IIT AGNE hosted a seminar featuring Pragati Mathur, Venki Nagesha and Rama Ramakrishna who presented a phenomenal panel on the convergence of technology trends, the challenges they face and the future of these technologies. The event was part of the monthly seminar series and was held at the Cambridge Innovation Center on February 9, 2019. 

The event opened with a welcome address by Bala Balasubramanian, President of IIT AGNE who described the goals of the organization. 

The last few years have seen a tremendous resurgence in applications of technology in the consumer sector. Today’s consumer has never had it so good: you can order any type of good or service and it is delivered within days with complete reliability. Home devices like Alexa or Google Home talk to us and understand our requests to play music, make phone or video calls and turn the lights on. Services like Netflix and Spotify make personal recommendations for music or movies based on your taste and personal history.

This growth in advanced technology available to consumers is driven by convergence of multiple technology trends, including Big Data and Data Analytics, Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. In the future, the use of delivery drones and autonomous vehicles will take this to the next level. This also opens up issues of data security and privacy controls for individuals and groups. A panel of experts discussed this. 

The first speaker was Venki Nagesha, an expert in the area of speech and voice recognition over networks, who currently works as an Research Scientist at Siri in Apple. Starting his career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, he went on to work at Dragon Systems and it’s successor, Nuance Communications, where he led the research team for Dragon Naturally Speaking line of products for consumer and medical dictation. Venki is a graduate of IIT Madras, with a Ph.D. from the University of Rhode Island. Venki described the history of the field and described the challenges with speech recognition. “The field started with a computer understanding the voice but not really acting upon it. The vision of Siri was the integration of Speech Recognition and cloud where a computer could a take a command and act upon it.”

 

He described challenges in the field especially extending it to Indian speakers. "The challenge in India is that people speak multilingual within a sentence," said Venki. 

The next speaker Pragati Mathur, EVP/CTO and CIO at Staples

Pragati Mathur has led enterprise level technology information architecture at General Motors, Boeing and Biogen Idec. As senior vice president for technology and business solutions,  Biogen Inc. she oversaw enterprise architecture, analytics, integration and collaboration services, and led the business intelligence team to determine how to aggregate and extract the right data from multiple sources. Recently appointed as CIO at Staples Inc., she leads the public cloud and devices initiative; and owns retail, point-of-sale, corporate and supply chain systems. She has a MS from Carnegie Mellon; and an MBA from Walsh College. 

She described the shop and factory of the future where technologies like block chain, state of the art robots will transform the retail experience.  “The Alibaba stores in China are a revolutionary new way of doing business. Using a cell phone a customer can scan an item and see the entire life cycle of the product as it made to the shelf ” said Pragati. 

She showcased several revolutionary ideas that are being implemented by Staples. 

Rama Ramakrishnan, a serial data science entrepreneur, seasoned tech executive (VP Oracle, SVP Salesforce), advisor to startups, angel investor and board member talked about the innovative uses of data to dramatically alter the online retail experience. He has founded or been a senior executive in 4 software companies that have exited to technology titans Oracle, Salesforce and Demandware and delivered exceptional returns to venture capital investors. The complex analytics/machine-learning systems built by Rama’s companies are in widespread use today globally and benefit hundreds of millions of consumers daily. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant at McKinsey. An IIT Madras graduate, Rama got his M.S. and Ph.D. in Operations Research from MIT. He described his journey as the entrepreneur and the innovation that radically changed the way online retail happens. An extensive discussion with the audience ensured on the several topics including the differences between Alexa and Siri.

It was arguably one of the finest seminars held.  To learn more about IIT AGNE, please check out their website at http://iitagne.org/