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2018 tech events: The year in photos
Did you hit the road in 2018 to learn about IT trends? We did. This photo roundup takes a look back at some of the notable moments from SearchCIO's tech event coverage.
It was another big year for SearchCIO reporting. Our 2018 tech events coverage spanned IT disciplines, technology trends and the continental U.S.
At these 2018 tech events -- which included notable conferences, summits, symposiums and forums -- our team absorbed and relayed strategic best practices around topics like AI, data analytics, cybersecurity, innovation leadership, virtual and augmented reality, digital transformation and so much more.
Throughout the year, we turned to Instagram to help document our time at these events and share valuable insights for CIOs and IT executives. This 2018 tech events roundup provides a sampling of the best and most interesting photo moments from the SearchCIO team's travels.
Gartner Data & Analytics Summit
March 2018, Grapevine, Texas
Jim Hare, research vice president at Gartner, said IT leaders looking to improve their data and analytics strategies could learn a couple things from spy agencies -- including tapping open source, investing in differentiating technology and talent, and being aware of your limitations.
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Whit Andrews, analyst at Gartner, said the first thing CIOs should do when introducing AI into their companies is to address something they're already trying to do. The key to AI right now is to use it to address reasonable and possible goals -- not moonshots. These goals aim for fairly "soft" outcomes, such as improvements to processes, customer satisfaction, products and financial benchmarking.
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More from this conference:
- Gartner issues four-part prescription for data and analytics leaders
- Two data scientists offer advice on breaking down siloed data
- Daniel Pink: How the science of timing can boost workplace productivity
- Conversational AI: Start by enlisting the big vendors
- What technical challenges face voice AI technology? There are many
- AI voice assistants won't just book your meetings, they'll partake in them
RSA Conference
April 2018, San Francisco
Gabriel Bassett, senior information security data scientist at Verizon, took the stage at RSA to talk about how organizations can build a data-driven security strategy. The goal is have a vision for security spending that goes beyond responding to the news of the day, Bassett said.
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Also from this conference:
MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
May 2018, Cambridge, Mass.
MIT's George Westerman and panelists at the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium emphasized that, above all, digital transformation is a leadership challenge. "Technology changes quickly. Organizations change much more slowly," Westerman said at the start of the panel.
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Also from this symposium:
LiveWorx
June 2018, Boston
A panel of experts -- consisting of John Werner, vice president at Meta; Paul Boris, CEO at AR for Industry; Andy Lowery, co-founder and CEO at RealWear; and Neena Kamath, principal program manager on the augmented reality and virtual reality team at Microsoft -- took the stage at LiveWorx to talk present and future use cases for AR headsets in the enterprise. Here, Meta's Werner shows off his company's enterprise headsets.
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More from this conference:
Gartner Catalyst
August 2018, San Diego
Gartner's Bill Delrieu said customer data does not equal good customer experience. At the Gartner Catalyst event, he shared four ways machine learning can improve customer experience and provided a litmus test for attendees to see how ready they are for AI and machine learning tools, including machine learning-enhanced analytics platforms.
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In a keynote presentation, Gartner analysts said the enabling technology is not the biggest problem IT practitioners are facing in building a digital ecosystem; it's culture. IT professionals must adopt a "just do it" mentality that starts with a change in vocabulary and an expanded scope.
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Also from this conference:
- Approaches for embedding human ethics in AI systems
- How bias in AI happens -- and what IT pros can do about it
- Gartner Catalyst 2018: A future without data centers?
- 3 secret virtues of a great IT practitioner
- A look inside MX's flat organizational structure
- Transforming IT infrastructure and operations to drive digital business
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
October 2018, Orlando, Fla.
Gartner analysts took the stage during the opening keynote at the 2018 Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to discuss an approach they've labeled "ContinuousNext." It's all about organizational dynamism and a focus on digital project management, Augmented intelligence and creating digital twins of entire organizations. Since culture is considered one of the biggest barriers to digital transformation, Kristin Moyer, an analyst at Gartner, devoted a whole segment of the keynote to offering 10 culture hacks for CIOs.
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David Cearley, an analyst at Gartner, presented the research firm's annual top 10 strategic trends. On that list you'll find autonomous things, empowered edge computing, immersive experiences and -- perhaps most surprisingly -- quantum computing, to name a few.
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More from this symposium:
- Gartner Symposium 2018: Digital business models shift IT priorities
- Six emerging trends in security: Gartner Symposium
- Enterprise cloud strategy mistakes to avoid
- Gartner breaks down the state of quantum computing technology
- Cloud exec: Cultivating skills for cloud computing still a challenge
AI World
December 2018, Boston
At AI World, Jay Bellissimo, managing partner of cognitive process transformation at IBM, listed explainability, ethics and security as the three biggest AI challenges in the enterprise.
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More from this conference:
- Impact of AI on business still more limited than some hoped
- Clinical processes, not AI, key to solving healthcare's problems
- Explainability is no solution to problem of bias in AI
Now that you've looked back at our 2018 IT events coverage, check out our Instagram account and give us a follow. It's your resource for event photos, videos and session snippets.
