data natives berlin

I’m attending the Data Natives conference in Berlin. First day was pretty interesting. Started with a talk around AI ethics and reasons some fail, “Viva the AI Revolution!” by Susara van den Heever from IBM. Gave examples of “bad” AI’s, MS Tay and MIT’s psychopathic AI Norman. Advice included building applications that explain themselves and inspire trust.

“Mixing virtual reality and data science for the new age of medicine.” by Dr. Adam Streck. Gave examples of uses for VR and analytics in psychotherapy (e.g. public speaking) and testing neurological conditions in controlled simulations. Advantages include safe experimentation with objective measured results in situations you could not do in reality.

“Re-thinking the structure of event data” by Cara Baestlein from Snowplow analytics. Caught my attention because of the event data, was about approaches to versioning event data with their advantages and disadvantages. Their company has created a product for collecting, validating and analysing event data, with an open source JSON schema data repository, Iglu. A previous talk was recorded here.

Last talk of the day was a good one, “Stunning differences between machine and human intelligence” by Prof. Dr. Danko Nikolic. Clearly articulated reasons why ML can’t do certain problems well with a lot of good humor. Covered things like humans thinking with concepts, context and working memory to think in stories. Examples like how a ML model can’t recognise an image of a modernist designed chair as a chair because it is purely going by pattern recognisation when a human who has concept of sitting can see the unusual object but still imagine themselves sitting in it. No recording I can find, but I’m going to look out for more talks from him.

There were other interesting talks around topics like analysing satellite images for farming to manage fertiliser use in specific areas, ML against decentralised medical data reducing privacy issues using a federated approach (IBM talk) and 3D point cloud analysis with object detection. Looking forward to the rest of the conference.