It’s common knowledge that there is a diversity problem in the tech industry. However, there’s a big gap from acknowledging a problem exists to actually fixing it. Accountability is the key to diversity and inclusion (D&I), and Diversif.ai is an app that allows you to hold companies to their word on D&I initiatives.
Last year, Clarifai signed the White House Tech Inclusion Pledge and we’re gearing up to release our first annual report detailing the steps we’ve taken toward building a diverse and inclusive company. So, when we saw Diversif.ai come out of TechCrunch Disrupt’s hackathon this summer, the app really hit home on the importance of holding ourselves and other tech companies accountable to D&I.
Diversif.ai allows you to enter any company’s website to gage its performance on D&I in a data-driven way. The app will scrape through a website’s images to populate, in real-time, a report of their gender, age, and multicultural appearance. The algorithm then compares this data to the data of peer institutions and produces a score relative to the industry. You can then share the data with your network or reach out to the company directly to expose the issue, thereby holding institutions accountable for D&I.
WHY WE ❤ IT
D&I is near and dear to our hearts, so of course this app is right up our alley. It’s easy to talk about D&I initiatives but it’s way harder to actually put your money where your mouth is and show results. Using this app on our own company page, we realize that despite our commitment to D&I, even we still have a ways to go before total parity at every level in every field and we encourage you to share ideas and suggestions with us via #DiversifAI on Twitter. Check out the GitHub repo to give it a try!
HOW YOU DO IT
We caught up with one of the creators of Diversif.ai, Harry Merzin (high schooler and React fan), to talk about his team’s inspiration for their game-changing app.
Clarifai: What inspired your idea for Diversif.ai?
Harry: We saw that there was a diversity issue in tech and other industries, and wanted to empower consumers to support companies that are committed to solving it.
How did you build the app?
We used node, react, phantomjs, and of course, Clarifai. Our biggest problem was setting the app’s state correctly and managing our socket listeners to fire the correct amount of times. We were also working with two awesome, open-minded college students who were learning along the way so that caused a bit of a speed deficit. Teaching them what they needed to know to complete the app in the appropriate amount of time was, in fact, an act of magic.
What was the best part about working with the Clarifai API?
I’ve used Microsoft’s Cognitive Services in the past, and I definitely prefer Clarifai. The response JSON is extremely straightforward, and the node SDK is fantastic. I have looked into using Google’s Cloud Vision services before, but Clarifai is still ahead in my book because of the ease of use in server and client side apps.
Thanks for sharing, Harry!
To learn more, check out our documentation and sign-up for a free Clarifai account to start using our API – all it takes is three lines of code to get up and running! We’re super excited to share all the cool things built by our developer community, so don’t forget to tweet @Clarifai to show us your apps.
And give the Harry some props in the comments below. Until next time!
