Two Big Tech Conferences In Phoenix

As most of you know about the burgeoning tech scene in the Valley of the Sun (Phoenix), I want to provide you an update on the recent tech conferences. Though I missed Phoenix Mobile Festival this year due to travel, I ended up meeting many tech enthusiasts in the Valley at Phoenix Data Conference. Lots of people asked how do I predict or come up with future trends. My answer is simple - be a constant learner, and for that, you need to be an avid reader. So read, read, read, always read, and never stop learning. I read 2 to 3 hours every day (5 to 6 hours on the weekend days) about future technologies. Have a passion, and you will find the path to your passion. My path is looking at where VCs are investing, which startups are getting investments, where top tech companies are focusing, what technologies/tools are quickly becoming top-level projects from Apache software incubation, which Github projects have more commits, what world economic forum is saying about the future, and the list goes on.

Phoenix Data Conference

The 6th Annual Phoenix Data Conference hosted by Phoenix Hadoop User group that was founded by Shekar Vemuri and Avinash Ramineni, who are the co-founders of Clairvoyant here in Chandler.

The Phoenix Data Conference is the most significant Big Data, AI/ML event of its kind in the Phoenix Valley, attracting keynote speakers and panelists from top brands across financial, insurance, cybersecurity, advanced data analytics, technology, and other vital fields.

The Phoenix Data Conference brought together over 850 Big Data enthusiasts where they got to hear a diverse speaker set, 28 in total with 24 sessions, from all the leading Big data companies around the globe. This year it was hosted at Sheraton Crescent Hotel on Nov 9th, 2019. It had 12 sponsors with Clairvoyant, Kogni leading the charge as Gold Sponsors.

Speakers were from organizations such as Cloudera, Clairvoyant, Intel, American Express, PayPal, SAP, Saama, phData, Sparx Lab, Vertica, Unravel Data, Carvana, Databricks, Bechtel, and Oshkosh Corp.

The Phoenix Data Conference covered the most critical topics for today's Big Data & Analytics executives, managers, data scientists, and engineers. The topics ranged from building solid foundations for Data/AI strategy to recommendations and practices to scaling, operationalizing Data, Machine Learning solutions both on cloud and on-premise for Enterprises. The attendees got a first look at the current and emerging trends, best practices, detailed case studies on making data strategies and implementations that work in today's ecosystem.

My talk was covering in-app purchases. Photo credit: Phoenix Data Conference

 

Highlights from the conference:

Ravishankar Rajalingam from DataBricks talked about "Build Reliable Data Lakes with Delta Lake & Databricks"

Hui Huang from Sparx Lab talked about "Get Ready To Innovate A Data Oriented product"

Srivatsan Srinivasan from Cognizant explained "The Future of Data Platforms in a Cloud Native Era"

Swati Shah, Priyanka Mishra, Sindhu Pillai, Ashish Hiranandani from PayPal Polaris Team covered "PayPal Polaris: Enterprise Operational Data Store for PayPal, Inc."

Raghav Jandhyala from SAP talked about "X-Data + O-Data: Integrating Experience Management with Intelligence Enterprise"

Thejas Nair from Cloudera covered "The essential ingredients for building the best analytical SQL query engine for the cloud"

Michael Arnold from Clairvoyant detailed "Smoke Test Your Hadoop Cluster!"

Kiran Ramineni from Intel covered "NLP Demystified"

This year, I talked about "The Future Beyond 2019 - Powered by Big Data, AI, ML & other Emerging Technologies." I made this a very interactive session while giving attendees a glimpse of the future with AI and ML in 2020 and beyond.

Find more information at http://www.phxdataconference.com/

Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Tech Festival

The other conference I really look forward to is the #phxmobi Emerging Tech Festival. The 8th Annual #phxmobi Emerging Tech Festival was hosted again at ASU by the founders of the #phxmobi Meetup Group Pranil Kanderi, Anjali Nennelli and Dr. Kiran Mudiam.

Sastry Durvasula, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Marsh, inspiring the next generation of emerging technology enthusiasts in the Valley. Photo credit: Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Festival

This year it was kicked off by a Guest Speaker, Sastry Durvasula, Chief Digital Officer and Chief Data & Analytics Officer at Marsh. He talked about the 4th Industrial revolution, which opens up a new world of new risks and new opportunities that can be solved with the emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and robotics, the proliferation of IOT sensors and blockchain and distributed ledger technologies. 

It was then followed by the Keynote by Laurie Strom and John (Tintinaglia) Tintinalli. Laurie talked about "What testing should be required before AVs are deployed on public roads?". John talked about the Automated Safety Consortium which is part of the SAE ITC. He stressed on the importance of AV testing in virtual environments (simulations) and open environments. 

Highlights from the conference sessions:

30% of the talks were related to Self-Driving and AV Technologies. 

Doug Loyd gave a very macro overview of some of the major players in the autonomous vehicle space. 

Srinivasan Natarajan (Nat) talked about Conversational interfaces and future of Enterprise apps. Katina Michael talked about the human factors in Autonomous Vehicles.

Leah Kaplan and John Nelson discussed the Informing Autonomous Vehicle Design and Deployment through Public Deliberation.

Yan Chen presented Safety Control of Automated Ground Vehicles.

Cathy Roth and Matt Megyese talked about Smart Cities.

Wenlong Zhang, Yi Ren, and Yezhou Yan, from ASU, presented Scalable and Customizable Intent Inference and Motion Planning for Socially-Adept Autonomous Vehicles.

Dr. Usha Jagannathan AV Perception: Discussion on how driverless cars "sees" the 

road?

Anjali Nennelli and Pranav Agrawal demonstrated Custom Facial Recognition.

Find more information at http://phxmobifestival.com/

Sastry Durvasula, inspiring the next generation of valley leaders. Photo credit: Phoenix Mobile & Emerging Festival

Conclusion

I am delighted to live in the Phoenix valley for the past two decades and have seen the growth of the tech community here. We are lucky to be the testbed for Autonomous Vehicles and several financial companies calling the Phoenix metro area as their HQs. I look forward to 2020 and beyond to understand how the advances in AI, ML, Robotics and AV affect our human behavior. 

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Hari Gottipati is a tech evangelist based out of the Valley. Opinions expressed here are solely his own and do not represent the views or opinions of his employer. His quotes can often be found in various technology magazines, GigaOM, CNN Money, WSJ, Bloomberg Business Week, etc. Follow him on Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin@harigottipati.