When: Thursday, January 12, 10:30-12:30

Where: Center for the Arts Auditorium

Organized by:
IT Department, School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
CIS Department, School of Business

Speaker: Armen Pischdotchian, Academic Tech Mentor, IBM Watson

Audience: Faculty, students

Abstract

Let us explore the cognitive era and the role that algorithms play in the API economy: Netflix recommends movies from the long tail, Amazon recommends the popular, cars that learn when to take over a vehicle that is in front, robots that distinguish trash from dishes to be washed. In this lecture, let’s uncover the “blackbox” that lurks behind artificial neural networks powering IBM Watson cognitive services that enables the magic of machine learning. Let’s construct the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. How fitting that we will end the lecture with a glimpse into year 2020: the rise of the bots and the sunset of apps, natural language interface elbows out application programming interface, blockchain is now in the fabric of bots and nuclear fusion is fueling the power grid.

Bio

Armen Pischdotchian currently mentors university faculty and students and conducts enablement sessions for both IBMers and partners pertaining to the IBM Watson Solution offerings. Armen has consulted and deployed various cognitive solutions at universities around the world. Armen started at IBM 11 years ago as course developer and trainer for the IoT solutions. He holds a BS in Organizational and Behavioral Psychology, MS in Computer Science and an MBA in Computer Information Systems. Armen writes in the Medium.com online publication and has co-authored IBM Red Books. He also holds an IBM Certified Application Developer – Watson V3 Certification and is a Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM).