Attending the Google Cloud Summit in NYC September 2018
I got to attend the Google Cloud Summit on September 20th. The main focus of the summit was to highlight Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning advancements and how they apply to the healthcare, financial services, and media & entertainment space. It was interesting to see where Google stands in terms of AI compared to Microsoft and IBM. Google’s CTO gave the keynote and led attendees through the possibilities of AI and machine learning in the Google Cloud.
The format of the summit was fairly standard. There were 5 breakthrough sessions in each time block, which had a duration of 50 minutes with a total of 7 blocks in the day. The financial services, big data, and advertising sessions interested me the most, so those were the ones I attended. The sessions were; “Capital Markets Readiness for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence”, “High Performance Compute & ML for Complex Financial Analysis and Smart Predictions”, “Big Data Analytics and ML Portfolio Optimization for Asset Managers”, “Google Cloud for the Changing Media Landscape”, “Powering Your Content and Enhancing Your User Experience with Machine Learning”, “Powering Global Media Workflows for Low Latency High Reliability Audience Experiences”, and “Monetizing Customer Data in Media Panel”.
Key Learnings & Takeaways from NYC Google Cloud Summit 2018
Some of the ideas that were introduced were machine learning acceleration through sensors real time. The example that was given was Pratt & Whitney jet engines which have 10k sensors per engine to monitor data real time.
Google Cloud functions and tech were explained such as Kubernetes, which is an open-source container system for automating deployment, scaling and management of containerized applications which was designed by Google.
Changes in tech were a talking point and progressive evolution over time with analog being the past, digital being the present, and quantum being the future.
The pillars of AI/Machine learning growth for Google clients were shown to be a trusted foundation, work re-imagined, intelligence everywhere, and unleashing developers.
For some of the financial services sessions there were use cases, and previous company problems solved. The SEC uses the technology for trade surveillance to identify fraud by traders. They also use machine learning to preemptively identify possible future market crashes. HSBC focused on CVA re-evaluation, and internally have several models structured because they are too big to fail. HSBC still has hundreds of thousands of excel spreadsheets the need to be manually updated. JP Morgan use machine learning in order to better understand credit card transactions on a personal level.
In another session Two Sigma went there there internal data process, how it changes over time, and present day capabilities with the help of Google Cloud.
Thomas Reuters Financial went over their electron data platform and how it functions.
Overall the media and advertising sessions focused on using and categorizing large volumes of content in all forms (written,audio, and visual). Things like Google Cloud Vision API and visual applications were covered as well. The main points were that time can be saved and the connections that can now be made connecting large amounts of data to make more insightful decisions in this case in advertising. Google already uses machine learning with Adwords to provide better experiences for searches from a paid search standpoint. And Rank Brain machine learning as a ranking factor for organic search
The conference added value and was well structured. Google’s main focus was to attract more clients to the cloud platform by showing all the present day applications of the companies that were highlighted in the sessions. If you don’t frequently attend summits, conferences, or networking events, I highly recommend you doing so. You can learn a lot from industry leaders, make new connections that can add value, and grow your personal brand.
