Dear CincyAI Community Member — 

Hope you’re having a wonderful weekend! (As a reminder, click “Read Online” in the upper right-hand corner of this email so nothing gets truncated ;).

I’m back from Boston, and it was great to have a Cincy cohort represented at the MIT AI Summit! Cincinnati got a few shoutouts throughout the event which was fantastic to hear. This is just the beginning of getting more well-deserved recognition where the coasts historically have dominated.

For everyone who attended the AMA Ignite conference on Friday in Cincinnati, hope you had a great time!

At our next meetup in May, we’ll do a debrief like my SXSW one from someone who attended the MIT AI Summit and the AMA Ignite conference — stay tuned!

On that note, there are only a few spots left for our May 7 meetup, so if you haven’t already, RSVP today! You know the drill: It’ll be 3-5pm in room 140 at the UC Digital Futures building located at 3080 Exploration Ave, Cincinnati, OH 45206.

Thank you to Mike Woodring, who conducted an AI and sales training before our last meetup! Here are the slides he presented which are packed with a ton of great content.

Also, I want to highlight an upcoming challenge where you can make a positive impact and have a chance to win a tier of the $6K cash prize package: Join the PeaceRise Innovation Challenge! The application deadline of April 28th is quickly approaching, so sign up today!

After our May 7 meetup, there will be another Makers + Mixers happy hour taking place from 5:30 - 7:30pm across the street at the iconic 1819 building. This happy hour is proudly sponsored by Maker’s Mark and is brought to you by our community partners MidwestCon and Disrupt Now with Rob Richardson at the helm. RSVP for this here! 

Do you find CincyAI valuable? If so, consider making a donation on Eventbrite when you sign up! We have some amazing sponsors and are looking to have all costs covered by the community, and we so appreciate whatever you can contribute to help keep CincyAI meetup free and accessible.

We’re a volunteer organization, and every little bit helps. A big thank you to those who’ve already contributed!

We couldn’t be more excited to have you be part of the largest AI community in the region. We’re an important node to the burgeoning AI ecosystem here in Cincinnati, leading the way with Responsible AI.

A big thank you to Seven Hills Technology for sponsoring the food and drink and to Big Kitty Labs for their sponsorship to help offset the photography and video costs. Big Kitty Labs will also be building our CincyAI website. Sponsors like these help make CincyAI possible! If you’re interested in sponsoring, don’t be shy. 😉 

Scroll on for our:

• CincyAI LinkedIn Group & Directory

• April Meetup Video

• April Meetup Photos

• UC Digital Futures Updates - More added!

• Community News & Updates - More added!

• CincyAI Feedback & Sponsorship Opportunities

We’re honored to partner with and host our CincyAI meetups at the UC Digital Futures building, an interdisciplinary research facility home to globally recognized leading research in responsible AI. A special thank you to our organizing partner, Dr. Kelly Cohen. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can partner with UC Research Labs to save costs and time researching, testing, and validating your AI initiatives, visit: https://ucdigitalfutures.com.

We also want to thank Ellie and Laura from À Lala Carte for the amazing charcuterie cups and David Choate’s DC Productions for the fantastic photos, video coverage, and editing.

And most importantly: THANK YOU!

Thank you for being part of this dynamic community where the whole is not just greater, but exponential in its impact.

-Kendra & Helen
Your CincyAI Cohosts
https://cincyai.beehiiv.com 

Sign up for Kendra’s AI Simplified newsletter:

Kendra also has an amazing list of all the upcoming AI events in the area on her website — check it out here!

Sign up for Helen’s Creativity Squared newsletter on AI and creativity:

For our own CincyAI member interviews on Helen’s Creativity Squared podcast, click on over for Ben Nash, Rob Richardson, Alejandro Lozano Robledo, and Dr. Andrew Cullison’s interviews. If you’re interested in getting cloned, book your appointment here!

CincyAI LinkedIn Group & Directory

We are so excited to keep the conversations, collaboration, and connections going beyond just our monthly meetups. Here are other ways to stay connected with the CincyAI community:

• LinkedIn Group

  • You voted! And our new digital hub for CincyAI Meetup will be our newly created LinkedIn Group. Please join us there and feel free to introduce yourself and share what aspects of AI interest you, as well as any asks you have for the community. We’ll keep the sharing, connecting, and collaborating going in this space. See you there!

• CincyAI Meetup Directory & Submission Form

  • In the spirit of connecting and collaborating, we’re starting a directory of everyone in the community. Feel free to submit your contact details to be included. This will also be a great resource to audit all of the amazing AI talent and projects that we have right here in Cincinnati! (And we’ll roll out a resource hub next, so stay tuned for that ;)

April Meetup Video

If you missed our last meetup or want to hear what was said again, we've got you covered with this recap video, and you can catch all of them in our CincyAI Video Playlist.

April Event Photos

Check out the photos from our last meetup!  Feel free to share the photos and use #CincyAI! Word of mouth definitely contributes to our growing community.

We just put all of the photos up on Flickr to make them more accessible and easier to share.

UC Digital Futures Updates

The Analytics Summit 2024 Conference

The University of Cincinnati Center for Business Analytics is hosting The Analytics Summit 2024 Conference on April 30 at the Sharonville Convention Center.

Dive into the future of strategy, leadership, and organizational development with our "Leading the Way" track of which Dr. Kelly Cohen is a speaker on. This series spotlights innovative approaches to harness data and analytics for forward-thinking solutions.

RSVP for the Summit Here

Explainable Fuzzy Challenge: XFC

Follow along the XFC challenge that started in Cincinnati and has gone global! Why? Because the students who participate may make good hires for ya!

XFC was born out of a collaboration between Thales USA, the University of Cincinnati, and Complex Engineering Systems Journal. Started in 2021, XFC’s goal is to expose students to the power of Genetic Fuzzy Systems, while also highlighting the explainability inherent to these types of systems.

Advances in AI technologies, brought forth by deep learning architectures, are incredible. There are cases where deep neural network-driven models can rival human-level performance, but even the best-performing models are driven by policies that are difficult, or in some cases impossible, to understand.

This year’s competition will take place at WCCI 2024 in Yokohama Japan, and we’ll all be cheering on the UC students who will be there.

What’s the challenge? The teams will create fully autonomous eXplainable AI (XAI) algorithms, in Python, that are able to play the game “Asteroid Smashers”.

Are you a student and interested in participating? Register here. 

Community News & Updates

Upcoming Events:

• Every Thursday - At 11am, join the ‘AI for Business Workshop’ held weekly at H7 Business Tech Corner using this Zoom link (Here’s the YouTube playlist of previous sessions)

• May 14 & 15 - AI Rising Conference in Columbus

• May 16 - INERTIA: The AI Summit for Non-technical Leaders

• May 20 - Alloy Small Business Day

• June 9 - Cocktails & Creatives 2024

• September 5 & 6 - MidwestCon — Apply to be a speaker on this page!

• September 10 & 12 - Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) in Cleveland

Have an event that will add value to the CincyAI community? Add it to this thread for consideration to be included in our next email!

Kendra also has an amazing list of all the upcoming AI events in the area on her website — check it out here!

Resources:

• Mike Woodring’s slides on AI and sales from our April meetup

• Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy With The Power Of AI with CincyAI Member J. Thorn’s Self-Paced Online Course — Content Marketing with ChatGPT: The Definitive Content Creation Blueprint

• CincyAI Marketplace on 1000Zebras from CincyAI member Kevin Mackey to connect the community to AI providers

• https://aionlineclassroom.com/tv/ - CincyAI member Chris Brock recently launched this website that’s The AI Learning Hub. Explore its extensive library of over 6,000+ A.I. videos! Dubbed the 'Netflix for AI,' this platform caters to learners at all levels, offering a diverse range of A.I. topics in a user-friendly, on-demand format.

• Alloy Economic Gardening Program for innovative companies in Hamilton County with $1-50M revenue and 10-100 FTE's 

• 5 Keys to AI Content Creation Success - The PDF from CincyAI member Jeff Hendrickson

Arts & Cultural Corner: 

Next Meetup: Tuesday, May 7

Our next CincyAI Meetup for Humans will be on Tuesday, May 7 from 3-5pm at the UC Digital Futures building room 140 again.

Know someone else who’d enjoy being part of the CincyAI meetup community? Don’t be shy - share this newsletter or the Evenbrite link with them!

Mark your calendars! All 2024 dates include:

• January — Tuesday, Jan 9: Photos & Video

• February — Tuesday, Feb 6: Photos & Video

• March — Tuesday, March 5: Photos & Video

• April — Tuesday, April 16: Photos & Video

• May — Tuesday, May 7: Sign up!

• June — Tuesday, June 4

• July — Tuesday, July 9

• August — Tuesday, Aug 6

• September — Tuesday, Sept 17

• October — Tuesday, Oct 8

• November — Tuesday, Nov 5

• December — Tuesday, Dec 3

Feedback & Sponsorship Opportunities

• Feedback? Want to help with CincyAI planning?

  • Don’t be shy! We’re here for you and would love your feedback on what else we can do to improve this community and add as much value as possible. We know your time is precious, and we want to ensure this community and our events are meaningful for all those who participate and belong — that’s you! :)

  • We’re also open to anyone who’d love to help us with the planning of these meetups.

  • Reach out to us at [email protected].
    

• Interested in Sponsoring our Upcoming CincyAI Meetups?

  • Our sponsors, like February’s Seven Hills Technology and Big Kitty Labs, help make CincyAI meetups possible. Interested in sponsoring upcoming events? Let Helen or Kendra know!