Archives: Seminar

Accessing Emerging Technology with St Louis’ Startup Ecosystem

  Presented by Advisory Council

There is the world of large enterprise companies and the world of startups. Often these groups orbit in different circles, but there is much to be gained by working together. Join the Advisory Council for a panel on the startup community in the Saint Louis area as they discuss what the ecosystem is like, how these seemingly disparate groups can connect and what can be gained from joining forces. Come hear stories from community leaders and corporate program managers and discover what hidden gems you can be a part of.

Moderator:

  • Mary Louise Helbig • Executive Director, ITEN STL

Panelists:

  • Tamas Javor • Assistant Director, UMSL Accelerate
  • Brian Handrigan • Co-Founder, Advocado
  • Ladan Kamfar • Business Relationship Management Dept. Lead, Enterprise Holdings

How Blockchain Can Boost Your Business Top-Line and Trim Your Bottomline

  Presented by Feng Hou • Chief Digital Transformation Evangelist; Maryville University

Blockchain technology is currently being adopted at all levels of the business environment including utilities, healthcare, payments, supply-chain, government, agriculture, and more. A recent survey conducted by PwC shows that a fully 84% of the responding companies have actively used blockchain. And according to Reuters, venture capital investment in blockchain startups will likely set a new all-time high in 2019. Blockchain is also gaining momentum this year due to the increasing interests of some of the largest technology companies such as Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and IBM, etc.

Drawn from his successful experience in implementing several blockchain solution, the keynote speaker will present how to use blockchain to boost your business top-line and cut your business bottomline. Specifically, he will show how record-keeping, smart contract and tokenization can help improve your business efficiency and add new sources of revenue.

Currently serving as the Chief Digital Transformation Evangelist at Maryville University in St. Louis, Feng Hou is a Harvard educated senior executive with more than 20 years leadership and digital transformation experience. Hou leads digital transformation with strategic development to improve customer digital experience, enhance operational efficiency and cut operational spending.

As an award winning CIO, Hou has led the blockchain initiative to successfully implement a student owned digital certificate and degree diploma solution at Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), which made CNM the first higher education institution in the nation to use blockchain technology to provide its students with digital credentials. Building upon the successful experience, Hou has been working on several blockchain use cases from creating a universal student ID, using smart contract to create a blockchain ERP solution, as well as building a stackable micro-credentialing solution to certify student soft skills.

Hou is a nationally sought-after keynote speaker. In the past 6 months, Hou has keynoted at Blockchain in Education Conference in Washington DC about how to use blockchain technology to reform higher education; he gave another keynote speech at INTERFACE-New Mexico 2018 in Albuquerque, NM to discuss about using blockchain technology to enhance cybersecurity. He also gave a speech to the Board and senior staff at New Mexico Mutual about how blockchain can transform insurance business. Recently, Hou has collaborated with IBM to build the global blockchain education platform.

As the leading blockchain expert in US, Hou frequently speaks about the major impact of blockchain technology on education reform, cybersecurity enhancement as well as industry transformation. He has recently been invited to the White House to attend the STEM Summit; he also hosted a roundtable discussion with the university and college presidents at the Higher Education Congress Annual Meeting in Washington DC. Hou has developed the widely adopted 7 criteria for selecting the right blockchain solutions that has recently been published in Business Officer Magazine; Hou also has 2 US Patents pending.

Hou is the Co-founder of Albuquerque Blockchain Alliance (ABA), he currently serves on the National Reviewing Board for the Blockchain Certificate Exam and was a member of the National Government Blockchain Chamber Albuquerque Chapter. Hou also served on the Board of Directors for The New Mexico Council for Higher Education Computing/Communication Services (CHECS) and Board of Directors for New Mexico Technology Council. He was twice elected as the President of Florida Association of Educational Data Systems (FAEDS).

Birds of a Feather

  Presented by Advisory Council

Want an opportunity to discuss in small groups and learn from other attendees? Join your fellow attendees in informal round table discussions on a variety of IT topics. Several lunch tables will have designated topics. Look for the “Birds of a Feather” topic signs to join the conversation. Tables will be located just outside of the theaters.

Table topics include:

  • Third Party Risk
  • Career Development
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • BC/DR and Availability Planning
  • VoIP
  • And more…

Hold onto Your Butts! Build a Better BC/DR Plan Than Jurassic Park

  Presented by Jimmy Tassin • Member, InfraGard

Business continuity and disaster recovery should be a key priority in all levels of business. Where the largest of companies can stumble when something happens (InGen) because not all potential factors were considered, SMBs can be chaos! Between convincing management to get solutions in place, figuring out what to put in place, determining what makes up a good plan and testing it once it’s in place, can be a monumental task for a small team, or a team of one. With seven years experience in the banking industry and working extensively with regulations, Jimmy will pass along what he learned about building a proper BC/DR plan, testing it, and recording to prove it’s getting done. He’ll also share a few “disasters” where things didn’t go the way they should have, to help you avoid the same pitfalls.

Algorithms & Social Justice: AI, Machine Learning & Its Implications

  Presented by Annamaria Szakonyi • Research Computing Architect; St Louis University

The amount of data created is staggering. Many turn to AI and machine learning to manage and utilize the data they have, but what if it does more harm than it is helpful? Join us as we discuss:

  • What’s AI and ML?Features and challenges in the pipeline (aka bias)
  • Potential harms
  • Real-life applications and examples
  • Implications for social justice

Emerging Trends in Cybersecurity

  Presented by Trace3

As the threat landscape rapidly expands, enterprises across all industries are seeking approaches and technologies to safeguard their interest from advanced and persistent threats. Mounting regulatory and financial penalties against a talent shortage, the need for better cybersecurity only becomes more apparent.

Startups are emerging to offer solutions that address vulnerabilities arising from the growing threat vectors introduced by the expansion of the enterprise domain. Understanding trends and technologies that are driving the future of cybersecurity is critical to both individual contributors and leaders.

Achieving Successful Security Segmentation

  Presented by Illumio

You rely on the network to deliver applications. But as IT scales in size, connectivity, and environments outside the network to public cloud, we cannot rely solely on the network to secure applications. The answer is to decouple security segmentation from the network. This allows us to protect applications wherever they run – because they do not live exclusively on our networks anymore, and enforcement must go wherever they do.

During this informative session, we’ll discuss:

  • What is security segmentation?
  • Challenges of traditional network segmentation
  • Decoupling segmentation from network architecture
  • Principles of successful security segmentation
  • 5 steps to implement a strategy

MFA is not a Four Letter Word

  Presented by JourneyTEAM

Securing identities is at the core of an intelligent cloud deployment. Learn how to plan and implement one of the most important security measures in Office 365, MFA! We will teach you tips and tricks on how to successfully deploy MFA without your users hating it and you will get the latest updates around usability for an MFA deployment.

Architecting the New SD-WAN Edge for the Cloud-First Enterprise

  Presented by Silver Peak Systems

Adoption of cloud services has driven enterprises to re-think WAN architecture. Architectures based on traditional, manually-programmed routers can’t keep pace. A business-driven SD-WAN can provide secure direct connections from the branch to SaaS/IaaS across the internet, significantly increasing application performance resulting in a superior end-user QoEx (Quality of Experience). By integrating SD-WAN, WAN optimization, routing and security in a single unified platform, enterprises can simplify branch WAN edge architecture, accelerating time to value and dramatically reducing operational costs. From a centralized SD-WAN orchestrator, application priorities and QoS and security policies may be configured and assigned to automate traffic handling across the WAN. A single mouse click distributes SD-WAN configuration parameters to all sites, improving operational efficiency and minimizing the potential for human errors that can negatively impact application availability and enterprise security. This session will describe why SD-WAN adoption continues at a breakneck pace because of the user productivity, agility and cost savings benefits that a business-driven SD-WAN delivers.