Empathization

Tuesday, April 24, 2018 - 11:20 am

If you, or someone you care about, receives an offensive, violent, or dehumanizing comment, what’s the impact? If one option only, would you rather have someone help you, or instead not dehumanize you emotionally or physically? And “how” might data science products facilitate for us to not only help each other more but dehumanize each other less?

While the “how” remains unproven below, such questions helped motivate Empathization, an effort aimed to support gender equality and decrease online gender harassment. Shruti van Hemmen, Apekshit Sharma, and I started the project during MIDS Capstone in Spring 2017.

This Empathization presentation at DataEDGE 2018 will cover a combination of team collaboration; product development; artificial intelligence; women interviews; field experiments; and/or post-graduation conference calls with Google Jigsaw, CNBC Digital, and Twitter.

Empathization (DataEDGE 2018)

Derek S. Chan
Derek S. Chan
Senior Product Manager - Cognitive
Automation Anywhere

Derek S. Chan is a May-2017 alum from the UC Berkeley School of Information’s Master of Information and Data Science (MIDS) program, where he focused on product development for social good, artificial intelligence, and field experiments, and developed meaningful friendships.

After their Capstone project, Empathization, against online gender harassment, his Capstone team accepted unsolicited opportunities: presented products at Google, held a conference call with a CNBC reporter, and met with a Jigsaw leader on a blog post series.

His full-time job is Sr. Product Manager – Cognitive at a fast-growing company called Automation Anywhere. There, he co-builds a cognitive product that involves computer vision and artificial intelligence to automate repetitive tasks, so enterprises can allocate more time to harder tasks such as decision-making.

In his free time, Derek is a live theater artist, primarily compelled to play people who think, walk, and talk/sing differently than himself.