Conference News: What I learned this week – September 20, 2019
AI Date Shuffle: The O’Reilly Conference organization is moving around the dates of their Artificial Intelligence (AI) conferences to be more strategic based on positioning them throughout the year. In 2020, the New York AI conference will be moved to September (previously April), the San Jose AI event will be in March (previously September) and AI London 2020 is moving up to April (from October). Also beginning next year, the AI and Strata Data Conferences will be co-located. Each conference will still have its own website, brand, CFP etc, but will share a combined Exposition Hall.
I Think I’ll Go to Boston: World Forum Disrupt has been running its Strategy & Innovation programs globally for a few years now, but this autumn marks its first time in Boston. On 14 November, around 200 leaders heading up innovation, change management, product, and design will meet at the Innovation & Design Building in Boston’s booming Seaport neighborhood to hear from brands like LEGO and Microsoft. Looking ahead to 2020, other Strategy & Innovation events are in the works for London (February), New York (April), and Sydney (May).
Speaking Opportunity: SpeechTEK 2020 (27 – 29 April; Washington DC) is seeking presentations explaining “how speech technologies (automatic speech recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, emotion detection, speech search) and conversational technologies (dialog management, error recovery, help) work to make modern applications more accessible to users, more human-like, and easier to use.”, If you would like to suggest a speaker or topic do so before the 11 October deadline.
Lunchtime Learning: Fortune convene its inaugural Global Sustainability Forum a couple weeks ago in Yunnan, China. They gathered senior leaders in business, government, NGOs, and academia “to discuss new tools, policies, ideas, and solutions for the world’s most pressing sustainability issues.” Watch speakers such as the Chief Executive Officer of Dow discuss sustainable leadership an the companies investment in cleaner chemicals, the Co-founder and CEO of AeroFarms explain what farming might look like in the future, and the Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency talk about the geopolitics of energy.
Coming Up Next Week: One of the largest gatherings of marketers and advertisers will take place in New York next week when Advertising Week NYC returns to the Big Apple. This year, organizers of the multi-day, decentralized celebration expect nearly 100k attendees at the almost 300 individual events. Begun as a banking operations workshop 40 years ago, Sibos (23-26 September; London) is now a brand name in the financial conference industry, drawing about 8,000 who represent financial institutions, market infrastructures, multinational corporations, and technology partners. Once known as the Washington Ideas Forum, the Atlantic Festival is a bona fide who’s-who of people in politics, but also business, tech, and the creative world. The Aspen Institute partners on this event, which runs 24-26 September in, you guessed it, DC. The Bloomberg Global Business Forum, which began in 2017 to take the place of the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Conference, will be held on 25 September in NYC. It retains its invite-only, CEO-heavy guest list. The World Forum Disrupt holds the Strategy & Innovation/San Francisco program on 25 September, featuring speakers from Salesforce, Walmart, Facebook, and other innovative brands. And just down the road, AI Summit gets underway on the 25th with another behemoth event covering the intersection of AI and business.