Estonia, EU – CIS, Forum, Good for Business, Innovations, Technology

President Kersti Kaljulaid will open the international North Star AI applied machine learning and data conference on March 7 in Tallinn, that will specifically focus on data skills and AI adoption in organizations and startups with limited resources, organizers said on Monday.

"It is important to shift the focus from algorithms to data as the way you use data, and how you use it, will define the success of your projects," said Andre Karpistsenko, data science lead at Taxify and co-founder of non-profit North Star AI.

"Developers and data-driven leaders participating at North Star AI will understand how to solve the hardest problems that exist within organizing and analyzing massive noisy data sets," Karpistsenko said.

The competitiveness and the future of European tech is not decided only by the determination and execution of entrepreneurs and technologists. Regulators and government support play a key role here.

"The Estonian digital infrastructure offers unique opportunities to put AI to good use, but only if we figure out how to create a reasonable legal framework for it. Governments need to stop forgoing their main obligations as soon as the new technological developments make it uncomfortable for them. This is the lesson we learned. This applies to digital, will apply to AI and any future developments," Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said.

The conference is followed by a roundtable discussion where global AI experts will meet the CTO of Estonia and local startup leaders. The meeting is expected to cover a broad range of emerging tech topics, from AI implementation in Estonia and Europe to international cooperation between countries, which can help ensure Estonia's leadership in e-governance.

The conference is a meeting place for AI practitioners, technology leaders and data enthusiast from all over the world. The overall theme of the conference is data and current challenges it brings, such as data privacy, quality, labeling being expensive to name a few. International speakers will bring case studies and examples from Silicon Valley, the UK and Scandinavia about data as a competitive advantage for governments and businesses.

The list of participating AI experts includes Samuel Ritter, research scientist at Google's DeepMind; Ville Tuulos, architect for machine learning at Netflix; Frank Seide, senior researcher and research manager at Microsoft; Henrik Lindstrom, product lead at Spotify; Roberto de Almeida, software engineer at Lyft; Pawel Mandera, NLP expert at Lingvist; Julien Simon, principal technical evangelist at Amazon Web Services; Alex Kozlov, enterprise solutions architect at Nvidia; Andre Karpistsenko, data science lead at Taxify; Kristjan Korjus, head of data at Starship; and Taivo Pungas, machine learning and automation lead at Veriff.