Hello PDNYCers,

Here's the line up for Monday night 9/29!

AI demos line-up:  
Demo #1: General Cybernetics
Product: Streamfully changing how users interact with digital content by enabling deep personalization and real-time hyperlinking across the web. 

Presenter: Paul Pangaro
Paul Pangaro is CEO of General Cybernetics, Inc., a startup focused on creating "conversation with content." Paul's products are based on formal models of conversation that calculate a user's cognitive uncertainty and learning style. He has taken roles as CTO in startups, tech executive, and professor of cybernetics & design. He taught a course in Stanford University HCI program for seven years and in the Interaction Design MFA program at the School of the Visual Arts since 2010, and has lectured on his approach to conversation software in São Paulo, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Toronto, and in cities in the US. Paul studied computer science and humanities at MIT, where he made award-winning computer-generated films. Nicholas Negroponte hired him to work in what became the MIT Media Lab. He earned a Ph.D. in cybernetics and conversation theory at Brunel University with Gordon Pask. 

Demo #2: X.AI  
Product: x.ai is a personal assistant who schedules meetings for you

Presenter: Dennis Mortensen
Dennis is the CEO and Founder of x.ai, whose artificial intelligence driven personal assistant lets people schedule meetings using plain English and nothing more than a CC to [address removed]. He’s a pioneer and expert in the analytics, optimization and big data space and has been since its inception – he is also a fully-fledged entrepreneur and successfully delivered a number of company exits. He’s an accredited Associate Analytics Instructor at the University of British Columbia, the Author of Data Driven Insights from Wiley and a frequent speaker on the subject of Analytics and Data. A native of Denmark, Mortensen currently calls New York City his home.

Demo #3: To be announced!

How AI is Related to Personal Data

Recently, a great piece was written in The Atlantic, titled  Data Doppelgangers and the Uncanny Valley of Personalization.  The uncanny valley is that creepy feeling you get when you look at a robot and it looks just human enough to freak you out (versus being a cute, Wall-E type bot).

For advertising, the idea of the uncanny valley is the point we'll get to get to soon where the algorithms behind online ads will become nuanced enough to make us feel that advertisers know us better than we do.  In this regard, having control over our personal data in the future means we can either choose not to be targeted in this way, or work with advertisers to bring greater transparency to their efforts.