 Welcome to JSA TV the newsroom for tech and telecom professionals. I'm Jamie Scato-Cutaya of JSA joining me here today at the telecom exchange NYC 2018. My good friend Mr. Melvin Greer he's the chief data scientist of the Americas of Intel. Melvin welcome to JSA TV. Jamie I'm so excited to be here thank you for inviting me. We're so honored he's our keynote here at telecom exchange and truly a respected thought leader in the field of AI. So let's start there Melvin. What do you see as coming trends and evolution of AI? Well certainly Jamie every business leader is trying their best to figure out how to take advantage of all of the data they acquire and so we see three really important trends. First people are hiring a data scientist or a chief data officer somebody whose primary responsibility is to turn data into a strategic asset they're really focusing in on a precursor to an artificial intelligence strategy which is really a data strategy. Where is it from? How is it stored? How can I use it? And then the number one impediment to the use of this data they're focusing on is cleansing, labeling, tagging and making sure they can get access to metadata that helps them derive the insights that they want. Right because data just left alone not useful data with where we can draw some insights from it now we're talking but there's some implications. I know a lot of folks are a little bit nervous about how this data is getting used and the security behind it. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yes sure so there's some legal ethical and societal implications associated with artificial intelligence and it's important to have that discussion one of the things that's happening is that there's an organization called Data for Democracy that's focused on creating a code of ethics for data scientists by data scientists and so the more we have this conversation around ethics and privacy the better we'll be able to drive adoption in AI. And certainly something we're trying to do here today more education more communication certainly the way to to move forward and and you're very very active in growing the the next leaders of tomorrow in the technological field. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure so one of the most important challenges associated with adopting AI is the lack of workforce and talent. We have about three million open jobs in data science today in the US and so I really applaud you and your organization JSA for really making that kind of effort to to get more people involved in the discussion. I've created a nonprofit called the Greer Institute as well that I'm really happy that you're supporting that is designed to figure out how to identify underserved communities underserved populations that are very capable and interested in supporting artificial intelligence and data science and so the Greer Institute is really happy to be participating with you and and driving this kind of change. It's so exciting for for to be part of the Greer Institute story literally the money we were able to raise here today is going towards a scholarship for young lady and she'll be studying aerospace engineering as her study and so we're very excited I can't announce who it is because she's going to she doesn't know who it is yet but we are going to support her academic career and we're going to provide her some mentoring and coaching as well so that she can as she matures through academic career move that into a career either an entrepreneurship like you or into some work workplace that is going to be materially impactful to other underserved communities and populations. We are so thrilled and we'll be following her story on our blog as well because we're we're already in love with her although she doesn't know it yet. So again tell us from a visionary standpoint where do you see where do you see this all going in the next three to five years I mean are we going to be living in a more of a virtual world than a reality one or how do you see the future coming? Well the future is actually here already in many ways we think about artificial intelligence and data science as something that happens in a Star Trek movie but today every day we use machine learning and cognitive computing to decide is that cancer can this person get alone will they be able to go to this school what kind of financial and social benefits will they be able to acquire and so today these kind of things happen on a regular basis even in great places like marketing and sales we see human avatars or virtual avatars in modeling and in advertising so the future is actually now and but in going forward I think what we will continue to see is a need to focus on use case development we'll see the advancement of prototypes that have small scale implication that can then scale directly into production and I think ultimately the the prediction the forecast that Gartner put together for the next 18 to 24 months around 40% of the development of data science products will come from citizen data scientists this is going to mean that data science is not going to be the preview of a few hopefully the data literacy will grow and that people will be able to acquire the meaningful ways to deal with data just like they do with addition and subtraction in in school the future is certainly exciting one and with visionaries like you to to help us get there we're very excited thank you so much Melvin for all that you do thank you Jamie I'm happy to work with you to do it and thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV happy networking