[Music] hello and welcome to the friday fast 15 the snacksize show where we break down big topics in under 15 minutes like many organizations 2020 was the year crossviews took a good hard look at what we were doing in terms of diversity inclusion and belonging in january leadership engaged a consultant to help us find our way one result of their work is the organization of a diversity inclusion and belonging task force this employee-led group examines current initiatives listens to employees and advises leadership on what's working and what's not working while the group is in its infancy it's never too soon to let our employees clients and the world know what we're up to so i invited dibs task force member telly cadet to join me on the show and share what the group is all about welcome to the show telly i'm glad to be here um yeah it's nice to meet everyone nice to kind of get everyone um familiar and involved in this whole project that we have going on in terms of involving more people of different races and backgrounds into cross fuse and telly before we get started i think it's important that our audience has a chance to get to know you tell us about your background and maybe a fun fact okay uh so uh hello everyone of course my name is tully and kind of to go on a brief introduction i am a haitian american born in florida lived in florida my entire life until the end of high school where i decided um you know this is everything i know and i wanted to try something completely different and what's the furthest thing from florida and in my head it was minnesota so i decided to come here after high school for college um did the whole college thing found out i didn't enjoy the things i did and then ended up finding myself in it and ever since then i've been enjoying it um crossfuse is actually the first company i i work for and i've been here ever since a little fun fact about me is i i guess i don't know how fun it is but i picked up working out ever since covet and it's been quite a habit i guess and turned more into an obsession at this point so yeah that's a little bit about me and obviously it's great that you're excited about cross fuse and it's great that you're excited about the diversity inclusion and belonging initiative um now as a member of the task force can you give our listeners a little bit of background on what we're doing with diversity inclusion and belonging so to me the best way to describe it um coming from my history like it's i i best describe it as initiated in an initiative to ask and answer the right questions uh in regards to diversity and inclusion such as how do we get people to feel more involved at cross views feel more accepted and that includes people that work here or people that will work here and how do we how do we find the answer to those questions now awareness is really a soft skill that everyone should have in their back pocket when we're preparing for your interview you and i talked about how diversity inclusion and belonging initiatives can positively impact work on the technical side too for example experts often talk about unconscious bias in artificial intelligence technology can you tell us a little bit more about that because what you had to say was really interesting uh yeah so um my first years in minnesota i came into contact with a support group called blackson technology and i met this woman she led me to do a bit of more research on specifically facial recognition biases and just to kind of paint the idea so in terms of people in the us that have computer scientists or computer science majors uh overwhelming percentage of them are white and even more of a percentage of them are men so when the development of facial recognition came to be and they were developing the databases for recognizing faces unfortunately most of the people that were kind of set as the basis of um official recognition was mostly white men not a lot of women and if they were women not a lot of women of color so what that led to is a lot of facial recognition applications during their development process kind of faced a bias towards blacks people of color and that leads to a misrepresentation of these people when it comes to how these facial recognition softwares are being used so in the article i kind of went into how also some of these facial recognition softwares are being used to falsely identify people with darker skins as you know criminals and it just kind of plays to the bias of those limited people and their experience rather than involving as many as many people in that project or in that space of facial recognition so bring it into cross views it's it's kind of that same narrative it's like how are we supposed to represent or speak for other people if we don't have these people with us or if we don't have these people with a voice bring these people to have a voice and to make sure that their voice is being heard so telly building diversity with technologies and building diversity with human to human interactions are equally important um besides that do you have any final thoughts for us today i kind of want to reiterate a point that it was that was brought to me by someone i looked up to and you know the time for action is always now no matter your age like i mean i'm pretty young in terms of just being in um i always felt like oh i'm too young to even start speaking but i was now i kind of got over that fear and it feels good to want to make a change but also to do it and there's no such thing as a smart step thank you telly i for one am glad that you're speaking up and thank you everyone for joining us today this has been diversity inclusion and belonging with telly cadet on the friday fast15 if you'd like to learn more about a career across fuse visit crossfuse.com or reach out at let's talk at crossfuse.com and for more snack size conversations subscribe at apple podcasts spotify or youtube see you next week [Music] you