Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to be presenting at a number of data related community meetups about “The Evolution of Artificial Intelligence”.

The tech community has changed a lot over the last five years, so as a speaker it’s refreshing to be invited to events where the breadth of their content is as appealing to audiences as much as the depth of content.  In fact, as the world of data evolves breadth has often become more important to audiences than depth.  For me, breadth often means bringing new content to an audience.  An occasion where everyone learns something, everyone gets to form an opinion and perhaps most importantly, everyone feels it was valuable to sit through.  That’s not to say there isn’t a place for depth, where audiences turn up experienced and educated – and still want to learn more.  But for me right now, sharing why I feel a potentially new topic is relevant to people is as inspiring as it is to see someone deepen their knowledge.

What I’ll be presenting about

This spring and summer, I’ll be presenting a topic that interests me as much as I hope it interests my audiences – the evolution of artificial intelligence.  I’ll be aiming to answer questions like “what actually is artificial intelligence?” and explaining how the idea has been around for centuries yet it was only Alan Turing in the 1940s who started to make it a theoretical reality.  Work happened in the 50s, 60s and 70s to accelerate the practical implementation of AI but it didn’t change the world.  It’s now only in the late 2010s, when we have large amounts of training data and powerful GPU based machines, that it’s become a valuable tool available to the masses.  My session ends by considering how business analytics, and therefore business decision making, is likely to change as a result of machines making the difficult decisions – as well as making our lives easier with the advent of other technologies such visual search (“I’d like a pair of shoes that look like those in this photo”), speech-to-text and real-time translation.

Session calendar

I’m currently scheduled to present at the moment events in addition to my session at the SQL Saturday event in Dublin: