NASSCOM Annual Technology Conference

Cynthia is a recipient of the CIO 100 Award in 2017 for Adobe IT’s innovative ways to deliver business value and was named among the top Women of Influence in 2016 by Silicon Valley Business Journal, and was recognized as one of Huffington Post’s Top 100 Most Social CIOs in 2015 and 2016.

Cynthia will share her views on ‘Customer & Employee Experience Journey’ and how this can be driven using technologies like AI/ML

Registration for Masterclass 1 & Masterclass 2

Workshop on Blockchain will give the audience an understanding of the concepts of Blockchain, how is it implemented in one of the popular Blockchain platforms, the Hyperledger Fabric. Session will continue to introduce the IBM Blockchain platform, an implementation of Hyperledger Fabric on the IBM cloud and show how to create and deploy an application using the Blockchain platform. By the end of the workshop, the attendees should have gained an understanding of what Blockchain is and how its' value can be leveraged in solutions, understood how the technology is implemented in Hyperledger and how to create an application using the Blockchain platform on IBM Cloud.
Agenda
TopicTimeWelcome by Sunil Goyal, COO Sopra Steria and Chair NRC Noida Council 9:00 – 9:30Introduction to Blockchain9: 30 -10:00Implementations of Blockchain - Hyperledger10:00 – 10:45IBM Blockchain Platform - Introduction10:45- 11: 15Simple Blockchain application on IBP11:15- 12:00Conclusion12:00- 12:15

Pre requisites:

• Participants must bring a laptop/chrome book to the event to work on the hands-on content.
• All participants must have an AWS account with access to all AI services including Sagemaker and dependencies with them.
• The AWS account should not be in suspension or blocked as this will not enable them to run services.

Software has traditionally not been able to SEE, HEAR or TALK, I can process only data. With the advent of AI and ML it is now possible to introduce complex capability where software can see and recognize objects, faces and things in pictures, understand text in blobs, generate speech and interact with humans naturally. In this workshop, we will introduce the participants to using the various capabilities in the AI/ML stack of AWS and how to build real world applications that are smart and can create engaging user experiences. This is a hands on workshop, though a lot of code will be pre-baked and given, the participants will be expected to write some code on their own. Familiarity on using Python programming language, processing data in text files, reading and writing json from web services would be expected.
Agenda
TimeTopic09:00 - 9:30Welcome by Sunil Goyal, COO Sopra Steria and Chair NRC Noida Council09.30 – 10.00Introduction to the AI/ML Services on Amazon Web Services10.00 – 10.15Lab 1: Rekognition Pictures – object detection in pictures10.15 – 10.30Lab 2: Rekognition Video – object and activity detection from video10.30 – 10.45Lab 3: Polly English and Hindi – speech generation10.45 – 11.00Lab 4: Advanced Polly controls in SSML – controlling aspects of speech11.00 – 11.15<Break>11.15 – 11.30Quick Walk through of Translate, Comprehend11.30 – 12.30Lab 5: Walk through with Amazon Sagemaker – build your own model

Portfolio optimization is the process of selecting the best portfolio and allocating ideal weights to every stock in a Portfolio. The objective typically maximizes expected return, and minimizes risk. One of the basic concepts of finance is the risk-return tradeoff. We will implement this using Machine Learning models and the approach of Markowitz’s Modern Portfolio Theory, which at the core of Portfolio Management Industry.
Deep Learning using TensorFlow is gaining lot of momentum over last couple of years. TensorFlow is an open source software library for high performance numerical computation. Originally developed by researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team within Google’s AI organization, it comes with strong support for machine learning and deep learning.
Stock Price prediction using Deep Learning models supported by the TensorFlow include Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long short-term memory (LSTM). Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks are special kind of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that are capable of learning long-term dependencies. LSTM network typically consists of memory blocks, referred to as cells, connected through layers.
Agenda
TimeTopic09:00 am – 9:30 amWelcome by Sunil Goyal, COO Sopra Steria and Chair NRC Noida Council09:30 am – 10:00 amIntroduction to Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT)10:00 am – 10:45 amAI and ML Implementation of MPT and Predicting three Portfolio Optimization Strategies use 5 BSE Stocks portfolio.10:45 am to 11:30 amDeep Learning Introduction using TensorFlow and Recurrent Neural Network11:30 am to 12:30 pmStock Price Prediction using TensorFlow (Keras) and Long Short Term Memory

Techquest 18 Registration

Welcome to TechQuest 2018
We at Quiz’D are some curious enthusiasts who ventured into this journey to engage our minds and incite them to ask the right questions. We are in no way more knowledgeable or accomplished than our amazing audience today, however for the exciting competition we are about to have ahead, we welcome you aboard.
Format of the Quiz
 
Preliminary Round – Level 1 : A series of questions on the themes of NATC namely, Intelligent Automation, Immersive Experience, Architecture, Block chain and Platforms will be thrown at you one at a time, questions will appear on the screen as well as will be read it out by the Quiz Master
A correct answer will fetch you 2 Points
A wrong answer will deduct -1 Point (Negative)
If your team wishes to answer, you write down the Answer in Block Letters on your writing Pad and raise your Team Placard immediately for the nearest TechQuest volunteer to identify your team number and reach out to you.
Your rank in the leaderboard will reflect the total points you have scored throughout the Prelims.
Preliminary Round – Level 2 : Similar format of questions as in round 1, however expect the intensity to be more tough and tricky. You would also be looking at a major reshuffle to the race in the leaderboard because the scoring pattern is a bit of a gamble here.
A correct answer will fetch you 6 Points
A wrong answer will deduct -2 Point (Negative)
It is a make or break round for the subsequent final round as only the Top 6 teams in the Leaderboard make it to the Final Rounds.

• Final Round – Level 3 : Teams reaching the finals are in for some serious business. However if you haven’t made it to the Finals, you have got a chance to win some grand prizes on exclusive audience questions. For every audience question correctly answered, you win Rs. 2500 Gift Vouchers. So play along and if the lady luck finds you, expect to be handsomely rewarded.

For the Top 6 Finalists, the scores have been reset. What is to follow are 4 exciting rounds to decide the ultimate champions of TechQuest 2018. They are:
 
Round 1
The Everyday Round (General Round)
Questions will be asked to each team by turn and Incorrect or No Answer will result the question to be passed. Teams to score
+30 Points on Direct Correct Answer
+10 Points on Pass Correct Answer 
0 Points on Incorrect or No Answer


Round 2
The Differential Round
Questions will be thrown at all teams. And all 6 teams need to pounce on the answer. No answers on the mic for this one, but you have to write it on the pad in front of you.  Every Question is of 60 Points each and the points will be divided amongst the teams giving the correct answer




No of Teams Answered Correctly


Score
6 Teams
5 Teams
4 Teams
3 Teams
2 Teams
1 Team
10 Points Each
12 Points Each
15 Points Each
20 Points Each
30 Points Each
60 Points Each


This is also a Knockout Round, which means the last 2 teams get eliminated and the top 4 teams move on to Round 3.


Round 3
The Gamble Round
This round gives a chance to settle some old records.
Here each team on its own turn, would choose as to which of the other 3 teams the question should be thrown at.
In-case the target team is able to answer the challenge correctly then
Target Team is awarded +40 Points 
Challenger Team is deducted -10 Points. 
However, in the case the Target Team gets it wrong
Target team penalized with -10 Points
Question is back to the Challenger Team and they get a chance to answer it.
Correct fetches them +40 Points
Incorrect penalizes them with -10 Points


Each team gets 3 Questions to throw at each of the 3 Teams. 
A challenge direction cannot be repeated (For eg.  if A has asked a question to B, then the next question can be directed to only C or D and not B anymore)
This is also a Knockout Round, which means the last 2 teams get eliminated and the top 2 teams move on to Round 4.
Round 4
The Tech Tac Toe Round
This is a duel round between the best two teams of TechQuest 2018.
Rules and Format are to be revealed on the stage.
You would have to hold out till this moment to watch the nail biting finish.
The Winner takes it all.


Audience Questions
Between each of the 4 rounds we have a total of 8 Audience Questions which are 2500/- each so there are some serious incentives to stay back.


Rules and Regulations – TechQuest 2018

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Answer to be written in Block Letters on your Writing Pad and Team Placard raised immediately.
Please note that the first answer written on your pad will be considered as final.
Any crosscutting or overwriting will be treated as a wrong answer.
Answer on the mic should be the same, as what you have written.
Any mismatch will also be dealt with negative marks.
Your rank in the leaderboard will reflect the total points you have scored throughout the Prelims.
Any unfair means such as using electronic devices to answer a question will result in disqualification of the team from the competition.
Teams to report exactly at the designated time after the tea break. Teams delayed will not be allowed to sit for Prelims-2
Any Prompting or Answering out of turn will be dealt with warning followed by disqualification of that team from the competition.
Each Round of the Finals will have a separate format so hear them out attentively.
Discussion or Conversations between any two teams is not permissible without the consent of the organizing committee.
The decision of the Quizmaster is the final decision and will abide to all issues.
In-case of any further queries, please reach out to the nearest TechQuest Volunteer.
Hope to learn from you all as well.


Happy Quizzing!

AI and Blockchain are both transformative technologies that are transforming every industry and profession in a fundamental way. While AI, using data as a fuel, is transforming enterprise decision making, blockchain is enabling business networks with trusted data sharing and trusted transactions. IN this session, using examples from supply chain networks, we will look at what is happening at the intersection of these technologies and the type of new innovation possibilities that are opening up when we begin to marry these technologies together.

The need for an AI Platform to meet rising user expectations in their digitally connected lifestyle. Voice, Vision & Data Intelligence as key components of an AI Platform used to create new experiences & value for users. Typical technology used to build each of these components. Current industry challenges in each area. Introduction to Bixby AI Platform (Voice, Vision & Home) from Samsung.

With artificial intelligence and machine learning coming to mainstream business, it is important for organizations to fundamentally rethink how to architect and evolve systems for the future. Big data, ML and superior computing power is here to stay. Systems no more need be built as transactional or analytical systems but re-imagined as "Intelligent/cognitive" systems. The integration of AI methods and techniques with mature conventional software engineering remains difficult and poses both conceptual and implementation problems. It is challenging to evolve from a legacy architecture or build ground up , intelligent systems of the future.
In this talk, Ajit will share some of the learnings he has had over the past years in attempting to build AI solutions at scale. He will talk about approaches he has taken across Product Design, Architecture, Engineering design, Data engineering, Data Sciences and Devops to start building systems with data and AI at its core. The talk will cover a reference architecture that is currently being used at mfine to build a multi-agent intelligent systems for primary healthcare. Irrespective of where you are in the journey of your organization, you should be able to apply some of these approaches to your own stacks

Software Industry has been going thru a digital transformation with massive focus on automation using machine learning and artificial intelligence. Such transformation are always a challenge but a bigger opportunity at the same time. As the Indian software industry moves from labor arbitrage to establish itself as Technology innovator and an innovation hub, Enterprises in India are either lagging behind their western counterparts or are relying on the technology backed innovation from either their parent company or third party providers in US/Europe. With the current government focus on Make/Design in India and the need for enterprises digitally transform, there is a need to connect the dot between Indian Tech industry with the Indian Enterprises to innovate for India and ensure both the Indian Enterprises and Software industry grows. All the stake holders including Enterprises, Software R&D companies, including Industry bodies like NASSCOM need to come together to provide an enabling platform to ensure that this digital transformation is path changing opportunity for the Indian Ecosystem.
This panel discussion shall bring on one side Technology Provider like Hughes Systique an Engineering R&D organisation, Panasonic Energy an Indian Enterprise which is the User Organisation on the other side and NASSCOM the Industry body to discuss the need for such an ecosystem and their experience, learning from a live case study where all the three parties are working together to come out with next generation Smart Energy system for telcos, smart vehicles etc. This will have relevance for any User industry which needs to digitally transform using technologies like AI/ML, Advanced Analytics, Blockchain etc.
The panellists are Pradeep Kirnapure VP of Technology at HSC, Atul Arya Head of Energy Systems Division at Panasonic. The discussion will be moderated by Sanjeev Malhotra CEO CoE DSAI & IoT NASSCOM.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) has been there for quite some time, especially the basic and templated solutions. The advanced part of NLG where machines could express themselves by producing meaningful interpretations of structured and unstructured data has gained traction and adoption only in recent years.
This session plans to demystify NLG putting it in the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computational Linguistics and the basic semantic architecture. Few use cases across Dialog systems, Contextual narratives, Summaries, and long text generation will be highlighted. The session will then deep dive into implementing Artificial Neural Network for NLG, especially Sequence to Sequence models.

Intelligence and robotic automation working in perfect harmony, leading to breakthrough efficiency, unprecedented agility and savings like never seen before. Is it just a pipe dream? Join this session with Nitin Seth, CEO Incedo to delve deeper into the boon and bane of intelligent automation. AI and automation are hardly new, what is different this time around that is making practical applications of these technologies possible? Understand real-life use cases on how organizations are putting intelligent automation to use and getting the most out of their investments. Learn how to become a master of your RPA and AI strategy by avoiding some common pitfalls. Lastly, and very importantly, Nitin shares implementation best practices, garnered from years of working with Fortune 100 companies.

• Emergence of RPA – RPA as contrasted with conventional automation with the need to deal with inefficiencies existing within conventional automation systems that limits business efficiencies
• RPA as an enabler of IT systems – How RPA supports the existing IT systems to making the overall Process flexible
• Basic Architecture of an RPA platform
• How is RPA platform positioned with the IT interface and the human interface
• What are basic features creating a distinction for RPA platforms compared to automation within IT systems
• The forms of coding using RPA platforms – Editors and Recorders with brief highlights on the actions and commands available
• Best practices suggested by RPA vendors
• Installation Modes and Services
• Standalone mode of installation and Distributed mode of installation
• Installation – On Premise, Cloud, On Premise and Bot -As- A- Service
• Key features of determining whether RPA will be an enabler
• How to identify potential processes candidates for RPA
• Determining the relevance of RPA in a project – qualifier questions
• Safety and Security with RPA
• Basic Security Features – TLS 1.2, SHA -256, SAML 2.0,AES, HMAC encryption
• Dealing with data at rest, data in use and data in transit
• Scalability and Flexibility of an IT project with RPA – talking about how RPA can work with different approach over different technology landscapes and the ease of adding components to scale up the RPA platform
• Future of RPA – Collaboration of technologies like AI, Analytics and BPM is the future of RPA as it modelled to take care of non-abstractions tasks. Technology is evolving to tackle abstraction hence we need to see how RPA fits in and remains relevant to hold onto routine , rule based tasks.

Badrish Agarwal will elaborate on the need for building a next generation personalized and immersive learning platform and how Edureka is doing it though intelligent automation. He will walk the audience through some of the key architecture choices which were made in this project while keeping users and other non-tech teams as centre of focus.

What problem/issue we are planning to address in this talk:
1. How to atomically publish events whenever the state changes?
2. How to implement queries in a microservice architecture?
Why is this a problem in microservice architecture?
- Since different services have different databases, the application cannot just use a local ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transaction to handle data consistency across services. To be reliable, the services must atomically publish events whenever their state changes.
- Microservice architecture is on "one database per service" pattern; as a result, it is no longer straightforward to implement queries that join data from multiple services
Description:
Microservice architecture has given birth to many new architectural patterns such as saga pattern, event sourcing pattern, CQRS ( (Command Query Responsibility Segregation), one database per service pattern and more. In this talk, we plan to discuss how Event Sourcing & CQRS patterns can be implemented to manage data, transaction and queries. The talk is outlined to solve the architectural obstacles noted above with an example and with a hands-on demo.
Outline of the talk:
- Introduction to microservice architecture and patterns
- Why build event-driven microservice architectures?
- Introduction to event sourcing
- Designing microservice with event sourcing
- Implementing queries (CQRS) with event sourcing
- Demo (Event Sourcing/CQRS with an example)

Breaking the Ivory Tower - Continuous architecture 
Agility is probably the most common word used in todays technology landscape and is accompanied by practices like continuous integration, continuous delivery & continuous deployment. What about continuous, agile, evolutionary, emergent architecture? With technology advancements into XaaS (everything as a service) as one of the evolving factor there lies an opportunity to break the ivory tower architect outlook and mindset. Here’ s a real experience for a product in which AWS cloud boundaries were tested starting from zero in less than 9 months, while continuously evolving architecture and keeping it testable. Technology besides, there is a need to start delivering business values quickly and changing the mindset by challenging the norm. Looking forward to share my experiences on how we approached this for Global Fidelity Wealth Experts program.

Digital advertising is powering unique experiences for consumers and brands alike through interactive ads, enhanced targeting and real-time optimisations. At the same time, the ecosystem is also experiencing trust related issues such as ad fraud, violation of user privacy and peddling of user data. This is resulting in erosion of value across the supply chain, revenue losses to content and service providers, decreasing RoI to advertisers and most of all - watering down of the value of data.
Blockchain, as a decentralized, tamper-proof registry of assets, when combined with other technologies such as encryption and DAPP, can become key to building trust in the digital advertising ecosystem. The proposed talk will cover core elements of this Blockchain based trust framework (A Distributed Advertising Platform - ADAPT) such as architecture of distributed ledgers - public and private, interactions between various entities and incentive structure for all 3 key parties - Advertisers, Publishers & Users - to drive adoption.

GDPR and Blockchain could seem like opposite philosophies on paper, however blockchain has become one of the best privacy enablement tool. In this talk we will dive deep into GDPR and what it means as well as blockchain and how it is impacted, Alexandre will share best practices from the industry on GDPR compliant solutions. He will also explain how blockchain based identity management (Self-sovereign Identity) is emerging as one of blockchain’s killer apps.

Cloud is a reality for enterprises and most enterprises are in some stage of cloud adoption. Once they've moved to the cloud, the next big challenge for enterprises is to operate securely. Moving to cloud transforms traditional security challenges and also presents new ones. Cloud platforms provide innovative tools that can be used to maintain an effective security posture and operational control, while allowing enterprises to utilize the promised flexibility of the cloud, and to respond to business needs.
Practical cloud security involves codification and enforcement of organizational security policies. This can be achieved by automation driven continuous monitoring, detection, alerting and remediation of security vulnerabilities.
In this talk, we talk about some of the common vulnerabilities, their impact in a cloud landscape. We also talk about cloud tools and best practices that can be used to prevent them, and how automation can help early detection and remediation of any vulnerabilities.

he success of Alpha-Go has raised hope that we can some time on future build algorithms which can train themselves given enough data and / or simulation environment. Currently, most algorithms have hyper parameters which cannot be trained by algorithms but those values have to be provided by human. Also the data has to be supplied in right format which typically requires lot of data aggregation steps before it can be fed to algorithm. These have been efforts in past to reduce human dependence but it is now going to another level with model being able to train themselves with almost the raw data. This will lead to use cases where problem was previously too complex to solve or algorithms train by playing against themselves or models being able to generate brand new content (art work, portraits) without human beings having to explicitly program them. 

• Introduction to Immersive Computing (5 mins) 
  • Introduce the concept of 'immersion' and 'presence' and why they matter
  • The story of the arc of the human computer interface
  • Where do AR and VR sit on this arc and why we at Google believe it is an inevitable next step
• Immersive Media (5 - 6 mins)
  • VR and its manifestations in terms of consumption formats and devices
  • The Google stack for production
  • Examples & creative explorations
• AR (5 - 6 mins)
  • Why AR marks the next big shift in mobile computing
  • Google's SDK for AR = ARCore and how it enables
    • Motion Tracking
    • Light estimation
    • Environment understanding
      • Which verticals (and what apps) are using these capabilities to solve for fun & utility
      • Google's investments across the stack for AR
• Computer Vision (5-6 Min)
  • How Vision is going to be next natural interface with computing
  • Google Lens and how it seeks to unlock these possibilities
  • Examples
  • Google's investments across the stack to enable Computer Vision use cases
• Conclusion (3 Mins) 

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a) The tremendous opportunity AI has to bring about fundamental disruption in Education, Heathcare, and Agriculture in India. 
(b) The evolution in our AI thinking and data science skilling needed to realize this transformation, and 
 (c) Key challenges we need to overcome together to reimagine an new India with AI.