What Tomorrow's Business Leaders Need to Know About Machine Learning Sometimes I write a blog just to formulate and organize a point of view, and I think it's time that I pull together the bounty of excellent information about Machine Learning. This is a topic with which business leaders must become comfortable, especially tomorrow's business leaders (tip for my next semester University of San Francisco business students!). Machine learning is a key capability that will help organizations drive optimization and monetization opportunities, and there have been some recent developments that will place basic machine learning capabilities into the hands of the lines of business. By the way, there is an absolute wealth of freely-available material on machine learning, so I've included a sources section at the end of this blog for folks who want more details on machine learning. Time to dive into the world of machine learning!

Bert Loomis was a visionary. This general session will highlight how Bert Loomis and people like him inspire us to build great things with small inventions. In their general session at 19th Cloud Expo, Harold Hannon, Architect at IBM Bluemix, and Michael O'Neill, Strategic Business Development at Nvidia, will discuss the accelerating pace of AI development and how IBM Cloud and NVIDIA are partnering to bring AI capabilities to "every day," on-demand. They will also review two "free infrastructure" programs available to startups and innovators. Speaker Bios Harold Hannon has worked in the field of software development as both an architect and developer for more than 15 years, with a focus on workflow, integration, and distributed systems.

Machine Learning helps make complex systems more efficient. By applying advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Cognitive Fingerprinting, wind project operators can utilize these tools to learn from collected data, detect regular patterns, and optimize their own operations. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, discussed how research has demonstrated the value of Machine Learning in delivering next generation analytics to improve safety, performance, and reliability in today's modern wind turbines. Speaker Bio Stuart Gillen is the Director of Business Development at SparkCognition. In this role, he is responsible for driving business engagements, partner development, marketing activities, and go-to market strategy.

Data is the fuel that drives the machine learning algorithmic engines and ultimately provides the business value. In his session at Cloud Expo, Ed Featherston, a director and senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting, discussed the key considerations around quality, volume, timeliness, and pedigree that must be dealt with in order to properly fuel that engine. Speaker Bio Ed Featherston is a director/senior enterprise architect at Collaborative Consulting. He brings 35 years of technology experience in designing, building, and implementing large complex solutions. He has significant expertise in systems integration, Internet/intranet, and cloud technologies, Ed has delivered projects in various industries, including financial services, pharmacy, government and retail.

The Internet of Things will challenge the status quo of how IT and development organizations operate. Certainly the fog layer of IoT requires special insights about data ontology, security and transactional integrity. But the developmental challenges are the same: People, Process and Platform. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Craig Sproule, CEO of Metavine, demonstrated how to move beyond today's coding paradigm and shared the must-have mindsets for removing complexity from the development process, accelerating application delivery times, and ensuring that developers will become heroes (not bottlenecks) in the IoT revolution. Speaker Bio Craig Sproule is the CEO of Metavine where he is responsible for the company's vision, product development and customer success.

Extreme Computing in the Cloud...How to Get It for FREE! Extreme Computing is the ability to leverage highly performant infrastructure and software to accelerate Big Data, machine learning, HPC, and Enterprise applications. High IOPS Storage, low-latency networks, in-memory databases, GPUs and other parallel accelerators are being used to achieve faster results and help businesses make better decisions. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Michael O'Neill, Strategic Business Development at NVIDIA, focused on some of the unique ways extreme computing is being used on IBM Cloud, Amazon, and Microsoft Azure and how to gain access to these resources in the cloud... for FREE! Speaker Bio Michael O'Neill is an established leader for NVIDIA.

Quantum Computing is becoming quite the hot topic lately. With research being done by Google, IBM, Microsoft, universities, and a number of other players, it's looking this is really going to happen. In fact, Google may just be weeks away from announcing the Quantum Supremacy milestone. If you aren't familiar with the concept of Quantum Supremacy yet, it's basically the point where a quantum computer can complete a computation in a short time where a classical computer can't complete it at all. While there are some simple quantum computers out there right now (you can try out IBM's via the Q Experience), this will be a big deal. I'm pretty sure it's not even for myself, but I am interested in the technology so I am intrigued to learn more. The point of this post isn't to teach you all of the details about quantum computing (because I am far from qualified to do that). It's to teach you some of the basic concepts you should go learn about and point you to resources on where to learn more.

Machine Learning helps make complex systems more efficient. By applying advanced Machine Learning techniques such as Cognitive Fingerprinting, wind project operators can utilize these tools to learn from collected data, detect regular patterns, and optimize their own operations. In his session at 18th Cloud Expo, Stuart Gillen, Director of Business Development at SparkCognition, discussed how research has demonstrated the value of Machine Learning in delivering next generation analytics to improve safety, performance, and reliability in today's modern wind turbines. Speaker Bio Stuart Gillen is the Director of Business Development at SparkCognition. In this role, he is responsible for driving business engagements, partner development, marketing activities, and go-to market strategy.

DXWorldEXPO LLC announced today that Chris Matthieu has been named the Tech Chair of "Smart Cities IoT IIoT" track of CloudEXPO's 10-Year Anniversary Event which will take place on November 12-13, 2018 in New York City. Chris Matthieu is the President & CEO of Computes, inc. He brings 30 years of experience in development and launches of disruptive technologies to create new market opportunities as well as enhance enterprise product portfolios with emerging technologies. His most recent venture was Octoblu, a cross-protocol Internet of Things (IoT) mesh network platform, acquired by Citrix. Prior to co-founding Octoblu, Chris was founder of Nodester, an open-source Node.JS PaaS which was acquired by AppFog and the founder of Teleku, a communications-as-a-service cloud platform which was acquired by Voxeo.

Each weekend in the winter, I drive 200 miles north to Warren, VT to feed my family's appetite for skiing, and the funky hippie vibe of the Mad River Valley. Yes, you westerners, I know that I should have moved west years ago. But I consider this area to be my second home - but I hate driving around there with "Mass" plates! And as I drive on VT Rt. 100, I pass this old abandoned travel information booth several times a weekend (yes it's still there). I pass by it in my connected car, with "infotainment" and my smartphone, with access to WWW via cellular towers.