AI Summit NYC 2019: AI for Good
On December 11 and 12, Mark III Systems attended the AI Summit in New York City. AI Summit conferences are always top notch and showcase a wide variety of companies that are innovating with their AI technologies. This year was no different! There were companies showing products that ranged from using AI to determine which makeup is best for your skin type to augmenting datasets by creating synthetic data to optimizing data science workflows. The breadth of technologies was definitely interesting.
At our booth, we showed off the latest version of our American Sign Language transcription software. Individuals would walk up to the screen and would sign and, in realtime, read what they were signing. We call the demo "AI for Good" since the response we get from attendees are life changing scenarios. We had people from major banks, healthcare systems, and universities who discussed possible use cases for their industry. The response to what we created was even bigger than at other conferences. A total of 25 people allowed us to gather more training data by filming them signing the alphabet as well as the words “hello”, “good”, “bad”, “I love you”, “you”, “me”, and “your”. Adding words that have motions is the next step of the project.
The AI Summit attendees are very technical or have a base understanding of how AI can impact the business. This level of expertise and interest allows us to learn from each person we talk to and discuss what others are doing with AI. In return, it helps us to improve our ASL demo and begin working on other projects needed for businesses to succeed in a world of digital transformation. The sharing of ideas is how industries advance. As the saying goes “All of us is better than one of us.” How many times do we get to talk to people about the hyperparameters we are using when training our models, the hardware that makes AI successful, and how we can optimize them? Conversations like this are increasing and we look forward to helping businesses succeed when adopting AI technology!
One eye opening experience was when a student from a university in New Jersey came to see the demo. We had a great discussion that later encouraged him to return with an entire team of developers, data scientists, other AI practitioners to see the demo. You can imagine how surprised we were to see all of these people show up at once because one student was so enthusiastic about computer vision he wanted them all to see it.
We are looking forward to the next AI Summit and hope to see you there!
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