Do you ever feel frustrated when you hear about significant AI developments and you can’t be sure how — or whether — they relate to your organization? Are you missing out? Will a competitor “get it” ahead of your firm? The best strategy is to take a bit of time to get to know the technology, the companies, the people, and the ideas personally. Then you will know what difference the next technology land run would make if you tried it where you live and work. Here are five choice venues:

AI Nextcon
Jan 23-27, Seattle (hurry!)
$149-$1499

For developers, by developers. The conference offers a mix of tutorials, workshops, and keynote speakers on how to apply the latest AI technology to your own software development practices. It hits computer vision, speech recognition, machine learning, analytics, and other topics that you need to stay on top of, even if you aren’t thinking of making a move right away.

IBM Think
February 12-15, San Francisco
$895-$2395

While IBM is not exclusively focused on AI, it has been publicly displaying its AI chops throughout the years with the chess champion DeepBlue and the Jeopardy champion Watson. The company has developed AI continually over the years and uses its Think conference to help developers and business leaders deliver useful products to the public. Think covers topics ranging from AI in your HR department to machine learning in search engine optimization.

TechCrunch Robotics+AI
April 18, Berkeley
$249

This one-day event brings you face-to-face with some of the world’s AI and robotics leaders, investors, and founders. It includes live interviews, workshops, and networking opportunities. If you are looking for an AI-oriented company to get involved with, this is your chance.

The O’Reilly AI Conference
April 15-18, New York
June 18-21, Beijing
Sept 9-12, San Jose
Oct 14-17, London
$1495+

Yes, that’s right, you can choose your date and location. This series of conferences is hosted by both O’Reilly (the technology publisher) and Intel (the chipmaker). It includes focused training courses for developers in specific technologies such as PyTorch and TensorFlow, as well as an AI for Managers track. The training is followed by a series of keynote speakers and special sessions with top leaders in the industry.

AWS re:Invent
Dec 2-6, Las Vegas
$1799

re:Invent is Amazon’s yearly conference to showcase the latest technology behind Amazon Web Services (AWS). While the AWS re:Invent conference doesn’t focus solely on AI, AI and machine learning have been a part of its schedule for years. Amazon was one of the first companies to pioneer Artificial Artificial Intelligence with their Mechanical Turk system. AWS’s list of tools has grown to include natural language processing, conversational interfaces, video analysis and recognition, automated translation, and machine learning tools. The re:Invent meet can help you make the right decisions about these tools in your organization, whether you are a developer or a manager.

The more we learn about what a move in a given direction with AI entails, the better our decision-making can be.

Jonathan Bartlett

Jonathan Bartlett is the Research and Education Director of the Blyth
Institute.

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