The new Frontiers in Computing Systems group, part of Columbia’s Data Science Institute, is hosting an inaugural full-day symposium, with leading speakers and panelists, to highlight the advances and grand challenges in Big Data infrastructure: extreme-scale computing systems (hardware, parallel computing, software, databases) and their application to solve diverse cutting-edge problems in climate and ocean science, population-scale biomedical informatics, genomics, materials science, neuroscience, astrophysics and engineering.
The symposium includes an exciting keynote by Ruchir Puri, the chief architect of IBM’s Watson system, on "Engineering the Future of Cognitive Systems." Other speakers include those developing state-of-art high-performance parallel computers and large-scale Python-based software platforms, as well as experts on computational problems in climate science, astrophysics, and protein folding simulation.
The event will include a keynote talk, lunch, two talk presentation sessions, a networking and poster session, and a panel of experts with audience participation.
"Engineering the Future of Cognitive Systems"
Ruchir Puri, Chief Architect of IBM Watson (IBM Fellow)
Recently, cognitive systems such as IBM Watson have made great strides in impacting many fields that are of fundamental relevance to society, from healthcare, to security and beyond. This has unleashed a torrent of innovation in cognitive systems that encompass a broad spectrum of computer science and engineering, from hardware infrastructure, to software stack, as-a-service platform layer, and finally data layer and cognitive applications. This talk will give an overview of the anatomy of a true cognitive system that lives and breathes in the cloud and will address key challenges that need to be addressed in the future.
