Stanford Seminar - Alphy and Alphy Reflect: creating a reflective mirror to advance women

Alphy and Alphy Reflect: creating a reflective mirror to advance women Ted Selker November 2, 2022 Social media sites are places for people to meet and be. The news and literature are full of stories based on how users of such platforms find themselves self promoting, and taking extreme positions. From the beginning of online communication, people have noted the tendency for people to “flame” (go extreme) online more than in person. In the physical world we meet people around a context. The context might be a french lesson, a ballroom dancing class, a hike, or sailboat ride. External contexts provide topics of mutual interest defusing the personal differences. How do we do that without furthering divisions in people's social and political experiences? Alphy creates a platform for supporting advancing women. Inspiring articles about people's successes, informative text, audio video & paced educational materials, and communication that encourages people to consider content and alphy traits attempt to make a safe and purpose built social media platform. A centerpeice of the approach is Alphysmarts with AlphyReflect. As well as incenting users to find interesting content, it gives feedback and encouragement for reflecting on things you are writing to others. The work expands on much of the sentiment analysis work done in my context aware and considerate computing labs at the MIT Media Lab and CMU too. About the Speaker: Ted Selker is CTO of Alphyco creating a community based considerate social media for advancing women. Ted is an entrepreneur inventor who also mentors innovation. Ted spent 5 years as director of Considerate Systems research at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley and in developing the campus’s research mission. Prior to that, Ted spent 10 years as an associate Professor at the MIT Media Laboratory where he created the Context Aware Computing group, co-directed the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and directed the Industrial Design Intel