Behind the Scenes: 1 Week Until the Machine Intelligence Summit Amsterdam

Following on from our hugely successful Machine Intelligence Summit and Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit in San Francisco earlier this year, the RE•WORK team are in the final stages of preparation to bring the European edition of this event to Amsterdam this June 28-29.

Over the past months we have been reaching out to the leading minds in machine intelligence to curate a diverse collection of speakers covering a variety of topics.

A note from Leonie, summit organiser, Amsterdam:

I am looking forward to two exciting days where great minds get together to discuss the technology that is shaping our present and future. Also, it will be great to finally meet all the speakers and attendees after having been in touch over several months of intense preparation. The NVIDIA DIGITS Image Classification workshop is definitely a highlight giving the attendees an opportunity to gain hands-on experience.

We have industry professionals joining us from across the spectrum of machine learning. We spoke to Julie Choo, our compere for the Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles Summit to find out what she’s most excited for to next week. With a FinTech background, Julie is also currently writing a book, The Strategy Journey, and will be meeting with industry pioneers to discuss their work in machine learning. 'I'm really looking forward to joining industry peers and other member of the community to discuss how Autonomous Vehicles and MI is going to change our world and the way we live! There so many possibilities and to be able to to feature these potential future states in my book and share our collective thoughts is just the icing on the cake.'

When we asked attendees from the Autonomous Vehicles Summit in San Francisco earlier this year ‘on a scale of 1 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend RE•WORK summits to a friend or colleague?’ we received an average score of 8.83, so we’re really excited to meet colleagues of previous attendees, as well as welcoming back past speakers and new guests.

What's on the agenda...

Machine Intelligence Summit

Machine intelligence is progressing extremely rapidly, and Google have revealed that they are using its capabilities to ‘tackle extremism content on YouTube’, whilst only last week Facebook’s AI accidently created its own language using machine learning algorithms.

These techniques however, are not limited to ‘technology companies’ per se, which is why we’re really excited to hear from retailers such as Zalando and L’Oréal next week who will explain how they’re bootstrapping ML to improve their products. Running up to the event, we were chatting with Roland Vollgraf, Research Lead at Zalando, who explained how ‘the fashion industry are able to use machine learning due to the vast amount of data that is generated in the online retail business, paired with continuously increasing computation power.’ Roland will be discussing how their fashion DNA maps items into a mathematically convenient Euclidean space.

We also heard from Panagiotis-Alexandros Bokaris, augmented reality engineer at L’Oréal earlier this week who is excited for progressions in augmented reality and AI, he estimates that in the beauty industry ‘breakthrough technologies will expand the product categories and the utilization scenarios. Various augmented reality applications will be available in the years to come transforming the way we perceive and interact with beauty products.’

We'll also hear from the likes of Scyfer, Skyscanner, Google Research, UCL, alpha-i, NVIDIA, and many more. See the full agenda here.

Machine Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicles

With autonomous vehicles being in the news consistently, this track has some really exciting speakers. Germany have recently approved the testing of driverless cars and a study by Intel has predicted that the autonomous vehicle industry will create a $7tn passenger economy. Of course safety is a huge concern in this space, and the industry professionals we have speaking at the summit are all plugged into this issue and overcoming concerns with the implementation of AI. Hans Anderson from the University of Singapore explained to us however, that cars operating independently of humans have the potential to be far safer than when you or I are behind the wheel. He explained that ‘currently, fully autonomous driving tests in cities usually involve at least 2 human operators in a single car: a safety driver and an engineer that monitors the state of the system. Hopefully we can see a full deployment of autonomous vehicles in a city without a safety driver as a backup in the near future.’ Hans will discuss the potential increased safety of autonomous vehicles as well as increased productivity, greater accessibility, better road efficiency, and positive impact to the environment.

Also presenting are TomTom, Toyota Motor Europe, EasyMile, Parkopedia and several other industry professionals and researchers working with autonomous vehicles. See the full agenda here.

In San Francisco we heard from INRIX who spoke about 'Connecting Cars for Smarter Citiers'. Watch Bryan Mistele's presentation here.

Workshops

For the first time at a RE•WORK event, NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute are hosting a workshop on day one of the summit where developers, data scientists, and engineers are able to receive hands on training. The workshop will show you how to leverage deep neural networks (DNN) - specifically convolutional neural networks (CNN) - within the deep learning workflow to solve a real-world image classification problem using NVIDIA DIGITS on top of the Caffe framework and the MNIST hand-written digits dataset.

Known as the ‘AI computing company’ NVIDIA design graphics processing units for both the gaming and the professional market, and Adam Grzywacezewski, Deep Learning Solution Architect at NVIDIA will be hosting the workshop.

This workshop is complimentary and included with standard event passes, but we must ask you to register in advance. Find out more and register here.

We'd love to see you in Amsterdam next week - do drop us an email if you have any questions, or register now.