Speaking at the DATAVERSITY Smart Data Online 2016 Conference, Adrian Bowles, industry analyst, recovering academic, and founder of STORM Insights, and Steve Ardire, Merchant of Light, both talked about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They addressed the question: "Will robots take my job?" The short answer could be summarized as: "Maybe." Lower level jobs with easily improved productivity are likely candidates for automated replacements, says Bowles, but higher level positions with decision making capacity are more likely to have assistance from AI, rather than being replaced by it. Bowles talked about recently going through the stack of books he used early in his AI studies and discovering that "nowhere in these books is the key phrase'Machine Learning,' and yet today, that's sort of at the center of everything we're doing."

Cognitive computing is still evolving. There is plenty of hype surrounding it, but also some solid use cases that are making practitioners pay close attention to its potential, particularly in financial services, customer engagement, retail, healthcare and the pharmaceutical industries. What, exactly, is cognitive computing and what technologies fall under this still-evolving field? How does it differ from Internet of Things and big data? Sue Feldman and Hadley Reynolds will use a series of vignettes to differentiate cognitive computing technologies and methods from more familiar technologies.

The Smart Data Online Conference will bring together the insights and training that are helpful in navigating new technologies shared across data management topics such as machine learning, cognitive computing, and artificial intelligence to name a few. It is in this event that we can connect you, the attendee, with the speakers who are working successfully with these new technologies in their daily positions.