November 2023 Business Briefing

On Friday Nov 24th the CEIA Nov ’23 Business Briefing took place in University College Cork (UCC), Council Room, North Wing, on College Road

Artificial intelligence (AI), Chatbots and the Future of Work, was this month’s topic

Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are a fascinating advancement in today’s digital technology landscape. They can do it all — whether it’s helping you answer specific questions, or guiding you through a complex B2B sales process. With all the things that artificial intelligence and chatbots can do, there are times when they almost seem like magic. And that makes AI chatbots a source of confusion (and sometimes fear) for the people who encounter them. But the truth is AI chatbots are simply a tool that you can use to level up your digital experience. Albeit, a powerful one.

We were pleased to have two prominent speakers to talk on this topic:

Ken Brown, PhD

Co-Principal Investigator/Group Leader in Insight: Centre for Data Analytics: UCC

Ken Brown is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at University College Cork, and co-lead of the Decision Making Research Challenge in Insight, the SFI centre for data analytics. Ken has 35 years research experience in the Applications of Artificial Intelligence. His work has been in collaboration with a range of industrial partners from SMEs to multinationals across a range of industries. Methods developed by Ken and colleagues have been deployed or licensed to many companies including Land Rover, Seaforth Maritime, Clinical Support Information Systems, and United Technologies.

He is the UCC lead PI on the EU projects Glaciation, applying AI to manage workloads in federated cloud systems, and SEISMEC, deploying and evaluating Human-centric ICT to support workers in 14 industrial use cases across Europe

Ken will present on: Thoughts on AI and the future of work

Jerry Sweeney, Founder & Managing Director, CloudCIX

Jerry graduated from UCC in 1980 with a B.E.(Elec.) degree and later earned an M.Sc. from DIT (now DCU). His career included working in the semiconductor and computer manufacturing industries. In 2008, Jerry founded Cork Internet eXchange, Cork’s only commercial data centre. In 2019 the company launched a Cloud platform, CloudCIX, offering tailored Cloud services to enterprise, government and education.

Since March 2023, CloudCIX has formed a specialised team focused on machine learning.

Jerry will present on: How do chatbots work?