Day 2 Retrospective – Graph + AI Summit May 2022

Practitioners and industry experts took center stage during the second day at Graph + AI Summit. In my opinion, this is the heart of the summit, hearing directly from the people using graph technology on the front lines.

The day, however, started off with two big presentations – an upbeat keynote by popular industry analyst Ray Wang, and before that, the announcement of our Million Dollar Challenge winners!

15 Projects Share Million Dollar Challenge Prize Pool

One of the best moments of the conference was seeing the reactions of the winners as they were informed by our CEO, Dr. Yu Xu, that their projects had been chosen for one of the cash prizes in the contest.

The winning projects were hand-selected by a global committee of judges. With over 1,500 registrations coming from over 100 countries, the winning projects really stood out and met a demanding set of criteria to be considered.

Congratulations to all of the winning entries! A complete list of winners is available on the Million Dollar Challenge page and in the press release published yesterday:

• Grand Prize – Mental Health Hero
• Most Impactful – UAWelcome
• Most Innovative – Universe Planner
• Most Ambitious – ShockNet
• Most Applicable – BioDex
• Women Who Graph – Diagnosx
• Most Popular – Multimodality Cancer Graph

The Case for Decision Velocity: How Analytics, Automation, and AI Will Transform Business

The excitement of the Million Dollar Challenge winner announcements could have been hard to follow, but keynote speaker Ray Wang from Constellation Research, Inc., was more than up to the task. 

His talk on digital transformation and decision velocity demonstrated to the audience just how important graph databases, analytics, automation, and AI are to modern businesses. As we watched his presentation, it was entertaining to see our company’s Slack channel light up with comments at some of the points he made. After all, who could have guessed that Domino’s Pizza was the top-performing stock of the last decade, thanks in part to its digital transformation efforts?

Here are a couple of quotes that stood out to me from his presentation:

• “You can’t have digital transformation without data. More importantly, you can’t build new business models without that data. And more importantly than that is the fact that you can’t do it without a graph database.”
• “70% of your mission-critical information is going to sit outside of your four walls…can you bring that information in real-time, be able to use that information and generate some insights and answer your business questions?”

Diverse Perspectives, Myriad Uses

Once again, it was difficult to catch everything during the day. Many of us will be going back and re-watching our favorite sessions on-demand, something I encourage everyone who registered for the Graph + AI Summit to do as well.

All of the sessions have incredible value. If you’re looking for a place to get started, here are a few of the more talked about presentations from Day 2:

• Walmart demonstrated how the company uses supplier similarity and item category mapping to improve its business operations and customer experience
• Data scientist and industry influencer Ashleigh Faith delved into the concept of using “hypergraphs” to achieve effective data integration
• During the Defi, NFT, Metaverse – Where Do We Go From Here? panel, a group of experts from across many industries engaged in a conversation around graph taxonomy, digital asset creation, and blockchain while sharing examples from their respective areas of expertise.

I hope you’re finding as much value from these sessions as we are inside TigerGraph, and we look forward to wrapping up the Summit today with even more great content.