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graziadiocenterilpostino · 1 year ago

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Alumni Spotlight: Francesca Ricciardelli

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. How did you become interested in your studies?

While raising my brothers and me, my parents would read a lot around us, and as a result I grew up enjoying reading and I have been curious about other cultures and histories, and later on languages as well. After my studies at a grammar school in Italy, Liceo Classico, I became even more interested in languages, linguistics and literature. Furthermore, I used to attend a private language school where my English drastically improved, and my confidence in speaking it at a young age became fundamental in my decision to pursue a BA in English and French language, literature and linguistics at the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. After volunteering and later getting an internship teaching Italian to migrants and tourists in Bologna, I decided to continue my studies at Ca’ Foscari in Venice, where I got an MA in English with a focus on Language Science and Foreign/Second Language Acquisition. While completing another (unpaid, academic and compulsory) internship in Venice, I was given classes to observe and teach, and that summer inspired me to write my thesis on teaching Italian cooking classes. I wrote my thesis in New York City, where I was teaching at the Italian Cultural Institute of Molise, the region I come from. I believe this experience really opened my eyes to my career path and I arrived at California State University of Long Beach, where I became a teaching associate and research graduate assistant because I knew I needed to go more in depth in the culture and literature of the Italian language in order to be a better instructor, and I was right.

You are currently pursuing a PhD at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, in Barcelona. Can you tell us a bit about your experiences there? What are you currently researching?

My experience in Barcelona has been great. I got to live and experience university life in another country and it felt very refreshing. My interest is in multilingualism and plurilingualism, therefore, I was looking for a PhD in a bilingual country. The Catalan community has been very welcoming and friendly, which is why I go back every summer and am happy to call it casa. Professors and peers have been sources of inspiration in many ways.

For my research I’ve observed reading and listening intercomprehension strategies used by three groups of participants specifically and carefully chosen between Catalunya, Spain, California and Central and South America. The PhD is international, meaning that it required a part of the research to be conducted in another institution abroad, in my case at CSULB, and part of the thesis written in another language, so in English for me. If everything goes well, I will defend my thesis next summer.

Do you have any advice for someone interested in a PhD? Is there something that surprised you that others should be aware of?

My advice, not to discourage anyone, would be to prepare to work hard and be committed to their research. If the research project is interesting and original you will fully enjoy the process and you won’t regret it. I was lucky enough to be accepted to the only university I had applied to and with the only two professors I wanted to work with, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. I’ve seen friends accept professors’ projects/ideas who dropped out in their second year, so choose carefully and make sure you’re not working for someone else. This wasn’t really a surprise for me because it’s something I had been warned about and I think everyone should be aware of it: it doesn’t matter how great your advisors are, you will have to learn how to work on your own. In my case they’ve always been kind and helpful, but this experience also taught me that I can succeed by working on my own and it’s extremely rewarding.

You are currently employed at USC. What can you share about the work you do there?

While living in LA for my research and personal reasons, I applied to a Part-Time Lecturer Call on LinkedIn and my first semester there was a blast. I felt the need to go back to teach in a university classroom. I was originally substituting for a professor on medical leave–who later decided to retire, which meant that I had to apply for a new International Call as a full-time Lecturer of Italian. When I was offered the position I couldn’t believe it, it was very fulfilling and I love working at USC. The colleagues and students are incredible. It’s a great department and I feel appreciated and valued, and as a new hire it’s something I’m very thankful for. I’m teaching Italian at various levels and I’ve also been assigned an Internship class that is giving me lots of ideas for the future and hope for generations of students to choose and embark on this beautiful Italian journey.

What is your favorite Italian city and why?

I would say that Bologna will always occupy a special place in my heart since it’s the first city I moved to when I was still figuring out how to live away from home and be independent. I still have friends there and I go back and visit every time I can.

Francesca dopo lezione

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humansofhds · 7 years ago

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Seokweon Jeon, MTS ’19

“As long as I remember, I was always curious about what religion means to people.”

Seokweon is a master of theological studies degree candidate focusing on Religion and Social Sciences.

From South Korea to the U.S. and Back

Both my parents are Korean. My dad studied in the U.S. for his doctoral degree in Texas and Atlanta. I was born while he was finishing his degree, but I was actually born in Seoul because they wanted to raise their children as Korean. For my childhood, naturally, I always had two different kinds of cultural backgrounds—American culture and Korean culture, too. South Korea is the place I spent more than 20 years of my life.

Now my family is living in South Korea in a very beautiful seaside village. When he was teaching at a college, my dad got a call from his friends from his hometown in South Korea and he told him that there is no pastor or people who can lead the church because he is from a really small seaside village, just 1,500 people. But because it's such a small town in the countryside no pastors or ministers wanted to come lead the church. Right after that phone call, he decided to go back to his hometown in South Korea and lead the church. He went back to South Korea because of that one phone call, and he’s spent his whole life working in that church. And I grew up there in that village: Samcheok, in the province of Gangwon-do.

Son of a (Different) Preacher Man

I was born and raised as the son of a preacher man and professor. But mostly I would say son of a preacher man. Church was my home, as well as my dad’s office. Although I was raised as the son of a preacher man, my upbringing was kind of different, because my dad was, in some ways, a different figure compared to other average “normal” pastors in South Korea. When it comes to South Korean Protestant churches, they are not really rigorous in terms of inter-religious dialogue or engagement. They have a kind of anti-non-Christianity sentiment. So they tend to demonize Buddhism or Catholicism and of course Shamanism, or any other kinds of religious traditions other than Protestantism.

But my dad was really different. Every year on the Buddha’s birthday I went to the local temples and had tea with the headmaster of the temple, and the whole day I would hang around and talk with many monks and nuns and kids around the temple. I visited all the time because my dad really liked having conversations with the headmasters of the temples around the town. I met a lot of shamanists, too, because he really loved to sit and talk with shamans. So he invited many of them, and many shamans would come to my dad’s office or house without appointments. Any time they would just knock on the door and say, “Is Pastor Jeon here?” And my mom would invite them to come inside to have tea, or she would serve them a meal and talk with them. So when it comes to my childhood upbringing, I would say I was surrounded by many religious people like Fathers, shamans, Buddhist monks, nuns, and of course pastors.

Sharing Your Life

My family has a summer house right next to the seashore—a beautiful place. And because my dad is like the pastor “boy-next-door,” he would invite everyone all the time—for 20 years not a single day has that house been empty. Backpackers, nuns, professors, friends of friends, businessmen, salarymen—everyone could come to my house. And every night if new guests came to my house I would just go there with my dad, mom, and brother and have tea and dinner and listen to their stories and how they live, how they get here, and what their worlds look like.

It was an amazing experience for me because from that time, as long as I can remember, I loved listening to other people’s stories, and that house was my natural setting. So I would listen to many people’s stories about how they live and how they found hardships in their lives. You know, if you go to a really beautiful place you could feel the tension drip away and sometimes you can really talk about your life and you really want to share your life. So that is my good fortune that my hometown had.

Religious Curiosity

Growing up, my dad had an inter-religious mindset. So as long as I remember, I was always curious about what religion means to people and what different faith traditions mean and signify in today's society. When I went to the summer house to see the new guests, they would talk about all the different faith traditions in their lives. Some talk about yoga, some talk about Buddha, some Bodhisattvas, and some Jesus Christ and Holy Spirit, and some angels, and some prophets, too. So I was really really curious about what all those things mean to me and to my family and to them. I think that is the place that I started to have an interest in having an occupation as a scholar to study religion and all the different religious traditions and practices. So that's the one part; interreligious settings and listening to different stories at the summer house.

Interdisciplinary Study

I studied sociology and theology in undergrad at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. From my undergrad years I worked on the sociological study of religion. I was fascinated by the fact that religious traditions and practice can be studied with quantitative methodologies and numbers and data. I also found out that can also provide a really good reflection, overview, and perspective on current movements and the larger picture of modern religion, too. So I was fascinated by two different academic disciplines in college—sociology and religion.

After graduation, I kept on studying religion but through a different lens: history. The reason I chose to study history of religion at a graduate level was to understand religion with an expanded frame of reference, with sensitivity and with an in-depth knowledge. As a student working on the religious movements of the current state or present time, it was really important for me to grasp the historical ways in which religious values and practices, which have a strong bearing on the way we behave and conduct ourselves in the society, have been formed and changed. So in graduate school in the same college I studied Christianity of East Asia. I studied how Western Christianity was introduced into most of East Asian countries, how they rooted to and interacted with the indigenous culture, and how Western Christianity became a model of “modernity” in East Asia. I especially focused on the late eighteenth-and-nineteenth century interplay between indigenous religious traditions and Christianity.

I think studying religion through the eyes of the humanities can give a vibrant framework that can reflect the diverse changes happening now. For me, choosing to study religion with sociology and history has allowed me consider not only what to think about religion, which will one day be outdated and obsolete, but also how to think about religion. I’m really fascinated by that at HDS, too, that I can experience the whole diverse spectrum of religion and be a part of this dynamic community, and reflect it back to my study using various methodologies; sociology, philosophy, and anthropology.

Academic and Cultural Differences

In Korean academia, I could not really synthesize all my different interests. And it is the same in Japan and China. They have their own kinds of boundaries when it comes to academic disciplines. But at HDS, there are not strict boundaries between disciplines. I can fully synthesize all methodologies and disparate academic perspectives in one place. Plus, last semester I went to BC, BU, MIT, HDS, and FAS, and I went to many seminars and classroom. I was a regular member of American politics seminar at BC. I feel like HDS does not attempt to funnel those whole diverse perspectives and methodologies down to one little path across the water but strive to connect the (seemingly irrelevant and distant) dots. In Boston, I can use all these diverse institutions and tools to study modern religious movement in depth and and comprehensive. That’s another big difference I am experiencing.

In Korea academia, its lecture oriented. So the instructor lectures and the advisor guides all your themes, dissertation, thesis, classes. There is hardly a vibrant dialogue between students. But in HDS, its more discussion oriented. And the academic relation between students is really vibrant and active. The second cultural different is rent. It's so expensive! So living in Boston can be overwhelming. Haha!

America Building Walls

Before I came to Harvard, Korea was a mess. The president was impeached and every day there were disturbing new allegations of corruption, scandal, bribery, deception, and collusion, which shook the very foundations of society. But in May 2017, a new president had been elected who was a former human rights lawyer. When I left there to study at Harvard, in August, it was a moment where everything seemed cleaned up. But when I got to HDS it seemed like a new kind of mess had started.

Growing up in South Korea, my parents always told me about the true source of America's greatness and what American greatness really means. Whenever they talked about it, they spoke of tolerance and diversity, and recognizing all different settings, race, ethnicity, gender, and political identity. My dad said that America can be one great country because they embrace all the differences and make them as great a thing, as positive power, the greatest power the U.S. can have. But after coming back to the U.S. in the Trump era, I am sensing and feeling the opposite context and landscape right now: hate speech and building walls rather than bridges.

So at first it was difficult for me because it was different from what I had heard and dreamed. Harvard is a safe haven for us, but if we walk out the door what we are seeing is so different. No tolerance. Too little empathy and compassion. Rather than tolerance what I’m seeing right now is hatred. That was one of the strongest impressions that I had in August and September of 2017, when I first arrived.

Positive Shock

I served in the army about four years. The first two years I spent at the DMZ, around the Joint Security Area (JSA). That is the place that Kim Jong Un and the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in, met at that historical meeting and shook hands. So watching that scene gave me a chill because that place used to be a place of hatred, tension, fears, and tears. But things are starting to change. This dialogue gives me a kind of hope that everything can change, maybe if the initial power and gathering can be weak, but if someone starts to work on dialogue, conversation, embracing diversity and overcoming difference, some really great change can happen. When I served the army, I thought this division between the North and South would last longer because, frankly, I sensed no hope there. But now, especially since February, I'm starting to think some really positive and powerful changes can happen and maybe my future generation can live in a united country.

My family cried when they watched the whole interviews and live streaming of the event. It was a fresh shock also to them because everything was so smooth and fast. My dad once told me that if we are trying to achieve peace between North and South Korea, gradual steps would be needed. So this is so different from what I thought because it happened without buildup. This big change happened all of a sudden with a small number of people’s efforts. It was a positive shock. My dad was born in North Korea before the Korean War and both my mom and dad’s parents came from North Korea, too. It inspires hope, and the need for gathering and mobilizing our force because huge positive changes are actually possible and at the darkest and most unexpected moments.

Interview and photos by Anaïs Garvanian

#Harvard Divinity School #Harvard #family #protestant #buddhism #large

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coppolafrancis · 6 years ago

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Diamonds Disrupted: How Man-Made Diamonds Will Disrupt The Mined-Diamond Industry

The mined-diamond industry is mightily concerned that the rapidly growing man-made diamond industry is on a course to disrupt their business. At least that is the conclusion I draw from the Diamond Producers Association’s new marketing campaign “Real Is Rare.” The DPA was organized in May 2015 by seven of the world’s leading diamond companies. Its new marketing efforts are backed up by a study conducted by KRC Research entitled What Women Really Want among 1,000 millennial-aged women (18-35 years).

The research conclusions, according to Deborah Marquardt, DPA’s chief marketing officer, are: “When evaluating luxury purchases, they seek items that are genuine, unique…not mass-produced, and have inherent meaning and value.” Authenticity is the key value these women identified when considering luxury purchases, such as diamonds, with nearly 9 in 10 (89%) agreeing with the statement “When treating myself to a luxury item, I look for authenticity.”

The research also delved into millennial women’s attitudes and purchase plans for diamond jewelry; however, what they didn’t report is how these women feel about cultivated, man-made diamonds as compared with natural, mined ones. They didn’t ask whether cultivated diamonds, which are “real” diamonds in their chemical and physical composition and indistinguishable from the mined version only with the aid of laboratory equipment, not the naked eye or a jeweler’s loupe, are an acceptable substitute for the mined version, especially considering man-made diamonds cost less.

The natural-diamond industry is doubling down on the potential disruptive threat from the man-made alternative with the Federal Trade Commission as well. Currently, the commission is considering letting the term “cultured” be added to these currently accepted descriptions of man-made versions, such as “lab-created,” or “laboratory grown.” The mined-diamond industry is fighting this addition tooth and nail, while the man-made producers are intent upon dropping any reference to “laboratory created” or “laboratory grown” in favor of “cultured” alone.

As for me, I prefer the term “cultivated” as in grown from a seed, rather than “cultured” which, though better than lab-grown to my mind, is more appropriate for pearls than the process of growing a diamond in the factory. Ultimately the decision is in the hands of the regulators.

But no matter what we call them, I reached across the aisles to those in both the mined-diamond and cultivated- diamond camps to assess the potential disruption to the $80 billion global diamond-mining industry that the man-made, cultivated diamonds represent.

Tradition favors natural diamonds, but is there really a diamond tradition?

Those inside the established mined-diamond industry cling to the tradition of diamond gemstones. “Across cultures and demographics, humans want to own and hold small, precious gems in their hands,” said Eric Mor, of Abe Mor Diamonds. “The distinct value and exclusivity of natural diamonds will shine through in the long run.”

And Thomas Gelb, a gemologist with Diamond Asset Advisors said, “Natural diamonds are billion-year old precious gems which have inherent and symbolic value. As undifferentiated industrial products, synthetic diamonds will never catch consumers’ imagination in the same way.”

Overwhelmingly, the establishment insiders hold natural diamonds as the ultimate expression of love and the preferred stone for an engagement ring. “A natural diamond is always going to be more valuable than a cultivated diamond,” said Anne Chertoff, trends expert with WeddingWire.

Sonia Esther Soltani, editor of the Rapaport Magazine, a leading trade journal for the diamond industry, said, “Cultivated diamonds have a very interesting industrial and scientific story to tell, but how can this compete with the intrinsic mystique of natural diamonds? It’s easy to argue they have the same chemical composition, but who is buying a chemical formula as a symbol of love or status? When it comes to the most important diamond purchase of a lifetime, the engagement ring, a natural diamond has magical allure.”

But that is just it. The tradition of a diamond as a symbol of love is a man-made, not a natural one. “Diamonds are valuable because people believe they’re valuable,” said Ira Weissman, Diamond Pros.

“Until De Beers began their famous marketing campaign of the 1940s, diamonds weren’t really all that special. De Beers at that time began to convince everyone that ‘Diamonds are Forever.’ This means that diamonds are both a symbol of everlasting love and a permanent store of value. So people began to buy them believing that they were worth something, and they’re still in demand for the same reasons. People believe that the supply is limited. Their prices have also risen more or less consistently over the last 70 years. So the historical facts pretty much bear witness to the myth that was created,” Weissman explained.

Marketing made diamonds what they are today. “The reason Americans buy diamonds for engagement rings and believe them to be valuable is because of marketing done by De Beers. It is not an ancient tradition. So De Beers has pushed the natural unique characteristics of a diamond shaped by the earth, but again it's all marketing,” said Scott Selby, a trademark attorney who wrote his master’s thesis on marketing of man-made versus mined diamonds and is author of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History.

Or as Rohin Dhar, CEO of Priceonomics, bluntly wrote in the Huffington Post article, “Diamonds Are Bulls**t:” “Not only is the demand for diamonds a marketing invention, but diamonds aren’t actually that rare. Only by carefully restricting the supply has De Beers kept the price of a diamond high.”

What’s the value? How much does it cost?

Warren Buffett famously said, “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.” The established-diamond industry is banking on consumers valuing natural diamonds more, while the cultured-diamond marketers are intent on price as their competitive edge. Given my research with consumers and what we are seeing in the retail market overall, price is a key driver for purchase decisions, and interestingly even more of a factor among affluents who can afford to pay higher prices. After all, they didn’t get wealthy by spending as much as they can.

Further confirmation of the outsized influence price plays in consumers’ purchase decisions comes from Stax Inc., a global strategy consultancy. The firm conducted a big-data analysis of over 40,000 survey respondents and found “Price remains the main decision driver with 50% of consumers acknowledging it as one of their top three considerations.”

To date, the real price advantage of cultivated diamonds has yet to be realized, but it is coming and I suspect it will have a profound downward pull on the prices that the natural-diamond marketers can command. “Lab-made diamonds are the result of a technological process which means their prices will drop like any other technological innovation, an effect described by Moore’s Law.

The economic principles of price elasticity tied to supply and demand mean that the prices for the two diamond alternatives will forever be linked, as Weissman said “If there's one thing everyone can agree on, it's that lab created diamonds draw their value from the (at least perceived) value of natural diamonds, i.e. if there was no market for natural diamonds, nobody would be trying to sell lab-created ones.”

While mined-diamond insiders believe that their diamonds have an intrinsic value, others, like Dhar, dispute that. “A diamond is a depreciating asset masquerading as an investment. The market for them is neither liquid nor are they fungible.” Or in layman’s terms, “With the exception of large, high-quality, fancy-colored diamonds, almost all diamonds have terrible value in the resale market,” said Selby.

What marketing gives, marketing can also take away

In the end, its marketing that is going to make or break the cultivated-diamond industry’s potential to disrupt the natural diamond market. If cultivated diamonds can get the marketing proposition right, e.g. “real” diamond for an “unreal” price,” the natural-diamond industry could be on its heels.

Naturally, the mined-diamond industry is fighting back with “Real Is Rare” and implicitly positioning its goods as the authentic luxury alternative to made-man, laboratory-produced diamonds. Yet the higher the natural-diamond industry moves its prices to take advantage of the “Veblen pricing effect,” specifically that for luxury goods as prices rise so seemingly does demand, the more attractive the cultivated-diamond alternative will look to many consumers. Furthermore the cultivated-diamond producers will be able to command higher prices too, all the while keeping the price to the consumer under that of natural diamonds.

“The introduction of hot-forged jewelry-grade diamonds, identical to those the earth takes eons to mete out, has sweeping implications for the $80 billion industry that has relied on the perceived scarcity of mined diamonds to drive up value,” he concludes. “Sales of lab-created diamonds, now estimated at $150 million, are expected to increase to $1 billion by 2020 and outpace mined diamonds, which have been in decline.”

If you are in search of Promise rings for couples then please contact us and send your queries.

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jeremyau · 8 years ago

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The empathy layer

Can an app that lets strangers — and bots — become amateur therapists create a safer internet?

by Mar 2, 2017, 10:30am EST

Illustrations by Peter Steineck

In January 2016, police in Blacksburg, Virginia, began looking into the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl named Nicole Lovell. Her parents had discovered her bedroom door barricaded with a dresser, her window open. Lovell was the victim of frequent bullying, both at school and online, and her parents thought she might have run away.

On social media, Lovell posted openly about her anguish. On Kik, a messaging app, Lovell told one contact, “Yes, I’m getting ready to kill myself.” In another exchange, she grabbed a screenshot from a boy she liked who had changed his screen name to “Nicole is ugly as fuck.” She broadcasted these private interactions to the wider world by posting them on her Instagram, where she also snapped a photo of herself looking sad, adding the caption “Nobody cares about me.”

Starved for affection among her peers, Lovell sought it out online. Police found a trail of texts on Kik between Lovell and a user named Dr. Tombstone. Kik allows users to remain anonymous, and over the course of a few months, the conversation turned romantic. Tombstone’s real identity was David Eisenhauer, a freshman at Virginia Tech, five years older than Lovell. In a horrific turn of events, authorities say Eisenhauer lured Lovell to meet him, then murdered her.

According to Kik employees of the time, the tragedy was a moment of reckoning for the platform. In the beginning of 2016, the app laid claim to 200 million users, and 40 percent of teenagers in the US. Kik’s terms of service stated that anyone under the age of 18 needed a parent’s permission to use the app, but these rules were easily ignored. Because it allowed users to remain anonymous, a wave of negative press around Lovell’s murder painted Kik as a playground for predators. “It was, for the entire company, a shock,” says Yuriy Blokhin, an early Kik employee who left the company recently. “Everyone felt we had to do more, an increased sense of responsibility.”

Executives at Kik wanted a system to identify, protect, and offer resources to its most vulnerable users. But it had no way of knowing how to find them, and no system in place for administering care even if it did. Through their investors, Kik was put in touch with a small New York City startup named Koko. The company had created an iPhone app that let users post entries about their stresses, fears, and sorrows. Other users would weigh in with suggestions of how to rethink the problem — a very basic form of cognitive behavioral therapy. It was a peer-to-peer network for a limited form of mental health care, and, according to a clinical trial and beta users, it had shown very positive results. The two teams partnered with a simple goal: find a way to bring the support and care found on Koko to Kik users in need.

But as the two companies talked, a more ambitious idea emerged. What if you could combine the emotional intelligence of Koko’s crowdsourced network with the scale of a massive social network? Was there a way to distribute the mental health resources of Koko more broadly, not just in a single app, but to anywhere people gathered online to socialize and share their feelings? Over the last year the team at Koko has been building a system that would do just that, and in the process, create an empathy layer for the internet.

In 1999 Robert Morris, future co-founder of Koko, was a Princeton psychology major who got good grades but struggled to find direction — or a thesis advisor. “They didn't know what to do with me,” Morris told me recently. “I had a bunch of vague and strange research ideas and I would show up to their office with a bunch of bizarre gadgets I had hacked together: microphones, sensors, lots of wires.”

Morris finally found a home at the MIT Media Lab. A budding coder, Morris spent much of his time on a site called Stack Overflow, a critical resource for programmers looking for help on thorny problems. Morris was blown away by the community’s ability to help him on demand and free of charge and wondered if that crowdsourced model could be applied to other personal challenges. “I struggled with depression on and off for much of my life, but my early time at MIT was especially difficult,” he recalls. “I liked StackOverflow, but I needed something to help me 'debug' my brain, not just my code.” For his thesis project, he set out to build just that.

Based on the peer-to-peer model of StackOverflow, Morris’ MIT thesis, named Panoply, offered two basic options: submit a post about a negative feeling or respond to one. To quickly build and test the platform, Morris needed users. So he turned to Mechanical Turk, an online marketplace where anyone can crowdsource simple tasks for a small payment.

Morris taught MTurk workers a few basic cognitive behavioral techniques to respond to posts: how to empathize with a tough situation, how to recognize cognitive distortions that amplify life’s troubles, and how to reframe a user’s thinking to provide a more optimistic alternative. The only quality control Morris put in place was basic reading and writing comprehension. For each completed task the MTurk workers were paid a few cents.

Using an online ad for a stress-reduction study, Morris recruited a few hundred volunteers in order to fully test the system. Like the MTurk workers, the subjects were given some brief training and set loose to post their issues and reframe the issues of others. This random assemblage of people was about as far as you could get from trained and expensive therapists. But in a clinical trial conducted along with his dissertation, Morris found that users who spent two months with the Panoply system reported feeling less stressed, less depressed, and more resilient than the control group. And the most effective help was given not by the paid MTurk workers, but by the unpaid volunteers who were themselves part of the experiment.

It was a single study and has not yet been replicated, but it gave Morris confidence that he was onto something big. And then a stranger came calling. “A week after I defended my dissertation, I got several manic emails out of the blue from some guy named Fraser,” Morris said. “It was immediately apparent that he had an incredibly deep understanding of the problem.”

At the same moment that Morris was building Panoply at MIT, Fraser Kelton and Kareem Kouddous, a pair of tech entrepreneurs, had been pursuing the same idea. The pair had hacked together their own version of a peer-to-peer system for therapy. They recruited participants off Twitter and put them into WhatsApp groups, then had one group teach the other group the basics of cognitive behavioral therapy. “At the end of testing, 100 percent of helpers thanked us for the opportunity to participate and asked if they could keep doing it,” said Kelton. “When we asked why, they all said something along the lines of "for the first time since I finished therapy I found a way to put 5 or 10 minutes a day toward practicing these techniques."

A month later Kelton came across Morris’ work and emailed him immediately. “This is embarrassing, but I think I emailed him two or three times that night,” says Kelton. “We thought we had a clever idea, but he had taken it and jumped miles ahead of where our thinking was, run a clinical trial, gotten results, and defended a dissertation.” Within a few weeks Kelton, Kouddous, and Morris had mocked up a wire frame of an app that became the blueprint for Koko. They called the company Koko because the service is meant to help users by showing them different perspectives. Koko backwards is “ok ok.”

Fraser, who knew the startup scene, approached investors. “It seemed to us that there was a possibility that a peer to peer network in this space was kind of a perfect application,” says Brad Burnham, a managing partner from Union Square Ventures. The firm had previously invested in a number of startups that relied on networks of highly engaged users: Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare. But Burnham had never seen something quite like Koko before. When Koko users added value to the network by rethinking problems, they actually provided value to themselves, by practicing the core techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy. “By helping others, they were helping themselves, and that seemed like a great synergy," said Burnham. In January of 2015 Union Square Ventures, along with MIT’s Joi Ito, invested $1 million into Koko. Less than a month later, the company launched its iOS in beta.

The first time Zelig used Koko, she was sitting in a parking lot waiting to pick up one of her kids from a summer program. She had downloaded the app in search of emotional relief. Her son, an intelligent and outgoing boy with Asperger’s syndrome, seemed to have no place of acceptance outside of home, and was facing the increasing isolation often prevalent in the lives of teens on the autism spectrum. Her younger daughter had just been diagnosed with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

“I have a special needs kid and high needs kid. My life is not typical,” Zelig explained in a phone call. “It’s pretty stressful and it’s always on. You make attempts to do your best and things don’t work, which is really scary.” She asked that we only use her Koko screen name in this story to preserve her family’s privacy. “My kids were struggling mightily, and there just wasn’t a way for me to see anything that could possibly make it better.”

The Koko app offered Zelig two choices. She could write a post laying out her troubles and share it with everyone who opened the app. They would give her advice on how to rethink her problems — not offer a solution, but rather suggest a more optimistic spin on the way she saw the world. But Zelig didn’t feel ready to open up about her own struggles. “It was hard for me to take the big things going on in my life and make them the size of a tweet, to get to the core. It was hard to turn loose those emotions.”

Instead, Zelig started reading through posts from other users. The Koko app starts users off with a short tutorial on “rethinking.” The app explains that rethinking isn’t about solving problems, but offering a more optimistic take. It uses memes and cartoons to illustrate the idea: if you choose the right reframe, a cute puppy offers his paw for a high-five. The app walks new users through posts and potential reframes, indicating which rethinks are good and which aren’t. The tutorial can be completed in as little as five minutes.

Once users finish the tutorial, they can scroll through live posts on the site. Despite the minimal training, the issues they are confronted with can be quite serious: an individual who is afraid to tell her family that she’s taking anti-depressants because they might think she’s crazy; a user stressed from school who believes “no one actually likes the real me, and if they see it, they will hate me”; a user with an abusive boyfriend who has come to feel “I am a failure and worth being yelled at.” I walked a friend through the tutorial recently, and they were shocked by how quickly Koko throws you into the deep end of human despair.

Koko lets you write anything you want for a rethink, but also offers simple prompts: “This could turn out better than you think because…,” “A more balanced take on this could be…,” etc. The company screens both the posts and rethinks before they become public, attempting to direct certain users to critical care and weed trolls out of the system. Originally, this was accomplished with human moderators, but increasingly, the company is turning to AI.

Accepting and offering rethinks is meant to help users get away from bad mental habits, cycles of negative thought that can perpetuate their anxiety and depression. Over the next few months, Zelig found herself offering rethinks of other Koko users almost every day. “Having it in your pocket is really good. All of sudden it would hit me what I needed say in the reframe, so I would pull my car over, or stand in the produce aisle.”

In the process of giving advice Zelig felt, almost immediately, a sense of relief and control. She began to recognize her own dark moods as variations on the problems she was helping others with. Zelig says the peculiar power of Koko is that by helping others, users are able to help themselves. She eventually got around to sharing her issues, but always felt that “I was more helped by the reframing action than I was by the posting. It trained me to be able to see my world that way.”

The last few years have seen an explosion of startup and mobile apps offering users mental health care on demand. Some, like MoodKit and Anxiety Coach, offer self-guided cognitive behavioral therapy. Others, like Pacifica, mix self-guided lessons with online support groups where users can chat with one another. Apps like Talkspace use the smartphone as a platform for connecting patients with professional therapists who treat them through calls and text messages.

For the moment, Koko is one of just a few company built primarily around a peer-to-peer model. Its best analog might be companies like Airbnb or Lyft. Why pay for a hotel room or black car when the spare apartment or neighbor’s car is just as good? Why pay for therapy when the advice of strangers has proven to be helpful and free?

Studies have found that cognitive behavioral therapy can be as effective at treating depression and anxiety as prescription drugs. Since the 1980s, people have been practicing self-guided cognitive behavioral therapy through workbooks, CD-ROMs, and web portals. But left to their own devices, most people don’t finish courses or stop practicing fairly quickly.

Koko is still a tiny company, staffed by the three co-founders and one full-time employee, all based out of New York City. To date, over 230,000 people have used Koko, and more than 26 million messages have been sent through the app over the last six months. Many, like Zelig, have used it on a daily basis for more than a year. But like so many mobile apps these days, Koko has struggled to attract a large following.

The Koko team always knew it would be difficult to charge users for the app, or to make money advertising to a relatively small number of anonymous users. It was at this critical juncture that the team from Kik came calling. After the murder of Nicole Lovell, Kik reached out to its investors at Union Square Ventures for advice. Burnham connected Kik with Koko, setting in motion an entirely new direction for the young company.

When users sign up for Kik, the first contact added to their address book is a chatbot. It answers questions about the service, tells jokes, and posts updates about new features. “A few months before meeting with Koko, we noticed something interesting happening with the Kik bot,” said Yuriy Blokhin, the former Kik engineer who helped forge the partnership with Koko. “People were not only talking to it the way it was meant to be, as a brand ambassador, but also sometimes people were mentioning they were depressed, concerned about their parents getting a divorce, or being unpopular at school.”

Kik didn’t know how to respond to these kinds of emotional confessions, but Koko did. It had millions of posts, carefully labeled by workers from Mechanical Turk to describe the type of problem they represented. It used that database to train artificial intelligence that could respond to posts sent to a chatbot. If the content of a message was critical — defined by Kokobot as being a danger to themselves or others — it would connect users with a service like Crisis Textline; if the issue was manageable, the bot would pass the person on to Koko users; if it was a troll, the bot would hide the post. This is the same AI approach Koko now uses to classify posts on its peer-to-peer network.

Once that approach proved successful, Koko went one step further. If a user posted about a stress Koko had a highly rated response for — a sick family member, a difficult test at school, a spat with a significant other — the chatbot would automatically offer up that rethink. The AI was now acting as a node in the peer-to-peer network.

Beginning in August 2016, any user on Kik could share their stress with the Kokobot. Most received a reply in just a few minutes. Working with Kik made Koko realize how big the business opportunity was. “Do a search on Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, any social network, and you will find a cohort of users reaching out into the ether with their problems,” said Kelton. The team realized that if they could train an AI to identify and respond to users sharing emotional stress, they might also be able to train algorithms to automatically detect users who were at risk, even if they hadn’t reached out. Koko was transforming itself into an intervention tool, scanning platforms and stepping in on its own volition. Koko hopes to provide these tools to online communities for free, using the feedback to train an AI with services it can one day sell to digital assistants like Siri and Alexa.

The move into detection and intervention, however, has been complicated. This past January, the team set up the Koko bot on two Reddit forums r/depression and r/SuicideWatch. It scanned incoming posts, and messaged several users offering help.

The response wasn’t what Koko engineers had expected: the community was outraged.

“I feel deeply disturbed that they would use a bot to do this,” wrote one user. “Disgusting that assholes would try and take advantage of people,” wrote another. The moderator of the two forums set up a warning advising users to ignore Koko’s chatbot. “I have to say that the technology itself looks like an interesting idea,” the moderator wrote. “But if it's in the hands of people who behave in this way, that is incredibly disturbing.” The Verge reached out to both moderators and users who left angry comments about Koko, but did not hear back.

The Koko team acknowledged it made a mistake by allowing its chatbot to send messages on Reddit without warning, and not educating users and moderators about who they were and what their goal was. But Kelton believes that the feedback from users who did interact with the bot on Reddit shows the system can do real good there. “One mod bent out of shape on how we handled the launch vs. many at-risk people helped in a way that they appreciated,” was a trade-off Kelton could live with. “Helping mods understand and embrace the service is a containable problem, one that we're already having good success with.”

In January 2017, top officials from the US military met with executives from Facebook, Google, and Apple at the Pentagon. The topic was suicide prevention in the age of social media. The federal government considers the subject a top priority, as suicide has become the leading cause of death among veterans. For the tech companies, the problem is wide ranging. Among teenagers in the United States, most of whom spend six and a half hours each with their smartphones and tablets daily, suicide is the second leading cause of death.

In attendance was Matthew Nock, a professor of psychology at Harvard and an expert in suicide prediction and prevention. When it comes to using technology for detection and intervention, “the consensus in the academic community is there is great potential promise here, but the jury is still out,” says Nock. “Personally I have seen a lot of interest in people using social media and the latest technologies to understand, predict, and prevent suicidal behavior. But so far many of the claims have outstripped the actual data.”

Despite those concerns, Nock is interested in what companies like Koko might offer. “We know that cognitive behavioral therapy is effective for treating people with clinical depression. There is not enough cognitive therapy to reach everyone who needs it.” Koko provides people with the simple tools they can use to help themselves and others. “These people aren’t clinicians, they have been trained in the basics, but for scaling purposes, I think it’s what we can do right now.”

The scalability of tech makes it an alluring tool for mental health — but the business comes with unique risks. “Everyone wants to be the Uber of mental health,” says Stephen Schueller, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who specializes in behavioral intervention technologies. “The thing I worry about is, unless you have a way to make sure the drivers are behaving appropriately, it’s hard to make sure people are getting quality care. Psychotherapy is a lot more complicated than driving a car.”

Koko’s experience with Reddit wasn’t the first mishap to befall company trying to scale mental health, an industry traditionally made up of heavily regulated, sensitive, one-on-one clinical relationships across an online community. Those challenges were made apparent in the case of Talkspace, where therapists didn’t feel they were able to warn authorities about patients who may have been a danger to themselves or others. That led some therapists to abandon the platform. Samaritans, a 65-year-old organization aimed at helping those in emotional distress, released an app in 2014 called Samaritan Radar. It attempted to identify Twitter users in need of help and offer assistance. But due to the public nature of the interaction, the warnings ended up encouraging bullies and angering users who felt their privacy had been invaded.

The ethics of using of artificial intelligence for this work has become a central question for the industry at large. “The potential demand for mental health is likely to always outstrip the professional resources,” says John Draper, project director at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. “There is increasingly a push to see what can technology do.” If AI can detect users at risk and engage them in emotionally intelligent conversations, should that be the first line of defense? “These are important ethical questions that we haven’t answered yet.”

In a recent manifesto on the state of Facebook, CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted that as people move online, society has seen a tremendous weakening of the traditional community ties that once provided mental and emotional support. To date, creating software that restores or reinforces those safeguards has been a reactionary afterthought, not an overarching goal. Systems designed to foster clicks, likes, retweets, and shares have become global communities of unprecedented scale. But Zuckerberg was left to ask, “Are we building the world we all want?”

“There have been terribly tragic events -- like suicides, some live streamed -- that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner. There are cases of bullying and harassment every day, that our team must be alerted to before we can help out. These stories show we must find a way to do more,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach. We are researching systems that can look at photos and videos to flag content our team should review.” In early March it was reported that Facebook had begun testing an AI system which scanned for vulnerable users and reached out to offer help.

The goal for Koko is the same, but distributed across any online community or social network. Its AI hopes to reach vulnerable users, people like Nicole Lovell, who are posting cries for help online, searching for an empathic community. On a recent afternoon I opened the Koko app, and spent an hour scrolling through a litany of angst: not having the money to complete school, feeling obsessed with an older married man, overwhelmed at the prospect of caring for sick relatives who can no longer remember your name. Beneath each post, three or four users had suggested rethinks, blueprints for coping that users could learn from.

For people who are suffering, knowing that others are in pain, and that they can do something about it, is one way of healing themselves. “Something that caught me right away and kept me coming back to the app again and again was the amazing feeling of hope,” said Zelig, when I emailed her recently to ask a few questions about Koko. “That regardless of all the crap that seemed to be happening in my life, that I could still be of help to someone and could take a positive action.”

Zelig’s kids, like most teenagers, have become keenly interested in what keeps their mother occupied on her smartphone. “They see me typing away and want to know what I’m doing,” Zelig explained. “I’ll ask them, do you think this is a reframe? How would you do it? It was cool, because it’s a puzzle we solve together. What is the critical thing this person was dealing with? [It’s] an emotional, social puzzle.”

A year and a half after she downloaded the app, Zelig still uses it almost every day, but she doesn’t consider herself to be in a state of crisis anymore. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Koko using chatbots and AI to reach out to people who had never heard of the service. At first she told me that if a chatbot had approached her out of the blue, she would have ignored it. But she wrote back later to say that, if these technologies mean more people find their way into the Koko community, she’s in favor. “Life really had me and our family by the throat there for a while,” she told me. “Koko was part of what gave me the ability to see a way through to the other side.”

Illustrations by Peter Steineck

#mental health #depression #anxiety #digital health

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