Dear CincyAI Community Member — 

Hope you’re enjoying some of the warmer weather that the groundhog predicted for this year!

We look forward to seeing out at our next CincyAI Meetup taking place Tuesday, March 5, from 3-5 pm at the UC Digital Futures building in room 140.

This meetup is almost sold out! So if for some reason you can no longer join, please update your RSVP to open up some more slots.

As a reminder, Kendra will host a 101 AI training before our next meeting at 2:30pm also in room 140. This is a great opportunity for our beginners and AI curious community members to learn AI basics. 

When you sign up, there’s now the option to donate to help cover the hard costs beyond what our amazing sponsors provide as there’s still a gap. We’re a volunteer organization, and every little bit helps. A big thank you to those who’ve already contributed!

Also, the RSVP is open for our April meetup — sign up for our CincyAI Meetup in April taking place Tuesday, April 16, from 3-5 pm at the UC Digital Futures building in room 140.

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

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

• February Meetup Video

• February Meetup Photos

• UC Digital Futures Updates - New!

• Community News & Updates - New!

• 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 Jeremy Griffin from 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 and Rob Richardson’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 ;)

February 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.

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 AI Symposium

If you couldn’t attend the AI Symposium on February 21 and see the keynote by Dr. Kelly Cohen, we’ve got you covered with this video of his presentation that’s worth a watch!

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.

• Purpose: Our focus is on analytics and data science content to support the growth and development of analytics efforts in business, government, and non-profit organizations.

• Knowledge: Increase your knowledge of the latest analytics topics, tools, and trends presented by the top experts in the industry. Learn from others how they apply analytics tools and manage data science teams in their industry.

• Networking: Connect with data scientists, analysts, presenters, and practitioners. Executives from multiple industries will be there to learn best practices and meet attendees who could be a good fit for their organization.

• Skills: Learn through use cases and case studies how other companies are using analytics to gain insights and grow their business.

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:

• March 21 -Goering Center breakfast on AI for Marketing

• April 19 - AMA’s IGNITE! Conference 2024: Keeping AI Real in CX

• May 14 & 15 - AI Rising Conference in Columbus

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

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

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

Recaps of Events:

• Video Part 1 of Nexigen 'Accelerating Enterprise AI' Leadership Summit (2/22/24)

  • A Secure Approach to Enterprise AI - Jon Salisbury, Nexigen

  • Exploring AI Success Stories - Eric Carr, Compoze Labs

• Video Part 2 of Nexigen 'Accelerating Enterprise AI' Leadership Summit (2/22/24)

  • Introduction - Zack Huhn, Nexigen

  • Understanding AI Risks and Threats - Dr Kelly Cohen, University of Cincinnati

  • Understanding Practical GenAI Use Cases - Kevin Brimberry, IDC

  • Cincinnati AI Meetup: Kendra Ramirez

Resources:

• 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: 

This is an interview with a fellow CincyAI member Katie Trauth Taylor who is Co-Founder & CEO of Narratize. CincyAI gets a shout-out along with Cincinnati's Responsible A.I. initiatives. Hope you enjoy it!

And if you haven't subscribed yet to Helen’s Creativity Squared newsletter, please do so here: https://creativitysquared.com

Next Meetup: Tuesday, March 5

Our next CincyAI Meetup for Humans will be on Tuesday, March 5 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: Sign up!

• April — Tuesday, April 16: Sign up!

• May — Tuesday, May 7

• 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!