AI Envisioning Workshop at Philadelphia Azure DataFest

I'm hosting an AI Envisioning Workshop at the Philadelphia MTC on January 7. Read on to learn more.

I’m hosting an AI Envisioning Workshop at the Winter 2020 Philadelphia Azure DataFest on Jan 07 from 12:30-4:00.

Azure DataFest is a 1-day Data & AI conference hosted at Microsoft locations throughout the year. I’ve been a presenter at every Philly Azure DataFest since its inception. This is generally a 200-300 level technical event, but my workshop this year is helping business and IT leaders accelerate their AI journey. In my day job I talk with many enterprises about their data science initiatives. Some companies are just starting their journey, others are looking for ways to make the process more friction-less, and others don’t know where to start.

The State of the Industry in 2020

In this workshop we’ll talk about the enterprise trends in ML and AI in 2020 and how your company can benefit. The most mature companies are no longer doing advanced analytics in a lab or in an isolated environment trying to prove the value of data science to senior leadership. Instead, the value proposition is proven and companies instead are working on how to productionize their models and make them better with continuous improvement. But it doesn’t stop with that. Companies are beginning to change how they fundamentally organize themselves to leverage these new processes. For these companies “data science” is out of the experimentation phase. They are now trying to learn from their pain of getting the first few solutions from proof-of-concept to production.

In the recent past the data science teams were usually aligned with the business units and not IT. Each business unit (or at least many) had a data scientist building bespoke, narrow solutions specific for that business unit. Now even at smaller shops we are seeing data scientists consolidate onto teams where the focus is on building enterprise-class, transformational solutions where collaboration is adding lift. IT and DevOps is helping these teams get their models out-the-door in a controlled manner with feedback loops that make the solutions truly “learn”. The most advanced companies are building Centers of Excellence (CoE) for their analytics teams. Data governance is important, but so is building a data lake that encourages the use of “feature libraries” and collaboration.

Finally, ethics is top-of-mind. Everyday we read stories about biased algorithms that give a black eye to companies that didn’t pay enough attention to the explainability and interpretability of their models.

Get your tickets to Winter 2020 Philly Azure DataFest today ›

Workshop Agenda

All of the above topics are covered when I host these AI Envisioning Workshops. But don’t think this is a one-way conversation. We want customers to bring their questions so we can answer them together. Much of AI and data science is bleeding edge and everyone is doing it differently. Can’t think of any AI use cases for your business? No problem, we’ll give you plenty of case studies in various industries. And yes, sometimes are projects are not completely successful.

Are you convinced your data or cloud project will be a success?

Most companies aren’t. I have lots of experience with these projects. I speak at conferences, host hackathon events, and am a prolific open source contributor. I love helping companies with Data problems. If that sounds like someone you can trust, contact me.

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