We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 – 28. SAN FRANCISCO – VentureBeat is proud to announces the winners of the 4th Women in AI Awards and its 4th AI Innovation Awards. The Women in AI Awards honors women leaders, mentors, researchers and entrepreneurs who are transforming the AI industry. This year, over 200 women were nominated over five categories, and we're delighted to introduce our winners. VentureBeat's 4th AI Innovation Awards recognizes and awards noteworthy, compelling, innovative and successful AI initiatives in five categories: Conversational AI, Applied AI, AI on the Edge, AI for Good and AI Innovators (startups less than two years old and with no more than $30 million in funding).

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a machine learning technique that solves large and complex problems in situations where labeled datasets are not …

AI isn't the end-all-be-all when it comes to conversational experiences like Amazon's Alexa. In fact, manual solutions to problems are sometimes superior to automated, AI-driven fixes. That's according to Amazon Alexa AI director of research science Janet Slifka, who spoke during a session today at VentureBeat's Transform 2020 conference. "If someone calls customer service and says something to the effect, 'Alexa doesn't understand me,' in many cases, we can be faster to the customer with a manual fix," Slifka said, describing her team's work in triage. "In some cases, it's almost required when you need words to enter the lexicon. You're probably not going to wait until you rebuilt and deploy a statistical model when a new word gains prominence, like'Brexit.'"

At Transform's second annual Women in AI Breakfast presented by Capital One and Intel, powerful women from tech companies across the industry gathered to talk about how women, particularly women of color, can take their seats at the table in the technology industry. "Much has been written about the industry's pipeline problem, and how we can increase diversity in tech companies," said Carla Saavedra Kochalski, director of conversational AI and messaging products at Capital One who provided opening remarks. "Many say they don't hire women or people of color candidates because there aren't enough qualified candidates. And it's true -- there are fewer of women than men with computer science degrees." But what if that low number is more of a symptom, than a cause?

Businesses and developers making conversational AI experiences should start with the understanding that you're going to have to use unsupervised learning to scale, said Prem Natarajan, Amazon head of product and VP of Alexa AI and NLP. He spoke with Barak Turovsky, Google AI director of product for the NLU team, at VentureBeat's Transform 2020 AI conference today as part of a conversation about future trends for AI assistants. Natarajan called unsupervised learning for language models an important trend for AI assistants and an essential part of creating conversational AI that works for everyone. "Don't wait for the unsupervised learning realization to come to you yet again. Start from the understanding that you're going to have to use unsupervised learning at some level of scale," he said.

Computer vision has become one of AI's most promising applications, combining ever-improving cameras with faster and smarter automated object recognition. During today's Transform 2020 digital conference, Intel VP Brian McCarson spoke with VentureBeat CEO Matt Marshall about computer vision's role in the growing industrial internet of things (IIoT) market. The conversation highlighted a particularly compelling emergent use case: hugely improved product defect detection that promises to improve the reliability of everything from computer screens to cars. Manufacturers seeking to eliminate product defects haven't historically lacked staff or defect screening expertise, McCarson said -- they have been held back by limitations of the human eye. In modern consumer products, defects can be microscopic or near-microscopic, such as bad screen pixels or surface issues in aluminum car transmission components.

Today marked the conclusion of VentureBeat's Transform 2020 summit, which took place online for the first time in our history. Luminaries including Google Brain ethicist Timnit Gebru and IBM AI ethics leader Francesca Rossi spoke about how women are advancing AI and leading the trend of AI fairness, ethics, and human-centered AI. Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal detailed the social network's efforts to apply AI to detect fake or hateful tweets. Pinterest SVP of technology Jeremy King walked through learnings from Pinterest's explorations of computer vision to create "inspirational" experiences. And Unity principal machine learning engineer Cesar Romero brought clarity to the link between synthetic data sets and real-world AI model training.

Everyone has a morning routine. You wake up, get dressed, have breakfast -- and in the days before COVID-19 -- pack up your bag to leave for the office. Day after day, you pack your bag the same way, tossing in your laptop, lunch, and maybe even workout clothes. It's so routine that it becomes automatic. One day you leave the house, and you notice your bag is less bulky than usual.

At our AI-focused Transform 2020 event, taking place July 15-17 entirely online, VentureBeat will recognize and award emergent, compelling, and influential work through our second annual VB AI Innovation Awards. Drawn from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise of our nominating committee members, these awards give us a chance to shine a light on the people and companies making an impact in AI. Here are the nominees in each of the five categories -- NLP/NLU Innovation, Business Application Innovation, Computer Vision Innovation, AI for Good, and Startup Spotlight. A senior principal scientist at Amazon Research and faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Dr. Hakkani-Tur currently works on solving natural dialogue for Amazon's Alexa AI. She has researched and worked on natural language processing, conversational AI, and more for over two decades, including stints at Google and Microsoft.

I can't wait until Transform 2020 starts tomorrow. It's our flagship event for enterprise decision-makers to learn how to apply AI. One of our goals at VentureBeat is to create a new kind of town square for enterprise decision makers to learn about transformative technology and transact. And the practice of AI is where we're going deep. AI is the most powerful technology in enterprise today, and VentureBeat is the leading publication covering AI news.