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Florida Business Analytics Forum Set for May

By Keith Morelli

TAMPA (April 13, 2021) -- Renowned experts of artificial intelligence and machine learning will speak at the Florida Business Analytics Forum, hosted by the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business in May. Healthcare will be a big focus this year, with speakers addressing the future of AI in medicine and ways of dealing with the potential for racial bias as well as applications in dyslexia. The event is on a virtual platform that likely will draw hundreds of registrants.

The field of academic specialists will deliver keynote talks during the three-hour event, discussing cutting-edge topics in business analytics. The forum is a signature event of the Muma College of Business’ Center for Analytics and Creativity.

“This is the fourth year we are bringing this event to our community free of cost to attend,” said Balaji Padmanabhan, director of the center and coordinator of the event. “Our overarching goal has always been to bring cutting-edge ideas within the analytics space for our attendees and each year our choice of topics and speakers has reflected this.

“Our speakers have been incredible thought leaders in this space and the thing we offer to them each year is the possibility of impact – translating their ideas into practice,” he said. “This year’s speakers continue this tradition and I urge our attendees to find ways not just to attend this event alone, but also to invite their colleagues so that the ideas can spark discussion within their teams.

“Ultimately, for us, it is all about facilitating the movement of new ideas and knowledge from thought leaders into teams whose jobs it is every day to make analytics work in organizations,” Padmanabhan said. “Our event each year has provided a wonderful platform for this and I can assure attendees that this year might even be the best to date.”

The event takes place from noon until 3 p.m. on May 20. To register, click here.

The speakers are:

Hugo Aerts, who will discuss artificial intelligence and medicine. Aerts is one of the leaders in this field, serves on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and is the director of the, Program for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. His research focuses on the development and application of novel artificial intelligence approaches – deep learning in particular – for personalized medicine by integrating and analyzing medical imaging, pathology and genomic data. His interest in the field grew with the technological advances in AI that have the potential to transform the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, including relevant solutions that can improve cancer care worldwide.

Ziad Obermeyer, whose will talk about racial bias in health. He is the Blue Cross of California Distinguished Associate Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of California Berkeley’s School of Health. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning, medicine and health policy. He previously served as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, where he received the Early Independence Award, the National Institutes of Health’s most prestigious award for exceptional junior scientists. Prior to his career in medicine, he worked as a consultant to pharmaceutical and global health clients at McKinsey & Co. in New Jersey, Geneva and Tokyo.

Luz Rello, who will discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning in dyslexia. Herself a dyslexic, Rello has done some innovative research to detect dyslexia early in children by using machine learning. She is the founder of Change Dyslexia, a social organization to screen and treat dyslexia, and assistant professor in the Department of Information Systems and Technology at IE Business School at IE University in Spain. Rello’s research Interests include e-health, dyslexia, linguistics, human/computer interaction, natural language processing and education. She is the author of “Overcome Dyslexia, A Personal Experience through Research.”

Chip Huyen, who will talk about “MLOps”, a subset of ModelOps, which is a practice of collaboration between data scientists and operations professionals to manage machine learning in production. She is a graduate of Stanford University where she teaches machine-learning systems designs. She also is a social media star in the field of analytics. Her work brings machine learning into production, working through platforms that include Netflix and Primer. She has helped some of the world’s largest organizations develop and deploy machine-learning systems. LinkedIn recognizes Huyen as being among the “Top Voices in Software Development” in 2019 and the “Top Voices in Data Science & AI” in 2020.

To register for the event, click here.