Media Party New York

Investigative Toolkit is a beta web app featuring tools to help investigators to execute crucial but laborious technical tasks—such as translating and OCRing documents, using large language models, downloading videos, and image searching. The app is highly innovative and would build on open-source tools and also use the latest in Document Intelligence, Large Language Model, and other AI services. This would massively increase investigators’ speed, efficacy, and security. It would feature an elegant user interface, making it more accessible to investigators who are not technically savvy. The project could be a traditional SaaS setup or, more excitingly, could reside in the user's own cloud environment. If in the user's own cloud environment, it would take advantage of locked-down private endpoints to all services (from data storage to AI), meaning that data would not leave the Microsoft/Amazon/Google backbone until requested through the web app via peer-to-peer (the successor to VPN technology) access by investigators; this would eliminate infrastructure-based security risks. Girish has a unique background for this task. He was an investigative journalist for just under a decade, based primarily in Venezuela during the worst of its humanitarian crisis; he also worked across the Americas and Middle East, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, and Cuba with everyone from the New Yorker to Reuters, where he was a Senior Correspondent. Girish is currently CTO of a Silicon Valley venture-backed startup, building enterprise software and architecture for the audit industry; in that role, he creates analogous SOC-2 compliant AI infrastructure in clients’ cloud environments. He also has a deep theoretical understanding of AI, having studied physics at Cambridge and Manchester, and machine learning at Stanford. He is therefore uniquely and highly qualified on both the technical and investigative dimensions of this project.