This is it… a whole new era for BIMA and our members. New directions & higher value. It’s a very exciting time for the organisation and I’m really honoured and looking forward to taking on the newly created role of Chair of the Ai Think Tank.
There’s a lot of noise swirling around Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at the moment and we feel it’s our role, at BIMA, to not only shield our members from it, but also guide them to the truths. Which is why we set up the Think Tank.
The Ai Think Tank will Demystify, Clarify, Unify + Drive the UK agenda around Artificial Intelligence. Pete Trainor, Nexus CX
I’m putting together a truly brilliant council of experts to lead the various conversations and my hope is by the end of 2017 we become the go-to source of knowledge for our members and the industry. The council is going to be made up of equal parts external leadership from the Ai & machine learning space + experts in the field from within our own membership.
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve already been able to fill half of the seats and joining me on day 1 in the Think Tank will be;
Alberta Soranzo – End-to-End Service Design Director at Lloyds Banking Group
Duncan Anderson – CTO of IBM Watson
Jonathan Seal – Director Strategy for Mando
Dr Chris Brauer – Director of Innovation and Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London
Luba Elliot – Creative AI advocate, Nameiambic.ai
Matt Celuszak – Co-Founder & CEO, CrowdEmotion
Additionally, we’re recruiting a BIMA member from the South West of the country and a BIMA member from the North of the country. An academic on the subject of machine learning and Ai. Someone from one of the Ai startups in the UK & potentially two additional BIMA members who are leaders in the field of Ai, Data & Machine Learning.
That’s just the start. Once we’ve established the Think Tank nationally we’ll be recruiting additional people from across the country to join us.
Good things. Very good things. We recognised that value to our BIMA members needs to come from more than just events and networking, we want to give you knowledge as well. So with that in mind we’re setting the Think Tank up for;
Recognition – Who’s hot in the industry right now?
Expert Insight – Who should you turn to for quality content and consultancy?
Data Mining – What’s happening from within our own membership base?
Planning – Readying the industry for the changes that will start to occur.
Demystification – Cutting through the noise to the quality. What’s real and what’s fake.
Over the coming months, in partnership with Cognition X, we’ll be meeting, polling, scoring and placing our members and Ai suppliers into the countries first BIMA Ai Index. The index will be exclusively available to our member organisations to help them navigate the Ai space with more confidence. Slotting & ranking companies into four categories; Implementors, Consultants, Vendors & Startups across the three axis of Narrow Intelligence, General Intelligence and Super Intelligence. More on that to come.
Additionally, our hope is to deliver the following;
4 directors dinners in 4 different parts of the UK, specifically driven from an Ai topic + Expert Guests.
Quarterly thought leadership content distributed to the members, industry press & UK Government (DCMS). Covering trends, things to watch out for and data from across the membership companies (including, but not limited to) a census of the Ai experts from within our membership.
You’ll all be getting access to the BIMA Bot, which will be continuously mining and posting to our private Twitter feed and Slack Channel. It will answer members questions about BIMA, Ai and the insights from the Think Tank. As well as posting links to articles of fact, not fiction.
The think tank, with members inputs and contributions, will be publishing a yearly white paper, exclusively available to BIMA members. Paper 1 will cover the basics of Ai, trends, thoughts and the need-to-knows for the industry and will be available towards the end of the Summer.
Because we want to Do and not just Say, we’ll also be organising a yearly hackathan in partnership with the IBM Watson team. A little fun for our members tech, design and UX teams, with a real brief, to solve some genuine human challenges. Why? Just because it sounds fun and we like to get our hands dirty!
As a BIMA member, we’ll also be sending out alerts via the Slack channel, covering quality conferences and courses for your staff.
Finally… we’ll be producing some good quality, fun, video & audio interviews. Our ai council members will be interviewing and podcasting chats with our expert members and some of the UKs hottest Ai startups including Darktrace, Seldon, EchoBox, StepSize, Tractable, Cleo, StatusToday, BenevolentAI, Digital Genius, Ravelin, Phrasee, Re:Infer, Brolly, Firef.ly and Rainbird.
By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it. Eliezer Yudkowsky
I’ve never been more excited about being a member of BIMA. This is the start of a very exciting new era – If you’re not a member of BIMA… fix that, because you’ll be missing out on good things!
If you are already a BIMA member and you’d like to join us on this next step in BIMA’s journey by filling one of the vacant seats on the Ai Council, email me – petetrainor@bima.co.uk – with a short description of why you would be right for a role.
Existing BIMA member organisations can also request access to our private Twitter feed of links and insights, our Ai Think Tank Slack channel & early-bird exclusives on dinners, events, participation opportunities and pre-reads of papers.
Finally – Members can also request to be audited for the BIMA Ai Index, which we will be sharing across all our member companies in due course.
If you are not already a BIMA member and would like to get access to the benefits of the Ai Think Tank, please contact David Butcher – davidbutcher@bima.co.uk.