Machinery.AI Launches in Seattle and DC

After the successful launch of our Voicehacks community in the summer of 2017, we knew it was time to accelerate our plans for Machinery.AI. The Voicehacks tour allowed us to visit ten cities and meet more than 1500 developers and the hunger for all things A.I. was notable. It felt like the early days of iOS and Android with developers and other professionals clamoring for knowledge. The term "AI is the new UI" rings so true. Instead of tap, pinch, swipe, it's now access (data), process, present.

Thanks to our solid sponsor partner Capital One, we accelerated our launch plans to include two one-day workshops in Seattle and DC in November. Each event would completely sell out and include a mix of talks across technology, process and vision related to this nascent field of software development. We had 50% gender parity of speakers at each event and 40% of attendees in Seattle were women, with 30% in DC. NVIDIA, Capital One, Microsoft, Google, Dimensional Mechanics, IBM, Amazon, Allen Institute for A.I. and many other leaders in the space would all speak, lead and participate.

In Seattle, the panel on Reducing Bias in A.I., led by Cheryl Ingram was captivating and powerful and has us thinking about how to turn Ethics and AI into its own workshop series. Bias embedded in our algorithms is already having a disastrous effect in areas such as criminal justice and social services and as we've just witnessed in social media marketing. It will be up to all of us to make sure our industry does not become a tool for hate, conscious or otherwise.

The broad takeaway from the two events is that the industry is just getting started with Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Data Engineering. It's a rabbit hole that goes very deep. The underemployment in this field will take some time to address as the challenges are so great. The need for community is greater than ever, and we're gearing up for much more in 2018. What lies ahead for Machinery.AI will be a mix of online and in-person opportunities from webinars to meetups to premium deep-dive workshops focused on the enterprise. We'll be making announcements soon and look forward to playing a role in helping shape this exciting (and a bit scary) new market.