All Things Tech

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On Episode 108 of Voices in AI , Byron and Kirk Borne discuss the intersection between human nature and artificial intelligence. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Kirk Borne. He is Principal Data Scientist and executive advisor at Booz Allen Hamilton. He holds a BS in Physics from Louisiana State and a PhD in Astronomy from Caltech. His background covers all kinds of things relating to data and data science and artificial intelligence so it should be a great conversation. Welcome to the show, Kirk. Kirk Borne: Thank you Byron. It’s great to be here. So for the folks who aren’t familiar with you and your work, can you give us a little bit of a history about how did you get here, what was the path you took? Well as you mentioned my background is Astrophysics and Astronomy. Starting in ...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On Episode 107 of Voices in AI , Byron and Nir Bar-Lev discuss narrow and general AI and the means by which we build them out and train them. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. Today I’m excited my guest is Nir Bar-Lev. He is the CEO and the co-founder of allegro.ai. He holds a degree in law and economics from the University of Haifa. He holds a Bachelor of Science in software engineering. He holds an MBA from Wharton and probably a whole lot more. Welcome to the show, Nir. Nir Bar-Lev: Hi Byron, thank you so much, I’m honored to be on the show. So I’d like to start off with just a signposting kind of question, which is about the nature of intelligence and when we talk about AI, do you think we’re really building something that is truly intelligent, or are we building something that can mimic intelligenc...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On Episode 104 of Voices in AI , Byron Reese discusses the nature of intelligence and how artificial intelligence evolves and becomes viable in today’s world. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I’m Byron Reese. Today, my guest is Anirudh Koul. He is the head of Artificial Intelligence and Research at Aira and the founder of Seeing AI. Before that he was a data scientist at Microsoft for six years. He has a Masters of Computational Data Science from Carnegie Mellon and some of his work was just called by Time magazine, ‘One of the best inventions of 2018,’ which I’m sure we will come to in a minute. Welcome to the show Anirudh. Anirudh Koul: It’s a pleasure being here. Hi to everyone. So I always like to start off with—I don’t wanna call it a philosophical question—but it’s sort of definitional question which is, what is art...

Here at GigaOm we’re looking at how leading-edge technologies impact the enterprise, and what organizations can do to gear up for the future. Here’s a take from several of our analysts about what to watch for in enterprise IT and beyond, this coming year and in years to come.   From Kubernetesization to workforce automation, data center shrink and the rise of the architect, read on. Andrew Brust, Big Data & Analytics “Kubernetesization” and Containerization of the Data Analytics Stack — both open source and commercial. To a large extent, this is one’s obvious. But it’s giving rise to something less so: a tendency to spin up clusters (be they for big data, data warehousing or machine learning) on a task-by-task basis. Call it extreme ephemeralism, if you’d like. It’s enabling a mentality of serverless everything. This architecture underlies the revamped Cloudera Data Platform, and it’s also being leveraged by Google for Spark on K8s on Cloud Data Proc. Ultimately, it’s ena...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On Episode 103 of Voices in AI , Byron Reese discusses AI with Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET, diving into the concepts of a master algorithm and AGI’s. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm, I’m Byron Reese. Today, my guest is Ben Goertzel. He is the CEO of SingularityNET, as well as the Chief Scientist over at Hanson Robotics. He holds a PhD in Mathematics from Temple University. And he’s talking to us from Hong Kong right now where he lives. Welcome to the show Ben! Ben Goertzel: Hey thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to our discussion. The first question I always throw at people is: “What is intelligence?” And interestingly you have a definition of intelligence in your Wikipedia entry. That’s a first, but why don’t we just start with that: what is intelligence? I actually spent a lot of time working on the mathemati...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On Episode 101 of Voices in AI , Byron speaks with Cindi Howsen of Thoughtspot about the direction of explainable AI and where we are going as an industry. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Cindi Howson. She is the Chief Data Strategy Officer at ThoughtSpot. She holds a degree in English from the University of Maryland and an MBA from my alma mater, Rice University. Welcome to the show, Cindy. Cindi Howson: Thank you, Byron. Yes Rice, where they had more trees than students. That is one of the things that was in the original charter, that it’d always be that way and it makes a real difference on the campus, doesn’t it? It does. It’s a beautiful campus. And you know a lot of people aren’t big into living in Houston. But the part where we lived had those beautiful oaks that hang over a...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On this Episode of Voices in AI Bryon speaks with Patrick Surry of Hopper on the nature of intelligence and the path that our relationship with AI is taking. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI , brought to you by GigaOm. I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Patrick Surry. He is the Chief Data Scientist at Hopper. He holds a PhD in math and statistics from the University of Edinburgh. Welcome to the show, Patrick. Patrick Surry: It’s great to be here. I like to start our journey off with the same question for most guests, which is: What is artificial intelligence? Specifically, why is it artificial? That’s a really interesting question. I think there’s a bunch of different takes you get from different people about that. I guess the way I think about it [is] in a pragmatic sense of trying to get computers to mimic the way that humans think about probl...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode On this Episode of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Hilary Mason, an acclaimed data and research scientist, about the mechanics and philosophy behind designing and building AI. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI, brought to you by Gigaom and I am Byron Reese. Today, our guest is Hilary Mason. She is the GM of Machine Learning at Cloudera, and the founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, and the Data Scientist in residence at Accel Partners, and a member of the Board of Directors at the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology, and the co-founder of hackNY.org. That’s as far down as it would let me read in her LinkedIn profile, but I’ve a feeling if I’d clicked that ‘More’ button, there would be a lot more. Welcome to the show, amazing Hilary Mason! Hilary Mason: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. I always like to start with...

Read Andrew Brust’s Full Report Report Summary: Business Intelligence Market Consolidation What took place from April through June, 2019 was the most significant BI market consolidation in more than a decade. Sure, market events like the emergence of Tableau and self-service BI in general were significant on their own. But these were nonetheless gradual and discrete developments, part of an evolving ecosystem that welcomes new vendors, and new offerings from existing vendors, over periods of years. The recent consolidation contrasts markedly with such typical calm and orderly progression. With a slew of deals in a period of just 10 weeks, the market calculus has been transformed. To understand this better, we need to examine the deals. The race is on, in the white-hot areas of cloud, analytics, and AI. The recent BI market consolidation demonstrates this and it’s the reason even more mergers are likely to come. The bigger mergers beg questions around the parties’ compatibility,...

[voices_in_ai_byline] About this Episode Episode 88 of Voices in AI features Byron speaking with Ron Green of KUNGFU.AI about how companies integrate AI and machine learning into their business models. Listen to this episode or read the full transcript at www.VoicesinAI.com Transcript Excerpt Byron Reese: This is Voices in AI brought to you by GigaOm and I’m Byron Reese. Today my guest is Ron Green. Ron is the CTO over at KUNGFU.AI. He holds a BA in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, and he holds a Master of Science from the University of Sussex in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems. His company, KUNGFU.AI is a professional services company that helps companies start and accelerate artificial intelligence projects. I asked him [to be] on the show today because I wanted to do an episode that was a little more ‘hands-on’ about how an enterprise today can apply this technology to their business. Welcome to the show, Ron. Ron Green: Thank you for having me. So ...

Would you describe yourself as a risk-taker? Fearless? Would you even go so far as jumping out of a plane on the journey to digital transformation? Me neither. And yet, if you are a Chief Data Officer, you are a trail blazer. You are fearless in your belief in the power of analytics to improve business, even more so in a digital world. Data has always been important, but that value increases exponentially in a digital world with new ways to personalize customer experience, optimize the supply chain, and operate more efficiently. The CDO role is still relatively new in the industry,  developing only over the last five years  in an almost thirty-year-old business intelligence and data warehousing market. Many of you have been in this role for less than two years. You may have risen to this role via the IT organization, perhaps as a BI director. Others have arrived via the line of business, recognizing the role of data in digital transformation efforts. I have likened my join...