Jad Kabbara

Social media spaces have been shown to cause social fragmentation and polarization. Jad’s work involves the design and implementation of new communication spaces that are an alternative to social media. Specifically, his work focuses on small-group dialogues. In-person or virtual conversations are organized with community partners, led by trained  facilitators, and focused on people in rural and urban communities alike, whose voices and stories are often not  picked up in surveys, reflected in the media, or heard in public dialogue. He is using Generative AI to automate the understanding of these community conversations at scale.  The primary motivation for his work is thus to seek new ways, alternative to social media, to involve people in civil dialogue and civic engagement in a safe and respectful environment based on trust, and to use AI to automate the understanding  of the resulting conversations.