http://www.blackenterprise.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/what-if-dr-king-had-access-to-machine-learning/

As we honor the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I want to reflect on all the positive things that have stemmed from this great man sharing his visions and dreams to make the world a better place. Yet, there in my #techie mind, I begin to wonder what if…

What if Dr. King had some of the modern marvels that we use daily to communicate, entertain, and share our personal views with our community and the world:  Would things have been different?

While having lunch with my friend and fellow #techie Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus—which uses state of art machine learning as a central nervous system to its product offering—we began to run the mental algorithmic reasons of what if. The first thing that came to mind is what if Dr. King had access to machine learning.

Now, I know that some think that machine learning is something mythical, but it’s not.   Machine learning is a powerful way to forecast possibilities through the usage of data analytics and data insights.

“Half of the industry uses machine learning as a buzzword, yet as a society we have not unearthed the brevity of its capabilities.” —Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus

Take a peek below at the possibilities that Rishabh and I dreamt up.

1. Discourse Identity

If Dr. King had access, he would’ve run a large-scale semantic analysis, running social media and social feeds of entire cities to see which cities had max discourse and minimum discourse to identify influential and noninfluential cities.

2. Information Dissemination and Network Effect

Use the maximum discourse hotspots to identify and quantify the speed at which information is being spread to the neighboring cities. This would have allowed MLK to identify which discourse-ridden hotspots were also rapidly affecting neighboring communities.

3. Time Utilization

Having the ability to find the top discourse spots, time utilization would have enabled him to focus on five strategic heat spots that had a significant impact on surrounding areas. He could’ve rapidly affected those surrounding areas indirectly and organically, thus impacting the country. He could have minimized his travel time to different cities and used his remaining time to focus on ways to improve and further understanding between races.

4. Data visualization

Mapping and contrasting U.S. Census data and finding correlations between social economic factors and the tendency toward racism. Using data visualization services like DOMO, MLK could have visualized complex data and gathered a complete picture of underlying patterns and problem points at the core of our U.S. culture. Big data would become easy to handle because everything would be visualized.

5. Finding Those That Matter

Finding the right person to recruit other people by noticing their sharing coefficient. Dr. King could have calculated the sharing coefficient of each user on the network to find the trendsetters and sympathizers of the cause that could influence that many more people to spread the message even further and organically.

“MLK achieved a monumental task of uniting the nation without machine learning. With machine learning there’s a high chance history textbooks might have referred to him as President-elect.” —Rishabh Sharma, CEO of Poletus

6. Automated Recruiting

Using state of the art products, we have to create automated campaigns to persuade people that are on the fence or who are sympathetic to the cause to join and further the cause. He could’ve tracked what emails are being opened, how many times an email has been opened, find out people who are accessing the email the most and give a weighted score to them and interact with a higher score of people. Also, he could have run Facebook Lead Ads to gather contact information, insert it directly into Salesforce, and produce an email marketing campaign. Using Pardot, he could have emailed campaigns to those of a certain weighted score to encourage them to spread the message.

Rishabh Sharma is a successful Indian-American entrepreneur and technologist based in Los Angeles. A graduate of Berklee College of Music, he has combined his passion for the arts with his passion for technology. He is the executive producer and founder of Poletus one of the leading social media marketing companies.