Blackbird.AI: A US-Bangladeshi Company Scaling AI Tools to Fight Disinformation
Naushad shares his personal journey that led to him co-founding Blackbird.AI, which raised a $20M Series B last year.
In our webinar with Naushad UzZaman, Co-Founder and CTO of Blackbird.AI, he discussed cybersecurity, distortion of public opinion, and the use of artificial intelligence and data analysis to combat them. Naushad holds a Ph.D. along with over two decades of experience in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, and has applied expertise in both academic research and social enterprise that comes from time spent at leading firms such as Nuance, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Bosch - and now at Blackbird.AI.
Naushad is responsible for developing Blackbird’s Narrative & Risk Intelligence Platform, and along with his team, he has built a unique series of scalable AI and network analysis modules that detect rare risk signals of threats. Leading enterprises, Fortune 500s, and large government organizations globally use the real-time AI-powered narrative detection and risk intelligence platform.
In this session, Naushad shared:
His background and how he came to be in this space
His career, key companies he was part of, and experience building teams, products, and businesses
A deep dive into how Blackbird AI was founded and built
His thoughts on Bangladesh and how to connect the ecosystem with NRBs like himself
🎙️ Listen to the episode on Spotify
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here's a summary of our key takeaways and highlights:
I grew up in Bangladesh and came to the US for graduate studies after my undergraduate studies at BRAC University. Growing up, my idol was my dad, who completed his Master's in Electrical Engineering, so I at least wanted to do my Ph.D. somewhere down the line. I wanted to be an engineer like him and pursue higher education to follow in his footsteps. I wanted to be an engineer, researcher and scientist growing up at different stages in life.
My mentor and idol, Dr. Mumit Khan, started the Center for Research for Bangla Language Processing at BRAC University and he graciously accepted me. Subsequently, I did a lot of research work alongside him and had a couple of research papers published. Leveraging this research experience, I applied to the University of Rochester (UofR) and got accepted, where I finished my Master's and PhD there. UofR has a vibrant Bangladeshi community, which also made my stay enjoyable.
In my early 30s, I was getting extremely bored at work as I was not feeling challenged. I was privileged to have studied in the United States and obtained my Ph.D. there, so I wanted to impact society positively. I did not want to settle for a relaxed and happy life, so I wanted to try something new.
Disinformation and misinformation cause reputational and financial harm. When narrative attacks are done at scale, this causes societal and organizational damage. For example, on social media, thousands of bots/trolls can significantly amplify a particular narrative as social media tries to replicate a democracy by giving every user an equal weight in their opinions. As a result, when many artificial entities support one side of the debate, it gains more momentum.
We at Blackbird.AI give visibility for everyone to understand what is happening. Is an organic or synthetic narrative behind a certain perspective and perspective attack? We list a range of problems with the narrative and offer solutions to such unethical acts.
I would say for us in Bangladesh to catch up to the rest of the world in terms of the burgeoning domain of artificial intelligence, the government and private companies should come forward to develop and provide us with the computational power required for initiatives in AI to flourish.
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