VIP Tech Talk - 4:00-5:00pm
Light Reception/Networking - 5:00-6:00pm

Talk Title: Cloud + Data + ML: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract: Breakthroughs in machine learning, scale-out storage and analytics, and cost-effective cloud services are creating a fundamental shift in computing. Data is now a core asset. AI is becoming a foundational tool in realizing value from data. These changes offer us an opportunity to rethink business strategies and scientific enterprises in radically different, data-driven ways.

Bio: In this talk, I will discuss the current technology landscape, the opportunities to bring ML to bear on a range of data-driven tasks, and the challenges of responsible data governance when doing so on high-value and sensitive data.

Raghu Ramakrishnan is CTO for Data, and a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and leads the CISL and GSL applied research teams. He has previously served as Chief Scientist at Yahoo! and Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in addition to being founder and CTO of QUIQ, an early online crowd-sourced question-answering company. He graduated from IIT Madras and received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

At Wisconsin, he wrote the text “Database Management Systems”. His early work influenced commercial query optimizers as well as the design of window functions in SQL:1999. At Yahoo!, he led research for the CORE project that was the foundation for Yahoo’s personalized portal pages, the PNUTS geo-replicated cloud service deployed in 18+ regions world-wide, and Yahoo!’s web-scale information extraction for semantic results in Yahoo! Search. At Microsoft, he leads the CISL and GSL applied research teams, and led the development of Azure Data Lake, Microsoft’s exabyte-scale storage and analytics platform.

Ramakrishnan has received the ACM SIGKDD Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Edward F. Codd Innovations Award, the ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award, 10 year Test-of-Time awards for papers published at the ICDT and SIGMOD conferences, a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, a Packard Foundation Fellowship and the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE and has served as Chair of ACM SIGMOD.

Register here: http://bit.ly/microsoftviptalkoct25