Throughout the day yesterday I attended the first day of the Ai4 2020 digital conference. With the conferences focus being on machine learning and artificial intelligence it seems like a good place to spend some of my time. All of the events during the conference are pretty much back to back and I attended as many of the virtual talks as I could with everything else going on throughout the day. I had almost expected the videos to be available on demand for all of the talks after they completed. Some of the talks on machine learning monitoring and deployment had overlapped and I wanted to go back and listen to a few of the ones I missed. They will probably all be on YouTube later so I’ll be able to circle back to a few of the videos. It should be easy enough to make a list from the conference program. Given that the program is all digital I’ll need to remember to save a PDF of the conference program. 

Looking back on yesterday I can now say it was really nice to take the day off and really focus on a few different things. That is the really nice part about attending conferences. You get to dig into topics at an expert level in short bursts. It really lets me engage in shifting some focus around. That is really the key to rallying my thoughts later on to something else. Being able to spend some time thinking about different and diverging topics helps me focus back in on other things. Sometimes gaining a little bit of perspective goes a long way to helping to understand the bigger picture surrounding something. Expertise can help focus you so far into a topic that the details obscure the bigger picture. That is one of those things you want to avoid happening. 

You might be wondering about what talks I attended yesterday during the first day of the Ai4 2020 digital conference. Really I make these lists as a record to be able to look back on later if I wanted to dig into something more. Here is the list:

• General Session Keynotes – This 3 talk package had a few technical difficulties at the start, but they got them fixed. This is one I would go back and watch again later on YouTube. 
• How Ambient Clinical Intelligence is Transforming the Provider-Patient Experience – This one had a really interesting use case and examples during the talk
• Research to Prod: Getting ML into real products at Bespoke – I would like to read more about this one. I might dig around for whitepapers later
• Monitoring Models at Scale – I have the whitepaper on this one and will be reading it later this week
• Natural Language Processing – Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare
• AI & RPA for the Finance Sector
• The State of AI in Healthcare

Normally I take better notes during conferences on the events I’m able to attend, but I was moving around the house and doing things throughout the day so this experience was mostly listening to the conference instead of sitting down in front of a keyboard where I could actively take notes. That was a really long sentence. I went back and read it again, but did not take the time to break it into three parts. That was probably an oversight on my part. I must not be sorry about it or it would have been corrected.  

Things don’t pick up again within the conference until later in the day. I have a few hours to work on other things this morning.