Edgar Perez

Why your Corporation Needs an Urgent Response to COVID-19

Back in January, Mr. Edgar Perez correctly predicted that the number of new COVID-19 cases in China would reach its peak by late February; then the infection crossed an inflection point when cases outside China exceeded those within the mainland for the first time. The daily movement of people and the sheer number of personal connections between China, South Korea, Iran, and Italy, make it unlikely that COVID-19 will be contained. While the situation in China has stabilized with the implementation of extraordinary public-health measures, new cases are rising elsewhere, including Latin America, the United States, Central Europe, and Africa. Mr. Perez will inspire CEOs and board directors to act immediately to protect their employees and customers, address operational business challenges and risks, and help to mitigate the outbreak in their communities.

The Artificial Intelligence Breakthroughs that are Changing the Digital World

Artificial intelligence has been referred to as the general ability of computers to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. Through a comprehensive review of the latest artificial intelligence breakthroughs, Mr. Edgar Perez will offer his insights on how these advancements will impact businesses and the human race in general for years to come, and more specifically, how companies can leverage the plethora of available resources to start their digital transformation and implement solutions to problems that only a few years ago belonged to the realm of science fiction. Mr. Perez will reveal why artificial intelligence is the present and the future.

Trade Wars and their Impact on Financial Markets already influenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI)

China and the US are locked in an escalating trade battle. The IMF has said that taxing all trade between these two economies would cause some $455 billion in GDP to evaporate; that would be a loss larger than South Africa’s economy. Financial markets are already wobbling with each new trade-war headline. What will happen if they near future? What are the long-term consequences? Would the trade war increase the likelihood of a “flash crash” in financial markets that are increasingly influenced by artificial intelligence-driven electronic trading systems?

Achieving Digital Impact with “State-of-the-art” Deep Learning

Deep learning has enabled many practical applications of artificial intelligence in today’s digital organizations. Deep learning breaks down tasks in ways that make all kinds of machine aids seem possible, even likely. Driverless cars, better image recognition, more effective medical diagnoses, even better movie recommendations, are all here today. Mr. Edgar Perez will identify what organizations need to do today to embrace the future, starting with the basics: empowering their employees and turbocharging the organization’s digital transformation strategy. Once these two important tasks are accomplished, organizations can then launch pilots for the most promising opportunities, leveraging “state of the art” cases from today’s global innovators such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Tesla. Mr. Perez will show organizations how to kick start their digital impact transformation.

What the Boeing 737 Groundings can teach us about Technology and Automation

Only days after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, the U.S. FAA grounded the Boeing 737 Max 8, joining airlines and governments worldwide to guarantee passenger safety, just months after the crash of Lion Air Flight 610 involved the same model. Reports point to Boeing’s new automated flight-control system, known as MCAS, as the culprit. However, an initial review of the design, certification and deployment process for the 737 MAX shows an over-reliance on untested technology, potential conflicts of interest between regulators and airlines, and lack of proper documentation and training. Is it still safe to fly? Mr. Edgar Perez will provide an insider’s look at how this dysfunctional process evolved, resulting in 346 casualties within five months, and what your organization can do to identify technology and operational challenges that can compromise its viability.

Is the Global Race to Achieve Quantum Supremacy Coming to an End?

Google recently announced that its most advanced quantum computer, a radically new design to manipulate and process information, has achieved “quantum supremacy” for the first time. The technology giant's Sycamore quantum processor was able to perform an incredibly complex task in 200 seconds, a feat that would take the world's fastest supercomputers 10,000 years to complete. The ultimate development and commercialization of this technology will tremendously accelerate difficult tasks across all industries, including financial services, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and the upcoming space exploration. Are we there yet? Mr. Edgar Perez will enlighten your audience with the latest head-turning business applications of this revolutionary technology.

Neuro what? Neuromorphic Computing and the Quest to Build an Artificial Brain

Neuromorphic Computing (NC) emulates the human brain’s neural structure and operation as it attempts to match a human's flexibility and ability to learn from unstructured stimuli with the energy efficiency displayed by our brain. NC has grown at the intersection of diverse research disciplines, including computational neuroscience, machine learning, microelectronics, and computer architecture, among others. It seeks to produce a cognition machine that not just reaches decisions, but memorizes information and even deduces facts. Mr. Edgar Perez will enthrall your audience with the possibilities created by computers that will behave as though they were originally engineered for the tasks they are executing, rather than as general-purpose computers taking their instructions from electronic programs.

The Ultimate Business Disruptor: Quantum Computing

Classical computing was invented in the 1940s; the advent of Quantum Computing (QC) will make these computers look painfully slow. Calculations that would take longer than a human’s life span to work out on a classic computer can be completed in a matter of hours or minutes with QC. Furthermore, QC will enable solving a set of problems that couldn’t be solved before. QC’s benefits include efficiently simulating new drug molecules and dramatically reducing the time complex financial calculations take, among many others. For optimization, sampling or search problems, this promises dramatic speedups. Mr. Edgar Perez will entertain your audience while revealing why Quantum Computing will disrupt companies in every industry.

The Challenges of Content Creation on Machine Learning Steroids

As reporters and editors around the world gear to face the rise of journalism generated by machines, challenges loom large on the horizon. Content published by news agencies already incorporates some sort of automated technology. For example, systems can assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each reporting period. However, these smart machine learning systems may be challenged by companies that astutely highlight figures or position relevant sentences to garner a more favorable portrayal than the numbers certainly warrant. Ultimately, machine-generated stories are not infallible. Mr. Edgar Perez will offer his insights on how journalists can rise to the challenge so that their APIs are not taken for a ride by such tactics no matter how sophisticated they are.

Managing the Upcoming Tsunami of Unstructured Data with Artificial Intelligence

The Internet of Things (IoT) explosion will see 20.8 billion connected devices deployed by 2020. The volumes of data generated will become a tsunami that firms will need to digitalize. Unfortunately, most firms only look at the easy information they can get from structured data while ignoring their unstructured data, which accounts for 90 percent of the content generated globally, making unstructured data a tremendous source of untapped value. Artificial Intelligence is making it possible and affordable to sift through and find digital meaning in vast amounts of unstructured data obtained from video, audio, emails, logs, social media posts and IoT devices. All of this data can bring about enormous benefits; Mr. Edgar Perez will show organizations how to reap these benefits today.

Social Engineering: The “Weakest Human Link” in Cybersecurity

Social engineering involves tricking your employees into breaching security protocols or giving away information, most often over the telephone or via email. Social engineering exploits human weaknesses rather than technology, preying upon people’s propensity towards trust in particular. Often, these exploits are used to gather information to support a more targeted cyberattack, with the initial forays based on the premise of ‘little and often’ so as not to cause concern. Employees at all levels, including senior executives, are vulnerable. Mr. Edgar Perez will explain why by improving employee awareness and introducing simple technical measures, organizations can protect themselves against social engineering techniques and the risk of a cyberattack and its potential impact on business, customers, and data.

The Biggest Risk for Financial Markets

Regulatory changes and technological evolution have transformed the financial landscape since the advent of the first electronic networks in the early 1970s. Regulators around the world are now in a race to respond to the evolution of technology in financial markets and prevent its operational challenges from becoming the biggest risk for financial markets. However, when considering technology and the cyber landscape, errors are bound to happen. Financial services firms are expected to have deployed the most sophisticated defense systems against cyberattacks. Most of them would realize the need for these investments and honestly attempt to implement them, but their IT departments would soon hit a wall. What would it take to limit the impact of the biggest risk for financial markets?

The Importance of the Cybersecurity Framework for Directors and CEOs

An email embedded with malware. Security systems hacked by thieves. Credit card numbers stolen from store purchases. There’s certainly no shortage of examples when it comes to data security breaches and the havoc they wreak on business. No wonder then that nearly a third of CEOs in KPMG’s latest global survey identified cybersecurity as the issue having the biggest impact on their companies today. Every organization should apply a Cybersecurity Framework for analyzing cybersecurity, and ideally, it should be integrated into an organization’s existing enterprise risk framework. The key is making it part of the mainstream of risk management within an organization. The most innovative companies today have recognized that cybersecurity is a customer experience and revenue opportunity, not just a risk that needs to be managed. Mr. Edgar Perez will explain why this must be done across the entire organization and why the CEO and Board of Directors have the most important role to play.

Establishing or Improving a Cybersecurity Program

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which was drafted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), comprises leading practices from various standards bodies that have proved to be successful when implemented, and it also may deliver regulatory and legal advantages that extend well beyond improved cybersecurity for organizations that adopt it early. Its adoption may prove advantageous for businesses across virtually all industries. Mr. Edgar Perez will explain why a proper Cybersecurity Program will build on the analysis of the possible areas of concern, an understanding of the company’s most critical assets, and a thorough review of Information Technology’s policies and procedures when faced with cybercrime.

The Present and Future of High-Frequency Trading

On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted nearly 1,000 points, then its biggest intraday point drop ever. The “Flash Crash” revealed the influence of high-frequency trading to mainstream audiences around the world. In fact, over the past 15 years, the global financial market has fragmented: where there were once three main U.S. exchanges, there are now more than 40 exchanges and alternative trading systems. High-frequency trading companies have largely replaced traditional broker-dealers, using algorithms instead of human traders to make decisions in milliseconds, mostly in response to orders made by other algorithms. Mr. Edgar Perez will discuss the benefits brought by technology