European Women In Tech 2018

With over 3000 attendees and 170 speakers from just under 150 companies, covering subjects ranging from technology to soft skills domains, this year’s Women in Tech conference has most definitely delivered on the variety and the quality of content, as well as the networking opportunities, fun and inspiration. Visitors were spoilt for choice choosing between hands-on workshops, knowledge sharing sessions and 70 booths of the expo experience.

The eBay Classifieds Group (eCG) booth, which was situated in the very middle of all hustle and bustle of the expo area, provided an unforgettable experience of meeting our fellow tech enthusiasts from most diverse backgrounds and career journeys. It was a huge pleasure to welcome visitors from all around the world — many of whom turned out to be eCG fans — for a cup of artisan coffee at our booth. Who would have thought that we would get such a delightful feedback on our product! “I love Gumtree, I sold so much on there!”, “mobile.de is such a useful platform! Most of my friends got their cars through it.”, “Marktplaats is huge in the Netherlands!” were the most frequent phrases in our corner of the floor. It was also amazing to find out that many of eBay values were shared by our visitors, who, just like us, aspired to be driven, inventive, courageous and promote rich diversity. Of course, we couldn’t let our guests leave without a little something, so we were pleased to be able to give away a load of swag, with our lovely eCG branded tote bags being particularly popular (closely followed by our stylish t-shirts).

The rest of the expo area was just as exciting and awe-inspiring: from humanoid robots, VR pieces and medical sensors to face recognition installation — which could guess your gender, age, hair colour, the presence of lip and eye makeup and even emotion in real time and almost accurately! (After all, who would mind being confused for a 24-year-old?!)

eCommerce platform Zalando were 100% ‘on brand’ giving away many fashionistas’ dream — versatile t-shirts, which guests could customise to their liking. I went for the confidence-boosting “Be brave” inscription and couldn’t be happier with my choice — well worth the queue!

Meanwhile, a whole different vibe was set in the presentation zones, where the speakers were sharing their professional insights and key industry trends, which will most likely define the not-so-distant future of tech.

So-called Cobots (collaborative robots, designed to physically interact with humans in the shared workspace) are on the rise, according to Nora Bereczki, Global Marketing Manager at OnRobot, and, with the predicted sales growth of 30% by end of next year, play a good catch up with the demand for traditional industrial robots, potentially competing for the 34% of the $33.8 billion robotics market by 2025. They are smaller, lighter, easy to program (many companies provide specific DSLs) and redeploy and are often provided with a set of sensors for safety. Similarly, end-of-arm tooling market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of over 13%, the Technavio’s report shows.

Violeta Misheva, Data Scientist at ABN AMRO, in her talk ‘Reinforcement Learning: The Less Hyped Approach to AI’ recapped the place of the Reinforcement Learning (RL) — a ML algorithm, where actions are improved by “trial and error” approach reinforced by an award or punishment — in the ML/AI landscape and summarised the advantages and disadvantages of it, arguing that, even though RL mimics human learning in long-term-sequential-decision tasks which require adaptation and modification, and the spared effort of labelling the test data, RL still remains data hungry, and computationally expensive. It is also sensitive to environment instability and prone to challenges of specifying an accurate reward, as well as the risk of overfit.

On the information security side of things, Sylvia Chidi, Director of IT at Emanuel School, gave a good overview of Intrusion Detection Systems, many of which turn out to be open source and are available for free (a comprehensive list can be found here), while Kat Chilton, a Senior Front End Developer at Adyen, shared her experience in setting up an automated system for ensuring the application security from the npm dependency management perspective. To address security verification in today’s fast-moving JS world with exceptionally complex dependency trees, Kat suggests taking the following most important factors into account when estimating the potential risk of a dependency: versions, licenses, vulnerabilities, difference between source code and npm publication, package age and lifecycle scripts — all raised to the power of the size of the dependency tree. An elaborate post on this subject can be found here.

On a more practical note, an impressive masterclass on Fast Prototypes with Flutter and Kotlin/Native by Mobile Engineering Manager Ayelen Chaves from OLX Group showcased how, in a matter of hours and using free and open source tools developed by Google, a cross-platform fully functional app prototype can be built from scratch.

The tech stack Ayelen used included:

· Flutter — for Common UI/UX

· Kotlin/Native — for common models

· Firebase DB — for simple static back-end

· Sketch plugin — for material theming

· Numerous Flutter plugins — for essential bits and pieces like log in, tracking, user preferences, etc.

Another useful hands-on workshop run by Steven van Rossum, Strategic cloud Engineer at Google, ‘Getting started with BigQuery’, shared how Google’s cloud-based big data analytics web service could be set up for your project in Google console and be easily used for processing very large read-only data sets. And it comes with an amazing bonus from Google: over 50 free public data sets you could get your hands on for your next pet project! Historical Air Quality, London Crime, Human Genome Variants and Open Images are just a few which are up for grabs.

Aarti Kriplani, a Software Engineer at Pivotal Labs, won her audience’s hearts with the interactive demo of an audio library app design. Aarti showed just how easy it is to set up the web application framework using Spring Initializr, which generates all the boilerplate code for you, keeping your focus on the business logic design, and deploy it using CloudFoundry — the open source cloud application platform. It was yet another opportunity to witness how Kotlin a programming language combines the beauty of its elegant syntax with the power of JVM.

Overall, the European Women in Tech Conference 2018 was a wonderful, insightful and inspirational experience, full of thought provoking conversations and practical ideas!