Abstract: 

Expectations of AI are high, but only a few understand what it is or what it takes to deliver. The biggest barrier to AI success is not math or technology, but getting stakeholders to understand the process of an AI project and tying the outcome to the business value. In this session, we will introduce the AI project process diagram, discuss what each step means to a business leader and a data scientist, and how we align both parties to drive business results. We will also discuss different methods - i.e. centralized or decentralized AI expertise - in building an AI team within an organization. After this session, you will understand:

1. How a business problem is translated into a data science problem

2. What a data scientist needs from a subject matter expert to succeed

3. The beginning to the end of a data science project

4. How do stakeholders evaluate models and get real value from them

5. Should you implement AI in a centralized or decentralized fashion in your organization

6. How to decide if you should build or buy AI tech

Bio: 

Pedro Alves is the founder and CEO of Ople Inc., a company that uses artificial intelligence to build artificial intelligence (AI). Pedro loves data science and has spent the past seventeen years working in the area of artificial intelligence - spanning predicting, analyzing and visualizing data across social media content, photos, genomics, insurance fraud/costs, social graphs, human attraction, spam detection, and topic modeling to name a few. Realizing that he was learning by observing how algorithms learn from processing different models, Alves discovered that data scientists could benefit from AI that mimics this behavior of ‘learning to learn to learn.’ Thus, Ople was founded with the vision of advancing data science to make it accessible to domain experts in the business.

Alves studied Ph.D in Computational Biology from Yale University and is an active speaker and advisor within the AI community.