I will be presenting a keynote talk at the 2019 TDWI Conference. The event runs February 10-15 and will be in Las Vegas. See https://tdwi.org/events/conferences/las-vegas/Home.aspx. My talk is titled “The Present and Future of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence”.

The TDWI Web site home page.

TDWI stands for “transforming data with intelligence”. Until a couple of years ago, TDWI emphasized data and what I think of as classical data science (things like SQL, big data, R, and data visualization). But over the past couple of years, the event has moved towards topics related to machine learning.

Examples of some of the all-day courses at the 2019 TDWI event include “Introduction to AI and Deep Learning” (wow! that’s a lot to cover in one day!), and “Hands-On: Data Science in R”.

Most conferences have an educational component to some extent. The TDWI event leans heavily towards straightforward education in the sense that there are many multi-hour sessions that are like workshops, and even the shorter talks resemble college lectures. And this is a good thing. Too many conferences have sessions that are just fluff, or thinly disguised product marketing.

I’m often asked to present a keynote talk but I usually decline. When I attend or speak at a conference, in many cases I am unimpressed with the keynote talks. A good keynote is very difficult to deliver because the audience is usually very heterogeneous. A talk that’s too generic isn’t interesting, and a talk that’s too specific might not resonate with a large part of the audience.

I’m best when I speak about a very specific technical topic. So that’s what I’m thinking I’ll do at the 2019 TDWI keynote. I’m toying with several ideas but I’ll probably talk about recent work in anomaly detection with deep neural autoencoders and LSTM recurrent neural networks. And I’m thinking about forward-looking topics including homomorphic encryption, symbolic reasoning, and quantum computing. These are areas where I know some leading experts who work at my large tech company, so I can get good state-of-the-art information.

I made my keynote talk title quite generic so I could have lots of leeway about what topics I end up talking about.

I get far more requests to speak than I can accommodate. One of the reasons I agreed to speak at TDWI is that I like the people who run the event. Sure, they’re in business to make money, but TDWI has been around for many years, and I’ve gotten a good vibe from the people I’ve dealt with there.

The TDWI organizers told me that if you wish to go to the 2019 TDWI event in Las Vegas, when you register, use the promo code “Speaker100” and you’ll get $100 off your registration. If you attend, track me down and say “hello”.

A group of art students created abstract animation set to a live performance of “La Creation du monde, Op. 81”, by Leonard Bernstein. Here are five screenshots from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYzH4349yCc.