If you are reading this, we’d like to start by thanking you for your time and attention - precious and finite resources that belong solely to you, and are all too often commoditized with no regard for your privacy or sanity. Project Alesia is our humble attempt to mount a defence against the darker forces of the big data industry. Forces backed by unsolicited data tracking, poorly governed data stores, and increasingly potent algorithms designed to keep you addicted to content that is eroding your attention span, warping your beliefs, engineering your desires, and consequently threatening to unravel the weaves of our social fabric.
This project will take a two-pronged approach to mounting the aforementioned defence:
- We want to help users of the internet to protect their data, and preserve their mental health. To that end, we will publish regular content to help you understand the big data landscape, the risks and liabilities of the technology you rely on, and why these issues may be more important than you realize. We will also arm you with the tools and resources to reclaim your sovereignty and privacy in cyberspace. These tools will range from privacy-preserving alternatives to your daily-use software, add-on software that can help you in this context, and really anything else we can find or build that make your cyber experience safer and healthier.
- We want to invite creators of technology, like ourselves, to rethink their approach to data science, software engineering, and product development. In more tangible terms, we plan to produce deeply technical content that can help challenge the status quo of data governance to do more and do better, highlight ethical approaches to data engineering, data science, and machine learning, ask new questions in the cybersecurity space, and pave the way for privacy-focused product development. Our hope is that we are able to add value to you as a professional, and empower you to become an ethical creator, a thought leader, and an agent of change in cyberspace.
Lastly, if you’re curious about who we are, Project Alesia is founded by Lulu Tan and Prateek Sanyal. Both Lulu and Prateek are Machine Learning developers at Unity Technologies, with somewhat distinct backgrounds but a shared passion for data privacy and ethical technology. Lulu holds a Master of Engineering degree with research in Applied Machine Learning from McGill, and has experience in both academic research, real world data science, and large-scale machine learning engineering. Prateek stacked up around half a decade of experience engineering data, building full stack applications and deploying machine learning models in distributed systems, along with some experience in leading a data engineering team. You can chat with us on our Discord server.