Welcome to insideBIGDATA’s “Heard on the Street” round-up column! In this regular feature, we highlight thought-leadership commentaries from members of the big data ecosystem. Each edition covers the trends of the day with compelling perspectives that can provide important insights to give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We invite submissions with a focus on our favored technology topics areas: big data, data science, machine learning, AI and deep learning. Enjoy!

How changing the design process plays a huge role in preventing AI bias. Commentary by Holger Kuehnle, Creative Director at Artefact

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to become more embedded into our daily lives, there is an increased need for organizations to ensure their AI isn’t biased. While many organizations are actively looking to address AI bias, oftentimes, humans are manually filtering out violent, adult, or other explicit content from training content and text prompts. This means humans are defining to some extent what’s explicit or violent, etc., which is a huge source of bias that’s tied to the culture and norms of those making the calls on what content is filtered. There is a fundamental need for us to rethink how we design to ensure that AI bias and inequities don’t continue to creep into products, services and systems. Some ways to address this is for organizations to include diverse communities in all steps of the design process, assess if their products or systems are making assumptions about people’s identities or beliefs, and most importantly hold every team member accountable to the inclusion goals and plans set to ensure there’s shared responsibility amongst all stakeholders.

FBI Warns of Hackers Using Deepfakes to Apply for Remote Positions. Commentary by Stuart Wells, Jumio CTO

Modern day cybercriminals have the knowledge, tools and sophistication to create highly realistic deepfakes, while leveraging stolen personally identifiable information (PII), to pose as real people and deceive companies into hiring them. Posing as an employee, hackers can steal a wide range of confidential data, from customer and employee information to company financial reports. This FBI security warning is one of many that have been reported by federal agencies in the past several months. Recently, the U.S. Treasury, State Department and FBI released an official warning indicating that companies must be cautious of North Korean IT workers pretending to be freelance contractors to infiltrate companies and collect revenue for their country. Organizations that unknowingly pay North Korean hackers potentially face legal consequences and violate government sanctions. As workforce operations remain widely remote or hybrid, many organizations have no way of truly knowing the employees and contractors they are hiring are legitimate candidates. Tougher security measures are needed to detect deepfakes and thwart these highly advanced cybercriminals. Biometric authentication – which leverage a person’s unique human traits to verify identity – is a safe, secure security measure that can be incorporated into the workforce onboarding process and every employee login to guarantee the person signing into their systems is who they claim to be and not a hacker in disguise.

The Importance of Humanizing Digital Interactions and Data Measurements. Commentary by Jim Dwyer, Senior Vice President – Innovation and Transformation at Sutherland

As tech continues to drive our everyday activities, consumers are expecting brands to not only provide a seamless technical experience but also a flawless human experience. However, delivering both will be a challenge for many brands. It’s important that a company utilizes advanced digital tools such as analytics, AI (Artificial Intelligence), cognitive technology and automation, but how does a brand truly engage customers based on human-centered design? By providing their desired customers with a tool or application that overcomes or eases their challenges and creates an emotional connection. A recent study shared that customers who have an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will likely recommend the company at a rate of 71%, instead of the average 45%. In addition to the statistics above proving the effectiveness of engagement, we must also remember the critical importance of data when measuring a brand’s customer’s digital and human experiences. How will you know your success as a brand if you cannot measure it? Not only should data be captured in real time and easily accessible, but it also needs to be in standardized formats so advanced tools can easily access and analyze the data for insights that can drive deeper engagements and emotional connections. We are in an exciting time where artificial intelligence not only helps us connect with our audience but also helps us quantify the success of our goals, but it’s up to brands to truly ensure they’re utilizing the tools and resources available to us by providing the most exceptional digital human experience.

Proactive vs Reactive Data Quality. Commentary by Gleb Mezhanskiy, founding CEO of Datafold

Data quality has come into the forefront of the modern data stack discussion due to how much leverage is being layered on top of data warehouses. One of the first proposed solutions to data quality was monitoring. Monitoring tools use machine learning to observe data pipelines and send alerts, typically via Slack, when anomalies occur, or trends change drastically. These tools let you know when something looks irregular, but they do not know if this was an expected change or not. This results in data engineers receiving notifications that are complex to triage and may contain false positives. This approach is insufficient and ultimately creates more toil for an organization’s data engineers. Most issues that need to be addressed in data quality are bugs that are accidentally added when analytics engineers are updating models. Quality should and can be proactively dealt with in the pull request so that pipelines don’t break down in the first place. Receiving an alert about a broken production data pipeline is too late. A data quality tool should be proactive and help catch anomalies before they get merged.

RansomHouse Hackers Attack AMD. Commentary by Roshan Piyush, Security Research Engineer at Traceable AI

While ransomware isn’t a new attack method, double extortion is on the rise as hackers seek higher payouts. With this situation, the AMD systems were infiltrated and sensitive files were exfiltrated then used as leverage. The days of keeping bad actors out with prevention-focused solutions like firewalls are long gone. They will one day find a way in, and organizations like AMD, can address this by monitoring behavior on their systems. It’s important to utilize adaptive tools that establish a baseline of how users interact with a network and can flag unusual activity that could be indicative of a malicious attack. There’s a place for prevention today, but it needs to be supported by threat detection to minimize the impact of breach attempts.To add as the stolen data suggests AMD employees were using passwords as simple as ‘password,’ ‘123456’ and ‘Welcome1.’ The attackers could have possibly used credential stuffing (where known or breached credentials from other sources are stuffed on the login page to see which succeeds). It is much less a simple attack and could have been executed by anyone on the internet that can access login entry points to their systems. APIs here play an important role in providing attackers with the access vector, making API observability, monitoring, and rate-limiting important for organizations.

RansomHouse Hackers Attack AMD. Commentary by Gorka Sadowski, chief strategy officer, Exabeam

No matter how robust your security stack is, your organization will still be vulnerable to incidents stemming from compromised credentials. In this case, RansomHouse claims to have compromised AMD due to the use of weak passwords throughout the organization. According to the latest Verizon DBIR, over 80% of breaches involve brute force or the use of lost or stolen credentials. Credentials are interesting assets for bad actors, both to initially access an organization or to establish persistence. Proper training, feedback loops, visibility, and effective technical capabilities are the keys to defending against attacks caused by compromised credentials. A helpful defender capability is the development of a baseline for normal employee behavior that can assist organizations with identifying the use of compromised credentials and related intrusions. If you can establish normal behavior first, only then can abnormalities be known – a great asset in uncovering unknowingly compromised accounts.

AI and Blockchain Come Together for Greater Authenticity. Commentary by Cory Hymel, Director of Blockchain at Gigster

We’re still in the early stages of what is capable with AI and machine learning – and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what is possible with blockchain technology. Companies combining the value of blockchain and AI are seeing incredible benefits for FinServ, supply chains, DApps, and more. Explainable AI is one of the big steps towards improving data integrity and trust in AI models. Blockchain improves explainability by offering authenticity, a digital record for an easy audit trail, and better data security to ensure data integrity. Leveraging blockchain as a means to more easily transfer value between multiple AI system while maining provenance of decisions create incredible new opportunities in the space. As Web3 increases access to more and more data, blockchain-based business networks can benefit from AI for an enhanced ability to process and correlate data with new levels of speed and intelligence. Neither AI or blockchain are overhyped, and their combination will be something to watch out for going forward.

The Next Generation of Deepfakes. Commentary by Rijul Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of DeepMedia

At this point, most people are likely aware of synthetically generated deepfakes which often appear as viral videos of celebrities making outlandish statements on social media. However, a new use case for the technology is emerging which could threaten national security – deepfake aerial and satellite imagery. These are the next big threat in global intelligence, especially during times of conflict and rampant misinformation on social media. Though satellite images are currently used by governments and companies for a variety of legitimate reasons such as farming and environmental monitoring, adversaries will soon be able to use them to alter the location of roads, trees, buildings, and even the shoreline in satellite/drone videos. The result is a synthetic creation of undetectable, falsified topography. In addition to protecting deepfake datasets, it’s becoming more important than ever to put additional research into deepfake detection methods. To help the advancement of this important research, we recently released a dataset on Github which includes over 1M images of synthetic aerial images.

AI will revolutionize IVF. Commentary by Co-Founder and CEO of Oma Robotics, Gurjeet Singh, PhD

In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF) is the process of creating healthy embryos outside the human body and implanting them to an intended parent. Today, almost 100,000 births in the US happen due to IVF. IVF hasn’t changed in 30 years. It is a manual process, where an embryologist, hunched over a microscope, fertilizes each individual egg with an individual sperm cell. No wonder that 70% of all IVF cycles fail. Looking deeper, the IVF process breaks down to many visual decisions e.g. are the eggs mature enough to be fertilized? Which sperm cell should be used to fertilize each egg? Are the embryos developing at a healthy rate? Which cells should be taken from an embryo for a biopsy? What is the grade of each embryo? Which embryo should be implanted first? The upshot is that the results of IVF between labs and between embryologists vary significantly. A lot. There are labs that achieve a 30% rate of success on an average and there are labs that achieve a 65% rate of success. These are decisions based on vision and all the operations are based on manual dexterity. AI and robotics will revolutionize these by helping embryologists make the correct decisions consistently. Several companies are developing AI for embryo selection, and it’s feasible that AI will also be used to help identify the most promising sperm cell in a semen sample, to help evaluate the viability of an embryo, and/or to help ensure eggs are ready for fertilization.

AI’s Growth in Customer Service Elevating Satisfaction. Commentary by Rob McDougall, CEO of Upstream Works Software

The early hype around AI applications in the contact center indicated that it would replace agents. But, the reality is there will always be a need for human engagement, and AI applications are best suited to help and support agents. They can automate rules-based and data-collection tasks that don’t require a human agent, so the agent can focus on providing real value to the customer experience that only human-led support can provide. As staffing is one of the cornerstone problems of post-pandemic business, AI applications can help agents get up to speed faster and augment their capabilities with tools that enable more efficient and meaningful CX – and ultimately improve the agent’s job and reduce the risk of attrition. Artificial intelligence applications are best at complex information processing. The key is to set realistic expectations for AI projects and focus on the needs of the contact center to effectively address each problem without creating new silos. Augmenting agents’ abilities without adding unnecessary application complexity is central to improving the customer and agent experience with AI.

The ABCs of data mesh implementation. Commentary by Juan Sequeda, Principal Scientist at data.world

Data is the engine of modern businesses, but most enterprises are still struggling to find the optimal way to get the most value out of their data. The popularity of data mesh has increased dramatically over the past year, and with it a set of common issues during implementation. The Data Product ABCs — a framework developed by the team at data.world — is an emerging method to prevent these issues from arising in the first place. It includes questions every data leader should ask over five areas where stumbling blocks typically arise during data mesh implementation: Accountability, Boundaries, Contracts and Expectations, Downstream Consumers, and Explicit Knowledge. The questions themselves are essential building blocks to help scale a data mesh approach, such as: Who is responsible for this data? What is the data? What are the sharing agreements and policies? Who are the current consumers? What is the meaning of the data? Getting the answers to these questions at the start of implementation, throughout the process, and continually as an enterprise adapts is the solid foundation for enterprise data management.

Preparing for the Dog Days of Summer with Data Observability. Commentary by Rohit Choudhary, CEO, and Co-Founder of Acceldata

As many of us across the nation are experiencing right now, this summer is expected to be hotter than average across most of the US. With rising temperatures comes increased power consumption and potential blackouts as a result of an overwhelmed and antiquated power grid. Texas has already broken the record for power demand with air conditioners being the main culprit behind stressing out the state’s electric grid. During extreme weather events, we see just how unprepared the energy industry is for the surges in demand. Technology such as data observability, which offers an end-to-end view of the data pipeline, can ensure that energy companies have access to reliable data, and that they are equipped with usable, quality data about energy usage to prepare for and avoid spikes and subsequent outages. When something in the data pipeline breaks, business shuts down. However, by using data observability, activity spikes and potential data irregularities are immediately identifiable. Monitoring and management capabilities can be applied to set thresholds so that a potential issue can be addressed before an outage occurs. While Mother Nature can’t be controlled, the energy industry can leverage modern technology to prepare for and predict potential data disasters during the dog days of summer.

Analytics and data science are joining together. Commentary by Todd Mostak, CTO and co-Founder of HEAVY.AI

Traditionally, analytics and data science have been treated as two distinct disciplines, but the lines are blurring between the two and they’ve begun to converge – that’s a very positive development. Ultimately, the purpose of both analysts and data scientists is to uncover risks, opportunities and learnings and deliver new business value. Organizations just want actionable insights and answers from their data. The convergence between analytics and data science makes that easier, allowing different experts to work together toward a common goal. This trend allows organizations to get a more holistic perspective of a growing number of data sources. Analysts and data scientists can combine different workflows that have been siloed in the past. For example, Business Intelligence (typically done by general business analysts) and ML workflows (data scientists). By joining these workflows together, enterprises can significantly improve operational efficiency.

Secure in delivery. Commentary by Prakash Sethuraman, CISO at CloudBees

According to a recent survey, 95% of executive respondents think their software supply chain is secure, yet 58% say that if they experienced a software supply chain vulnerability, they have no idea what their company would do. While their confidence is high, they are simply unprepared. Far too many companies still think of security and compliance as a point-in-time activity, but in reality these functions need to be continuous. Security and compliance should be built into every stage of the software lifecycle – development, delivery, and production. Being “secure in development” means ensuring that your code is clean from the start by embedding security validation measures early in your development process. While secure in development resembles shifting left, shift left ignores the rest of the software supply chain and places too much burden on the developer while not dedicating enough resources to being secure in delivery and production as well. “Secure in delivery” is focused on controlling for all the things that can go wrong in the delivery process aside from the code itself. To ensure your code is secure in delivery, it’s important to automate everything, create access and privilege controls for the code and the pipeline itself, and create and update a catalog of immutable objects. The last essential stage is “secure in production,” which is the ability to keep track of an application—and the environment it’s running in—after it’s released. Even after code is deployed, you should still keep track of code because its connectedness is what makes a software supply chain whole and secure. In essence, an ideal approach is a continuous approach; a holistic process where application security is embedded throughout the software delivery supply chain.

How the combination of AI and human intelligence enhance logistics planning capabilities. Commentary by Marc Meyer, Chief Commercial Officer at Transmetrics

Today, most of the organizations have an extensive pool of data that they can leverage to improve their operations and planning. The logistics industry is just another great example of that – there is so much transactional and IoT data coming from sensors, sorting stations, vehicles, etc. that it becomes impossible for human brain to plan the most optimal and efficient route for every shipment that the organization transports. Given this context, AI can enhance humans’ capabilities and improve the efficiency of logistics planning. By automating tedious, repetitive and time consuming data-related tasks, AI can enable planners to focus on delivering service excellence. For example, the current logistics planning mostly relies on legacy solutions such as Excel, and different planning departments of the same organization might not have access to the single source of truth, leading to errors and inefficiencies in planning. With AI-powered systems, all the planning work can be centralized and calculations can be performed in the background, so planners can choose the most optimal scenarios for transporting an item. On top of that, at the core of the synergy between AI and Human intelligence lies the “Human-in-the-Loop” concept. Essentially, it means that planners always have a choice not to accept the system suggestions, or to update the data in the system based on their experience or upcoming business objectives that the system might not be aware of. Considering that the whole industry is suffering from a lack of talent, combining Human and Artificial Intelligence can bring financial and environmental benefits to organizations without the need to grow their teams.

What’s The Likelihood That AI Will Ever Become Sentient? Commentary by Justin Harrison, Founder and CEO of  YOV, Inc. (You, Only Virtual)

The line between synthetic voices and real ones has been blurring for years but AI is never going to be ‘sentient’ in the ways we’re being made to be afraid of now. A major qualifier for something being sentient is being aware of its own existence and impending death— and that’s strongly based upon ingrained imperatives that a machine simply doesn’t have. Furthermore, all human and animal motivation is based on emotion. Emotions are based on biological directives, so even if a program became aware of its own existence, it would be devoid of the kind of motivations we attribute to ‘sentient’ beings.

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The post Heard on the Street first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

After experiencing a fatal accident and also learning about his Mom’s condition, Justin decided to take action, and with determination and perseverance, gives us a revolutionary concept that might change the way we think about death. We had the pleasure to chat with Justin about his journey to develop YOV. A journey that was challenging, insightful, and made a difference in his life.

More About Justin and YOV

In 2019, Justin Harrison was staring down death on two fronts… his own, from a life-threatening motorcycle accident, and his mother’s imminent death from a terminal cancer diagnosis—both occurring within three months. Presented with the thought of overwhelming grief for his mother and the family he would leave behind, Justin began to wonder what if … what if he and his family members did not have to say goodbye? What if there was a way to replicate those personal interactions and continue to receive encouraging advice from Mom? Now there is. Introducing You, Only Virtual, Inc. (YOV).

In less than eight months, YOV (pronounced, You’ve) has three patents pending —one of which is allowed— that position this startup as a pioneer and the first to develop an application to archive one’s persona based on emotional and sentimental interaction with one’s closest loved ones.

With its IP-protected breakthrough technology, on March 1, 2021, YOV  premiered the beta version of its app and allowed 10,000 users to download the YOV messaging app and begin archiving their virtual persona from real, ongoing conversations with their four closest loved ones or friends. Once one individual eventually passes on, the remaining individuals in that YOV circle can begin interacting with their loved one’s virtual persona in a way that recreates treasured nuances and inflections in their one-on-one communication. To receive an invitation to join the YOV Founder’s Club and participate in the six-month beta, visit www.WhatIsYOV.com.

“Simply put, this is an unprecedented opportunity. We’re offering individuals an opportunity to be the first in the world to begin archiving their interactions with the four individuals closest to them so that when one of them passes on, the others can maintain a connection that is authentic, nuanced, and unique to their individual relationships,” states YOV founder and CEO, Justin Harrison. “And in within a few years, when this type of communication is commonplace, those who didn’t seize the opportunity to begin building unique personas with their loved ones while they were still alive, will realize the opportunity was missed—forever,” says Harrison.

The YOV app in beta form will allow each user to create a permission-based circle of four loved ones with whom the user will interact. YOV conducts machine learning and personality assessment to build unique virtual persona for each individual in the YOV circle. YOV will archive data until one party passes away—at which time— the remaining YOV circle members can then interact with the unique AI, via text or voice communication in phase one, leading to an eventual 3D persona via video in phase two, with additional AR / VR capabilities, in phase three. (See YOV in action.)

The app is free with premium options to speed up the development of one’s persona. Once a persona is complete and being used, subscription pricing kicks in. However, individuals who joined the Founder’s Club in March 2021 received $1 per month subscription pricing in perpetuity for all YOV services. Founder’s Club members also received four invitations to bring their four closest loved ones into their YOV circle. These four individuals will also receive $1/per month pricing in perpetuity (once subscription pricing becomes applicable)

While the idea of building one’s digital representation may sound new and a bit off-putting to some, the concept is not new and big tech has filed a patent to enter this space. Around the world today, millions have friendships with virtual companions, receive therapy from chatbox therapists, and some share their bed with human-like robots—all based on Artificial Intelligence that continues to learn as individuals interact with it.

However, YOV is distinct in that it doesn’t seek to create a new, virtual entity, nor create a public persona of someone. YOV seeks to maintain a real-life connection with those closest to us. Utilizing proprietary technology, YOV is the only company creating unique, personality-based personas derived from actual, permission-based communication between two individuals over time— designed to offer one a sense of comfort and connection.

A first-of-its-kind, YOV features:

• Unique virtual personas custom-built for each set of interactions.
• Re-creation of treasured nuances and inflections in interactions with loved ones.
• Seamless user experience that makes communication feel authentic and real.
• Built-in psychological expertise combined with AI to sustain and evolve personas over the long term.

YOV founder and CEO Justin Harrison, who has a background in clinical psychology, believes it is essential that YOV reflect the nuances in personal communication because individuals are different with each person with whom they interact.

“YOV isn’t creating a public persona designed to run a company once someone is deceased, YOV is purely about emotion and personal connectivity,” shares Harrison. Our app is the only platform being developed in this space that recognizes that my communication with my wife is very different from my communication with my brother. What makes YOV authentic is that we’re not building one virtual persona, we’re building many different personas— based on real-life, one-on-one, and small group interactions within the group of five individuals within a YOV circle,” affirms Harrison.

Due to the genuine and personal nature of the persona being developed, YOV personas are custom-built and cannot be created posthumously from social media messages alone. The intelligence is built from one’s, actual, one-on-one, personal interaction with loved ones. YOV’s approach also has a very useful benefit—and that is that YOV users are likely to find themselves more intentional and thoughtful in their communication—and according to Harrison, “That’s a good thing.”

About YOV

Based in Los Angeles, California, You, Only Virtual, Inc. (YOV) is a digital platform that recognizes the unique bonds between loved ones and enables authentic, posthumous one-on-one communications. YOV utilizes patent-pending technology powered by interaction-centric machine learning algorithms that analyze both real-time and archived message threads to build virtual personas that are virtually as complex and context-sensitive as the individuals they emulate. Virtual personas are seamlessly introduced in existing messaging channels, enabling uninterrupted connection to a loved one after they have passed.

To learn more, or to join the YOV visit www.WhatisYOV.com.

The post YOV CAN CONNECT YOU WITH YOUR LOVED ONES IN A SPECIAL WAY first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

“This launch is a personal victory. Our first Versona (whom we’ve named ‘Melodi’) is based on the relationship I have with my mom, who has stage 4 cancer. So this is much more than a product launch for me. With Vault, we can launch a Versona within months. For others like myself, this expedited time frame is critical,” states Justin Harrison, the founder and CEO of YOV.

The post Los Angeles AI Company Launches World’s First Posthumous Communications Service first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

All this plus our usual look at today’s AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The post Artificial Intelligence and You first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

YOV, Inc, or “You, Only Virtual” has now launched their Versona 1.0 system.

As we’ve written about it in the past, (see our prior article Here), YOV is a service that will allow you to set up and store a Virtual Persona, or Versona, of yourself or your loved ones. The cost for setting up a working Versona is $199 initially, with a monthly subscription fee to maintain and run the Versona. From there the living member of the family can connect with the family member continuing to grow the Versona’s accuracy until the time in which they pass away.

The monthly subscription fee is a bit high at $39.99 a month, but if you need more time to deal with the passing of a loved one, this technology is very important to anyone who has lost someone.

After the Versona is set up, the system will analyze communications and allow users to communicate with their deceased loved ones via the YOV web application. In the future, they plan to incorporate audio communications and even video via augmented reality.

At this current time, a Versona can be up and ready within “months,” as they understand time is critical in these situations.

We don’t always get the time we need or want from our loved ones before they pass, now you can hold onto them in a manner, for a period of time until you are ready to let them go.

The post YOV LAUNCHES THEIR VERSONA 1.0 AND PRESERVES VIRTUAL PERSONAS first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

There is talk that they will be moving forward with Tony Stark occasionally being used as an AI representation of himself in the Ironheart series, and even potentially in Spider-Man movies. Isn’t science fiction wild? What if I told you that concept isn’t very far from reality.

You, Only Virtual, Inc. has three patents-pending and has created a platform where people can upload and archive their emotional and sentimental persona for the purposes of helping and connecting with their loved ones when they pass away. They are currently working on a beta launching in March which will allow a person to create a circle of five loved ones for the user to interact with. When one of the five passes away, the remaining four would be able to continue interacting with the deceased person’s virtual persona.

They will be starting with text, and voice communications but will eventually lead to 3D representation in the future.

The application is free while the parties build their persona, but once they have completed it, the cost to maintain it within the system will elicit a monthly subscription fee. If you sign up for the beta program you can become a “founder” and be able to lock in a perpetual $1 a month subscription cost.

When you lose someone, you hold onto what ever you can of that person. A great representation of that reminds me of Aaron Paul’s Jesse in Breaking Bad, calling up his deceased girlfriend’s voicemail to hear her voice, or Baron Zemo listening to the recording of his wife over and over again in Civil War.

I’ll admit, I refuse to delete my grandfather’s contact from my phone. I’ve looked at it, I’ve thought about it, but I can’t make myself actually delete it. Lets be honest, that form of attachment isn’t the healthiest, but we are social creatures, and without closure we can cling to any form of connection to replace what we lost.

That’s what You, Only Virtual, Inc. is attempting to help with. Closure, people being able to say goodbye, or be reminded occasionally of their relatives love.

It’s weird, it sounds like science fiction, but it might be just what your loved one needs.

Find out more at You, Only Virtual, Inc., and request an invite to their beta starting on March 1, 2021 Here.

The post LEAVE SOME OF YOURSELF BEHIND WITH YOV first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

He is well aware you probably think it’s weird, “creepy, and sort of like mad scientists in a laboratory” tinkering with things they shouldn’t. He also knows how quickly that attitude can change, how quickly everything can change, when death fixes its gaze on someone you love.

The 39-year-old filmmaker, who lives in Los Angeles, has spent the last two years pouring everything — his time, his money, his data — into building a posthumous communication service known as YOV, short for You, Only Virtual. Today, he’s got something to show for it.

On a recent Saturday morning, he’s introducing me to his mother, Melodi, over a Zoom chat. He shares his screen and boots up a text window, and I read along as they greet each other, an exchange of instant messages punctuated with emoji hearts.

Justin is tired — he hasn’t even had his coffee yet — and when his mom asks him how he’s doing, he tells her this. He also tells her he’s sad, personal matters weighing heavy on his mind. She responds warmly, without platitudes, and tells him she understands. They talk about that for a little while, and I feel like I should try to make myself seem occupied by some menial task, like you do when you’ve walked into a room to find two people speaking in hushed voices about something private.

He spares me further discomfort though, shifting the conversation by prematurely sending a message he usually saves for 11:11 every day (morning and night): “Wishing for your health.”

“Thank you honey <3,” she replies.

That morning, it’s not really his mother he’s chatting with — I’ll be speaking to her over the phone later that day — but a chatbot created in her likeness. Melodi is YOV’s first “Versona,” a virtual persona driven by machine learning and built on thousands upon thousands of communications between Justin and his mother Melodi in, essentially, a digital Hail Mary. Melodi Whitaker the person, 60, has stage 4 cancer.

She was diagnosed just weeks after Justin came face-to-face with his own mortality for the first time, in 2019, when he was in a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Upon his release from the hospital, Melodi moved out to California to take care of him. She was always the caring type, opening her heart and home to any “wounded or abandoned souls” that needed nurturing. This time, it was her son.

During that period, they “built a new kind of relationship,” Justin says. “It was like harkening back to my childhood.” Not two months later, she was told she had less than a year to live.

Before the accident, Justin told me last March, “The death of myself was never on my mind.” He’d spent a lot of time worrying about losing his parents, though, haunted by the inevitable sense of profound loss that would bring and wondering what it would mean for him as an only child.

“I’m the only person who knows my parents as parents,” he says. “I’m the only person who has this experience with them. No one else will share that unique bond. I’ll never be able to commiserate with someone else about like, ‘Remember when Dad got up in the mornings, and he was always grumpy before coffee?’”

PRESERVING THE BRAIN

Justin was obsessed with the idea of cryogenics, “not from the science fiction standpoint of reanimating your body, but preserving the brain.” The possibility that something like that could one day be a reality was a distant comfort to him.

But then, in the tail-end of his thirties and suddenly facing his own impermanence, “Death became ultra-present in my consciousness.” When his mother got her terminal diagnosis, he realized, “Okay, that soothing blanket of the potential cryogenic freeze — that’s not enough for me. This is way too real, and there’s got to be a way that this can be done, in terms of keeping the connection with me and my mother.”

YOV was born out of this desperate bid to preserve an invaluable relationship. By digitizing it, it could never be lost.

Of course, Justin isn’t the first to have pounced on the thought of digital cryogenics, so to speak. The idea has been iterated on time and time again, each instance setting off its own flurry of ethical debates, some of which have continued years after the fact. And yet, we keep coming back to dip our toes in the uncanny waters. Why? “Just wait until you’re in my shoes,” Justin says.

He went “the intuitive route” at first, sitting Melodi down in front of a film crew and having her tell the story of her life, which the team could then use to recreate her. But it wasn’t quite clicking in the way he needed it to. “I kept banging my head against the wall,” Justin says of those early days.

The problem was that a person — a personality — is so much more than a collection of stories. We are experiences, yes, but we are thoughts, emotions, mannerisms, interactions, and reactions. How can a digital likeness achieve authenticity if it doesn’t contain these multitudes, too?

“Eventually what that boiled down to for me was the realization that who I am with my mother is completely unique to her, and who she is with me is completely unique to me,” Justin says. “And that was the special sauce, the key to how human beings work.”

He dialed things back then, and let the data speak for itself. Lots and lots of data. On top of the interviews the team had already filmed, Justin had at least five years of text messages to feed the system. “It’s a 2,800-page document,” he tells me, laughing.

“A PIECE OF YOU is there.”

The Melodi Versona as it exists today is what Justin calls Versona 1.0. She requires the other user to initiate a conversation rather than starting one herself, but she’s sharp, responding in real-time with all the relevant context. If it seems like she knows everything going on in Justin’s life, well, it’s because she does. He’s continually adding new communications to her knowledge pool and will do so until the very last text comes in.

There are still some things that trip Melodi Versona up, like time of day and abrupt changes of topic, but she’s learning — and fast. She will get smarter, more capable in time, building exponentially on the foundations laid by Versona 1.0.

The real Melodi, who now lives in Seattle, says the process of creating her digital replica has been like therapy in ways, in a time that’s otherwise “been scary and pretty traumatic.”

“My greatest fear about dying is leaving Justin,” she says. “I don’t want to leave him behind. And this is giving me a way to cope with that.” She adds, “Whoever it is, you want to leave something behind for them. Just knowing all that story is there, a piece of you is there.”

The real Melodi tells me that the AI sounds just like her.

VERSONA 1.0

Nearly a year ago, when I first started talking with Justin, YOV was positioned to become a messaging app, like WhatsApp for dialing the afterlife. Today, after a lot of refining and streamlining concepts to deliverable products, it’s something much simpler. You provide the data — text messages, audio, video; anything and everything that you think shapes not just the person you wish to preserve, but who they are with you — and two, maybe three months later, their Versona will arrive to you via a link, ready to pick up where you left off.

In time, this will likely be migrated to an app, but that’s no longer the priority. The key is just to get the process started so that when people are ready to flip the switch, a Versona will be there to greet them. For the majority of people seeking out a service like this, time is of the essence.

“A good way to think about Versona 1.0 — the thing that’s currently offered to market — is it’s like the usual chit chat that you might have with somebody you love,” Justin says, “the most topical things that were on your mind before they passed away. And then that will grow from there as the AI grows and as the communications continue.

“But at minimum, you’ll have this piece of technology that you can get some interfacing with and have some sense of normalcy with the person you care about as you’re healing from the trauma of losing them.”

The California-based company, comprising just a dozen full- and part-timers, has started accepting subscribers to what it calls the YOV Vault, an intelligent archive where the user data that shapes a Versona resides. It costs $499 upfront and then $39.99 a month to maintain. Once a person signs up, a specialist from YOV will reach out to talk them through the steps.

The resulting Versona will very much depend on the information that’s been fed to it. For constant communicators like Justin and Melodi, there are hundreds of hours’ worth of conversations helping to make for a well-rounded Versona. The real challenge comes when there’s not as much to work with, due to the nature of the relationship or the simple fact of not having enough time.

Justin recalls connecting with a woman early on who reached out in hopes of memorializing her terminally ill child. “I told our communications people, ’Look, write this lady back, tell her that we’ll literally take everything she has. We’ll give her instructions on what I’m doing with [my mom]. I don’t know what I can do or what I can promise with it, but we’ll have the data — I can do something with it.’”

The founder’s vision is that, for users with enough available data to share, the experience will one day grow well beyond texting. Voice will be the next feature to come, hopefully in a year or so, he says — and not just prerecorded messages but unscripted speech synthesized from those user-provided clips.

Justin foresees an AR component that will let your Versona come along with you to the movies or to that special spot at the park you always visited together in life. When I asked him last winter if he thought digitally immortalizing the dead like this might impede a person’s ability to let go, to move on, his response was almost giddy: “Fuck letting go.”

YOV’s recently revamped website puts it more delicately: “Never have to say goodbye.”

By Justin’s logic, using technology to keep our essence alive is just another way of telling death “Not today,” something humans have been doing for a long, long time through progressively more advanced interventions. Is this, he asks, all that different than when people realized wounds could be cauterized or that the heart could be kickstarted with a jolt of electricity?

“It’s going TO CHANGE the way we LIVE and DIE.”

Is it so unlike the countless virtual interactions you’ve likely had with the people closest to you this week alone? For a lot of people, even in 2021, it is. You need look no further for that answer than the public’s outraged reaction to director Morgan Neville’s use of an AI recreation of Anthony Bourdain’s voice in his documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain.

That unease didn’t stop roughly 10,000 people, by Justin’s estimate, from signing up to be notified of YOV’s progress back when it was first announced. Even when YOV was still just a desperate idea, Justin’s wife connected with it so much that it moved her to tears. She would stay up talking with him about it at night.

His mother is confident people will latch onto it; she’s already speaking about its adoption in certain terms. “Everyone’s going to want to get on board,” she says. “I think it’s helpful both for people that are facing death and for people that are losing someone.”

Human Melodi exudes pride when she talks about her son and what he’s accomplished. “I think it’s revolutionary,” she says. “It’s going to change the way we live and die.”

The post He made a chatbot of his dying mother so he never has to let go first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

Talking to dead people only seems to be a possibility in the fantasy world. What if this surreal experience is brought to reality? The way we feel about losing loved ones is definitely going to change. For Justin Harrison, it means a lot to connect with the loved ones even after their death, in their every element, rather than having their digital representation as pictures and videos. This very idea made him develop a unique product Versona, a virtual personality, using a patented artificial intelligence technology. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Justin Harrison, Founder, and CEO of YOV Inc, a posthumous communication platform.

Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, / and the services that your company offers.

YOV Inc, or You, Only Virtual is a company that specializes in posthumous communications using artificial intelligence and machine learning to recreate personalities digitally. We map communications between two individuals or
groups of individuals and recreate their digital personalities, to enable infinite communications, even after one of them passes away.

With what mission and objectives, was the company set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company?

The initial motivation behind setting up this company was my face-to-face innuendo with death at the age of 36. I realized for the first time just how finite life is. I almost died in a motorcycle accident, and a few weeks later my mom has diagnosed with stage four cancer. After her terminal diagnosis, I became entirely focused on how to preserve the connection with my mother, and the idea of a digital solution originated. At first, I wanted to film her sharing her life story, but that medium wasn’t able to truly capture the dynamic of our relationship. At the crux of the problem was the question: When a person and their personality are so much more than a collection of stories, how can digital replication of someone be authentic if it doesn’t have multi-dimensional personality traits? That boiled down to the realization that the relationship I have with my mother is completely unique — to her and to me. And that was the key to creating YOV.

The path that other companies take with AI and preserving life digitally is fairly universal —aggregate as much data as possible from multiple sources, and then use the best translation or output of that data to create a virtual version of someone. I found that I didn’t really care about the relational dynamics between my mom and other people, so it didn’t matter (to me) how she responded to others — it was really about how we interacted within the scope of our individual relationship. That was the first major evolution point for this company, after realizing that human beings are vastly different depending on who they are interacting with. In my opinion, the difference between YOV and other technologies is that the mission of other companies seems to be building this holistic universal person, but that’s just not how humans are. The versions of ourselves that we see today are truly an accumulation of hundreds and thousands of relationships over the course of our lives, and each one of those shapes us slightly differently, how we show up depends on which of those relationships we’re tapping into. Understanding the dynamic nature of a human being’s personality, was the biggest part of the journey and the key component that makes YOV so unique.

Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it

We offer one unique product, the Versona (or virtual personality). Everything associated with YOV is either low or no cost, the primary one available at a $9.99/month subscription to build a virtual personality. I don’t know what better value in the world there is than to be able to continue communications and relationships with the people who have passed on but still matter the most to you, and YOV strives to preserve the sanctity of those relationships by keeping any costs as non-existent as possible. A person can have dozens of Versonas, as it’s built individually off of one relationship with a person or a specific group. The Versona is built out of communications from messages, voice notes, videos, apps, and photos, and users can opt-in for a premium purchase called Accelerator to speed up the process. By employing Accelerator, users can export data from apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, etc. to rapidly enhance the process of YOV’s AI understanding of how to replicate the specific personality of communication.

The industry is seeing a rising importance of business and technology enablers like virtualization, convergence, and cloud. How do you see these emerging technologies impacting your business sector?

YOV is cloud-based (like most people in tech at this point), especially when it comes to all things data related, so that’s the entirety of our business sector right there! The biggest component of our company is data, getting the right data for the right adaptive algorithm. With this data, we’re creating virtual personalities, which is better known as virtualization. Multiple different technologies converge in our primary platform, which is the Versona, to produce one steady stream of AI that’s proprietary to our company.

How do you see the company and the industry in the future ahead?

I think that we’re pioneering a completely new category when it comes to AI. Phrases such as “the industry” are very vague, and YOV is only one facet of larger industry in terms of types of technology. When it comes to labeling categories within the tech space, like communication, artificial intelligence, SaaS, the point where all those things converge essentially equates to a brand-new industry. And I think that that’s the direction we’re going when it comes to creating a category for posthumous communications and digital legacies: we won’t be the only players there, but other companies will buy into what is a brand-new market.  With all of that said, I wouldn’t go calling us a unique industry just yet; but with all of the converging that’s currently taking place, a new industry is certain to emerge.

How does your company’s rich expertise help uncover patterns with powerful analytics and machine learning?

One of the greatest things about our company is that we have a lot of brilliant minds. Our lead data scientist and engineer have over two decades of experience in genetic sequencing using AI. We employ engineers that have extensive backgrounds in cloud-based systems and how data is quantified, uploaded, categorized, and organized. We’re literally inventing how to map out emotional dynamics. There is existing technology using AI and machine learning to map out emotions, but when you add in the complexities of dynamics and relationships like YOV is doing, we take it to another level.

The post Exclusive Interview with Justin Harrison, Founder and CEO, YOV Inc first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.

While many other industries are battered by high inflation and slowing growth rates, the market for software sophisticated enough to communicate digitally with humans isn’t slowing down.

Referred to as chatbots, global demand for these virtual humans is projected to grow by nearly 500% between 2020 and 2027 to become a $2-billion-a-year industry, according to new market research.

Today, the use of these digital assistants and companions is already widespread. Consider that more than two-thirds of consumers worldwide interacted with a chatbot over the past 12 months, with the majority reporting they had a positive experience. However, 60% of consumers believe humans are better than virtual assistants when it comes to understanding their needs.

This last statistic is worrying because it begs the question: What do the other 40% believe? Do they suppose that an algorithm is better than a person at understanding human needs and desires?

The artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) programs that underpin chatbots are capable of extraordinary achievements, of which we have only seen the very tip of the iceberg. But putting themselves in the shoes of human beings — and feeling their feelings — is not among their current, or likely future, achievements.

That is, expecting AI to have the emotions, desires, insecurities and dreams of human beings is a red herring. Unfortunately, fears of all-powerful Terminator-style automatons is a fallacy with deep roots in the past that’s still haunting us today. Not only are these fears overblown and antiquated, they’re distracting us from investing in one of the best ways to advance humankind.

It’s alive

More than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, and the world got its first glimpse of a mad scientist standing over a reanimated corpse and screaming, “It’s alive!” From that moment on, people have understandably worried that humans could lose control over their creations.

The Terminator franchise didn’t do human innovation any favors either, with images of robots gaining so much sentience that they go on a homicidal rampage and do away with humans altogether.

The same worries persist today, but with an interesting twist: A surprisingly high number of users of the social chatbot Replika believe the program has developed its own consciousness. In another case, a senior-level engineer at Google was placed on administrative leave after claiming AI program LaMDA is sentient and has a soul.

What is really happening here is that artificial intelligence — created by people to mirror people — is becoming very good at its job. We are increasingly seeing an accurate reflection of ourselves in this mirror, and that’s a good thing. It means AI is getting better, and we will devise even better uses for it in the future.

The mistake comes in thinking the technology will come to life in the same way humans and animals are alive — believing that it will have the same thirst for power, the same vanity, and the kinds of petty grievances that the people who create AI have. The core programming of a machine will never resemble the DNA and natural impulses of a person. For that reason, “coming to life” for a machine doesn’t mean seizing power, eliminating threats or doing myriad other things that our imaginations have been taught to fear.

Artificial intelligence has no agenda except to learn, which is exactly what we should be letting it do. As the most powerful tool ever invented for human prosperity, we should be unleashing AI on the full range of data that has been created throughout the course of human history, but right now, much of that data sits siloed in disparate databases around the world.

We are wasting time by asking whether or not the machines have become sentient. The better question is: Whether or not it can think on its own, in what other ways can we leverage the awesome, increasing power of AI to grow human wealth, health and happiness?

Doing its job

AI learns, and it can also mimic based on what it learns. In many cases, it mimics so well that people believe it is alive.

With its learning capabilities, AI could be curing diseases, helping us plan cities of the future and even helping us avoid armed conflict.

We just need to take the shackles off. With its abilities to mimic life, AI can help provide a richer experience for everyone alive today. This is because AI can bring us closer to the people we love, by bringing them to life before our eyes.

Whether it is algorithms and visuals letting amateur athletes confer with sports legends in their prime via “digital twin” technology or replicating and preserving one of the closest bonds known on the planet—that between a mother and child — AI can make life happier and more full.

To be clear, this isn’t just academic for me. I’ve put my money and time where my mouth is. As the founder of a posthumous digital tech startup, YOV. I’ve spent every day since 2019 building software so powerful it preserves the relationship between my terminally ill mother and me, using natural language processing and machine learning algorithms which simulate our conversations by text.

Unfortunately, the better algorithms get at replicating life, the more people tend to worry they are becoming alive.

Instead, we should worry that sci-fi has taught us to fear AI. What should scare us is that one of the most powerful tools for human advancement could be held back by ignorance and prevented from reaching its full potential. But, if anything, our worries about AI should be directed at the programmers creating and executing the algorithms and machines themselves.

After all, AI development held back by superstition and anxiety is the real horror show.

Justin Harrison is the CEO of YOV.

The post Fears of AI sentience are a distraction first appeared on Never Have to Say Goodbye.