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johnstibal · 4 years ago

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Career advice for law students wanting to practice in international law

Hello,

I was recently asked by a law student for some career advice on how to get a job internationally, and particularly how they could get engaged in international (public and private) legal work.

While my legal background stems largely from doing multinational corporate work, particularly in the IT sector, here are my basic ideas outlining a few generic things to think about in terms of your career planning and some key approaches to pursuing these types of careers.

My background. For the past several years, I have worked primarily in London, and secondarily in Paris, for a very large telecommunications company. I was originally working for another one of this companies' affiliates in USA, and this enabled me to move internally to another one of their companies in the UK. Making this move internally within a large company allowed me to move abroad far easier, especially in terms of sorting out work visas and professional qualifications, etc.

Three Career Principles to Never Forget. In terms of general career advice, there are three principles which you must keep in mind to work in international law related field. While I recognize the risk of sharing a 'firm grasp of the obvious' (and I can almost hear some cringing already) most law students do not receive this message framed in this sort of a utilitarian light. So, here it goes:

The sole purpose of your first legal job is to enable you to get a better second legal job.

It is all about Brand. Your CV / Resume is a personal marketing tool. It is your personal ‘brand’. The choice of your first job should strongly take into account the value which the ‘brand’ of your new employer will add to your CV, and your future ambitions. This lasts for decades.

You cannot save the world if you cannot pay the bills. Public international law has some of the most interesting legal work around. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it also has a tendency to attract incredibly brilliant people who will work for a minimum salary. If you are independently wealthy, then great, no problem. If you have large education debts, please do not neglect the fact this will undoubtedly impact your choice of jobs in the short term, even if not necessarily in the longer term.

Your first Legal job. Getting your first Legal job is always a nerve wracking experience at best, and especially if you want to take a track other than going directly into a large law firm. Unfortunately, nearly all major law schools are set up to build a funnel for large firms. For your interests, even if you do not wish to 'end up' in a law firm or major global corporation, it usually makes considerable sense for you to go out to find the best ‘brand’ firm which you can, either in the US, UK or elsewhere. You will be able to extract the majority of the benefits during this time by working at a firm for exactly two years (or three years, if in New York City) doing whatever type of legal work - - of course, its even better if your firm or company has a public international law practice, but this is not required. By the end of this time, you will have ‘checked the box’ on your CV, and you can happily move on to what you really want to do. This is by far is the safest option for most, and also incidentally, completes one of the requirements enabling you to be admitted to practice in other common law countries (e.g. the UK). I’m not certain whether this is as helpful in other civil law countries, but I suspect it would be.

There is no question that working at a law firm, and potentially billing in ‘6 minute’ increments gets very tiring. Reviewing e.g. commercial leases is even less fun than watching paint dry. But this said, you will probably be practicing law for a very long time off and on anyway. Having a good initial first employer on your CV, who has ‘trained’ you is always a good investment for your CV even if not necessarily beneficial to you over the long term.

As a lawyer who has graduated from a US law school, you are able to come to Europe with a well respected professional background (speaking generally). In terms of global perceptions, US lawyers are highly respected, maybe in a similar form of the admiration to being world-class in other professions e.g. French engineers, British accountants, or Indian mathematicians - - not to foster bad stereotypes… But, needless to say, the USA legal professional qualification travels well around the world, particularly among global employers.

This being said, there is a particular area of confusion when you first come out of law school. Legal training is not the same around the world, meaning in France, a jurist has may have only attended the equivalent of undergrad and not graduate school (in terms of USA style nomenclature, depending on their qualifications). In the UK, while there are some permutations, most young associates at large law firms will attend around a year and a half or so of graduate school, followed by two years of a training contract to learn how to practice law. In Germany, many associates hold an LLM, or a PHD, at minimum, staying in school much longer. While you probably can research the differences in the number of years of schooling better than me, you should be particularly aware of this issue when you turn up to speak with a new potential employer in Europe. There is a risk of being perceived as wanting to find only a training contract, which is not needed as a USA law school graduate. After your first job, the timing issue goes away as you accumulate more PQE (Post Qualification Experience). The same is true in France, as I understand it.

An alternative path in human rights / non-profit sector for law students. This is an area where my knowledge is limited. But, if I wanted to pursue a career in this field, I would adopt some of the following key approaches.

First, figure out who are the heavyweights thought leaders in your particular field of interest, either individuals or organizations - - and, do your best to somehow associate yourself with their organization or sphere of colleagues. You want to try to figure out who these organizations interact with, and by extension, which of these organizations might hire you. Linkedin is an extraordinarily powerful resource for this research. To test your hypotheses, try calling up or meeting up with the General Counsel of any public interest foundation (if not possible to meet in person, then email / Skype also works but is far less effective than in person). Introduce yourself, and ask him or her for some general advice, in particular what ‘outside counsel’ their foundation typically uses - - make clear that you admire the work of their foundation, and look to gain relevant experience by doing similar work in the future. Ask about their Legal department organizational structure (General Counsels - GCs) love talking about this stuff), and what skills they look for over the long term, but even if not necessarily immediately. If it goes well, you might get some really good information, and maybe even a referral to a firm or sister organization. Senior Executives are very used to people asking them for jobs on a daily basis. But, they get asked for their advice far less often. Use this to your advantage... but do not be a pest.

As an example coming from NGOs, from time to time, I have occasionally dealt with some of the affiliates of the United Nations as a supplier. There are probably 20 of these, e.g. World Bank, IMF, UNHCR, IATA, WIPO, Red Cross, Red Crescent, and Red Crystal. Some of these organizations you are probably more familiar to you than others. There are two consistent traits that I see when dealing with their personnel. First, many of the staff are about to retire, and second, their staff have all consistently bounced around the world working in many different UN affiliates and national governments doing all sort of different roles, both legal and non-legal. The first of these is a well known problem for the UN and its agencies, at least, at a macro level, which might be helpfully to you. While I’m not certain what formal hiring programs may exist in these orgs, you should check with them around world, and particularly in Geneva, Switzerland and New York. Also, in terms of firms which advise this types of groups, you should also talk with McKinsey & Company. They do some very impressive pro bono work consulting for non-profits, and like to hire people with diverse backgrounds often having law degrees.

To get the attention of any large organization, and not just the UN agencies, you will always want to first find a way to get through the door, even if you need to do the unsexy type of legal work. Once you are inside, it is usually far easier to move internally. For example, if you work for a big organization like the UN, they have a vast array of legal needs, ranging from the basic to the exotic. It is undoubtedly the case that a large portion of the UN’s legal budget goes to HR and Procurement legal advice (e.g. doing commercial leases, procuring pencils and IT projects) (whether done in-house or by external firms.) When a UN agency needs to lease a building in sub-Saharan Africa, some lawyer somewhere in the world needs to review and advise on the tender process (often in combination with other local lawyers). Therefore, this is an opportunity to target. ��Yes, this is not sexy work, but it gets you a pass into the ‘club’ to work on other more interesting projects in the future.

As a final thought. Having outlined all of above, if you truly want to work in the non-profit / human rights space, it might be the case that being a ‘junior file clerk’ for Google.org or the Gates Foundation is equally beneficial (from a brand perspective to get your next job) as being a senior associate at Skadden Arps.

On the one hand, being at a big firm allows you to potentially develop a deep legal specialty, which might be later retooled for a good purpose. For example, undoubtedly, at some point, a brilliant lawyer in some large law firm will figure out how to package up millions of ‘microfinance’ loans using mezzanine financing techniques (i.e. allowing Wall Street money to start funding billions of very small loans around the world) - - in so doing, they could indirectly create prosperity in Africa for a life time.

At the same time, NGOs have a potential to do great things too. These are the people who are likely to generate the next generation of new legal concepts / quasi-regulatory regimes. For example, a newer area which I am following lately relates to 'conservation services' and 'natural capital' (see Conservation International) (www.conservation.org). These structures are, essentially, quasi-voluntary regulatory schemes to allow companies to share and manage ecological externalities (see Jennifer Morris's speech at Stanford). For me, CI's approach is just a start of a major trend in this area: soon there will be ISO certificate schemes covering externality pricing, as well as voluntary business case weighting methodologies which hopefully over time will become a standard approach in global commercial activity - - yet, this said, few individuals in the world understand how these types of governance tools work in practice. It simply cross too many intellectual domains, which so far has stymied adoption on a global level. 'Deep Greens' are not well suited to create these types of applied 'corporate' innovations around externalities, but maybe you are the one given your legal background.

Highly innovative organizations, such as the Gates Foundation, look great to onlookers because, in large part, by comparison, the other large global NGOs have tired ‘business’ models. Often major NGOs have been doing the same exact thing for decades. For me, I could see this as creating an opportunity. It might be great fun to join one of these NGOs for the express purpose to reshape it, remake it, and help them to reinvent their bag of tricks as an NGO. As a lawyer, you can have this level of influence within these types of organizations - - but, remember, always ask for forgiveness, never for permission when trying to affect major change within large organizations.

Keep in touch. If you like this or have other items to add, please drop me a note. I always enjoy hearing from people and what they think. These are changing times!

Best of luck,

John

#UN affiliates #career advice #career planning #change management #emory school of law #gates foundation #international law #law school #law student #non-profit #open precedents #public law #skadden arps #united nations #conservation services

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bioelectrogenisis-blog · 6 years ago

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The Near-ish Future in the Post December Tumblr, and where to go for Art.

This topic title is a bit misleading to some, and I sincerely apologize for any confusion thusly. The main reason for me dropping a text post like this on the first place is as follows:

I have not too long ago just finished reviewing the guidelines brought upon the site only months after its implication, and have seen the aftermath. I've not however seen any posts likes this looking too into this subject matter, so to my knowledge I will be the first, (Correct me if I am mistaken.)

Firstly, I wanted to go over the guidelines in two particular areas, regarding automatic registration and posts.

Most of the guidelines I agree with whole heartedly, no question. They offer opportunities for a safer environment for Art and other fun posts; I bare in mind no care for the removal of pornographic content and tumblers, I actually feel safe opening the app in public without hiding in my hoodie. What I do mind is their guidelines on automated posts.

It states in the Tumblr guidelines "Do register accounts or post content automatically, systematically, or programmatically." No other sentance beyond that one sentance on the subject.

I read through this carefully four seperate times, and came to two possibly ways to achive the result of 'automatic' posts; in order of logic from least to most:

1. As a script writtee and programmer, you set up a Jacascript style code into Python and program that to scan your account for any combination of Hml Text. Then it randomly generates Jpg Files that follow the permutations of existing Hml or with the use of the English language and its various symbols and numbers to make brand new content. It must then recognize symbols in the file to appropriate accurate (to a degree) tags in correspondence, and then without question post that bew photo on the sight to create a new post. Rinse and repeat at least once a day and you have yourself an automatic account posting everyday. I could not account for multiple registrations, but I may say that could be another separate program to assist the first in doing this process for multitasking purposes. I may have used improper terminology on this, but hopefully it seems clear on the of set.

2. Say in my situation I want to make this particular account a main stay for my posting library- along with Twitter and Instagram especially- and make nee art once a day for that. Or more logically stock pile art in grinding art sessions for daily posts until a second session comes my way for more art int he future, with bigger projects and commissions coming in anytime. I run the schedule consistently and have my self sort of the same thing, but in a different format and context.

The point is where is the line between automatic posts and scheduled planned out art posts? This is more of a problem for myself because I know I have been labeled dormant, and plan on leaving that soon. And I want to personally make big decisions moving forward with art as a main career, along with my bigger goal of making comics for fun and net gain. If I post pages at a time a day as updates, along with commissions and backlogged art a day, and other possible reblogs, making it more than once a day, is that considered to Tumblr "Automatic?"

To you and I knowing the foreknowledge, absolutely not; but to supervisors of the sight, it seems sketchy to try on my end. They have cracks in the system that still allow some nsfw art to leak through regardless, such as one which occasionally has newd women in compromising poses, with no clear intention behind it other than "We got boobs and butts" and no bio to boast of educational purposes to mask its intentions, again if any at all.

I'm posting this to ask any one following, if you're not one of the billions of porn bots following me, and as a true human being not trying to scam me of my money, to read through this for yourself or share to any others and comment the answer my question:

Should I post my career choice to Tumblr?

I offer commissions to anyone willing, though it may be free for the first few months or even year until i have a proper sight working for PayPal or which ever I so choose.

Thusly you would need proper examples of what my art is before I follow through with this plan. And as such, I will soon post a select few of my Instagram photos along side original art for this account, and some (not all) of my best works of the recent years to give you ideas of what you're asking for.

I thank you for baring through my horrendously verbose post on the matter. I get quite paranoid at many things, and fight my inner "I cant English" to present a better side of me that frankly, I prefer over saying everytime I am still new to English as a second language. (Though by this point I have also graduated two honors English courses in high school as well as write stories for my in progress comic.)

Thank you to you select few homosapiens still around to see this. To 2019 and what it may bring. And here is what I bring to you as a reward: Exhibit #1:

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nsw4133 · 7 years ago

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Hi! I’m NSW4133, the one-person show behind this blog page! So first of all, thank you for reading this, thank you for checking out the stuff on my page, and thank you for liking/reblogging/following my stuff! Thank you so much for spending time on me when really everything in 2018 is all about grabbing your precious attention and phone time. Long story ahead, so if you don’t like reading, please skip :)

Why NSW4133

For a good while, I was going to go for Not Safe For Work, but then it became Not Safe for the World. The numbers was really because in the sea of IDs, you need numbers to distinguish your email accounts. I will retain the pseudonym NSW4133 for stuff I put in here, unless life changed course and suddenly I think it’s cool for me to have my real name associated with this page. Because to be honest, there are so many things I would like to explore artistically that I simply can’t do it IRL, with my actual legal name. Not necessarily sexual themes, but also, if the art direction calls for sexual/genital/minor fetish stuff, I don’t ever want to feel like I’m holding back either. The only thing I hope to do with it is to make it tasteful, not trashy. Disclosure: I was raised in a Christian home. I can’t call myself a Christian. A lot of people in my home community cannot accept me if I ever tell them that, er… I am queer and I do a shit ton of tarot art. So while I do mention a lot of Christian stuff or biblical themes in my work, please don’t feel offended. I’m not here to make fun of anyone, or convert anyone, or threaten anyone of going to hell with my work. I’m a living contradiction, all these religious experiences are still part of my personal history, and I find it important to allow it to come out if the card triggers something in me. It’s not the most pleasant existence, and I allow that to show through in my work. The only good thing is that right now I’m not kicked out of the house just yet. This is my tiny oasis out in the vast internet space, but it is a growing place, so perhaps by next year I will say something totally different instead.

Why I draw tarot

I graduated in 2017 with an art degree and the scariest thing they talk about in college is not about how terrible the assignments were, but everything that happens after college. Will I be a starving artist? Will I even be doing art? Will I survive my day job?

This year has been challenging in the sense that I am discovering a new side of myself, post grad. I have no idea how/when I create stuff. Or what I even like to draw when the pressures of homework are removed. And how to balance that with my whittling paycheck and my unstable job situation. And the fact that I’m transitioning between countries. All I know is that I do not want to be like this super bitter professor who barks at us to get better at design by drawing more, but he himself can’t draw to save his life. I hated him, but I hated how pitiful he must have looked compared to everyone that graduated the same time as him. My school is not a big school and it is stuck in a rural(read: Pokemon town sized) part of Missouri. Yeah, not a good look. But I recognised that this could have easily been me. I too, could be like this jerk, if I’m not careful. So that’s why I’m scrambling to find a way to make sure I’m at least doing something artistically, even if I don’t earn the big money. Enter tarot.

There was this one time I attended an Adobe Creative Jam and there was this speaker who was talking about her journey in tarot designs, but really she spent the first half convincing the audience that tarot is not occultic lol. But that sure got me thinking that hey, maybe this is a really good practice on my art and not many people can claim that they completed a full deck, so why not right? My mind was envisioning tarot to be the creative equivalent of the Boston marathon and lenormand to be the creative 5k. All these ideas came while I was in a position ready for change. And I went for it. And this page happened. What really struck me about tarot is that it has a certain structure, yet it can also hold infinite permutations, which is great for artists like me who obviously needed guidance but acted like they know better.

So when will I sell my decks?

I like the idea of money, but ugh, I’m not ready for everything that goes into social media promotion, making sure I print the decks out, and ship them to good people like you. But also another part of me is wanting to keep it as accessible as possible to broke ass college kids, cos I was one too. It sucks to only see only parts of the deck being posted online. I wanted to let people be able to enjoy the deck freely, and only buy them if and when they are ready. Because the whole point about this page is NOT TO MAKE MONEY, but to keep me away from the bigger demon that is creative death. So eventually I will open up some paypal/ko-fi so y’all kind hearted souls can send me some tips if you are feeling it, but even as of right now I am not in a stable postal code. This isn’t like going from one city to another. This is moving to a different country, and not in the sexy way. Don’t ask me why, but this has a lot to do with the Malaysian (some Malaysians, not all) fixation on migration. Americans may have been talking about moving to Canada or Mexico when Trump gets elected, but bruh, this is exactly what Malaysians have been doing for the past few decades and this migration thing is not as great or easy as you think. My own family is quite invested in this idea, but as a result, my personal life have been in a halt. I can’t plan what kind of jobs I can take because I think of maybe I need to be ready to move out, I can’t take freelance jobs as easily because it requires a permanent address for Paypal and I don’t have that, and I can’t form relationships (not even romantic ones!) properly because I’m just temporary. I’m just a fresh grad. As much as I struggle though, at least no one is dying in this story. All I can say is that please send some good thoughts/vibes/spells my way so I can finally not have to struggle with moving.

PS: Originally I wanted to make this into something more of like an artist statement, because that is what artists do, but then I realised that I will change, even on an every-3-months basis. Then I wanted to make this into more of an about me page, but all the other examples I see online are so corporate-y, and I don’t think I would fit in either. But it’s weed day (happy 4/20, folks) and I don’t ever want to operate this page as a super capitalistic venture, so I decided that this is going to be somewhat like an about me page, but also like a yearly check-in on why I draw. Really, why the heck do I draw when I don’t earn good money out of it?

#announcement #nsw4133

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drsunnyhanda-md · 4 years ago

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My COVID story: “We were positive and we didn’t know from where” by Sunny Handa MD

The situation around us is sort of funny. Most folks have started behaving as if the new normal is nothing but the traditional that we’ve always known. More and more people have started going out and lots of are unapologetic about not wearing masks anymore. Traffic’s almost back to normal and crowds are often seen in gyms, malls, markets, and where not. I used to be just starting to feel that Covid wasn’t an enormous deal anymore and lo and behold, my entire family came out positive within the last week of December 2020. Having done all the permutations and combinations of where we’d have caught it from, all we had for a thought was an enormous nada. Since the start of August or even before that, my mother had started going for her usual walks within the neighborhood park in Canada. Doctor MD Sunny Handa’s father may be a CKD patient and was getting to the hospital for hemodialysis twice or thrice every week and that I – well I had just met my friends (the first time since lockdown) a couple of days before the nemesis struck us. However, none of my friends clothed positive. We accepted it – we were positive and that we didn’t know from where. The symptoms Most of our symptoms were similar but some. Father: Extreme fatigue for 4 weeks, fever (99-103 degree) within the first fortnight , loss of smell/taste within the second week, fluctuating vital sign and pulse after a month Mother: Extreme fatigue and low-grade fever (99-100 degree) for 40 days, loss of smell/taste within the second week Me: Fatigue and low-grade fever (99-101 degree) for 40 days, loss of smell/taste within the second week, headaches A question arose – Were we alleged to isolate ourselves from one another or could we all sleep in quarantine happily together? We might get an everyday call from the Delhi Government to ask about our health, which we actually commended them for. So, I asked them this and that they told me that we could stick together . However, me doctor MD Sunny Handa still had my doubts because my mother had begun positive a couple of days before my father and me. Hence, I asked my sister who lives in Australia to see together with her country’s coronavirus helpline. And as I had suspected, we were to isolate ourselves from one another also , just because we might be at different levels of recovery and being together could impact that. So began our covid journey. Medicines and more medicines The doctor that we had been seeing recommended a mess of multivitamins and paracetamol only fever touched 100 degrees Celsius. Considering my father’s comorbidity, he was hospitalized a couple of days later – the lag because we were unsuccessful at convincing him earlier and his super-strong will power. Anyway, so then, my mother and I were stuck under home quarantine and my father was admitted within the covid ward of a personal hospital. Our meals were largely being delivered by our extremely considerate relatives, as neither my mother nor I had the energy to cook, or do anything in the least . an easy task of tidying just our own rooms got us doomed. we might see one another mostly in our front room , with our masks on. However, because we both would really feel lonely and in need of some human company, we gradually started eating our meals together but we sat a minimum of 15 feet apart. The slew of home remedies As far because the kadhas and residential remedies are concerned, we all know it’s in India. We got massive spam of recipes of various kinds from our relatives, friends, and acquaintances, but all with good and highly appreciated intentions. We usually stuck to the subsequent home-remedies routine: Morning: predicament with juice and gargles pre-breakfast. coconut milk and a plateful of fruits, especially those rich in vitamin C (mosambi and kiwi) around mid-afternoon. Pre-lunch: A cup of predicament with five drops of Tulsi ark Evening: Kadha made with three essentials, Tulsi leaves, ginger and raw turmeric, and anything more was what we had at hand that day, including cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom, etc. Before sleep: Steam with carom seeds/kalonji (later, we skipped the spices though), milk boiled with raw turmeric We were also recommended some totkas to interrupt our fevers and mothers being what they’re, we followed one among them also . But guess what? You recognize it. Cleaning It is also recommended by MD Sunny Handa that if your family/you are diagnosed positive, you want to sanitize your surroundings every few hours in order that any virus that you simply could also be leaving around gets destroyed. Hence, we had two sets of sanitizers – One was the milder version that we might also use on our hands. We used it to wash our furniture, doorknobs, any surfaces we often touched, and therefore the likes. The opposite one was a stronger version that we only utilized in washrooms and floor cleaning. This was an excellent draining task, but we managed it. At least, most of the time. What worked and what didn’t Honestly, we don’t know. Neighborhood folks expected that home remedies would help alleviate symptoms before later but I’m unsure they did. Or a minimum of they didn’t offer any visible respite. The multivitamins also didn’t seem to be working. Often it just felt like hoarding on heavy medication with no clear signs of any improvement. We went on like that for over a month, shifting among three doctors, but to not any significant difference. How long did our covid symptoms last? Both Doctor Sunny Handa MD mother and I stayed with symptoms for for much longer than we had expected. Her fever and fatigue lasted about 45 days, while mine lasted about 30 days. i might also get bouts of headaches every now then , and still do, but much but earlier. As far as my father cares , he was released from the hospital after about fortnight of stay. He came back with no fever which was some respite. However, he still had a cough. He would nebulize twice each day a day for nearly every week or 10 days after coming home. However, his dialysis became trickier. In every session, his vital sign started getting dangerously low. At some point after we had to chop short his dialysis and obtain him home sooner, his pulse shot up to 180 and vital signs dropped to 40-60. We had to rush him to the hospital again and after having injected a couple of medicines for arrhythmia, two rounds of ECG, and a couple of other tests, he stabilized and didn’t require admission. Now, he’s on a further medication for arrhythmia but his dialysis sessions have gotten smoother. When did we begin negatively? As far as getting a negative covid report cares, we were advised that it could take anywhere between fortnight to 3 months. Especially within the case of patients with comorbidity/other illnesses like my father, the virus can take longer than usual to go away the body, so was told to us. My, doctor MD Sunny Handa’s entire family came out negative after about 30 days of getting positive. I only got tested after 30 days and was negative, however, my father got tested hebdomadally and he took about 35 days to return out negative. Post-covid illnesses my mother has often been complaining of brain fog and fatigue, such a lot in order that she isn’t ready to manage her everyday tasks. My father too feels more fatigued than before-covid. So, we had to urge a 24X7 household help despite its risks within the current scenario. I had been getting unusual bouts of headaches even after a month. Screen time for my paperwork got me extremely tired. But, I started recuperating in about 35 days approximately, and may hopefully say that I am back to (almost) normal now. However, I even have joined various post-covid illness groups on social media and I was surprised to ascertain that folks are witnessing unusual/unregistered symptoms even after months of getting diagnosed and treated. Some, including kids, still suffer from headaches and weird vital sign ranges, while brain fog appeared like a really common persistent issue. None of us knows what we are handling. None of us has any idea about the amount of the way our bodies have been/may be suffering from this novel virus. All we will do is share our experiences and find solace in being together during this experience. As far as ‘the new normal’ cares, I’m just scared at how casual many became with reference to precautions. Corona virus can’t be taken lightly – that’s my biggest lesson from my entire corona virus sojourn. And you ought to take that home too. Written by:

Sunny Handa MD – An MBA Graduate from Canada University, Ottawa

#dr.Sunny Handa #MD sunny handa #Sunny Handa md #MD sunny handa canada

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cashcounts · 7 years ago

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Can AI Learn to Understand Emotions?

Growing up in Egypt in the 1980s, Rana el Kaliouby was fascinated by hidden languages—the rapid-fire blinks of 1s and 0s computers use to transform electricity into commands and the infinitely more complicated nonverbal cues that teenagers use to transmit volumes of hormone-laden information to each other.

Culture and social stigma discouraged girls like el Kaliouby in the Middle East from hacking either code, but she wasn’t deterred. When her father brought home an Atari video game console and challenged the three el Kaliouby sisters to figure out how it worked, Rana gleefully did. When she wasn’t allowed to date, el Kaliouby studied her peers the same way that she did the Atari.

Rana el Kaliouby, who grew up hacking Ataris, is now helping AI understand human emotion.

“I was always the first one to say ‘Oh, he has a crush on her’ because of all of the gestures and the eye contact,” she says.

Following in the footsteps of her parents, both computer scientists, el Kaliouby knew that her knowledge of programming languages would be a foundational skill for her career. But it wasn’t until graduate school that she discovered that her interest in decoding human behavior would be equally important. In 1998, while looking for topics for her Master’s thesis at the American University in Cairo, el Kaliouby stumbled upon a book by MIT researcher Rosalind Picard. It argued that, since emotions play a large role in human decision-making, machines will require emotional intelligence if they are to truly understand human needs. El Kaliouby was captivated by the idea that feelings could be measured, analyzed, and used to design systems that can genuinely connect with people. The book, called Affective Computing, would change her career. So would its author.

Today, el Kaliouby is the CEO of Affectiva, a company that’s building the type of emotionally intelligent AI systems Picard envisioned two decades ago. Affectiva’s software measures a user’s emotional response through algorithms that identify key facial landmarks and analyze pixels in those regions to classify facial expressions. Combinations of those facial expressions are then mapped to any of seven different emotions as well as some complex cognitive states such as drowsiness and distraction. Separate algorithms also analyze voice patterns and inflections.

Rosalind Picard pioneered the field of affective computing.

Affectiva’s software allows market researchers to gauge a response to ads and TV shows. It powers furry social robots that help children stay engaged in learning. And, in the near future, it will allow cars to detect when drivers are dozing off.

By creating AI systems that incorporate emotion data, el Kaliouby and others in the affective computing field envision a world where technologies respond to user frustration, boredom, or even help alleviate human suffering.

“I see that our emotional AI technology can be a core component of online learning systems, health wearables even,” el Kaliouby says. “Imagine if your Fitbit was smart about when it told you to go to sleep or when you needed to get snacks. It could say, ‘Oh, I see that today is going to be a really busy day for you and you’re going to be stressed. How about you take three minutes to meditate?’ ”

Calculating Emotion

Analyzing emotions in real time is a mathematical problem of astronomical proportions—an equation our brains solve in microseconds over and over and over again throughout the day.

“If you take chess or Go—these games in AI that people think are so hard to solve—those are nothing to compared to what can happen in a few minutes in facial expressions,” says Rosalind Picard, founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Lab.

By conservative estimates, one single chess game can have up to 10120 possible moves, presenting a colossal challenge for artificial intelligence systems at the time. AI is more sophisticated today—last year Google’s AlphaZero algorithm taught itself the game and defeated a world champion chess program called Stockfish in just four hours—but analyzing metrics like facial expression in real time “isn’t even in the same league” Picard says.

Humans start an interaction with any of 10,000 possible combinations of facial muscle movements that can create a facial expression. Each expression is created through a combination of more than 40 distinct muscle movements ranging from eyebrow furrowing to nose wrinkling to lip puckering. Those expressions are often accompanied by any of roughly 400 possible aspects of vocal inflections along with several thousand potential hand and body gestures. These face-voice-hand permutations change continuously throughout a single conversation, creating an ocean of data that zips from one person to another instantaneously. While our brains subconsciously process complex emotions and their intensities, teaching an artificial neural network to wade through that tsunami of data is an extraordinary technological challenge, one that’s further complicated by the fact that nonverbal communication varies between cultures.

How does today’s artificial intelligence actually work—and is it truly intelligent? Watch “Can We Build a Brain?” Wednesday, May 16 at 9/8c on PBS.

Despite the challenges, artificial emotional intelligence is a technological brass ring for a growing number of companies and researchers. While the field is in many ways still in its infancy, serious resources are being devoted to developing tools that can analyze and predict emotional response. These emerging tools include apps that forecast when students will be stressed out, vocal analysis software that helps diagnose mania and schizophrenia, and programs that predict suicide risk based on social media posts. These tools come with serious privacy and ethical questions that haven’t yet been answered as well as significant technical challenges.

“There’s just a huge, huge amount of data and research that has to happen before it’s going to be something that our computers are smart about,” Picard says.

Making the Field of Feelings

While el Kaliouby was fighting to be taken seriously as a computer scientist in Egypt, Rosalind “Roz” Picard was in Boston waging a somewhat similar war. Picard spent her early days at the MIT Media Lab building mathematical models that emulate how the brain detects patterns from data it collects from the outside world. Emotions, she discovered, have more to do with it than one might suspect.

“As I learned more and more about the role of feelings I went, ‘Oh shoot. This looks really important for AI and computer intelligence, and I sure don’t want to do it,’ ” Picard says. “This would totally destroy my career as a woman. Who wants to be associated with emotion?”

Picard tried to recruit male researchers, but no one bit. She began to do it herself, testing ways to capture data on genuine, spontaneous emotions and applying the same machine learning techniques she had used in previous research. Her first papers were rejected and criticized, with one reviewer writing that one article about engineering emotional intelligence was perhaps best suited for an in-flight magazine.

Like el Kaliouby, Picard persisted, turning what began as a small collection of academic papers into her groundbreaking book, Affective Computing, which was first published in 1997.

Seven years later, Picard met a starstruck el Kaliouby, then a Ph.D. student who was designing facial analysis software that could recognize emotional states. The system, called MindReader, was trained using video footage from the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. It featured actors making hundreds of different facial expressions—a sort of library originally compiled to teach children on the autism spectrum how to read nonverbal cues. El Kaliouby was planning to return to her husband and home country after finishing school. Instead, Picard offered to collaborate with her in Boston.

“I was like ‘I would love that. That would be a dream come true; however, I’m married. I have to go back,’ ” el Kaliouby recounts. “She actually said, ‘Commute from Cairo.’ It was insane.”

El Kaliouby finished her Ph.D. and embarked on a three-year stint at the MIT Media Lab, flying between Egypt to Boston while creating the next iteration of MindReader. Picard, in the meantime, had already developed several new tools for capturing emotions in data computers could read, including a set of hair scrunchies embedded with sensors to measure skin conductance. Worn on the palm of the hand, the sensors picked up changes in electrical conductivity that happen when someone becomes psychologically aroused and begins to sweat. Believing that MindReader and the biometric sensors could be used to help children on the autism spectrum learn to navigate social situations and control their emotional responses, el Kaliouby and Picard began a multi-year study.

As the project progressed, the pair demonstrated both technologies for corporate sponsors visiting the Media Lab. They were overwhelmed by how many organizations in industries ranging from retail to banking to robotics were interested in real-time data on their target audience’s emotional states. In 2008, they asked then Media Lab director Frank Moss to expand their research team. He refused, but offered a different proposition: Form a company. Reluctantly, Affectiva was born.

Affectiva’s software maps a person’s face and uses a series of neural networks to judge their emotion.

Nearly a decade later, neuroscientist Dr. Ned T. Sahin is using Affectiva software to fulfill Roz and Rana’s early dreams of using the technology to help people on the autism spectrum. Sahin is the founder of Brain Power, a company that makes wearable life coaching technologies for people with brain and cognitive challenges. Sahin’s team has developed a suite of Google Glass augmented reality applications, some of which are powered by Affectiva algorithms, and many of which were originally designed for children but have applications for wider audiences.

One game, called Emotion Charades, prompts a partner sitting across from the user to make a specific facial expression. Affectiva algorithms identifies the emotion and shows the user one augmented reality emoji representing that feeling and another that doesn’t. Users earn points by picking the correct emotion while prompts encourage players to discuss how they experience that feeling in their lives.

Like all Brain Power apps, Emotion Charades is designed to be used in short, daily spurts, just enough for users to practice skills they can use in their everyday lives.

“It’s like training wheels on a bike that then get removed,” Sahin says.

El Kaliouby and Picard agree that affective computing should focus on human needs. People should be able to decide whether and when to use the technology, understand how their data is being used, and maintain a level of privacy. Affectiva’s licensing agreement prohibits the software from being used in security or surveillance, and it requires partner organizations to obtain explicit consent from users before deployment.

But as the field expands, potential for misuse ratchets up. Groups like the IEEE Standards Association have issued guidelines for affective design that include calls for explicit consent and data transparency policies. When a system is likely to elicit an emotional response, it should be easily modifiable in case its misunderstood or if it unexpectedly hurts or upsets. Whether and how organizations will implement those guidelines is still up in the air.

Automating Mental Health

Answering those questions now is crucial, says Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech. Back in 2010, while completing her dissertation, De Choudhury unexpectedly lost her father. As she processed her shock and grief, she began thinking about the loss from a more scientific perspective—how do users change their social media behaviors when a major life event happens?

De Choudhury began analyzing how and what new mothers post on Twitter after they’ve had a baby. She expected to see shifts in positive social media activity, but her data also revealed that some new moms were expressing negative emotions, too, and posting less often than they were during pregnancy. Suspecting that these might be indicators of postpartum depression, De Choudhury, then working at Microsoft Research, conducted a separate study that compared data from Facebook posts to interviews with mothers before and after their children were born. She found that data from social media posts could not only detect when a user had postpartum depression, but it could also predict which users would become depressed after giving birth.

Since then, De Choudhury has used social media to identify mental illness risk, including psychosis symptoms among patients with schizophrenia, while other researchers have created algorithms that detect signs of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Another team at Vanderbilt has built algorithms to predict suicide risk and is currently seeking ways to translate them into medical practice. Late last year, Facebook rolled out several suicide prevention tools, including an artificial intelligence program that scans posts and comments for words related to suicide or self-injury.

“Social data can be helpful to clinicians and psychiatrists as well as public health workers because it gives them a sense of where are the risks,” De Choudhury says. But, she adds, “currently the landscape is really, for lack of a better word, ‘primitive,’ in how algorithmic inferences can be incorporated into interventions.”

Chris Danforth, co-director of the University of Vermont’s Computational Story Lab, believes that conversations around when and how to deploy predictive mental health algorithms are especially important as opaque organizations like Facebook move further into the field. Danforth has designed one proof of concept computational model that can predict whether users are depressed by observing their Twitter feed and another from their Instagram photos.

Rosalind Picard is also focused on mental health. She left Affective in 2013 and has since concentrated on several health-minded projects, including work with MIT research scientist Akane Sano to build predictive models of mood, stress, and depression using data from wearable sensors. The goal is to create models that anticipate changes in mood and physical health and to help users make evidence-based decisions to stay happier and healthier, she says. Picard has also launched Empatica, a start-up that makes wearable devices for medical research. Earlier this year, Empatica received FDA clearance for the Embrace smartwatch, a device that uses skin conductance and other metrics combined with AI to monitor for seizures.

Meanwhile, el Kaliouby spends much of her time developing Affectiva tech. Since launching the software development kit in 2014, the company has licensed its software to organizations in healthcare, gaming, education, market research, and retail, to name a few. The company is currently focused on automotive applications as well as incorporating voice analysis into its “Emotion AI” software. Last year, Affectiva also joined the Partnership on AI—a technology consortium developing ethics and education protocols for AI systems—and el Kaliouby is currently working with the World Economic Forum to design an ethics curriculum for schools. She envisions a future where machines are tuned into our feelings enough to make our lives happier, healthier, maybe even more human.

“I just have this deep conviction that we’re building a new paradigm of how we communicate with computers,” el Kaliouby says. “That’s been the driving factor of my work. We are changing how humans connect with one another.”

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