AI for Social Impact via a Conversational Assistant Platform

In this white paper, we explain the rationale behind Ninjamoba LTD. This is why we are doing what we are doing. Intended as a business read, rather than just purely academic. Often, white papers begin with hypothetical quantifiable equations. Since we are in the qualitative field of social science and communications, we will give you the following equation instead.

Communications in Media + Direct Social Influence = Adoption

We base this on a widely referenced research of effecting change in a group who are not known for quickly changing in response to new ideas.

the adoption of innovation depends on some combination of well-established interpersonal ties and habitual exposure to mass communication” Ryan and Gross.

In their study on acceptance and diffusion, Ryan and Gross investigated how hybrid seed corn gained attention as well as which of two communication channels (mass communications and peer-to-peer interactions) prompted farmers to adopt the new innovation. Both channels served different functions, according to the researchers. Communication through mass media served as the source of initial information, while interpersonal networks influenced farmer decisions (p. 125). The results of this study indicate that the adoption of innovation is dependent upon some combination of established interpersonal ties and habitual exposure to mass media (p. 127).

At Ninjamoba LTD, we operate on this basis. This Ryan and Gross study still stands out as an amazing achievement in communications. The result was the development of a field of inquiry known as "diffusion theory". "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell popularized these ideas. Jan Servaes, PhD, a tireless educator and researcher in sustainability, also deserves credit for his many influences of effecting change with justice.

After our team won the largest hackathon in the world on remote education and family life (EU VS VIRUS) and another on remote health care (Data4Recovery) also sponsored by the EU - we consider validation for our ideation moving forward to be sufficient.

That's some of our foundations - we've also published previously on corporate communication, short form video, and sustainability communications. 42.pdf may not be the answer to life, the universe and everything, but it is a pretty good resource for corporate sustainability communication by using short form video.

This is also to help explain why short form video platforms are doing so well. The dissertation will help describe reasons for deployment in sustainability communications and our mission based on research. We see short form videos taking over the world of commerce right now. Web3 requires not only text but video integrations. Our plans include human like avatars in the future, just as we have previously foreseen the benefits of short form video we also recommend AI Avatars.

And finally we favor design thinking to guide our product development. We like agile development methods when making production. However we are not “lean”. Principally our understanding of infrastructure and institutional transformation requires impact investors or state aid. We admire those who see capital risk creating social advances to be worthy if a solid rational based on research is in place for the initiative. We encourage speculative investment especially where there is a business model supporting the effort. Shortly put a deep tech social intervention requires capitalization once due diligence in peer review is accomplished both in the business model and the technology deployment.

Development can greatly benefit from utilizing automated conversational assistance in teaching new skills. Dialogue requires nuanced expertise particularly when addressing social concerns. While impressive we haven’t been convinced by large siloed conversational models that a machine learning approach with massive data points is the best solution for our use case. Namely for our trust to be placed our AI must be distributed, transparent, decentralized, and traceable. For mission critical social work trusty caregivers are at stake and must be considered. The corpus should be human reviewed by experts (and trained specifically using their conversational expertise).

This relies on attention to a elegant design. We have covered our detail of social health in our hackathon disclosures and on our web page - however this current white paper provides methodology and our fundamental basis. We are essentially documenting our progress and the mission and philosophy that guides our business.

Now that the preamble is out of the way.

Conversational assistant can be an effective tool in sustainability communications, in teaching, and in social services. We hypothesize because it is hybrid of intervention between social influence and mass media.

A notable study examined the associations between conversational AI use and various measures of social capital using an online survey. On average, conversational AI users had more bonding offline and online, greater social trust, and more civic participation than non-users.

AI gives us both the opportunity to present information remotely via media and be present as an automated interpersonal figure. This is effective when a deployment is paired with an existing innovator that is known by the user.

We are focused on the three fields of education, health and the environment because they are currently the most stressed public fields as a result of inequities the pandemic and war.

Also we see the opportunity in business to create a transdisciplinary “Network Effect”. This will utilize the MVP we have built across our social impact fields. These are underserved markets by AI deployment that are synergistic.

Current methodology and working platform is this:

  1. Make the software platform really easy to use. Remove as much friction as possible. Our IDE is lowcode/nocode and is integrated into the leading platforms.
  2. Offer a scalable solution. We’ve found a method to transform arbitrary text and / or to a list of questions and answers to an automated conversation. This is placed with an integrated development environment allowing easy offline and online deployment and scaling. Its wrapped into the leading content manager. Or can be fed into any chat application public or private. We can deploy on multiple software containers - or make several instances operate from a single source. The bots can live in the cloud - however we favor local deployment. This depends on the pleasure of the business client.
  3. Let’s pursue innovators to create expert human reviewed dialog either as a partnership or independently. Innovators that are influencers are best as they already exist as effectively established mass communication. Our bots are trained on predigested QNA gleaned from all manner of machine learning or human creation.
  4. Invite stakeholders to host the dialogs that contribute to their mission. Our business model is a distribution of expert systems which rely on trusted sources of information. This creates veracity and distributed resilience.
  5. We have devised a decentralized multisided platform that rewards all participants. This means we create a marketplace to develop dialogs and contribute to the core software for functionality. It also indicates that we believe in a tiered notion of the monetization of our data collection and multiple income streams. We are not offering “open data”.

For instance the UNITY platform allows use of its software freely for educational use and startups - however enterprises are charged fair market value. We are concerned that the “open data” movement has different impacts than “open source”. Namely that well capitalized entities can leverage the value of these disclosures more effectively than the efforts of individuals and startups. Additionally the municipal hosts can be “gypped" of the outcomes by commercial interests. So we want to emulate the successful business models of software giants like Apple and Unity - however our intent is to “revenue share” with our hosts/partners who help us gather these data resources. The WEB3 movement is an effort to correct this market failure, we also see the inordinate aggregation of finance and endeavor to correct these trends going forward as well.

We invite participation and hope to have many partners in our advances - especially in establishing localized profit centers to be partners in each jurisdiction. We welcome governance, educational, institutional as well as transnational engagement. We have partnered with several institutions to bring this to market and invite newcomers to review our work for soundness and efficacy.

Thanks for reading.

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