In 2017, we are going to tackle many important topics, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are taking centre stage. AI has been around for decades, but is it different this time?
We’ll continue our discussion on AI and ML with practitioners who have decades of experience in how such techniques might be applied to real-life scenarios like IoT, mobile devices, personalized services, etc. They understand what problems they are really good for and can answer the question: are we entering the golden age of AI?
We will also tackle the pressing ethical questions on how to deal with personalization and the use of AI. We will separate the hype from ground reality and give you things to think about for your own business.
Panelists
- Lev Mass – Venture Partner for XSeed Capital
- Prof. Mark Schmidt – Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia
- Chetan Sharma – CEO at Chetan Sharma Consulting
- Additional speakers to be announced
Registration
Seating for this session is limited. We recommend an early registration.
Speaker Bios
Lev Mass is a Venture Partner at XSeed Capital, with expertise in cloud computing, mobile, and business development. Prior to joining XSeed, Lev ran operations and business development for the Cloud Group at Yahoo!. While at Yahoo!, Lev helped to facilitate the spin-off of the Hadoop Group into what is now Hortonworks, a leading big data company. In addition, he held a number of executive roles at Yahoo! helping to define strategy for mobile, social, cloud and big data. Previous to Yahoo!, Lev was an investment banker with Thomas Weisel Partners focused on TMT (technology, media, telecommunications) and health technology. Lev holds a BS from University of Kansas and an MBA from Columbia University and UC Berkeley, where he is currently a mentor at the UC Berkeley Skydeck Incubator.
Prof. Mark Schmidt has been an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia since 2014, and is a Canada Research Chair and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. His research focuses on developing faster algorithms for large-scale machine learning, with an emphasis on methods with provable convergence rates and that can be applied to structured prediction problems. From 2011 through 2013 he worked at the École normale supérieure in Paris on inexact and stochastic convex optimization methods. He finished his M.Sc. in 2005 at the University of Alberta working as part of the Brain Tumor Analysis Project, and his Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of British Columbia working on graphical model structure learning with L1-regularization. He has also worked at Siemens Medical Solutions on heart motion abnormality detection, with Michael Friedlander in the Scientific Computing Laboratory at the University of British Columbia on semi-stochastic optimization methods, and with Anoop Sarkar at Simon Fraser University on large-scale training of natural language models.
Chetan Sharma is CEO of Chetan Sharma Consulting and is one of the leading strategists in the mobile industry. He has served as an advisor to senior executive management of several Fortune 100 companies in the wireless space and is one of the only industry strategists who has advised each of the top 6 global mobile data operators.
Chetan serves on the advisory boards of Ericsson, Telefonica, Kymeta, NextNav, Zeotap, Opanga Networks, Mast and several other startups. He is the author or co-author of a dozen best-selling books on wireless including Mobile Advertising: Supercharge your brand in the exploding wireless market and Wireless Broadband: Conflict and Convergence, and is also the editor of the Mobile Future Forward Book Series. His books have been adopted in several corporate training programs and university courses at NYU, Stanford, and Tokyo University.