(US and Canada) Nate Rackiewicz, Chief Data Officer, Gannett (USA Today Network), talks to Amina Al Sharif, Chief Data Ethics Officer and Chief Innovation Officer, Anno.AI, about the lineage behind his last name. Rackiewicz belongs to Washington DC originally and grew up in the Northern Virgin. He moved to New York City after college from the Midwest. 

Briefing about his career path, Rackiewicz shared about USA Today and its strong network of 250 local publishers and publications around the country. The group has one of the most extensive local news and national news footprints and a wealth of great content.

Rackiewicz discussed the most innovative and practical implementations of machine learning and data science in his vertical, along with some excellent examples of the magic that data science could deliver to benefit the consumer and have an impressive impact on the organization as a whole.

Rackiewicz tried his hand at entrepreneurship after leaving HBO and wanted to jump all the way into the trenches again to build an analytics platform around the advertising research industry. Sharing further about his wild experimentation, he said he used machine learning to analyze content to look for emotion, fingerprints, psychographic fingerprints. With this type of deep content analysis, they were able to draw a correlation between those and consumer consumption from the messaging to be applied to this type of technology into the making creatives for marketing campaigns and advertisement placement. 

During his stint in HBO, they used data science and AI to analyze scripts, apply psychographic frameworks, and understand certain aspects of emotions that can influence positive ratings versus negative ratings in television. In addition, utilize AI for basic work like auto-captioning for videos.