I’m an entrepreneur, educator and researcher currently working with a number of teams and projects developing socially beneficial uses of Artificial Intelligence.
My interest in AI was triggered when I attended Marvin Minsky’s MIT class lectures. Minsky was a spellbinding lecturer and I was captivated by his ideas about “machines that can understand stories.”
I received a Master’s from the Media Lab at MIT, where my research focused on the transition from analog to digital media and the ways digital technologies influence how we make and share messages to inform, educate, and entertain.
From MIT I moved to Apple, where I spent 5 years leading a new product team tasked with evolving the Macintosh operating system from support of static text and still images to dynamic streaming of interactive video, audio, and animation. These capabilities enabled new “media rich” applications like interactive learning, video editing, and musical composition and production
I’m now an adjunct faculty member and post-doctoral researcher at New York University, teaching about the impact of AI on communication. I also serve as the CEO of Tickr, a startup building enterprise-focused AI software tools and advising organizations on beneficial uses of AI.
Some current projects:
Prosocial Partners is an informal group of researchers, designers, artists, and technologists that pursue projects of interest relating to socially beneficial uses of AI. Currently, we are developing the “Prosocial Prize” for essays envisioning a realistic and positive future for AI technology in healthcare, economics, public policy, and the arts. We are constantly on the lookout for high-impact projects. Feel free to contact me at tyler@prosocial.partners.
Wordloop uses Natural Language Processing to analyze language samples and use the resulting outputs to enhance existing language.
For example, Wordloop can be used to analyze an individual primary-school student’s writing and use that analysis to refactor existing curricula and assignments into a hyper-personalized 1:1 curriculum tailored to that student’s cognitive abilities, language skills, and personal communication style.
Top Model is an online public forum where anyone can upload AI-driven predictive models for competition and scoring in real time.
The models predict causality and outcomes across topics like climate change, financial resilience, social stability, and public health. Ratings of model accuracy will be displayed live, 24/7, to a global audience. Model-makers retain ownership of their models and the competition is open to all.
Top Model combines the power of AI-driven predictive analytics with crowdsourcing to accelerate discovery of new solutions to critical global issues.
StoryLab (in conjunction with the Covid 19 Impact Project at New York University). StoryLab applies Natural Language Processing techniques to oral histories, from the earliest examples to the present.
Our goal is to “mine” the oral histories to discover how social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances of individual lives have impacted overall well-being, both during and after crisis events.
Our hope is to then use our findings to inform policy-making in ways that increase social equity and resilience in future crisis situations (pandemics, natural disasters, and economic dislocation) with a particular focus on at-risk and disadvantaged groups.