M+E Daily

Attendees of the annual HITS Spring: The Hollywood Innovation & Technology Summit in Los Angeles on May 17 will be greeted with a diverse selection of individual presentations to start the day.

At 9:45 a.m., Dave Abbitt, VP of production finance with Fox21 Television Studios — with an introduction by Dan Satterthwaite, chief human resources officer for Entertainment Partners — will share how digital product adoption can lead to increased productivity and efficiency, and why all media and entertainment companies can benefit from making paper-heavy production offices a thing of the past, in the presentation “It’s About Time: A Case Study on Production Going Digital.”

At 10:30 a.m., David Arnold, director of product strategy for Dow Jones — with an introduction by Ian Cameron, VP of digital media for Expert System — offers up the presentation “Turning a Billion Articles into Actionable Insights using AI, Part I,” looking at the concrete applications of artificial intelligence, emerging technology that may hold the key to the entertainment industry’s future. He’ll look at how AI-based software has saved over a decade in research around discovery for risk and compliance and GDPR.

And the morning keynote of HITS Spring at 10:45 a.m. — “The Power of Inclusion” — has Jill Hopper, head of global feature production for DreamWorks Animation, exploring the competitive advantage of a workplace environment that embraces differences . That diversity increases creativity, invention, problem solving and productivity, she’ll argue.

HITS Spring expects to see several hundred senior studio technology leaders gathering for the 9th annual “reality check” on the key trends transforming the way content is being produced, distributed and consumed.

HITS Spring is produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA) and the Smart Content Council. The event is being presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Expert System, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, Ooyala, Veritone, Amazon Web Services, Avanade, Avid, IBM Security, MarkLogic, Aspera, Light Point Security, MicroStrategy, SAS, Scaeva Technologies, Western Digital, Brainstorm, Zaszou IT Consulting and Bob Gold & Associates.

For more information visit HollywoodITSummit.com. To become a sponsor and participate at upcoming MESA events, contact Christian Calson at [email protected], 310-945-6284.