Digital responsibility: Utopia Analytics offers tools for preventing inappropriate behavior online but does not sell to everyone

Task: Build a social media platform for kids. Let them chat and teach them gently how to interact with others in a nice way.

Launched in 2013, Danish Momio has now more than 4 million yearly users in ten North European countries and seven languages. On Momio, kids can make posts, join discussions and chat with their friends.

The flow of messages is continuous: more than one million a day. Momio, therefore, needs real-time moderation to keep the community safe.

Momio uses Finnish Utopia AI Moderator to moderate kids’ chat messages and posts. Every new chat message or post goes from Momio to Utopia for an instant, automatic check, and is then either accepted for publishing or rejected within milliseconds.

Momio’s CEO Mikael Jensen explains that Momio has six categories of inappropriate content. These include inappropriate language or bullying, phishing, self-harm and sexual content. Utopia AI Moderator is able to moderate messages with more than 99 percent accuracy.

If e.g., a child’s chat message gets rejected, Momio’s character police officer Jack sends helpful advice and guides the child to behave in a more responsible way.

Momio is available in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Dutch, German and Polish. The question is, why has a Danish company chosen a Finnish AI tool?

“We were impressed by Utopia’s fresh approach to text moderation. It can be challenging to moderate kids’ communication. They use a lot of emojis and slang words, and there’s a lot of typos. Utopia can handle all of this, and it’s fast at accommodating to new trends.”, says CEO Jensen.

DIGITAL RESPONSIBILITY

Helsinki-based Utopia Analytics is a unique AI company in many ways. It claims that it builds the finest text analytics tools on the planet, no matter which language or dialect. On top of that, Utopia provides tools only for responsible companies and communities.

Utopia’s contracts declare the agreement is terminated with immediate effect if one party breaches UN Declaration of Human Rights. Utopia’s CEO, Dr. Mari-Sanna Paukkeri is confident that by doing this both sides of the contract are committed to digital responsibility.

“Utopia offers tools for responsible parties’ which they can utilize in preventing inappropriate behavior and illegality online. We are not the ones who define what is right and what is wrong. Our clients define the moderation policy. One offers the tool, and the other provides the policy, allowing both sides to look after each other”, says Dr. Paukkeri.

Dr. Paukkeri thinks that the operation of AI business is to some extend similar to that of a law firm. “We get highly sensitive data from our clients. We need to be trusted 100 percent that our clients’ data won’t be compromised and the AI models we build are as unbiased as possible”, Dr. Paukkeri says.

AI FOR MINOR LANGUAGES TOO

Utopia’s approach in text analytics is based on statistical modelling and computational linguistics. According to Dr. Paukkeri, it is superior in understanding social media language in which traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches alone are not accurate enough.

Utopia utilizes machine learning to learn customers’ moderation policy based on past human moderation decisions. Utopia AI Moderator learns any language or dialect. Building a new tailor-made unique AI model only takes two weeks.

”Modern and sophisticated AI solutions can handle the minor languages as well as major ones. As Finns we have experience in a language that really is minor and hard to analyze”, Dr. Paukkeri says.

Utopia Analytics was founded in 2014, and is growing fast. Utopia AI Moderator is the flagship product of Utopia. It is used to automatically moderate any type of user-generated content, and for example in the largest discussions forum in Finland, Aller Media’s Suomi24.fi, popular online marketplaces such as Swiss Tamedia’s tutti.ch and Schibsted’s Finnish tori.fi. Also, news houses in the frontline globally use Utopia’s AI Moderator.

“Online services world-wide have found Utopia’s unique approach in keeping the quality of user-generated content, and thus future-proofing their businesses. Our AI doctors and experts all have over 15 years of experience in machine learning algorithms and text analytics. Building and maintaining AI in high quality is rocket science. Utopia will carry that burden, and our clients can use the AI tool like any other IT tool without any special knowledge of AI”, says Dr. Paukkeri.

Why is Finnish AI so good?

“AI research units in the Aalto University and University of Helsinki are among the best in the world. Also, our very special and complex language has naturally led us to look for other text analytics solutions than those working only for the English language.”, says Dr. Paukkeri.

Utopia Analytics will discuss artificial intelligence and digital responsibility at The Confederation of Danish Industry’s (DI) event in Aarhus on May 9th 2019. The event in Restaurant Hantwerk (14-15:30), is part of Internet Week Denmark’s official program.

Event information:

https://iwdk.dk/

https://iwdk.dk/event/digital-ansvarlighed-og-kunstig-intelligens-forudsaetter-viden-hos-dig-og-mig/