Juan (John) Tubert

The ‘Impossibly Smart Billboard’ campaign used AI to generate copy for every neighborhood in New York based on location, weather, traffic data and time

The brand continues its campaign against misinformation with an unsettling experiment from Tombras

STEAK-UMM OPENS 'METAVERSE UNIVERSITY' TO FIGHT DISINFORMATION
Frozen steak brand Steak-umm is activating the metaverse in its own wacky way: by opening a university to fight disinformation. Of course, the “Meataversity” launch is a marketing stunt (it comes from agency Tombras), not an accredited school. That’s not stopping Steak-umm from offering users who complete made-up coursework a Bachelor of Science in Misinformation Studies.

Developed by Tombras and their new CTO Juan Tubert, Chief Technology Officer (formerly of R/GA), at the helm, this isn’t the first time the brand has been outspoken on disinformation and misinformation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Steak-umm was hailed as a “misinformation watchdog,” tweeting to followers to question news sources and ensure they are getting accurate information.

Free entry to the Meataversity of Steak-umm can be gained through the website, and you can see more about… Show more

Developed by Tombras and their new CTO Juan Tubert, Chief Technology Officer (formerly of R/GA), at the helm, this isn’t the first time the brand has been outspoken on disinformation and misinformation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Steak-umm was hailed as a “misinformation watchdog,” tweeting to followers to question news sources and ensure they are getting accurate information.

Free entry to the Meataversity of Steak-umm can be gained through the website, and you can see more about it on the brand’s social media pages, including Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.

Serving as AOR since early 2022, Tombras’ first work for the brand brought Steak-umm's voice to life via a personified version of the packaging, and has been driving awareness across a wider audience since. In May, the brand introduced quick-to-sell-out Beef Sheets, actual queen sized bed sheets allowing beef curious vegans—and other meatless eaters—to experience Steak-umm. Show less

Led by agency CTO Juan Tubert, the agency team worked with Dr. Eric Haley, a professor at the University of Tennessee's Tombras School of ADPR, to design the experience. It resides in the 3D virtual realm known as Decentraland, with a goal of "teaching people to critically think and navigate the complexities of the metaverse with healthy skepticism."

We’re stoked to have Juan Tubert, previously SVP of technology for the U.S. at R/GA and winner of multiple Cannes Lions, join Tombras as our first-ever CTO. Juan’s going to help us sharpen our clients’ creative technology chops and push the boundaries of web 3.0, the metaverse, AR/VR, or any other technical term you’ve heard in the past year but don’t quite understand yet (no worries, Juan will explain everything)

R/GA, which has been an early experimenter with creative AI technologies like deepfakes, has used Runway’s tools for creating various prototypes and experiments, but many of the tools remain too early stage for a full-fledged campaign, according to John Tubert, svp of technology at R/GA. Tubert said he organized a workshop with Runway’s Barrera to better acquaint the agency’s employees with Runway’s new video editing offerings.
Tubert said while the pace of research in what machine learning… Show more

R/GA, which has been an early experimenter with creative AI technologies like deepfakes, has used Runway’s tools for creating various prototypes and experiments, but many of the tools remain too early stage for a full-fledged campaign, according to John Tubert, svp of technology at R/GA. Tubert said he organized a workshop with Runway’s Barrera to better acquaint the agency’s employees with Runway’s new video editing offerings.
Tubert said while the pace of research in what machine learning is able to do for creative fields moves fast, it can be expensive and time-consuming for the agency to turn those into applications that are useful to its clients on its own. That’s why Tubert keeps an eye on the market for tools and software that can make these capabilities more accessible.
“Otherwise, the time that it will take for us to white paper, to understand and build it, to run an experiment—this is just a much, much faster way of working,” he said. “Instead of having to have multiple data scientists and technologists combine all of this for ad creatives, you can have creatives go into the tool directly and try these things out.” Show less

Beyond language understanding, chatbots now can also translate text, answer questions, summarize texts, write essays, write code, and even draw images based on a description...

Select quotes:
To ensure R/GA continues to wield AI for the benefit of its clients, John Tubert, senior vice president of Technology at R/GA, held a workshop recently for R/GA creatives. His goal was to “up-level everyone on the creative team” so they can effectively pitch R/GA’s secret sauce combining AI and creativity to prospective clients.
First, Tubert’s team provided an overview of AI. “We looked at examples of what had already been done in the world, and also what we’ve done at… Show more

Select quotes:
To ensure R/GA continues to wield AI for the benefit of its clients, John Tubert, senior vice president of Technology at R/GA, held a workshop recently for R/GA creatives. His goal was to “up-level everyone on the creative team” so they can effectively pitch R/GA’s secret sauce combining AI and creativity to prospective clients.
First, Tubert’s team provided an overview of AI. “We looked at examples of what had already been done in the world, and also what we’ve done at R/GA,” he says. Then attendees began brainstorming around briefs for clients in banking, finance and technology. “We asked, ‘What are the problems we are trying to solve, and how can we use AI to solve them?’” During the third part of the workshop, the group selected “the best idea we can solve for, generated the data required to train an AI, then actually built a functioning prototype AI in real time to show [that AI] can work in real time.” Show less

“It will be interesting to see how they run it virtually; it’s not going to be the same, not being able to see the products in real life,” says
John Tubert, senior VP of technology at R/GA. “I imagine there will be kinds of big reveals and big presentations. What I’m kind
of wondering more is the exhibit part of it. I hope that they do a more personalized way to be able to experience some of those things, or being able to ask questions more directly to different companies.”

"Inside look at how R/GA road-tests a new technology like GPT-3 as part of a human-first approach to business and marketing innovation."

English version
https://medium.com/@jtubert/the-data-that-most-people-use-to-train-their-artificial-intelligence-models-comes-with-a-built-in-4190cae82f55

An in-depth interview with three leaders within the company on steps to breaking down bias in tech.

Artificial Intelligence plays an increasingly significant role in our daily lives and is sure to make an even bigger impact in the future. Yet, the reputation for diversity and inclusion in the field is nothing short of abysmal. In April of this year, AI Now Institute released a damning report on the state of diversity in AI

"When it comes to engaging voice-centric experiences, a little humor and a lot of creativity can go a long way. That’s why video game publisher Ubisoft partnered with R/GA to create Alexios, an Alexa-enabled device and Alexa Skill for Amazon based on the action role playing game Assassin’s Creed Odyssey..."

Take charge of you

“I want you to grow up and be fully independent so that you can live your life the way that you want to.”

“In the ad industry, we often read stories and hear accounts about the representation of women in creative roles, especially leadership. The same struggles exist in tech, which remains a predominantly male industry. While almost half of the total workforce in large tech companies is now female, only about 20% of those women actually work in tech roles.”

....These themes will continue at SXSW, where R/GA’s John Tubert will be speaking on a panel called “The Extreme Dangers of Bias in AI.”

“There are a few things that companies can do to reduce the bias in artificial intelligence,” says Tubert, Executive Technology Director, R/GA San Francisco. “As we know, tech roles are not very diverse, so the first and most important thing we can do is to bring more diverse teams to work on these products that use AI, so that minorities are well… Show more

....These themes will continue at SXSW, where R/GA’s John Tubert will be speaking on a panel called “The Extreme Dangers of Bias in AI.”

“There are a few things that companies can do to reduce the bias in artificial intelligence,” says Tubert, Executive Technology Director, R/GA San Francisco. “As we know, tech roles are not very diverse, so the first and most important thing we can do is to bring more diverse teams to work on these products that use AI, so that minorities are well represented.”

“What’s necessary is not only diverse developers,” Tubert continues, “but also more diverse product managers, designers, strategies, and testers, so they are well-represented through all the parts of the process. In addition, it’s important to add ‘bias testing’ to the product’s development cycle, so that you are specifically looking for the bias. Training data should also be made public. AI is biased because the data that is used to train is biased. If we make the data accessible to the public, other companies would be able to make sure it's fair and inclusive." Show less

“John Tubert, Executive Technology Director, R/GA San Francisco, who has written about voice-assistant limitations in recognizing accents, says that although it’s early days when it comes to addressing the issue of bias in AI, the industry is aware and attempting to tackle it.”

“Alexa play music.” “Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question.”

This—or some variation of it—is what happens to my mom whenever she interacts with her Amazon Echo.

And it’s not just Alexa. Every voice-enabled device has trouble understanding accents, whether you’re using Siri, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, or others. As more devices become voice-enabled, the companies developing them are failing to use diverse enough data to train these systems to be inclusive for all… Show more

“Alexa play music.” “Sorry, I don’t know the answer to your question.”

This—or some variation of it—is what happens to my mom whenever she interacts with her Amazon Echo.

And it’s not just Alexa. Every voice-enabled device has trouble understanding accents, whether you’re using Siri, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, or others. As more devices become voice-enabled, the companies developing them are failing to use diverse enough data to train these systems to be inclusive for all users... Show less

Recently, R/GA San Francisco kicked off an Accelerator program focused on defining the future of commerce — from messaging chatbots, to visual recognition and connected experience technologies, to innovations in fulfillment, returns and staff training. As we work with the startups to help define their business and brand, the conversation always seems to gravitate towards chatbots, artificial intelligence, natural language processing and machine learning...

I recently launched an iOS app called 2by2. The app allows users to combine digital artwork to create new “double exposure” art, which users can share or combine again. I decided to use Parse for the backend since it provides time-savers like social login, push notifications and data storage out of the box. The infrastructure handles security and scaling...

Parse visited the R/GA office in March and was bought by Facebook in April. Since then, interest in Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) has continued to increase. BaaS or MBaas (Mobile-Backend-as-a-Service) saves time and money by simplifying the task of selecting, installing, and configuring your stack and making it easier to write, test and securely deploy backend code ...

Last week Parse‘s CEO & Founder Ilya Sukhar visited the R/GA offices in New York to introduce our development teams to the Parse platform...

As users expect more sophisticated AJAX, animation and event functionality, the amount, and complexity of Javascript code is increasing. Even small sites and RIAs can contain 100′s of lines of Javascript code. With the increase in complexity comes the potential for bugs. Writing clean code matched with lots of testing is what’s required to keep projects ...

As an end-to-end hacker, I frequently need to quickly stand up a server up for quick demos, POCs, micro campaigns, or to host some services for my mobile apps. The need for a flexible, quick-to-market, pay as you go platform with tons of development choices has prompted me to explore the PaaS market, which is ...

In the past, my development tool-chain relied heavily on an IDE and build tools to provide automation services, Eclipes/Java/Ant, C#/Visual Studio/nAnt, and ActionScript /Eclipse/FDT/Ant. Moving to open standard development projects, the road to automation was not so clear. But with research and perseverance I have been able to find a solution. While it presently contains ...