Earley Information Science Team

Session Title: Product Data Strategy: No More “Clean-Up on Server 3” Speaker: Jason Hein Distributors have had no bigger technology headache than managing and integrating fragmented product/content databases, with often messy and expensive cleanup projects. With recent advances in PIM/MDM technologies (Product Information Management/Multi-Domain Management), new approaches are possible that are less expensive, more effective and provide faster ROI on investments in the content asset while using data to drive the roadmap for user experience. This session identifies why data-cleanup projects fail and outlines the technology developments that are opening up new ways to manage product information and content that are more scalable and drive business results quickly.

CS101. The Rise Of Artificial Intelligence Tuesday, May 21: 10:45 a.m. - 11:45 a.m. Depending on who you talk to, AI will either enable massive productivity gains from your employees or replace them entirely. Hype aside, AI is coming, and companies need to understand how to harness it. Despite the promise of “plug and play” technology, real AI requires varying degrees of information architecture (IA), knowledge engineering, product and content architecture, and high-quality data sources to be effective. Seth Earley demystifies AI in this mini-keynote. Speaker: Seth Earley, Founder and CEO, Earley Information Science

A202. There’s No AI Without IA (Information Architecture) Tuesday, April 30: 11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to completely revolutionize the B2B selling function. And depending on who you talk to, AI will either enable massive productivity gains from your employees or replace them entirely. Hype aside, AI is coming, and B2B companies need to understand how to harness it. And despite the promise of “plug-and- play” technology, real AI requires varying degrees of knowledge engineering, product and content architecture, and high-quality data sources to be effective. Come and learn how you can leverage best practices to rethink processes for the product content lifecycle, from initial on-boarding to post-production syndication; the infrastructure you’ll need to consider when planning for your AI initiative; and how AI enables new product associations and personalized experiences to drive deeper engagement with your customers. Speaker: Seth Earley, Founder and CEO, Earley Information Science

Earley Information Science is pleased to announce that it has once again been named in KMWorld’s 100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management. The list, released today, is featured in the March 2019 issue of the publication. Earley Information Science, who is also celebrating its 25th year in business, was recognized for its ability to help retailers, manufacturers, financial services companies, and other organizations build and execute scalable, governance-driven digital transformation initiatives that drive fulfilling customer journeys and measurable ROI impact. "The 2019 KMWorld 100 list spans a wide variety of companies that are each addressing the evolving demands of knowledge management,” said Tom Hogan, Group Publisher of KMWorld. “Some are long-standing companies with well-established offerings that have evolved over time, while others are much more recent entrants to the field. In selecting organizations to be included on the list, we consider insights gleaned from our own interactions with companies during interviews and events, how they have succeeded in helping customers solve business problems, and we review product updates to make sure that capabilities are advancing to address evolving requirements.” “We are pleased to be acknowledged for our organization’s contributions to the field once again this year,” said Seth Earley, Founder and CEO, Earley Information Science. “It’s terrific that our team is being recognized for the innovation and transformation that they bring to the marketplace and to our clients.” To view the entire list of award winners, visit KMWorld’s site here: www.kmworld.com.

Global business leaders believe that AI is transformational and either they incorporate it into the enterprise or get left behind. The reality - AI is still in its nascent stages of development. While there’s plenty of AI used in specific business areas such as fraud detection, billing systems, and data integration, autonomous machines that replace humans is still a work of fiction. According to Gartner, by 2020, 30% of CIOs will include AI in their top five investment priorities. However, to deliver on the AI promise, organizations must implement technologies and processes that generate high quality data that support analytics and the fidelity of business decisions. Join Lisa Bos, SVP Technology, Smartlogic and panelists Jeremy Bentley, CEO Smartlogic; Seth Earley, CEO Earley Information Sciences and Steven Cohen, EVP, COO, and Co-founder BasisTech to hear about: Organizational drivers, barriers and success criteria for AI adoption Assisted Intelligence and the role of semantics Existing and future AI trends and solutions Register today for Smartlogic’s AI panel discussion, which will be held on Thursday, February 7th at 11 am Eastern. If you are unable to join us, register to receive the playback.

Earley Information Science is pleased to announce that Vivek Shivaprabhu has joined the EIS team as our Senior Technical Architect. With over 15+ years experience in software development, Vivek specializes in master data management, natural language processing, and machine learning in big data applications. Further, he has designed and developed solutions to build and manipulate complex product ontologies, as well as implemented enterprise search for multi-million products. Vivek has worked with manufacturers and distributors to design technology solutions for their taxonomies, attribution, and product data, as well has helped clients select Product Information Management / Digital Asset Management / Master Data Management Solutions, eCommerce platforms, and internal search platforms. Former clients include Grainger (Zoro Tools), MSC Industrial Supply, Motion Industries, Kaman Industrial Technologies, Abatix, Sugatsune, Weiler Abrasives, among others. Vivek is also the developer and owner of several software solutions, including Aiden (www.aiden.pw), a taxonomy and attribution design software, Lumen Search (www.lumensearch.com), a product search platform, and Sentēme (www.senteme.com), an NLP-based linguistic analysis solution. Vivek is a PhD Student, working on Visualization of Ontology Matching, at the University of Illinois. He has earned his MS in Computer Science, with focus on Data Mining and Scientific Visualization, from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The Earley Information Science team is pleased to welcome Jason Hein as our new Director of Delivery to the EIS team. Jason brings over 20 years of experience and expertise to the EIS team. With a background combining B2B ecommerce best practices and practical experience across multiple industrial product lines, his unique perspective helps companies find ecommerce success for products that are unfamiliar (or unknown) to some customers. Jason is most passionate helping people, teams, and companies differentiate themselves in their market. The best projects he’s worked on are those that have produced something truly unique. When asked why he chose to join the EIS team, he stated “First, I was awed by the capabilities of everyone I met here – between the clear direction provided by the leadership team and the passion and creativity shown by the delivery organization it’s thrilling to be surrounded by great people. Second, the capabilities and services here are highly ‘forward looking’ – it’s not solely about ‘getting started’ – we have the talent here to think beyond foundational phases of digital strategy. When we talk about ‘what’s next’ – it’s not just theoretical.” Prior to entering consulting, Jason spent almost five years working at Amazon.com building what is now Amazon Business. Starting as the first Senior Vendor Manager he led the launch of many of the current product categories and brought many of the leading B2B brands into Amazon. He then led a new internal team specifically focused on building product content in Amazon’s Industrial & Scientific category – creating new processes and collaborating with external teams to enable product information needed to categorize and sell industrial product. Jason joined Amazon after over a decade at McMaster-Carr – an industry leader in ecommerce for industrial/MRO products. While there, Jason designed content-based merchandising strategies for multiple product categories including metalworking, abrasives, adhesives, welding, hand tools, precision measuring, inspection & testing, industrial hardware, and more. In addition, he was part of the team that laid the foundation for McMaster-Carr’s transition to their first web-ready Product Information Management (PIM) system. Jason’s education includes a Master in Business Administration from the Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Theater Arts from Carleton College. He currently resides with his wife and daughter in Seattle, WA.

EIS will be presenting two programs at DXSummit 2018 in Chicago: Workshop: Aspiration vs Reality - The Promise and Practice of AI for Personalization Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to completely revolutionize the ecommerce experience. However, most organizations are still struggling with harmonizing data standards, streamlining information flows and optimizing upstream processes to improve the customer experience with the tools they have today. AI can enable customer service and sales reps to be significantly more productive and improve the self-service experience; but areas of product on boarding, content optimization, marketing automation and process orchestration have to be improved in order to support this vision. This workshop will demystify AI and show how companies can re-think processes for the product and content lifecycle from initial onboarding to end user experience. Outline how to build the infrastructure to machine-intelligence-enable content to create product associations and personalized experiences not possible without AI. Breakout Session: There’s No AI without IA: Information Architecture as a Critical Enabler Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting lots of attention but one key aspect is often overlooked, understated, or underestimated: the quality of “training” information and the structure of that information – the Information Architecture or “IA”. AI only works when it has the data it needs to spot trends, identify patterns and provide functionality – especially when it comes to chatbots and other so called “cognitive” technologies. While many recent high profile attempts at chatbots have failed, they are getting better and one day will be indispensable. Organizations need to do certain things to prepare for a future of bots and AI-driven processes. This session will outline what that looks like and how organizations can solve problems today while preparing themselves for a future where businesses will succeed or fail based on the power of their bots.

Dino Eliopulos will be in Washington, DC at the Text Analytics Forum, co-located with KMWorld, on November 7th. He is speaking on "Finding The Sweet Spot For Cognitive Computing." The panelists will ponder, how do you decide whether cognitive computing is right—even necessary—for your organization? When new and complex technologies like AI and cognitive computing burst on the scene, it’s easy to rush to adopt them. The result is often confusion and technology abandonment when the new applications don’t meet expectations. Hoping to forestall this shelfware phenomenon, in 2016 the Cognitive Computing Consortium started to develop guidelines for understanding how to use cognitive applications. The goal was to come up with a set of usage profiles that developers could match to their planned use of cognitive technologies. The panel will open with a presentation on the Consortium framework for understanding cognitive applications with examples of successful uses for a variety of purposes such as customer relations, healthcare, and robotics. A panel of experienced experts then describes how they are using cognitive applications and fields questions on that topic from the audience.