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Saturday, October 20
 

9:00am

Registration
Saturday October 20, 2018 9:00am - 9:30am
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk

9:30am

Opening Talk - IDEAS
Saturday October 20, 2018 9:30am - 10:00am
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk

10:00am

Adversarial machine learning to detect phishing URLs
Phishing attacks cost businesses millions of dollars and are a principal vector for data breaches. Attackers and defenders are using artificial intelligence in an escalating arms race that threatens to consume ever greater resources. It does not have to be this way. This presentation describes the use of practical, cost-effective machine learning tools to generate and to detect target phishing URLs.
Three developments help bring phishing prevention under control. First, many machine learning platforms give essentially the same answer to the problems that they are given, so neither the offense nor the defense needs to know precisely what the other side is doing to be effective. Second, the use of adversarial training methods means that defenders can anticipate the future challenges of phishing attempts. Third, relatively simple, cost effective methods can be used generate novel phishing attempts and to block them, reducing the cost to defend against future phishing attacks while improving the defense effectiveness.
Speakers
avatar for Herbert Roitblat

Herbert Roitblat

Principal Data Scientist, Mimecast
Dr. Roitblat, is currently Principal Data Scientist, for Mimecast where he works on data analysis and visualization, information retrieval, machine learning, and computer security. Before joining Mimecast, Dr. Roitblat was the Principal Data Scientist for Archiving and eDiscovery... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 406
  AI

10:00am

How AI Data Will Help Companies Get Smarter
Artificial Intelligence is a huge component of the Immersive Media space and is growing alongside 360 video, AR, Wearables, and VR. AI data that is collected when working with different forms of these technologies for mobile, web, or mixed reality can drive a unique outlook on future brand engagement, brand interactivity, and total time spent with a brand. To dive deeper, Artificial Intelligence is changing the way brands can be represented and the way consumers look at technology--causing more interaction from the consumer, less fraud, and and increased level of brand awareness.
(Examples would be shown via a walkthrough the Internet of Things and how data has helped greatly to achieve maximum results for companies who dabble in AI)
Speakers
avatar for Robert Bruza

Robert Bruza

CEO, Advrtas
Robert Bruza is an award winning entrepreneur and business executive with more than 20 years experience applying technology to interactive marketing. Robert brings a unique perspective to how we digitally reach and engage consumers and today is leveraging A.I. to launch Advrtas; the... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

10:00am

Predictive Analysis of Financial Fraud Detection using Azure ML and Spark ML in AWS
This talk aims at providing insights, performance, and architecture on Financial Fraud Detection on a mobile money transactional activity in Azure ML and Spark. We have predicted and classified the transaction as normal or fraud with a small sample and massive data set using Azure ML and Spark ML, which are traditional systems and Big Data respectively. I will present predictive analysis with several classification models experimenting in Azure and Spark ML. Besides, scalibility of Spark ML will be presented for the models with different number of nodes for Spark clusters in Amazon AWS.
Speakers
avatar for Jongwook Woo

Jongwook Woo

Professor, California State Univerisity Los Angeles & Big Data AI Center
Dr Jongwook Woo received his Ph.D from USC and went Yonsei University. He is a Professor at CIS Department of California State University Los Angeles and serves as a Technical Advisor of Isaac Engineering, Council Member of IBM Spark Technology Center and as a president at KSEA-SC... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

10:00am

Value Investment in Blockchain
Speakers
avatar for Feng Han

Feng Han

Co-Founder, Elastos
Feng Han is a developer and instructor of Tsinghua University’s graduate course series — ‘Cyber Intelligence Economics and Blockchain’. He is also a Blockchain Advisor at Huawei Central Institute, and the Secretary General of Asia Blockchain DACA (Distributed Autonomous Coalition... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect

10:00am

Is the Best Predictor Actually the Best?
It is common that to build a predictive model the data analyst tries to select the best subset of predictors. In this presentation we answer the question, does this subset include the single best predictor, always? We show examples where the best predictor is not always in the best subset, and the worst one actually is included in the best subset. We discuss both numeric and categorical predictors, and show simple extreme examples on how not to set up the data set before building the model. Otherwise the results may be misleading. We use data visualization and measures to explain the differences, such as going from 0.05 to 0.95 r-squared or from a negative adjusted r-squared to a model with that measure close to one.
We conclude with suggestions on how to (or how not to) build models in high-dimensional space, where graphical displays may not be as helpful as desired.
Speakers
avatar for Cesar Acosta

Cesar Acosta

Professor, University of Southern California
Dr. Acosta is the program director of the MS in Analytics program at the University of Southern California. A faculty member of Viterbi School of Engineering at USC, Dr. Acosta is a data analyst and statistical computing scholar. His research interests focus on using advanced statistical... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, professionals

10:00am

When Classical Statistics Meet Modern Data Science
Modern applications have generated many data sets of complex nature, such as high dimensionality, heterogeneity and unknown structure of interest. In this talk, I will discuss a few ideas on extending traditional statistical methods such as the principal component analysis, expectation maximization, and mixture model, to accommodate challenges in those applications. Theoretical properties, numerical results, and applications in biomedical studies will be discussed.
Speakers
avatar for Weining Shen

Weining Shen

Professor, UC Irvine
Weining Shen is assistant professor of Statistics at UC Irvine. He received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 2013, and his thesis won the Leonard J. Savage Dissertation Award. In 2013-2015, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Department of Biostatistics, M.D. Anderson Cancer... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

10:00am

Reducing AI biases by collecting balanced training data
The problem of bias in machine learning has raised significant concerns and become more critical than ever as AI technology rapidly spreads to all application domains.  While AI biases could occur due to the limitation of technology and design, majority of incidents happened because of the biased training data.  As AI powered systems are only as good as the data we feed them, skewed training data often result in AI models that show discrimination and amplify human prejudices.

Over 10 years enabling AI projects in the real world, Figure Eight’s platform has collected more than 10 billion human judgements, and has more than 100 million images labeled.  In an effort to prevent discrimination in AI, Figure Eight developed a framework that reduces biases in collecting training data in order to address the problem from the source.  By routing proper labeling tasks to proper labelers, our framework prevents potentially unwanted biases introduced by the labeling crowd.  The solution essentially performs a multi-objective optimization in order to achieve the desired distribution of labelers working on a given task.  In the talk, Monchu will share some use cases in Figure Eight where we applied the bias minimizer framework.  Empirical results will be shown to illustrate how the optimization process was done in the data collection process to minimize skewed training data.  The extension and implication to different scenarios and issues will then be discussed.

Speakers
avatar for Monchu Chen

Monchu Chen

Director of Human-Computer Interaction, Figure Eight Technologies Inc.
Monchu Chen is the Director of Human-Computer Interaction at Figure Eight, the leading Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning platform that transforms unstructured data into customized high quality training data.  He has over 15 years of experiences in practicing and researching human... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:00am - 10:30am
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning

10:30am

Make Offline Retail Greater with AI
Past a few years have seen many offline retailers close stores or go out of business, but in fact offline retail actually has been growing, despite in a slower pace compared to online retail. Offline retail still counts 87% of the entire retail business and has its own unique advantages that serve customers better. With latest AI technologies, such as facial recognition, image recognition, and tighter integration between software and hardware, offline retailors have more options than ever to improve customer experience by having a better understanding of customers, products, and the interaction between. This talk will give an overview of such enabling technologies that could make offline retail more appealing and effective.

Speakers
avatar for Yipeng Li

Yipeng Li

Tech Lead, Clobotics
Dr. Yipeng Li currently is the Tech Lead of Clobotics at the Seattle Headquarter, where he is leading the effort of building machine learning and computer vision algorithms and systems to serve enterprise customers globally. Prior to Clobotics, Yipeng had been a software developer... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

10:30am

Using AI to provide insights and recommendations from activity data
Brief Description: In the customer age, being able to extract relevant communications information in real-time and cross reference it with context is key.
This presentation will explain how Salesforce is using data science and engineering to monitor Salespeople activities in real-time and surface insights and recommendations across products.


Salesforce is developing Einstein which is an artificial intelligence (AI) capability built into the core of the Salesforce Platform. Einstein helps power the world’s smartest CRM to deliver advanced AI capabilities to sales, services, and marketing teams – helping them discover new insights, predict likely outcomes to power smarter decision making, recommend next steps, and automate workflows so users can focus on building meaningful relationships with every customer.
In this presentation, we will explain how Salesforce Einstein Activity Platform combines activity data (such as emails) with contextual knowledge from users and CRM data to provide real time insights and recommended actions.
We will go over use cases, high level architecture and how a variety of technologies (data engineering, data science, graph processing, NLP, machine learning and deep learning) are combined together to support Salesforce applications.
Speakers
avatar for Alexis Roos

Alexis Roos

Director Data Science, Salesforce
Alexis is director of data science and machine learning at salesforce where he is leading a team of data scientists and engineers delivering Intelligent services for Einstein platform. Alexis has over twenty years of engineering and management experience including 13 years at Sun... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

10:30am

An Opensource Data Governance System for IoT Communities
The I3 (Intelligent Internet-of-Things Integrator) Consortium is a newly formed open consortium being created to encourage the accelerated formation of community-based IoT networks. These networks are formed when independent IoT device owners work together to create data “rivers” that have more composite value than a series of individual IoT data streams. I3 is an innovative IoT data management system was first conceived at USC and evolved with encouragement from the City of Los Angeles and other entities seeking to create an ecosystem that will encourage the accelerated deployment of IoT technology by creating an environment that allows citizens and businesses to form community managed data marketplaces. This presentation will cover the challenges that must be overcome to realize what is, in effect, an open data market place that allows producers and consumers to connect and exchange data on mutually acceptable terms. The presentation will also cover the motivational issues that have driven the program with a focus on the implications such a system has for the larger IoT market. To close the session, a number of use cases will be presented that serve to illustrate application of the system in a live IOT environment.
Speakers
avatar for Jerry Power

Jerry Power

Executive Director, Institute for Communications Technology Management (CTM), University of Southern California
Jerry Power is the executive director of USC-Marshall’s Institute for Communication Technology Management, a think tank that is dedicated to understanding how technology will impact markets and business processes. The CTM community serves as a focus point for innovative thinking... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

10:30am

Open Innovation Protocols to Accelerate Frontier Technology
Our world is full of amazing technology but our future as a species still depends on our ability to innovate. To this end, we had a key insight: HOW we innovate is just as important as what we innovate on. Introducing Kambria, an open innovation blockchain project that enables and incentivizes collaboration in R&D, manufacturing, and commercialization of advanced technology. We are developing our own public chain with protocols uniquely designed to address the current waste and inefficiencies in today's innovation model. Kambria will allow for many verticals, including Biotech, Space, and Autonomous Vehicles to be developed and thrive in the ecosystem. We are focusing first on the AI and Robotics vertical which is potentially a trillion dollar market. Through existing partnerships with top universities and large international corporations, as well as access to talented developers, we aim to build an ecosystem that can bring the next wave of frontier technology to provide value to billions of people around the world.
Speakers
avatar for Thuc Vu

Thuc Vu

Co-founder & CEO, Kambria
Dr. Thuc Vu is the CEO and co-founder of Kambria and OhmniLabs. He previously founded Katango and Tappy which were acquired by Google and Weeby.co, respectively. Thuc has deep expertise in game theory, machine learning, tournament design and multi-agent systems. He earned his PhD... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

10:30am

How to Use Data Analytics to “Win the Race for Eyeballs” in the Eye Candy Economy
Today we live in an “Eye Candy Economy”, everyone is craving for delightful content to satisfy their Eyes and Brain. The Digital Media Companies think that “Content is King” and are in a multi-billion dollar race to create more content. But Consumer is the “King Kong” who decides which content is viral and which content is dud. This has created a complex business problem of identifying topics and themes which will be viral and need to produce viral content. Advance Analytics and AI can be used to solve this complex problem by utilizing the Content Data from social media and Social Interaction and other data of the users and content to predict the resonating content that will have a large audience. This talk will help Digital Media Companies to “Win the race for Eyeballs and Revenue”.
Speakers
avatar for Arif Ansari

Arif Ansari

Professor, University of Southern California
Arif Ansari is a Professor in the Data Sciences and Operations Department at Marshall School of Business at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is the CEO of Intuition Intelligence Inc. developing Creative Analytics Solution for the Digital Media. He is an expert in... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

10:30am

The New Media Ecosystem – Disruption or Dissolution?
We’ll explore the ways data at scale, machine learning, crypto currencies and distributed databases are remaking what we think of as media. We’ll do this from two perspectives:


Disruption - Are established media distribution, content creation, and audience engagement platforms doomed by design? As the media industry is remade by new entrants and new business models, the distinction between media and technology has effectively disappeared. Strategy and differentiation for new media entities is as much about flexible engagement platforms, integrated operations, and partner ecosystems as it is about new ideas and new content. While audiences fragment and migrate, new audience currencies are emerging distinguished by speed, scale, and flexibility. We'll explore the evolution of media engagement models, understand these in the context of current market trends, and explore some of the ways new entrants are using emerging technologies to enable groundbreaking customer experiences.


Dissolution - We’ll also explore the underside of new media platforms, specifically the ways personal data syndication, programmatic content, simplistic learning algorithms, and automated decisioning can be manipulated to perpetuate bias, raise rancor and undermine good faith. Do media and technology companies have obligations that extend beyond the confines of customer relationships? What are the implications of captive ecosystems that are becoming increasingly enmeshed in more areas of our lives?
Speakers
avatar for Gerald Parham

Gerald Parham

Fan Experience and Omnichannel Customer Engagement Leader, IBM
Mr. Parham is a senior product & service innovation leader with 20 years’ experience in media and marketing, technology and creative strategy. Prior to joining IBM, he founded a social discovery platform (yuni vrs) and authored a patent for enabling immersive interaction of user-generated... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, professionals

10:30am

Leaders, Women, and Men Who Want Balance in Leadership
The financial cost of unhappiness at work is in excess of $550 billion per year because 68% of the American workforce is unengaged. Add to that increasing workplacehostility, discrimination, harassment, workforce division, miscommunication, and as of lately, the MeToo movement. All are evidence that changes in the way we invest in, train and engage our workforce are necessary. This old code is becoming too expensive to maintain.

But, what are we missing in our businesses? Deep employee dissatisfaction with our workplace cultures is pushing a new code to emerge.

Millennials, minorities, women, and men are questioning the current system’s effectiveness because it operates on an outdated code of workplace politics and hierarchies and it’s perceived sole focus on profits. This old code has not been updated to reflect the changing values that we expect of today’s business culture, which must include all people. Because of that, we are now at a breaking point.
There is a way to fix this. We can solve these problems by introducing a new code. The Women’s Code shows how to rebalance office culture. Innovation, creativity, and increased productivity and engagement happen when the focus shifts to building up people and their skills, developing strength-based leadership, and mapping out gender-neutral career paths. A workforce of individuals who feel recognized for their unique talents will produce up to 66% return on investment. Specifically, this new code will
- Show you what the old code is costing your business
- Skyrocket your people ROI
- Give you the five elements needed for diverse and equal team building
- Demonstrate how to master the essential three female-centric leadership attributes and how best you can use them in synergy with male-centric ones




Your takeaway is identifying how to take the first step that you can take immediately that will transform employee engagement and improve your overall financial performance.
Speakers
avatar for Beate Chelette

Beate Chelette

Founder, The Women’s Code
Beate Chelette is The Growth Architect and a results-oriented businesswoman with an entrepreneurial spirit and a proven track record in growing, building, and scaling businesses. Once $135,000 in debt and a single mother, she successfully sold her business to a global entertainment... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 10:30am - 11:00am
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning

11:00am

6 Steps for Implementing AI to Enable Efficiency in the Enterprise
With AI and machine learning transforming industries, many companies are looking to take advantage of the recent advances. One of the challenges today is that there is no structured process to follow and realize business value quickly without wasted effort. Rajendra Koppula, Director of Machine Learning at Manifold, will talk about an iterative six step process using specific real world case studies. We call this process “Lean AI”. It helps Manifold deliver value to our clients quickly accelerating their journey towards becoming a data-driven organization. Raj will share examples of how businesses he’s worked with have implemented the 6 steps and different AI technologies to analyze specific areas of their business and resolve their toughest problems.
Speakers
avatar for Rajendra Koppula

Rajendra Koppula

Director of Machine Learning, Manifold
As Director of Machine learning at Manifold Inc, Raj works on real-world data problems that deliver business value to clients. He has experience in IoT data analytics, computer vision, and customer-centric analytics in retail. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at Qualcomm working... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

11:00am

Machine Learning Benefits and Applications in Healthcare
Machine learning plays an essential role in the healthcare field and is being ever more applied to healthcare. This presentation will include machine learning applications and the uses of machine learning in healthcare. Some successful applications of machine learning in healthcare include predicting health insurance frauds and patient diagnosis. The uses of machine learning and data mining to discover these patterns will be examined. A discussion of the suggestions on machine learning algorithms for healthcare will accompany this presentation.
Speakers
avatar for Shilpa Balan

Shilpa Balan

Assistant Professor, California State University-Los Angeles
Dr. Shilpa Balan is a professor in the Department of Information Systems at California State University-Los Angeles. Professor Balan is very passionate about Big Data and Analytics and has teaching and research interests in Big Data, Business Intelligence and Healthcare Informatics... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 406
  AI, beginners

11:00am

Building a Human – Centered Tech Company
There is a growing need for tech companies to take greater responsibility for users' privacy and for the way their business models produce social impacts. Regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU and California's proposed bill AB 2182 are forcing penalties for uses of personal data that had previously been considered legally acceptable, even if they creeped some people out. How do we build companies that listen to the canaries in our data mines, the employees who are more easily creeped out, the employees who are particularly adept at imagining the unintended impacts of the technology they are building?


This talk presents a reporting structure for listening to the canaries and broad, critical thinkers among our tech staff. I discuss how to make these conversations productive, how to reward employees for coming forward, and how to assess which anxieties require further investigation and action. Inviting all employees to hone their ethical imaginations about the impact of the products they are building is a good first step. Building organizations that are capable of listening to and rewarding employees for their critical thinking skills, tech companies will be more resilient to future regulation and more beneficial to the communities they serve and in which they operate.
Speakers
avatar for Laura Noren

Laura Noren

Director, of Obsidian Security
Laura Norén is Director of Research at Obsidian Security. She holds a PhD in Sociology from NYU and undergraduate degrees from MIT. Her Ethics for Data Science class at NYU was profiled in The New York Times. She investigates the sociotechnical contexts in which data science is conducted... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data

11:00am

Disruptive Innovation through Technology
This presentation would offer an overview of what makes Disruptive Innovation & Technology, and will have a challenging point of view encouraging the audience to introspect and consider how much their own industries, companies, and their own jobs are at risk due to disruptive innovation through new technology. I will offer an overview of key disruptive technologies including AI, Blockchain, Quantum Computing, & Cloud, -this can be delivered in 45 minutes.
Speakers
avatar for Pavel G Ferreri

Pavel G Ferreri

Innovation Executive, Watson, Cloud & Blockchain, IBM
Pavel G Ferreri is a Technology Solution Sales Executive experienced identifying and developing solutions for clients across multiple industries, with over 10 years of Post-MBA experience working for global technology leaders Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, & currently IBM. Most recently... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, beginners

11:00am

(Cancelled) Why Data Governance Matters
The adage of "garbage in, garbage out" could not be truer for data analytics. While the least visible (and not the flashiest), data governance is the most impactful factor to any data driven organization. A good data governance system will allow organizations to lay down a strong foundation to build their data strategies on with consistent and reliable data. This presentation will give an overview of why every organization needs data governance and a framework to build theirs on.
Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, professionals

11:00am

Conversational AI for Business Intelligence: Ask Interesting Questions
It often takes a long time for business users in enterprises to get the right data and insights, even if the data is well organized and structured. This is because they may not know where the data is located, how it is modeled, and how to frame the right queries for their needs. As a result, traditionally, access to analytics content from BI and analytics and data science platforms has mostly been limited to power users, business analytics and specialist data scientists with varying degrees of analytical and technical skills. This is where conversational analytics comes in. Conversational chatbots for analytics allows any user to ask voice or text questions of their data and receive back a natural language and potentially, a visual analysis of the most statistically relevant and actionable insight for that user. In this talk I shall describe some of the key AI technologies needed to deploy conversational analytics including natural-language processing (NLP), natural-language generation/narration, chatbots and AI/augmented analytics. I shall also describe some case studies where expanding access to insights from analytics to all employees helped driving strong business impact.
Speakers
avatar for Anand Ranganathan

Anand Ranganathan

Chief AI Officer, Unscrambi
Anand Ranganathan is a co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Unscrambl, Inc. He is a data scientist, AI developer, Big Data developer, architect and researcher rolled into one person. He is leading Unscrambl’s product development in several cutting-edge areas, including context-aware... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

11:00am

AI and Deep Learning Trends in Genomics, Healthcare Informatics and Precision Medicine
The presentation will cover current trends in AI and Machine learning literature on Genomics , Healthcare informatics and our march towards precision medicine. This will also cover the ethics and other issues involved as we gather more and more of healthcare information about patients. There will be a few discussions on how AI can help doctors in patient management and the role of AI based prediction in patient care.


While the healthcare sector is being transformed by the ability to record massive amounts of information about individual patients, the enormous volume of data being collected is impossible for doctors to analyse. Machine learning comes to the rescue and provides a way to automatically find patterns and reason about data, which enables healthcare professionals to move to personalized care known as precision medicine.


As an illustration, healthcare providers can take advantage of machine learning to predict hospital re-admission for chronically ill patients. Greater support can be provided to patients identified most at risk of being re-admitted at discharge. By lowering the rate of readmission, we improve the lives of those most at risk and lower healthcare expenses. PatientMD team is involved in developing such algorithms.


Ninety three percent of healthcare information is in images. We will cover the latest in image recognition algorithms that our researchers at PatientMD are working on.


Finally, a introduction to chromputer model which uses CNNs sto predict histone modifications and chromatin states will be provided to audience interested in genomics.


Short Bio: Anirban Majumdar is the co-founder and CTO/COO of PatientMD. Prior to founding PatientMD, Anirban spent a decade in investments and finance. Anirban spent many years working in Silicon valley leading teams in companies like Oracle and BEA Systems.


Anirban is currently involved in rolling out PatientMD platform live in multiple countries.


Anirban is passionate about block chain, healthcare, genomics, mathematics, economics, finance, AI and computer modeling.


Anirban has BTech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, MS in Computer Science from Alabama and MBA in Analytical Finance from University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.
Speakers
avatar for Anirban Majumdar

Anirban Majumdar

Co-Founder, CTO/COO, PatientMD Inc.
Anirban Majumdar is the co-founder and CTO/COO of PatientMD. Prior to founding PatientMD, Anirban spent a decade in investments and finance. Anirban spent many years working in Silicon valley leading teams in companies like Oracle and BEA Systems. Anirban is currently involved in... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:00am - 11:30am
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning, experts

11:30am

(Cancelled) Building trust in an age of AI and data science - #TheMoralCompass
With the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal keeping security practitioners and their lawyers up at night, and rightly so, it is very likely there is second guessing going on over the digital transformation happening in organizations. Across all functions — marketing, sales, LOBs, support — the "go digital, go cognitive, go AI at all costs” is being questioned.
But, this is not the time to second guess or slow down — it is the time to actually stop — yes, stop. It is time to put some really strong ethical foundations in place that thus far have been willfully ignored or postponed and then hit the accelerator pedal.
This session will talk about the "four horsemen of unethical digital transformation" and the need for "the three musketeers of morality" to lay out a foundation of four ethical pillars. These pillars will hold organizations in good stead as they kick-start their ride into the AI-driven future with gusto. The age of content creation, social evangelization, and follower creation is fraught with ethical issues, the three musketeers of morality provide an actionable framework.
As a content producer myself — blogging, podcasting, video logging — I have a special interest in ConTech and my experience as a former high-tech executive means I understand how technology works. Having good cognition of both sides of this complex issue, I am able to lay out a pragmatic path forward.
Speakers
avatar for Ashwin Krishnan

Ashwin Krishnan

Tech Ethicist, Writer, Podcaster and Speaker, Ernst & Young
Ashwin Krishnan is a former hi-tech executive in the cyber security and cloud domain turned tech ethicist, writer, podcaster, and speaker. His focus is on simplifying technology trends and complex topics, such as AI and ethics through enduring analogies which he shares on his blog... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, beginners

11:30am

Democratizing AI and DL with Watson Studio
AI holds enormous power to transform our world and the businesses
leading the future. However, AI can only have this impact if it is
easily accessible and can be applied with purpose. The democratization
of AI and Deep Learning, combined with an improved understanding of its
usage and growing consumer trust, will help to break down current
barriers to make it easy to integrate AI into the enterprise
workflows.


IBM Watson Studio is an integrated AI platform to build and train AI &
machine learning models, prepare and analyze data - all in a flexible,
hybrid cloud environment. The new Forrester Wave Report examines
Predictive Analytics & Machine Learning Platforms and ranks IBM Watson
Studio as the leader.


In this session, you will learn how to use these new offerings to solve
real-world business problems and infuse AI into your business to drive
innovation.
Speakers
avatar for Andrew Zhang

Andrew Zhang

Watson Cloud Advocate, IBM
Andrew Zhang is an IBM Watson Cloud Advocate. He has many years of experience in cloud, analytics, machine learning, and blockchain. He advises and advocates enterprise and startup companies on emerging technologies and implementation practices. Andrew is a frequent speaker on topics... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

11:30am

Introducing Keras- Pandas, an Open Source Package That Allows Users to Rapidly Build and Iterate on Deep Learning Models
Introducing keras-pandas, an open source package that allows users to rapidly build and iterate on deep learning models.


Deep learning provides amazing opportunities to build highly predictive models. However, historically this modeling has required deep domain experience, and keeping up with a massive body of literature. Further, applying these approaches to tabular data has been a highly-specialized field.


My recently open sourced package, keras-pandas, allows users to rapidly prototype and deploy models by providing state-of-the art defaults and heuristics, based on the techniques used in Fortune 100 companies and by kaggle grandmasters.


During this talk, we'll dive into keras-pandas's design, have a look at a case study, and discuss real-world approaches for handling numerical, categorical, text, and timestamp data with deep learning.
Speakers
avatar for Brendan Herger

Brendan Herger

Senior Data Scientist, Metis Data Science
Brendan Herger enjoys bridging the gap between data science and engineering, to build and deploy data products.Brendan brings a unique combination of machine learning, deep learning, and software engineering skills. In his previous work at Capital One and startups, he has built authorization... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data

11:30am

Business Value of Blockchain: Global Case Studies
Cryptocurrency made blockchain popular, but most companies are adopting blockchain without a coin or cryptocurrency. In this session, learn the business value of blockchain by exploring real-world applications built by global enterprise companies. Each case study will explore a different industry vertical and highlight an innovative blockchain solution for an everyday business problem. Highlights include companies that are leveraging blockchain to: reduce pharmaceutical fraud, invest in diverse entrepreneurs, and reduce food-borne illness!
Speakers
avatar for X. Eyeé

X. Eyeé

Blockchain Ambassador, Microsoft
X. Eyee is a Blockchain Ambassador at Microsoft, where she works with Fortune 500 companies to launch blockchain applications. She is also the Co-founder and CEO of Harvest, a blockchain inventory management tool and consumer rewards app for the cannabis industry. A self-taught developer... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, beginners

11:30am

Application of Random Forests for Educational Video Games
Prediction and interpretation with trees and random forests for learning behavior in educational video games. How extracting these insights can help improve adaptative learning systems.
Speakers
avatar for Marie H Roy

Marie H Roy

Data Scientist, Age of Learning
I am a data scientist, soon to be PhD, specialized in predictive modeling and ensemble methods. I work in a learning sciences team in an EdTech company with a goal to leverage machine learning for educational technology.

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

11:30am

The Fashionable Misunderstandings of Data Science in the Industry
Along the years, I have realized that many business leaders do not understand what Data Science is or why they would need experts of the field in their organization. Data Scientists even get too often confused with Data Analysts, Business Intelligence Analysts or Data Engineers.


But Data Science, Big Data, Machine Learning or AI are fashionable concepts so companies need to hire Data Scientist, right? So how do we recruit those specialists? Sometime the job descriptions list a set of requirements that demand 3 PhDs to achieve, sometimes you just need to know Excel to apply or sometime the job description is actually describing a Data Engineer or BI analyst. Few years ago, every Data Scientists had to know Hadoop or NoSQL for some reason. Few years later, it was about knowing Spark. Today it is about knowing everything in Deep Learning or/and being a Kaggle master.


When the companies finally get hold of a new Data Science recruit with the 3 PhDs, the question remains: what should they do with them? Too many times you will find Data Scientists ending up doing dashboard reporting instead of looking for ML driven business solutions. Too many times the companies simply do not have the engineering infrastructure around the data to leverage any data science solution. Too many times, the Data Scientists are actually discouraged to explore new ideas because of the upper management’s fear around the statistical uncertainty intrinsic to the field. Let’s discuss about those misunderstandings surrounding Data Science
Speakers
avatar for Damien Benveniste

Damien Benveniste

Lead Data Scientist, Rackspace
Damien is currently a Lead Data Scientist at Rackspace, one of the leading companies in managed cloud computing. He has worked in diverse industries such as a market place for virtual items (Opskins), e-commerce (Bluestem Brands), healthcare (Transfuse Solutions) or data storage (EMC... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, beginners

11:30am

Image Detection/ Object Recognition – Convolutional Neural Network
Our brains make vision seem easy. It doesn't take much effort for humans to tell apart her cousin and nephew, detect a face or recognize who it is. But these are actually hard problems to solve with a computer: they only seem easy because our brains are incredibly good at understanding images. Today, we will discuss the history of models used for such problems, what we've achieved so far and demonstrate combinations of state-of-art machine learning algorithms to tackle these problems and beyond.
Speakers
avatar for Phillip Kim

Phillip Kim

Founder /Data Scientist, Banking & Quantitative Solutions
Phillip is a founder and data scientist at Banking & Quantitative Solutions LLC. He worked in various traditional & data analytics roles in legal, insurance, social media, finance, and investment banking. His expertise is in gathering and analyzing big data using various statistical... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning

11:30am

Making Blockchain Smart Contracts smarter with AI
One of the many benefits of Blockchain for Business is the automation of complex, high-value transactions within a business network. Smart Contracts is a feature of the Blockchain Platform that evaluates the mutually accepted terms and conditions between parties. Automating these transactions requires validating identity and proof of work to provide trust in the process. We will explore how Machine Learning, AI and Analytics can help make these Smart Contracts smarter.
Speakers
avatar for Chris Tyler

Chris Tyler

Sr. Cloud Architect and Cognitive Evangelist, IBM
Chris Tyler is an IBM Technical Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in data, analytics and software development. He helps IBM Partners leverage IBM technologies to bring new products and services to market. Chris is an expert in embedded analytics and speaks to audiences around... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 11:30am - 12:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  Deep Learning

12:00pm

Hands-on lab building your first blockchain network with Hyperledger Fabric and Composer
Hyperledger Fabric is an open source project, run by the Linux Foundation, which is becoming known as the Blockchain for Business. This workshop will include a lecture which differentiates between the blockchain used for Bitcoin and the blockchain changing the way businesses manage high value transactions within a business network. IBM along with many other contributors are leading the charge on developing and deploying Hyperledger Fabric and helping businesses on their blockchain journey. This is your chance to get started, with a hands-on experience building your own blockchain network with Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Composer.

Speakers
avatar for Chris Tyler

Chris Tyler

Sr. Cloud Architect and Cognitive Evangelist, IBM
Chris Tyler is an IBM Technical Evangelist with over 25 years of experience in data, analytics and software development. He helps IBM Partners leverage IBM technologies to bring new products and services to market. Chris is an expert in embedded analytics and speaks to audiences around... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

12:00pm

Production Ready Real-Time Recommendations in About a Month
At Joymode it took a machine learning data scientist and a fraction of a cloud devops engineer about a month to build the leanest customer facing, real-time personalization engine we could devise. In this presentation I will describe the end-to-end solution, which includes Docker for environment management, Jupyter and Papermill for batch training matrix factorization models, and Flask for delivering the recommendations via a RESTful web service. I'll also cover the strategic bets we are making, like dynamic prototyping, long term AB testing, and extremely rapid delivery of AI solutions for in-flight iteration.

Speakers
avatar for William High

William High

Head of Data Science, Joymode
Will is Head of Data Science at Joymode in Los Angeles. He was previously a data scientist at Netflix LA and occasionally serves as a pro bono Data Ambassador for DataKind. Will received a PhD in astrophysics from Harvard and a BA from Berkeley and has held research posts at Caltech... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm
Ballroom # 408A
  AI, professionals

12:00pm

Real World Mining
Cryptocurrency needs to be earnable by everyone to become more mainstream. This presentation goes over traditional proof of work and proof of stake, and the future of earning cryptocurrency by more accessible methods.
Speakers
avatar for Jonathan Chou

Jonathan Chou

CEO, Bee Token
Jonathan Chou is the Co-Founder & CEO of Bee Token, Airbnb on the Blockchain, and Founding Partner of Silverblock Capital. Previously, Jonathan was a technical lead at Uber, Security & Fraud division, managing device tampering and preventing account takeovers. As an advocate of cryptocurrency... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 12:00pm - 12:30pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

12:00pm

Panel Discussion #1 Blockchain Application 2018
FundingTree is the first of its kind peer to peer matchmaking platform using Blockchain Technology, Artificial intelligence, machine learning, data insight and matching algorithms to create a perfect match between companies that need Capital and Institutions that provide Capital. Once matched the appropriate parties are alerted and the entire transaction takes place inside a secure data room within the platform. All parties to the transaction have end to end visibility and can drill down into the details at each stage. All decision critical documents are chained, hashed to create an immutable record of each transaction. This will save Time, Money, reduce friction and reduce paperwork.
Speakers
avatar for Rayaan Arif

Rayaan Arif

CEO, Funding Tree Capital Corp
Rayaan is the Founder of FundingTree.com. He is a serial Entrepreneur with a passion for tackling difficult problems. This passion has to lead him to find better ways to deliver Capital and Deal Flow using technology, marketing, and relationships he has cultivated over several decades... Read More →
avatar for Carter Harrison

Carter Harrison

Sr. Blockchain Engineer, XYO Network
Carter Harrison is a Sr. Blockchain engineer at XYO Network. The XYO Network allows blockchain to talk to the real world using a series of cryptographic proofs and on and off chain protocols.
avatar for Jules Hilliard

Jules Hilliard

CEO, Secure Block Technologies
Entrepreneurial and Tech Savvy Executive with over 20 years of business experience successfully working with both private and publicly traded companies. By utilizing the benefits of emerging technologies, team building activities and effective business development skills, I am able... Read More →
avatar for Jesse Mauck

Jesse Mauck

CIO of Verse Vault, Founder, Zigr
I am the founder of Zigr- a digital marketing & iot consultancy company. I created a website that offers numerous services in digital marketing, consulting on cyber security, Web & App development including blockchain and ICO Marketing. Although the platform is not finished we have... Read More →
avatar for Dennis O’Neill

Dennis O’Neill

CEO, O'Neill Capital Advisors
Dennis O'Neill has over 25 years experience as an Investment Banker. He helped start two of the largest regional Investments banks in Chicago, Madison Securities and Advanced Equities. He was the Managing Director for Softbank Investments/ E2Capital office in Chicago for two years... Read More →
avatar for Yogesh Srihari

Yogesh Srihari

Co-Founder & CEO, LQDEX
Yogesh co-founded popular blockchain startup called Spankchain in 2017, which raised $11 million in token sales. Prior to Spankchain, Yogesh worked as Lead Software Engineer at ZEFR, Director of Engineering at Wickr, and Software Engineer at Google. Yogesh holds a Masters degree from... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 12:00pm - 12:50pm
Ballroom # 404
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

12:30pm

Flexible and Fast Storage with Alluxio for Deep Learning
In the age of growing data and increased computing power, deep learning models continue to improve their performance across a variety of domains, with access to more and more data, and the processing power to train larger neural networks. This rise of deep learning advances the state-of-the-art for AI but also exposes some challenges for the access to data in different storage systems especially in cloud object storage. In this talk, we will describe the storage challenges for deep learning workloads and how Alluxio can help to solve them.


Alluxio is an open-source memory-speed storage system, which unifies disparate persistent storage systems and provides data access as a local folder to the deep learning frameworks. With Alluxio, data scientists can gain easy access to a variety of storage systems (including Azure block store, AWS S3, and many others) and flexibility without the compromise on performance. This talk will use Tensorflow as an example to show how Alluxio can help data access and management for deep learning frameworks.
Speakers
avatar for Bin Fan

Bin Fan

Founding Member & Architect, Alluxio
Bin Fan is the founding member of Alluxio Inc and the PMC member of Alluxio open source project. Prior to Alluxio, he worked for Google to build the next-generation storage infrastructure and won Google’s Technical Infrastructure award. Bin got his Ph.D. in Computer Science from... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 12:30pm - 1:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, beginners

1:00pm

AI for Earth: Land Cover Mapping
Conservationists use land cover maps to quantify environmental changes like deforestation and urban development. Most land cover maps are currently made by applying rule-based classifiers to overhead imagery: this low-accuracy approach that requires manual curation, often delaying the publication of new maps by 3+ years. In this session, we will introduce the goals of Microsoft’s AI for Earth grant program and describe our work designing a high-resolution semantic segmentation model to perform land cover mapping for the Chesapeake Conservancy. Professionals in the artificial intelligence space may benefit from our discussion of lessons learned in expanding training and inference to the national scale (100+ TB imagery / 100+ K80 GPUs). Attendees will learn where to obtain our trained models, code, and methods; try out land cover mapping with our API; and apply for AI for Earth funding for their own projects.
Speakers
avatar for Mary Wahl

Mary Wahl

Data Scientist II, Microsoft
Microsoft’s AI for Earth team provides resources and technical expertise that enable NGOs to bring AI to critical problems in conservation biology and environmental science. As a data scientist on the AI for Earth team, Mary has implemented distributed training and crowdsourced... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

1:00pm

Governing Digital Labor
Lessons learned in leveraging digital workers with your existing workforce. Where, why, when and how to use RPA, ML and AI to generate innovative outcomes, rather than mere improvement.
Speakers
avatar for Chris Surdak

Chris Surdak

Senior Manager, Robotics and AI, Ernst & Young
Award-winning author, innovator, disrupter, engineer and strategist. Author of the new book “Jerk: Twelve Steps to Rule the World” and “Data Crush: How the Information Tidal Wave Is Creating New Business Opportunities”, winner of GetAbstract’s International Book of the Year... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

1:00pm

Practical Aspects of Machine Learning Models
Deep learning techniques are rapidly gaining popularity in a variety of industries. Developing accurate forecasting models can guarantee success in a corporate environment. Specifically, accurate demand prediction can empower decision making and expand vital planning capabilities of a company. These models can allow better negotiation on flexible shipping rates, as well as avoiding premium fees.
This talk will go over an industry use case that focuses on forecasting using both classical and modern machine learning techniques. The practical aspects of model building process will be discussed: utilizing the CRISP-DM approach and communicating results at the executive level.
Speakers
avatar for Inga Maslova

Inga Maslova

Professor, University of Southern California
Inga Maslova is a data scientist specializing in predictive analytics, machine learning, big data, and applications to finance, business analytics, economics, hydrology, remote sensing, precision agriculture, and climate change problems. She is currently teaching at Marshall School... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

1:00pm

Blockchain, IoT and Data: Using IoT Technology to Combine the Real World with the World of Blockchain
The XYO Network has created a unique protocol that allows for interactions in the real world to be trustlessly recorded on our blockchain. In my presentation, I will go over how we are able to make offline blockchain interactions with IoT devices, and efficiently store and access this data post-hoc. There are many potential use cases for this technology, with one of the most prevalent being automatic and verifiable payment on delivery for delivered packages. I will further discuss other use cases in the talk, and potential applications of the data in the future. Specifically, I will close with how exploring the chaotic dynamics between objects can give us a better understanding of causational relationships in the real world that were unknown before.
Speakers
avatar for Erik Saberski

Erik Saberski

Lead Data Scientists, XYO Network
I am the lead mathematician and data scientist for XYO Network and a PhD student in Biological Oceanography studying nonlinear dynamics, complexity theory, and data-driven theory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). I am fascinated by variable interactions within complex... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

1:00pm

Data Science in Academia vs. Indusry. What is Right for Me?
During the last few years, data science has brought about many changes to how we live and work. Students interested in careers in data science often ask "do I need a graduate degree to work as a data scientist?" Obviously, while there is no one-size-fits-all answer to that question, there are some important questions to consider when making career choices in data science. I compare and contrast academia vs industry as career options after bachelors degree or masters degree based on my personal experience in research and industry.
Speakers
avatar for Sang-Yun Oh

Sang-Yun Oh

Professor, UC Santa Barbara
I worked for a number of years between my bachelor’s degree in physics at UC Berkeley, and my Ph.D. in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford. My work experience span research and industry as medical imaging research engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, director... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, beginners

1:00pm

Latent Dirichlet Allocation on Player Session Behavior in Gaming
As data scientists at Riot Games, our goal is to focus on providing the best player experience possible. Understanding how players play individual sessions and how their styles evolve over time is key to evaluating our products and helps make decisions for future designs. In this talk, I will present how we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a three-level hierarchical Bayesian model, to identify major session topics in League of Legends and how we construct a player segmentation with session clusters.
Speakers
avatar for Ran Cao

Ran Cao

Data Scientist, Riot Games
Ran Cao is a Data Scientist for League of Legends at Riot Games. League of Legends is one of the most-played games in the world, with frequent updates to expand the possibilities for players. Her data science background has focused on Bayesian modeling across genetics, public policy... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:30pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

1:00pm

Panel Discussion #2 How AI Can Grow Business?
Speakers
avatar for Mic Farris

Mic Farris

Director, KPMG
Mic serves as Director in KPMG’s Deal Advisory & Strategy Analytics practice and previously served as Vice President of Decision Science for CenturyLink. Mic is an experienced senior technology executive with over 20 years of proven success in creating, developing, and delivering... Read More →
avatar for Yutao He

Yutao He

Sr. Research Technologist, NASA/JPL
Dr. Yutao He is a Sr. Research Technologist and explorer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) leading technology development in innovative avionics systems for future space exploration. He is also an adjunct faculty member at UCLA and CSULA. Dr. He received his B.E. in Electrical... Read More →
avatar for Vladyslav Ivanov

Vladyslav Ivanov

Co-Founder & CEO, Enxiety
Vladyslav Ivanov is a Co-founder and CEO of Enxiety, a closed-beta startup that utilizes the latest advancements in machine learning to fight financial anxiety and allow in a better wealth management for individuals and their families. As a savvy economist and experienced data scientist... Read More →
avatar for Marie Smith

Marie Smith

CIO, DATA 360
Marie Smith’s ambitious entrepreneurial spirit has led her to be a founding contributor in her 20 year career to nearly 50 media, tech and wellness companies and projects which have contributed to over $45 million in transactions. After bringing her talents to work at Warner Brothers... Read More →
avatar for Xiaolu Zhao

Xiaolu Zhao

CTO, Data Application Lab
Specialize in building the solutions for on-prem cloud computing and infrastructure, enterprise networking system and petabyte data warehouse. Automate and enhance IT operations by using analytics and machine learning to process data collected from various sources, spot and react... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:00pm - 1:40pm
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning, professionals

1:30pm

Augmenting Creative Content Creation with AI
After producing the world's first AI written film, we looked beyond to see how generative AI can be used to augment the creative process. Specifically, can AI make content creation, a creative endeavor, more efficient? RivetAI’s platform augments writers and producers, by letting AI handle the tedious parts, while leveraging their creativity through agile story development.

Starting with a script, the platform automatically generates a script breakdown, shot-list and storyboard. After inputting variable costs, the platform produces an interactive budget and optimized schedules that can achieve significant reductions in timeline and budget. The Generative AI helps visualize a script, explore the effects of changing the narrative, and enables new forms of content creation in interactive story games and VR. This gives development teams more granular data to greenlight projects.
Speakers
avatar for Debajyoti Ray

Debajyoti Ray

Founder & CEO, RivetAI Inc.
Debajyoti (Deb) Ray focuses on the development of generative applications of AI that can create new media, designs, or concepts. With RivetAI, he is bringing a platform for story development and production optimization for film-makers and content creators. The application was conceived... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI

1:30pm

Keeping Human in Technology, Unbiased AI, Security IoT challenges, Autonomous, AI Challenges, New Jobs, What the Future Holds, AI Organizational Strategy
From a Global and Enterprise perspective of Government, Universities, Private, Enterprises, and Individuals, AI has become a source of every conversation and has quite a few misconceptions.
We are implementing narrow AI in many cases that are data driven decisions and still far off from general AI.
As we forge on, there are multiple things to consider.
A. The state of AI
B. Where we are heading in the next 5-8 years
C. What is Expected
D. What it is not
E. What are the challenges
F. AI Strategy for Organizations - What to Look for? Where to Start?
G. New Jobs/Products
H. Forecasting from top organizations (IBM/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/Forrester/Sony; Universities such as Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley; Government approaches what Las Vegas and Los Angeles is implementing; Security Measures)
Speakers
avatar for Erika Steele

Erika Steele

IT Futurologist/Certified MIT AI Strategist, Oxford Road
Erika is Executive Producer of over 15 internationally acclaimed global films and series, as well as CEO, COO of companies, promoter, engineer, business adviser, futurologist, strategist, and Certified in Artificial Intelligence Organizational Strategy from MIT. Ameritech, Viacom... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, professionals

1:30pm

AutoML - The Future of AI
The key challenge in making AI technology more accessible to the broader community is the scarcity of AI experts. Most businesses simply don’t have the much needed resources or skills for modeling and engineering. This is why automated machine learning and deep learning technologies (AutoML and AutoDL) are increasingly valued by academics and industries. The core of AI lies in the model design. Automated machine learning technologies reduce the barrier to AI application, enabling developers with no AI expertise to independently and easily develop and deploy AI models. Automated machine learning is expected to completely overturn the AI industry in the next few years, making AI accessible to everyone
Speakers
avatar for Ning Jiang

Ning Jiang

CTO, OneClick.ai
Ning Jiang is CTO of oneclick.ai, a leading platform in automating deep learning model design and deployment. Ning has over 15 years of experience in Machine Learning across multiple industries, including web/entity search, search ads, online retail, and cyber security. His was a... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

1:30pm

Digital Identity and Compliance
Discuss the merits of a strong self sovereign digital identity and the methodologies used to establish the identity and user's control. In addition, discuss the need for better compliance in the blockchain/financial services and other industries.
Speakers
avatar for Ed Zabar

Ed Zabar

CEO, Verif-y
Ed Zabar, Founder & CEO. Over 20 years of broad management and business experience; helped found two technology companies and was involved in successfully selling them in the early 2000’s; worked at several fortune 500 companies in technology roles; fulfilled role as head of sales... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

1:30pm

Deep Learning for NLP (Natural Language Processing)
As my main focus is on applying Deep Learning techniques in NLP (Natural Language Processing) field, I would love to speak about couple of my research projects which I did with New York University. First one was on Reading Comprehension task, where we tried to beat the state of the art models with experiments on attention based RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) models. We performed our task on two Daily Mail reading comprehension data set. Second one was with Prof. Kyunghyun Cho, where our main goal was to develop a system capable of summarizing content for user query. Here as well we tried to solve the problem with variety of convolution and recurrent neural networks with attention.


I would like to start my session by introducing the development of Deep Learning since last few years in NLP domain. I can control the technical level of my speech based on the level of audience.


More information on these research projects is available on these links below:
Summarization : https://github.com/up276/NLP2K16/blob/master/Two_Layer_Attention_Reading_Comprehension/NLP_Project_Paper_up276_vec241.pdf


Reading Comprehension: https://github.com/up276/QueryBasedSummarizationNLP/blob/master/IndependentStudyReport_vec241_up276.pdf


Other projects: https://cims.nyu.edu/~up276/info.html
Speakers
avatar for Urjit Patel

Urjit Patel

Data Scientist, Praedicat Inc | New York University
I hold a Master’s degree in Data Science from New York University. I am an active researcher in Deep Learning and NLP domain. I was part of Prof. Kyunghyun Cho's (CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar) NLP research group at NYU. I was a Teaching Assistant for Prof. Yann LeCun (Director of... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science

1:30pm

Marketing Like a Musician
I saw that the IDEAS conference is coming to L.A. in October. Since L.A. is my home, I would love to come and speak. I do talks about how to think like musicians when it comes to problem solving, marketing, engaging audiences, etc. I’d also be happy to share how I grew a Facebook audience for my business, PianoCub, to over 44K followers.
Here’s some footage of a recent talk of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7NiUDs9gx0
Speakers
avatar for David Brown

David Brown

Entrepreneur/Musician, PianoCub
David Asher Brown is a rare voice among young, American composers. The Metropolitan Opera’s William Lewis praised him as, “one of the most brilliant music makers it has been my pleasure to serve”. His composition craft innovatively draws on the sounds and techniques of everything... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:30pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

1:40pm

Investment on AI
Speakers
avatar for Shawn Chen

Shawn Chen

Global Partner, Plug and Play
Dr. Chen is the Global Partner of Plug and Play and the founder and chairman of Sias International University. He is also the Chairman of the Advisory Council of the Association of Universities of Asia and the Pacific (AUAP). He served as the President of the AUAP from 2014 to 2016... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 1:40pm - 2:10pm
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning

1:50pm

UCTV Signing Ceremony/AI Monster Signing Ceremony
Saturday October 20, 2018 1:50pm - 2:00pm
Ballroom # 404
  Deep Learning

2:00pm

Borg Orgs: AI, Neuroscience and the Future of Media Borg Orgs: AI, Neuroscience and the Future of Media
At a time when the entertainment industry faces a landscape of exponential complexity, studios are dedicating more resources to leveraging machine intelligence to develop more granular insights into their market. The availability of rich data and research on the mechanics of cognition on one side, and advanced computing paradigms on the other, promises to take those who experiment with it into a deeper understanding of film audiences. But the road to AI-driven decisions in media is intricate, and a lot of questions remain. This talk aims at answering these basic questions about what machine intelligence is and what industry problems it can be applied to by looking at concrete examples of AI methods and tools developed for the entertainment industry inside of USC’s Entertainment Technology Center. At ETC, Yves Bergquist (director of the “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project) and his team have been working for the past two years to architect and prototype advanced AI applications to create a deeper understanding of the cognitive relationship between film stories and film audiences, and what narrative structures in film correlate to more popularity. Yves will unveil the results of his team’s research (which is funded by all 6 Hollywood studios and major tech companies) and demonstrate a few AI applications he’s been working on which promise to change the way the industry thinks about its product and audiences.
Speakers
avatar for Yves Bergquist

Yves Bergquist

Director, “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project
Yves Bergquist is the Director of the “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project at the Entertainment Technology Center, where his team is developing next-generation applications drawn from AI and neuroscience for the media and entertainment industry. Yves is also CEO of AI startup... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, beginners

2:00pm

The Future of Prediction: Utilizing Unsupervised Learning
Advances in Artificial Intelligence over the past few years have focused on the ability to build better predictive models using a variety of techniques, not the least of which is deep learning. These approaches, however, require massive datasets and restrict their utility for enterprise grade problems. Complicating matters further, the vast majority of enterprise data is unlabeled creating an additional class of challenges.


The future of prediction lies upstream in the analytical process – in the unsupervised learning techniques of segmentation, anomaly detection and hotspot detection. Here, unencumbered by labels, or even the requirement to know what you are looking for, lies the keys to improving the performance of prediction. This nascent form of machine learning has already had enormous impact on some of today’s largest enterprises across finance, government and healthcare.


In this session, Gunnar Carlsson, President & Co-Founder at Ayasdi, will dive deeper into unsupervised learning and why this is the next frontier in AI. He'll break the problem down technically and practically – discussing feature generation, dimensionality reduction and how to get started. In doing so she will explore key enterprise uses cases ranging from fraud detection, financial crime and population health
Speakers
TO

Tom O'Neill

Head of Data, Periscope Data
Gunnar Carlsson is the President & Co-Founder of Ayasdi. He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from Stanford University. Over the past 35 years, Gunnar has taught at the University of Chicago, University of California, Princeton University, and has... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI

2:00pm

Modernizing and Digitally Transforming Traditional Industrial Companies Using IoT and AI
Most companies today are still relying on traditional assets -- equipment and people -- and outdated business models to compete in an highly dynamic, disruptive industry landscape. In this talk, presenter will describe in in detail, an actual recent client case study where he helped a $1.5B traditional B2B services company which owns over one million "machines" and 100K+ clients to move to a IoT and AI based business model to both generate new $250M earnings (both new sources of revenue and operational cost savings), and in doing so, begin to serve 20M consumers (i.e., also become a B2B2C company), and in the process, transform from a traditional blue collar service company to a modern, data-driven digital company. The presentation will include details examples of use of IoT, advanced data science, AI (Machines Learning, Predictive Analytics) across broad areas of the project.
Speakers
avatar for Sugath Warnakulasuriya

Sugath Warnakulasuriya

Managing Director, Thalamus Labs
Dr. Sugath Warnakulasuriya, Managing Director of Thalamus Labs, is a strategic advisor and entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience in innovation and growth for enterprises and startups. He has been a consultant with McKinsey & Co, and co-founded two companies: 10EQS and eLink Commerce... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

2:00pm

Blockchain and the Law
Discussing legal implications of blockchains, including how to address issues with jurisdiction, liability, and enforcement with respect to disputes that arise involving such decentralized systems. Specifically, as physical real-world assets become tied to blockchains such issues become particularly important as disputes arising from either error in smart contract code or fraud will become more prevalent and will have to be addressed. If forethought is not put into contract drafting and the smart contract coding then the result will be situations where multiple countries may have jurisdiction and laws applicable to the transaction at issue may conflict as arguably every physical location a node is located will be a point for jurisdiction. Also discussing additional unintended complications arising from use of blockchains that people fail to realize. For example, how crypto assets are stored would be important in divorce cases. Additionally, illegal content can be embedded on blockchains and then more easily and anonymously distributed – i.e. copyright infringing materials, revenge porn, malware, etc.
Speakers
avatar for Morvareed Salehpour

Morvareed Salehpour

Managing Partner, Salepour Legal Consulting
Morvareed Z. Salehpour is managing partner of Salehpour Legal Consulting, a boutique law firm which provides big firm representation at small firm prices. She specializes in handling a diverse range of complex legal matters both in and outside the courtroom. She is experienced in... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect

2:00pm

Analytics for Industrial Cyber Control Security
Modern industrial control systems are highly automated and often controlled by computers and connected devices. In addition to physical failures, cyber attacks present an increasing threat to normal system operations. We propose an unsupervised learning approach for automated detection of adverse cyber attacks. In particular, we will devise the unsupervised learning based approaches for anomaly detection using only datasets collected under normal system conditions. Anomaly detection techniques are extremely useful for real-life system security management because cyber attacks rarely happen in practice even though their impact could be disastrous. We conduct detailed studies on a water treatment plant in which water processes are all connected by computer control systems. We demonstrate our analytics tools can effectively detect new types of cyber attacks and, moreover, can locate potential attacking points and compromised control units or devises
Speakers
avatar for Honggang Wang

Honggang Wang

Assistant Professor, University of La Verne
Honggang Wang is an assistant professor in Analytics in College of Business and Public Management at University of La Verne. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in Power Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 1996, Master of Science in Manufacturing... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, professionals

2:00pm

Data Science for Good – A Case Study in Wisconsin Higher Ed
Speakers
avatar for Fletcher Riehl

Fletcher Riehl

Data Scientist, System1
I am a Data Scientist at System1. System1 is the world’s largest independent marketplace for keyword pay-per-click advertising. I work on optimization and forecasting projects for the SEM and native advertising lines of business. Prior to System1 I was a software engineer at Maker... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:00pm - 2:30pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science

2:20pm

Startup Pitch for AI, Data Science & Blockchain
Startup Pitch Projects: 
  • Healora DirectPay
  • Qoop
  • Boid.com
  • Koder Platform
  • SLOT - An Off-Chain Smart Contract System
  • OneClick.ai -- AI for everyone.
  • AI-Based Human Body Modeling & Measuring Solution For Mobile Platform
  • Tinkr Garage
  • Intelligent AI-powered Digital Assistants that are changing the way we shop, buy, and own vehicles
  • AIVON
Saturday October 20, 2018 2:20pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 404
  Innovation, beginners

2:30pm

Control Automation with Reinforcement Learning and Engineering Simulation
The complexity of controlling machineries with sophisticated rules in manufacturing and hard technologies makes them a good candidate for Reinforcement Learning (RL). This has the potential to generate billions of dollars in increased performance and efficiency. RL algorithms usually require a lot of trials and it is expensive and dangerous to run physical trials. Using RL and industrial simulation will not only optimize the rules of operating for more efficiency and time saving, it also can disrupt manufacturing by developing new methods that require less complicated machinery. The proposed solution is an RL as a service that is catered toward control engineers. We used a problem in rocket engines to develop a proof of concept. The goal was to develop a control loop for a system that mixes two fluids (oxygen and methane) and adapt to changing requirements for the output of the mixer. The platform will generate a rule to control inputs to the mixer in response to changes in the requirement for output.
Speakers
avatar for Edward Mehr

Edward Mehr

CEO, Cyberpunk Lab
Edward Mehr is an entrepreneur and engineer with the background in smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and CEO of Cyberpunk Lab, a company that provides AI solutions in manufacturing. Previously at Relativity Space, He led a team, in charge of developing... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

2:30pm

Data Teams: The Moral Compass of AI
As data becomes more accessible to everyone, and as artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies become part of our everyday lives, data teams are increasingly taking on a very important moral role as the conscience of their corporations, given their critical role in building the algorithms that translate data into action. Beyond just governing AI/ML processes to ensure they are accurate, it is now the data teams’ job to use their skills to be the moral compass of their organization and prevent unchallenged biases from influencing the world behind their walls.


Harry Glaser, the CEO & Founder of Periscope Data, will seek to answer the question of “How do you balance your responsibility to do what’s best for the company with your moral responsibility as a member of society?” He will discuss how companies are taking charge to ensure their data is used properly, explore different ways to add human intelligence to artificial intelligence, and provide insight into how to equip your data team with the right tools like NLP, SQL, Python, and R in a unified platform to perform their jobs while upholding their ethical duties.
Speakers
avatar for Harry Glaser

Harry Glaser

CEO & Co-Founder, Periscope Data
Harry Glaser is the Co-Founder and CEO of Periscope Data, an end-to-end analytics platform enabling powerful data team collaboration for over 1000 customers globally, including New Relic, Adobe, Ernst & Young, Flexport and more. Periscope was rated the best small company to work for... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

2:30pm

Big Data for the Rest of Us
Its an exciting time in the Big Data and Machine learning space! Never before has there been such an abundance of open-source tools and projects available for companies to leverage when they build their big data solution.


Leveraging the correct framework can significantly accelerate the development of a big data solution, making it simplicity for small teams to develop solutions that scale to terabyte data sets with relative ease. However, it is important to understand that each of the available frameworks are targeted at addressing specific pain points, that may, or may not, be relevant to your specific requirements and environment. The use of poorly suited frameworks, at best, provide little benefit to development and potentially introduces significant unnecessary complexities and downstream limitations.


In this presentation we highlight key factors to consider when developing a big data architecture, discuss the applicability of different big data frameworks to design around and the benefits and pitfalls associated with many of the common frameworks.
Speakers
avatar for Lawrence Spracklen

Lawrence Spracklen

VP of Engineering, SupportLogic, Inc.
Dr. Lawrence Spracklen leads engineering at SupportLogic, where he leads a team applying AI to the enterprise technical support space. Prior to joining SupportLogic, Lawrence lead engineering teams at two other ML startups; Alpine Data and Ayasdi. Before this, Lawrence spent over... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, professionals

2:30pm

Leveraging Blockchain for identity and Authentication for IoT
Since the inception of the internet, attempts have been made to solve the problem of privacy and security. These efforts demonstrate the challenge of inconvenience, cost and insecurity. In this session we’ll discuss Blockchain technology and its mutual distributed ledgers (MDL). The unique benefits of the MDL’s that allow companies to record, validate and track transactions throughout a network of decentralized computer systems will be presented. You’ll hear how these blockchains and its MDLs could open the door to innovation and improve your identity and authentication efforts in the future. The applications include: Financial transactions, Healthcare, Smart Contracts, Telecom, manufacturing, consumer and high technology. Blockchain will continue to change and disrupt transaction based industries.
Speakers
avatar for Don Malloy

Don Malloy

Chair, OATH
Donald Malloy is the Chairman of OATH, The Initiative for Open Authentication. OATH is an industry alliance that has transformed the authentication market from proprietary systems to an open source standard based architecture promoting ubiquitous strong authentication used by most... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, professionals

2:30pm

Beyond Chat Bots: Towards Truly Intelligent Conversational Agents
Alexa and other chat bots have taken the world by storm. However, the current reality is that natural language applications have severe limitations, failing on tasks that even a child could easily handle. They typically have no memory of what was said earlier, don't reason about their task, and have no common sense. Moreover, they are usually engineered to perform just one specific task -- i.e. they do not have any general intelligence.


Originally (the first wave), conversational agents were programmed manually using logic flow. Everyone is well aware of limitations in scaling and maintaining such system. More recently (in the second wave), big data and machine learning have automated task classification (intent identification) and some key parameter extraction. However, we now also understand the difficulty in obtaining massive amounts of manually tagged training data, and the problems with lack of transparency, reasoning, and real-time adaptability in these systems.


This talk will explain how a cognitive architecture approach can overcome many of these limitations and provide a much more intelligent platform for conversation agent. A practical example of this 'third wave' technology will be demonstrated.
Speakers
avatar for Peter Voss

Peter Voss

CEO/Chief Scientist, Aigo.ai Inc
Peter Voss’ careers include being an entrepreneur, engineer, and scientist. His experience includes growing a computer solutions company from zero to a 400-person IPO. For the past 15 years, his focus has been on developing AGI (artificial general intelligence). In 2009 Peter founded... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science

2:30pm

Deploying Data Science Engines to Production: Comparing Options + Code Examples
Reducing the gap between R&D and production is still a challenge for data science/ machine learning engineering groups in many companies. Typically, data scientists develop the data-driven models in a research-oriented programming environment (such as R and python). Next, the data/machine learning engineers rewrite the code (typically in another programming language) in a way that is easy to integrate with production services. This process has some disadvantages: 1) It is time consuming; 2) slows the impact of data science team on business; 3) code rewriting is prone to errors. A possible solution to overcome the aforementioned disadvantages would be to implement a deployment strategy that easily embeds/transforms the model created by data scientists. Packages and products such as jPMML, MLeap, PFA, Amazon SageMaker, and PMML among others are developed for this purpose. In this talk we review some of the mentioned packages along with a coding exercise, motivated by a real world project at Meredith Corp. The project involves development of a near real-time recommender system, which includes a predictor engine, paired with a set of business rules.
Speakers
avatar for Mostafa Majidpour

Mostafa Majidpour

Senior Data Scientist, Meredith
Mostafa Majidpour is a Senior Data Scientist with Meredith (previously Time Inc) working on harvesting the power of machine learning for various user experience related recommendation engines. Previously at ZEFR, he has been involved in building/improving their forecasting engine... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 2:30pm - 3:00pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, experts

3:00pm

Making Real-Time Predictive Decisions with Redis
The primary focus of most machine learning research and development centers on the training side of the problem. Multiple frameworks, in every language, provide developers with access to a host of data manipulation and training algorithms, but until recently developers had virtually no frameworks for building real-time predictive engines from trained ML models. Most developers resort to building custom applications, yet building highly available and performant applications is difficult. Redis in conjunction with the Redis-ML module provides a framework for developers to build predictive engines with familiar, off-the-shelf components. Developers can take advantage of all the features of Redis to deliver faster and more reliable prediction engines with less custom development.

Speakers
avatar for Dave Nielsen

Dave Nielsen

Head of Ecosystem Programs, Redis Labs
As Head of Ecosystem Programs, Dave engages with emerging technologies and open source projects like Microservices, Serverless & Kubernetes to bring the magic of Redis to the broader developer community. Dave has extensive ecosystem experience from his years of engagement in the web... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI

3:00pm

Using data science to find clinical trial patients in minutes, not months
Clinical trials are a critical step in bringing new life-saving treatments to the market. However, each year, we recruit less than 40% of the patients required for US clinical trials. This affects millions of lives, costs the industry billions of dollars, and slows down innovation in healthcare as a whole.


Scott Hoch, lead data scientist at Deep 6 AI, will talk about how his team is applying various ML, NLP, AI, and data engineering techniques to a wide variety of clinical data in an effort to solve the patient recruitment problem. Scott will touch upon specific challenges and opportunities and how Deep 6 works to leverage AI and UI to achieve a solid ROI, for health systems and pharma.
Speakers
avatar for Scott Hoch

Scott Hoch

Lead Data Scientist, Deep 6 AI
Scott is a lead data engineer at Deep6 AI working to accelerate patient recruitment to clinical trials with the goal of bringing life-saving cures to people faster. His engineering career started in the physics lab leading to 7 peer-reviewed publications in precision measurement... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI

3:00pm

Demand Forecasting with Real World Data
7 years ago , a consulting assignment for demand forecasting for one of our client sent us on a wild goose chase and brought some interesting actionable insights for our client. I am planning to do a working session with real world like data to derive insights while guiding the attendees on common pitfalls. We had done our initial analysis in SPSS, but I am planning to do the session on R/Python .
Agenda:
1) Introduction to Demand Forecasting Concepts - 5 mins
2) Algorithms typically used for Demand forecasting - 5mins
3) Introduce the data , business context - 5 mins
4) Tasks include cleaning data for outliers, null values, modelling - 30 mins
5) Analysis of Results and model selection - 5 mins
6) Analysis of Residual Error - 5 mins
7) Other Insights - 5 mins
Speakers
avatar for Sarat Tatineni

Sarat Tatineni

Senior Manager, Cognizant
I am a development manager , currently leading a team of data analysts for an Insurance client. My areas of expertise include predictive analytics, modeling, business intelligence , big data and data warehousing. I work on platforms & languages such as Python , Scala, Spark ML , SQL... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, beginners

3:00pm

The Power of Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency
Empower anyone who wants to participate in the crypto markets, regardless of experience, by providing them with an AI powered toolkit in a cost effective and readily accessible manner. This has the potential to enable our users to participate in these markets without friction, thus, giving everyone equal opportunity to claim their stake in the future of money.
Speakers
avatar for Sam Czertok

Sam Czertok


Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, beginners

3:00pm

Location Intelligence Goes Big in Digital Marketing
The dawn of digital marketing began with search ads, then proceeded to social ads and now has evolved to include geospatial ads. Location Intelligence is the discipline that analyzes the petabytes of location data generated daily by mobile devices to extract meaningful and actionable consumer insights.


Predicting customer intent is an age-old problem. With more than 80% of sales still occurring in brick and mortar stores, it is important to understand the customer intent. Currently, many marketers such as Facebook and Snapchat are using location data to calculate ROI and lift of in-store visits for their ads. In this session, I will discuss ways to advance our understanding of store visitors using location intelligence: who they are and what they do in the physical world.
Speakers
avatar for Annie Flippo

Annie Flippo

Manager of Analytics, Thinknear by Telenav
Annie Flippo works as the Head of Data Science & Analytics at Thinknear by Telenav, a GPS navigation software, connected car and mobile advertising company. She is a data science expert focusing on the application of machine learning techniques to extract insights in the areas of... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science, beginners

3:00pm

Machine Learning on Social Networks
Social networks are extremely common in our modern-day world. These networks are composed of individuals and connections, where connections here represent social interactions such as friendship, peer or work relationships, and communication. Social network data can originate from many sources including online social networks, mobile phones, email, financial transactions or a variety of digital communications channels over which individuals interact. Social networks are typically very large and heterogeneous, and while the construction of features from this data can be quite complex it can often justify itself by providing great signal for machine learning prediction tasks.


In this presentation I will describe the social networks that I work with as a data scientist in Tala, how we construct these networks from our various data sources and how we use these networks for machine learning tasks including credit scoring and fraud prediction. I will talk about the complexities and nuances of using this data, and considerations and challenges that arise when building live scoring machine learning models based on this data. I will describe local network features (based on individuals' direct connections) and global network features (based on an individual’s position or centrality within the network), and approximation methods for global metrics which allow for their rapid implementation in live models. I will discuss the effectiveness of models based on network features and conclude with other use cases of networks in data science.
Speakers
avatar for Peter Fennell

Peter Fennell

Data Scientist, Tala
Dr. Peter Fennell is a Data Scientist at Tala where he uses A.I. to build credit and fraud models for Tala’s global markets. Peter received his PhD in applied mathematics and network science at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and previous to Tala was a James S. McDonnell postdoctoral... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:00pm - 3:30pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, professionals

3:30pm

How businesses are leveraging Google Cloud AI to think big and transform – using ML to improve the taste of beer!
Manju and Raj will share how Google Cloud AI is being leveraged for business transformation across Retail, Supply Chain and Manufacturing Industries. For example, Learn how machine learning and Ai is used to optimize the beer manufacturing process. This use cases have a direct impact on the production line and identifying downtime of equipment and huge impact on cost, time and quality of beer being produced. The role of the of machine learning and Ai is to improve the manufacturing process while in turn improves the quality while driving higher ROI through the undisruptive production process. Listen to experts on how keras Deep Learning was used with classifications of good parts vs. bad parts using Tensorflow. The model will be deployed to Google Cloud Machine Learning Engine where it will make predictions about the new data that is fed every day with an interactive dashboard using Data Studio.
Speakers
avatar for Manju Devadas

Manju Devadas

Founder & CEO, Pluto7
Manju Devadas is the founder/CEO of Pluto7 which is one of the top 5 breakthrough partner of the year award by Google with ML and AI focus. He has overall 17+ years experience in predictive analytics and as an Executive, Technology Leader and Architect he has helped companies with... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

3:30pm

What to expect from AI?
To understand how the evolution of AI translates into the work, it is important to understand the specific use cases of and the value AI delivers. The benefits to a company either come with increasing revenue or decreasing costs. This is usually accomplished with better predictions of the customer, competitor activity or through better allocation of resources.


So, the real value lies in predicting the future. Every action taken by a company or employee is guided by certain rules or occur in specific conditions. The recent advances in this field, especially in machine learning, have provided us with necessary frameworks and tools to apply thinking at scale. Therefore, AI has reduced the cost of prediction. So, how do we navigate in a world where the cost of prediction is so low and the value of prediction is high?


Judgment, an ability to make decisions by understanding the impact of different actions in the real world, is increasingly becoming an important skill. AI is forcing us to become more skilled in making decisions. This also presents a managerial challenge of preparing employees for the new world and making sure that the right skillsets exist in the organization. Training, understanding the rate of adoption and designing processes that help build effective conversations and collaboration is the key to success.
Speakers
avatar for Goutham Budati

Goutham Budati

Director of Analytics, Oxford Road
Goutham currently leads the Analytics team at Oxford Road, ad agency focussed on scaling disruptive companies. His team works on attribution, predictions, media optimizations and creative analytics. He is driving the adoption of Machine Learning across the organization to improve... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, beginners

3:30pm

Using Big Data, Insight and Automation to Transform Industries
As Machine Learning becomes mainstream, companies and individuals are trying to figure out how to navigate through the various options. There are opportunities, thanks to the availability of a massive amount of data (both personal and contextual) and information-crunching algorithms. The key is to gain insight that provides real benefits. And achieve automation that closely resembles our decision-making processes.


During my presentation, I will provide technical details and will summarize how companies in various industries (healthcare, marketing, retail, distribution, automotive, agriculture, etc) are leaping ahead of their competition by utilizing these added insights. I will also cover opportunities for consumers and how they stand to benefit from this revolution.


It's time Artificial Intelligence stops being just a buzzword
Speakers
avatar for Nadeem Moghal

Nadeem Moghal

Executive Director of Technology and Operations, Barco Uniforms
An engineer by education and technologist by experience, I have spent my career in analyzing operational challenges and in implementing technology to optimize everything that we do. I have designed solutions to transforms companies ranging from 5 to 200,000 global employees. These... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data, experts

3:30pm

Should your company be on the blockchain?
Blockchain-based solutions are destined to not only disrupt the financial industry but will impact many other industries. Companies that want to stay relevant must understand how blockchains might impact their business and whether they themselves should deploy blockchain technology or tokenize and existing business model.
Speakers
avatar for Christian Kameir

Christian Kameir

Managing Partner, Sustany Capital
Christian Kameir is Managing Partner at Sustany Capital, a venture capital firm investing in blockchain technologies that are reshaping the business landscape. Christian has been a tech entrepreneur since the dial-up days and is an expert in future technologies, network effects and... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect

3:30pm

Labeling Foot Traffic in Dense Locations
Mobile sensor data is enabling us to better understand user behavior. It is now possible to accurately and persistently model foot traffic to brick-and-mortar retail stores and other points of interest in near real-time. However, this capability comes with increasing state-of-the-art data processing and machine learning challenges.
Locations of stores in dense areas, such as shopping malls, are often indistinguishable using lat/long or street address data because of their close geographical proximity. This creates a complex problem for accurate foot traffic estimation to these stores, especially in the absence of accurate, large-scale ground truth data. The problem is further aggravated by the diverse nature of user behavior and visit frequency to stores of different categories.
In this talk, I describe our approach at Sense360 to solve this. In particular, I will talk about framing this issue as a probabilistic learning problem, engineering features from point-of-interest data, and using regularization. The developed approach is currently being used at Sense360 to further boost the accuracy of our market research insights
Speakers
avatar for Om Patri

Om Patri

Data Scientist, Sense360
Om is a Data Scientist at Sense360, a market research and insights firm in Culver City, CA, which enables some of the world’s largest restaurant and retail companies to continuously measure and optimize their business in real-time. He focuses on using AI and machine learning approaches... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science

3:30pm

Understanding Chatbots and Building Chatbot using Rasa Tech Stack
Understanding Chatbots and Building Chatbot using Rasa Tech Stack
Brief Description: Chatbots are one of the most emerging topic in the space of Artificial Intelligence. We have already started seeing a lot of chat-bots around us wherein we can literally do conversation with those virtual assistants without even realizing its a bot not a real human.
All the big giants of information technology are coming up with their own frameworks to build chat-bots. Industry have already started putting a lot of focus towards building Machine Learning/Deep Learning based chatbots. Considering it is one of the most important and hot topic across industry, this session is going to explain how Natural Language Processing can be used to develop state of the art chat bots or virtual assistant.
This session will explain all the nuts and bolts of a chatbot, explaining how Natural Language Understanding(NLU) plays a vital role in developing a chatbot. And how can we create our own NLU system using NLP or Text Analytics. We will also showcase a chatbot demo that can search restaurants given any natural language query by the user. Also we will help audience to learn building a chatbot using one of the open source platform. And finally how we can integrate our chatbot with one of public channels such as Facebook, Skype or Slack.
Speakers
avatar for anuj saini

anuj saini

sr data scientist, Sapient
Anuj is a Solutions Architect working with Sapient with 10 years of experience in the area of Data Science. Anuj has worked in various domains like Finance, Banking, Food Industry, and e-commerce industry. He holds Master degree in Computer Applications from YMCA. His interest areas... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 3:30pm - 4:00pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science

4:00pm

Introducing Cranial: The Machine learning Engineer’s Open Source Toolbox
An introduction to the open-source Python code library and Framework for accelerating the Data-Science-to-Production pipeline and delivering scalable, distributed AI- and Machine-Learning-backed services. It provides:
- Standardized interfaces for Data Storage & Retrieval with many Databases, Protocols, and Filesystems;
- Synchronous and Asynchronous Messaging with or without brokers;
- Wrappers for ML models providing interoperability with these Data & Messaging Services.


This Python Programmer's toolkit was developed at Tribune Publishing and powers successful Content Recommendation services that learn from user behavior in real-time, for the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, but was developed as a general solution for delivering Data Pipelines with a focus on the needs of high-speed, high volume Online Learning Models.


This presentation will identify how Cranial fits into the current ecosystem of Data Science & Engineering platforms, comparing and contrasting to Airflow, Spark, Tensorflow, and related technologies. We'll give an overview of the capabilities provided and how to use them to solve common problems, and walk through the specific implementation of the Tribune Content Recommendation System with Cranial and Tensorflow. Finally, we'll discuss future goals of the Cranial project and how users can shape its future direction.
Speakers
avatar for Matt Chapman

Matt Chapman

Manager & Data engineering, mPulse Mobile
Matt is currently the Manager of Data Engineering at mPulse Mobile, a company providing innovative messaging solutions to Health Care providers. Previously, Matt was the founding Data Engineer for Tribune Interactive’s Data Science team, designing and implementing an in-house News... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, beginners

4:00pm

Machine, Stategy, and You: AI & Our Future
Big Data, Robotics and Artificial intelligence are coming from every direction. This fact filled, actionable and eye-opening talk explores the relationship between our strategies to win, the role of machines in our future and fears of machine mastery. The session provides the audience with choices and decision drivers regarding AI and our collective future. The audience will leave with a new found faith in the future.
Speakers
avatar for Sid Mohasseb

Sid Mohasseb

CEO, Anabasis
I am a serial entrepreneur, venture investor, author, speaker, and thought leader on artificial intelligence and data analytics. My book, The Caterpillar’s Edge, was published last year and is being used at universities around the world. The book revolves around the topic of business... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, professionals

4:00pm

Data Rescue – Guerrilla Data Capture for Extremely Large Data Sets
The US Government creates and maintains perhaps the largest datasets of any single government. But often times that data is not easily available, or is not publicly available for various reasons. Here the interesting escapades of how a group of citizen scientists harvested the single greatest treasure trove of raw scientific data in the United States, recovered from a harvest-day server crash, and got kicked off GoDaddy. What is the role of the public? The private sector? Or the Tech community in this important effort? Who are these people, anyway? What we did, how we did it, and where the effort stands today
Speakers
avatar for Joan Saez

Joan Saez

Chief Data Officer, Cloud BIRST, Inc.
Joan Torres-Saez is the Chief Data Officer of CloudBIRST, Inc. where she manages huge datasets that provide meaningful insights on consumer behavior . She spearheaded the collection and topology of over 2,000 data points on every single city, town, county and zip code in the United... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data

4:00pm

How AI can maximize one’s portfolio through cryptocurrency Investing
Artificial Intelligence helps us build a new token economy. Blockchain, and the tokens built upon them, will continue to
transform and flourish. Despite the potential for resistance that transformative technologies seem to face, the revolution that is taking place will forever change the way we store value. There have been plenty of developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We have Siri and Alexa and now Juliet. A Machine learning algorithm deployed to leverage AI in the crypto markets for the regular person. An unbiased global data consuming algorithm makes that has personality. AI with a name. Is it a fad or is there a reason.
Speakers
avatar for IIana Fraines

IIana Fraines

Co-Founder & Lead Blockchain Developer, TokenAI
Ilana Fraines is the co-founder and lead blockchain developer at TokenAI, a cryptocurrency investing platform powered by Artificial Intelligence. After discovering computer science at an early age, Ilana began developing apps and eventually became a full-time software developer for... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect, beginners

4:00pm

Becoming Best Buds: Modernizing How Government Treats Business
Government is not known for being business friendly, taxes suck, and bureaucracies move slow. All these things are true - so how can government switch things up enough so that it actually helps entrepreneurs and business owners?
Learn how the Los Angeles Office of Finance is answering this question through use cases that look at technology, people, and process working in unison towards goals and impact.
During our time together we will learn protips and strategies in change management through product development, data management, and human relations.
We'll explore basic strategy, use of tools, visualization techniques, lessons learned from wins and failures, and actionable steps to implement lessons in your own work.
This presentation is not limited to government employees - everyone interacts with government, either as an individual or a professional, so come learn how the second largest city in the country is improving the relationships between government and its local business community.
Speakers
avatar for Juan Vasquez

Juan Vasquez

Data Program Manager, City of Los Angeles of Finance
As Data Programs Manager at the Office of Finance, Juan blends data, operations, engagement, and creativity to help the 300-person department better serve customers. He uses tools like Esri ArcGIS Online, Tableau, and Socrata to analyze, visualize, and contextualize actionable insights... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science

4:00pm

Data Science That Drives Business Outcomes: A Case in the Practice Growth Space
As a discipline, Data Science continues to experience a boom in growth. Not too long ago, use of data and models were mostly confined to Finance departments, but they've now become critical in optimizing across all company functions, with ever-growing use cases in Product, Marketing, Operations, and a multitude of others. With such growth, many companies have gotten caught up in the hype, doing data science just for the sake of doing it, and without a clear plan on how it will have an impact on the business and on the bottom line. To get value, Data Science teams must work with business stakeholders to build data products that are embedded into company functions and business goals. Learn how PatientPop, the leader in the Practice Growth platform space, is undertaking this challenge in a way that serves Doctors, improves experience of their patients, and amplifies our business. In this talk, I'll share our vision for a combined data science and business strategy, and show how our business drives our data science efforts, which in turn improve existing functions and enable entirely new ones.
Speakers
avatar for Charalampos Papadimitriou

Charalampos Papadimitriou

Lead Data Scientist, PatientPop
Charalampos founded and is the Lead Data Scientist of the data science team at PatientPop, where he works on data science projects, programs, and process. Previously, he worked at DataScience.com where he lead data science consulting engagements with client companies big and small... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:00pm - 4:30pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, beginners

4:30pm

AI in Digital Transformation Journey: Make Two Millennia of Live Conversation Searchable
Advancements in AI, which is driven by deep learning, are enabling enterprise companies to transform their workflow. In this talk, we will discuss how AI can change the customer contact centers that record millions of calls per day. The Gridspace Sift conversational search system is designed to search through billions of minutes of long-form, conversational speech data. The core technology allows for complex searches that combine semantic and signal information, and a method for executing constraints on time, logical structure, and metadata. The live demo highlighting use cases will be demonstrated. Also, we will introduce our ongoing work for other emerging problems on our journey for digital-transforming the industry including capturing emotions from conversation and building dialogue systems for human-like interactive voice systems(IVR).
Speakers
avatar for Wonkyum Lee

Wonkyum Lee

lead Software Engineer, Gridspace
Wonkyum Lee is Lead ASR Engineer at Gridspace, working on deep learning for various tasks in speech recognition, speech synthesis and NLP. He likes to write code and to play with GPUs. He studied at Carnegie Mellon University with the focus on automatic speech recognition and deep... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 406
  AI, professionals

4:30pm

Real-time Application of Deep Learning in Colonoscopy
Until recently, AI has not impacted time-sensitive procedures such as colonoscopy, during which potentially precancerous lesions can be missed in the blink of an eye. We will present our development and validation of multiple real-time AIs during colonoscopy to improve procedure quality and eliminate colorectal cancer. We envision a future where doctors can be doctors, and focus on the patient while letting AI take care of the rest. To that effect, we are developing AI differently, with a focus on assisting with the simplest and most important tasks.


Algorithm development is the first step, but making it function smoothly in a physician's already busy workflow is the biggest challenge. Toward that end, we've designed a new system architecture that enables several AIs to run simultaneously in real-time with no lag or framedrop, and have designed the AI to integrate seamlessly into workflow to reduce redundacy of documentation and can be turned on with a single button press.
Speakers
avatar for William Karnes

William Karnes

Chief Medical Officer/ Clinical Professor, UC Irvine
I am a gastroenterologist with a primary interest in colorectal cancer prevention. After several years as Director of Research in the Colorectal Neoplasia Clinic at the Mayo Clinic, I was recruited to UCI in 2012 to spearhead efforts to reduce colorectal cancer burden in Orange County... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 403A + Conference Registration + Open talk
  AI, professionals

4:30pm

Realtime Analytics Leveraging Serverless Computing
1.) Introduction to Serverless computing/Architecture - Serverless computing is a cloud-computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Building serverless applications means that your developers can focus on their core product instead of worrying about managing and operating servers or runtimes, either in the cloud or on-premises.
2.) How we use to generate our metrics in batch manner - Explaining nightly ETL's, collecting data throughout the day and running nightly ETL with spark and Scala to generate metrics (with diagram). Drawbacks of batch approach - the lag (up to 24 hours) in reporting provided a poor experience for end-users, as client base grew, the ETL costs were increasing significantly. Finally, the overhead of managing and provisioning resources to run the ETLs was becoming a pain point.
3.) How to generate metrics in real-time manner using Serverless computing - Leveraged Aws Lambda and explain the real-time system(with diagram). Advantages - pay per use, concentrate on the code, no managing of the servers and other resources, reduced lag to 30 secs, simplified infrastructure
4.) Caveats of serverless computing - statelessness, limited native language support, vendor dependencies, concurrent execution limits etc.
Speakers
avatar for Avi Sanadhya

Avi Sanadhya

Data Engineer, Retention Science
MS CS DataScience graduate from University of Southern California. Have 4 years of industry experience in Big Data domain. Have expertise in projects dealing with large, unstructured data sets. I believe that concurrent with growth, organizations face an exponential increase in the... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 408A
  Big Data

4:30pm

Blockchain’s Greatest Contribution
Exploration of new forms of governance may be blockchain’s greatest societal contribution.


For the first time in our known history, humanity has the tools to organize mass numbers of people in complex governance systems without needing approval/involvement of formal government entities or for the participants to be in geographic proximity to one another.


I define blockchain consensus mechanisms as models for aligning the incentives of individuals who don’t know or trust each other, such that they can securely transact in mutually beneficial ways, while building and sustaining a functioning economy by virtue of their participation.


Today we are seeing a Cambrian explosion of governance models being launched by a plethora of teams with unique philosophies and clever ideas.


One way to view this phenomenon is as mass experimentation on a global scale with real stakes. Blockchain networks can serve as a testing ground upon which we as a society learn what can work better than our current governance systems.


To me this is the most exciting aspect of blockchain technology. At the same time, these networks are generating massive value, as indicated by trading markets.


The potential wealth to be gained via speculation fuels the growth of what you might consider to be high potential research projects. This process is vital and beautifully synergistic
Speakers
avatar for Jeremy Musighi

Jeremy Musighi

Founder, Immutable Capital
Jeremy is the founder of Immutable Capital, a blockchain consultancy and cryptoasset investment fund. He is also founder of Sesh, unlocking human potential by combining mobile technology with live professional coaching. Previously, Jeremy served as co-founder and COO of Revenue.com... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 408B
  BlockChain Leadership Connect

4:30pm

Choosing the Right Cloud, a Machine Learning Approach
As cloud services have grown in maturity and offerings, the differentiations between them has shrunk. For example, many CSPs now provide capabilities to host and run Jupyter Notebooks for Data Science workloads, but what makes one different than the other? As a data scientist, I wanted to see if it would be possible to classify respective clouds by using machine learning. An effect dataset and model could provide insights to the differences in userbases among clouds, and could help those new to developing in cloud environments a resource to choose a cloud in which other users having similar coding styles, interests, and needs
Speakers
avatar for Nick Acosta

Nick Acosta

Developer Advocate, IBM
Before becoming a Developer Advocate at IBM, Nick studied computer science at Purdue University and the University of Southern California, and was a high performance computing consultant for Hewlett-Packard in Grenoble, France. He now specializes in machine learning and interacting... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 403B
  Data Science, beginners

4:30pm

Start Your Career in Data Science
Speakers
avatar for Jason Geng

Jason Geng

Chair of the Board, IDEAS
As committee chair of International Data Engineering and Science Association (IDEAS), Jason organized series of AI and data science conference at Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles. Jason is adjunct professor at University of Southern California. When worked at Symantec, Jason designed... Read More →

Saturday October 20, 2018 4:30pm - 5:00pm
Ballroom # 409
  Data Science