On Wednesday, January 14, the Washington Technology Industry Association kicked off the new year with the first of their Tech in Focus series events. Over 100 guests registered to hear speakers Ian Dempster, Andrew Musselman, Dipankar Ray, and Benjamin S. Skrainka, lead a panel discussion on the topic of machine learning.

WTIA member company, Context Relevant, hosted the event at their downtown Seattle office. The evening began with a fun opportunity for attendees to network and play a word pairing, icebreaker game with fellow WTIA members and employees before the event. Each attendee was asked to draw a word on their way into the event and find their match (ie. peanut butter needs to find jelly). The first four pairs who met their match received lift tickets to Mission Ridge Ski Resort! The winning pairs included: Rocky and Bullwinkle, Macaroni and Cheese, Copy and Paste, Peanut butter and Jelly.

The discussion, which focused primarily on the past, present and future of machine learning, was facilitated by panel moderator and Zensa CIO, David Kelley. To jumpstart the conversation, machine learning was differentiated and defined by the panel as “a subset of the big, ambitious idea that is artificial intelligence” and “the narrowing down of specific problems.

“The adoption of machine learning is taking off slowly; it’s on a curve going up fast” said Andrew Musselman, Chief Data Scientist at Accenture. Ian Dempster, the Senior Director of Product Innovation at Optimum Energy added that, while machine learning is still in its early phases, “it is going to be important for business to embrace it. It is going to make life much easier and end up saving people billions of dollars. “

When asked about the immediate future of machine learning, Microsoft Senior Research Software Design Engineer, Dipankar Ray, said, “In five years we’ll be doing the same thing, I think we should ask about fifty years down the line. My job didn’t exist fifty years ago and it wont fifty years from now because by then, a machine will be doing it.”

Final remarks from speaker Ian Dempster: “I’m really glad I came to this; my eyes have been opened to some interesting new things.”

Thank you to everyone who attended our event! The Tech in Focus series is part of the WTIA’s Technology Industry Programs (TIPs). Our next event will be the Tech Author series with Joshua Davis on January 22^nd, check out the events page for more information.

 

If you want to learn more about Machine Learning, click here to download a Google whitepaper.

 

For those who want to take an even deeper dive, check out this Microsoft Bing whitepaper.