Social Impact Tech: Intel’s Sinem Aslan On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
As a social scientist, my research sits at the intersection between human learning and machine learning. Using multidisciplinary expertise, we are researching context aware multi-modal AI technologies in education to understand how such technologies can enable personalized learning just like 1:1 tutoring through advanced sensing and sense-making technologies. We believe such approaches could empower students to become self-directed in their learning journey, help teachers to support their students better, enable content providers to offer personalized content anywhere, anytime with powerful learning analytics.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making an Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sinem Aslan.
Sinem Aslan earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Instructional Systems Technology with a minor in Educational Inquiry Methodology from Indiana University. She currently works as a research scientist on the Intel Labs team at Intel Corporation. Her research focuses on understanding how AI can better understand and model learners’ behaviors and emotions to enable personalized experiences. As a scholar, she has authored several journal publications, given presentations at international conferences, and received a number of internationally-recognized awards for her research.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I was born in one of the villages in the eastern part of Turkey in a farming family doing agriculture for a living. Both my parents didn’t go to college — my father has a high school degree and my mother completed elementary school. My father had the primary responsibility of providing for us while my mother stayed at home and took care of us. We had a lot of financial challenges growing up — in fact, I recall them often purchasing bread that was past the expiration date at the store because it would be cheaper. But they never compromised on giving me and my brother the opportunities we needed to educate ourselves and break out of that poverty cycle, often at the cost of great hardship to themselves. I owe them everything.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
After completing my doctoral degree in the United States, I decided to go back to Turkey. At that time, I had always assumed that with a Ph.D., the most logical career path for me was to become a professor at a university. I didn’t know there could be other possibilities to apply the domain expertise I had built to other areas. Around that time, as I began interviewing, I met someone (who also currently works in Intel Labs) — when I interviewed with her, she opened my eyes to options that weren’t even on my radar. She is one of the strongest women I know, and as my prospective manager at that time, guided me to be courageous and explore paths in applied research in my field I had not even considered. I’m grateful every day that my paths crossed with her and I now get to collaborate with top-notch researchers around the world working at Intel Labs.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
There is a quote that I’ve heard is often attributed to Audrey Hepburn: “Nothing is impossible, the word itself says ‘I’m possible’!” and it has always resonated with me.
Mine is the unlikeliest of success stories because the odds were stacked against me — a young girl in rural Turkey who grew up in a farming family with limited financial means, surrounded by a culture that really resisted the idea of girls pursuing higher education. When I look back, it is quite extraordinary how many barriers I had to be overcome to break the mold, but I did it. It took extraordinary courage — on my part, and on the part of my parents who went against rigid societal norms and were harshly judged in their community for encouraging my studies. Their determination (as well as the resistance of those around me) only fueled my determination to prove the nay sayers wrong. It was a long, hard road with many struggles along the way but today, here I am working for one of the greatest technology companies in the world. Where I am today is way beyond even the best life I could have dreamed for myself.
Today, I serve as a role model to the daughters of the very same people who tried to hold me back, to let them know that anything is in fact possible. Ultimately, this is really what I wanted to achieve — to light a candle and show a path forward for other young women from disadvantaged backgrounds similar to mine.
You are a successful technology leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Based on my unique start in life, I would have to say resilience/persistence, hard work and the courage to embrace the unknown have all played a role in my successes. My personality does not fit what is often the western stereotype of leadership — strong, vocal, bold, extroverted. In fact, I don’t naturally exhibit any of those traits. It was quiet persistence and resilience that got me to where I am today, not big, bold, confident moves.
Being a natural introvert, I struggled with issues of low self-confidence and several insecurities early in my career. I always over-relied on letting my work speak for itself, always shooting for a high bar there. And because of confidence issues early on, I was quite comfortable staying in my comfort zone. This is where having a great mentor who can truly see your potential makes all the difference. Early in my early career at another company, I was assigned to work with a senior designer who was leading a key project. Things weren’t going great and the project was at risk. One day, our manager simply handed me the reins to lead it. That act reinforced her complete trust and confidence in my abilities — she believed I was ready even when I thought I wasn’t. That made me — despite my anxiety at being asked to step up — rise to the challenge. Mentors like her have played a huge role in my career successes. This includes my current manager who has always been empowering me to see my strengths and lean into new experiences and opportunities.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
There is research that has shown us that students who engage in 1:1 tutoring using mastery learning performed significantly better. However, securing a personal tutor to each student is costly and not scalable. Recent advances in AI, however, are allowing us to explore creative approaches to this issue.
How do you think your technology can address this?
As a social scientist, my research sits at the intersection between human learning and machine learning. Using multidisciplinary expertise, we are researching context aware multi-modal AI technologies in education to understand how such technologies can enable personalized learning just like 1:1 tutoring through advanced sensing and sense-making technologies. We believe such approaches could empower students to become self-directed in their learning journey, help teachers to support their students better, enable content providers to offer personalized content anywhere, anytime with powerful learning analytics. Here’s a potential scenario of how this could play out: Let’s say Melisa is a 9th grader in a class of 30 students. Her teacher has covered a new topic in math but she has been struggling with solving questions related with this topic at home. Our sensing/AI technologies can detect Melisa’s high levels of confusion when solving the questions in this topic and can inform the content provider to support Melisa with additional resources (e.g., providing extra instruction, customizing the questions, etc.). If this level of support is not sufficient for the student, then the teacher as the human in the loop can be informed about Melisa’s need for additional support on this topic. This is when the teacher can do 1:1 coaching with Melisa to understand the root causes of her confusion and ensure she masters the topic before moving to the next topic.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
While I was in high school, there was a time when I was struggling with the learning and didn’t believe I could make it all the way to college. My language arts teacher was astute enough to pick up this dynamic. She spotted the issue early and she intervened, encouraging me to believe in myself and my goal at that time, which was to get into Middle East Turkey University (one of the top schools in Turkey). I realize today how lucky I was to have a teacher like her whose keen eye spotted my struggles. Had it not been for her timely intervention and encouragement, my life could very easily have gone down a different path. I also realize that not everyone is as lucky. Experiences like these really fired up in me the will to tap the power of technology to give teachers in classroom a set of “virtual” eyes and ears to be able to observe students, listen and understand their struggles, and support them wherever they are.
How do you think this might change the world?
In developing countries, teachers are a scare resource in a classroom. In fact, it is not uncommon to have a teacher-student ratio of 1:50. Ironically, we lack the ability to scale teachers in communities where students actually need their help the most. But we can give teachers access to technologies that can address this gap and help them gain insights about each student in their classroom and reallocate their time and attention toward students who most need the support
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
It is usually not about the technology; it is about how people use it. Even the best-intentioned inventions could be used by those with negative intent. For example, learning analytics from technologies we’re researching for classrooms could be used to rank students but that is not the intent behind how we built them. We designed them in a way that they serve as an assistant to teachers to help every student to reach their best potential. Towards this end, alongside our technology research, we have been conducting ethnographic research with teachers, students, parents, and administrators to understand how we can eliminate such misuse. Such insights will inform the design of our technology — so we address potential misuse within the design of the technology itself.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1. Identify a research area that is also a personal passion point for you and will drive you to do your very best…something that touches your own heart as a researcher. In my case, I gravitated toward research in educational technology because education played such a transformative role in my life and carved out a career path for a young woman raised in rural Turkey that simply didn’t seem possible!
2. Put yourself into the shoes of people who will be using these technologies — in my case, I have a Ph.D. in education and I have made it a point to closely work with parents, teachers, students, and school administrators throughout my entire career. At the end of the day, I’m not designing a technology for myself –no matter how cool it is. I need to design for a human or societal need, so I need to be 100% aware of their struggles and pain points.
3. Prior to starting on a project — whether it’s research or developing an actual technology, think about the impact you want to create in the lives of the people you’re designing for, and the impact you intend to create. If that clear vision is missing or does not excite you, then never start.
4. Always proactively think about the potential drawbacks or unintended negative consequences if the technology falls into the hands of bad actors who might abuse it. And try to eliminate them by design.
5. Always be open for change — research is an iterative process — apply technologies in the field, get feedback from prospective users, iterate, and continue refining.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I’d encourage them to think about what kind of an environment or society they want to live in. And what changes they want to see. Instead of waiting others to make the change, they can be the agents of change to turn things upside down if needed.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
Elon Musk. When kids start pre-school and kindergarten, they have this amazing spirit, creativity, hunger for learning. When they move towards high school, we sometimes see them lose interest, get less engaged and also less curious about the world around them. As educators and researchers, at a societal level we need to think hard about the multitude of reasons why this “drop-off” happens so that we can address it. I would love to understand how Elon Musk kept his curiosity for learning and exploration, his hunger for invention and his ability to dream big alive. The hunger for learning, the ability to stay curious, and the will to explore new dimensions — these are characteristics the biggest innovators in technology all exhibit — including Elon.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I am very active user of social media. They can follow me on Twitter (@sinem_aslan) or Instagram (_sinem_aslan_) to know more about me as a person and a researcher.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
About the Interviewer: Jilea Hemmings is a staunch believer in the power of entrepreneurship. A successful career revamping Fortune 500 companies was not enough for her entrepreneurial spirit, so Jilea began focusing her passion in startups. She has successfully built 6 startups to date. Her passion for entrepreneurship continues to flourish with the development of Stretchy Hair Care, focusing on relieving the pain associated with detangling and styling natural black hair. For far too long, people with tender heads have suffered in pain. Until now.
