Podcast/Video Interviews by Stephen Ibaraki

A Chat with JACQUELINE CORBELLI: Transformational Leader; Entrepreneur; CEO, Founder and Chairman of BrightLine; Member of the Board of the Sustainable Development Goals Centre for Africa, a Member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and a Governor at the New York Academy of Sciences; founding member of Pope Francis' Ethics in Action Forum created under the auspices of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences and JOANNA HALL: Entrepreneur; high energy Innovator; Executive Director of the U.S. Coalition on Sustainability (USCS); Co-founder and Head of Product, SustainChain™ Founding team member of BrightLine; Board Member; past Managing Director and Global SVP of Partnerships at Originate

This week, Stephen Ibaraki has an exclusive interview with Jacqueline Corbelli and Joanna Hall.

Jacqueline Corbelli is a transformational leader that drives positive business growth and societal change. She tackles issues that re-define industry verticals, re-shape culture and rebuild communities.

As the CEO, Founder and Chairman of BrightLine, Jacqueline built and continues to lead a technology software company that ushered in the reinvention of television advertising from thirty second interruptive commercials to immersive, interactive units. BrightLine is a cornerstone of advanced TV advertising and interactive content for all of America's leading broadcasters, including NBCU, ABC/Disney, CBS, and Fox, among others. What drew her to advanced TV advertising was the sweeping change to business models being ushered in by the Internet and digital technologies. As an astute executive, having leveraged this same wave in the financial industry, she saw the prospect that shifting consumer behaviors held for media and brands and the opportunity to put her executional change management and technical innovation skills to work to help redefine the relationship between the two.

Before BrightLine, Jacqueline served as president of Aston Associates, the leading advisory firm for financial institutions and their investors. At Aston, Jacqueline restructured underperforming companies into beacons of the investment community. Over the course of more than 15 years she directed the corporate-wide organizational, business and financial redesign of ten major financial corporations worldwide. The company prides itself in creating over $45 billion in shareholder value during Jacqueline's tenure, through 2002.

Jacqueline applies her transformational change methodologies outside of business and into the world of economic development and in both governmental and non-governmental organizations. Jacqueline served as Chairman of the Board of the Millennium Promise Alliance, overseeing Columbia University's Millennium Villages Project, integrated economic development work in 10 countries across Sub-Saharan Africa undertaken from 2010-2015. Millennium Promise was the leading international non-profit organization solely committed to accelerating the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals and the eradication of extreme poverty, hunger, and preventable disease.

Jacqueline currently serves in leadership roles within forums of both the United Nations and the Vatican. She is a Member of the Board of the Sustainable Development Goals Centre for Africa, a Member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and a Governor at the New York Academy of Sciences. Among others, Jacqueline also plays a leading role for the Vatican as a founding member of Pope Francis' Ethics in Action Forum created under the auspices of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where she assists the Vatican to identify how technology, media, education and data can generate justice in society.

Throughout her career Jacqueline has been recognized for her important achievements in American business. In 2017-19 Jacqueline was named as one of Adweek's Disruptors, a Broadcasting and Cable Digital All-Star, a Cynopsis Top Woman in Digital and New York Business Journal’s Women of Influence.

Jacqueline frequently publishes and speaks on her work in business and NGO's. She shared her extensive expertise and learnings as the author of "REVEALED: Thoughts on the Connected Television Revolution," published in 2014. She followed her first book with a collection of articles she wrote in 2017 titled "TVTOPIA." Jacqueline provides industry knowledge regularly in articles and on the airwaves of Variety, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Radio, Business Insider and Advertising Age.

Jacqueline sits on numerous other boards, including the Atlantic Theater Company in New York City, the International Radio and Television Society, Second Curve Capital, Luminari Capital, Halogen Ventures, Women's Voices for Change, and NBCU Women's Advisory Board.

Jacqueline received her Master's in International Banking, Business, and Finance from Columbia University.

Joanna Hall is the Executive Director of the U.S. Coalition on Sustainability (USCS) where she leads an exclusive team of world class technologists in the design and development for SustainChain™ - a public utility platform built in partnership with the United Nations to help accelerate achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. Joanna has led the scaling of SustainChain to over 1,000 leading sustainability organizations including major strategic partnerships with XPrize, United Cities, and ThoughtWorks.

Before joining the USCS, Joanna was Managing Director and Global SVP of Partnerships at Originate, a world-class designer of custom software products. Joanna led large scale Digital transformation initiatives as well as enterprise innovation lab trainings and accelerated and agile MVP builds for organizations including Chief, BlackRock and McKinsey.

Prior to Originate, Joanna co-founded BrightLine, the first company to pioneer interactive television solutions for brands. Today BrightLine offers the industry’s most powerful advanced TV technology suite and gives marketers a plug-and-play solution to take advantage of the entire scale of Over-The-Top (OTT), connected TV and Smart TV advertising opportunities.

Joanna is a high-energy innovator with a passion for sustainability, tech for good and the power of positive thinking. She enjoys giving back as an advisor to tech for good start-ups and supporting talent in their transition to climate impact roles as an advisor at Terra.do. She is on the board of Brixton, the headwear fashion brand, and Real Leaders, a sustainable business and leadership media platform. Joanna holds a Bachelor of Science in Advertising from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University.

About SustainChain - 2 minute demo and overview

SustainChain - :45 second quick intro

Join the Chain - invite link

Film trailer premiered @ UNGA

AI to help solve the Sustainable Development Goals
with Jarno Kartela
Lead Architect for SustainChain's AI and Machine Learning engine, DaVinci

At the US Coalition on Sustainability, we believe in the power of advanced digital technology to quickly guide leaders toward the products, partnerships, and solutions required to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

At the core of the SustainChain™ platform is a data engine that continually learns from its users and their efforts - and we named it DaVinci™ after the eminent inventor's intelligence and vision.

Below is an interview conducted with the lead architect of DaVinci.

How will AI help you solve the problem that SustainChain proposes to address?

Given the scale and complexity of SustainChain’s mission; to drive meaningful action recommendations across the entire Sustainability ecosystem), it would be very inefficient to match the right member to the right action initiative, to the right organization, to the right activity, to the right content or to another member in the right time in any other way than with data and applied artificial intelligence. Should we attempt to do that, the resulting logic would infinitely scale to different if-when statements until impossible to manage.

Therefore, SustainChain uses a reinforcement learning based, self-optimizing and self-exploring artificial intelligence system called DaVinci as its backbone, resulting in a fully real-time data-enabled optimization and recommendation system that can ultimately guide any recommendation decision between different actors in the platform and do that in a way that constantly helps the platform to learn, adapt and evolve, improving both overall impact and the experience for its members.

What datasets do you have?

The core data asset - is a fully real-time stream of signals which include a triplet of member, object and weight that is used to online train DaVinci whenever new data is created in the platform via interaction or via the creation of new objects (like action initiatives, organizations, content, or new members).

An analytical data asset – rich analytical warehouse and object storage-backed data asset consisting of every piece of data that is created in the platform, that is enriched from outside sources or that is directly created by DaVinci during the constantly ongoing reinforcement learning process. This can be used for offline policy optimization, feature engineering, analytical reasoning, monitoring, reporting or model retraining purposes.

The core idea of DaVinci is to fully utilize all data assets available while also creating completely new, mission-critical insights from exploring what past data only does not tell us.

Do you currently have access to this data? If not, how do you plan to collect or access them?

Access to data explained above is available in real time, but there will be a need for enriching the data asset with external sources to further improve capability in serving SustainChain's community and mission. That said, the most interesting data asset is created by the constant exploration of the reinforcement learning system, as it has the capability of exploring the impact of any new object in SustainChain immediately after it is created. The resulting data asset is critical since it allows the platform and its users to truly learn something new, instead of solely looking at or mirroring past performance.

Tell us about how you would use the data in an AI model. What data would your model consume, and what information or decisions would it produce?

All data created in the platform, enriched from outside sources or created by the AI system itself is fed back to the intelligence engine for learning purposes as fast as possible. This is done in real time through online learning and the intelligence engine itself does optimized exploration of all new assets as they are created.

The model consumes a real-time stream of events which is created partly as a byproduct of the reinforcement learning system and its recommendation mechanisms and more importantly as a result of more and more users interacting with the platform to further their initiatives. The model also consumes features about the objects being recommended or acted on which can range from typical object metadata assets to enriched, industry-specific features.

Importantly, there is virtually no separation between learning and providing decisions – they are two sides of the same coin in SustainChain’s setup. The intelligence engine can optimize for any decision in the platform that has a set of choices, like recommending action initiatives to members or recommending members to other members and will learn from its own actions in real time. Since it does exploration - which is effectively just very intelligent randomization, it is much less prone to bias from historical decisions and less prone to create unwanted ethical concerns as all possible futures are explored.

How does SustainChain currently use AI?

SustainChain's backbone is its intelligence engine DaVinci, which runs recommendations in the platform and creates new insights through its online learning and online exploration mechanisms.

Importantly, the recommendation system is a reinforcement learning based system which allows it to recommend anything that has a set of choices. It is by no means a standard product/content recommendation system designed for a single recommendation purpose, but a multifunctional decisioning engine that is used to optimize all relevant decisioning problems occurring on the platform.

Given the scale, complexity and impact of SustainChain, there are limited possibilities of running the platform with anything else than a AI- and data-backed intelligence engine nor there are better ways to achieve the amount of new insights and understanding.