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Innovation in an Era of Accelerating Technologies
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| Keynote |
| Ray Kurzweil |
Ray Kurzweil has been described as “the restless genius” by the Wall Street Journal, and “the ultimate thinking machine” by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and PBS included Ray as one of 16 “revolutionaries who made America,” along with other inventors of the past two centuries.
As one of the leading inventors of our time, Ray was the principal developer of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray’s web site Kurzweil AI.net has over one million readers.
Among Ray’s many honors, he is the recipient of the $500,000 MIT-Lemelson Prize, the world's largest for innovation. In 1999, he received the National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. And in 2002, he was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, established by the US Patent Office.
He has received nineteen honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents.
Ray has written six books, four of which have been national best sellers. The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages and was the #1 best selling book on Amazon in science. Ray’s latest book, The Singularity is Near, was a New York Times best seller, and has been the #1 book on Amazon in both science and philosophy. |
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Reality in the Hyped-Up Cloud
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| Cloud Computing |
| Angelo Valleta, CIO, Sun National Bank |
With a handful of hurdles preventing enterprises from full adoption of the cloud, even current providers are claiming the technology as an inappropriate tool for the IT enterprise as of yet. So what are some CIOs doing in the cloud today and why have they chosen to stay there if there is such trepidation? In this panel of CIOs from three varying sectors, hear what part of the cloud they have adopted into their business models and how they overcame the specific hurdles to get there. While the hype surrounding cloud computing is creating buzz, learn how to get past the noise and use the solution to your advantage.
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How IT can Lead the Customer-Centric Revolution
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| Workshop |
| Bill Waszak, CIO Scotts Miracle Grow |
There may be a recession in play but companies right now are restructuring their products and services to meet the customer’s needs. This strategic change is best lead by no one other than the CIO. But having IT leap from the reactive support they have always been into the proactive drivers of innovation and customer-engagement can be one of the biggest challenges for change management. How can the CIO reposition the IT department to evolve into a fully engaged proponent of growth and what roles will the other C-level executives play to support IT’s new function, for a change?
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Effective and Efficient IT Management
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| Management |
| Round Table |
With the wake of identity theft and various security intrusions in the midst of the current market, financial services firms have realized the need to broaden their governance and risk management to include IT. Successful risk management programs enable IT to deliver business value efficiently and securely while providing high-quality assurance around data integrity, availability and confidentiality. IT risk management teams need to consider a variety of success criteria in order to meet the expectations of senior mamangement. Learn about the five main principles that steer a successful program and what role regulatory compliance will have in creating a mature risk management plan.
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Social Media’s Hold on IT
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| Social Media |
| Round Table |
Web 2.0 is affecting businesses on a daily basis; from the way people now interact with others to how they relate to technology. But in the world of IT, social media can have a severe negative impact on security yet can help institutions achieve strong public relations with clients. While ignoring social computing is no longer an option, how ready is the internal IT organization to embrace Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and the like and still manage to stay in compliance? Hear how some CIOs are incorporating social media both internally and externally and where they have found the most benefits.
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CIO and the CTO: Re-Defining the Roles
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| Round Table |
| Bill Krivoshik, CIO Marsh & McLennan |
Forging an alignment with business has been an elusive goal for IT executives. With a recent report stating only 15% of CIOs claiming to be fully aligned with business, organizations are beginning to have a knee-jerk response as they divvy up the responsibilities of the CIO and CTO to become focused solely on business or technological functions (respectively). But the dividing line can prove the change to be nothing short of ill-devised.
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