Artificial Intelligence discussion at BarCampNYC3

They say at BarCamp that if you don’t like the session you are in, feel free to go to a better one. No hard feelings. But what do you do, if you show up for the announced moderated discussion session yet the moderator does not.

That’s what happened to us with the last (5:15pm) slot of the second day of BarCampNYC3. So, after waiting for 10 minutes past the start time, I decided to step in and moderate.

We talked a bit about everything: a definition of Artificial Intelligence (no agreement) and statistical algorithms that try to find the tanks, tune adverts and prevent SPAM. We discussed the state of art in computer vision and why once well-known consumer company in that space (Riya) still failed miserably. Near the end, we also talked about artificial intelligence as an emotional one and whether Pleo is intelligent.

All together, it was a very spirited discussion and most of the people contributed their opinion and their knowledge. We may not have discussed what the original moderator had in mind, but we certainly discussed interesting topics.