SRII Global Conference 2012 in San Jose, CA
July 24-27 the Service Research and Innovation Institute (SRII) organized its annual global conference in the Fairmont hotel in San Jose, CA. The picture above was taken during the award ceremony event on the last day. The SRII mission is to drive innovation for "IT-Enabled Services" at the global level. About 300 academics and business people from all over the world gathered to discuss the different topics.
Friday 27 July 2012
The first day (after registration, see below) the different SRII Global Chapters/SIGs (Special Interest Groups) held internal meetings. Kris Singh (SRII President, see picture below) opened the event. Then, everybody was invited to introduce themselves. This really was a great networking opportunity!!
Next, we had some keynote talks including the one by Subu Goparaju (Senior VP, Infosys Labs, see picture below).
Dr. Yan Chow (Kaiser Permanente, see picture below) gave a very inspiring talk innovative use of IT tackled by SRII Healthcare SIG including 1. Quality of care delivered by the healthcare system, 2. Consumer experience with healthcare system, 3. Affordability of healthcare, 4. Professional satisfaction with healthcare workers.
Mark Gorenberg (Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, see picture below) talked about the big themes of 2012 in Venture Capital funding: Mobile, Cloud, Data. They see open source as a key innovation driver (see slide below). He is also advisor to President Obama. By 2014, 70 billion mobile apps are going to be downloaded. It did not exist 5 years ago…
Next, Jinesh Varia (@jinman, Amazon Web Services, see picture below) gave a presentation titled “Cloud Transformations Accelerating Innovation”. Amazon basically allows its users to do big data without big servers.
Then it was time for some informal contacts during a nice welcome reception (see picture below). The Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA obviously is a nice conference venue...
Next morning, the real conference started with a keynote talk (actually a recorded video) by Vint Cerf (Chief Internet Evangelist for Google, see picture below).
Next, Lenny T. Mendonca (Director McKinsey & Co, see picture below) talked about big themes in our current times including the fact that the ageing in advanced economies will slow GDP growth, unless we see a large increase in productivity. Moreover, restoring government debt to reasonable levels (e.g. 60%) will require painful fiscal adjustment in many countries. Finally, his analysis shows that the world is likely to have too few high-skill workers and not enough jobs for low-skill workers.
Rob High (IBM Fellow, VP and CTO Watson Solutions, see picture below) talks about Watson. Since Watson won the Jeopardy game on TV, it’s very well known. He went on to explain the inner workings of the system (DeepQA see below).
Next, a plenary panel was held on the topic of “Government Policy for IT Innovation”. From left to right: Paul Kedrosky (Senior Fellow at Kauffman Foundation), Scott Belcher (President & CEO, Intelligent Transportation Society of America), Rob Atkinson (President of IT & Innovation Foundation), and Lenny T. Mendonca (Director, McKinsey & Co). Rob Atkinson mentioned his new book (about to appear): "Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage" (Yale University Press, Authors: Robert D. Atkinson & Stephen Ezell).
Then, it was time for the first break-out sessions, followed by the panel (see picture below) “IT Innovation for Heath Care Services”: Dr. Yan Chow (MD, Director of Kaiser Permanente (KP) Information Technology’s Innovation & Advanced Technology Group), Dan Gonos (Chief Technologist, HP Enterprise Services Healthcare and Life Sciences & HP Fellow), Marc Olesen (President and COO at DNAnexus), Dr.Dan Riskin (MD, CEO of Health Fidelity Menlo Park, CA).
The evening reception (see pictures below) included a lot of nice food, but also innovation showcases. Many startups as well as established companies presented their services: E.g. BeyondCore, BlueJeans, Ayasdi, Apixio, and many more...
During the SRII conference, it was also nice meeting some blogger colleagues: 1. Charlie Bess (@cebess HP, his “The Next Big Thing” blog can be found here: http://www.hp.com/go/tnbt) has a very nice technology blog; 2. Dr. Bonnie Feldman focuses on healthcare IT (@drbonnie360, Her blog is available here: http://drbonnie360.com).
On Thursday, July 26th sessions started off with a keynote talk by David Tennenhouse (Partner at NewVenture Partners LLC, see picture below). He contrasted proactive computing (anticipate our needs and sometimes act on our behalf) to interactive computing (paradigm since the 1960s). Moreover, he talks about Taas (Things as a Service), sensor data as a service. Examples: Alverix (Point of care diagnostics), Munisense (you want to get the data from the sensors to the end users, see below), Intelleflex (RFID tags and readers).
Next, Rajeeb Hazra (VP, General Manager of Technical Computing at Intel, see picture below) talked about "Democracy in a knowledge economy".
Next, Keith Lowery (Senior Fellow at AMD, see picture below) presented his talk titled "Workloads in a web-scale computing world". AMD studies the workloads that run on its CPUs, but many workloads are proprietary (no legacy commercial workloads). He presented a very interesting chart (see below) characterizing the different workloads according to the “compute intensity” and “I/O, Memory Intensity”. This led them to focus on key ‘Amplification Points’ (see slide below).
Sumit Dhawan (@sumit_dhawan, Group VP, Citrix Systems, see picture below) talks about "Enterprise Mobility". He predicts that Mobile is causing the biggest changes in the years to come (see picture below).
Next, we had the “Big Data and Advanced Analytics” Keynote Panel: Brian Aker (HP Fellow), Anjul Bhambhri (VP of Big Data at IBM), John Roese (Senior VP & General Manager, Huawei North America R&D), Arijit Sengupta (Founder & CEO, BeyondCore), David Tennenhouse (New Venture Partner).
Then, yours truly (@dirkvandenpoel, see picture below) presented the paper titled “Using Webcrawling of Publicly-Available Websites to Assess E-Commerce Relationships” (co-authored with Dr. Dirk Thorleuchter).
Next, the “Cloud & Mobile Services” Keynote Panel was organized, including: Enrique Castro-Leon (Enterprise Architect & Technology Strategist, Intel Corporation), Sunil Potti (Vice President and General Manager, NetScalar Platforms, Citrix System), Thomas Renner (Head of Electronics Competency Center, Fraunhofer IAO, Stuttgart, Germany), Sharad Singhal (Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. Panel Moderator), Jinesh Varia (Technology Evangelist at Amazon.com), Marc Wilkinson (Director, Cloud Global Practice, HP).
Next, the “High-Performance Technical Computing as a Service” Panel was held: Nick Appleyard (Vice President - Product Delivery (PDT) Operations Americas of CD-adapco), Frank Ding (Engineering Analysis & Technical Computing Manager at Simpson Strong-Tie), Wolfgang Gentzsch (Executive HPC Consultant and Chairman of the annual ISC Cloud Conference series, Panel Moderator), Bob Graybill (CEO and President, Nimbis Services), Ashok K. Krishnamurthy (Interim co-executive director, Ohio Supercomputing Center), Addison Snell (CEO Intersect360).
Next, another innovation showcase took place in the evening. The European SRII Chapter had a very good meeting afterwards to start organizing an annual European conference as well.
Friday, July 27th, the SRII conference started with a plenary talk by Theresa Anna Maldonado (Division Director NSF, see picture below). She talks minorities, grand challenges, and latest grants. She compares the "Education" Challenge to JFK's '60s space.
Next, the “Education Innovation” Panel was held (see picture below) including Peter Denning (Computer Scientist/Distinguished Professor at Naval Postgraduate School), who talked about Dreyfus' assertion that telepresence is limited to the first three levels of learning (beginner -> rookie -> competent -> proficient -> expert -> master), Theresa Anna Maldonado (Division Director, National Science Foundation), and a representative from Coursera. MOOC (Massively Online Open Courses) represent THE innovation.
Next, I attended Prof. Dr. Katsutoshi Yada & Natsuki Sano (see picture below)‘s paper titled “Customer Behavior Modeling using Radio Frequency Identification Data and the Hidden Markov Model”.
Next, I attended a very interesting talk by Prof. Dr. Freimut Bodendorf (Head of the Department of Information Systems, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). He explained their use of “Interactive Shopping Window” using Microsoft Kinect.
After lunch, Ray Harishankar (IBM Fellow & Vice President of Technology and Innovation) gave an outlook on the future of IT services. See some slides below.
This was followed by a plenary panel “Service Innovation/Engineering/Quality (SIEQ)” Panel: Rama Akkiraju (IBM Almaden Research Center), Charlie Bess (@cebess, HP Labs), Srinivas Padmanabhuni (Head, Software Engineering Research, Infosys Labs).
In his talk, Charles Bess (@cebess, see picture to the right) provided some nice outlook slides (see below). Even though data may be abundantly available, some things are fundamentally scarce: human attention span
The closing session included summary remarks, but also the award ceremony (see picture on top). Prof. Dr. Shusaku Tsumoto (Shimane University) was awarded both the best paper of his chapter, but also of the overall conference.
See you next year at SRII 2013 Global Conference (or at the European Chapter conference in Munich, Germany) for more innovative IT service presentations, talks, panels, and most importantly, networking.
