Schedule: Monday, April 30

Purpose, a well-defined problem, and trustworthiness 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.

AI is a powerful tool, but often companies get more excited about their technology than in the customer value they’re creating. Radhika Dutt, Geordie Kaytes, and Nidhi Aggarwal share a framework for building customer-centered AI products. You'll learn how to craft a far-reaching vision and strategy centered around customer needs and balance that vision with the day-to-day needs of your company.

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.

Amy Unruh walks you through training a machine learning system using popular open source library TensorFlow, starting from conceptual overviews and building all the way up to complex classifiers. Along the way, you'll gain insight into deep learning and how it can be applied to complex problems in science and industry.

Greg Werner walks you through using MXNet and TensorFlow to train deep learning models and deploy them using the leading serverless compute services in the market: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, and Azure Functions. You'll also learn how to monitor and iterate upon trained models for continued success using standard development and operations tools.

Ashwin Vijayakumar gives you a hands-on overview of Intel's Movidius Neural Compute Stick, a miniature deep learning hardware development platform that you can use to prototype, tune, and validate your AI programs (specifically deep neural networks).

Ion Stoica, Robert Nishihara, and Philipp Moritz lead a deep dive into Ray, a new distributed execution framework for reinforcement learning applications, walking you through Ray's API and system architecture and sharing application examples, including several state-of-the art RL algorithms.

Bruno Gonçalves explores word2vec and its variations, discussing the main concepts and algorithms behind the neural network architecture used in word2vec and the word2vec reference implementation in TensorFlow. Bruno then presents a bird's-eye view of the emerging field of "anything"-2vec methods that use variations of the word2vec neural network architecture.

Computer vision has led the artificial intelligence renaissance, and pushing it further forward is PyTorch, a flexible framework for training models. Mo Patel and Neejole Patel offer an overview of computer vision fundamentals and walk you through PyTorch code explanations for notable objection classification and object detection models.

Ignite is happening at AI in New York on Monday, April 30. Join us for a fun, high-energy evening of five-minute talks—all aspiring to live up to the Ignite motto: Enlighten us, but make it quick.