GHCI 2016 - a review

Conferences are always good to attend for many reasons like catching up with latest trends, what & where the industry is heading and of course goodies. Grace Hopper Conference 2016 was organized as a 3 day conference and is special for it had a theme of "Celebration" of women in computing which meant lot of technical tracks alongside motivational career track tailored for women. This is the first time I attended this 3-day conference. Being a family woman with 2 kids, I decided to attend the main 2 day event and skipped the first day event having some key note sessions. Nevertheless, I wanted to share my experiences and thoughts about this conference.

My inclination towards attending this conference was to understand the trend in Machine Learning and Data Science (ML & DS) and also in general how women are progressing in their technology career, the struggles & difficulties faced and how they circumvented them.

The 2nd day conference had following 4 tracks namely ML & DS, Open Source, Human Comuputer Interaction (HCI), Emerging Technology, of which I decided to focus on ML & DS.
The first presentation on "Data Science for Health Care" topic was about "Pneumonia detection using ML". It gave me a strikingly different perception about how ML is been used for pneumonia detection and early intervention. With the help of previous history of factors leading to pneumonia, doctors could now predict if a patient's symptoms could lead to pneumonia. The second presentation was also related to health care, where in the researcher deployed ML algorithms to understand bio-molecular interaction of a particular protein type. Though it was a bit difficult to follow, what made it interesting was, how she used SVM, Random Forest algorith,s on her dataset, undelining the fact that both could not extract much features and is not effective in prediction. I could learn, how to evaluate the applicability of a ML algorithm to any domain.

Followed this was the talk I was waiting for by our own Cisco Veteran Mr. Srikanth Narasimhan on how deep learning is applied to Business Applications. He shed light on how machine learning evolved over the decades starting with perceptrons and neural networks. However they had a limitation that those models cannot simalate new data from the learning and also could not scale.  Another main hindrance is the non availability of a large data set with labels to verify the output in real world.  This paved way to "Deep Belief Networks" which solved two significant problems seen in other methods, namely they could not infer information from the unobserved variables of dataset and could not generate new metadata from rich dataset. Unsupervised Machine Learning algorithms addressed these problems and Srikanth wonderfully linked this evolution history to the business application Diet Guru and explained how his team deployed RBM - an unsupervised machine learning algorithm. He stated how the next gen networks would infer, interpret and predict using such ML algorithms. Next came IBM's "Whatson" presentation - a ML based IoT platform with rich API's that can be customized to any domain like cancer research.

With more of DS & ML since morning, I thought of lending my ears towards Virtual Reality. Thanks for the decision for it turned out to be my best presentation in the conference. A team from Microsoft presented their Hololens product (similar to Google glass) and explained how its been used in treating person affected with autism spectrum. Besides the cause where its deployed, I was impressed by the way she presented the Hololens App platform, its simplicity and the need of apps to transform the lives of autism affected people. Though the underlying intention could be to sell their Hololens product and vouch on app developers, the manner in which it was put forth made the presentation stand out.

Following this was the workshop on "R & Python" in Predictive modelling. The handson session on R language given by Maheshwari from Cisco was very good, that I could grasp it instantly. Kudos to their efforts in sharing the preparatory slides beforehand which made me hit the ground running. Being already did Python and Scikit programing found the workshop to reinforce my learning. In crux, I understood R technically and also learnt that I need to open up, structure my thoughts and share the knowledge I have acquired in this domain.

Post Lunch sessions were from Flipkart and Amazon on how they are solving online retailer problems using ML. Some of them are identifying anomalous/rogue users, reviews & rating. It was interesting to know how Amazon benefited by using visual deep learning in delivering features like "Similar products/designs, recently bought ones" etc. The day however ended with an okayish session on "The art of secure coding". Perhaps after securing Cisco's Security Ninja belt, I might have found the session too naive.

The conference on third day had sessions on Career Mastery, Entrepreneurship, Management excellence, etc. I peeped into one of the sessions and found it to be all "known" stuff. These were the things which are perceived as "known" but hard to implement. I was looking for more practical ways to implement which I could not see them delivered on the sessions. So I decided to visit the company booths and demos, get to know their work and try my hand getting goodies. Below are the interesting updates from various companies.

1. GE Health care - It was exciting to know about Predix - The Industrial IoT platform which offers Data Science Analytics using cloud deployed machine learning algorithms. They claimed that this was already been deployed and used in big industries like Aerospace, Medical, Wind Power. Being inquisitive to know more, I had a 1-1 discussion and came to know how they developed Predix and their strategy for Go-To-Market. The platform is been deployed - Yes, however, it was deployed on the domains, where they own the assets. It is offered as Platform-as-a-Service (Paas) thereby incur recurring revenues. So they own both the risk and growth of the Predix, while slowly trying to acquire external customers. Very good strategy for innovation deployment indeed. (https://www.predix.io/)

2. Adobe - Adobe had a demo of their latest FREE products Photoshop Fix, Adobe Draw. Very easy to use and good to know to use it for creating my posters. (www.adobe.com/in/products/fix.html)

3. Alexa from Amazon - Alexa is a voice controlled IoT product from Amazon, something similar to Siri from Apple, Cortona from Microsoft. However, Alexa is a bit more intelligent that it could process complex commands from a person and act based on them. It can be integrated with other home appliances and also in industrial automation. Have to watch how this IoT product is evolving in the market. (https://developer.amazon.com/alexa)

4. Arm educational kit - Arm's educational wing demonstrated a ARM Cortex processor built by ST Micro which can be used as Robot. Their main aim is to reach to more university students by donating these products and give them their development environment to create products using ARM. I could infer that they want to get more students' mind share for ARM processor technical proficiency and also get their involvement in developing innovative products.

5. GE portable scanning machine - This is a path breaking device from GE health care which is a portable Ultrasound scanner device that can be taken to remote villages to perform abdominal scan, pregnancy scan tests etc. It would be a saviour to people living in remote areas. 

6. Microsoft bot - Got to know how Microsoft's bot framework operate and how easy it is to deploy bot for websites having social media plugins from various social media channels like Twitter, Skype etc. (https://dev.botframework.com/)

7. Cisco's Next Gen Network protection firewall - Last but not the least, paid a visit to Cisco's demo about next gen network protection. They demonstrated two wonderful demos about how our products safeguard the network threats. I was amazed to see Stealthwatch product (http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/stealthwatch/index.html)  about the network anomaly detection using Machine Learning. It's exactly the similar idea which we presented in one of our Hackathon and later wanted to build on that. I wish I could spend more time on the Machine Learning technology on an innovative product that come under Cisco's market landscape.

Thanks to Cisco for giving me this opportunity to attend GHCI'2016
Fingers Crossed and Brains ticking - to present some cool ML product next time in GHCI?!

Learning is always a pleasure - this time car driving

Few years back, I was not interested and also reluctant to drive a car myself. As with every other thing in our lives, there was a change in my attitude towards car driving. Recently, I thought I have to learn car driving for very many reasons like to be capable of driving car during emergency situations, to be a good grandma cruising around the city with grandchildren in car (well, futuristic thinking that in future, car driving becomes indispensable like two wheeler now).
Okay, jokes behind, I thought it is high time to learn a new skill especially car driving which needs confidence and courage to maneouvre in a city like Chennai. So I decided to join car driving school during my maternity break. Thanks to my mother in law who encouraged me to learn and told she did not get those opportunities then.
So finally with a month's time frame I took car driving lessons and also got driver's license. The test for license was easy - just we need to start the car, pace it down slowly to pause and start again without stopping it. I thought how can they determine driver's capability with this simple test. Indeed it is a simple test, however, after cruising around the Chennai city, I could completely understand how the test is evaluating us if we are ready to really drive in the congested roads of Chennai.

So now that I have my driver's license am I courageous enough to start driving on my own? No, obviously not and that is because of the sheer traffic and the unpredictable circumstances that are happening on the road. Without confidence on us that we could handle these unpredictable circumstances (for example, while driving on a side a bike or a person from another side appears all of a sudden and goes in the wrong direction), I strongly recommend not to drive car. Nevertheless, confidence comes from practice, but practicing alone in this case is risky. So having a good car driver as my husband, I had to look up to him to guide me in driving.

I used to hear from some doctors, that they may not be able to do surgery for their own family members because of emotional attachment. Also, I have heard that astrologers would not prefer looking into his children's horoscope because emotional bonding may conceal foreseeing the negative things that are going to happen. On the same lines, I can say, having my husband as a guide to car driving comes with a coin having two sides. He knows your strength, weakness and can guide you appropriately. However, with personal attachment, he may want to prevent accidents, damage to car etc and therefore may not give you leeway to attempt car driving on own.
My husband though guided me well in handling many situations, his sudden out pour during my small mistakes made me more tensed and gets my brain blanked out. One such was in a signal that even after many attempts I could not start our car and get it moving (now remembering the simple test during driver's license!), his repeated high tone instructions made my brain blank and we had to swap seats. I became embarrassed and resolved to learn driving well and drive confidently.

Without time & focus, learning a new thing and especially mastering it may not be possible. So I decided to take 20 days off from my work (before I would join new company) and  learn car driving to the level I can drive it on my own. Found a good driving instructor who can guide and teach me in our own car. His first few words are "When I am driving, I should not damage others/properties even though they are wrong. However, I should also be assertive and display confidence." So with that thought instilled in my mind and the instructor's able guidance get me going. Within few days, I got confidence on myself and could also predict which places are prone to violation of rules. Therefore one fine day, when my instructor could not come for the class, I thought its time for me to venture out. I did take the route which I was familiar with, and could drive back home safely, albeit the car did stop at some places. But I gathered courage now on how to handle it. The moment, I reached safely, I called to my husband and asked "Do you know what I just did?", to my pleasant surprise he replied, "You drove on your own, right?". Thanks to the instructor.

After this training and venturing out on my own, my husband provided his consent to start doing the driving on my own and these days I drive to work and other places. More than my learning of car driving, I would like to share the most important highlight of what I liked during my driving, which is

Being on car, I stop and stop others to give way

         * The thanks sign shown by an auto driver with many school children on his auto, when I    slowed down my car and gave him the way to cross
         * A smiley thanks displayed by a husband who was waiting to cross the road with his wife        having injured and stitched legs, when I stopped on the main road and gave them the time to cross.
         * I think I have the power now to stop not only my car, but also the vehicles behind me, to give  time and way for others. :)

As always, it is indeed a pleasant journey and experience while you attempt to do some new learning. Have to think what I would like to learn next from my long list of "To Learn"

PS: Btw, I had to say that the 20 days off I took from joining new job, gave me an opportunity to join another big company. God's grace always showers best.