Conference Co-Chair: Scott Lundstrom, Group Vice President and General Manager of IDC Government and Health Insights

June 22 | Day 1

Morning Summit

Chair: Scott Lundstrom, Group Vice President and General Manager of IDC Government and Health Insights

In the digital era, AI is at the center stage of business intelligence. Data is the core of the new digital economy and needs to be managed from edge to core to cloud and analyzed in near real time for insights. Due to the complexity and resources required for AI, model creation tends to be time intensive, expensive, experimental, and often "one-off" solutions. Most organizations haven't made it beyond the incremental benefits of a single business process to full production agency wide. At AI World Government 2020 agency and industry executives with experience confronting the challenges of operationalizing and scaling AI will discuss how they are dealing with roadblocks, lessons learned, strategies in play to move forward, and taking responsible and ethical action to affect outcomes. 

Full Day Seminar

Instructors:
Ronald Schmelzer, Managing Partner, Principal Analyst, Cognilytica
Kathleen Walch, Managing Partner, Principal Analyst, Cognilytica

Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) are transforming the way we work, live, and interact with each other. The emergence of these cognitive technologies is transforming the way public sector agencies and citizens interact with each other. However, putting AI, ML, and DL into practice and getting beyond the buzzwords, as well as procuring these technologies can be a challenge. This seminar focuses on bringing real world practices, use cases, and methodologies to make AI projects a tangible success for public and private sector organizations. It will also help procurement professionals to understand why procuring AI is different than procuring traditional application development technology. Attendees will gain insight into what makes AI projects a success across a wide range of industries, learn about the seven patterns of AI, and learn about emerging cognitive automation and intelligent automation approaches.

Co-Chairs: Bob Gourley, Co-Founder and CTO, OODA LLC
David Bray, PhD, Senior Fellow with the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition & Incoming Executive with the Atlantic Council

AI has injected new capabilities into government and is already improving the missions and functions of federal, state and local governments as well as governments globally. If this were the end of the story, our task would be simple. We would only need to accelerate AI into every facet of every government.  But we live in a world where not all humans are angels and not all nations respect the sovereignty of others. And with globally interconnected IT allowing criminals, fraudsters and hostile nations to continuously innovate, we have to be mindful of the challenges of cybersecurity and counter-misinformation. Experience also shows that AI itself has unique security challenges because of the nature of the algorithms involved. Enterprises are finding that their AI solutions need special protections. AI needs to be developed in the most secure manner possible. Adversaries who can access training data can manipulate it to drive outcomes of ML. Algorithms themselves must also be protected. Many AI solutions have been shown to be biased and/or bigoted. And in some cases, the solutions will generate results that are unexplainable, making security and compliance even more complicated.  

 This half day seminar, led by two widely recognized AI experts, will bring together a range of experienced practitioners to share lessons learned and best practices in mitigating these serious challenges so we can accelerate the fielding of AI in service to governments. 

What do public and private sector officials need to know about non-governmental efforts to develop standards for Artificial Intelligence? In this workshop, representatives from the IEEE standards association will introduce the ways IEEE is moving into standards-making that addresses the social implications of technology. We aspire to introduce attendees to the IEEE Society for Social Implications of Technology standards-making and the IEEE Ethically Aligned Design initiative. Components of this workshop will include panels that discuss the issues in developing and implementing standards, as well as invite participants to offer their guidance on the standards that their industry will need as they move forward to incorporate AI into their workflow.

June 23 | Day 2

Chair: Adelaide O’Brien, Research Director, Government Digital Transformation Strategies, IDC

AI will prove to be a valuable asset for government agencies, but several challenges remain in moving beyond RPA and chatbots to reach the goal of augmented intelligence. In this track, you will hear from agency and industry executives with experience confronting these challenges, how they are dealing with roadblocks, strategies in play to move forward, and outcomes achieved. Challenges and solutions discussed will include:

• Reengineering agency workflows and processes
• Workforce training on using and interacting with AI
• Deciding who owns the data
• Developing data management and governance strategies
• Organizing stakeholders to determine roles of each team member
• Creating policies to ensure responsible and ethical AI
• Leveraging industry partners
• Deploying best practices

Chair: David Schubmehl, Research Director Cognitive/Artificial Intelligent Systems and Content Analytics, IDC

AI is the means by which organizations are enabling and creating digital transformation and the government is working toward becoming an AI organization. This track provides attendees with a roadmap for the evolution of AI technologies over the next few years. Talks and panels will showcase several topics including:

• Use Cases & Advances in Computer Vision and Facial Recognition
• Language-based AI – Improved NLP and Translational Technology
• AI for Autonomous Vehicles, Drones and Robotics
• Machine Learning and AI Enabling the Investigation & Discovery Process through Knowledge Graphs
• Cutting-Edge Topics: Quantum Computing, Training Data, AI Governance, Explainable & Trusted AI, Synthetic Data, AI at Edge

Chair: Shawn McCarthy, Research Director, IDC

As government IT organizations continue to explore ways that artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning can enable innovation, productivity, and efficiencies, a key question is how to build the right environment and infrastructure to support these compute-intensive, next-generation applications.

From portable devices to edge computing nodes to cloud-based data centers, AI demands a tremendous amount of resources. This track explores current use cases of how cloud-based infrastructure helps organizations capitalize on the potential of AI and machine learning, and provides best practice examples of agencies on the cutting edge of AI and ML implementations.

June 24 | Day 3

Chair: Cynthia Burghard, Research Director, Value-Based IT Transformation Strategies, IDC Health Insights

The application of artificial intelligence to improve healthcare is a high priority for government, both because of the immense spending and services represented by healthcare, as well as the enormous opportunities to use AI to accomplish more efficient and better integrated care. Perspectives presented will include top-down policies and overarching strategies for major departments and agencies, as well as specific examples of smaller projects that can be implemented in collaboration with partners. It is critical to demonstrate the potential for democratization of AI for healthcare, and emphasize that even in smaller units that do not have huge budgets, there are excellent opportunities to apply AI relatively quickly and with positive impact in the short-term. Competitions and challenges, which solicit collaborative entries from numerous academic and commercial partners, are one of the ways of accelerating innovation and adoption in this field.

Chair: Maureen Fleming, Program Vice President, Integration and Process Automation, IDC

Government agencies face unprecedented operating challenges as they manage mounting budget constraints while trying to become more agile, improve citizen experience and improve their overall process efficiencies. Unable, in many cases, to hire more employees, agency leaders are forced to spend dollars on contractor support or shift resources away from strategic work to handle routine, manual tasks. Robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation technology provides agencies with the capability to operate more efficiently while reducing resources costs. Furthermore, RPA is moving from the back office to the front office and empowering knowledge workers. Hear from thought leaders and agency experts who will discuss leading use cases for intelligent automation and how they can also be leveraged through machine learning approaches.

Chair: Holly Muscolino, Research Vice President, Content and Process Strategies and the Future of Work, IDC

As government agencies continue down the mandated path of AI adoption, fundamental questions revolve around ‘what applications should be deployed’ and ‘what new skillsets are required'? The growth and adoption of AI and intelligent automation solutions are giving rise to a new "digital worker" – automated technology that is rapidly changing the nature of the human workforce and related skillsets. At the same time, our consumer experiences are driving new sets of expectations for almost immediate (and intelligent) access to resources, anytime and anywhere. Members of our multi-generational workforce have differing workstyles that must be accommodated. And broader macroeconomic, geopolitical and environmental trends are also impacting the work environment.

Work transformation is about rethinking the way work gets done. It is a fundamental shift in the work model to one that fosters human-machine collaboration; enables new skills and worker experiences and supports an intelligent and dynamic environment un-bounded by time or physical space. This track will explore how work transformation impacts strategic government functions today and in the future.