Bob Filbin is Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at Crisis Text Line, which offers 24/7 support for people in crisis by text. Crisis Text Line has the largest data corpus on crisis in the world, with over 105 million messages exchanged between crisis counselors and texters in crisis. Bob believes the data can have two impacts: improving Crisis Text Line’s service, and improving the crisis space as a whole. Internally, his team developed a “texter triage” algorithm that detects imminently suicidal texters and moves them to #1 in the queue; externally, 5 academic research papers have been published using Crisis Text Line’s data, including one that found the majority of texters experiencing abuse never mentioned “abuse.” In short, smarter detection can lead to crisis prevention. Bob was named one of the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 40 Under 40 in 2016, and an Allstate Aspen Ideas Festical Scholar in 2019. He writes and speaks frequently on Data for Social Impact.
North America
