The first ever Intel SHIFT event touches upon transformative initiatives undertaken by industry leaders worldwide and how Intel technologies are being leveraged for the same.
The underlying fabric of every new technological innovation to emerge from Silicon Valley has to do with Artificial Intelligence. And what we saw at Intel SHIFT 2017 was no different. SHIFT 2017 is Intel’s business centric event where industry leaders elaborate upon the transformative initiatives that are being undertaken. We had the privilege of interacting with not only key personnel from Intel but also other industry veterans who’d come down to New York to share what they were working on.
Highlights of Intel SHIFT 2017
Most of the talks at the event had some elements of IoT, Blockchain, AI and ML. The focus was on how newer techniques of utilising the same data using devices with greater compute had brought about a transformation of how enterprises approach their customers and build better services. And along these lines began Andrew McAfee’s talk of the day on “Business Advice that we don’t believe in anymore”. His insightful talk on how AI systems have evolved to become more self-reliant through the AlphaGO example certainly had everyone’s attention. For those unaware of the AlphaGO story, the second iteration of the AI, named AlphaGO Zero, improved its accuracy by playing against itself. Thus, eliminating the need for a massive data set to train the accuracy. His talk culminated into a new set of rules for businesses to keep in mind to be competitive.
We then moved on to a fireside chat hosted by Shannon Poulin, VP Sales and Marketing Group, & GM Industry Sales Group, Intel as he interacted with Citigroup and a startup called FINDMIN to reveal how they were leveraging newer technological trends to serve their customers better. FINDMINE, for example, uses Machine Learning to figure out your next outfit. By sourcing user opinion on what is viewed fashionable, FINDMINE’s AI is able to take into account your individual dresses and come up with combinations that work.
Lisa Davis, VP & GM for IT Transformation, Enterprise, and Government Data Center Group, Intel then stepped onto the stage to champion for the Mature Hybrid Cloud which ends up being a much better approach towards building your cloud infrastructure. Not only does it end up being economically more viable but the flexibility of the hybrid cloud allows businesses to scale without making drastic changes to their codebase. Another key point she spoke on was the need to democratise analytics. Having an analytics system that doesn’t require specialised hardware, is easy to use and implement goes a long way towards getting insights about your business and customers, which in turn helps the businesses serve their customers better.
Lisa was followed by Rob Crooke, SVP & GM, Non-volatile Memory Solutions Group. Rob spoke on how Intel’s Optane technology (3D XPoint) was the first innovation in 25 years in the storage space and how companies were leveraging the same in their data centers to accelerate workloads.
We then moved on to Mitchell Joachim, Co-Founder of TerraformONE who extolled the virtues of non-conventional strategies. These bold decisions are generally what helps companies build innovative technologies that disrupt the existing ecosystem. To elaborate upon the same, he quoted the Cricket Shelter project. The Cricket Shelter project proposes a hybrid solution that not only provides a means of nutrition but also shelter. So one might wonder, why the “Cricket” in the name? Well, because the shelter is made using a lot of growth habitats for crickets. These crickets, once matured, will be ground up to produce cricket flour.
While it may not be palatable for many, the United Nations has said that insect sourced protein is a major component to solving food distribution problems.
… and more.
That’s about all the sessions we attended at Intel SHIFT 2017. We did get to interact with quite a few industry leaders, so stay tuned for some exclusive insights we gained at SHIFT 2017.
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Mithun Mohandas
Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile
