Coworking: Bridgette Befort acts as a communication bridge

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

My job as a machine learning sales engineer at Howso is to interface between the customers, the engineering team, and the sales and marketing teams to help facilitate understanding of our AI products. Often, each of these groups—all of which have a stake in how our products are utilized—are siloed, and bridging communication between them can be difficult. Translating the technical into nontechnical language, and vice versa, is a skill I strive to constantly improve.

Perhaps the time I spent during my chemical engineering PhD struggling to describe my complex research in accessible terms helped me recognize the importance of this. Technologists like myself often forget how critical clear communication is for any product to be successful. In the field of AI in particular, there is so much hype, but very little clear and concise communication around how products will directly impact companies and society. I see my role as the mediator who makes that type of communication happen.

What’s the most compelling tech project you’ve worked on, and why?

I’m really excited about the future of Howso’s understandable AI technology, which is a totally different AI paradigm than the mainstream neural network-driven modeling methods getting so much attention right now. The Howso team has developed our AI Engine, where predictions are made directly from data, not an inexplicable mathematical equation. Thus, every modeling decision the AI makes is fully auditable because each prediction can be attributed directly back to the data that influenced it.

My hope for the future is that understandable AI will enable as many new insights as black-box neural networks, but do so in a way that can be 100% trusted by showing exactly why the insights were surfaced. I have spent time working on many engineering research projects in the past that would have really benefited from such explainability, so I’m looking forward to seeing how understandable AI can help drive innovation in fields like engineering, chemistry, biotechnology, and more.

What technologies are you most optimistic about? Least? And why?

I’m actually very interested to see where Apple goes with its new mixed-reality headset. Apple has a history of changing the way we interact and work as a society, and my hunch is this product is the start of another big transition.

Additionally, I think the ongoing electrification of vehicles is exciting. It seems the world has made a quiet, but seismic, leap in the last few years to adopt electric vehicles, and I believe a permanent shift away from oil is really taking root, at least in the everyday transportation needs for many people.

What’s the best tech-related media you read/watch/listen to?

As an engineer, I am very interested in the application of new technologies in the natural world, so I subscribe to the Nature Briefing newsletter. It keeps me up to date on all the major STEM advances and their potential impacts across the globe. It’s so inspiring to see what STEM research is doing to help our planet, but also alarming to see that there are often more negative than positive impacts of technological advances, especially when new technology is too complex for its implications to be understood by many. Unfortunately, I believe advances in AI fall in this category. AI has the potential to be used for good in so many ways, but because its technical underpinnings are often inexplicable, we may implement it in an unintentionally damaging way. We need to strive to ensure AI becomes less biased, more transparent, and more trustworthy so that it doesn’t harm us more than it helps.

What’s something about you we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I’m from the Great Plains, so I like being in wide-open spaces. I love sitting on the porch watching golden sunsets or rolling thunderstorms with just my family, close friends, and some cows for company. This may sound a bit provincial, and while I do often enjoy indulging my adventurous streak by traveling and exploring new places, I feel most at home in the middle of nowhere.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

I daydream about cooking experiments a lot. My process is to buy just a few basic ingredients for a week, then feel with my soul how they should be combined to form meals without using recipes or instructions (I know, very unscientific of me). It’s always an adventure in edibility. Recently, I did potato week, which resulted in a very mushy glob of homemade gnocchi, but excellent crispy homemade french fries.