One day, untold insights

Jamie discusses why Outlier Ventures invest and partner with the communities that will create this new equitable economy, driving the mass decentralisation of the web and challenging the existential threats from evolving data monopolies.

The talk also looks at the growing competition with the current enterprise leaders in the space and the parallel innovation in governments, exemplified in China and India. Finally, there is an assessment of what more still needs to be done holistically, to move away from proprietary models and enable anyone, anywhere, to birth a digital economy and program it with game theory, changing the rules of the game.

About the speaker

Jamie Burke

CEO, Outlier Ventures

Jamie is CEO of Outlier Ventures, Europe's first blockchain venture capital firm, set up in 2013. Since then he has pioneered the convergence thesis that views blockchain as foundational to Deep Tech like AI, AR / VR, IoT and 3D printing scaling securely and eventually converging. As a global thought leader, he assists startups and corporations in the space with an emphasis on AI, Industry 4.0, Smart Cities & Mobility and is an adviser to exciting startups IOTA and Hyperloop.

For many, blockchain has created the latest Internet gold rush. The frenzy has come and gone, but the technology remains. So what can we really do with it? At the same time, a core question that every cryptocurrency investor and blockchain project should ask is: does this project really need a token?

In this talk, Mike King addresses those burning questions through a framework through which every blockchain project should be reviewed and makes predictions on what use cases of the blockchain will revolutionize digital marketing as we know it.

About the speaker

Mike King

Owner, Managing Director, iPullRank

An artist and a technologist, all rolled into one, Michael King recently founded boutique digital marketing agency, iPullRank. Mike consults with companies all over the world, including brands ranging from SAP, American Express, HSBC, SanDisk, General Mills, and FTD, to a laundry list of promising startups and small businesses.

We are at the dawn in Artificial intelligence era. At one end we have already AI enabled solutions that we use daily (like Google, Spotify, Facebook, Amazon, Siri, various mobile games, Netflix, Areena, K-Ruoka, various medias like Helsingin Sanomat etc.) and on the other: we don't know at all what are the solutions and what they solve in the future, we just know that the potential is huge. At the same time the whole concept of AI is fuzzy and the most of us need better understanding on the topic. Let's explore this together!

About the speaker

Hanna Hagström

Director of Artificial Intelligence, Reaktor

Hanna Hagström is Director of Artificial Intelligence at Reaktor. Reaktor is in a unique position to employ many of the market’s leading experts in the area with 10 PhD’s. Hanna’s role is to ensure that these bright minds can be harnessed to serve the customers various business needs. Reaktor’s standing point is that automated data processing, machine learning and machine vision are on the verge of turning into core technology just like mobile technologies did a few years back. Reaktor is not selling hype, but AI skills are integrated into projects and teams that deliver the promised value to customers.

Nobody denies that autonomous vehicles (AVs) have the potential to make our traffic safer and more efficient. However, weather plays a critical role in the performance of AVs. During heavy rain, fog, or snow, most of the current AVs and ADAS sensors and algorithms function very poorly, if at all.

Varying weather causes a new level of problems for AVs when it comes to perception, mapping, and dynamic control. This is especially relevant when we are ready to consider giving AVs full control over our daily mobility needs. After all, who would invest in a fleet of taxis if the driver is incapable of driving during the rainy season?

As autonomous vehicles are not limited by the narrow frequency of visible light, their vision can be enhanced by using a full spectrum of sensors. The solution to SAE L4-L5 snowtonomous driving lies in using smart sensor fusion supported lidar to enable true self-driving.

About the speaker

Harri Santamala

CEO and co-founder, Sensible 4

Harri Santamala, "Mr. Robobus", CEO and co-founder of Sensible 4 - a company pioneering with all-season autonomous driving technologies. He is leading the company towards commercial shared driverless mobility systems.

The future of mobility will be made up of cars, trains, and buses as we know them today. But new forms of transportation are also emerging. They are individual or shared and can not be categorized with any of the transport means we have now. The drivers of our future mobility are urbanization and an urgent need to ease traffic and reduce emissions. Digitalization, automation, and electrified powertrains are part of the solution.

In our panel discussion, we will hear from autonomous vehicle technology provider Sensible 4 and MOIA, the mobility service company of the Volkswagen Group. Also with us onstage is MaaS Global, the creator of the Whim App and inventor of the term "MaaS", mobility as a service.

About the speaker

Krista Huhtala-Jenks

Ecosystem manager at MaaS Global Oy

Krista has been working on developing the revolutionary Mobility as a Service concept for more than six years. She recently moved from the Finnish Ministry of Transport and Communications to the wild side - to MaaS Global, world's first true MaaS operator. Leaving the high life of a civil servant, she now focuses on bringing the Whim app to new markets and building the open ecosystem MaaS Global envisions around the world. Besides her day job she moonlights as a hard core metal head.

The future of mobility will be made up of cars, trains, and buses as we know them today. But new forms of transportation are also emerging. They are individual or shared and can not be categorized with any of the transport means we have now. The drivers of our future mobility are urbanization and an urgent need to ease traffic and reduce emissions. Digitalization, automation, and electrified powertrains are part of the solution.

In our panel discussion, we will hear from autonomous vehicle technology provider Sensible 4 and MOIA, the mobility service company of the Volkswagen Group. Also with us onstage is MaaS Global, the creator of the Whim App and inventor of the term "MaaS", mobility as a service.

About the speaker

Teemu Sihvola

MOIA, Managing Director in Finland

Teemu Sihvola is a pioneer in developing on-demand transportation. He developed the concept for Kutsuplus, the first dynamic shared ride service in the world, and is now spearheading efforts to develop on-demand and shared ride services at MOIA, the new mobility company within the Volkswagen group.

Johan will demonstrate how you can use basic machine learning to understand differences between narratives of political parties, based on natural language, open data from a voting advice application in Finnish elections. We will even ponder some ethical and methodological issues arising in machine learning!

Then you’ll see how similar algorithm is applied to completely different data in a full blown recommendation engine! Let’s hear out how this worked in the real world at YLE the Finnish Broadcasting Company, and what it took in addition to machine learning algorithms.

About the speaker

Dr. Johan Himberg

Chief Data Scientist, Reaktor

Dr. Johan Himberg has 18 years of professional experience working with data, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Specialised in advanced customer and process analytics, Johan has helped some of Reaktor’s most recognised clients stay on top of their game. He also has a research background with 25 peer reviewed publications, and contributions to widely used data analysis research packages. Johan has also frequently appeared as a speaker both at business conferences and at university lectures.

Discussion between different viewpoints: private, public. What are the use cases for both, what are the common factors and what sets these apart. Not trying to look for who's right or better. The point is to find out the different aspects and mediate a good discussion between "opposing" parties.

Participants:
- Teemu Alasaarela (Inbot)
- Akseli Virtanen (Economic Space Agency)
- Ville Sointu (Nordea)

About the speaker

Mikko Alasaarela

CEO, Inbot

Mikko Alasaarela is the founder and CEO of Inbot, an AI-powered platform for business growth, and the winner of 2018 Global Blockchain Competition in the AI category. Before Inbot, Mikko has founded 6 companies with 3 exits. Based in Berlin, he is a regular speaker on international conferences about artificial intelligence and blockchains.

Discussion between different viewpoints: private, public. What are the use cases for both, what are the common factors and what sets these apart. Not trying to look for who's right or better. The point is to find out the different aspects and mediate a good discussion between "opposing" parties.

Participants:
- Teemu Alasaarela (Inbot)
- Akseli Virtanen (Economic Space Agency)
- Ville Sointu (Nordea)

About the speaker

Ville Sointu

Nordea

Ville leads Nordea Bank's distributed ledger and blockchain core development and research team. He has more than sixteen years of experience in digital financial services and has held several key positions worldwide in financial services and connected devices industries. Before joining Nordea in 2017 Ville was the global head of strategy for Ericsson's digital financial services unit.

Discussion between different viewpoints: private, public. What are the use cases for both, what are the common factors and what sets these apart. Not trying to look for who's right or better. The point is to find out the different aspects and mediate a good discussion between "opposing" parties.

Participants:
- Teemu Alasaarela (Inbot)
- Akseli Virtanen (Economic Space Agency)
- Ville Sointu (Nordea)

About the speaker

Akseli Virtanen

CEO, Economic Space Agency

Akseli Virtanen, PhD, is a co-founder and CEO of Economic Space Agency. He is a political economist and finance theorist, born in Finland and currently based in Oakland, where he is working with the ECSA team on organizational and political potentiality of financial technologies and distributed software architectures. ECSA is building a 4th generation (“post-blockchain”) distributed cryptographic smart contracts and smart organizations technology and an easily usable platform for rapid creation and deployment of modular, interoperable, self-governing “economic spaces”. Economic spaces are like 21st century decentralized business models and economic games, protocols of economic interaction: different ways for people to do things together economically, create and distribute value, govern themselves, belong and interact, participate, share stakes and ownerships, open joint opportunities, risk and speculate together.

Discussion between different viewpoints: private, public. What are the use cases for both, what are the common factors and what sets these apart. Not trying to look for who's right or better. The point is to find out the different aspects and mediate a good discussion between "opposing" parties.

Participants:
- Teemu Alasaarela (Inbot)
- Akseli Virtanen (Economic Space Agency)
- Ville Sointu (Nordea)

Tommi Joentakanen from Reaktor will host the discussion.

About the speaker

Tommi Joentakanen

Head of Blockchain Solutions, Reaktor

Tommi Joentakanen is the Head of Blockchain Solutions at Reaktor. Tommi is developing Reaktor’s operations and strategy in the decentralised world of trustless general purpose computation.

One of the founding ideas of pioneering media theorist Marshall McLuhan was that “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us”. In today’s digitally-mediated world, the shape of design and the role of designers in the creative process is very different to what it was even just ten years ago. As our design tools are beginning to understand more of our intuitive human knowledge, they have the ability to either automate our decisions away from us or become more intelligent collaborators in an enhanced creative process. How might our role as designers change in this computationally-mediated future and what tools will we need in our toolbox?

Journeying through the history of computational design and the opportunities and challenges of our artificially intelligent future, this talk will consider the various approaches we have for digitally-enabled creativity today and how we can better design the interactions with our tools to shape the creative future we desire.

About the speaker

Pip Mothersill

Researcher, MIT Media Lab

Pip Mothersill is a PhD student in the Object-Based Media group at the MIT Media Lab, where her research draws from design theory, cognitive psychology and computer science to understandand enhance creativity, particularly considering how we can more intuitively and considerately integrate technology into new tools for the creative process.

Design tools she has developed include the EmotiveModeler CAD tool that allows users to use expressive adjectives to manipulate 3D forms (http://emotivemodeler.media.mit.edu/) and the design(human)design creative prompt tool that provokes new associations between concepts in a user’s project.

Right now voice assistants are on the rise, but they can be... well... hit and miss. As all the big players are heavily investing in commoditising voice UI, let’s suppose they’ll be much more ubiquitous in the near future.

What does that mean for technologists? Will screen UI even be required? Should we be changing our workflow or strategy now? In this talk, Ben will look at the current capabilities of Voice UIs, what’s next, and how we might design for a voice-first future. If you’re lucky, he’ll try an amusing but foolhardy live demo of how to fake a voice UI .

About the speaker

Ben Sauer

Voice UI Expert

Ben Sauer is a design strategist for Clearleft. Most of the time, he works with organisations around the world to raise their design game. He’s been speaking about voice UI at events for several years, and training teams in how to rapidly prototype voice interfaces. He’s also spent many hours at home listening to his kids put ridiculous things on Alexa’s shopping list.

Che Douglas will join Reaktor's Creative Director Hannu Oksa in a conversation, to discuss his journey from running an agency to running global design teams within a heralded organization, and how to use design as tool to drive business.

About the speaker

Che Douglas

Global Head of Design, Wall Street Journal, Dow Jones

Che is the head of design at Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. He has a strong background of doing branding in digital domains, and speaks very passionately about bridging the design of journalism between print and digital, how to ensure the heritage and integrity of a famous publication stays intact in device-centric times.

The way we interact with the automobile and treat it as a commodity has not changed much since the first cars rolled out of factories more than 100 years ago. But the car is in a transition phase from something we all know well to something a bit more unexpected.

This change is driven by new technologies and manufacturing methods, advanced materials, improved connectivity, changing legislation, the urban landscape, new ownership models and more.

All these aspects will reshape the car as we know it. How will we control the car from the inside or outside? How will the car react to its surroundings? How do we make passive elements in a car more active? New drivetrains and higher levels of autonomy are driving major changes to everything from overall structure and architecture to the tiniest of details.

About the speaker

Joonas Vartola

Creative lead, co-partner, Northern Works Ltd, Previously at Tesla

Joonas Vartola is a vehicle & industrial design specialist and works as a Creative lead and co-partner for Northern Works Ltd. He worked in the Tesla motors core team as a Senior Exterior Designer for five years until embarking on consultancy role in 2016.

Creativity is the key to addressing ill-formed business threats, for putting shape around poorly defined market opportunities. A creative organization is ready to handle the innovation challenges of greenfield markets, to take on the reimaging challenges of shrinking market share, and to best the misalignment challenges introduced by running fast and loose. But bringing creativity into your company feels like adding to the mess, not fixing it. Creative processes feel wild and unpredictable – and so do the people doing the creative work. We hire creative talent, but we don’t have a lot of well-formed frameworks for managing them or their work.

Design thinking offered us a starting point, as it gave us tools like empathy to help drive innovation. Lean and the lean business canvas tells us to run really fast and pivot left and right and left and right. But many of us have started realizing the limitations of design thinking and lean, because after doing a lot of thinking and pivoting, we still have to do a lot of doing. We don’t have the skills to bring the mess into focus.

In this talk, participants will learn about finding creative clarity. First, it’s about having a vision and choreographing a creative strategy – envisioning a crisp future even among the blurry business landscape. Next, it’s about growing a team that includes those creative unpredictable outcasts, and giving them the space to produce amazing work. Third, planning the work takes process, but not a process characterized by boring stage gates or stale gantt charts. It’s an iterative process of conflict, resolution, and trust. Finally, it’s about actually delivering creative new products and services that bring everything into focus.

About the speaker

Jon Kolko

Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design

Jon is a Partner at Modernist Studio, and the Founder of Austin Center for Design.

He was previously the Vice President of Design at Blackboard, the largest educational software company in the world. He joined Blackboard with the acquisition of MyEdu, a startup focused on helping students succeed in college and get jobs.

Simple software tends to be easier to use than complex software because it does less things. But supporting new needs typically makes software increasingly complex over time. How can a designer, looking to help the users’ in all ways possible, help slow this growth of complexity?

One way is to avoid doing design altogether. Instead of designing something fancy, offer less support – or even no UI at all.

About the speaker

Karri-Pekka Laakso

Lead UX Designer, Reaktor

Karri-Pekka Laakso is a lead designer, authority in UX, and passionate developer with expertise in making sure software solves real world problems. He goes barefoot whenever it’s appropriate – and often even if it’s not – and practices backflips and orienteering in his free time.

What to do when your meticulous design process hits a snag? Or when you follow every step and still don't reach the intended outcome?

Processes are integral to how we work, navigating us through ambiguity. However, strict processes can also weaken our ability to deliver if we're unable to respond to change.

Whether in the upstream or iterating on nitty gritty details, hear how principles commonly adopted by agile software development can help you continuously learn and improve your work.

Questions:

1. How to overcome obstacles in your design work and learn from failures?
2. How to increase your and your team's adaptability to respond to change?
3. How to adopt and work with flexible guiding principles instead of strict processes?

About the speaker

Hannu Oksa

Creative Director, Reaktor

Hannu is a creative director and product design lead with 13+ years of experience. Designed and built things for HBO and Dow Jones. Before: book and publication design, advertising. Now: purposeful digital products. Best work happens in teams.

In his talk Justus talks about some surprisingly simple ways that help us design great digital services. You learn how to avoid being a psychotic ice-cream salesman and how not to shoot your foot when looking data. In the end you are armed with questions and tools that turbocharge your capabilities in using data in design.

About the speaker

Justus Hämäläinen

Independent Consultant, Growth Hacker

Justus now works as a growth hacker. He was one of founders of Elisa Kasvutiimi and has unique insight how to use data to keep us honest when designing services. He is on a quest to learn how to create provable better services. But he isn’t just a Growth Hacker evangelist, but can also code any hacks and make tests a reality.

Have you ever been in a conversation with someone where you both were using the same words, but walked away with entirely different meanings of what was said? In this talk, we'll take a look at the mechanics of dialogue and why having a shared vocabulary does not guarantee a shared meaning between people. We'll also take a look at some stories and practice spotting these tricky meaning differences together, and then look at some examples at how this type of contextual awareness can be used in a deliberate fashion to encourage cultural alignment at work, home, and in life.

About the speaker

Jabari Bell

Product Developer, Reaktor

Jabari is a product developer with over 10 years of experience building digital
products and services. He has worked with a wide variety of clients from large media companies to startups. With a B.Sc. in Computer Science, Jabari possesses a solid foundation in writing and maintaining clean code in a number of environments, including web and mobile. He has also embraced many principles of design thinking and is passionate about seeing how a client's business needs flow into product thinking and then get implemented at the design and development levels. His foundation in engineering combined with his passion for product allow him to assist in transforming client needs into executable code with efficiency.

The amount of software today is huge, and we read the code more than we write it. We change it, we rewrite, and we refactor. So, we shouldn't focus on getting computer to understand the code, but instead getting our team to understand what we wanted. Stop writing code with no informational value, and make it better in communicating.

About the speaker

Heikki Ritola

Software Developer, Reaktor

Heikki has decades of experience developing software for digital businesses. With strong agile background, he believes in evolutionary improvement in business and software development. He loves teamwork and he is constantly seeking better working practices.