(upbeat pop music) >> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering South by Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Okay welcome back everyone. We are here live at South by Southwest at the Intel AI lounge. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, talking to some great guests. The theme for this week is AI for Social Good. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, our next guest is Federico Gomez Suarez, technical advisor and volunteer at Thorn, doing some really amazing things with technology for the betterment of society. Specifically a use case. So Federico, welcome to theCUBE, welcome to the AI Lounge here at Intel. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> So talk about Thorn. First of all, you work for Microsoft, but you're a volunteer? >> Correct. >> Talk about what Thorn is, and what you guys do. It's really a great story. >> So Thorn is a non-profit which focuses on driving technological innovation to fight child sexual exploitation. And it does it two ways. One of them is by doing research to find the new trends and the new ways that this is happening. But also by using the latest technology to find ways that we can actually fight this problem. Thorn has something called an innovation lab, where we're always trying new technology, we're trying AI just to find new ways to fight the problem. >> So this is really a great use case of where technology is being used for the betterment of society and good, because what you're doing is taking really cutting edge big data, machine learning, AI techniques. And the rage right now is facial recognition. >> Oh Yes! >> So talk about where and how it works. And what's the results? And can you share some of the impact? >> Yeah! So as part of my volunteer work, one of the projects that I have been working, is called a child finder service. And the idea of this work is, if we have an image, particularly an image of a child who have been missing, can we use facial recognition to determine whether another image is the same child. And this is actually a pretty challenging problem because the child may have gone missing many years back and now we want to match against another picture where the child may show much growth. >> Depending on the duration, right? >> And you know, if you imagine the impact of actually having this technology, a person who is trying to look for a missing child, if they have to go through a lot of pictures, it's actually hard to determine whether two people are the same person or not. So we're helping in that case. We're helping so that you don't have to go through so many pictures. So that we can highlight the ones that the machine thinks is actually the same person. >> Take us through how it works, in just a use case, just as an illustration. >> Yeah, So when a child goes missing, the National Center for Missing Children, which we work with, they publish a poster and that poster has an image of a missing child. Now once you have that image, you may want to say well are there places where the picture of that child may be showing up. One place that there's usually pictures of children being exploited are online ads. So let's say that there's online ads and you want to say, well in any of these ads that they use for exploitation, could there be the same child in both of them. So that's actually a use case. And just using face recognition technology, we can try to make the problem easier, faster than it would be if you were trying to do it manually. >> And you're doing a demo here in the Intel AI Lounge. What's in the demo? What are you showing? >> So in the demo, I'm showing how difficult it really is to do face recognition by hand. And how by just having some assistance from a machine, you can go from having to look at hundreds of images and spending potentially hours, to doing it seconds. >> So how to do you involved? I mean, this is a volunteer organization, take us through your journey. How did you get involved? And talk about how you guys are getting more people involved, and how can someone get involved? >> Absolutely! So, you know as for Microsoft, there is the Hack for Good community, and they encourage us to go and donate our time, our skill to non-profits. Two years ago, I had this idea, and I did a hackathon. And after the hackathon, I got connected with Thorn. I learn about what they do, and that's how I pretty much got involved. I was really fortunate that Microsoft supported me to actually go spend time with a non-profit. And when I start working with Thorn, I realized, hey there's other tech companies also willing to help. So in this child finder service project, I work with Intel, I work with other companies all coming together to find ways to solve this problem using the cutting edge technology available. And you know, Thorn is always looking for volunteers, we're looking for what we call our Tech Defenders. If you go to our website, which is wearethorn.org/Sxsw, you'll find the link where you can actually volunteer your skills as a technical defender for Thorn. >> So talk about, that's very cool by the way. People should check out Thorn. Is there a website, Thorn? >> Yeah, it's wearethorn.org/sxsw. >> Okay, wearethorn.org/sxsw. For South by Southwest. So talk about the technology, because obviously Intel makes chips, makes stuff go faster, you got more compute, you've got more cores, you got now, cloud technology. And you've seen at Google Next, where they were showcasing their Xeon processor, that the AI trend now is becoming really, really, really big. I know Microsoft as your Amazon web services. They're all having these machine learning libraries, and the big trend is self-learning machines or deep-learning. So this is a tech trend. But now when you apply it to this, it really can work. So, what is some of the technology, and what are some of the data sets that you use, how does it work under the covers? >> Yeah so, we actually start with an open source technology for face recognition. And after we started with this technology, we realized that we had to make it better. So we had to build data sets ourselves. For the data sets we have images of the posters that are published from the National Center. We have also started asking people to donate images over time, of themselves. Because we need images of people when they were children, and when they're older. And that's how we've been building data sets. And then having the data set, we need to go and train them. And that's where we're using hardware, in particularly using GPUs to actually do training is really is key for us. The technology really under this is deep learning for us. We used an existing deep-learning models, and improving them with our particular scenario, cause there's special challenges in our case. Not only with the age, but also a lot of the images that we process. Sometimes there's heavy makeup, sometimes there's things like that. >> Or res, resolution right? Depending on the photo? Right? >> Yeah. And you now, low resolution images particularly they're a challenge, so we need to improve it, we need to keep training to actually get to the point where we feel we have a really robust system. >> I want to ask you a personal question. And this is something we were talking about on our intro segment, and something that I've been thinking a lot about. I haven't written about it yet, but I've been starting to tease it out on some of my thought leader interviews. Is that, in every major inflection point in the business of technology, there's always been a counter-culture movement. And it seems to be that, if you look at all the news, whether it's political or tech company news, and all this stuff happening around the world, there seems to be a social good culture developing. We're seeing a counter-culture where what was once valued, tech or public proprietary algorithms, is now changing to open source, community, societal benefits. There seems to be a lot of activity, and no one's kind of put their finger on it. And you're a great use case of that example. >> And I feel like, the Hack for Good community in Microsoft is growing, and there's people, peers of mine, working on all this kind of interesting projects helping non-profits. >> And that's called Hack for Good? >> Yes. >> What's it called? >> Hack for Good in Microsoft. >> So that's a Microsoft hackathon with employees who just say, hey let's pick something good to do and they apply their programming technical skills to... >> Yeah, and you know there's a lot of support, and we're encouraged to do it. And it's to me inspiring to work in a company that really encourage that, and you know what? I see the same when I look across the industry. I see people willing to spend their evenings, like I spend my evenings working on some of this, or weekends, but we're passionate about making a difference. And I know I'm not alone. I've met a lot of people, and I know there's a lot more out there. >> Is there a community people can check out? Is it on the website? Is there open source community? Is there a certain software groups that are playing more than others? >> Actually I don't know. I know in my space, I think a I think a great place to start is joining Thorn's Digital Defenders. But I would say if someone is passionate about a cause, it could be anything, and say I want to help, there's non-profits out there for that. And when I work with non-profits, they're so passionate about it, and sometimes they just need help in little things. And having so many tech communities go in and help them makes a huge difference. I would invite people to just go. If you're passionate about it, just go for it. Find a non-profit, they'll be happy to work with you. >> Federico, I want to ask you if you could share just some anecdotal impact that you guys have had. Can you share some successes, some advances? Just highlight some of the things. >> Yeah, so Thorn just published their yearly report and it was really encouraging. So, Thorn has a couple of different tools that they build. One of them is called Spotlight. Through the use of this tool last year, about 2,000 children who were victims of trafficking, were recovered from around 6,000 victims. And you know, each victim is a person. And the fact that we're making a difference in those lives is extremely encouraging. And that's just one of the things that we were able to contribute. So that's one of the stories that we have. And to me it's not only that. To me, it's also the fact that I see people who are willing to actually get engaged, learn more about these problems is another huge win. >> Final question for you Federico. Describe the scene here at the AI Lounge at Intel. For folks watching who aren't at South by Southwest, what is the vibe here? What are they showing? Obviously AI is the theme. AI for Social Good is our broadcast here. Hashtag is #intelai, if you're interested in sharing, we'd appreciate if you could retweet and share the love. What's your thoughts on with the vibe here? Describe the scene here. >> You know, when I look around, all the demos are amazing. Like each one of them, you're blown away by it. And it just shows you how in a practical way, AI can be changing lives or doing amazing things. There's the drones there on the video. The drones, I love those, they look amazing. And then there's also the demo around using an art style and getting your picture. I'm going to get mine in a second. I think if you come by, you'll see how AI really in practice, is able to contribute to people's lives. And the vibe is awesome. And I'm loving it here. >> Well I want to say congratulations. You do amazing things. >> Thank you. >> It's really a real testament to where the society's going AI for Social Change. Microsoft has a Hackathon for Good, and this is not a one-off. I mean Microsoft certainly has had that. Google's got the 20% work on your own project. Intel has it. Companies are getting involved, a counter-culture is developing for societal benefits. And all these new things happening, like autonomous vehicles, smart cities, these are paradigm shifting society changes around the world and will require a human involvement. Congratulations, and thanks for sharing. >> Thank you very much. And we have a hashtag just for our product which is #defendhappiness. >> John: Defend happiness? >> Yeah, which is all about stopping sexual exploitation and trafficking all around the world. >> Okay, #defendhappiness. Please put it out there and share it, tweet this video. And for the betterment of society, I'm John Furrier with Federico here at the Intel AI Lounge. More coverage from South by Southwest. Three days of coverage, full day Cube today, some interviews tomorrow. Intel has some amazing super demos they're going to be showing here throughout the weekend. Stay tuned on theCUBE, we'll be covering it. We'll be right back with more, after this short break. 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(electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube. Covering South By Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're here live in Austin, Texas, for South By Southwest Cube coverage at the Intel AI Lounge, #IntelAI if you're watching, put it out on Twitter. I'm John Furrier of Silicon Angle for the Cube. Our next guest is Alison Yu who's with Cloudera. And in the news today, although they won't comment on it. It's great to see you, social media manager at Cloudera. >> Yes, it's nice to see you as well. >> Great to see you. So, Cloudera has a strategic relationship with Intel. You guys have a strategic investment, Intel, and you guys partner up, so it's well-known in the industry. But what's going on here is interesting, AI for social good is our theme. >> Alison: Yes. >> Cloudera has always been a pay-it-forward company. And I've known the founders, Mike Olson and Amr Awadallah. >> Really all about the community and paying it forward. So Alison, talk about what you guys are working on. Because you're involved in a panel, but also Cloudera Cares. And you guys have teamed up with Thorn, doing some interesting things. >> Alison: Yeah (laughing). >> Take it away! >> Sure, thanks. Thanks for the great intro. So I'll give you a little bit of a brief introduction to Cloudera Cares. Cloudera Cares was founded roughly about three years ago. It was really an employee-driven and -led effort. I kind of stepped into the role and ended up being a little bit more of the leader just by the way it worked out. So we've really gone from, going from, you know, we're just doing soup kitchens and everything else, to strategic partnerships, donating software, professional service hours, things along those lines. >> Which has been very exciting to see our nonprofit partnerships grow in that way. So it really went from almost grass-root efforts to an organized organization now. And we start stepping up our strategic partnerships about a year and a half ago. We started with DataKind, is our initial one. About two years ago, we initiated that. Then we a year ago, about in September, we finalized our donation of an enterprise data hub to Thorn, which if you're not aware of they're all about using technology and innovation to stop child-trafficking. So last year, around September or so, we announced the partnership and we donated professional service hours. And then in October, we went with them to Grace Hopper, which is obviously the largest Women in Tech Conference in North America. And we hosted a hackathon and we helped mentor women entering into the tech workforce, and trying to come up with some really cool innovative solutions for them to track and see what's going on with the dark web, so we had quite a few interesting ideas coming out of that. >> Okay, awesome. We had Frederico Gomez Suarez on, who was the technical advisor. >> Alison: Yeah. >> A Microsoft employee, but he's volunteering at Thorn, and this is interesting because this is not just donating to the soup kitchens and what not. >> Alison: Yeah. >> You're starting to see a community approach to philanthropy that's coding RENN. >> Yeah. >> Hackathons turning into community galvanizing communities, and actually taking it to the next level. >> Yeah. So, I think one of the things we realize is tech, while it's so great, we have actually introduced a lot of new problems. So, I don't know if everyone's aware, but in the '80s and '90s, child exploitation had almost completely died. They had almost resolved the issue. With the introduction of technology and the Internet, it opened up a lot more ways for people to go ahead and exploit children, arrange things, in the dark web. So we're trying to figure out a way to use technology to combat a problem that technology kind of created as well, but not only solving it, but rescuing people. >> It's a classic security problem, the surface area has increased for this kind of thing. But big data, which is where you guys were founded on in the cloud era that we live in. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Pun intended. (laughing) Using the machine learning now you start with some scale now involved. >> Yes, exactly, and that's what we're really hoping, so we're partnering with Intel in the National Center of Missing Exploited Children. We're actually kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow, and our hope is we can figure out some different innovative ways that AI can be applied to scraping data and finding children. A lot of times we'll see there's not a lot of clues, but for example, if we can upload, if there can be a tool that can upload three or four different angles of a child's face when they go missing, maybe what happens is someone posts a picture on Instagram or Twitter that has a geo tag and this kid is in the background. That would be an amazing way of using AI and machine learning-- >> Yeah. >> Alison: To find a child, right. >> Well, I'll give you guy a plug for Cloudera. And I'll reference Dr. Naveen Rao, who's the GM of Intel's AI group, was on earlier. And he was talking about how there's a lot of storage available, not a lot of compute. Now, Cloudera, you guys have really pioneered the data lake, data hub concept where storage is critical. >> Yeah. >> Now, you got this compute power and machine learning, that's kind of where it comes together. Did I get that right? >> Yeah, and I think it's great that with the partnership with Intel we're able to integrate our technology directly into the hardware, which makes it so much more efficient. You're able to compute massive amounts of data in a very short amount of time, and really come up with real results. And with this partnership, specifically with Thorn and NCMEC, we're seeing that it's real impact for thousands of people last year, I think. In the 2016 impact report, Thorn said they identified over 6,000 trafficking victims, of which over 2,000 were children. Right, so that tool that they use is actually built on Cloudera. So, it's great seeing our technology put into place. >> Yeah, that's awesome. I was talking to an Intel person the other day, they have 72 cores now on a processor, on the high-end Xeons. Let's get down to some other things that you're working on. What are you doing here at the show? Do you have things that you're doing? You have a panel? >> Yeah, so at the show, at South by Southwest, we're kicking off a virtual hackathon tomorrow at our Austin offices for South by Southwest. Everyone's welcome to come. I just did the liquor order, so yes, everyone please come. (laughing) >> You just came from Austin's office, you're just coming there. >> Yeah, exactly. So we've-- >> Unlimited Red Bull, pizza, food. (laughing) >> Well, we'll be doing lots and lots tomorrow, but we're kicking that off, we have representatives from Thorn, NCMEC, Google, Intel, all on site to answer questions. That's kind of our kickoff of this month-long virtual hackathon. You don't need to be in Austin to participate, but that is one of the things that we are kicking off. >> And then on Sunday, actually here at the Intel AI Lounge we're doing a panel on AI for Good, and using artificial intelligence to solve problems. >> And we'll be broadcasting that live here on The Cube. So, folks, SiliconAngle.tv will carry that. Alison, talk about the trend that, you weren't here when we were talking about how there's now a new counterculture developing in a good way around community and social change. How real is the trend that you're starting to see these hackathons evolve from what used to be recruiting sessions to people just jamming together to meet each other. Now, you're starting to see the next level of formation where people are organizing collectively-- >> Yeah. >> To impact real issues. >> Yeah. >> Is this a real trend or where is that trend, can you speak to that? >> Sure, so from what I've seen from the hackathons what we've been seeing before was it's very company-specific. Only one company wanted to do it, and they would kind of silo themselves, right? Now, we're kind of seeing this coming together of companies that are generally competitors, but they see a great social cause and they decide that they want to band together, regardless of their differences in technology, product, et cetera, for a common good. And, so. >> Like a Thorn. >> For Thorn, you'll see a lot of competitors, so you'll see Facebook and Twitter or Google and Amazon, right? >> John: Yeah. >> And we'll see all these different competitors come together, lend their workforce to us, and have them code for one great project. >> So, you see it as a real trend. >> I do see it as a trend. I saw Thorn last year did a great one with Facebook and on-site with Facebook. This year as we started to introduce this hackathon, we decided that we wanted to do a hackathon series versus just a one-off hackathon. So we're seeing people being able to share code, contribute, work on top of other code, right, and it's very much a sharing community, so we're very excited for that. >> All right, so I got to ask you what's they culture like at Cloudera these days, as you guys prepare to go public? What's the vibe internally of the company, obviously Mike Olson, the founder, is still around, Amr's around. You guys have been growing really fast. Got your new space. What's the vibe like in Cloudera now? >> Honestly, the culture at Cloudera hasn't really changed. So, when I joined three years ago we were much smaller than we are now. But I think one thing that we're really excited about is everyone's still so collaborative, and everyone makes sure to help one another out. So, I think our common goal is really more along the lines of we're one team, and let's put out the best product we can. >> Awesome. So, what's South by Southwest mean to you this year? If you had to kind of zoom out and say, okay. What's the theme? We heard Robert Scoble earlier say it's a VR theme. We hear at Intel it's AI. So, there's a plethora of different touchpoints here. What do you see? >> Yeah, so I actually went to the opening keynote this morning, which was great. There was an introduction, and then I don't know if you realized, but Cory Booker was on as well, which is great. >> John: Yep. >> But I think a lot of what we had seen was they called out on stage that artificial intelligence is something that will be a trend for the next year. And I think that's very exciting that Intel really hit the nail on the head with the AI Lounge, right? >> Cory Booker, I'm a big fan. He's from my neighborhood, went to the same school I went to, that my family. So in Northern Valley, Old Tappan. Cory, if you're watching, retweet us, hashtag #IntelAI. So AI's there. >> AI is definitely there. >> No doubt, it's on stage. >> Yes, but I think we're also seeing a very large, just community around how can we make our community better versus let's try to go in these different silos, and just be hyper-aware of what's only in front of us, right? So, we're seeing a lot more from the community as well, just being interested in things that are not immediately in front of us, the wider, either nation, global, et cetera. So, I think that's very exciting people are stepping out of just their own little bubbles, right? And looking and having more compassion for other people, and figuring out how they can give back. >> And, of course, open source at the center of all the innovation as always. (laughing) >> I would like to think so, right? >> It is! I would testify. Machine learning is just a great example, how that's now going up into the cloud. We started to see that really being part of all the apps coming out, which is great because you guys are in the big data business. >> Alison: Yeah. >> Okay, Alison, thanks so much for taking the time. Real quick plug for your panel on Sunday here. >> Yeah. >> What are you going to talk about? >> So we're going to be talking a lot about AI for good. We're really going to be talking about the NCMEC, Thorn, Google, Intel, Cloudera partnership. How we've been able to do that, and a lot of what we're going to also concentrate on is how the everyday tech worker can really get involved and give back and contribute. I think there is generally a misconception of if there's not a program at my company, how do I give back? >> John: Yeah. >> And I think Cloudera's a shining example of how a few employees can really enact a lot of change. We went from grassroots, just a few employees, to a global program pretty quickly, so. >> And it's organically grown, which is the formula for success versus some sort of structured company program (laughing). >> Exactly, so we definitely gone from soup kitchen to strategic partnerships, and being able to donate our own time, our engineers' times, and obviously our software, so. >> Thanks for taking the time to come on our Cube. It's getting crowded in here. It's rocking the house, the house is rocking here at the Intel AI Lounge. If you're watching, check out the hashtag #IntelAI or South by Southwest. I'm John Furrie. I'll be back with more after this short break. (electronic music)