Dan Keyserling has traveled far from the basement of Newcomb Hall since graduating from the University in 2008.<\/p>\n
The newly elected member of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association Board of Directors is now the head of communications and a senior advisor at Jigsaw, the big ideas incubator for Google parent company Alphabet.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a job that\u2019s taken him to Cuba, Afghanistan, Chad, Kenya, Rwanda, C\u00f4te D\u2019Ivoire, Israel, the United Arab Emirates and beyond. His team has a single charge: How can technology make people in the world safer?<\/p>\n
\u201cI met with the leaders of these countries to understand their priorities and their interests, [and] to convey the values of Google \u2014 from defending free speech to empowering an independent press,\u201d Keyserling said.<\/p>\n
Last week, Jigsaw launched Perspective, a piece of code that uses artificial intelligence to identify \u201ctoxic\u201d online comments. The interface aims to crack down on online harassment and help news organizations keep their comment sections troll-free.<\/p>\n
The team has been testing a version of the technology with The New York Times, which sorts through up to 11,000 comments each day on only a small fraction of its articles, according to an Alphabet release.<\/p>\n
The potential for the tool to support media organizations is not lost on Keyserling, who served as executive editor of The Cavalier Daily<\/em> as a student.<\/p>\n He described working at the paper as a \u201cformative experience\u201d of his life.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s probably the most intense working environment I\u2019ve ever had, and I\u2019ve driven down the streets of Kabul in full body armor,\u201d Keyserling said.<\/p>\n After graduating from U.Va. with a major in political and social thought, Keyserling helped run communications at Larry Sabato\u2019s Center for Politics. He also assisted Sabato with his 2009 book \u201cThe Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n Following a brief stint at The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 communications office, Keyserling went to work for Google. He was one of the first employees on the Google Ideas team \u2014 an upstart that eventually grew into Jigsaw.<\/p>\n \u201cGoogle Ideas was created to use technology to address some of the world\u2019s most pressing geopolitical challenges,\u201d Keyserling said. \u201cEverything from terrorism to censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an exciting and demanding job \u2014 but he hasn\u2019t forgotten about the CD.<\/p>\n \u201cThe late nights huddling with the rest of the managing board is probably the most fun at work I\u2019ve ever had and ever will have,\u201d Keyserling said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dan Keyserling has traveled far from the basement of Newcomb Hall since graduating from the University in 2008. The newly elected member of the Cavalier Daily Alumni Association Board of Directors is now the head of communications and a senior advisor at Jigsaw, the big ideas incubator for Google parent company Alphabet. It\u2019s a job […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[55,137,240,241,243,60,242,145,136,151],"class_list":["post-582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","tag-alumni-2","tag-cavalier-daily","tag-dan-keyserling","tag-google","tag-jigsaw","tag-new-york-times","tag-sabato","tag-university-of-virginia","tag-uva","tag-virginia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n