Ed Bice is the CEO of Meedan, a social tech NGO focused on increasing the online exchange of media, dialogue, and educational materials between Arabic and English speakers. At the confluence of social networking, social translation, and open innovation, Meedan has forwarded ideas and projects with the singular focus of promoting more diverse networks for knowledge, data, and idea exchange between Arabic and English speakers on the Internet. Ed has been an invited speaker at the 2010 Harvard Advance Leadership Initiative, the 2009 UN Internet Governance Forum, and many other ICT4D events. Ed is a member of the Partners for a New Beginning (PNB) group, a member of the Qatar Foundation International Educational Technology Working Group, and is a Co-Chair of the United Palestinian Partnership (UPP).

This week on Disarming Data, Ed Bice joins David and Paige Biderman to share his experience of being arrested at a protest against the Iraq War and how a subsequent email recounting his tale changed his life trajectory. We discuss Meedan’s approach to using a hybrid network of machines and people to generate translations and why it’s critical to layer human knowledge of context on top of machine translation. Ed also shares Meedan’s role in the COVID-19 Vaccine Media Hub and the importance of providing context explainers and fact-checkers to the media.

“The lower the language barrier, the better for societies and conflict.” - Ed Bice

“It feels like the hyperlink that was supposed to lead us down the path of collaboration and knowledge creation and progress has been hijacked.” - Ed Bice

“There's always going to be a need for humans to bring context and meaning to machine interpretations.” - Ed Bice

This week on Disarming Data:

●How Ed became interested in the field of technology
●Why there are a lot of mistranslations from Arabic to English, and how we can mitigate the problem
●What Ed did to try to address the Palestinian-Israeli conflict under the Obama administration and his opinions on the limitations of those actions
●How the upcoming Brazilian election is being handled in terms of the distribution of misinformation
●Why fake news and misinformation is such a continued problem
●Ed’s opinions on fact-checking on social media platforms in the Philippines and other countries
●How the pandemic shifted so many things about the internet and how we use it in terms of public health, and why it’s such a high-impact place to address misinformation and information integrity
●Whether Ed feels that educators are taking media literacy in schools more seriously and why he thinks the teaching needs to evolve

Connect with Ed Brice:

● Ed Brice on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/edbice/
●Meedan - https://meedan.com/

Connect with Disarming Data:

●David Biderman on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-t-biderman-3337b45/
●Disarming Data Website - https://www.disarmingdata.com/