Back in America

we have to start looking at elements like technology

is something that is for all people. Unfortunately, big tech focus on what's going to serve their bottom line. In terms of artificial intelligence, the models, machines cannot work without human interaction.

Unfortunately, as humans, we all have biases. And when that is coupled with the creation of a new thing, those biases can be implemented into, for example, the training data, whether it's done purposefully or not, the biases are always going to be in there. What we can do is mitigate the bias. And when we talk about mitigating biases,

we really look at how we can use diverse data sources. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them in real life.

Welcome to Back in America, the podcast.

Welcome to Back in America, Tamara Huggins. So you are the founder and CEO of TechSpark, a platform dedicated to empowering black, indigenous, and people of color through technology education. Recently you've developed Sparkplug, which is an AI tool that translates classical literature into African-American vernacular English to create a more inclusive learning experience.

I'm really delighted to have you on the show today. Thank you so much for having me, Stan. So I'm curious, how did you get involved with AI? So my journey began when I was a little girl. My father, who was an immigrant into Canada, he came from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, and he was not a classically trained engineer. He was actually a carpenter,

and he could do wonderful things with his hands. And so I grew up seeing him build things and create sculptures. And I distinctly remember him taking night classes at one of the high schools nearby. And it was something to do with electrical wiring. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it's something he was interested in

and just wanted to take the course. And I remember seeing all the wires in the house, and that turned into him building computers from scratch. So in the 90s, all of our computers were all computers that he built. He bought the motherboards, all the different pieces, the towers, everything, and built everything from scratch with his bare hands.

And again, he was not a classically trained engineer. However, he had the talents and the skills to be able to do so. And that was my first introduction to technology. In high school, I was very much interested in more of the digital side of technology. I tell the story all the time that my best friend and I would sneak in the library

because certain websites you can't go on at school, and there were social media sites that we used to go on back then. One of them was called blackplanet.com. And we used to go on and create our own, we basically hacked our profiles. Fast forward into college, I went to school for creative advertising.

I worked at one of the top agencies in the Toronto area. And it was at a really interesting time where we were starting to really see the explosion of social media, social media marketing. So something that I was really interested in, unfortunately, 2009, I lost my job during the recession. And I decided I was gonna start my own company. I started my own media company

and worked with athletes, media personalities. And that led me to building Driven Accelerator, which was Canada's first technology accelerator that was geared towards women founders, black founders, other founders of color. And the goal was to be able to provide them with advanced training, mentorship, and access to capital. We helped our startups collectively raise

about $20 million over the course from 2012 until about 2014.

So in that period, we were able to cultivate and create a community of underrepresented founders who then went on to raise even more money outside of what they had access to while they were in the accelerator. And the idea for TechSpark actually came from Driven because we were super early for the marketplace. Again, this was back in 2012.

And we decided as a team that we were going to shift towards young people because we wanted to create a deeper impact. And we knew that in order to see more black founders, women founders, et cetera, we had to start exposing young people to the idea of tech entrepreneurship. Otherwise there would be no need for accelerators like Driven, right?

Well, that is where TechSpark, the idea for that was born. We ran our first tech bootcamp in June of 2015. And the goal at the beginning was to take students

who were at risk of dropping out, undereducated, underemployed students and give them access to this tech training so that they could become junior coders and then we connected them to jobs with agencies in the city. And then it just really started to grow from there outside of doing bootcamps, we started doing workshops,

we started integrating our work into the school districts, we started getting requests from school districts, we started building curriculum that lives within the course calendar for several high schools across the greater Toronto area. And now we have built Barcloud, which started out as an idea, I wanna say maybe like 2018, 2019.

And it's grown into this, it has a life of its own. We first started out by transforming classical text into African-American vernacular English because we wanted to increase the engagement in schools and also content retention. And we thought the best way to do that was to create a piece of technology that was designed with the end user in mind.

Yeah, so let me stop you right here. I want to come back to Spotplugin in a minute, but going back to your own experience, I see a thread here, which I would like you to expand on. Why did you want to focus on underprivileged youth rather than on the old startupers, be they black or white or why this interest of yours and people didn't need?

One, being a black woman, I'm very much aware of the oppression that exists in the world. And I'm very well aware of the inequalities and the inequities that exist. And I've always had this thing about me from the time I was a little girl, where I always rooted for the underdog.

And that was probably because I viewed myself as the underdog, which is interesting, but I always wanted to give opportunities to those who deserved it, but that weren't getting access to it because of maybe something that was out of their control, whether it was economically, financially, their social status, whatever the case may be.

I always thought that the way that I grew up, and I grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Brampton, which is a suburb of Toronto. And so I had access to certain things that my friends who lived in some of the more inner city communities didn't have. And so as a young girl, when I would go into those spaces in those communities

and see how they were living and see how they were experiencing life and seeing how different it was from what I was experiencing, I thought, hey, this isn't fair. There's a disconnect here. And I wonder how much your dad's experience being a carpenter and seeing him work as an electrician and building computers with all those wires

and motherboard and all that, how much that has also gave you a realization that you can do different things. You can move outside of the place where you were put. Exactly. And that's exactly what it was. It was more of a subconscious lesson that I learned that you can do anything. You can be anything.

As long as you have the interest, you can learn how to do anything. And you don't necessarily have to go to school and receive formal training. So you started to say that after this amazing adventure of Driven and TechSpark, you started seeing a use for AI and you developed Sparkplug,

which you started to train on classical text. So tell us more about that and tell us, and I guess you were trying to fight the biases of AI

as we know it today with Gemini and ChatGPT. So talk to us about these biases and why it was important for you to develop what I'm going to call a black AI. So in terms of artificial intelligence, it's just that it's artificial intelligence. The models, machines cannot work without human interaction.

Unfortunately, as humans, we all have biases. And when that is coupled with the creation of a new thing, those biases can be implemented into, for example, the training data, whether it's done purposefully or not, the biases are always going to be in there. So nothing is ever going to be 100% bias-free because humans are always going to be involved

in the creation of technology. What we can do is mitigate the bias. When we talk about mitigating biases, we look at how we can use diverse data sources and focus on creating solutions with more of a diverse lens rather than a narrow lens. So for us, when we created Spark Club, we use text from the civil rights movement.

So you're talking about speeches from Dr. King, speeches from Malcolm X. We also looked into the Harlem Renaissance authors who were very prominent during that period, as well as other authors who wrote about the resistance in America, the black experience in America. And all of that as Canadians for us, that's open source material.

So we were able to train our model on those texts.

And I like to think of it as training it and building a foundation that rests upon the shoulders of our ancestors. And what makes Spark Club unique is its voice. And the voice is that of a 13-year-old, which is my daughter. And so she was very instrumental in how the AI will speak and respond to you.

So it's not going to give you, like if you go into chat, GBT, Gemini, you ask it the same question, it's going to give you the exact same response. Doesn't really have a tone, doesn't really have an attitude, doesn't really have a personality. With us, because we wanted to target young people and we wanted to engage them,

we wanted to create something that resonated strongly with them. And language is one of the ways that we connect as human beings. So to be able to look at African-American vernacular English, which for centuries has evolved and has been stripped away from the education system in terms of like how students speak and talk.

And even going deeper than that, looking at how they wear their hair, the clothes that they wear, how they interact with each other, all of the things that make our culture so unique and special has been stripped away from education. And we wanted to put the culture back into education. That's why one of our slogans is AI driven by the culture.

And so going back to your question about mitigating the bias, it's really important that not only are we choosing diverse sources, but that we also have psychometricians, educators, linguistics. We always have those who are experts in their field providing their insights and their feedback in addition to feedback from the students

to ensure the experience that we're giving them is the experience that they deserve and that they want. So tell us more about this African-American vernacular English. I mean, in popular culture, we, I mean, me, white guy, I've heard of it. I've never really thought of it as being culture,

but as I researched for this interview, I realized that indeed, right, it's part of history. It's part of the slavery resistance. And it's not just English, it's Creole language. It's African language. What can you tell me about African-American vernacular? It's a very rich language. And as you, as you rightfully said,

it is a blend of different languages, whether that be Creole, whether that is different African patois, all of that was built in English, of course, built into how African-Americans speak. And it's very important to understand that it's evolved over time. And the way that the language is spoken in the South

is not the same way it's spoken on the East Coast or the West Coast. So the experiences, the lived experiences are definitely rooted within the language itself. And so over centuries, AAV evolved as a form of, as you mentioned, linguistic resistance and cultural identity among African-Americans. Because as a group of individuals that were stripped

from their culture, from their identity, from their land and placed into an unknown land and expected to work and build a country from scratch, they had to create something that was unique to them. They had to create, because that's what we do. When things are taken from us, we find some way to recreate and to regenerate and to innovate and to build.

It's just, it's part of the fiber of who we are as African people. And so over time, individuals would take, as I mentioned, various social, geographical and cultural factors to be able to evolve what AAV is known as today. So definitely it blends different types of English and African and Creole influences

that it's still developing as we look at different generation. It's continuing to really evolve, right? And I think what's also really important to mention is that people often think that AAV is Gen Z language or they try to, instead of honoring and acknowledging African-American vernacular English, a lot of times you'll hear people say,

oh, it's Gen Z or oh, it's Gen Alpha. You know what I mean? But no, it's rooted in African-American culture and we have to identify it as such. And most importantly, with the work that we do, it is honoring it and looking at it as scholarly. Because in the education system, what's lifted up as scholarly is Elizabethan English,

American English, UK English. But when you hear anything that is distinctly different from the norm, from the majority, it's immediately demonized. Once people can't understand it, they demonize it. Once they see, as I mentioned before, that language is powerful, they want to strip it, right? So it's important for everyone to understand

that part of the work that we're doing is really uplifting the way that our children speak and positioning it as scholarly because it is. And it's a beautifully complex. It is, and I realized that also in my research when I saw that Cornwall West here in Princeton is really making it part of the African-American culture and is working on preserving AAV.

So no, I was very interested to learn about that. And so today you are bringing this foundation into AI and you're training AI to be able to use this vernacular within its answer, not only to comprehend it, but to provide answers which are formulated in the vernacular English. Yes, yes. And I also just wanted to touch on one of the points

that you made. You called Sparkplug a black AI. And I would like to rephrase that as human AI. We have to start looking at elements like technology is something that is for all people. Unfortunately, big tech, they will focus on what's going to serve their bottom line and being culturally relevant and equitable

to serve their bottom line because it takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and dedication to do the type of work that we do. But it's really important for us to understand that it's not just for black students. It's not just for brown students. It's for brown students. All students can use Sparkplug.

Corporations are using Sparkplug to create more authentic brand messaging, whether that is employee training. It has the ability to take any type of educational material, mainly complex, and reposition it and transform it into a way that is culturally relevant and responsive to that particular individual. So it doesn't have to be a black student.

It could be an exchange student who came from India, who is working at one of the big banks and has to learn a whole bunch of material and would better learn it and learn it in a quicker way if it was given to him in a language and a tone that resonated with him. Imagine how much time would be saved on the business side and then also on his side,

because he'll be able or she'll be able to advance further along in their career because now the educational material is tailored to them. So while it can work for others, we definitely started with our black children because those are the ones that are often consistently overlooked, misrepresented, oppressed and suppressed. And that is where we wanted to start the work first,

rather than starting with the general public and then letting trickle down into black communities. Yeah. I'm curious, what kind of feedback did you get from VCs or entrepreneur large corporation when you launched Spotplug? I would say that investors were very excited for the work that we're doing

and we got a lot of interest. We have already raised over 1.4 million, mainly from large banks here. So TD Bank was our leading investor. There was also the government of Canada, NBA Canada, Salesforce Canada, the foundation for black communities. All of those groups were responsible

for the initial investment that we received. And so we are currently in our next. And again, the pipeline of investors is always there. And so we're obviously working towards building relationships with the right investors as we're scaling into the United States. So it's a new market for us. So ensuring that we're partnering

with the right distribution companies, the right publishers, the right investors is definitely important to us, but definitely, definitely there's lots of interest because no one's doing the work that we're doing. I mean, I had one investor say to me that the work that you're doing is work that needs to be done. And unfortunately, a lot of the startups

in the ed tech personalized learning space, they don't do this deep work. They don't, you know what I mean? Because as I mentioned earlier, for them, it doesn't serve their bottom line. For them, it will buy vast public, general public, but for us, it's not just profit. It's also people that are also part

of our return on investment. So if our intended users, targeted users are not profiting from what we are building, then why? Yeah, I was struck to see that out of the five speech recognition technologies, all of them have twice more errors when listening to black voice than for white voices. And I'm talking Alexa, Google, smart speakers,

all those technologies, Siri's. Were you surprised by that? No, not at all. I don't know why anyone is surprised by that. If you do not have a diverse development team, what do you expect? If you are creating a product that is for millions of people to use and have access to,

and your development team, your UX design team, your engineering team, your product team, your sales team, your marketing team is not reflective of the market that you are attracting, then what is going to happen?

There's obviously going to be errors. This reminds me of, have you ever watched Mad Men? Yeah, yeah. So, right, so this reminds me of like a group of men

creating advertising for women's hygiene products without asking any woman. And there was clients of women, but they were all in like subordinate roles. They were secretaries, they were personal assistants. Never asked any woman, hey, does this marketing even make sense? Yeah.

Right? You're so right. But by doing that in the US alone, you are cutting yourself from close to 13% of the population, right? Right. 13% of the population in the US is black. You bet attention to the way you develop your product.

Yes, and not only that, that may even sound like a small number to some of your listeners, but it's important to know the power of that 13%, that power to influence that 13%, right? That 13% has the influence that brands are looking for, right? The data, they take the data and they sell it,

and they're able to market their product. We look at brands like Nike, for example, they know who their demographic is. It is largely black teams, mainly they're like their Jordans line is mainly black teams. Now, are black teams part of their development process? They're the shoe making, the design process? I'm gonna say, highly unlikely

that they are adequately represented on those teams. And yet still they're profiting off of our communities. And a lot of people are not seeing that gap, right? Between the consumption and the creation. And it's continuing to widen. So when we translate that over to technology and we think about the digital divide, the digital divide originally was things

like not having access to computers, not having access to wifi, to not learning about STEM. Or being streamed out of STEM courses because of your gender or because of your cultural identity. And now with official intelligence, some will call it like the fifth revolution. It now has the ability to widen that gap even further. And if educators do not understand their role

in preparing future generations, then those who are most marginalized will continue to be marginalized in a much deeper, deeply impactful way. And we're here to really mitigate that. Yeah. So Tamar, we are getting at the end of this interview. I want to understand why are you moving to the US?

What are you trying to achieve by doing that? Well, Stan, there is a larger population of black and brown folks in the United States compared to Canada. The US education market is much different from the Canadian market in such a way that, there, I want to say a little bit more, maybe innovative, a little more advanced

when it comes to different ways of education. When we think about ideas like project-based learning, culturally responsive pedagogy, all of those things came from American scholars. And we don't always see that same representation in Canada. And so the short answer is that there's definitely much more opportunity for us to scale and to be successful in the United States.

And so that is what we're doing. Okay. So that provides me with a perfect transition to my last question. What is America to you? Oh, America to me, I know this sounds so cliche,

but it is the land of opportunity. There's so much opportunity, not just to generate revenue, but to create real impact. There are a lot of issues. In America as a whole, but especially in the education system. And there's so much work that needs to be done. And there's not enough people,

or the people who are there are tired, burnt out, spent. They don't know what else to do. And I always see myself as providing fresh solutions to stale problem. And so I think the US market presents us with an opportunity to be able to provide those fresh solutions and to create real impact and real meaningful change and turn things around

for a group of people who were snatched from their land and brought to an unknown place to build a country from scratch that takes every opportunity to tear them down, oppress them, kill them, and really look at how we can turn that around and build those people up. So that's what America means to me.

Thank you so much. And Tamar, thank you for accepting my invitation to Back in America. You're welcome. Thank you for having me.