Google Researcher Talks Cognitive Computing

He is a research scientist at Google Research in NY. He was previously a member of the leadership team for Watson and IBM's Jeopardy! Challenge, at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York.

He is Chris Welty, and he is coming to Montclair State on Nov. 20 to talk cognitive computing from an entrepreneurial perspective. In this talk, Welty will give a personal perspective on how cognitive computing has progressed and is re-shaping the software solution business and ecosystem, as well as our very expectations of what computers are capable of.

Todd Carter, founder/ CEO of Tagasauris Inc., will also be speaking. Carter is recognized as an innovator and entrepreneur in the digital media and linked data communities with over 20 years working experience in publishing, broadcasting and cultural heritage.

This event is part of Global Entrepreneurship Week (http://us.gew.co/activity/google-researcher-talks-entrepreneurial-cognitive-computing).

This event is co-organized with Google Developers Group: GDG North Jersey (https://www.meetup.com/GDG-North-Jersey/), and its leader Todd Nakamura is the one who landed the great talent for this event. If you have already signed up for this event on the GDG Meetup page, you do not need to sign up here.

Event is free.

Agenda:
6:00-6:45 p.m. Networking with pizza
6:45-7:00 p.m. Welcome and 1-minute pitches from the audience
7:00-8:30 p.m. Welty and Carter presentations, with audience Q&A

Join the conversation on Twitter: #MSUmeetup

Speaker bios

Chris Welty is a research scientist at Google Research (http://research.google.com/) in NY, and a professor of Cognitive Computing at the VU University, Amsterdam. He was previously a member of the leadership team for Watson and IBM's Jeopardy! Challenge, at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. Welty's principal area of research is the role of semantic technology in deep analytic problems such as natural language processing. He led three technical teams in IBM's Watson project: structured knowledge exploitation, rapid domain adaptation, and crowd sourcing. In addition to numerous scientific achievements, Welty has played an active role in transferring research into practice through web standards, open software development, and the meetup community. At WWW 2011, soon after the notable performance of IBM's Watson on Jeopardy!, Welty laid out the skeleton of a new computing paradigm, which IBM has since dubbed "Cognitive Computing." Over the three years since then, cognitive computing is proving to be a radical shift in software and information technology that disrupts previously understood terms like "performance," "feature," "debugging," and even "truth."

See Welty and the rest of the team at IBM talking about Watson (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lI-M7O_bRNg) in a behind- the-scenes video from IBM in 2011 documenting Watson's performance on Jeopardy! against grand champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Todd Carter is founder/ CEO of Tagasauris (http://www.tagasauris.com/) Inc. Tagasauris is an intelligent data platform for visual media that combines human assisted computing with semantic Web technologies to create networked, relationship-aware image and video objects. Tagasauris has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, Business Week, The Economist and others. Tagasauris and the Museum of the City of New York are the recipients of an award from The National Endowment for the Humanities to annotate the museum's collections. Carter believes that visual content is the currency of tomorrow's Web, that the shift from hypertext to hypermedia is both inevitable and exciting and, that once computers can understand visual media, a new generation of applications for discovery and visual-first learning will be enabled. Tagasauris' computational approach allows them to backfill the so called "semantic gap" with a layer of structured, contextual, relationship-aware data. This data is persisted in a knowledge base we call mediaGraph. mediaGraph has the potential to interlink the currently impoverished, disparate and silo'd descriptions of media across the Web and Tagasauris believes it can power a new breed of knowledge-centric applications in the world of ubiquitous online multimedia.