The highlights of the first Data Innovation Summit Conference day: LEGO, Uber, Facebook, Google, Netflix, eBay, Coca Cola and more

It has been an awesome day for everyone that attended the first conference day of the Online Data Innovation Summit. We had a super immersive and one-of-a-kind experience listening to some of the biggest names in the industry share their data and analytics stories. 

As we are getting our impressions in order, we’ve compiled the highlights of the first Data Innovation Summit day, topics, case studies and success stories.

Stroll through the Online Exhibition Hall

We opened the conference day with a walkthrough of the online Exhibition Hall and got to know all our partners and sponsors where we learned all about the latest of technology, tools and solutions on the market.

Made great connections in the Speed Networking

Afterwards, we joined all our delegates and speakers in the morning Speed Networking to meet everyone, share our stories, listen to theirs and exchange contacts.

Keynote Spotlight

The show started with the sessions of our remarkable Keynote Speakers. Traditionally, Henrik Göthberg, Founder of Dairdux and Chairman of the Data Innovation Summit, opened the summit with his Chairman Opening Remarks focused on the Data and AI Innovation journey these past 5 years, how to operationalise Data and AI Innovation in the organisation, and how to drive the DAIR journey onwards. He was followed by Martin Willcox, EMEA VP of Technology at Teradata who talked on Getting analytics out of the lab and into production, David Dadoun, Head of Enterprise Data and Business Intelligence at Ubisoft, who delivered Learning to Read: A Tale in Data Literacy and Nick Desbarats, Data Visualisation Evangelist at Practical Reporting who explained The real reasons so many dashboards disappoint users.

Following the Keynote Speakers, attendees could choose from as many as 8 jam-packet stages with rich, unparalleled content.

The Applied Analytics, Data Science and AI Stage featured presentations highlighting a clear business output of DataScience, Analytics, ML & AI to enhance customer experience, improve business processes, reinvent business models and create new ones.

Some of the most innovative companies and names that shared their success stories on this stage were: 

• Takuya Hirakuri, General Manager, Digital Strategy Dept. at Mitsubishi Corporation & Rei Kubonaga, CTO at MC Digital presented on one of Mitsubishi Corporation’s digital strategies – digital transformation in the food industry by developing a food distribution data platform in their presentation DX for Food Industry.

• Sébastien Foucaud, Chief Data Officer at HRS Group, brought concrete examples of problems faced in setting up a large data function and how they are solving it at HRS in his presentation on How to scale Data function in a fast-growing Organization?

• Martijn Bauters, Head of Data Intelligence, Easyfairs International, explained what is needed to build data science capabilities and leverage ROI on AI. He shared his experience with a working ML project that they stopped, because of misalignment between Business & Technology in his session named Why we pulled the plug out of a perfect working Machine Learning project.

The Analytics and Visualisation Stage centred around the latest methodologies of turning real-time data from multiple sources into insight, Self-Service BI, Data Visualization, Prescriptive Analytics, and much more. The stage showcased talks by some of the most established data visualisation experts:

• Andy Cotgreave, Technical Evangelist at Tableau Software, showed us how to encourage people to engage with the information at their fingertips, and go on to make a greater impact on their business in his talk How to make an impact with data: Going from bold to beautiful!

• Jacob Olsufka, Visual Analytics Engineer at Spotify, shared his experience with how they turn massive amounts of data into insights that help inform product decisions across the company in his inspiring presentation Spotify: Making data dance with Analytics.

• Juan Manuel Contreras, Data Science Manager at Uber, presented a framework that defines data science management and outlines three areas of competence needed to succeed as a data science leader: diplomacy, diagnosis, and development, elaborated in his session How to lead data science teams: The 3 D’s of data science leadership.

The Data Engineering Stage focused on agile approaches to designing, implementing and maintaining a distributed Data Architecture to support a wide range of tools and frameworks in production. The stage hosted some of the most advanced companies and speakers making great headways in data engineering: 

• Francesc Joan Riera, Applied Machine Learning Engineer at The LEGO Group, revealed how they have set up a “frameless server” to train, maintain and update their deployed Machine Learning models for LEGO’s Moderation Service in his talk Continuous evaluation and improvement of Deployed Models in Production.

• Michal Gancarski, Data Engineer at Zalando, delivered a practical session focused on how to design, build, deploy and monitor a serverless data pipelines, as well as advantages and disadvantages of the approach with a live-coding session and a practical example in Serverless Data Infrastructure – A Complete Example.

• Gustav Rånby, Senior Data Scientist & Veeresh Elango, Data Scientist at Scania, presented their journey from a Matlab script to an IT-product combining big data processing, the AWS cloud and a javascript front end, in their session on Data Ops: Systemizing the shift towards sustainable transport.

The Data Management Stage focus was on the CDO agenda, Data & Information Governance, Big Data Quality, Master Data, Warehousing, Data Lake, delivered by the frontrunners in leveraging data as an enterprise asset and ways of collecting and distributing quality data.

Coming from the banking industry where data management, privacy and usage are of burning importance, 

• Shaun Rolls, Head of Data Foundation at SEB, covered insights into how SEB is evolving its innovative data management platform in his session How to build a data foundation to enable machine learning, AI and data analytics.

• Gary Class, Senior Vice President at Wells Fargo, illustrated the successful application of advanced analytics at Wells Fargo in his session titled Advanced Analytics and the Importance of Early Adoption of an Analytics Platform at Wells Fargo.

• Nicola Askham, The Data Governance Coach, elaborated on Minimal Data Governance – is it effective and how to do it? and whether Data Governance on a shoestring can be effective and how to go about it.

The Industry 4.0 and IoT Stage dove into how we can utilize IOT data to create insight and innovate through that data. Some of the companies-leaders in this area presented some innovative business examples, technical examples on IOT data management, and utilization of Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning and Blockchain:

• Birger Ober, CEO at Sustainable Digital Infrastructure (SDIA) & Christoph Buchli, Founder & CTO at Helio AG, provided us with a deeper understanding of how an organization can minimize impact, without sacrificing performance in their session titled How to build AI models that don’t hurt Mother Earth – one AI model at a time.

• Neil Hodgson, who is currently leading Star Connect in Maersk Technology, a system which turns raw data from IoT devices onboard Maersk vessels into insights and advice that drive efficiency, safety and reliability of the Maersk fleet, talked about the Star Connect IoT project.

• Simon Moritz, IoT Ecosystem Evangelist at Ericsson, presented solutions to the challenges of the 4th industrial revolution such as increased the extract transform and load (ETL) process, complexity and add latency of integration and silos, as well inspired to a new business model that can help unleash the true potential in his Digital Infrastructure and AI paving the way for 4IR session.

The Machine and Deep Learning Stage brought us the best of technical presentations on deploying Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Generative Adversarial Network and Artificial Intelligence in projects by some of the leading experts, researchers and practitioners in the area:

• Errol Koolmeister, Head of AI Tech & Data Science at H&MxAI, delivered an overview of some of the accomplishments to date in machine learning with a focus on where we are today and a forecast on where we are going in his talk Machine Learning – Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

• Arvind Keprate, Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering at Oslo Metropolitan University, presented an introduction to Bayesian Networks (BNs) along with an illustrative case study in his session Causal Network – A Possible Tool for Human-Level Intelligence.

• Fabrizio Silvestri, Research Scientist at Facebook AI, presented the novel Misspelling Embeddings Model (MOE) which combines Facebook’s open-source library fastText with a supervised task that embeds misspellings close to their correct variants.

The Ignite and Accelerate Stages provided Data Innovation Summit attendees with bonus practical case studies on Applied Innovation, Analytics, Data Management, Data Engineering, Data Science, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, AI, IoT and much more. The speakers that took over these stages are coming from both world’s leading brands and leaders in data and AI:

• We were super excited to listen to two Google Corporate Engineering, Rich Dutton, Head of Machine Learning for Corporate Engineering, who gave an exclusive talk on How Google Uses AI and ML in the Enterprise; and Peter Grabowski, Austin Site Lead of Enterprise Machine Learning, who in turn presented on Drawing Insights from Customer Feedback Using NLP.

• Representing the e-commerce giant eBay, Ashok Ramani, Computer Vision Machine Translation and AI Platform Lead at eBay, presented how they use state-of-the-art AI innovations in Computer Vision and NLP to power various eBay experiences during his session on Powering e-Commerce Experiences with Computer Vision, NLP and AI Platform.

• Jayesh R. Patel, Sr. Data Engineer at Rockstar Games, the game developer of Red Dead Redemption II and Grand Theft Auto V, uncovered the best practices to model data well to achieve scalability and usability presenting on Scalable Big Data Modeling.

• Alexandros Tzitzeras, Data Science & Advanced Analytics Manager – Strategy & Insights at The Coca-Cola Company, described the process of Forging a business plan for Data Science & Advanced Analytics transformation and provided use cases of analytics and proving value from the soft beverage tycoon.

• Meltem Ballan, Data Science Fellow at General Motors gave an overview of the neural components of data and behaviour and some common neural network algorithms in her talk on Vehicles as data platforms: Telemetry meets vehicle identity.

• Wrapping up the first conference day of the Accelerate stage was reserved for Romain Cledat, Senior Software Engineer, Machine LearningInfrastructure at Netflix and his session on Using Metaflow to host models for real-time inference.

These were some of the amazing speakers of Day 1 at the Data Innovation Summit. But the show still goes on tomorrow when we continue with even more great presentations and insightful discussions on the last day of the summit. Stay tuned for more!

Last chance not to miss the biggest online Data & AI spectacle of the year!