12 Days of AI: RE•WORK 2017 Highlights

In the spirit of Christmas, we’re going to count down to the new year with the 12 Days of AI, bringing you a new, festive AI post every day! What better way to kick off 2018 than to look back at the RE•WORK highlights of 2017 and celebrate some of our successes of the past 12 months.

This year saw RE•WORK hosting more events and bringing our globally renowned Summits to new locations. Our first ever Canadian Summit this year took place in Montreal, the ‘Silicon Valley of AI’, and was one of our biggest events to date with over 600 attendees over the two days. We were fortunate enough to be joined by the ‘Godfathers of AI’, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton who appeared on a panel together for the first time ever. The pioneers shared their current work in individual presentations, and discussed the landscape and progressions of AI in the panel, which is available on the content hub here.

In previous years we have hosted attendee dinners in London, but 2017 has seen our first international dinner take place in Montreal. At the Women in AI in Machine Intelligence Dinner in we heard from leading minds applying machine learning to their work to optimise efficiency and solve real world problems they were facing in their work. In 2018 we will be hosting more international dinners in San Francisco, Boston, London and Toronto.

The expansion of our events has allowed us to introduce new topics, and this year we hosted the first Deep Learning in Retail and Advertising Summit in London, and the Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit in Amsterdam. Following on from their success, we will be hosting the Deep Learning in Retail and Advertising Summit in London this March with confirmed speakers including Changtao Zhong from Twitter, Dima Karamshuk from Skyscanner, Alessandro Magnani from Walmart Labs amongst many more. Following on from the Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit, in 2018 we will be hosting the first AI in Industrial Automation Summit and the Deep Learning for Robotics Summit in San Francisco. AI and automation is ‘set to bring a bigger shift than the industrial revolution’, and with these progressions being so prominent in the news as of recent, we are excited to welcome experts from Amazon Robotics, DeepMind, Google Brain and many more.

Over the last 12 months, the RE•WORK team has doubled in size welcoming new conference organisers, and expanding the sales and marketing team. More man-power (or woman-power in our case!!) has allowed us to invest more time in some really exciting projects such as the expansion of our digital content hub, and the launch of the new website. At each of our events we are lucky enough to interview and network with leading minds and global pioneers in AI. This extensive network of AI experts we have formed has allowed us to create three exciting strands of content: the Women in AI Podcast, Video Playlists, and White Papers. The podcast brings together a cross-disciplinary mix of influential women working in AI, Deep Learning, and Machine Learning and their impact on solving challenges in business and society. Some of the experts we’ve been lucky enough to interview on the podcast include Ira Kemelmacher from Facebook, Doina Precup from DeepMind & McGill University, and Antonia Creswell from Imperial College London.

Our video playlists provide access to the current trends and developments in deep learning and machine intelligence to strengthen your skills and advance your business. Some of the topics currently available include AI for Business, NLP, Pioneers of Deep Learning, and Women in AI.

The first RE•WORK White Paper “Should You Be Using AI In Your Business”, published at the end of November, delves into the latest advancements and complex issues in AI through a comprehensive report on current trends by industry expert analysis and practical case studies, enabling business leaders to leverage AI to optimise efficiency. This paper explores the application of AI in business with research contributions from leading minds in the field including Ankur Handa, Research Scientist, OpenAI, Ian Goodfellow, Senior Research Scientist, Google Brain. Jörg Bornschien, Research Scientist, DeepMind, Maggie Mhanna, Data Scientist, Renault Digital and many more.

Looking towards 2018, we are excited to host yet more events in new locations such as Hong Kong, Toronto and New York, as well as bringing the summits, dinners and workshops back to our current locations with upcoming events planned in San Francisco, London, and Boston.