The TIBCO Analytics Forum (TAF) 2021 is already off to a great start with a day full of captivating keynotes around today’s most pressing digital challenges, customer presentations on successful use cases, product trainings, technical deep dives, and more.
If you weren’t able to attend day one, you can still register now to join us for day two and gain access to all the great content from the event on-demand through June 25. Check out the full agenda to learn more about everything that is available through the TAF virtual platform.
Here are some highlights and golden nuggets from day one to take back to your business:
Thought leaders on human-centered AI, the role of analytics, and success stories
First up, a fireside chat between TIBCO Chief Analytics Officer Michael O’Connell and Ben Schneiderman, Emeritus Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, about the beginnings of TIBCO Spotfire®, Schneiderman’s groundbreaking work in information visualization and human-computer interaction, and his current work on human-centered artificial intelligence (AI).
Spotfire was based on research on information visualization by Christopher Ahlberg at the Human-Computer Interaction Lab under Schneiderman’s guidance. O’Connell and Schneiderman discussed and explored the very beginnings of interactive visual analytics. One project from 1994, a visual analytics movie app called FilmFinder, catalogued 10,000 films and allowed users to interactively explore the film library. This was the beginning of overloading the scatter plot—popularity vs. year of production—with attributes such as film director, genre, length, lead actor and actress. Over the years, Spotfire has continued to grow and expand, now including interactive AI, embedded data science functions and visual innovation with Spotfire Mods. Spotfire and the entire field of information visualization, is still guided by the philosophy of answering complex questions with intuitive, interactive exploratory analysis.
As O’Connell explained, human-centered AI is all about delivering information-rich visualizations and explanations to allow people to interact and manage the suggestions that AI engines bring forward. According to Schneiderman, “The future is human centered. You will always do well to put humans at the center. Humans are not machines. Machines are not people. Give people powerful tools like Spotfire and let them run, explore, and do something that no one’s ever done before.”
The conversation around visual analytics and AI continued as TIBCO COO Matt Quinn shared his perspectives on the role of analytics in TIBCO’s portfolio of products and how interconnected software magnifies the impact of analytics across the enterprise. Quinn commented on how this last year has shown everyone the importance of managing uncertainty with agility. He demonstrated, through the success stories of Aeroporti di Roma and Dartmouth, how analytics, adaptability, and agility can come together to help companies think big and scale fast.
And cloud-first AI can help organizations think bigger and scale faster. TIBCO CMO Fred Studer and David Totten, CTO, US Partner Ecosystem at Microsoft, took the virtual stage to exchange views on moving to the cloud to scale and shift business models quickly. Today, data is everywhere and the cloud is opening opportunities for businesses to collect and understand it. Totten stated, “Every industry requires more data collection, a standard and quick way to ingest it and build upon the data model, and real-time, customizable analytics to justify the decisions made to move forward.”
With TIBCO analytics, customers are, in fact, transforming every industry. Conference attendees heard directly from Ahmer Srivistava, Director of Memory Product Solutions at Western Digital, about how the use of Spotfire analytics has transformed high-tech manufacturing to meet growing demand. Srivistava stated, “Global manufacturing demands precision and predictability at each step of the production process. We created a connected view of our data across the entire supply chain and used that data to accelerate innovation through advanced analytics, simulation, and optimization.”
TIBCO is also partnering with organizations around the world to meet challenges facing communities as a part of the #TIBCO4Good™ program. Alan Ho, Sr. Director Head of Global Partner Marketing at TIBCO, was joined by Jana Marié-Zizková, Co-founder and CEO of Meiro and She Loves Data, for an open dialogue on why diversity and data go hand in hand and how this has impacted corporations around the world. With TIBCO’s help, She Loves Data has helped women facing unemployment as a result of the pandemic with virtual certification workshops on dashboarding and forecasting.
What’s new and what’s next for TIBCO Spotfire
Midway through day one, Arnaud Varin, Senior Product Manager for TIBCO Spotfire, presented on what’s new and what’s next for TIBCO Spotfire, a market-leading, full-spectrum analytics platform that supports visual analytics, data science, dashboards and reports, mobile BI, analytic applications, and embedded analytics. Varin highlighted recent innovations and plans for Spotfire that center around five key focus areas:
- Discovery: Hyper-deep insights in the fastest time
- Data: Any data, anywhere
- Analytics applications: Faster, easier, higher quality analytics
- Whitelabel and OEM: Brand domain and use-case specific analytics
- Cloud: Cloud agnostic, industry standards and interfaces
The result: a platform that combines immersive visual analysis, smart data science, and real-time streaming to enable data-driven decision making in all aspects of your business.
Hyperconverged analytics on any data
In the day’s final keynote presentation, TIBCO product leaders joined Michael O’Connell in a fast-paced, end-to-end tour of TIBCO data management and analytic capabilities and how their interconnectivity supports the hyperconverged analytics approach with an “any data” hub. The team demonstrated how to load well production data into Spotfire, model the data, inspect the metadata and reference data in TIBCO EBX™ software, create virtualized views in TIBCO® Data Virtualization, and build machine learning models to predict well performance, monitor operations, and predict failures in real time.
Breakout sessions, tech deep dives, product training, and more
Throughout the day, attendees also participated in the following activities to learn best practices from industry leaders, up their technical knowledge, and make lasting connections with other analytics professionals:
- Customer and partner sessions from: GE Aviation, Western Digital, Hemlock Semiconductor, Bayer, Intel, Birchcliff Energy, Biota Technology, and IHS Markit
- Tech deep dives around: Spotfire Mods, Spotfire and Python, ethical AI/ML, location analytics, and enterprise reporting with TIBCO WebFOCUS
- Product training for: TIBCO® Data Science, TIBCO® Streaming, TIBCO® Data Virtualization, and TIBCO EBX
- Women in Tech Panel: A panel of female leaders in analytics and data science shared their experiences and insights on how to recruit, hire, develop, and retain gender diverse teams that outperform competitors
- Connectivity Lounge powered by Remo: Attendees used this virtual networking tool to “move” from table to table, video chat with other attendees, and make new connections
More to come: join us for day two
We’ve got even more exciting content in store for day two. Tomorrow’s line up includes Texas Instruments, Bayer, Genware, and more. Explore the complete TAF agenda to plan out your day. Register now to join us for day two!
And remember if you miss any sessions, don’t worry! Everything will be available on-demand through June 25.