2022-09-20 Rethinking Social Data with Dr. Kenton White

Hosted by CapCHI

10 years ago Social Media broke into the mainstream. Facebook, Twitter and Reddit promised an unfiltered view into our collective consciousness. Today influencers and bots actively game the system, skewing perception towards their agendas. There are still insights that can be mined from Social Data, but with ever increasing effort. At Advanced Symbolics we developed a tool called askpolly that rethinks Social Data from the ground up, making finding those insights effortless. I’ll discuss every aspect of Social Data we considered in askpolly’s development and how at every step we defined the user experience and tackled tough technological challenges.


Kenton White has been working in the AI space since 2003, when he was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer for Distil Interactive. Distil Interactive used artificial intelligence to evaluate worker performance in training simulations. In 2009 Canadian Standards Association, North America’s largest corporate training provider, acquired Distil Interactive. Following the acquisition, Dr. White was a Professor of Computer Science, first with Carleton University and then with University of Ottawa. Today, Dr. White is co-founder and Chief Scientist of Advanced Symbolics, an artificial intelligence company.


Dr. White studied Physics at University of California, Berkeley (go Bears!) and holds a Ph.D. in Physics / Applied Mathematics from The University of Arizona (go Wildcats!). He is a past chair of the Canada’s National Science and Engineering Research Council’s Electrical and Computer Engineering committee and a Special Advisor to the Defence Science Advisory Board. Dr. White has published over 80 peer reviewed journal and conference articles, 7 patents, and has been a featured and keynote speaker at several international AI conferences.


To learn more about Kenton’s work see:
 

 

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CapCHI (www.capchi.org) is a social and professional society of people who work as user interface designers, researchers, educators, software developers, web designers, graphic designers and human factors engineers in and around Canada’s National Capital Region. Founded in 1991, CapCHI’s goal is to bring together local professionals interested in how humans and computers interact, in a relaxed and informal atmosphere. 

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