Archives: Presentations
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Closing Remarks
End our day on a high note! Join us for closing remarks in the upstairs theater.
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Andy Quick, Entergy, Former Chief AI Officer (Fireside Chat)
Andy Quick, Chief AI Officer at Entergy, led one of Louisiana’s largest applied AI teams, driving innovation across the energy grid, storm response, and customer operations. Over nearly three decades at Entergy, he has helped shape how advanced technology supports critical infrastructure at scale. In this fireside conversation, interviewed by Blake Bertuccelli-Booth, we’ll explore Andy’s…
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Code, Bias & Bots: Voices of Operation Spark Alumni Navigating AI’s Future by Johnnie James II
This panel brings together alumni developers from Operation Spark to share their frontline experiences and evolving relationship with AI in software development. Panelists will discuss how AI tools are changing their daily workflows, the opportunities AI presents, and their concerns about job security, skill shifts, and ethical responsibilities. Special focus will be given to diversity…
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Al in Environmental Science Panel: Perspectives from Louisiana’s Leading Nonprofits
This 45-minute panel discussion, moderated by Jesse Hoppes, PG, will explore how leading environmental and science-based organizations in southeast Louisiana are approaching artificial intelligence. Panelists will share how their teams are evaluating and beginning to implement Al tools, the challenges they face, and the potential they see for improving data analysis, operational efficiency, and environmental…
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The Surplus of Adjacency: Context, Compression, and the Shape of Intelligence by Rick Montgomery
Intelligence isn’t computed—it’s compressed. Starting from a single Gaussian blur kernel, we trace how the fundamental operation of context-gathering creates surplus that must be destroyed to become useful. Through demonstrations of convolution, pooling, and attention mechanisms, we show that “understanding” is literally the art of forgetting the right things. Context windows, whether in pixels, neurons,…
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Unlocking Revenue with Conversational AI by Yasmine Gardiner
With financial institutions becoming increasingly restrictive in approving sponsorships, loans, and investments, organizations must provide detailed data metrics to justify funding requests and improve approval chances. Conversational AI has evolved beyond customer service into powerful revenue-generating systems that both create the precise data intelligence financial institutions demand and drive sophisticated lead generation capabilities. These platforms…
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How Vibe Coding Saved My Life! by Charles Handler
I will tell my story of various points in my professional career where technology allowed me to get out of difficult situations and help me up my game significantly. These center around my lack of ability to work with things that I had/have the mental capacity to execute well, but was on the road to…
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Bootstrap to Breakthrough: Emergent Beauty in Repository-Based Agent Memory by Mark Stark
What happens when you try to make coding agents behave reliably? This talk chronicles the practical journey of building a repository-based agent memory system that evolved from frustrating AI interactions to more consistent behaviors—with some unexpectedly beautiful insights along the way. As any developer working with AI assistants knows, getting reliable behavior from coding agents…
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Augmented Trails & Neighborhoods: Place across Time and Space by Jacob Harver
Historic markers, whether along a hike-and-bike trail or within a neighborhood, can spark reflections that bridge past and present. With emerging technologies, from something as simple as QR codes to more advanced tools such as augmented reality and artificial intelligence, these experiences are becoming increasingly immersive and interactive. In this talk, Jacob Harver will share…
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Deconstructing Context Engineering by Ishmael Amin
I will address Context Engineering and its importance in building Agentic Generative AI Applications.