Twitter played a significant community role for me when I first started out in my career. Over the course of several years working in developer relations at Microsoft, focused on virtual and augmented reality, I developed a strong network of people who regularly engaged with my work (and I theirs) in a frequent and low-stakes manner. It was a (relatively) safe way to interact with people in an extended field, and I made several close
Read moreThree years ago, my husband and I sold our house in Maryland and headed to New York City. I had just been accepted to Columbia Business School for their Saturday Executive MBA program. I finished my courses at Columbia in February, and have a lot of complicated feelings about it. It’s the most beautiful time of the year to be in Astoria, but this is my last week in New York City.
Read moreEach person is unique. Our bodies and brains are uniquely shaped to the inputs we are given (or give) them. Our minds are shaped by the information we consume, the people we listen to, the stories we tell ourselves as truth. Thoughts and beliefs are connected through neural pathways, which are reinforced and made stronger the more frequently we practice thinking a certain way. Over time, this neuroplasticity turns practice into routine; our inner voice becomes the narrator of our memory.
Reflecting on the way that my relationship to computers and the internet has changed over the past decade prompted me to download a complete archive of my Facebook history before I went on vacation.
I used a python script to iterate through every folder in my Facebook messages archive and generate a .csv file with message content. I then uploaded the .csv file to ChatGPT to query and interrogate the data, asking it questions about myself and my growth.
Read more2024 was a year where I had to complete reinvent myself into a new person, which has been powerful, exciting, scary, lonely, invigorating, marvelous, and awesome (in the true sense of awe).
Cassian’s birth – eight days past his due date – marked the beginning of the rest of my life. No experience of my life prepared me to so graciously and willingly say goodbye to a version of myself that felt unshakeable.
Read moreOne of the most challenging moments as a leader can be confronting the moment when you know that you are no longer able to continue down a particular path you had been following. For me, a moment like this came on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023, when I sat down in an empty room in the Palais de Congres conference center in Montreal and submitted my leave of absence request for my fifth term at CBS.
Read moreI’m no stranger to being a contrarian – so when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene a few years back, I resisted the urge to start using it for everything and instead decided to go as long as possible without. At the one year mark, I wrote about how my non-use of ChatGPT was going. The TL;DR – the ethical concerns related to large-scale, hosted LLMs around copyright, labor in training, climate, and monopolization/market capture led
Read moreAs an autistic and queer individual, the role that technology plays in identifying, surveilling, and categorizing acceptable behavior within society is not lost on me. Despite using machine learning technology since 2014, I have used ChatGPT one time. The challenge that has come from not using OpenAI products and ChatGPT has actually been in the way that it impacts my relationship with people more than anything else.
Read moreOne decision that many organizations may be making right now is how to develop a corporate policy about artificial intelligence. Could, perhaps, an eigenvalue be calculated against a matrix of perspectives within an organization, to represent a new form of communicating the nuance and fluid nature of these complex, multi-cellular entities in which we house business endeavors? To evaluate this idea, I took a small (9 person) survey of team members and asked them to share their perspectives on AI innovation.
Read moreAs I’m writing this, I’m wearing a green t-shirt with a giant eyeball over my rapidly growing stomach. It’s Halloween, and I’ve decided to dress up as Mike Wazowski – it feels like I’m all stomach these days, so it felt appropriate. My partner dressed up as Boo. Halloween is an especially interesting time of year to reflect on identity and persona: it’s a holiday that encourages people to step into a different character and
Read moreI joke sometimes that my entire career to date has been about Learning How to Human – that I was drawn to social VR and metaverse platforms because my neurodivergent self wanted to experience a taste of a world that I could both understand, navigate, and flourish within. As it turns out, there’s a ton of overlap in the product domains of AI and metaverse, because while the core enabling technologies and their interaction modes look quite different from one another, the entire premise of the advancements and opportunities are grounded in emergent behaviors of computers simulating people and reality.
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