In our special Christmas episode, Ansgar Bittermann, CEO of Goldblum Consulting, is talking to Brother Ken Tsay from the Local Church in Berlin. Ken is originally from Taiwan and after a few years in Switzerland calls Berlin now his home. 
Artificial intelligence is developing in a rapid speed and AI applications become more and more human-like in their behavior. As AI is moving closer and closer to show human-like behavior, many people ask themselves if this will have a substantial impact on religions and religions’ self-perception. 

Thus in our Christmas special today, Brother Ken and I will try to untangle this question and hopefully give you some answers to this existential question. 

We ask "What is a human, what differentiates him from animals?", "What is the Spirit? Is it that bodiless organ which helps us to connect to God?", How does love relate to the Spirit? And could General AI become beings without spirit, eternal beings without the need for god?"

For this podcast about religion, we gave us ground rules. When talking about religion, it is important to be clear and precise to not cause confusion. Fighting about religion is much easier than having an academic, civil discourse.

·       First of all, in this Podcast we assume that God exists. 

·       Secondly, as we are an international truth seeking podcast, we specifically called it broadly “God and AI” and not “the Catholic Church or Islam and AI”. All three book religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) pray to the same God. The God of the Christians is the same God the Jews pray to – the God of their Forefather Abraham. And also in Koran Sure 12:39 says: ”And I follow the religion of my fathers Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.”

·       Thirdly, we want to assume that when we talk about God here, we mean the all-mighty God which different religions and cultures gave different names like God, Khodah, Allah or Jehova – but they all mean the same devine being – the Creator of everything. 

·       And fourthly we assume that God’s word has been distorted over hundreds and thousands of years as humans err and sin. Thus we assume – as in an ML algorithm, you have a true value (e.g. the direct discussion which God had with a prophet) and then over the course of hundreds or even thousands of years this conversation or true value was mostly not correctly handed down from generation to generation or was even purposely changed for political or cultural reasons. For example the famous example of the camel which doesn’t fit through the eye of the needle. Some researchers assume that the original text read camelos which meant rope and not camel. Thus religions nowadays express a religious view (or observant variable) which consists of a true value(God’s word) and an error component (what humans made out of it). 
 
 We assume, it is this error component which deflects people’s appreciation of God. We do not oppose religion, but we all have to be aware that human religious expression of any kind is the sum of a true value and an error component. And stressing the erring human component in an religion never critizes God, but takes “the fall of man” into account and applies this to everything we do today. Or as Jesus said: “the one who is without sin, cast the first stone”. 
 
 In order to not fight over debatable components in religions (e.g. the subject of baptism or Trinity or denomination) we will focus today solely on the beginning of the three book-religions and will try to find answers in Genesis – The first book of the Christian Bible, the first book of Moses and thus part of the Hebrew bible or Tanakh and also reference for many aspects of Islam. 

Today we talk with Roland Woldt, Washington DC, and J-M Erlendson, Toronto. Both are working at Software AG as Business Process and Transformation Architect and are also running their own website (and podcast) whatsyourbaseline.com, where they demystify and explain enterprise architechture. 

Our topic today is process mining. As Roland puts it: like footprints in the snow executing processes leave process traces in application systems. And with process mining we can analyse these process traces to discover the underlying processes. We will learn how this works in reality, what a company needs to use this successfully and how it is connected to artificial intelligence.  We wil also talk about process lifecycles,  process mining analysis and how it is connected to task mining and RPA.

Today we are talking to Dr. Anna Melbinger, theoretical physicist and managing consultant at Xenium in Munich. She had been conducting research in Munich, Paris and San Diego and is now supporting and accompanying both IT and Data projects for several years. Anna will try to paint a vivid picture for the listener on how IT and data projects differ while challenging her ideas with Rainer Raupach, Founder of Novedas, Satya Dharnapuram, Consultant at IBM, Dr. Johannes Nehrkorn, Chief product owner for AI Services Siemens Industries and CEO of Goldblum Consulting, Ansgar Bittermann. 

Our guest speaker is David Meinka, CEO of Ayna Analytics . David has studied pharmacology, speaks four languages (German, English, Portuguese and Spanisch) and for over five years has been writing on his PhD thesis at the university of Greifswald while working in the field of pharma and specialty pharma.

This February he became founder and CEO of Ayna Analytics which is based on his doctoral work and Ayna Analytics is situated close to Berlin. 

The opening of Ayna Analytics was a big event – where even our new chancellor-to-be Olaf Scholz was a speaker. And the Brandenburg business magazine names Ayna Analytics in one sentence with Ebay as the newest innovative company in their new innovation hub. 

Learn how Ayna Analytics uses NIR-spectroscopy, an analytical method that uses near-infrared radiation to obtain information about the chemical and physical composition of the sample, without destroying it. They offer services to pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies. And at the heart of it all is a lot of data. 

David will lead us into the world of data mining within the pharma industry and show us the challenges and solutions.

Riding the Data Wave - The amount of data is exploding and thus only those who manage high throughput and low latency will be able to stay successful in business. In this podcast Ansgar, Satya and Isao will talk with Zaid Al-Ars, Associate Professor at Delft University of Technology. He is one of the founders of Teratide (teratide.io), a technology start up, which delivers technology solutions to enhance your big data analysis with impressive numbers: 10x higher throughput, 100x lower latency, 50% cheaper and 100% greener. Hard to believe? Listen in yourself

Today we have the chance to talk to Mark Kerzner, Official Member of the Forbes Technology Council and CEO of SCAIA from Houston Texas.

SCAIA stands for Scalable Artificial Intelligence and at SCAIA they are building AI-based products and are applying them to document processing, such as eDiscovery for lawyers. We will dive with Mark into the possibilities and challenges of NLP and eDiscovery in the legal industry, discuss the uniqueness of governmental clients and he gives us an outlook into the world of AI for SMEs. 

Mark has been in the field of AI since the late 70ies, holds a master in Mathematics and Computer Systems, helped to introduce AI to the oil industry and is official member of Mensa, an association of people with an IQ over 132. 

In 2013 he also co-founded Elephant Scale – a modern technology training company for AI and machine learning and also is the creator of Talmud Illuminated, an almost 30 year project to create an audio-visual experience out of the Jewish Talmud.

The vast majority of companies in a country are small and medium size companies.  The EU defines SMEs as companies with up to 250 employees and 50 millions annual revenue. According to the European Union 99% of the companies in the EU are SMEs.  It is one thing, if VW or Google try to use AI, but what about SMEs? SMEs have barely research money or money "to waste", every wrong decision can literally break the company. They have up to no resources to spare and very seldom the money or the time to heavily invest in IT or new personell. So how do you consult in this environment? How does it differ to be an SME consultant in comparison to an AI consultant for big companies? Nicole Weider, Isao Kabayashi and Satya Dharnapuram discuss with Ansgar Bittermann this special job assignment.

In our newest podcast recording, Nicole Weidner, Associate Partner at Xenium is going to give an impulse talk about the topic "Why arent't you getting more from your Marketing AI?" Nicole has been a managing consultant at Xenium for over 10 years and since January 2021 she is an Associate Partner at Xenium. She has a deep knowledge in project management and IT consulting. Her talk will be loosely based on the recent Harvard Business Review Spotlight Series "AI-powered Marketing". For interested parties who want to prepare, here is the link to the article: https://hbr.org/2021/07/why-you-arent-getting-more-from-your-marketing-ai