at ICCS 2018: Culture meets Artificial Intelligence

Looking forward to my trip to Boston for ICCS 2018. Our Educational systems worldwide are not keeping up with the big data explosion, nor are they providing a basic understanding of how this change in technologies affect our lives, inform us about vital trends, and the potential to empower us to solve our greatest social and environmental challenges. In this interactive workshop, we will explore the range of efforts being made to address this gap in education, and collaborate on potential new approaches. Thanks to ICCS and Catherine Cramer of Columbia University’s Data Science Institute for the invite.

---

Culture Meets Artificial Intelligence and Storytelling

IVOW collaborates with scholars, educators, journalists, computer scientists, and AI experts to develop a new structured database to tag culture, tradition, and history. AI today represents a fairly narrow range of viewpoints, excluding the perspectives of tens of millions of people. This is because we have been looking at AI from the perspective of current data and algorithms. We now have the ability to look at AI from a interdisciplinary background--bringing together data science, enterprise and storytelling. 

We can leverage the philosophy of AI around patterns, and see what’s missing in large datasets and find new ways to apply it to areas such as customer and user engagement. Building authentic relationships with audiences, users and consumers requires inviting them to share who they are and what matters to them most--their traditions and cultural heritage. Making AI more inclusive requires us to invite the world to share their stories. 

Davar Ardalan is the Founder and Storyteller in Chief of IVOW, a cultural storytelling startup powered by AI. Davar has been a journalist in public media for 25 years, most of those at NPR News, where she designed stories anchored in multiculturalism and steeped in historical context.

In 2015, her last position at NPR was senior producer of the Identity and Culture Unit. Realizing that there is a gaping hole in AI algorithms that will define our future stories, Davar created IVOW, to crowdsource global narratives via a structured database. Ardalan co-chairs the Stories and Audiences Committee of the VR/AR Association, and has been recognized with a 2017 NASA Team Leadership award for Space Apps, a Gracie Award from the American Women in Radio and Television and a shout-out in the popular comic strip Zippy.

In May 2014, she was the recipient of a United States Ellis Island Medal of Honor, for individual achievement and for promoting cultural unity.