look at LinkedIn or ask me what I do.
I am recovering academic – I love research. I love interacting with students. The rest I could do without.
I have worked in the Federal Government, Fortune 100, startups, nonprofits, consulting.
Currently, I am the Founder and Board Chairman of the nonprofit, The Data-Driven Institute. ….
Currently, I am the Director of Global Partner Technology Strategy for Public Sector for Microsoft.
Currently, I am adjunct faculty at the University of Technology Jamaica where I teach Software Engineering, CyberSecurity, and Data Science.
I have had a lot of roles. I aim to use my skills to improve the world around me.
During the first 2 years of the COVID-19, I have co-founded startups in chronic disease management, telehealth, and long term care.
I was also an Innovation Fellow for the parent company for a large healthcare provider and payer in the PNW, was in the founding cohort of a National Academies program, and co-chaired the Seattle Human Rights Commission.
I was that engaged because I firmly believe that those of us with the skills, knowledge, and abilities to positively contribute to society MUST do this.
It is not optional for me – and it is not optional for you.
I always like to start discussions ensuring that we are all talking from the same set of facts and with the same definitions.
Let’s talk Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship.
Let me first point out that Technology goes beyond Computers, Data, and Information. It refers to the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.
So, everything from a shovel in pre-industrial times to the steam engine in the 1st Industrial revolution, to the assembly line to in the 2nd Industrial Revolution to calculators and computers in the 3rd Industrial Revolution to Artificial Intelligence in the 4th Industrial Revolution are technology.
The things that I want to us to all understand is that:
Technology is a means to an end,
Technology does not exist in a vacuum. It is an embodiment of some “thing” that needs to get done – and it lives somewhere – it lives in an environment
Every single solution, technical or non-technical, has elements, components, constraints that address the factors in each of these categories.
Business refers to the business models and motivations driving investment and optimization decision by executives. e.g. Facebook’s business model and hyper growth constraints impact how they think about user solutions.
Legal refers to the laws and policies in place by all your governmental jurisdictions that dictate what can be legally done or not.
Technical refers to machinery and equipment necessary to solve the problem.
Societal refers to the cultural factors that dictate the acceptance/rejection of solution, that dictate the suitability of the solution for the intended user group, that highlight the social and behaviors elements that must be included.
Important to mention that not every problem requires a technology solution. (<-REPEAT).
Source: https://www.slideshare.net/tgrandison/realizing-the-potential-of-trust-management
Technology has no polarity – no charge
Technology is neutral.
The net effect or impact of technology occurs when a person sets a piece of technology to a specific purpose or use.
Quick Example: Clustering technologies that are commonplace in the AI world are used to provide you with movie recommendations. They have also been used to build online models of you so that companies like Cambridge Analytica can manipulate your behavior and steer elections and referendum in the direction of the clients.
Same technology. In different hands. Used for different purposes. One purpose: Okay. Sorta good. Another purpose: Definitely not good (for most people)
To drive innovation, one needs two things: Knowledge & Will.
Knowledge:
Knowledge of a meaningful problem.
Knowledge of people, how they experience the problem, and what the solution should be shaped like.
Foundational, Technical Knowledge to execute and bring solutions to life.
Knowledge of the landscape that every solution lives in, i.e. Business, Legal, Social.
Will:
The perseverance to constantly engage with your users and relentlessly believe in your path to push your idea into the world.
Now that we are all on the same page with regards to basics.
Let’s talk about what is to come.
And you are saying to yourself …. How accurate is your crystal ball?
Right now, looking back.
In the United States on February 29th, 2020, we had the first reported death from COVID-19 (that was heavily reported on by the media).
The deceased was a man in his sixties with no travel history to China living at the Evergreen Health Medical Center in Kirkland, Washington.
Two deaths that occurred on February 26th at a nearby nursing home would later be recorded as the first COVID-19 deaths to occur in the United States.
Source: https://khn.org/news/nursing-home-outbreak-spotlights-coronavirus-risk-in-elder-care-facilities/
Seniors are going through tough economic times. Most lived on fixed budgets, heavily dependent on the state and federal government. Those their incomes reduced and are making difficult financial decisions.
Seniors are dying from COVID at higher rates than other demographic groups.
Shelter-in-place and physical distancing measures are leading to “documented and reported” spikes in mental health episodes in our elderly communities.
The availability of medical care that older populations need is decreasing due to attention being needed elsewhere and the medical personnel themselves being impacted by COVID.
Our elders no longer have the option to be first responders because of the threat that COVID poses to them.
Before pandemic, Financial and physical abuse of the elderly were hidden and rampant Abuses in the world of elder guardianship in the US impacts an estimated 1.5 million adults with estates worth more than $250 billion—and that is rife with financial fraud and elder abuse. This has accelerated during the pandemic.
The world is getting older. This demographic shift is happening everywhere – and no country is immune to the consequences.
This is what happens when life expectancy increases and birth rates decline.
The speed of ageing, across all nations, is accelerating.
So, all countries are getting older faster.
This means that by 2050, 20% of the world will be people over 60.
Of those people, 80% of them will live in low- and middle-income countries.
, similar to other behavioral attacks, that threaten the social contracts between government and governed