Cognifest: Working Enterprise AI

Cognifest is disrupting conferences since June 2017. It is a free community festival of meetups, uniting communities across the whole city and creating network effects. Cognifest is about Cognitive Applications, building End-to-End Data Pipelines for AI.

Cognifest NYC 2017 takes place the whole week of October 23-27, 2017.

The Kickoff will be at the historic IBM Watson HQ with three leaders of the top AI teams succeeding in the enterprise:

• Simon Chan, Senior Director of Product, Salesforce Einstein
Simon is a product innovator and serial entrepreneur with more than 14 years of global technology management experience in London, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Beijing, and the Bay Area. Previously, Simon was the cofounder and CEO of PredictionIO, a leading open source machine learning server (acquired by Salesforce). Simon holds a BSE in computer science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a PhD in machine learning from University College London.

The Evolution of Machine Learning Platforms
Artificial intelligence is a game changer that’s transforming the very foundation of how businesses interact with customers. Salesforce recently released Einstein, which brings AI into its core platform to power every business. In addition to enabling prebuilt predictive applications, Einstein empowers customers to quickly build AI-powered apps that include Einstein-powered fields in any object, page layout, or workflow, making every business process smarter. For data scientists and developers, Einstein offers predictive vision and sentiment services that enable developers to train deep learning models to recognize and classify images and sentiment in text. And PredictionIO in Heroku Private Spaces empowers developers to build custom machine learning models and put them into their apps. The secret behind Einstein is an underlying platform that accelerates Machine Learning development at scale for both internal and external data scientists. Simon Chan shares his experience building Machine Learning platform to power advanced machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and smart data discovery for multiple enterprise product lines. He will highlight the key learnings through the AI platform journey. Bio:Simon Chan is a senior director of product management for Salesforce Einstein, where he oversees platform development and delivers products that empower everyone to build smarter apps with Salesforce.

• Dennis Mortensen, Founder and CEO of x.ai
Dennis is the CEO and Founder of x.ai. He’s a pioneer and expert in leveraging Data and a serial entrepreneur who has successfully delivered a number of company exits on that theme. Dennis’s long term vision of killing the inbox triggered the formation of x.ai and the creation of an artificial intelligence personal assistant to schedule meetings. He’s an accredited Associate Analytics Instructor at the University of British Columbia, the Author of Data Driven Insights from Wiley and a frequent speaker on the subject of AI, intelligent agents, and the future of work. A native of Denmark, Mortensen currently calls New York City his home.

Machine Agents in the Real World
Dennis will illuminate the difference between high-accuracy applications like self-driving cars, where there is little-to-no room for errors, and low accuracy applications, such as Facebook's ability to find a friend in an uploaded picture (where any output is good). X.ai is in the high accuracy space, and a type system like Scala is especially useful - as we value robustness more highly than, for example, agility. Teaming up with Scala engineers may also help us source people whose mentality is wired for a high accuracy implementation team, as they genuinely understand the cost of a bug. He'll also cover direct benefits of Scala to x.ai's engineering teams.

• Dr Marc Teerlink, Chief Business Strategist, IBM Watson
Dr/ Marc Teerlink,mba/mbi, is the Chief Business Strategist IBM’s for Watson Platform and melds big thinking with true passion. If he isn't in an airplane, he can be found in Watson's office in the heart of New York City's Silicon Alley.
Marc is a recognized business and thought leader, with a successful track record as a serial entrepreneur within
corporations. He has been inspiring, coaching and leading organizations to reframe opportunity for innovation, while turning data into dollars. He continues to transform businesses with his no-nonsense execution, even when change seems insurmountable. Along with coaching startups, teaching MBA courses and publishing numerous papers he is an avid sailor, passionate chef, photographer and first and foremost, a proud father.

Some additional information: Dr Teerlink's recent keynote at TNW, Europe Largest Tech Event on "Capitalizing on AI"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSJPRW-WlrI. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSJPRW-WlrI)
Dr Teerlink's Panel Participation at the opening of this year's Alpbach European Economical Forum, hosted by the Peter Ducker Foundation, "Artificial intelligence and the future of work" https://www.alpbach.org/en/session/ecn17-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-work-08-30-09-00/
Dr. Teerlink's Ted Talk on "the Digitization of Society through Cognitive technology (such as IBM Watson) and Big Data Analytics" can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6rAbDrgW78

Capitalize on AI: Moving from Startup to Scale up - How to get going with Artificial Intelligence
IBM’s Artificial Intelligence, Watson, made its debut as a research project on the American gameshow Jeopardy! in
2011. As part of IBM’s strategy to accelerate the growth of artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, today
Watson is an open platform to the world! With millions of developers connected to this advanced and diverse
cognitive computing tech, entrepreneurs, students and tech enthusiasts can easily tap into the growing solution base for use and deployment. The community is growing quickly –in over 45 countries, across 20 different industries - of those who build and bring to market their own powered-by-Watson applications. Learning what is possible may seem obscure. With thousands of companies who build and offer ‘smart’ products, we may be lead to think that AI is just to enable ‘new things’. But, says Teerlink “it turns out that people just want to do the same things they’ve always done, only faster, across an obscene amount of data, and preferably cheaper”. Marc’s guidance for startups is no-nonsense: “If you want to build a successful business, take a process that you know well, and move the heavy lifting to AI, whilst letting humans do the creative thinking”.

In order to attend, you must register here: https://cognifest.splashthat.com/

Refreshments will be provided. All RSVPs must be in 24 hurs in advance.