Back to the program

Artificial Intelligence has arrived. After decades of wishful thinking and false-starts, we're seeing consistent evidence of industry applications where generalized approaches of automation can beat human experts. Major technology firms now battle for top experts, capabilities, market share, etc., and a robust ecosystem begins to emerge. Arguably, the lion's share of the discussion goes toward Deep Learning, although other areas of AI applications are emerging as well.

Recently, O'Reilly Media hosted its first Artificial Intelligence conference, including key insights from Peter Norvig, Tim O'Reilly, Yann LeCun, Lili Cheng, Genevieve Bell, Oren Etzioni, et al. Met with unexpectedly high demand from the audience and compelling engagement by vendors, the forum surfaced non-intuitive problems encountered with AI applications at scale and their cognitive embrace. Of course, it also surfaced the plaguing questions about ethics, anthropology, and the future of work.

This talk will give a brief survey through the state of AI in 2016, showing examples, caveats, trends -- along with insights gathered from practitioners. Notably, what is the impact for those of us already immersed in Data Science, Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Cloud technologies, DevOps Practice, etc.?