Andrew Blance

Is there something you want to do? Something bold, exciting, new? Maybe you worry your competitors are zooming ahead, and you are falling behind. Do you long for everyone around you to be brave, but you can't seem to take them on that journey? It can be frustrating when your idea for that AI model/ Data Lakehouse/ IoT system is amazing, but you still can never get it deployed. Let's change that. People find big ideas scary, but the truth is they don't need to be. At the root of this is an almost universal problem - exciting technology exists out there, but how do you successfully link that to the business challenges you face? This talk is not a technical one, but it will enable you to do the technical work you think your business should be doing. Whether it's changing your CI/CD pipeline, or using AI to automate everything everywhere all at once, there is always a small step you can take to make this happen. Let's take a look at how to sidestep your Maturity Model and actually get something done. This talk gives you three tools to help you pitch your ideas to your Boss, the Board, and the CEO that will help them become a reality.

As new technologies develop, the expectations put upon them become more and more inflated. Nevertheless, this cannot last forever, and as these unrealistic promises reveal themselves as false, popular opinion nose-dives into disillusionment. This talk is about ChatGPT, the extremely popular chatbot from OpenAI. ChatGPT has been promised to revolutionise the world. Whether it is coding, education, art or writing, nothing is apparently safe from its reach. However, pragmatic reality will be different. Looking at history, we can see the pattern of extreme overhype leading to disappointed realism repeating itself. Even in the 1960s, they were people who believed chatbots were sentient! In this talk, we will take a realistic and grounded look at its capabilities, examining why it can be dangerous to hype software beyond its capabilities. Primarily, we will discuss the hype cycle all emerging technologies go through and how to set your expectations to avoid disappointment!

Going from an machine learning model trained on your laptop in a notebook called “trainmodelV1Final_FINAL (1).ipynb” to a system ready to deploy is difficult. However, MLOps (a set of principles to prepare your model for prime time) is here to help! This talk is an introduction to all the...