Michael Airhart

San Francisco Bay Times — The 45th anniversary of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) was a year of stellar progress for Born Perfect, our survivor-led campaign launched in 2014 to end the dangerous and discredited practice of "conversion therapy." In 2022 alone, we worked to pass ordinances in 11 municipalities and advanced prohibitions in two [...]

Medium — Awash in competing demands for more advertising and next-generation machine learning, ecommerce site managers have rediscovered the simplicity of what the retail industry's founders knew a century ago: Consumers seek an inspiring merchant conversation, not a typed questionnaire - or an encounter with a brand that knows too much about them. By Borja Santoalalla and Michael Airhart.

bornperfect.org — Amazon.com told a group of senators this week that it will no longer sell books that misframe LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill. When a group of senators complained to Amazon about the disappearance of a book that stigmatizes transgender people, survivors of conversion therapy thanked the bookseller.

them. — The recent decision by Facebook and Instagram to exclude content that promotes conversion therapy is not just the right thing to do. It is a game-changer that will finally begin to remedy a problem that social media itself inadvertently created: the explosion of conversion therapy into an internet-driven industry that has caused devastating harm to LGBTQ+ people.

lucidworks.com — AI-driven chatbots are set to save industry $8 billion per year by 2022, according to Juniper Research. Those gains will be driven by the flexibility, conversationality, speed, and a sense of personal customer engagement that natural language processing gives to chatbots. But chatbots represent just one component of a comprehensive self-service portal.

lucidworks.com — Enterprise data management firm Veritas has a bold lesson for enterprise website managers: Design your online presence correctly, and users seeking support should be able to solve their own cases in eight hours or less.

lucidworks.com — In 20 years, search logic has evolved from word matching, to probability calculation, to machine learning. For all that maturation, search is still missing a vital element of intelligence: Emotion. People are drawn to products by emotion, not just logic, so search results must also emote.

lucidworks.com — Target can’t afford slow or off-base search results. They use a combination of deep learning models and custom Solr components to deliver highly accurate search results at scale – fast.

lucidworks.com — As one of the world's largest retailers, Target can't afford slow or off-base search results. When adding products (and their data) how does Target maintain and improve speed and accuracy at the same time?

lucidworks.com — When British firm Darktrace needed to ward off potential ransomware attacks, machine learning came to the rescue, aiding clients in filtering and prioritizing threats. When health care organizations need to identify markers for aortic stenosis or cancer, they turn to machine learning solutions from IBM Watson and Microsoft.

exgaywatch.com — This open letter made international headlines in 2009. It exposed violent collusion among the U.S. ex-gay movement, U.S. religious conservatives, and leaders in Uganda.