I noticed the AI day videos were released a few days ago and I’d like to share my thoughts on the day. First I”d like to congratulate the organisers Ben Reid and Justin Flitter for putting this event together. Michelle Dickinson did a great job making the day flow as master of ceremonies. This type of event is just what NZ needs to help people understand how different organisations are using AI so they can make more informed decisions on how they could use the ever evolving set of technologies.

I’d characterise the event as having presentations from small and large organisations, a couple of panels, a politician and a good dose of networking. The highlight for me was from the small companies because they were the ones who had taken various AI technologies and applied them in a way to give them an advantage. In my mind these are the stories that are most likely to inspire other NZ companies. This included:

• R& D coordinator for Ohmio, Mahmood Hikmet describing the self-driving shuttle that they are building and how their AI team is building a sensor fusion model. This combines data from GPS, lidar and odometry sensors to estimate the position of the shuttle, that is then used for navigating.
• Kurt Janssen, the founder of Orbica described how they’re using machine vision with aerial and drone footage to automate various GIS tasks.
• Grant Ryan (or Bro as I call him) describing how Cacophony are using machine vision with thermal cameras to automatically identify pests, and how they might then kill them.
• Sean Lyons had the most entertaining presentation where he described how Netsafe are using bots to waste scammers time in a project they call Rescam. They’re using IBM Watson for sentiment analysis. It’s been hugely successful, wasting over 5 years of scammers time with 1 million emails.
  
• Mark Sagar and team are doing some of the most interesting AI work globally at Soul Machines. Unfortunately, his presentation had a few technical glitches, but it was nice to see the latest version of BabyX, complete with arms. Mark talked a little bit about how they are using neural networks for perception and control. I’d love to find out more details.
  

The other small company that presented was Centrality.ai. Founder Aaron McDonald spent most of the presentation explaining blockchain and how it can be used for contracts. I didn’t come away with any understanding that the company is using AI, or with any comprehension of what the company actually does.

The panels had a selection of interesting entrepreneurs and academics. However, I personally find the panel format a little too unstructured to get much useful information from. I may be an outlier here, Justin told me they got very good feedback about the panels from their post conference surveys.

The other highlight of the conference for me was the networking during the breaks. Everyone you spoke to had some involvement in AI: Entrepreneurs, practitioners, academics and investors. This was an added benefit to an already very stimulating day. I wasn’t able to attend the 2nd day of workshops.

To Justin and Ben: Well done! I look forward to attending next year and hearing how a host of other NZ companies are using AI in interesting ways. For those that didn’t make it, check out the videos.