ExpoTees Conference 2017: Data Science
Tuesday 23 May 2017, 9.00am - 1.30pm
The Curve, Teesside University
Programme
9.00am
Registration and refreshments
The Curve Foyer
9.20am
Welcome
T1.10
9.30am
Artificial intelligence and building solutions now using Microsoft Azure
Amy Nicholson, Microsoft
T1.10
Networking brea
10.15am
k
10.30am
Internet of everything? The big society implications of IoT, big data and big
decisions
Paul Williams, CloudView
T1.10
11.15am
Break and refreshments
T2.02/3
11.30am
Multiagent decision-making in the big data era
Dr Yifeng Zeng, Teesside University
T1.10
12.15pm
Round up
T1.10
12.30pm
Lunch
2.02/3
1.30pm – 5.00pm
ExpoTees Exhibition and VIP lounge for businesses
Speakers
Artificial Intelligence and building solutions now using Microsoft Azure
Amy Nicholson, Technical Evangelist, Microsoft
The world and technology are once again transforming, the vast majority of the world’s data
is now digital and customers who are harnessing the power of big data, the cloud and
intelligent applications are doing revolutionary things. This talk will help you answer some key
questions around what is artificial intelligence? Why has it exploded as the next big thing?
And how can you build AI solutions using data services on Microsoft Azure?
Amy will introduce you to some of the game changing technologies people are using *today*
to make their applications stand out from the rest, using advanced analytics, machine
learning services and IoT technologies. By diving into the services that build up advanced
analytics architectures in the cloud, creating machine learning models and harnessing
intelligence via APIs.
Amy is a technical evangelist in Microsoft’s Developer
Experience Division, having obtained a degree in computer
science and completing a research project in natural language
processing and machine learning. She is passionate about data
science, machine learning and internet of things. Amy helps
customers to envision, design and build their cloud solutions
and specialises in the Microsoft Azure Data Platform.
Internet of everything? The big society implications of IoT, big data and big decisions
Paul Williams, Cloudview
A customer-centric technologist who has
worked in senior IT, business development
and customer experience roles, Paul has
worked as a consultant and for everything
from start-ups to multi-billion dollar
organisations. With over 22 years of
experience in the IT sector, and having designed and
implemented one of the first cloud-based email services at Sun
Microsystems and been involved in a number of projects involving personal and patient data,
Paul has witnessed first-hand how our ability to secure and use data has improved peoples’
lives. People and society can benefit from the combination of big data, artificial intelligence
and large-scale integrated networks, but we have choices to make that will affect how we live
and what our collective future will look like.
Multi-agent decision-making in the big data era
Dr Yifeng Zeng, Teesside University
Guiding a team of agents in order to accomplish tasks is a challenging artificial intelligence
problem with implications in many fields such as robotics, computer games and so on. The
problem is infamously hard when the agents are faced with adversarial agents sharing the
common environments. A significant amount of progress has been achieved along this line of
research particularly by tacking this problem from a single agent perspective.
However, most of the work still stands on conventional AI modelling approaches that require
precise and sufficient inputs of domain knowledge, which may further complicate the
solutions. This presentation will report interesting results of solving the complex problems
through data-driven approaches, and discuss challenges and potential solutions.
Dr Yifeng Zeng is a Reader in the School of Computing at
Teesside University. His research interests include artificial
intelligence, big data, social networks analysis and computer
games. Yifeng has published over 70 referred papers in
prestigious international academic journals and has organised
international workshops on agents and data mining interaction
since 2011.
Yifeng is a PC chair of the 2016/17 IEEE International
Conference on Big Data Service and currently leading an
Innovate UK project on improving customer experience through
machine learning technologies.