Chair: Hadley Reynolds, Managing Director, Cognitive Computing Consortium

Directions in Cognitive is a program focused on the issues facing Cognitive Computing Consortium Members and other AI and cognitive computing applications professionals today, as they scope, design, build, and revise production applications for the enterprise. The program presents the experience of practitioners working with applications in the field, as well as research-based frameworks for characterizing cognitive applications and understanding cognitive work profiles, skills, attributes, and knowledge. We present emerging technologies, the state of the market, and bring focus to important challenges in the area of ethical guidelines for the new applications.

Jana Eggers, CEO, Nara Logics

Many enterprises are grappling with questions about how cognitive computing can make the biggest impact on their businesses — and how to get started. Jana Eggers will bring insights built on bringing scores of cognitive/AI projects to production and poses a challenging question: what is different this time? What makes AI different than the computer technology we are used to deploying?

Chad Steelberg, Chairman & CEO, Veritone

Ganesan Shankar, Assoc. Professor, Babson College Technology, Operations, and Information Management
Hadley Reynolds, Managing Director, Cognitive Computing Consortium

This session presents the current work being carried out in a joint research program sponsored by Babson College and the Cognitive Computing Consortium. The goal of the first stage of this program is to create a framework for business decision-making around cognitive applications. The framework should shed light on the executive decision process: from defining business objectives to clarifying the characteristics and components of a specific cognitive computing system. The goal is to assist decision makers in clarifying expectations and approaches as they plan to integrate cognitive techniques into their organization’s operations. Decision makers, developers, data scientists, human factors professionals, business owners, and users can all use this model to develop insights about their cognitive applications projects.

Larry Todd Wilson, Founder & Director, Knowledge Harvesting, Inc.
Hadley Reynolds, Managing Director, Cognitive Computing Consortium 

Cognitive computing executives today face steep challenges in defining and staffing teams to carry out their innovation projects. Larry and Hadley will present results of work underway to examine and codify cognitive tasks related to cognitive application development, enhancement, and maintenance. Closely aligned with the Reference Model for Cognitive Applications, this approach utilizes frameworks and standards to clarify roles, capabilities, and interaction requirements to help organizations hire, develop teams, redeploy, and accomplish projects and processes.

Shunpei Yamazaki Ph.D., President, Semiconductor Energy Laboratory Co., Ltd.

Leslie Owens, Executive Director, MIT-Sloan School Center for Information Systems Research

Despite all the excitement about artificial intelligence, generating business value from cognitive computing applications has proved challenging. For 20 years, established companies have been pursuing efficiencies through digitization. Regardless of the outcomes of their digitization efforts, they must now turn their attention to developing digital offerings and the underlying capabilities that enable rapid innovation. Digital success depends on business componentization, which requires a new system environment and fundamental business redesign. In this session, we will talk about where and how cognitive computing fits into your digital strategy using case studies and frameworks from MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).

Speakers:
Dr. Ronald Weissman, Apax Partners, Software Leads, Band of Angels, Silicon Valley
Dan Donahue, Partner, Keystone Strategy

Today’s rate of growth of AI business formations and technology innovation initiatives in the enterprise is virtually unprecedented. This session will focus on clarifying current realities in the field relative to enterprise expectations and the preconditions for business success among the hundreds of software and service vendors large and small that are attempting to carve out a niche or become a dominant franchise in the cognitive computing market space. It will deconstruct the current cloud of hype and provide fundamental insights into the emerging trends that will shape the market 3-5 years from now.

Moderator: Hadley Reynolds, Cognitive Computing Consortium
Panelists:
– Gauthier Robe, VP Platform, Coveo
– Daniel Mayer, CEO, Expert System
– Dino Eliopulos, Managing Director, Earley Information Science

When it comes time to build a cognitive computing application, what do you actually need to do? Where do you begin? How do you structure a team? What are the preconditions for success? And when can you declare victory? The panelists in this session all have extensive experience with today’s cognitive implementations. They will share their perspectives on best practices, pitfalls to avoid, and where the most important development trends will take the industry in the near future.

Moderator: Jeff Fried, CTO, BA-Insights
Panelists:
– Gabi Zijderveld, CMO, Affectiva
– Tyler Schulze, VP Ecosystem, Veritone

This conversational panel will address the impact that technologies for rich data analytics and interaction are having on cognitive applications, their developers, users, and owners. Should rich interaction be a requirement for cognitive applications? Will rich interactions ease or impede the emerging partnership between humans and machines within the business process? This expert panel of professionals will address these questions, as well as providing a glimpse into where this rapidly evolving set of technologies will be taking us.

Moderator: Clare Gillan, Babson College

Speakers:

• Finale Doshi-Velez, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University
• David Weinberger, Senior Researcher, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University
• Sara R Mattingly-Jordan, Center for Public Administration & Policy, Virginia Tech

Harvard colleagues Doshi-Velez and Weinberger will present both a catalog of ethical issues facing the rise of AI-based systems and a deep dive into particular areas of focus within their work and within the work that the Berkman Klein Center and the MIT Media Lab are undertaking as anchor institutions of the Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence Fund, the $27M fund created by the Knight Foundation, Omidyar Network, and Reid Hoffman to research artificial intelligence for the public interest.