Two big tech conferences in Phoenix
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
As most of our readers know about the burgeoning tech scene in the Valley of the Sun, I want to provide you an update on the recent tech conferences where it was an honor for me to speak about tech trends.
Phoenix Data Conference
This year my conference speaking engagements were kicked off with the 5th Annual Phoenix Data Conference hosted by Phoenix Hadoop User group that was founded by Shekar Vemuri and Avinash Ramineni who are the co-founders of Clairvoyant here in Chandler.
The Phoenix Data Conference is the largest Big Data, AI/ML event of its kind in the Phoenix Valley, attracting keynote speakers and panelists from top brands across fi-nancial, insurance, cybersecurity, advanced data analytics, technology, and other key fields.
More than 700 people attended the event. Photo credit: Phoenix Data Conference
The Phoenix Data Conference brought together over 700 Big Data enthusiasts where they got to hear a diverse speaker set, 33 in total with 28 sessions, from all the leading Big data companies around the globe. This year it was hosted at Sheraton Crescent Hotel on Oct 27th, 2018. It also had 18 sponsors with Clairvoyant, Intel, and Microsoft leading the charge as Gold Sponsors.
Speakers were from organizations such as Cloudera, Intel, Clairvoyant, Confluent, American Express, Paypal, Choice Hotels, SAP, Microsoft, Attunity, Mesosphere, MemSQL, Unravel Data, and Talend.
The Phoenix Data Conference covered the most critical topics for today's Big Data & Analytics executives, managers, data scientist, and engineers. The topics ranged from building solid foundations for Data/AI strategy to recommendations and practices to scaling, operationalizing Data, Machine Learning solutions both on cloud and on-premise for Enterprises. The attendees got a first look at the current and emerging trends, best practices, detailed case studies on making data strategies and implementa-tions that work in today’s ecosystem.
Highlights from the conference:
Lenin Aboagye talked about “Autonomous Security: How to use Big Data, Machine Learning, and AI to build the Security of the future”
Shekhar Vemuri presented his learnings in AI in his talk titled “Operationalizing AI for Scale and Velocity”
Thomas Brown gave an outstanding presentation on “Big Data Journey to the Cloud”
Robert Sanders gave an excellent talk that gave real-world pointers in “Productionaliz-ing Spark Streaming Applications”
This year, I talked about “Practical Big Data, AI/ML 2018 - trends, technologies, and use cases.” I made this a very interactive session while giving attendees a glimpse of the use-cases and what to look for in the future with AI and ML in 2019 and beyond.
Find more information at http://www.phxdataconference.com/
Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Tech Festival
The other conference I really look forward to is the Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Festival yearly conference.
The 7th Annual Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Festival was hosted again at ASU
by the founders of the Phoenix Mobile and Emerging Tech Meetup Group by Pranil Kanderi, Anjali Nennelli and Dr. Kiran Mudiam
Justin Olson inspiring the next generation of leaders in the valley. Photo credit: Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Festival
This year it was kicked off by Justin Olson, AZ Corporation Commissioner who works with our esteemed Arizona Governor, Doug Ducey. He talked about the importance of how the governor’s office has been instrumental in helping the tech ecosystem grow here in the Valley of the Sun.
It was then followed by the Keynote by Brittany Stotler, VP of Marketing at Local Motors who talked about the crowdsourced model for building the next autonomous transport vehicle locally here in Arizona. Local Motors brought in Olli, their Autonomous vehicle to allow the attendees to get a feel for the technology.
Highlights from the conference sessions:
Olli - Self Driving Vehicle for participants to admire.
30% of the talks were related to Self Driving Technologies.
Doug Loyd gave a very macro overview of some of the major players in the autono-mous vehicle space.
Chris Matthieu provided a great talk about “Decentralized Cloud Computing” - His company Computes was recently acquired by Magic Leap.
Kiran Ramineni gave an awesome talk about getting up to speed on ML in his talk titled “0 to 60 in Machine Learning”
The State of Self Driving Panel was a hit again this year to talk about the progress from last year.
Dr. David Bolman talked about “VR for GOOD”
I talked about “Emerging Technology trends 2018 – AI, IoT, Digital Twins, Smart Homes/Cities, AR/VR, Blockchain” and this was part 2 of the talk I gave at the Phoenix Data Conference. I talked about the innovations in AI and what to expect in 2019 and beyond.
Find more information at http://phxmobifestival.com/
Conclusion
I am very happy with the state of affairs in the technology world as we are lucky to live in the age of such advancements of Autonomous cars, Personal robot butlers all thanks to AI, ML. I look forward to 2019 and beyond to understand how these advances affect our human behavior. Do we want to be enslaved by robots or do we make the robots do all the mundane work, and let humans truly pursue their creativity and find answers to the ultimate question of the Purpose of Life?