Summer 2018 Ideagen "Catalyze" Magazine 1 | Page 17

Ideagen Intersection

3

Ideagen Intersection

3

Ideagen Intersection

16

George Sifakis:

Welcome to Ideagen's Catalyst Radio, our global podcast. Today we have with us Rana Novack from IBM. Rana, welcome.

Rana:

Thank you, thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

George

It's so great to have you here and we'll talk about this a little bit later, but we were so incredibly inspired by your recent TED Talk that it was just incumbent upon us to have an exclusive interview which we're so excited to host today with you.

Rana:

Thank you so much for saying that. Obviously it was a really personal talk, really from the heart, and so that means a lot to me. I hope it was impactful and I hope that our audience has a chance to watch it.

George:

Fantastic Rana. We'll go right into the interview, because I know you have a lot of interesting and unique vantage points that are so incredibly valuable to the listeners today. Rana, what inspired you to focus on artificial intelligence as a tool to predict refugee crises and also to provide better options for refugees across the planet?

Rana:

A couple of different things, and thank you for the question. I'm a first-generation Syrian American. I was born in the US. Both of my parents are from Syria and so obviously, the crisis hit close to home. Most of my extended relatives have become refugees and at the same time their experience was unfolding, I was working at IBM learning more about predictive technology and cognitive computing, and I was seeing that we were using this technology for commercial purposes and I was wondering why we weren't also using it to better support displaced populations. I had been doing advocacy for refugees, outside of IBM personally, so for me it was a natural connection.

Rana:

You know, it's just something I was really passionate about and through my family's experience just seeing how, how challenging it is for civilians in conflict to find a way out. I guess I was naive at the time, but I found it really surprising, I had just always assumed that if people were in danger, that they would be offered a swift pathway to safety if they wanted one. Reality is that it works very differently and I also recognized that it was a really reactive process. That a conflict would occur. People would flee and then, once they crossed an international border, they would be eligible for services and so on and so forth.

Rana:

I just remembered thinking, ‘there has to be a more proactive way for us to respond a refugee crisis. Why are we acting like it's an emergency? We can measure this and we should be able to see it coming,’ so it was really, I think, a confluence of a lot of different things at that time in my life personally and professionally and it all kind of came together in this perfect storm and I was inspired to move forward.

Predictive Technology for a Promising Future

An interview with

Rana Novak of IBM

Rana Novack is a Syrian American advocate for refugees and civilians in conflict, writer, TED and keynote speaker, and the solution owner of IBM’s Refugee & Migration Predictive Analytics Solution. She is currently leading a global team from across the IBM organization to develop a first-of-a-kind solution leveraging machine learning and cognitive computing to enable Government agencies and humanitarian aid organizations to better manage refugee and migration crises.

Ms. Novack has been published in the Wall Street Journal, WIRED magazine, and her work has been cited by Yale University and the Foreign Policy Initiative. She is a Non-Resident Scholar and Global Policy Center Affiliate of the University of Virginia's Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy, and recipient of the 2017 George Mason University Department of Communication Alumnus of the Year and Distinguished Alumna Awards.