Outcome of AI in Practice event in Amsterdam

Last Thursday 8 November, University of Amsterdam's Start-up Village hosted AI in Practice. This event discussed the current resistances to implementing AI and how these challenges can be overcome to unleash the technologies potential and empower professionals.

One issue discussed in the event was the need for Open Data. Training AI models requires large volumes of good quality data to produce valuable output. If these cannot be obtained internally or externally, businesses are required to invest substantial sums of money to produce them from scratch. Moreover, a challenge to obtaining large volumes of good quality data is that Open Data culture itself is not yet common. Currently, very few organisations today can imagine embarking in such a task collaboratively.

Notable speakers in the event were:

• Maarten Stol from Brain Creators, who discussed that making an informed decision between what can be solved by traditional algorithms and what is needed for machine learning is one of the AI practitioners' greatest unspoken challenges today.
• Florin Manaila from IBM, who shared his work on breast cancer detection through AI (deep learning) to accelerate the diagnosis practice.
• Stefen Elsaesser from Capgemini Invent, who discussed how the current gap between believing and opportunity is why it may take decades to go from imagining what is next to bringing it to life.