trevmex's tumblings

Mickey and Minnie visited the Seattle Disney Office for the first time in 18 years, and though Disney VoluntEARS and US Hunger we fed 40,000 people through Northwest Harvest!!!

Years ago, when I was just a manager, I was (and still am) passionate about tech meetups and sharing information. So, I organized a tech meetup at our offices (I was at a large media company at the time) for after hours. This is something I normally did. Many months of me doing this went by, and finally the office admin lashed out at me in frustration. They said, “don’t you know that when you do things off the cuff, like plan an after hours meeting, you are creating extra work for so many people?!? You should really think about how your actions affect others before leaping in.”

I still have a bad habit of leaping in, though I have reflected often on that experience and it has shaped my world view on the ripple effects my actions cause in the world.

Let me tell you a story.

I was at a tech meetup once and raised my hand to ask a question. I said, “This is a dumb question, but …” and asked my question.

I didn’t think anything of it. After the meetup, a good and always straightforward friend of mine came up to me and said, “Don’t call your questions dumb.”

To which I said, “Oh, but it was just my ignorance…”

He stopped me. He said, “No, you don’t understand. In that room, people look up to you. I know some people didn’t even know to ask that question. And others that had the same or similar questions. When you deprecate yourself around others, you de facto deprecate those around you thinking the same thing. Don’t self-deprecate in front of others. It adds nothing and lowers the self-esteem of those around you.”

I was blown away. I never thought of self-depreciation as harming others, but he is right. Knowledge, skill, talent: it is a spectrum. And when I self deprecated in front of others, that negativity has impacts beyond just me.

Let’s say you self-deprecate about what you do. Are you the best in the world? Probably not. You know that. Are you better than a hell of a lot of people? Yes. Yes, you are. Who does that self-deprecation serve? Not me. 

Africa Periañez

BENSHI.AI, CEO

Focusing on bringing AI to the most underserved countries in the world.

40% countries have fewer than 10 medical doctors per 10,000 people!

HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death across the world, especially in Africa.

There are many cheap, easy-to-implement technologies that can improve health outcomes across the world.

Most of the problem isn’t getting the supply out there, it is getting people to understand, and trust, that the medicine is safe and trustworthy.

The name of the game, then, is engagement. We need to engage folx that do not know what is safe or not.

A great way do this is through games!

Benshi’s were people that would describe silent movies to illiterate people in Japan. Origin of the name benshi.ai

They want to democratize medical knowledge through mobile phones. Mobile phone penetration is widespread. 80% of people in Africa have smart phones connected to the Internet.

Global health is a messy field that is not remotely organized globally, so there is a lot of communication needed at the local level to bring people together.

They focus on experimentation and machine learning to forecast health trends

The goal is to predict and nudge behavior towards improved health decisions.

They work to gamify and personalize interventions and predictions for each client.

It is not enough to have data, you need to have organized data to mine the value out of it.

Benshi uses data labeling to to organize data and build data sets, which feed back to client nudges

Benshi is n opinionated system. They want to guide clients towards decisions that will save their lives.

A Nigerian doctor can visit about 100 patients a day. In Ethiopia, there is 1 midwife per 10,500 people.

How can we use AI to optimize the limited resources of medical professionals to triage the highest need cases in within these constraints?

Malaria is 100% preventable, treatable, and curable, but we still see 200,000 deaths every year. We want to nudge people to take their malaria medication through gamification.

If a person goes to a pharmacy, and they do not have the drugs they need right away, there is a 29.4% chance that person will never return to get their medicine in developing countries.

Part of what we can do is predict the medicine needs per area using AI modelling.

ML helps us discover and predict actual demand and needs per area. That can kickstart the supply chain ahead of the resource needs

Big Pharma is not incentivized to participate in these improvements right now. So another problem is how do we encourage and incentivize Big Pharma to lean in as well?

There are very few people working in this field, despite this being a very large problem for the world

M. Kramer, E. Duflo, and A. Banejee got the Nobel prize for work in this field, and much more is needed in experimentation in low income countries and global health

Check out Milind Tambe’s Field Study in Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandit in India

Tracking out of stock medicines over the world help s drive preemptive resource management

The more people that feed data into ML model apps, the better refines the predictions have gotten in Indonesia.

The team is largely woman-driven, 83% in leadership, 55% in engineering

Thank you, Africa, for the great talk!