CBS News Texas featured BALANCED Chief Technology Officer, Corey Clark, PhD in its nightly news broadcast in a segment titled The I-Team- Video game helps researchers fight sex trafficking. In that segment, Dr. Clark is interviewed about a project he heads at SMU where they have created a game that utilizes human-in-the-loop AI, a technique that BALANCED Media | Technology pioneered and holds several patents on, to help train a large language model search engine to help investigators find information that can assist them in solving crimes involving human sex trafficking.

The project features a computer game created by SMU postdoctoral researcher Stephanie Buongiorno called “Dark Shadows”, which was inspired in part by a game created by BALANCED CEO Robert M. Atkins and features technical input from BALANCED‘s development team. In the game, players teach an AI to improve its accuracy and efficiency in identifying and connecting data points from different sources. This approach saves time and resources for law enforcement and anti-trafficking organizations, as well as provides new insights into the patterns and trends of human trafficking in the U.S.

SMU has also created a data warehouse that aims to centralize and analyze nationwide human trafficking data, as well as a cost analysis of the economic impact of this crime.

Multiple BALANCED projects have achieved just that by coupling machine-learning algorithms with human-guided interactions facilitated through games. Underneath the hood of shattering brightly-colored blocks in the pattern-matching game Rocks & Runes or fighting ghosts in the arcade-style shooting game Wiley Wizard, players’ decisions are actually sorting through data from FDA-approved drug compounds to isolate promising combinations of co-medication properties used to identify new chemotherapeutic treatments to fight cancer.

Read full Discover Magazine article

Read the full article on SciStarter

BALANCED Media|Technology’s revolutionary work on Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) was featured in this month’s issue of Dallas Innovates. BALANCED’s Eye in the Sky: Defender, created in partnership with Southern Methodist University (SMU), Johns Hopkins University, and the Retina Foundation of the Southwest, is a game powered by BALANCED’s HEWMEN technology. The game inserts human problem solving into the machine learning (ML) loop by embedding retinal OCT images into the game environment so that players learn to recognize certain visual markers that are used to diagnose and track the progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration. By crowdsourcing gamers’ intelligence and unstructured problem-solving skills and combining them with raw computational power, the game successfully created new datasets that were then used by researchers at SMU to train an ML algorithm to analyze OCT images more accurately and precisely.

“If you have to use machine learning alone, you need hundreds of thousands of images for the machine to keep iterating and iterating by force of logic. By doing this gaming, we can short circuit that process.”

-Dr. Karl Csaky, Retina Foundation

Read the entire article at Dallas Innovates:

Local Startup Aims to Save Peoples’ Sight with Video Games

“This technology could be a game-changer for researchers and drug manufacturers in the data analyzation of disease progression…”

-Dr. Karl Csaky, Retina Foundation

Eye in the Sky: Defender is powered by BALANCED’s HEWMEN technology, which inserts human problem solving into the machine learning (ML) loop. Eye in the Sky: Defender embeds retinal OCT images into the game environment with players learning to recognize certain visual markers that are used to diagnose and track progression of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD). The game successfully created new datasets that were then used by researchers SMU to train a machine learning algorithm to analyze OCT images (and other image types) more accurately and precisely.

“It’s now possible to use AI to quickly analyze millions of individual datasets (retinal images) to detect patterns and pathologies that would have been impossible or impractical given the scope.”

-Corey Clark, PhD, BALANCED

Read the entire article at D Magazine:

SMU Is Gamifying the Detection of Macular Degeneration

In this episode of the podcast, which focuses on esports and innovators in the gaming industry, Rob talks about offering creatives ownership and freedom to inspire and achieve high-level results.

You can check out the podcast via links below to all major podcast platforms:

Read the blog in its entirety on Wright Connatser.

Play games, save lives

 

One of BALANCED’s software engineers, Cameron Ferguson, who is also a professional streamer who broadcasts as GhostFromTexas was recently highlighted in high-profile online outlets Wired magazine and Buzzfeed when a stream of him being forced to switch from the suddenly shuttered Mixer platform to Twitch went viral.

We’re sorry Ghost (Cameron) had to go through losing the streaming platform he had put so much of his heart and effort into building and evangelizing, but it’s cool to see one of our BALANCED team get this kind of attention and we wish him success on his new streaming platform, Twitch.

Check out Cameron’s quote in the Wired’s full article

The team at Balanced Media wanted more than just another gaming company, though. They wanted to drive real change, and that’s when their company was born. By connecting communities of developers, researchers, and foundations, Balanced Media Technology, allows them to create tools, and gathers data to help solve extremely complex problems (think cancer research).

You can read the podcast overview and program rundown as well as listen to the podcast on the Innovation Calling website:

Innovation Calling Podcast – Solving Complex Issues Through Gaming

You can listen to the podcast below: