Speakers

Georgi Petrov

PROS

Georgi Petrov is a software engineer at PROS with more than 20 years of programming experience. He has a Master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence from Sofia University and at the roots of his day-to-day job lies his involvement with programming competitions in the distant previous century.

Applying Computer Science Algorithms in Air Travel Industry

Day 3 - 29th Nov 10:30-12:20 Master Class Hall Advanced Georgi Petrov, Dafo Nachkov, Vasil Velikov

We’ll have a look at some Air Travel Industry problems and how we approach them with Computer Science knowledge.

Audience requirements: Attendees are expected to be proficient in C++ and to bring their own development setup (e.g. laptop + IDE). C++ 11, STL (gcc) will be used for the exercise.

Dobromir Georgiev

PROS

Dobromir Georgiev is a tech lead at PROS, developing software for airfare pricing and shopping. Having worked in both industry and academia, he has been creating software for over 8 years. His main interests are algorithm design, software architecture, and high-performance computing.

The travel search problem – from complex industry standards to pure algorithms and engineering

Day 1 - 27th Nov 17:20-18:10 Hall 7 #CM Advanced Advanced Dobromir Georgiev, Brent Franklin

We will talk about combinatorial and search problems from real-life tasks within our product and we will propose possible computer science solutions with their pros and cons for one or more problems. We will cover up to 3 problems.

Dafo Nachkov

PROS

Dafo is Director Product Development at PROS. With over 20 years in the software engineering field, 7 of which in the travel industry, Dafo manages the processes of designing, building, delivering, and maintaining versatile software solution to complex business problems, with long-term strategy in mind. He is interested in service-oriented architectures, big data processing, application scalability and efficiency.

Applying Computer Science Algorithms in Air Travel Industry

Day 3 - 29th Nov 10:30-12:20 Master Class Hall Advanced Dafo Nachkov, Georgi Petrov, Vasil Velikov

We’ll have a look at some Air Travel Industry problems and how we approach them with Computer Science knowledge.

Audience requirements: Attendees are expected to be proficient in C++ and to bring their own development setup (e.g. laptop + IDE). C++ 11, STL (gcc) will be used for the exercise.

Reza Rahman

CapTech Ventures, Inc.
m-reza-rahman http://blog.rahmannet.net/

Reza Rahman is a long time consultant now working at CapTech. He has been an official Java technologist at Oracle. He is the author of the popular book EJB 3 in Action. Reza has long been a frequent speaker at Java User Groups and conferences worldwide including JavaOne and Devoxx. He has been the lead for the Java EE track at JavaOne as well as a JavaOne Rock Star Speaker award recipient. Reza is an avid contributor to industry journals like JavaLobby/DZone and TheServerSide. He has been a member of the Java EE, EJB and JMS expert groups over the years. Reza implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server. He helps lead the Philadelphia Java User Group.

Reza has over a decade of experience with technology leadership, enterprise architecture, application development and consulting. He has been working with Java EE technology since its inception, developing on almost every major application platform ranging from Tomcat to JBoss, GlassFish, WebSphere and WebLogic. Reza has developed enterprise systems for well-known companies like eBay, Motorola, Comcast, Nokia, Prudential, Guardian Life, USAA, Independence Blue Cross, Anthem, CapitalOne and AAA using Java EE and Spring.

MicroProfile state of the Union

Day 1 - 27th Nov 11:10-12:00 Main Hall #Influencers Novice

Effective Docker and Kubernetes for Java EE Developers

Day 2 - 28th Nov 17:20-18:10 Hall 3.1 #J2D Advanced Advanced Reza Rahman, Ahmad Gohar

Jakarta EE Expert Panel

Day 2 - 28th Nov 13:30-14:20 Main Hall #Influencers Discussion Novice Reza Rahman, Werner Keil, Dmitry Kornilov, Ondro Mihalyi, Otavio Goncalves de Santana, Emily Jiang

Discuss the future of Jakarta EE with the main people behind it!

Slides

Ahmed Shabana

Parkpine Capital

Egyptian American entrepreneur-turned investor Ahmed Shabana is the current managing partner of the $150 million fund one Parkpine Capital, the U.S.-based venture capital firm he formed with partner Billy Zane most known in Hollywood for the movies Titanic and The Phantom. Launched in 2016, Parkpine has offices in Los Angeles and Menlo Park.

Ahmed is recognized as a high impact entrepreneur by the Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times by founding the Middle East’s first & Africa’s first eCommerce portal and online pharmacy, Agzakhana.com, generating millions in sales turnover while overcoming the economic and commercialization obstacles of the region. Moreover, Ahmed was able to raise capital from Vodafone Ventures and help fundraise for a number of Healthcare, BigData, and SaaS startups of over $800M in combined valuation.

Ahmed holds an MBA from the the University of Southern California, where he was inspired to form Parkpine as a way to improve access to funding and resources for tech entrepreneurs on a global scale. He funded the Global Ventures Summit to connect influencers of the highest growth startup ecosystems in the world. The Summit enables innovative startups to access venture capital professionals, funded technology startup founders, and policy makers in the freshest tech scenes on the planet.

Parkpine’s fund will target post-revenue investments in early-stage technology ventures in growing markets around the world. The fund has a broad mandate invests in tech companies with business models that can be replicated in different markets.

Delyan Lilov

Musala Soft JSC

Delyan Lilov is founder and CEO of Musala Soft JSC, leading software services company specialized in some of the most challenging industries worldwide like Cloud Integration, API Management, Augmented Intelligence, BigData, Digital Engagement and IoT.

As a CEO of Musala Soft for more than 18 years, Delyan Lilov is responsible for defining the corporate strategy, managing operations and participating in key clients` management. His experience, professionalism and business views lead Musala Soft as a reliable, prestigious and long-term partner for innovative and trendsetting enterprises such as: IBM, Tsystems, VMWare, Experian, SAP, Atos, Cellent, Milestone, UGT, Deutsche Telekom, Telenor, A1, Vivacom, OTP Group, KBC, DZI, Commerzbank, Generali, Bulgarian Guarantee Fund, Visa, Telus Health, Telus International, ESG, Phillip Morris, Edoardo Miroglio, etc.

Committed to lifelong learning, knowledge sharing and a high degree of personal involvement, Musala Soft successfully develops its people and enlarges its offices in Macedonia and Bulgaria. The company is a proud winner of multiple national and international honors and recognitions in Talent Development, Science and Innovation, Quality of Software Solutions, Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility.

Eugene Ciurana

Meltwater Group
pr3d4t0r https://ciurana.eu

Eugene Ciurana is the director of knowledge representation science and technology at Meltwater, where his team is building the most advanced competitive intelligence system in the world by contextualizing 1.2 trillion documents and 12 million unique entities from 10 million data sources worldwide. His previous work as an AI technology principal led to successful exits, products, and services at Cosmify, Yahoo, Summly, and Badoo. Eugene’s career evolved from high availability and scalability systems to deep learning, exploratory analysis of unstructurеd data, and applied ML over the last 7 years. He has served in direct tech advisory roles at MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B), Horizons Ventures, TA Venture, JP Morgan Chase, Cloudera, Kearny Jackson, Rubikloud, and Box. Eugene can be reached at https://ciurana.eu or in the Freenode and OFTC networks under /nick pr3d4t0r.

Wanna Be a Data Scientist? Here’s How You Start!

11:30-12:20 Novice

Data scientists and engineers have some overlapping skills, but transitioning from one to the other requires more than coding skills. This session explains how to improve an engineer’s hands on skills to start a path toward exploratory, applied data science coding and system design.

  • Background
  • Scientists vs engineers: conflicting project and career objectives
  • Data science basics
    • Math
    • Tools
    • Exploratory analysis
  • Unstructured data
    • ETL
    • Data models vs knowledge representation
    • Information vs data
  • Jupyter Lab – hands on introduction
    • Python
    • R
    • Other languages and tools
  • The path to production
    • Jupyter Notebook vs Lab
    • The development toolchain
    • Unit tests
    • Reproducible results
  • Cloud deployment
    • Docker containers
    • Edge computing
    • AWS, Google Cloud
  • Use case – putting it all together
  • Q&A

Machine Learning and Data Science Tools

10:30-11:20 Novice

ML, NLP, and data science applications require a blend of programming languages, databases, libraries and services. This session explains how to decide on the tools for the production, integration, and development environments, from the desktop to the largest computational network.

  • Background
  • Team needs: scientists vs engineers
    • Programming
    • Python
    • R
    • Kotlin
    • Java
    • Others
  • Development environments
    • Native
    • IDE
    • Jupyter vs Zeppelin
  • Database selection
    • Application driven
    • Document DB
    • Graph DB
    • Hybrids
  • DevOps
    • Easy to code and debug, easy to deploy and support
    • Containers: when and why
    • VMs: when and why
  • Deep learning tools integration
    • Tensorflow
    • Azure ML
  • Cloud deployment
    • Cheap and it works
  • Putting it all together
  • Q&A

Find the Terrorist!

Day 1 - 27th Nov 16:20-17:10 Main Hall #Influencers Novice

Deeper discussions about data science and how various problems were solved during the development phase – how do you go about finding the one bad guy of interest among 500 million unique entities?

Mark Stephen Meadows

Botanic Technologies, Inc
meadovian http://markmeadows.com

Meadows is an American author, inventor, artist and entrepreneur. With 18 years in AI, 22 in VR, and 7 years in blockchain he has designed and developed AI applications at some of the world’s top research labs (Xerox-PARC, SRI, Waag, and others). He has worked as a government-level consultant in both hemispheres, is the author of a half-dozen patents, and has written four books that examine technology and their social consequences. As founder / CEO of Botanic.io and co-founder / Trustee of SeedToken.io, he leads the vision of the companies by inventing new methods of computer-human interaction, designing the hearts and minds of highly social software robots.

Ethical AI and Blockchain: A Democratic approach

Day 1 - 27th Nov 10:20-11:10 Main Hall #Influencers Novice

This presentation looks at conversational user interfaces (CUIs), how they will be coupled with blockchain and AI, and their impact on our near future. Popular CUIs are Alexa and Siri. As these systems collect more user data, which is used to train AI systems, we need to consider several key issues, including: trust – who is responsible for these bots; privacy – who has access to my data; and ethics – what is my data being used for? We look at solutions, why blockchain is needed to solve problems AI introduces, and ways to provide maximum value to all stakeholders.

Thomas Metcalfe

Rasa
MetcalfeTom

Physics Master’s graduate with an appetite for machine learning & AI. Passionate in the areas of natural language processing and human-machine interaction.

Words words words

Day 1 - 27th Nov 15:20-16:10 Hall 8 #AIST Advanced

If we’re going to continue using words, we’re going to need to do a lot of work.  In this talk, I will give an overview of how we have adapted to use words as data for machine learning, and then showcase the technique of embedding data, from single synonyms to whole sentences.  I will also talk about some recent Rasa research we have been conducting with embeddings when building AI assistants.

Slides

Stefan Enev

Ontotext

Stefan has key roles in product development, development infrastructure, and projects with some of Ontotext’s biggest clients. He was the guiding force behind the creation of the Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform and two of its core components, the Concept Extraction Service, and the Recommendations engine.

In his present role,  Stefan manages the Semantic Analytics Solutions squad. His mission is to make sure the team builds exciting, easy to use and run, and semantically powered software. The focus is on creating technologies which empower publishers to generate more relevant, interconnected content and personalized semantic recommendations, which helps them increase user engagement.

Approaches for continuous delivery of ML-based text analytics pipelines in Java

Day 2 - 28th Nov 09:30-10:20 Hall 8 #AIST Advanced

What’s a text analytics pipeline made of? What does it do and how? How to effectively process and index millions of documents through a text analytics pipeline? How to manage your corpus to make the processing smooth and predictable? How to performance tune the JVM for the job? How to make the process repeatable?

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