Who's your Data? Podcast

One of the most rewarding use-cases of AI is providing access of life changing services to minority populations who are underserved. Nowhere is this more true than in the medical field, and specifically in the quote-unquote niche field of LGBTQ Health. Today’s guest is Dr. Roy Zucker, Director of LGBTQ Health Services at Clalit, Israel’s biggest HMO and chairman of the Israeli LGBTQ medical association. We chat about the state of LGBTQ medicine in Israel, difficulties for LGBTQ patients trying to seek access to services and what his vision is for using AI to improve LGBTQ healthcare. We discuss how doctors need to adapt to the AI age, and the fact that AI chatbots can provide safe spaces and be more compassionate or with less judgement to LGBTQ patients and give them services, as well as using AI for harm reduction in drug use and how that relates to getting past the safeguards of public Generative AI.

Generative AI has become a hot buzzword everywhere and it is especially true in the Enterprise Organization space - but how do Enterprise organizations use it and what are the challenges and pitfalls in attempting to implement it? Can it truly be cross-organizational or be relagated to specific tasks in specific departments? To help ponder these questions I chat with Inna Tokarev Sela, founder and CEO of Illumex, a company that specializes in implementing generative AI solutions in the Enterprise. We discuss being in the third wave of generative AI, what it means to have business semantics across the organization and how to approach utilizing gen AI in the best way.

In the 30th episode of Who's Your Data? I am very excited to host the one, the only Dr. Claudia Perlich - Data scientist extraordinaire, mentor and friend who dives deep into the evolving landscape of AI and data science, navigating the hype around AI's capabilities and addressing ethical concerns. Claudia brings her no-nonsense, real-world insights and tackles everything from the unpredictability of human behavior to the challenges of maintaining privacy in a data-driven world. Thought-provoking and candid, this conversation explores whether AI is set to replace us — or if human judgment will always reign supreme.

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.