Web Summit 2018: Deep Learning and So Much More

I had the good fortune of attending the largest Tech Conference in the world again this year which was held in Lisbon. The Web Summit drew in 70,000 people and it was estimated that almost half were women thanks to the heavily subsidised Women in Technology tickets. Forbes has referred to it as the “The best Technology Conference on the Planet” and based on my conference experience to date I would have to agree. There are too many aspects to document in one sitting so here are some of my highlights…

Ethics

It is probably no surprise to anyone that the common theme this year was Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, both of which featured heavily in all 24 tracks. There was a great emphasis on the democratisation of AI with a huge slant on the ethical implications of Big Data, with questions like “is tech killing democracy?”

Listening to the famous whistleblower, Chris Wylie, give his account of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was captivating, although it wouldn’t bring much comfort to those already paranoid. He talked with frustration about the lack of regulation “if we can regulate nuclear power, why can’t we regulate some code?”. He expressed that he does not regret his actions, even though it has turned his world upside down, and that in the grand scheme of things there have been no consequences for Cambridge Analytica and Facebook…yet. What did resonate with me is that we all have a responsibility to protect customer data and what we do with it. With the increased use of AI within all our fields, it’s imperative that we are all adequately educated.

Christian Beedgen from Sumo Logic asked how to measure our morals and analog thinking in a digital world — does data reveal an objective truth of a situation, or the truth of who we truly are through bias or prejudice? He talks about systemic issues when humans use data to justify decisions about other humans by claiming its un-biased analysis. He emphasised that data is human and not objective. He used IBM Watson’s oncology failure as an example of this. A product hyped to be the answer to cancer treatment but it was later discovered that it had been fed, in most part, theoretical patient data provided by only a few doctors.

Even though it started off with a Doomsday tone, it wasn’t all negative as he explained that he does have faith in the general morality of most technologists so there is hope for the world yet.

All things Reality

Brenda Freeman, the CMO of the secretive company Magic Leap talked about the company’s journey of releasing their first product — “Magic Leap One — the Creator” which uses the less commonly talked about Mixed Reality. Mixed Reality is the merging of real and virtual worlds to produce new environments and visualisations where physical and digital objects co-exist in real time.

Vitaly Ponomarev CEO of WayRay, Christian Knorle of Porsche talked about how Augmented Reality(AR) will change the car industry. Vitaly explained AR by telling an anecdote of when he was child with poor eyesight, he resisted getting glasses, but when he eventually did he couldn’t believe how well it improved his vision. He says AR is just like this — it will enhance what we see as humans. Interestingly he believes that AR will help us trust self-driving cars. I’m not convinced but happy to be proved wrong

Environmental Issues

Something which is a personal concern of mine is the overuse of one-use plastic which drew me to Daphne Nissenbaum’s CEO of Tipa-Corp. talk where she explained about how Tipa have succeeded in hacking plastic. Do you know that only 9% of the world’s plastic is recycled!?! Tipa have developed a biodegradable polymer which could be used in place of non-recyclable plastic. They have a similar business model as Uber where they work on an existing supply chain which brings resources and cost down but in order for it to accelerate progress it is imperative that there is support from the government. She also spoke with delight about Stella McCartney being an advocate of the revolutionary material which she uses to package all of her apparel.

AutoTech

Something I focused on more last year, which continues to interest me, is emerging technology in the car industry — which is surprising considering that I don’t even have central locking or electric windows in my own car….

Olaf Sakkers of Maniv Mobility and Tim Smith of ustwo discussed what cars will mean to us 20 years down the line with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. Surprisingly they suspect that the introduction of autonomous vehicles will increase congestion so in order to prevent this they need to address the dilemma of how to increase occupancy of cars. They talked about the failure of UberPool and the human psychology of sharing space. They did talk positively about how no-driver Autonomous Vehicles will remove human prejudice giving an example where the visually impaired currently use Uber as its easier than public transport but in notable occasions the drivers will refuse the fares if they see a white stick or guide dog when approaching their booking. Shocking!

Graph Databases

I really enjoyed Neo4J’s CEO Emil Eifrem who unlocked the secrets of graph databases and explained how they are the secret weapons of AI. This had more of a technical slant starting off with an introduction to what a graph database was. He went on to give existing examples of this within the realm of investigative journalism referencing the Panama Papers along with the more obvious use cases of real-time and triangle recommendations such as Google search and Linked-in.

Low Code

One of the most memorable talks was from Paulo Rosado from OutSystems who provide a low code platform for rapid development. He talked about how bots and other AI technology is helping us create software and ultimately replace hand-written code. AI is used for many things but he believes one of the most interesting and powerful application is its ability to help developers write code. With the increased pressure on developers to determine intent and provide a solution in a fraction of time that was once acceptable, OutSystems believe that with using the huge datasets available within code repositories, Machine Learning will be able to assist developers in doing their jobs.

There is a school of thought that worry this will replace the need for humans to write code and eliminate the need for what I have built my career on. Where does this leave us as software engineers? But maybe that’s it — we are engineers and not just developers and it will give us more room to be innovative and creative. He does emphasise, as did many of the speakers this year, that the bottleneck now not only within the IT industry but in all fields is the lack of technical talent which makes for a hugely important use case. It also keeps us in a job for a while yet!

There were so many more thought-provoking words spoken and the quality of the talks really stood out but it was easy to become nonchalant about who you were listening to. This brings me to the more hands-on part of the conference.

Workshops

As well as the hundreds of speakers at the conference which spanned over 4 pavilions and an arena that would dwarf Belfast’s SSE Arena, there was an opportunity to do multiple workshops with some of the big vendors (AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Google).

To note a few….

Understanding graph databases, run by Gabe Hollombe. In this 50minute session we discovered that graph databases are best used to store and retrieve highly connected data. The use cases included obvious applications such as social networking as well as life sciences and fraud detection.

Another session lead by Gabe that was pretty cool was Deep Learning Demystified where he was able to extend an existing object recognition model to identify himself and several other objects, train it and apply the results within the 50minute session.

Dennis Hills, also from AWS gave an introduction to ML/AI options for mobile devices. He showed 4 different ways in which ML can be used on a device and possible use cases where he delved into the AWS Rekognition API.

Start Ups

Something which is unique to other conferences I have attended is the huge focus on startups, there was some 1800 of these start-ups, exhibiting throughout the Pavilions and pitches were being made throughout the day which you could spectate while they try to sell their ideas.

Afterhours

In addition to the talks and workshops the Web Summit also organised social events across the city of Lisbon every evening once the conference ended. It started off with the Sunset Summit which was held just a short walk from the main arena. You enter this pretty nondescript building where you were welcomed by performing artists and art installations followed by local cuisine to try and buy. They stepped it up a notch from last year by creating a courtyard that resembled more of a music festival chill-out area rather than a stiff techy meeting room you would see at other conferences. If you weren’t too exhausted after the days adventures you were invited into the famous Pink Street bordering on the Barrio Alto neighbourhood for drinks and conversation.

This is a pretty intense 3 day event with opportunity to see so much in the technology realm — at some points it can become overwhelming and at times a sensory overload, but I think it is one of the most inspiring and motivating experiences anyone in the technology space could benefit from going to.

To read more about the conference you can visit the main Web Summit site where you can see this year’s speakers and schedule.