Meet Polly – the Artificial Intelligence that predicted the Brexit vote, the 2016 American Election, the 2015 Federal Election in Canada a month before the vote took place, and the June 7, 2018 riding results in the Ontario Provincial Election with a 94% accuracy rate.
Behind Polly’s keen predictive ability in politics (which is where she gets her name), is Erin Kelly, president and CEO of Advanced Symbolics Inc (ASI) -- a company that uses Artificial Intelligence to measure human behavior and predict outcomes. Erin is featured regularly in national and international media for the work her company is doing to advance research into human behavior.
I spoke with Erin yesterday on I’m a Millionaire! So Now What? EP 19 (listen & subscribe here).
Polly’s AI technology took five years to develop, a collaboration with a team at the University of Ottawa and Erin’s business partner, Kenton White, who invented the technology. Polly holds a massive amount of information that she can sort quickly according to certain ‘rules’ of demographic probability. And with each new project, Polly ‘learns’ more. Erin explains in the podcast:
“She will look at your name and look it up in an actuarial table. So, for example, if your name is Jennifer, the probability of you having been born between 1965 and 1975 is high because that was a popular name then. If your name is Madison, you are more likely to have been born in the year 2000. If your name is Gertrude, you are more likely to be over 70. So, she is able to (calculate) all these probabilities based on little crumbs and footprints that people leave.”
As I’ve written about before AI like Polly is incredibly fast at sorting through vast amounts of information and being able to pull out patterns. Advanced Symbolics has been hired to help identify trends in public transportation and tourism, consumer and retail research, and is doing internationally recognized work in the field of healthcare to predict suicide rates, assess the effectiveness of patient outreach programs, and track drug recalls.
Advanced Symbolics holds two US patents on population sampling for online media and works with major companies including Disney, McDonald’s Canada, Cadillac Fairview, Bell and many branches of government.
It’s refreshing to talk with Erin, because she sees the potential of AI like Polly to do real good in the world.
“Most of the time people want to make behaviour change. They want to stop smoking. But they don’t know how to do it. That’s the real promise of AI – figuring out what anti-smoking tools are likely to work for you. By being able to study it on a broad, broad basis like this we can get those insights that were not available before. We really need to not fear it and look at the opportunities that this technology can bring to us. To liberate us… To really move us forward and help the human condition. That is what I’ve been seeing.”
Erin Kelly is our guest at our next LIVE invitation-only Elevated Conversations dinner party. If the topic of Artificial Intelligence intrigues you and you live in the Ottawa area or will be in the Ottawa area on November 21st, reach out to express your interest. You can email me at colleen.campbell@rbc.com. This event is by invite only, so please apply for your spot at the table through me.