Black Professional Community at Bloomberg event 2018-02-08 - [click to view]
There are a couple of good indicators when you host a successful event. For a panel discussion it is when attendees wish it could have lasted at least another hour. For a networking event, when the discussion panel not only stay around to answer questions, but security figuratively need to push a still full-house of attendees out the door nearly an hour after the panel discussion has ended.
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Black Professional Community at Bloomberg event 2018-02-08 - [click to view]
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The networking event I am speaking about was a panel discussion last night (Feb 8th 2018) on "How will Artificial Intelligence Impact Our Lives in the Future?" held at the impressive Bloomberg offices in NYC.
Kudos to the Black Professional community at Bloomberg and the Bloomberg CTO, Shawn Edwards for hosting this event and bringing together this amazing diverse audience.
A third sign of success if you need more is this was one event where everyone hopes to remain on the BPC mailing list for notice on any of their future events.
Black Professional Community at Bloomberg event 2018-02-08 - [click to view]
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Shawn gave the keynote address and discussed how AI was being used at Bloomberg, not to eliminate jobs but to make the organization much more efficient. AI is a key factor in enabling timely responses to more than 3 million client questions a year or processing 100 billion messages
Naz Quadri, Head of Quant Research and Development for Bloomberg’s Enterprise Solutions Division, gave insight into how his group uses AI and machine learning to develop financial models, liquidity analytics and new products and services for Bloomberg clients.
Amanda Stent, a Bloomberg Natural language Processing Architect and CTO of the Bloomberg Data Science group provided insight into some of the tools, websites and podcasts where we could learn more about AI and its uses without needing a PHD in mathematics and statistics
Harold Jean-Baptiste is an Executive Director and Chief Data Scientist at Segmint. His team also develops sophisticated algorithms and financial models through the use of AI.
Timnit Gebru, from Microsoft research and Co-founder of Black in AI, covered some of the ethical considerations in AI usage from adoption, to bias in datasets used to build the learnin models.
David Mitchell, Equity Market Specialist Team Leader at Bloomberg was the panel moderator, kept the discussion focused and moving along and not being an AI expert also provided the grounding for those of us in the audience that were also not AI experts.
The panel discussion left us wanting more, which is a good thing. This discussion stayed closely with where AI is today and how it can make new products possible and existing processes far more efficient. I do hope the group does a part two as I am curious about the promise or potential for AI to predict the future (in health-care for example). I did get to speak to Shawn, Naz and Harold for a little bit during the post-panel reception and there definitely are use cases for predictive models beyond market making news and even more interestingly a possibility that we may one day see financial models and/or AI tools being released to allow smaller companies and developers to use so maybe a "Bloomberg TensorFlow for Financials?".