Panelists during the first session of Friday's Cucalorus Connect program used the word "resilience" as they described the purpose of the dating technology they work with.

At Thalian Hall on Friday morning in downtown Wilmington, Galen Buckwalter, co-founder of eHarmony and chief science officer at Payoff.com, who has been working with local dating app startup Likeli; Juddy Arnold, founder and CEO of Insight Profiling; and George Taylor III, founder and CEO of Likeli, discussed issues related to how matching software can help connect people in search of meaningful relationships. 

"I spent the past couple years working at the Institute of Creative Technologies at USC [the University of Southern California] developing virtual reality resilience training for people going into combat, and I’ve gotten fascinated with this whole idea of resilience. And I think the notion of resilience is basically getting yourself strong when things are going nicely so that you can better handle the next trauma," Buckwalter said during Friday morning's panel talk, in response to a question from Taylor. "The notion of resilience in matching is, can we find couples, can we help people get together that are going to make both individuals stronger on the way to building a better relationship. And that’s a pretty sizable task to take on, but I honestly think that we can do that, and that’s kind of the goal that we lay down for ourselves at Likeli."

Panelists said technology and access to data has evolved exponentially in recent years and continues to do so.

"We've got amazing science here," Arnold said. "We've got access to things that we never had in history." 

As a result, newer technology that people will use to find each other, like Likeli, can delve more deeply into that information in a positive way, panelists said. 

"What we're doing at Likeli is going to be kind of a second generation psychometric assessment. We're going to be looking at things like personality; we're going to be looking at values, but we're also going to be looking at things like empathy, the emotionally vulnerability - these factors that we're learning about from positive psychology that are so useful in building those," Buckwalter said.

He said Likeli is in the process of doing basic research related to that psychometric assessment and also to figure out how to best use it to promote strong, resilient relationships.

Cucalorus Connect is being held as an innovation- and entrepreneurship-focused program during the Cucalorus Film Festival, and the intertwined events continue through Nov. 15. On the Cucalorus Connect schedule for Saturday is a Placemakers Fair, which will include regional makers, DIYers, tinkerers and inventors showcasing their inventions with exhibits and demonstrations, from noon to 4 p.m. on Princess Street between Front and 2nd streets.