On Smarter AI for a Better World
Before founding DefinedCrowd, our CEO Daniela Braga had a long career as a researcher at companies like Voicebox and Microsoft. A pioneer in speech technology, she became one of the earliest advocates for voice-enabled technology as a primary user interface (long before Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, proved her right).
Her stance was rooted in a passion for uncovering the crossroads where technology and human experience collide. Convinced that Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) could improve all of our interactions with the world at large, she strove to build the models that would make that vision into a reality.
Quickly, she butted up against technological limits. The lack of high-quality training data so critical to constructing effective models was chief among them. She founded DefinedCrowd in 2015 as a direct result of that frustration, envisioning a company that would leverage cutting-edge technology, dynamic workflows, and innovative crowd-management practices to deliver the exact data sets researchers would need to build high-performance models.
Her passion for AI as a means of enhancing human experience permeates everything we do. We take the goal seriously. As our COO, Walter Benadof, wrote so eloquently just a few months ago, it’s imperative that every practitioner in this field maintains a core set of ethics and values as they continue to develop and mature.
That word, “practitioner,” is no accident. I use it to reinforce a concept we’ve touched on before, a “Hippocratic Oath” for AI, first proposed in Microsoft’s The Future Computed, and further elaborated upon by Oren Etzioni at TechCrunch. We’ve been thinking hard about how our past and future work fits with the values stated therein and the values of our company as a whole.
We’re proud that our core competencies in Natural Language Processing, Computer Vision and Automated Speech Recognition are already making workplaces, classrooms, and ultimately the world at large more accessible, safer, and easier to navigate.
On top of that, we’re also thrilled to be in the process of developing several inspiring pilots for use cases as diverse as improving healthcare interfaces to detecting preventable natural disasters (think wildfires) before they have a chance to spread out of control.
The AI sector as a whole is just scratching the surface of how the technology we create can improve the human experience. We look forward to continuing our partnerships, and forging new ones, with companies we truly do consider as beacons of our industry. We can’t wait we work side-by-side to unlock new use cases and technologies that truly can make our world a better place.
That’s why we do what we do. It has been from the very beginning.
