This week (May 5th and 6th) marks Think Digital, IBM's largest digital conference ever. I had the pleasure of previewing some of the sessions early and wanted to provide some recommendations of what to look for at Think Digital in the coming days, especially sessions relevant to our Data Science community. The event is free to register and attend (IBMers do not need to register to attend). Below are 5 highlights that can be experienced on day 1, which is tomorrow, Tuesday, May 5th.

Live Sessions

The New Essential Technologies for Business

Join IBM CEO Arvind Krishna as he shares his vision for the future of enterprise technology in an era of digital transformation. Arvind will discuss the new, essential platforms that provide businesses with the flexibility, speed, reliability and innovation they need to be successful in times of both crisis and opportunity. This session will be broadcast at 11:15 and 7:15 EST, where Arvind will discuss the importance of hybrid cloud, AI and other areas shaping the future of technology. This will be in the 'Featured Sessions 1' track.

Taking on the World’s Toughest Challenges. Build Smart. Build Secure.

At 2:30 and 10:30 EST, IBM SVP Bob Lord will lead this session detailing how developers will need to leverage open source technologies to solve new and evolving business challenges. Promoteo, last year's Call for Code winners will speak, and the initial finalist for this year's Call for Code COVID-19 solutions will be announced with help from Chelsea Clinton. This will be in the 'Featured Sessions 2' track.

Video Library

A number or sessions will be hosted live during Tuesday and Wednesdays' Think Digital. In addition to these session, many more are available on demand. These additional videos can be accessed via the navigation bar on the top of Think's website in the 'Video Library.' Data Science Community members may find the sessions of particular interest in both the 'Code' and 'Data and AI' sections.

Meeting the Global Challenge of COVID-19 with IBM Data and AI

In this session, Seth Dobrin, IBM VP of Data and AI, discusses the pervasiveness of COVID-19 and its impact on citizens, businesses, and governments. This session outlines what IBM is doing to help in these challenging times to meet the needs of everyone via customized and/or pretrained Watson Assistants. Watson Assistant can provide much needed relief to overworked call centers as well as a great introduction to new or experienced developers and data scientists looking to infuse AI technologies into their work. An overview of organizations currently using Watson Assistant to provide COVID-19 related information and free access and setup help for Watson Assistant are also outlined.

Learning the Language of Business: How NLP is Moving from Research to Transforming Industries

This panel of IBM researchers explain the history and future of NLP, or Natural Language Processing. An in depth discussion is provided on how information is extracted from documents and texts and used to in solutions to business problems, and provides a summary to IBM Research projects like Project Debater and NLP concepts such as understanding, classifying, retrieving, and generating.

Building Recommender Pipelines with TensorFlow and Spark

IBM CODAIT developers Nick Pentreath and Daniel Jalova build a performant, scalable, and end-to-end pipeline for recommendation models in this session. An introduction to recommendation systems is provided as well as an explanation as recent developments in technology that are helping to shape them. Specifically, deep learning modeling techniques are used to add nonlinear recommendations and distributed computing techniques in Apache Spark are used to handle the exponential growth in maintaining recommendation pipelines. Finally, it is shown how the recommendation pipeline built can be easily accessed and used via IBM's Model Asset Exchange.

Please enjoy IBM's Think Digital! And let me know if you have and questioning or comments about the event.

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