Why AI is finally going mainstream
Introducing the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference.
People in train station. (source: Pexels)
It’s clear that the age of applied AI is at hand. Every day, we see more headlines like these:
- Can Artificial Intelligence Create the Next Wonder Material?
- Artificial Intelligence Use in Financial Services
- Enlitic Raises $10M to Enhance Deep Learning Medical Imaging
- The World’s First Artificially Intelligent Lawyer Was Just Hired at a Law Firm
- Samsung Applies Deep Learning to Ultrasound Device
- The Day Is Coming When Customer Service Will Be Run By Chatbots
- Your New Digital Coworker
- Why IBM Just Bought Billions of Medical Images for Watson to Look At
- Microsoft Open Sources Its Artificial Brain to One-Up Google
- How Satellite And Imaging Technologies Are Changing The World As We Know It
- Conversational Commerce: What This Buzzword Means for Business
Deep learning toolkits are becoming essential tools for software engineers and data scientists. Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have open-sourced their artificial intelligence frameworks. Applied AI developers now develop software that doesn’t just do what it’s told, but also has the ability to anticipate the needs of its users through a combination of pattern recognition, knowledge, planning, and reasoning.
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There is a growing—and urgent—need for information on applied AI, as opposed to the kind of research presented at academic conferences. That’s why we’re launching a new event—the O’Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference—to be held in New York City at the Javits Convention Center, alongside the Strata + Hadoop World conference. This event will focus on the engineering practices and technologies used for building smart software.
We’re gathering developers interested in artificial intelligence to talk about the latest research and explain how to implement AI in real projects. And we’re gathering business people who want to think about the impact AI will have on their businesses: how they will use it and how it will change their competitive landscape. We’ll discuss the limitations of artificial intelligence and its untapped opportunities.
It’s easy to get excited about recent progress but much more difficult to understand what lies ahead. Researchers have built some excellent, but very specialized, systems. Still, we’re far from anything that looks like a general intelligence system. We have programs that can play Go, drive a car, chat, manage investments, and identify pictures; we don’t have programs that can do all of the thousands of things that humans do every day. Integrating many systems that can each do one very specific task is a challenging problem, if that’s even the right approach. What does the future hold, and how are we to get there?
We’re just at the beginning of an explosion of intelligent software, and we want to gather people and organizations who are putting the latest breakthroughs to work in real products and services. Join us in New York Sept. 26-27, 2016, to explore the most essential—and intriguing—topics in artificial intelligence engineering and applied AI today. The call for speakers is open until June 6.