On June 4th over 60 digital leaders and business partners joined CIONET at the venues of the VRT (Flemish Radio and Television) for an afternoon full of Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Listening and Automated Decision Making.

The presentations were followed with an exclusive behind the scenes tour of the Television and Radio studios. And, as a climax, for the bravest among us, the ascending of the 89 meters high broadcasting tower, a monument in the Brussels skyline. This provided some fantastic views on Brussels and its surroundings.

We want to thank the four presenters for their astounding presentations:

• Kris Peeters, CEO and founder of Data Minded
• ing Peter Karsmakers, Assistant Professor at KULeuven
• Eveline Hoekx, Product Owner & Team Coach at Mediahuis
• Philippe Van Impe, CEO of DigitYser

And special thanks to Marco Bellusci, Wim Wauterickx and Frank Lemmens for hosting this event at VRT.

Some key takeaways from the four presentations:

Kris Peeters started of by giving us some fresh insights, for example the ‘Digital Feedback Loop’ on how analytics only succeeds if it really impacts the organisation, with data being the core. Next he focused on protecting data: when you start opening up silos , the risks exists that data will be used against you or sold to competition. But if you’re very open about data in your organization, only then your employees will make the right decisions without delay. And Kris finished with the conclusion that data users are becoming more and more hungry, for example requesting real-time analytics on the fly.

With an academic topic on Machine listening, Peter Karsmakers presented a very interesting topic: how to use information enclosed in acoustic signals. We learned about coughing pigs and anomalous pandas, how a researcher was locked up for a week in a mobilehome to classify all sounds he made in order to create data sets. Next to that, Peter showed us that supervised machine learning and deep learning enables to search for suitable representations and gives state of the art performance. In conclusion we can safely assume high-accuracy automatic sound scene and event recognition in the near future.

The business case of Eveline Hoekx presented how Mediahuis shifted from a data informed company to consumer centric with data, analytics, models organized around the consumer, and data driven. She explained how Mediahuis developed their own trackers to measure the generic behavior in their digital products and how content is then personalized for all consumers using collaborative filtering and AI. With a handful of data scientist it’s then very important that they shouldn’t need to worry about the technical setup. People should be able to onboard without any concerns: Keep It Simple & Stupid.

Finally Philippe Van Impe presented the evolutions in AI, where now more data and more power is available, resulting in a big AI hype. ‘Are we heading to a digital winter..?’ was the first question of the presentation. ‘Are we having unrealistic expectations?’ and ‘Is it a hotdog or not?’. To solve this and to provide solid answers, a digital leader will need to continuously let his IT crew dive in the world of AI through Meetups, Hackatons, Kaggle days, the DI summit and the tv-show ‘Silicon Valley’.

Quote of the day: “Giving business users access to BI data, is like giving a hand grenade to a monkey..”