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Put AI to work
Sep 4-5, 2018: Training
Sep 5-7, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Francisco, CA

AI Business Summit

September 5-7, 2018
San Francisco, CA

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AI will have enormous impact on your business.
Don’t get left behind.

Designed specifically for executives, business leaders, and strategists, the AI Business Summit provides concise, high-level executive briefings on the most promising and important developments in AI for business.

Sponsored by:
Teradata

You'll get an insider’s look at the AI implementations that will have the most profound impact on your business. Advice on how to mitigate risk and out-innovate your competitors. Detailed case studies of successful AI projects.

You have critical—and urgent—decisions to make about your AI strategy. Get the insight you need at the AI Business Summit.

Featured Speakers

All AI Conference Gold and Silver passes have access to AI Business Summit Wednesday-Friday. Platinum and Bronze passes have access to AI Business Summit Thursday-Friday.

Wednesday September 5:Tutorials (Gold & Silver passes)
Thursday September 6: Keynotes & Sessions (Platinum, Gold, Silver & Bronze passes)
9:00am | Location: Continental Ballroom 4-6
AI Conference Keynotes
10:35am
Morning break
Friday September 7: Keynotes & Sessions (Platinum, Gold, Silver & Bronze passes)
9:00am | Location: Continental Ballroom 4-6
AI Conference Keynotes
10:35am
Morning break
9:00am-12:30pm Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Design thinking for AI
Location: Yosemite ABC
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security, Interfaces and UX
Chris Butler (IPsoft)
Average rating: ***..
(3.83, 6 ratings)
Purpose, a well-defined problem, and trust from people are important factors to any system, especially those that employ AI. Chris Butler leads you through exercises that borrow from the principles of design thinking to help you create more impactful solutions and better team alignment. Read more.
9:00am-5:00pm Wednesday, September 5, 2018
CANCELLED: Bringing AI into the enterprise
Location: Continental 2
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise, Ethics, Privacy, and Security
Kristian Hammond (Northwestern Computer Science)
Even as AI technologies move into common use, many enterprise decision makers remain baffled about what the different technologies actually do and how they can be integrated into their businesses. Rather than focusing on the technologies alone, Kristian Hammond provides a practical framework for understanding your role in problem solving and decision making. Read more.
1:30pm-5:00pm Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Taming dragons: A breakthrough approach to AI for business leaders
Location: Yosemite ABC
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Elizabeth Partridge (milk+honey), Nick Paquin (milk+honey), Byron Freney (milk+honey)
Average rating: ***..
(3.40, 5 ratings)
Utilizing AI technologies to advance business goals remains one of the most daunting challenges for many business leaders. Beth Partridge, assisted by Nick Paquin and Annie O'Connor, shares a breakthrough approach that bridges the gap between data science and business. Join in to gain a clear understanding of what AI can do for your business and how to go about implementing it. Read more.
11:05am-11:45am Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: Have we reached peak human? The impact of AI on the workforce
Location: Continental 4
Mehdi Miremadi (McKinsey & Company)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
Drawing on the McKinsey Global Institute's groundbreaking research, Mehdi Miremadi explores commonly asked questions relating to AI and its impact on work, including: How big is the AI opportunity? Which sectors and functions will capture the most value? As AI takes hold, will there be enough jobs for humans? What will they be, and what skills are needed? What are the implications for leaders? Read more.
11:05am-11:45am Thursday, September 6, 2018
Building machines that can read and write
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Text, Language, and Speech
Sean Gourley (Primer)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 4 ratings)
Technology has opened up access to more information than ever before, but it’s still on humans to turn that data into knowledge. To solve this problem, organizations are turning to AI and natural language processing to augment human analysts. Sean Gourley explores how the world’s largest organizations use AI to summarize thousands of documents and scale human analysts. Read more.
11:55am-12:35pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: Moving AI off your product roadmap and into your products
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Ashok Srivastava (Intuit)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
Ashok Srivastava explains how to make your organization AI ready, determine the right AI applications for your business and products, and accelerate your AI efforts with speed and scale. Read more.
11:55am-12:35pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
On the road to artificial general intelligence
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Reinforcement Learning, Transportation and Logistics
Danny Lange (Unity Technologies)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
Danny Lange discusses the role of intelligence in biological evolution and learning and demonstrates why a game engine is the perfect virtual biodome for AI’s evolution. You'll discover how the scale and speed of simulations is changing the game of AI while learning about new developments in reinforcement learning. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: What you must know to build AI systems that understand natural language
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  Text, Language, and Speech
David Talby (Pacific AI)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
New AI solutions in question answering, chatbots, structured data extraction, text generation, and inference all require deep understanding of the nuances of human language. David Talby shares challenges, risks, and best practices for building NLU-based systems, drawing on examples and case studies from products and services built by Fortune 500 companies and startups over the past six years. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Applications of AI for quantitative finance at Thomson Reuters
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Text, Language, and Speech
Joe Rothermich (Refinitiv)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
After a slow start, the finance industry is quickly catching up with others in its adoption of AI. Joe Rothermich explains how Thomson Reuters Labs is using AI to perform research in building quantitative investment models and discusses the company's research in deep learning for credit risk, machine learning and NLP for unlocking alternative datasets, and financial graph-based analytics. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Forming meaningful relationships between human and machine
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Interfaces and UX
Adam Cutler (IBM Design)
Here at the dawn of the cognitive era, we must focus our design talents upon a new type relationship with machines—machines that can hold a conversation, interpret nonverbal cues, and draw from vast stores of human knowledge. But what should these relationships look like? Adam Cutler explains why designing for AI requires new considerations and new rules. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: How to develop a full stack deep learning team
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Forrest Iandola (DeepScale)
Average rating: ****.
(4.67, 3 ratings)
Now more than ever, success in AI requires expertise in multiple disciplines, including big data, efficient software, and novel models and algorithms. Forrest Iandola shares an approach for developing a full stack AI team that can use all of these diverse skills to execute on industrial-scale AI problems. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Data-driven healthcare
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Health and Medicine
Shelley Zhuang (11.2 Capital)
Given the revolution in data and healthcare, Shelley Zhuang predicts how certain sectors may unfold and shares opportunities for innovation. Along the way, Shelley discusses innovations that advance precision medicine by bringing together interdisciplinary fields across biology, engineering, data science, and clinical care. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Empathic design for AI: The future is feeling.
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Interfaces and UX
Danielle Krettek (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.80, 5 ratings)
We now live in the age of assistive and AI companions, where everything is coming alive. Danielle Krettek demonstrates how to design for the "invisible" emotional layer of experience that marks this new wave of technology. Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: When privacy scales—Intelligent product design under global data privacy regulation
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security
Amanda Casari (Google)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Data-driven companies making intelligent products must design for security and privacy to be competitive globally. Amanda Casari details the high-level changes that EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-compliant businesses face and how this translates to teams designing products driven by machine learning and artificial intelligence. Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
How Autodesk is humanizing customer support with AI: Meet AVA
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Interfaces and UX, Platforms and infrastructure, Text, Language, and Speech
Rachael Rekart (Autodesk )
Average rating: ***..
(3.00, 2 ratings)
Rachael Rekart offers an overview of Autodesk Virtual Agent (AVA), which has revolutionized the way Autodesk approaches customer service. Customers chat with AVA as they would a human, in natural language, and AVA processes transactions quickly, returns accurate answers, or gathers information to pass to a human counterpart to resolve the query. Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
CANCELED The human-centered and ethical approach to designing intelligent systems with multidisciplinary teams
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security, Interfaces and UX
Irmak Sirer (IDEO)
The public dialogue around artificial intelligence takes place at extremes, with some focusing on how robots will take everyone’s job and others speaking of a utopia where AI will do everything from cure cancer to solve world hunger. Irmak Sirer offers an alternative to these extreme views of AI: instead of artificial intelligence, we instead must focus on augmenting people’s intelligence. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Executive Briefing: AI safety—Problems, state of the art, and alternatives
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  Data Networks and Data Markets, Ethics, Privacy, and Security
Allison Duettmann (Foresight Institute)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Allison Duettmann offers an overview of AI philosophy and explains why traditional approaches need updating, because they pave the way for a singleton AI that will hardly be benevolent. Allison then discusses potential alternative AI safety strategies and their shortcomings and shares a brief survey of interesting problems in AI safety and what we can hope for if we get it right. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Human-machine teaming: Why the human element will always be indispensable in cybersecurity
Location: Continental 5
Candace Worley (McAfee)
The future isn’t about AI or machine learning; it’s about human-machine teaming. Candace Worley explains why, as long as there are human adversaries behind cybercrime and cyberwarfare, there will always be a critical need for the human beings teamed with machines in cybersecurity. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Thursday, September 6, 2018
Inside and out: The impact of AI and data on transforming the enterprise
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Interfaces and UX
Rudina Seseri (Glasswing Ventures), Brian Eberman (Independent), Rob May (Talla)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 1 rating)
Join in for a panel discussion on how AI and data are transforming the enterprise as we know it. Panelists will discuss data, talent, and technology challenges, enterprise adoption barriers, areas of disruption, and talent concerns (enterprises' willingness to pay) as AI turns the enterprise world as we know inside and out. Read more.
11:05am-11:45am Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: Ethical AI—How to build products that customers will love and trust
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security, Interfaces and UX
Susan Etlinger (Altimeter Group)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Susan Etlinger explores how AI fundamentally changes the relationship between people and businesses, lays out its risks and opportunities, and demonstrates emerging best practices for designing customer-centric and ethical products and services. Read more.
11:05am-11:45am Friday, September 7, 2018
Evolutionary computation: The next deep learning
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Deep Learning models, Reinforcement Learning
Risto Miikkulainen (Sentient.ai)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Deep learning (DL) has transformed much of AI and demonstrated how machine learning can make a difference in the real world. With DL, the massive expansion of available training data and compute gave neural networks a new instantiation that significantly increased their power. Evolutionary computation (EC) is on the verge of a similar breakthrough. Risto Miikkulainen explains why. Read more.
11:55am-12:35pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: Organizational design for effective AI
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Mariya Yao (Metamaven)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 6 ratings)
Executives are often asked to "innovate with AI," but barriers to successful adoption for most enterprises are organizational, not technical. Mariya Yao explains why effective AI requires not only technical talent but extended interdisciplinary coordination between teams, investments in retraining your workforces at all levels, and cultivation of an experimental, data-driven culture. Read more.
11:55am-12:35pm Friday, September 7, 2018
AI is my copilot.
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise, Text, Language, and Speech
Jake Saper (Emergence Capital)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
Much attention in enterprise AI today is focused on automation. Jake Saper explains why the more interesting applications focus on worker augmentation and offers an overview of coaching networks, which gather data from a distributed network of workers and identify the best techniques for getting things done. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: Knowledge graphs for AI
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise, Text, Language, and Speech
Mike Tung (Diffbot)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
Leveraging structured knowledge will be a critical ingredient in the design of the next wave of intelligent applications. Mike Tung offers an overview of the current open source and commercial knowledge graphs and explains how consumer and business applications are already taking advantage of these to provide intelligent experiences and enhanced business efficiency. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Learning from video games
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Interfaces and UX
Paris Buttfield-Addison (Secret Lab), Tim Nugent (lonely.coffee), Mars Geldard (University of Tasmania)
Average rating: ****.
(4.33, 3 ratings)
Video games have used sophisticated AI techniques for decades to drive everything from area design to navigation to enemies to conversation and planning. Paris Buttfield-Addison, Mars Geldard, and Tim Nugent offer an overview of the history of AI in video games and explain how the needs that drove AI advancement in the game development world map to almost-identical problems in the real world. Read more.
1:45pm-2:25pm Friday, September 7, 2018
AI: A force for good
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security
Jake Porway (DataKind)
Average rating: ****.
(4.50, 2 ratings)
Jake Porway sheds light on AI’s true potential to impact the world in a positive way. Drawing on his experience as the head of DataKind, an organization applying AI for social good, Jake shares best practices, discusses the importance of using human-centered design principles, and addresses ethical concerns and challenges encountered when using AI to tackle complex humanitarian issues. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: A multichannel chatbot strategy
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise, Ethics, Privacy, and Security, Health and Medicine, Platforms and infrastructure, Text, Language, and Speech
Sharad Gupta (Blue Shield of California)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
AI-powered chatbots are increasingly becoming viable solutions for customer service use cases. Technology leaders must consider adopting a multichannel chatbot strategy to avoid siloed chatbot solutions. Sharad Gupta shares a framework to ensure long-term strategic investment in chatbots. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Reality Check: Beyond the Hype. Real Companies Doing Real Business Getting Real Value with AI
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger (Figure-Eight)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
AI - everyone is talking about it but who is actually doing it (and generating business results). This session takes an industry by industry perspective on true AI adoption disambiguating the hype from the reality, the theoretical from the practical and the research labs from ROI. Read more.
2:35pm-3:15pm Friday, September 7, 2018
AI for Good
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security, Health and Medicine
Aleksandra Mojsilovic (IBM)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 1 rating)
AI possesses an incredible potential to help address the challenges of our planet. Drawing on her experience as the head of AI foundations and codirector of Science for Social Good at IBM Research, Aleksandra Mojsilovic shares innovative examples of applying AI to humanitarian problems and discusses gaps that challenge us from making larger impact with our work. Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: Is there a Moore’s law (not hardware related) for artificial intelligence
Location: Continental 4
Ben Vigoda (Gamalon)
Average rating: **...
(2.50, 2 ratings)
For AI to serve each individual customer, we need much more complex natural language understanding, ideas, and behaviors. Will compositional deep learning put us on a new curve? Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Friday, September 7, 2018
AI for Earth: Using machine learning to monitor, model, and manage natural resources
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Computer Vision
Jennifer Marsman (Microsoft)
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 2 ratings)
Microsoft's AI for Earth team helps NGOs apply AI to challenges in conservation biology and environmental science. Jennifer Marsman outlines Microsoft’s objectives for AI for Earth and highlights recent successes in applying AI to agriculture, poacher detection, animal identification in camera trap and citizen scientist photography, and more. Read more.
4:00pm-4:40pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Trustworthiness of machine learning applications
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Ethics, Privacy, and Security
mayukh bhaowal (Salesforce)
Machine learning is eating software. As decisions are automated, model interpretability must become an integral part of the ML pipeline rather than an afterthought. In the real world, the demand for being able to explain a model is rapidly gaining on model accuracy. Mayukh Bhaowal discusses the steps Salesforce Einstein is taking to make machine learning more transparent and less of a black box. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Executive Briefing: Best practices for human in the loop—The business case for active learning
Location: Continental 4
Secondary topics:  AI in the Enterprise
Paco Nathan (derwen.ai)
Average rating: **...
(2.00, 1 rating)
Deep learning works well when you have large labeled datasets, but not every team has those assets. Paco Nathan offers an overview of active learning, an ML variant that incorporates human-in-the-loop computing. Active learning focuses input from human experts, leveraging intelligence already in the system, and provides systematic ways to explore and exploit uncertainty in your data. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Friday, September 7, 2018
AI for improving teaching and learning
Location: Continental 5
Secondary topics:  Reinforcement Learning
Varun Arora (Baidu USA)
We haven't figured out how to make the perfect robot tutors. But we have figured out how make them much more effective in improving student learning outcomes with modern AI techniques. Varun Arora covers some of those important techniques, along with real-world examples. Read more.
4:50pm-5:30pm Friday, September 7, 2018
Fighting human trafficking with AI
Location: Continental 7-9
Secondary topics:  Platforms and infrastructure, Text, Language, and Speech
Mayank Kejriwal (USC Information Sciences Institute)
Average rating: ****.
(4.00, 2 ratings)
Human trafficking is a form of modern-day slavery. Online sex advertisement activity on portals like Backpage provide important clues that, if harnessed and analyzed at scale, can help resource-strapped law enforcement crack down on trafficking activity. Mayank Kejriwal details an AI architecture called DIG that law enforcement have used (and are using) to combat sex trafficking. Read more.