Day 2 at Cypher 2019 started with another talented roster of speakers and business leaders. This 5th edition of Cypher has been our biggest and most well-attended summit with 900+ attendees along with 100+ speakers coming together on one single platform for 3 days of hands-on learning and tech talks by best of the breed in AI and analytics industry.

Lion Kontorer from HackerU headlined Day 2 at Cypher 2019 with a very interesting talk on  “AI in the future of Cybersecurity”. Israel-based Kontorer who is the Offensive Security Team Leader with deep experience in penetration testing and crime investigation walked the packed audience through supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning play a critical role in cybersecurity.  

Up next, Genpact’s Amaresh Tripathy, prolific global business leader and also an Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina took the audience through Cora —  Genpact’s AI accelerator which takes the heavy-lifting out of machine learning. Not delving into the “next-gen” and buzzworthy applications of AI, Tripathy’s keynote addressed some of the biggest problems businesses face today, such as on real-time claims decisioning, invoices and modularization can deliver real business value and drive AI at scale. 

Also taking the keynote stage was Srinidhi Rao and Saurav Ghosh of TheMathCompany whose talk was as curious as the title itself — Curious Case of the Missing Gorilla. In their fascinating talk, Ghosh and Rao touched upon the various kinds of biases that are pervasive throughout the machine learning practices. They also have an interesting proposition to usher in a new era of analytics project lifecycle in the form of “data ethnography”, which is the study of the origin of the data. 

Great Learning’s stalwart Dr PK Vishawanathan took centre-stage to talk about one of the most overlooked contributions of AI by Ronald Fisher – discriminant analysis and its other companion — Support Vector Machines. Dr Vishawanathan also defined the way for future data scientists and analytics professionals, “The need of the hour today is marrying academic elegance with business domain knowledge. It is the time for bilingual people who speak the business lingo and have sound data science concepts”. 

Meanwhile, senior industry leader and Hike’s VP of AI and data technologies Ankur Narang talked about the challenges and opportunities of implementing quantum computing in AI. Another prolific speaker ISIMA’s co-founder Darshan Rawal highlighted how startups and mid-sized AI companies are ushering in a new revolution in enterprise AI market. “It’s time to wean off the mothership which is Google,” he said.

Perhaps one of the most informative sessions turned out to be an interesting panel moderated by Udacity’s Ishan Gupta Global Head, Student Ops, Arvind Rathore Senior Vice President & Global Head of Digital Engineering at Virtusa , Bhargavi Sunkara Head of Corporate Technology at BNY Mellon, Abhijit Shroff Director, Digital Transformation at DXC Technology and Sreekanth Menon Vice President – AI & ML at Genpact. Titled “AI in the real world – Deciphering the hype and blusters,” the panelists deliberated how human in the loop will remain a critical element in AI implementation. Post lunch, a five-member panel moderated by Genpact’s Dimple Arora discussed the challenges AI at scale. Tapati Bandopadhyay of HFS Research, Ramsu Sundararajan of Cartesian Consulting, Rohit Dhameja and Sreekanth Menon at Genpact, Anurag Verma CEO and Co-founder at FN MathLogic, Piyush Chowhan of Arvind Lifestyle Brands deliberated on the hype surrounding AI and why simply knowing Python isn’t enough to make one data scientist. “Today a lot of people think by knowing Python programming or the open source frameworks like Keras, Theano one is doing data science,” Tapati said to a packed audience. 

Overall, it was an action packed day 2 at Cypher 2019 and the day wrapped up with Great Learning Data Science Awards given away in 11 categories. 

Stay tuned for Day 3 highlights.