Today I descended on London Olympia for the AI & Big Data Expo. It was a busy and exciting day, here’s four things that stood out for me…

1) The future of education? I spoke with SquirrelAI, a Chinese Education Tech startup that is automating teaching. This is how it was explained to me… Each subject (e.g. Maths) is split into 10,000 ‘knowledge-points’ (e.g. long division), and each student is assessed against these 10,000 dimensions and a personalised education program is built from that. Is this the future of education… or a little bit scary? I’ll let you decide, but they have reached unicorn status after several substantial fundraises in China, and will be looking to expand globally in the coming years. Before you know it, your little Johnny might be having his Maths ability described by a 10,000 dimension vector.

2) AI infrastructure at Facebook scale: Did you know - Facebook predict more than 200 trillion data points, every day? I really enjoyed the talk by Aditya Kalro (AI Infrastructure Manager @ Facebook). Aditya went into some detail about how they’ve had to build resilience into their distributed model training infrastructure. If one machine goes down, it used to ruin their whole training run, some of which can take 29 days! They’ve invested in disaster recovery, check-pointing and replication to overcome these challenges. Takeaway: even in the age of deep learning (where models can automatically extract features) , Facebook still put a lot of importance on feature engineering to save on the compute.

3) Building enterprise chatbots: I caught the end of an interesting talk by Lauren Kunze (CEO @ PandoraBots). Lauren gave a well-rounded summary of the top things to bare in mind whilst building an enterprise chatbot; my favourite was the importance of building and keeping up-to-date a suite of test cases to ensure your bot performs as you expect, even through rapid release iterations.

4) IoT ramping up in the UK: Finally, I met Peter Smith (Head of BD @ IAConnects) for the first time in person. In Mott MacDonald’s Smart Infrastructure team, we’ve been using IoT sensors and gateways supplied by iaConnects to develop our smart & healthy buildings product, so it was great to meet in person and hear about the amazing growth their company is going through!

If you’d like to know more about my experiences at the conference or anything else, please do leave a message or get in touch!

Originally posted here.