Google Brain, NHS & Microsoft Research: What Did You Miss in London?

After day one of the summit, attendees came together for a three-course meal to continue discussions surrounding the day’s presentations, workshops and panels’. Conversations initiated at the attendee dinner resumed on the morning of day two, with attendees arriving for coffee and breakfast prior to the mornings' talks on Cryptocurrency, Clinical Coding, Multi-Cloud Machine Learning and Chronic Disease Management.

The morning presentations sparked great discussion on day two, with Maithra Raghu from Google Brain addressing the persistent challenges in the practice of medicine (and machine learning), which include the stark contrast in opinions of highly trained experts on data instances, with the example of patient image scans being highlighted.

“There are many studies that have been done which show that doctors vary largely in terms of diagnosis, in more than 21% of cases there is significant disagreement” - Maithra Raghu, Google Brain

On the Deep Learning track, Chris Fregley of Pipeline AI discussed End-to-End, Multi-Cloud, Continuous Machine Learning, suggesting that traditional Machine Learning models are typically trained on stale, offline, historical batch data. Static models and stale data are, therefore, not sufficient to power today's modern, AI-first Enterprises that require continuous model training.

Before breaking for lunch, attendees gathered en masse to participate in the Accenture workshop led by Caryn Tan, covering the Design of AI using Centricity. Issues discussed included gender bias and imbalance in the field of data science, alongside the lack of suitable candidates due to the extensive hiring processes currently in place. Attendees then collaborated on potential solutions for combatting the increase in social disparity, with ideas ranging from the farfetched in dream monitoring to the easily achievable sentiment of monitoring current processes. Whether we like it or not, we are inevitably moving toward a world of increasingly autonomous decision making, however, if done correctly, this could surely lead to an exciting future?

With over twelve hours of networking across both days, we were delighted to receive some great feedback from attendees and speakers alike who were making some exciting connections, and getting involved in some great conversations.

“RE•WORK events are at the forefront of the industry, I try to attend all of the summits because of the quality of attendees and speakers”

Eli David, Deep Instinct

“I’m not just saying this, but I’m blown away. The calibre of the talks, speakers and startups is amazing. I had no expectations when coming here, but it’s been brilliant.”

Nirmit Upadhyay, Healum

“We have had some great traffic from attendees to our stand and some really good conversations”

Kalina Boshnakova, Graphcore

The afternoon brought yet more interesting discussion, this time in the form of workshops and panel discussions. Regulation and Global Policy was dissected first, with a specific focus on AI and Autonomous Systems. An interesting debate ensued with contrasting viewpoints on experimentation in the field and its dangers, alongside the need for transparency when making decisions surrounding the effect of AI on economic change. Attendees did, however, find themselves in mutual agreement when discussing the future of data science and engineering, recognising the lack of academics choosing to enter the field, alongside decreasing rates of study at degree and higher level.

“If you want to go fast, go solo, but if you want to go far, go together”

Andrea Renda - Senior Research Fellow and Head of Global Governance, Regulation, Innovation and the Digital Economy, Centre for European Policy Studies

The final panel discussion addressed the potential ethical implications surrounding data handling, alongside the intersections between ethics and data. A popular discussion point included the timing at which ethics are considered in project-based work, with members of the panel suggesting that ethics should not merely be considered on completion of a project, but rather that it should be a constant throughout, with meticulous planning at the conceptualisation stages.

“Traditionally, ethics comes in at the end once we’ve created the product, but we’re trying to push to incorporate it from the start. We need an ethicist as part of the design team. Be critical in a friendly manner and push the boundaries so ethics is part of the innovation process”

Amiee Van Wynsberghe - Assistant Professor of Ethics and Robotics, TU Delft.

The close of the ethics panel marked the conclusion of day two and, therefore, the summit as a whole. Attendees departed the conference with notebooks full of interesting information and plenty of new business connections. We would like to extend our thanks to all of the speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, social media ambassadors, volunteers and attendees for making the summit a memorable one.

We will be in Toronto next month for the Deep Learning and AI for Government summit on the 25-26th October. An overview of the speakers, agenda and venue, alongside ticket details, can be found here:

https://www.re-work.co/events/deep-learning-summit-toronto-canada-2018

https://www.re-work.co/events/ai-for-government-summit-canada-2018

Are you interested in joining us at a future RE•WORK Summit? See a full calendar listing of our upcoming events here: www.re-work.co/events

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