Operationalizing AI Agents: Limiting risk on the bleeding edge

You've successfully built your first AI agent ... now what? How do you operationalize the agent, with appropriate guardrails, while accounting for security, data privacy, and governance? Process orchestration can help you operationalize AI in a way that will eliminate the siloed use of AI/ML tools and services; put your teams on the fast track to orchestrating your most business-critical processes; and help you uncover hidden value in your processes and drive continuous improvement.

In this talk, I will share how to:
* Create an automation strategy that starts where humans can shine and infuses generative AI throughout the process automation journey
* Establish AI governance with a focus on purpose, culture, assessment, and action
* Combine AI with process orchestration to deliver an automation fabric that’s flexible, robust, and intelligent

Connecting Developers and Architects: From Whiteboard to Code Production with Process Orchestration

It’s not surprising that teams are under constant pressure to go faster and be leaner. New technologies become top of mind. Market dynamics change. The C-Suite shifts its focus. Navigating these complexities and delivering great new software on time and with minimal rework requires the careful alignment of really diverse teams. Often, this pressure occurs regardless of whether teams believe those changes will provide the intended value. The tipping point for this pressure often comes from a breakdown in communication between the design (often driven by the architects) and implementation (engineering). Communication, interpretation, and execution gaps between architects and engineers frequently emerge, posing significant risks to business outcomes. These risks include delays, increased costs, and missed strategic goals. The process of translating architectural plans and product requirements into actionable code can be a major challenge.

In this talk, I will address these common problems and explore how process orchestration offers a structured approach to aligning architectural plans with development teams. I will also examine how process orchestration can help break down organizational silos and create seamless connections between teams and systems. I’ll dive into how process orchestration helps by:
* Coordinating diverse endpoints (people, systems, and devices),
* Bridging gaps and streamlining workflows,
* Reducing the risk of costly errors,
* Accelerating the delivery of high-quality software

Orchestrate the chaos: Process automation in modern architectures

Microservices, Kubernetes, and Geographically distributed applications ... OH MY! A recent (2022) poll by Kong placed the average number of microservices for a single enterprise at 184! Modern architecture patterns are great at optimizing resource usage, but what happens when you need to make a critical change to one process that spans multiple shared services?

Complex business processes can be difficult to manage and automate. How do you quickly implement changes while maintaining uptime? How do you introduce a new service to an existing process? In this talk, we will discuss how to use Business Process Modeling (BPM) to orchestrate and execute complex business processes in your application. Don't let the name fool you: this not your father's Visio diagram. Everyone should leave this talk with a new approach to solving their orchestration complexities!

AlphaZero to Hero: Solving board games with AI/ML [Full-Day Workshop]

In December of 2017, DeepMind introduced AlphaZero, a machine learning algorithm that taught itself to play chess, shogi, and go. After only four hours of training, it was arguably the most powerful chess engine at the time.

Why not build your own???

No, seriously, let's do it! If you're like the rest of the world, you played at least a few games of chess after binge watching The Queen's Gambit. Whether you've played chess or not, it's much easier than you might think to create your own chess engine. And what better way to learn some AI/ML than to write a program that can beat any human on the planet in a game of chess?

We will start with a simpler, but related, problem to solve: Connect 4. This will lay the groundwork for the chess engine by examining step by step how to approach solving Connect 4 heuristically, then using deep learning to train a neural network to play the game. Once Connect 4 is solved, we will take what we learned and apply it to chess, working to train a neural network that teaches itself.

You should leave this workshop with a working algorithm to solve Connect 4 and chess, a better understanding of how AI/ML can be applied to solve problems, and, with any luck, some ideas on how to use AI/ML in your daily work.

How do chess engines work? A look at applied AI/ML principles

If you're like the rest of the world, you played at least a few games of chess after binge watching The Queen's Gambit. Beth Harmon didn't have powerful computers to help her train like we do today. Ever since Deep Blue famous defeated Gary Kasparov in 1997, chess engines have become a critical part of the game.

But how do chess engines work? Is it hardcoded from a database of known moves, or is it learned through training? Could it be using both?

More importantly, what can you learn from chess engines? You should leave this session with an understanding of how modern chess engines work, a better understanding of how AI/ML can be applied to solve problems, and, with any luck, some ideas on how to use AI/ML in your daily work.

Accessibility: A Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes

Everyone talks about accessibility - or a11y - but how often is accessibility a primary thought during your development pipeline? How often is accessibility taken for granted? It’s easy to push it aside and say you’ll do it later or to forget entirely. It’s easy to drop a couple WAI-ARIA tags into your HTML and move on, but this doesn’t address many accessibility needs. When was the last time you used your website with your eyes closed?

Let’s do just that. Let’s try to navigate a website with a blindfold on. Let’s try to use a website without a mouse. Let’s try navigating a website with a visual impairment. And then let’s fix the problems encountered.

We will focus on experiencing a website as a user with two types of impairments:
* Visual impairments, such as color blindness, low visual acuity, and a complete lack of vision
* Mobility impairments, preventing users from using a mouse for input

These impairments are quite common and are simple to simulate using a combination of browser extensions and existing tools in your operating system. For each impairment, we will look at how the markup (both the semantic structure and the attributes), the colors and contrast, tab order, and focus affect the experience. And for each issue we encounter, we will look at specific ways that experience can be improved.

Last, we will look at testing strategies to audit your code for potential accessibility issues, using extensions such as Google’s Lighthouse, Deque’s axe-engine, and others.

Previous workshops:
CodeMash - January, 2019
Music City Tech - May, 2019
THAT Conference - September, 2019

Empathy, chemotherapy, development: A journey

In 2016, my daughter started chemotherapy for a rare disease. Over the next two years of ups, downs, twists and turns, I’ve learned empathically listening to people is not something just for medical professionals, but for software teams as well. The parallels between patient support and working with clients or projects became clear. Naturally, it is easier said than done. Sharing stories from my personal experience, I will illustrate the common mistakes and how to turn them around. This is a talk for more than just developers or consultants; everyone can walk away with something new.

Previous presentations:
Dog Food Conference - October, 2018

The Cost of Accessibility: A Business Case for A11y

Accessibility is a growing concern in the developer community, but the question of "Why" still lingers in the air. Why should a developer care about accessibility? Why should a private business invest in accessibility? One answer is money.

In 2019, Federal Courts ruled that a pizza chain must make their web platform accessible in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. That is just one of many recent rulings holding businesses accountable for accessibility. Not to mention that 1 in 5 visitors to your website will have some form of disability - that's 20% of your users! This isn't only for public facing websites, either. The ADA also requires internal websites to be accessible.

This session outlines the business case for accessibility - why it's important and what the ROI for accessibility could be - as well as presenting the possible costs associated with ignoring accessibility. Take the notes from this session, or take the slides themselves, and present them to your business team. Help make the web accessible to everyone!