Transform 2021: Technology’s key themes

Join AI and data leaders at Transform 2021, the industry’s premier AI digital event, hosted July 12-16. Transform gathers thought and action leaders from today’s top enterprise technology companies for highly informative sessions, focused roundtables, and unbeatable networking opportunities.

Hear from top industry experts on strategy and technology in the main application areas of AI/ML Automation Technology, RPA, data analytics, conversational AI, intelligent AI assistants, AI at the edge, IoT, computer vision, AR/VR, & robotics.

Register today to join enterprise leaders at Transform 2021. Find the full agenda online, or keep reading to discover all of the key topics throughout Transform 2021.

 

Monday, July 12, 2021

10:30am – 10:55am (America/Los Angeles)

Lessons from Redfin’s powerful AI-powered recommendation engines. A walkthrough of its data tech and strategy journey

In a world where the first step in buying a home is to look online, Redfin has a responsibility to make this experience equitable. That begins with building a diverse technical team that develops inclusive AI algorithms for making unbiased and personalized recommendations to homebuyers, working closely with a diverse agent workforce that helps people find homes.

Over the past four years, the representation of Black and Latinx technical Redfin employees has grown from 3% to 10%, and the representation of women technical employees has grown from 28% to 36%. These diverse perspectives improve Redfin’s vigilance about the data it does—and does not—feed its algorithms. For example, when developing its home recommendations engine, the engineering team decided to omit demographic and socioeconomic data that can encode biases. And it’s helping people discover homes and neighborhoods they may otherwise have missed: Redfin users are more likely to tour a recommended home vs. one they found on their own.

Since 2016, Redfin has also increased its non-white agent workforce by 4 percentage points, from 27% to 31% today—that’s more than 50% higher than the national representation of non-white real estate agents. Redfin’s algorithm for matching customers to agents online disrupts how people traditionally find a realtor, which is through their personal network. Redfin’s model, however, is based on an agent’s capacity for new customers, geography, and agent efficiency—not who anyone knows.

Redfin CTO Bridget Frey will talk about building diverse and inclusive teams; Redfin’s data and AI technologies and strategy; describe the opportunity for AI to diversify American neighborhoods, and offer practical advice for those working to diversify their teams and products.

Speakers: 

Bridget Frey, Chief Technology Officer – Redfin

Matt Marshall, CEO – VentureBeat

 

Monday, July 12, 2021

2:15pm – 2:40pm (America/Los Angeles)

AI+ Synthetic data = Smarter Robots

Advancement in the robotics field has been slow going due to the costs and complications of innovating on a large scale. Progress on perception and intelligence has brought the industry to the verge of real application breakthroughs. Danny Lange, Head of AI/ML at Unity, will demonstrate how synthetic data is now helping robots learn rather than be programmed and the potential this has for advancing the industry. Simulation technology is highly effective and advantageous when testing applications in situations that are dangerous, expensive, or rare. Validating applications in simulation before deploying to a robot shortens iteration time by revealing potential issues early. In this session, you will see a powerful example of a system that learns instead of being programmed, and as it learns from synthetic data, it is able to capture much more nuanced patterns than any programmer ever could. Layering technologies together is making the future vision of what is possible a reality. Discover how AI is now proving the efficiencies possible in training robots.

Speakers:

Danny Lange, SVP of AI and Machine Learning – Unity

Hari Sivaraman, Head of AI Content Strategy – VentureBeat

 

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

10:05am – 10:30am (America/Los Angeles)

Towards Hyperautomation: How Adobe is enhancing employee and customer experiences alike by capitalizing on its data assets to inform AI & automation processes

Adobe is continuing to invest in AI and automation bots as business enablers and strategic priorities – particularly in the wake of COVID-19 as many companies, including Adobe, are now defining the future “hybrid” workforce. AI and machine learning will play major roles here as CIOs help their companies and employees navigate the next wave of digital workplace transformation. Adobe SVP and CIO Cynthia Stoddard will discuss how Adobe is leveraging AI and automation bots to promote digital-first efficiencies that take the human element out of repetitive tasks – driving enhanced experiences for employees and customers alike in a hybrid workplace environment. Plus, why a data strategy and leveraging data assets are more critical than ever when executing any AI and automation strategy. Join Cynthia as she dives into the ‘how’ of multiple examples in AI-powered digital automation, which are helping Adobe drive towards ‘hyperautomation’.

Speakers:

Cynthia Stoddard, CIO – Adobe

Noelle Silver, Founder – Women in AI

 

Tuesday, July 13, 2021

10:45am – 11:10am (America/Los Angeles)

The Real tech Powering Real Estate: How Zillow uses AI, data, and advanced tech to revolutionize real estate

“Zillow Surfing” is sweeping the internet. It led to a record 9.6 billion visits to Zillow in 2020 alone, and a hilarious, viral Saturday Night Live sketch earlier this year. People may not be as aware, however, of the advanced, complex technology that undergirds Zillow’s business. Zillow Chief Analytics Officer Stan Humphries, creator of the original Zestimate algorithm, will explain how the company ingests and processes data from multiple sources to create accurate valuations for millions of U.S. homes and more. Zillow not only has product offerings that help streamline the real estate transaction process, including iBuying, home loans, and title but also leverages advances in AI and machine learning to produce valuations with a median error rate of less than 2% on currently listed homes. Humphries will describe how Zillow incorporates data from public records, listing services, brokerages, and customers, and uses AI, computer vision, and deep-learning neural networks to deliver unique analytic products that empower consumers. He will discuss how humans and machines interact in creating home valuations, with each contributing unique strengths to the overall process. He will also go through the evolution of valuation approaches from a focus largely on prediction to one now balanced by needs for interpretability and explainability. The latter focus is especially important, as Zillow now provides initial cash offers based on the Zestimate on homes in more than 23 markets.

Speakers:

Sage Lazzaro, Senior Reporter – VentureBeat

Stan Humphries, Chief Analytics Officer – Zillow

 

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

9:40am – 10:05am (America/Los Angeles)

Nex-Gen Entertainment: Learn about Comcast’s journey in implementing conversational AI for content discovery and enabling better user experiences

Comcast has leveraged AI and Machine learning, paired with a powerful natural language processing platform, to dramatically increase customer engagement and satisfaction with its suite of video entertainment products, led by the X1 Platform. In particular, the company has deployed its award-winning X1 Voice Remote – powered by an internally developed NLP platform – to help viewers discover and connect to content, faster and easier. The team employs these technologies with one goal in mind: getting customers to exactly what they want to watch at the moment they want to watch it.

More than 70 percent of customers use voice commands at least once a week, and those voice users spend more time watching content and engage with significantly more of the services offered within the Xfinity suite of products. Comcast Chief Technology Officer Matt Zelesko will talk about how the company continues to deepen those experiences, including the development of a new feature set, that gives customers more control than ever before over the content they record on their DVRs. As just one example, combining Comcast’s AI platforms with deep metadata, Zelesko’s team has developed an experience that allows customers to jump directly to the most exciting highlight from a football game they have recorded on their DVRs. Zelesko will share how the team uses state-of-the-art multimodal analysis of audio, video, and text with AI and ML techniques to pinpoint specific onscreen moments. The analysis includes traditional and AI/ML-based computer vision, signal processing, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to detect elements such as on-screen text, emotions, objects, and topics in content that customers record on their DVRs. These detections are then fused together using additional layers of AI and ML algorithms resulting in a semantic identification of what is happening at the moment. This modular, multi-layered, approach to AI and ML has allowed Comcast to develop and deploy new customer features quickly and efficiently. More importantly, Zelesko will share how these technologies fit into a holistic approach to delivering personalized content that elevates engagement and customer satisfaction.

Speakers:

Hari Sivaraman, Head of AI Content Strategy – VentureBeat

Matthew Zelesko, CTO – Comcast

 

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

11:35am – 12:00pm (America/Los Angeles)

What enterprise decision-makers need to know about Convo AI LLM’s such as GPT3 & BERT.

Speakers:

Margaret Mitchell, AI Researcher

Matt Marshall, CEO – VentureBeat

 

Thursday, July 15, 2021

12:10pm – 12:40pm (America/Los Angeles)

D&I in shopping; How Pinterest is building a more representative shopping experience through AI & AR

Using the guiding principle of, you can’t be inspired if you don’t feel represented, Pinterest set out to build a more inclusive product, starting with a way to filter beauty searches and products by skin tone range. Pinterest’s SVP of Technology Jeremy King will discuss the latest in building a more inclusive platform and the company’s work to make the service diverse by default, and how it has resulted in the evolution of Pinterest as a place to shop. By working with a more diverse data set to build inclusive products — from skin tone ranges to AR Try on— to help in the discovery and purchasing of beauty products, Pinterest has found Pinners are more likely to buy. For example, Pinners are 5x more likely to show purchase intent on Pins with AR than standard Pins. And the user base continues to grow, with +450 million global monthly users, representing 37% year over year growth. Jeremy will dive into the company’s work to diminish bias in AI, build more compassionate algorithms, and how Pinterest is using machine learning to match the best products to the best people.

Speakers:

Jeremy King, Head of Engineering – Pinterest

Matt Marshall, CEO – VentureBeat

 

Register today to join enterprise leaders at Transform 2021.