Who's your Data? Podcast

We’ve heard many stories about how AI has become increasingly responsible for spreading misinformation, whether in politics, health information or otherwise. But did you know that AI can be used to combat misinformation too? In this episode we chat with Amelia Burke Garcia, Director at the Center for Health Communication Science at NORC at the University of Chicago and Rebecca Soskin Hicks, Pediatrician and Fellow at NORC. We discuss their new initiative to create health communication using AI. Their thesis is that AI can be the next form of opinion leader like social media influencers have been so far.

We discuss the theory behind this thesis, how this AI model gets trained and interacts with humans, what the ethical concerns are.

As a clinician Rebecca discusses the barriers to entry for using AI in her practice and we talk about the future of the study and share some contemporary tips for identifying health misinformation online.

We talk a lot about data and AI and how they influence our work and society, but today we get in the trenches!

Today I chat with Mo Villigran, Associate director of insights, analytics and data at Cambrex, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company, about AI projects she is implementing. We discuss what it’s like for data teams to implement AI projects - how to communicate with stakeholders, what unique challenges these projects hold.

We discuss Mo’s book - Data Insights Delivered - and how she sees the 7 stages of stakeholder engagement, future trends in AI project management and what she looks for when choosing an AI vendor.

April 7 marks the beginning of Black Maternal Health week and to honor this important topic I have a chat with Bianca Pryor.

Bianca is VP of consumer insights at BET networks but also the co-founder of the Dr. Shalon’s Maternal Action Project, a non-profit organization that seeks to empower Women of color to reach out and find support in their community, utilizing an innovative app called “Believe Her”.

Bianca tells us Dr. Shalon’s story and how she herself became involved in this endeavor and how she brings Big Data and her expertise in insights to tackle this important issue. We discuss the importance of cultural sensitivity and representation in Healthcare as well as in market research, where Bianca delves into how she thinks about segmentation for the BET audience as well as what representation means for the BET viewers themselves.

PhySec, or physical security, encompasses everything that physically protects, alerts and monitors us - from burglar alarms to video surveillance. Unsurprisingly, this industry is also being revolutionized by AI.

I speak to Don Morron, host of the AI Physec Today podcast, about how AI is changing the physical security industry, and also how they continue to think about privacy and about human and data bias, as well as how regulation affects innovation.

So will Big Brother end up being a robot? Check out the episode to find out!

I chat with Karlien Kriegler and David Wright, co-founders of Hello Ara, a tech-forward market research company in South Africa that has created a Metaverse environment to run focus groups!

What does it mean to create a Metaverse environment for market research? How is AI utilized in several stages of its lifecycle? What are the localization/cultural considerations for South Africa as opposed to the US or Europe? And how close are we to a hologram of Cher asking me about my beauty routine and skincare concerns?

If you want to find out check out the episode!

Whew! We made it to the end of 2023! Join me as I remember my favorite moments and guests of the year, with my favorite pearls of wisdom that they discussed. It's a cornucopia of knowledge from the HealthTech, Financial Services, Music Streaming, Analytics, Art and other industries.

Generative AI has already started to have major implications in regards to the content we consume - and this is especially true in music! In today’s episode I chat with Eyal Golshani, VP of Data Science at Vevo, the world’s leading music video network, to discuss how data and generative AI influence their work.

We explore how their Data Science team uses data, talk about AI generated content, the effect of emerging platforms such as tiktok, what kind of bias they deal with and how they communicate data to promote stakeholder trust.

We also discuss AI's emerging place in the industry and what it may look like in the future. Eyal also shares what he looks for when hiring for data science roles.

AI is rapidly changing the landscape of innovative healthtech. In this episode I chat with Dr. Yoni Goldwasser, a digital health investor and entrepreneur, about the exciting new trends in healthtech and whether or not AI will advance enough to replace doctors in the future.

We discuss how accurate medical models need to be in his opinion, how he and his team of investors evaluate new healthtech startups in terms of algorithms, bias in the data and he provides tips on what makes a good startup pitch.

Progress in healthcare and medical research requires a lot of data. In the era of Big Data health data is among the most valuable and the most private information anyone can have. Two major hurdles with finding quality medical data are access to that data in a private and ethical way as well as bias on the data due to underrepresentation of women, certain racial or ethnic groups.

In this episode I talk to Dinidh O’Brien about how donateyourdata.org and DataLake are trying to solve this problem with a patient-first approach to sourcing medical data for research. Data Lake is an EU-funded start-up creating a global medical data donation system based on blockchain technology, with privacy and informed consent as fundamental pillars.

We discuss this data donation framework and how it addresses the issues of privacy, consent, data monetization and working to minimize biases. Dinidh explains how they approach patients to opt in, how they vet organizations that request access to this data and how they plan to expand throughout Europe and the US.

In this episode I chat with Rich Edwards, CEO of Mindspan systems, about the changing tech and data landscape for Financial Institutions, especially big banks vs. regional ones - how Mindspan turns tech into a commodity and data from what was once a regulatory liability into a democratized operating asset.

In this age of consolidation we chat about how data is the smaller banks’ secret weapon to improve service, add innovation and combat bias in financial data that has historically barred access to services from underrepresented communities. We also chat about how financial data is shared more broadly among financial institutions through the Open Banking framework and what that means for privacy and competitiveness.