January 4, 2018 | 12:45pm – 1:50pm

Inhi Suh
General Manager, IBM Collaboration Solutions

Title: Cognitive Computing and the Future

Abstract: Humans are on the cusp of augmenting their lives in extraordinary ways with Artificial Intelligence.  Machine Learning and cognitive computing allow novices to employ the knowledge of experts, enabling better decisions in healthcare, finance, education and more.  Educators and employers need to deal with how digital disruption and AI will continue to influence the way people live and work.  We have not even begun to experience the depth in which AI will change and influence everything we do, and yet we can already reveal some extraordinary outcomes.

Bio: Inhi began her career with IBM in 1998, joining the worldwide customer set strategy team for IBM’s Personal Systems Group. She then went on to hold a variety of leadership and management positions focused on strategic growth, development and marketing.  Most recently, Inhi was the Vice President for Big Data, Information, Integration and Governance in IBM Software Group, responsible for all areas of the business.  Prior to joining IBM, Inhi was a consultant in the education sector focused on international student teaching and counseling for university and professional institutions. Inhi received a Bachelor of Science from Duke University and a Juris Doctorate from North Carolina Central University School of Law. She is a licensed attorney in the state of North Carolina.

January 5, 2018 | 12:45pm – 1:50pm

Larry Smarr
Founding Director, California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UC San Diego/UC Irvine partnership

Title: Toward a Global Research Platform for Big Data Analysis

Abstract: In every field we see an exponential rise of Big Data, which in turn is demanding new technological solutions in visualization, machine learning, and high performance cyberinfrastructure. I will describe how my NSF-funded Pacific Research Platform (PRP), which provides an Internet platform with 100-1000 times the bandwidth of today’s commodity Internet to all the research universities on the West Coast, is being designed from the Big Data application needs of multi-institutional research teams from particle physics to climate to human health. NSF is also funding a Cognitive Hardware and Software Ecosystem Community Infrastructure (CHASE-CI) to be built on top of the PRP, adding GPU and non-von Neumann machine learning capabilities to enable distributed Big Data Analytics. The next stage, well underway, is understanding how to scale this prototype cyberinfrastructure to a National and Global Research Platform.

Bio: Larry Smarr holds the Harry E. Gruber professorship in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at UC San Diego’s Jacobs School. Before that he was Professor of Physics and Astronomy and the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at UIUC. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2006 he received the IEEE Computer Society Tsutomu Kanai Award for his lifetime achievements in distributed computing systems and in 2014 the Golden Goose Award. He served on the NASA Advisory Council to 4 NASA Administrators, was chair of the NASA Information Technology Infrastructure Committee and the NSF Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure, and for 8 years he was a member of the NIH Advisory Committee to the NIH Director, serving 3 directors. He is currently the Principal Investigator on the NSF Pacific Research Platform grants.