From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Rama Akkiraju

We have entered a new period of computing history — a cognitive era. For decades, science fiction visionaries have shared their renditions of intelligent machines and computers that could learn and function as humans. Intelligent machines have moved beyond the lore of science fiction; today, they are a reality thanks to breakthroughs in AI and machine learning. So how will this impact and change the apps that we build and how we leverage new and existing data? In this interactive session, we’ll explore those questions, and * Discuss where AI currently is and where the technology is going * Show how pioneering apps and developers around the world are already using it * Provide access to sample code and applications that you and your teams can use to understand and explore cognitive computing for yourself Rama Akkiraju is a Distinguished Engineer, and Master Inventor at IBM. Rama is presently leading the mission of enabling natural, personalized and compassionate conversations between computers and humans via user modeling at IBM’s Watson division. Specific projects in user modeling domain that she is leading include: researching and developing technologies to infer people’s personalities, emotions, tone, attitudes and intentions etc. from social media data using linguistic and machine learning techniques. In her career, Rama has worked on agent-based decision support systems, electronic market places, and business process integration technologies including semantic Web services, for which she drove a World-Wide-Web (W3C) standard. Rama has co-authored 4 book chapters, and over 50 technical papers. Rama has over dozen issued patents and 20+ others pending. She is the recipient of 3 best paper awards in the areas of AI and Operations Research. Rama also received multiple awards and honors at IBM in her professional career. Rama holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and has received a gold medal from New York University for her MBA.