Date: November 1, 2016

Name: An intimate talk with machine learning leaders

Presenters: Jaspreet Oberoi, Natalie Cartwright, Justin Long, Chris Adlparvar, Suzanne Gildert, Jeff Herbst, Geordie Rose, Toufic Boubez, and Mike Gelbart

Machine learning is changing the way entrepreneurs operate their businesses. Moreover, entrepreneurs need to adapt the new ways to take advantage of the changes. Vancouver Entrepreneurs Forum invites the machine learning leaders panel to discuss their perspective of machine learning. Vancouver Entrepreneurs Forum also invites 5 machine leading companies to share how their companies play in the part of current machine leading trend. Entrepreneurs will learn the impact of the changes and discover where they can find their talents in this industry.

Machine Learning Presentation

Jaspreet Oberoi, the Researcher of data science, machine learning and optimization algorithms of 1QB Information Technologies, believes a different perspective solves a different hard problem. The classical tools are saturated in this industry and many people are trying to fit everything into classical tools. Entrepreneurs need to redefine interaction.

1QB focuses on software development. It provides micro services and custom software. Oberoi believes the trend is leading towards quantum. It is required. It requires to insulate in future since it might become familiar programming for the future. In the future, quantum will play a huge role in finance, health science, and energy industries. Entrepreneurs must realize machine leading will optimize effective algorithm, time and accuracy. The optimization approach will outperform classical methods to solve problems in business.

With quantum software, businesses will be able to perform better market basket analysis, collaborative filtering, image recognition, clustering, and big data.

Natalie Cartwright, the Co-Founder of Finn.ai, shares the history of machine learning. The PC Era started in 1980s and it leads to Internet in 1990s. Mobile started to take over in 2008 and leads to artificial intelligence in 2016. Cartwright believes white label virtual banking is an example of the future artificial intelligence. The company is working with ATB Financial to fully utilize Facebook and Facebook Messenger to gain better and efficient experience in virtual banking. In the future, this new type of artificial intelligence will expand to all kind of channels.

Currently, Cartwright is working towards building data sets for users with productive and personalize data.

Justin Long, the Founder of Bernie AI, revolutionaries the online dating industry. Bernie AI is a personal assistant for online dating and it helps people to start conversation. The application does all the hard work for users. Long reveals the idea started with a conversation at the bar to automate Tinder algorithm system. Now Bernie AI is everywhere. It allows people to learn enough to make the right decision. Long mentions it uses face recognition and landmark system to match personalizes with the users. The face recognition also uses background scan to identify mood for users. The application works along with other dating application.

Chris Adlparvar, the Founder of Copypants, focuses on Intellectual Property protection. With the advance of machine learning trend, entrepreneurs need to protect their personal and business brand. Adlparvar identifies the problem of Intellectual Property theft and many other law issues. These problems will remain exist. Copypants will help entrepreneurs to protect, find, notify, give and manage their Intellectual Property.

As machine learning trend increases, Adlparvar ensure Copypants will understand and match content, discover the difference, and grow the user database.

Suzanne Gildert, the Founder of Kindred Systems Inc., shares their company vision of building machine with human-like intelligence. The company has 3 core technology. The first one is to build robots. It uses embodied cognition hypotheses. The second one is immersive and real time. It uses teleoperation by linking human perspective and robot actions. The third one is the state of the art AI. The AI operator learns the process from human operators and send the perception data to robots.

Machine learning leaders panel

The panel includes Jeff Herbst, the Vice President of Business Development from NVidia, Geordie Rose, the Founder of CTO D-Wave, Toufic Boubez, the Vice President of Engineering at Splunk, and Mike Gelbart, the Machine Learning Lecturer from University of British Columbia. The moderator is Moe Kermani, the Managing Partner of Vanedge Capital.

What attracts Herbst into the machine learning industry is the ability to create high performance solution. The development of machine learning crates availability for entrepreneurs. They can take advantage of generating improvement for their businesses and provide platform for many users.

“We build it; we are there at the right time”

Boubez sees the problem for machine learning industry. Entrepreneurs will encounter weak security application because it still requires human detector to detect unusual pattern. The second weakness is predicting analytics. The last weakness is clustering.

The view of Artificial Intelligence changes time to time. Rose believes it depends on what dimension entrepreneurs are measuring. The new cycle uprising fears people if there is no human work in the future. The way human spends their time will change. Rose mentions sometimes in future machine works better than human. However, the role of human will still remain in future.

“Understand the fundamental mechanism of how we act”

The driver of Master Degree of Data Science for Gelbart is to bring in all kind of people in different industries to data science. It joints with computer science and it gives the students the cutting edge. In the machine learning industry, entrepreneurs are looking for team. Gelbart emphasizes teamwork is important and people need vertical experience. Algorithms are opened for public, and data is what entrepreneurs are after now.

Rose believes the key of future of machine learning industry is transformation. More data is better for certain algorithms. People who can do all this is still in a small group and tools are getting better for them to use. Boubez believes the major advantage for entrepreneurs is the unsupervised learning. They need to get the data that nobody has.

Herbst believes the tangible values in the future appear in automotive space, finance, voice enable system, and security.

For closing thought, machine learning is still messy, but it is still exciting. Entrepreneurs are living in the most interesting life in this century because they are creating the life of machine for the future. It is an exciting stage for entrepreneurs, but existing tools are only to make life efficient because they are still in the stage of acceleration in machine learning industry. It is a big deal even though nobody knows what comes after Artificial Intelligence. Nevertheless, all moves to process data.

The post An intimate talk with machine learning leaders appeared first on Frank Yang.

Date: October 22, 2015

Name: CTRL ALT DELETE – Young leaders Reboot the Conversation

Presenters: Melody Ma, Amie Rotherham, Natalie Cartwright, Sarah Goodman, and Nikki Wong

Many thought young leaders and experts come from various intersections of many different industries. Moreover, young leaders will recognize various of disruptions when they reboot their conversations. SFU Woodward presents “CTRL ALT DELETE” presentation to educate and motivate young leaders in Vancouver to revisit the experience and lessons from successful young leaders. The presentation invites Melody Ma, the Developer at MEC & Kids Code Advocate, and Amie Rotherham, the Account Executive at Rsquared Communication. Furthermore, the presentation will include a panel discussion. The panelists include Natalie Cartwright, the Co-Founder & COO of Payso, Sarah Goodman, the CEO of VitalSines, and Nikki Wong, the Program Director at Spring.is. This presentation will focus on technology sector and young leaders will learn the experiences and valuable insights from all presenters.

Melody Ma

Before Melody Ma stepped into the world of web developer, she was a Product Manager. While working as a Product Manager, she was trapped but she could feel there was a black box she wanted to pursue. Ma quitted her job and took the risk to join the coding camp. She developed a simple mini game and realized she enjoys coding. It took her 10 years to realize her true passion.

Ma believes she did not have any access of technology when she was young. In high school, Ma never thought technology sector would ever across her career path. Later that year, she made a New Year resolution to help kids to realize their options of learning. She decided to find a way to help students from kindergarten to grade 12 in British Columbia to learn how to code at school.

Many countries have already introduced coding as mandatory courses in their education system. This will help students to maximize the exposure of technology advancement. British Columbia is not in the list, so Ma wrote a letter to the Ministry to attach coding program framework as education criteria of digital literacy. However, her idea was rejected. Even though the idea was rejected, the ministry realized there was a need in digital literacy component.

Ma will not allow this response to stop her passion. She continues to help students by hosting workshops to create awareness for Ministry. In last December, currently there were over 400 students in age 8 to 18 in 4 BC cities to code for free. Ma believes this is just the start of the awareness. The team is in the transition to reboot this conversation for the new society.

Amie Rotherham

Amie Rotherham started her journey in the passion of journalism. However, the media was not an easy path for Rotherham. In university, Rotherham transformed her passion into something deeper, which is public relation.

While working in a local newspaper company in her town, she experienced a whole new opportunity. She refocused her passion even deeper, which is lifestyle public relation. While she worked in Rsquared Communication, she learned to love her career. Technology can change people’s lives and simplify people’s work.

Rotherham explains that there is a dirty “D” word in her industry that many people are trying to avoid. The word is “Disrupt”. Many people encourage her not to use this word, but she feels the word, “Disrupt” can change behaviour. It is difficult to perform, but it can be very effective. Telling stories with technology is a new way to expose coverage for daily news. Rotherham believes young leaders have limitless room to tell stories by using the right technology. It is interesting to see the shift of traditional approach of journalism career to new digital century of journalism career.

Many media companies are covering more serious news. Local newspaper companies are aware of losing customers due to selections from other online media companies. The growth increases due to engagement and media. Media impression has increased significantly. The technology cycle changes significantly and the future of work is important to notice. Nevertheless, technology companies are now holding high standard due to media coverage.

Rotherham suggests young leaders to go beyond what they are and what they know.

The panel 

Many young leaders believe all founders are considered themselves as the alone wolf. The panellists disagree. Natalie Cartwright believes in her entrepreneur journey, she receives many peer supports. When she was blindsided by someone who she trusted, she was depressed. However, that moment made her realized she has many supporters in her company that she was grateful for. The emotional support is equally important as any tangible support. Sarah Goodman mentions people will introduce her to other great young leaders. The connections set her up for more opportunities and peer support keeps her going in the direction she wants to go. Nikki Wong also believes alone wolf is a myth. There is always peer support around young leaders if they look hard enough. In community, building strong network is essential. People know the tides and people are there to motivate their peers. This happens not just in professional network, yet they become their personal network.

There are many things the panelists believe things should change in Canada. Cartwright emphasizes payment method is something Canada needs to look into. United States is way further ahead than Canada. Sweden is the next country to be cashless. Based on statistic, many countries are doing better than Canada. Canada is currently copying other countries and they are not really ahead. Goodman believes showing positive impact is important. This brings new matric to attention. Wong believes young leaders are creating things to be innovative. They should think reverse innovation. This means instead of taking exiting solution from other country and meet the needs, they should identify the fundamental problem and start there.

Many young leaders will need to take a stand from what they believe. Cartwright provides an example that many financial technology companies own most customer relationship. This hurts the traditional banks. What they should have done is to be collaborative. Goodman mentions Health Canada and Fraser Health Authority have different standards. They are very sensitive towards the response of diagnostic. Perhaps, young leaders should seek health professionals for further assistance. Wong mentions there is a misconception of being profitable and successful. Success will not be together in social entrepreneurs, so it is a learning curve for social communities to create impact to society.

The panelists provide some suggestions for young leaders. Wong suggests young leaders need to have peers support. Young leaders should initiate the conversation and peers should have the responsibly to council young leaders. Cartwright suggests young leaders to believe confidence is always there for them. In entrepreneurship, failure is not real failure. Goodman suggests young leaders need to figure out what is working and not working. They should make the mistake quickly and ensure they do not do it again next time.

Questions and Answers

Goodman met her co-founder 32 years ago. Her business partner is her father. Cartwright met her co-founders from passion and ideas. She indicates co-founders relationship feel like marriage.

Goodman believes public usually hear the financial announcement, but they never follow through. It is interesting to hear the process, but many people in public never have interest to look deeper.

In her journey, Cartwright learns to adapt the jobs that do not exist, which is the meaning of evolution in business. Goodman learns it is important to overcome obstacle as quick as possible. Wong learns she has the confidence to become a founder in the future. Ma learns skills can be transferrable in any business industries. Rotherham learns that in order to develop relationship, young leaders need to see values in other people’s stories.

“Develop relationship by seeing values in stories”

The post CTRL ALT DELETE – Young leaders Reboot the Conversation appeared first on Frank Yang.