Agenda

Click on a session title below to see individual session descriptions and speaker details. Or, click here to view the full Text Analytics Forum program.

  •  
    Keynotes
  •  
    Track 1 - Technical
  •  
    Track 2 - Applications
Monday, November 4, 2019
8:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m.
  • Optional Workshop/Conference Day
  • Upgrade to a Platinum Pass for your choice of two preconference workshops or access to Taxonomy Boot Camp, a co-located event with Text Analytics Forum 2019. Also, includes access to the Enterprise Solutions Showcase Grand Opening Reception from 5:00 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.

Tuesday, November 5, 2019
8:00 a.m. - 6:00 p.m.
  • Optional Conference Day
  • Upgrade to a Platinum or Gold Pass for full-access to all sessions at KMWorldEnterprise Search & DiscoveryOffice 365 Symposium, and Taxonomy Boot Camp, a series of co-located events happening alongside Text Analytics Forum 2019. Also includes access to the Networking Happy Hour taking place in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase from 5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.

Wednesday, November 6, 2019
8:00 a.m. - 8:30 a.m.
  • Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.
  • Keynote - Future Trends: Insights for Knowledge Sharing in 2020+
  • Get the highlights and insights from Glimpse, the trend analysis which focuses on emergent generational and societal shifts, and learn how to respond to these changes. Understanding the global context teaches us what each person is facing with the world today and sets the emotional groundwork for every project. From this global context, Turner shares insights into how our minds have changed, how society has shifted in response, and where it is going through the eyes of generational and cultural evolution. Get ideas about what the future holds for knowledge sharing in our organizations. The eight important mega-trends that inform the world today, the disruptors are reinvention, non-linears, crowd-shared revolution, being human, data disruption, human +, a new visual-verbal culture, and human speak. Hear more and get ideas of how to prepare for this future.

    Jody Turner, Future Trend & Innovation Specialist, Culture of Future
9:15 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
  • Keynote - Pure to Pragmatic: From AI Hype to Delivering Actual ROI
  • Over the last couple of years, AI, machine learning, and deep learning have received unprecedented attention and are now reaching the top of the hype cycle. But today, despite many technology breakthroughs and success stories from early adopters, very few enterprise organizations are actually reaping the promised benefits. Sinequa is one of the few software platform vendors with customers deploying applications powered by AI models. Our journey in the field has taught us some valuable lessons, and there are some key takeaways we would like to share with you: a look at what pragmatic AI can do for you, bridging the gap between AI’s long-term potential and today’s capabilities, tips to identify the highest ROI use cases which can be addressed with AI models today, best practices to deploy these in production and start generating value. Get great insights and ideas from a KMWorld magazine award-winner and industry leader.

    Scott Parker, Director of Product Marketing, Sinequa
9:30 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
  • Keynote - Demands for Data: Governance, Risk, Compliance, Analytics & Value
  • Knowledge graphs built on top of semantic technologies, supported by machine learning technologies, can become a paradigm change in how we deal with metadata management. Keeping track of what is going on in your data is the crucial momentum. Active metadata is a key element to achieve this. Traditional approaches do not work anymore—they are not adaptive, cross-application, and do not provide the semantic richness creating additional value from your data. You need a knowledge graph to specify your business rules and semantics. It is the bases for data enrichment, lineage, and impact analysis. Working in complex deployments requires metadata exchange in a unified, standardized way. Knowledge graphs provide better user experience and allow to fulfill specific workflow, security, and privacy requirements. Based on real business examples, our speakers illustrate how active metadata management works and provides more value to your data and, by that, your corporation.

    Helmut Nagy, COO, Semantic Web Company GmbH
  • Sebastian Gabler, Director of Sales, Semantic Web Company, Austria
9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
  • Keynote - Knowledge Management in the Age of AI
  • Artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies, and related tools have the ability to fundamentally reshape knowledge management. As always with groundbreaking technologies and management systems, there is a mixture of some successes, lots of hype, and an emerging body of knowledge of how and where to deploy AI/cognitive for both quick wins and long-term transformational impact. Namir provides an overview of this rapidly transforming landscape and discusses how organizations can accelerate their AI investments to derive maximum value.

    Ido Namir, Global Knowledge Management Center of Excellence Leader, Deloitte
10:00 a.m. - 10:45 a.m.
  • Coffee Break in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
10:45 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
  • Welcome & Keynote - A Deep Text Look at Text Analytics
  • What are the current and future trends for the field of text analytics? Join program chair Tom Reamy for an overview of the conference themes and highlights and a look at what is driving the field forward. This year’s main new topic is knowledge graphs, which are being developed for everything from enterprise search to a way to build an enterprise platform to integrate all an organization’s data. We also continue the exploration of machine learning and rules-based approaches and how people are combining them to get the best of both worlds. The talk ends with a look at current and future trends that promise to dramatically enhance our ability to utilize text with new techniques and applications.

    Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group, LLC, USA
11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
  • Knowledge Graphs—Deep Dive
  • Make Beautiful Metadata: Using Knowledge Graphs to Improve Relevance in Automated Tagging

    This talk describes the use of an enterprise knowledge graph as the semantic backbone of a text analytics application. Going beyond traditional hierarchical taxonomies, we demonstrate how we use a knowledge graph to enhance entity resolution, boost signal detection, and improve relevance scoring. We examine a use case where graph-informed tagging adds business value by surfacing connections between different facets of content and by driving personalization and user experience through precise metadata.

    Dan Segal, Information Architect, IBM
  • Tools & Trends
  • Text Analytics Market Trends: Users Speak

    We’ve been doing text analytics since the mid-2000s. What’s working and what’s not? Seth Grimes presents findings from a 2019 study that surveyed user experiences with text technologies, solutions, and providers. What capabilities are users looking for in text analytics products and services, and are they finding what they need? How has the market evolved—both demand and supply—and how should practitioners and solution providers stay on top of developments? This talk provides practical guidance from fellow users to help you extract the greatest value from text analytics.

    Seth Grimes, Principal Consultant, Alta Plana Corporation
  • Multiple Tools, One Taxonomy: Selecting the Right Text Analytics Tools for Semantic Search

    At Indeed, we analyze petabytes of unstructured text in support of our mission to help people get jobs. We strive to go beyond keyword search and enable users to search by concepts relevant to their job interests, such as occupation, location, or salary range. Our talk focuses on entity extraction: how can it unlock meaning from big data and what are the best strategies for implementing it? Should you build an in-house tool, choose an off-the-shelf tool, or combine both of these approaches? We review lessons learned from implementing each of these strategies at Indeed. This presentation is targeted at practitioners who want to develop scalable information extraction systems and are interested in decision factors such as model performance, startup training costs, operator workflows, ongoing maintenance, and risk mitigating strategies.

    Alexandra Teodorescu, Taxonomy Analyst, Indeed
  • Nicholas Bacuez, Software engineer, Indeed
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
  • Attendee Luncheon in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
1:30 p.m. - 2:15 p.m.
  • Knowledge Graphs—Deep Dive
  • Knowledge Graph Enrichment via Text Analytics

    This presentation covers text analytics and text processing techniques used in creating several interesting text based knowledge graphs. One example is the Noam Chomsky Knowledge Graph which incorporates hundreds of articles and numerous books that Chomsky has authored about linguistics, mass media, politics, and war. Another example covers health effects for ingredients in foods and beauty products. We show how a combination of AI techniques and knowledge graphs can be used to transform text-heavy applications into an interactive response system that can be used by scientists, technologists, politicians, and scholars along with smart applications, intelligent chatbots, and question/answering machines, as well as other AI and data systems.

    Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz Inc.
  • Inside & Outside the Enterprise
  • You Don’t Have a Text Analyst, & You Wouldn’t Know Where to Put One If You Did

    Text analytics is a well-established discipline, yet many organizations don’t have dedicated text analyst roles. When they do, they arise from ad hoc needs and are embedded within specific functional units, often doing work which could be repurposed for other processes. One part call to action, one part proposal, hear ideas about who a text analyst is, where this role should sit in the organization, and what actions to take to create a text analyst role in your organization.

    Ahren E Lehnert, Principal Taxonomist, Nike Inc., USA
  • Text & Data Mining of Scientific Research Content: Use Cases for Knowledge Management & Product Development

    Increasingly, knowledge managers and product developers are looking beyond in-house proprietary data to external sources to provide context and critical information. For companies focused on innovation and research, important sources include scientific journal publications, specialized databases, and a growing body of open access data. This talk looks closely at two different customer use cases that take text and data mining (TDM) projects from start to finish. The first is a knowledge manager seeking to enhance content discovery and linking key research findings to in-house data. The second is a company focused on leveraging research content for product development. In both cases, TDM is applied to drive an efficient research and discovery process, saving time and money, and positively impacting revenue.

    Chris Bendall, Director, Business Development, Springer Nature
2:30 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.
  • AI & Analytics
  • This session looks at how AI and data science may be able to shape the world of project delivery, particularly projects which have a high degree of complexity but only if mediated by human sense-making and decision support. Our experienced and popular speaker takes work from counter-terrorism (his DARPA and other work) and applies them to project management using a multi-methods approach. Get in on the ground floor and grab new ways of thinking about AI and analytics.

    Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientist, The Cynefin Company, UK
  • The Business Dimension
  • Text Analytics has emerged as a defining technology for enterprise transformation. Its promise is no less than a radical rethinking of how businesses organize their workflows and take decisions. When cognitive processes can be automated and scaled, the impact is faster processes and better insights, enabling professionals to focus on the highest added-value parts of their mission. Join this session to discover today’s “art of the possible” in NLP, based on examples of leading-edge analytics and process automation applications

    Luca Scagliarini, Expert System Enterprise
  • Michael Strickland, Expert System
3:15 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
  • Coffee Break in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
  • Ask the Experts Panel
  • A panel of four text analytics experts answer questions that have been gathered before the conference, during the conference and some additional questions from the program chair. This was one of our most popular features last year, so come prepared with your favorite questions and be ready to learn!

    Jeremy Bentley, Head, MarkLogic
  • John Paty, Expert System
  • Mark Butler, VP Engineering, Voise, Inc.
  • Simon Taylor, VP, Partners & Alliances, Lucidworks
  • A panel of four text analytics experts answer questions that have been gathered before the conference, during the conference and some additional questions from the program chair. This was one of our most popular features last year, so come prepared with your favorite questions and be ready to learn!

    Jeremy Bentley, Head, MarkLogic
  • John Paty, Expert System
  • Mark Butler, VP Engineering, Voise, Inc.
  • Simon Taylor, VP, Partners & Alliances, Lucidworks
Thursday, November 7, 2019
8:00 a.m. - 8:30 a.m.
  • Continental Breakfast
8:30 a.m. - 9:30 a.m.
  • Keynote - Knowledge-Sharing Culture to Support Organizational Success
  • In the age of new and useful technologies rushing to take their place in our organizations, 80% of respondents to a recent global culture survey say their organization’s culture must evolve in the next 5 years for their company to succeed, grow, and retain the best people. Yes, it’s all about the people in any organization. Technology can certainly support, speed, and spark knowledge sharing, innovation and success, but culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational—that’s what makes it so hard to work with, but that’s also what makes it so powerful! Anderson shares secrets from her recent book, a practical guide to working with culture and tapping into a source of catalytic change within your organization. Since every organization’s culture is intimate and personal, aligning culture always involves getting to the heart of difficult matters, unearthing the “family secrets” of a company—the emotional histories that lie under the surface of the story the company tells about itself to the outside world. Get lots of insights and tips to use in your organization to build a knowledge-sharing culture which supports success!

    Gretchen Anderson, Director, PwC Strategy&
9:30 a.m. - 9:45 a.m.
  • Keynote - Bringing a Consumer-Like Experience to the Digital Workplace
  • Creating a consumer-like, personalized experience for the daily work of finding information people need to do their jobs is the crux of efficient knowledge sharing. These uniquely personal experiences facilitate the flow of organizational operations and more intelligent decision-making. Professionals at companies like Red Hat, Reddit, and PwC rely on this type of platform to quickly find answers and proactively suggest insights. Learn how they approached their challenges and the solutions they found to empower employees to be more productive and help their organizations to attract and retain the best talent.

    Diane Burley, VP Content, Lucidworks
9:45 a.m. - 10:00 a.m.
  • Keynote - Top 5 Lessons Learned in Enriching Enterprise Search
  • Our speaker shares best practices for and lessons learned from implementing and enriching enterprise search solutions.

    Megan DeSomery, Director, Product Management, EPAM Systems
10:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
  • Coffee Break
10:15 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
  • Text Analytics in Government
  • Measuring the Effects of Information Operations Through Specialized Sentiment Analysis

    Government influence operations (IO) have been conducted throughout recorded history. In recent times, they have commonly been referred to as propaganda, active measures, or psychological operations (PSYOPS). More than a century of Russian “Chekist” tradition has culminated in a force that can mobilize thousands of humans augmented by unlimited numbers of bots. As documented in congressional testimony, this force has repeatedly seized control of foreign news cycles, inserting sentiments or wholly fictional stories. A simple positive/neutral/negative axis is not as applicable to the IO mission as one specific to the operation in question, such as entity stability/ instability, trustworthiness, or advocacy of violence. Given an IO action, such as promotion of an embarrassing story, the operator wants to measure the effect as change in sentiment, such as distrust of the now-discredited entity.

    Christopher Biow, SVP, Global Public Sector, Basis Technology
  • Mike Harris, Director, Field Operations, Basis Technology Corp
  • Text Analytics for Federal Regulations Public Commentary

    Regulations.gov was launched in 2003 to provide the public with access to federal regulatory content and the ability to submit comments on federal regulations. Manually reading thousands of comments is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It is also difficult for multiple reviewers to accurately and consistently assess content, themes, stakeholder identity, and sentiment. In response to this issue, text analytics can be used to develop transparent and accurate text models, and visual analytics can quantify, summarize, and present the results of that analysis. This talk addresses public commentary submitted in response to new product regulations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

    Emily McRae, Systems Engineer, SAS
  • AI
  • An AI Framework to Counter International Human Trafficking

    Efforts to counter human trafficking internationally must assess data from a variety of sources to determine where best to devote limited resources. How can analysts effectively tap all the relevant data to best inform decisions to counter human trafficking? This presentation showcases a framework supporting AI for exploring all data related to counter human trafficking initiatives internationally. The framework incorporates rule-based and machine learning (ML) text analytics results not available in the original datasets. As a focal point, we demonstrate how to apply rule-based text extraction of trafficking victims to generate training data for subsequent ML and deep learning models. We ultimately show how this framework provides decision makers with capabilities for countering human trafficking internationally, and how it is extensible as new AI techniques and sources of information become available.

    Tom Sabo, Advisory Solutions Architect, SAS
  • Leveraging Semantic AI to Drive & Calibrate Data Quality: Vehicle Safety Analytics

    As organizations shift focus from data-generating to data-powered, the ability to incorporate all information—structured and unstructured—is key to delivering insight that is trusted by the business. What does an organization need to bring together all information and successfully manage its data quality? Semantic AI provides the context and meaning that transforms textual information into trusted data. It uncovers the insights and relationships using NLP, machine learning, and AI strategies so you can expose new information to the business and answer questions you couldn’t answer before. Using the real-life success story of one of the world’s largest auto manufacturers that uses Semantic AI to harmonize, extract, and enrich data for vehicle safety analysis, this session covers how the use of Semantic AI cleans and calibrates IoT, text-based data, and unstructured content to improve data quality, analytics, and the fidelity of business decisions.

    Jeremy Bentley, Head, MarkLogic
11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
  • Building Training Sets
  • Where Do I Start? : How SAS Provides an Easy, Automated and Unified Platform for Unstructured Data Analysis

    Due to subjective content, an absence of labels and a lack of dimensions, analyzing unstructured data can be a challenging task. In this session we’ll discuss improving unstructured data analysis through automation (including a human-in-the-loop), pre-processing capabilities for reducing noise, and options for feature engineering and extraction. You will also get an overview of our hybrid analytical platform, which combines Natural Language Processing along with Machine Learning and statistical techniques in order to deliver rich insights. Our hope is that regardless of your platform of choice, you obtain ideas that make your own analysis easier and more effective

    Sundaresh Sankaran, Solutions Architect, Global Technology Practice, SAS Institute
  • NLP & Rule-Based Approach for Fact Extraction: Launchpad for Machine Learning Techniques

    One fundamental obstacle for using machine learning (ML) to accurately extract facts from free text documents is that it requires huge amounts of pre-categorized data for training. Manual annotation is not a viable option as it would entail enormous amounts of human analyst time. In this presentation we outline an innovative rule-based approach for automated generation of pre-categorized data that can be further used for training ML models. This approach relies on writing queries expressed in the powerful pattern definition language that fully exploits the results of the underlying natural language processing (NLP): deep linguistic, semantic, and statistical analysis of documents. The sequential application of rule-based and ML techniques facilitates the high accuracy of results. An example project illustrating this technology focuses on the automated extraction of clinical information from patient medical records.

    Sergei Ananyan, CEO, Megaputer Intelligence Inc.
  • Elli Bourlai, Senior Computational Linguist, Megaputer Intelligence
  • Special Vocabularies—Music & Biomedical
  • Mountains of Musical Metadata

    How can we classify audio files of music with very sparsely available text? A large commercial music publisher with a faceted classification system (for 650,000 tracks!) realized that its search problems were caused by incomplete, missing, or misapplied metadata. Additionally, the text associated with each track (or album) was spotty at best. In this talk, Kasenchak describes the variety of text analytical (and other) approaches used to try to solve the problem: adding or correcting metadata to improve search.

    James Schumann, Director of Corporate Relations, Access Innovations, Inc.
  • Delivering Better Biomedical Text Analytics Solutions

    Vocabularies and natural language processing (NLP) often work handin- hand to provide text analytics solutions. This talk explores this partnership in detail in the context of a specific knowledge domain: biomedicine. Standard assumptions made by NLP engines regarding how words are stemmed, tokenized, assembled to form phrases and sentences can be challenged by a specialized domain such as biomedicine, which has its own terminology and knowledge models. Biomedical vocabularies and ontologies play an essential role to make biomedical text is being analyzed appropriately. This talk goes into more detail about how the two capabilities—domain-specific vocabularies and ontologies and NLP engines—can learn from each other to deliver better biomedical text analytics solutions.

    James Morris, Solution Architect, Semaphore by MarkLogic
  • Jon Stevens, NLP Software Developer, AbbVie
12:15 p.m. - 12:30 p.m.
  • Keynote Luncheon - The 3 Pillars of AI & Their Impact on KM
  • The Internet of Things, computer vision, and document understanding are all becoming critical drivers of enterprise evolution. These are the “3 Pillars of AI” and they are having a real, practical impact on the world of KM. Khan, who leads Accenture's Search & Content Analytics Group, briefly explains these pillars, delving into document understanding and explaining how it is drastically changing the search and KM landscape. Citing a real-world example, he discusses how search and analytics are being combined with AI technologies like machine learning and natural language processing to help make it possible for a global enterprise to extract valuable insights from their untapped, unstructured data sources, improving operations and maintaining a competitive advantage.

    Kamran Khan, Managing Director, Accenture
12:30 p.m. - 12:45 p.m.
  • KMWorld & Intranet Awards
  • KMWorld magazine is proud to sponsor the 2019 KMWorld Awards, KM Promise & KM Reality, which are designed to celebrate the success stories of knowledge management. The awards will be presented along with Step Two’s Intranet & Digital Awards, where you get a sneak peek behind the firewall of these organizations.

    Rebecca Rodgers, Principal Consultant & Forum Community Manager, Step Two
1:00 p.m. - 1:45 p.m.
  • Auto-Categorization: People & Structure
  • Supervised vs. Unsupervised Automated Categorization

    AI promises to categorize all types of content with reliable results, but the reality is much more complex. Most applications won’t work with a meat grinder approach, where you pour a huge amount of content in one end and a perfectly organized collection comes out the other end. Effective automated categorization depends on defining a process workflow and assembling a stack of methods to process different types of content in different ways. Designing and validating a content processing workflow requires human judgments. So good quality categorization applications often rely on how to make the best use of people. This presentation provides a reality check on unsupervised automated categorization, and discusses a case study in which the performance was suitable for editorial review and approval, but not for unsupervised processing of a large collection.

    Joseph A. Busch, Founder and Principal, Taxonomy Strategies
  • Content Structure Models—A Technique to Improve Both Machine Learning & Rules-Based Categorization

    There is no such thing as unstructured text—even tweets have some structure—words, clauses, phrases, even the occasional paragraph. Techniques that treat documents as undifferentiated bags of words have never achieved a high enough accuracy to build good auto-categorization whether using machine learning (ML) or rules. However, going beyond bags of words and utilizing the structures found in “unstructured” text, it is possible to achieve dramatically improved accuracy. This talk, using multiple examples from recent projects, presents how to build content structure models and content structure rules that can be used for both rules-based and ML categorization. We conclude with a method for combining rules and ML in a variety of ways for the best of both worlds.

    Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect & Founder, KAPS Group, LLC, USA
  • Finally Getting Better?
  • Summary of Supervised Machine Learning vs. Keyword Search Results

    In some contexts, such as e-discovery, achieving high recall when retrieving documents is critical. Over the past year, Dimm has challenged audiences at several conferences to construct keyword searches that perform better than supervised machine learning. This talk summarizes the results and explains why it is so hard for humans to beat machine learning when seeking high recall.

    Bill Dimm, Founder & CEO, Hot Neuron LLC
  • Maturation of Semantic Search After Years of False Promise

    It's “How the Future Was” in 2004: Microsoft and enterprise search vendors showed semantic search demos that were "so close" to being better than keywords. Fifteen years on, we're still "so close," and most information retrieval searches are still keyword lookups in hash tables. What has happened is that semantic search matured in other directions. We explore multiple use cases and specific applications to government missions and commercial business problems, where semantic search has established these and a few other niches. We give special emphasis to the “analytic refutation problem,” in which both keyword search and much of current AI serves only to assist people find even more content that reinforces their biases and mistaken conceptions. Here semantic search has found its deepest niche: helping human analysts triage otherwise intractable quantities of textual information, maintaining a healthy bias against their working hypotheses.

    Christopher Biow, SVP, Global Public Sector, Basis Technology
  • Eugene S. Reyes, Federal Solutions Engineer, Basis Technology
2:00 p.m. - 2:45 p.m.
  • Machine Learning & Rules—Either/Or/And
  • Indexing Psychological Content: Striving for Consistency & Specificity

    The American Psychological Association’s PsycINFO databases release around 3,000 records per month. In June 2017, a plan was created to bring machine-aided indexing (MAI) back to the APA’s PsycINFO databases. Since then, MAI has been implemented across three of the databases, including PsycARTICLES. Pearson discusses the strategy used to build the rule base, and integrate the software into the production system. He also takes a look at some of the challenges faced along the way and explores future goals and further deployment plans.

    Christopher Pearson, Machine-Aided Indexing Specialist, American Psychological Association
  • Text Analytics for Ecommerce
  • Leveraging Text Analytics for Faceted Search

    Combining search with text analytics creates a powerful tool called SAS Cognitive Search to elevate the intelligence of information retrieval. Search features a flexible query syntax to fit various business needs and help uncover insights hidden in data. Text analytics can extract entities from user text data and enrich the raw data with category and sentiment information. This session presents an easy-to-use interface that leverages SAS Cognitive Search to perform search on temporal and spatial data, enriched with NLP features. With this interface, the user can analyze customer reviews for a product category to create a timeline and deduce trends. Other features include an interactive map facilitating geographic data search and filtering and a facet-based view for query results aggregation. Understanding your customers and what they think of your products has never been easier!

    Feng Ye, Principal Software Developer, SAS Institute
  • Competing With Amazon by Deploying a Self-Learning Ecommerce Solution

    Key words and hundreds, if not thousands, of rules are no longer enough to keep up with Amazon and recapture lost market share. Amazon has set the new standard that organizations must meet to effectively compete for their customers’ attention. Join this presentation and learn how to capture and aggregate valuable customer interactions like queries, clicks, and cart behavior in real-time so every customer gets a customized experience that is continuously being refined; easily incorporate regional trends and seasonality to deliver relevant results; make every customer experience personal; and run A/B testing and experiments so the shopping and purchase flow is constantly fine-tuned and optimized. Go from running a few experiments that take months to get out the door to dozens running live in production, without having to bother your data scientists or the engineers.

    Simon Taylor, VP, Partners & Alliances, Lucidworks
3:00 p.m. - 3:45 p.m.
  • Knowledge Graphs: A Foundation for Search & Beyond
  • Using Text Analytics & Knowledge Graphs for Natural Language Search

    Products like Amazon Alexa and Google Home are changing the expectations as to how search should work. Searchers now expect voice-driven search solutions that provide answers and not just a list of links. Part of this talk shares how knowledge graphs enable a natural language search and how text analytics along with machine learning can be used to populate these powerful constructs. We explain how to architect these solutions and provide real world examples as to how many of our clients have taken advantage of these powerful tools.

    Joseph Hilger, COO, Enterprise Knowledge
  • Lessons Learned Building a Knowledge Graph for IDB

    Similar to many enterprises, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has multiple information sources which are isolated in different systems. There is no link between all these information resources that can make them accessible outside of their native systems. It is not possible to relate distinct kinds of resources that share some characteristics, e.g., to find a course that is about the same topic as a publication. To achieve this objective, IDB implemented a system that can automatically extract entities and concepts from its systems, including structured and unstructured data. Further, it semantically enhanced the data and made it accessible in a Knowledge Graph. Hernandez and Marino share lessons learned from this project that can help interested attendees start with a baseline of best practices for their own projects, saving valuable time and money.

    Chris Marino, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Knowledge
  • Monica Hernandez, Senior Project Manager, Inter-American Development Bank
4:00 p.m. - 4:15 p.m.
  • Keynote - Knowledge Sharing in a New Tech Future
  • The possibilities are endless but what can we really expect in 2020? Our experience speaker, who wrote the book SharePoint 2013 Consultant’s Handbook, coached people on metadata and taxonomies as well apps for Office 365, and more, shares the most recent developments and promises for the coming years.

    Chris McNulty, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft
4:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
  • Closing Keynote Panel - 2020 & Beyond: Creating Resilience in Organizations & Society
  • We live in a world which promises infinite choice, but are we more trapped in the patterns of past practice than we care to think? Is the hierarchical or matrixed organization fit for purpose in a world of increased uncertainty and volatility? Governments have increasing legitimate demands on their resources from citizens and the wider needs of the planet, but few resources to deal with it. Ideology and belief seem at times to triumph over fact, evidence, and reason. Have we gone beyond even post-modernism into a new world with constantly shifting paradigms and increasingly less time to adjust to them? Our panel looks at these questions from the perspectives of knowledge and complexity. They discuss transforming and revolutionizing the way we do business as we move into an uncertain future, how we satisfy our clients in an ever-changing technological age, and how, in our complex societies, we provide value, exchange knowledge, innovate, grow and support our world. Our panel of experienced thinkers and doers shares their insights about what we should be doing to further develop a sustainable ecosystem in our organizations, communities, and world.

    Patrick Lambe, Principal Consultant, Straits Knowledge
  • Dave Snowden, Founder & Chief Scientist, The Cynefin Company, UK
  • Tom Stewart, Executive Director, The Ohio State University
  • Alicia Juarrero, Founder and President, VectorAnalytica, Inc.

Co-Located With