At the Shoah Foundation, I was able to converse with a still-living Holocaust survivor named Pinchas Gutter. Pinchas wasn’t really there, though; I was chatting with a hologram of Pinchas, which appeared on a flat, 2D display in the hallway. The conversation felt almost absurdly natural, due in large part to the foundation’s development of its own natural language processing system. At one point, I realized I felt rude interrupting a video.

NEW YORK - Eva Schloss lived through Auschwitz. Her father and brother did not. Pinchas Gutter survived five Nazi concentration camps and was, as he says, “torn apart” from his family when they were killed.

The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, known for its work preserving genocide survivor testimonies, had embarked on a new project: interactive three-dimensional recordings of Holocaust survivors, to allow people to continue speaking to them long after they are gone. I wanted to know more.

USC SHoah Foundation has announced the "Stronger Than Hate" initiative to support educators by providing them with tools and training to responsibly engage their students now and into the future.

After 20-year-old James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, over the weekend, his former high school teacher Derek Weimer reported that his student had been fascinated by the Nazis at school. Weimer’s classroom was not where Fields’ fascination began, but where he was able to express himself openly and publicly with pride. The Second World War and the entire period of Nazi power was indeed fascinating, but Weimer realized that Fields’ interests lay in a deeper and darker place.

The USC Shoah Foundation is using big data to recreate the experience of having a one-on-one conversation with someone who lived through the Holocaust.