AI, Machine Learning & Smart Technologies Software Development Conference.
The best event to learn new development skills, advance your career and make new human connections.
Keynote Speakers
Yordanka Fandakova
Mayor of Sofia
Yordanka Fandakova
Yordanka Fandakova is Mayor of Sofia since 2009.
Her previous positions include elected Member of Parliament in 2009, Minister of Education, Youth and Science of the Republic of Bulgaria in 2009, Sofia Deputy Mayor for Culture, education and Sports in 2007-2009. Prior to that she gained rich 20-year experience in the area of education as a teacher and as a school principle of Vladislav Gramatik Secondary Comprehensive School with Foreign Language Teaching in Sofia.
Mrs. Fandakova holds MA in Russian Philology from Sofia University and Pushkin Institute in Moscow. She has acquired vast additional qualifications in the spheres of management of education, business administration, political management. She speaks Russian and English.
Mrs. Fandakova’s priorities and achievements during her mandates as Mayor of Sofia include fast development of city infrastructure, free and fast internet coverage in public spaces, environment, education, better conditions for doing business in Sofia. During her term in office Sofia became one of the 30 fastest developing cities in the world and the European capital city with the biggest GDP growth in the last 10 years.
Iva Abadjieva
CEO Innovation Center Inc.
Iva Abadjieva
Ivan Georgiev
Manager of Kaufland Service IT Hub Kaufland Service IT Hub
Ivan Georgiev
Ivan Georgiev is the Manager of Kaufland Service IT Hub since its opening in 2016. The Hub is part of the Schwarz group which operates in 29 countries, on three continents and has more than 400 000 employees worldwide. The most famous brands gathered under its hat are Kaufland, Lidl & GreenCycle. The company here in Bulgaria is responsible for the operations of more than 11 000 stores. Its main strengths lie in Development, Infrastructure and Business & Application Support. The IT Hub started with 9 people and under Ivan’s leadership set up a course for steady growth. Not just in numbers but also in responsibilities. The company now has more than a 150 specialists and plans to expand even further.
Ivan comes with more than 16 years of experience in the field of IT. His background is one of a SAP Consultant but his strength lies in management as he has been dedicated to it for the last 12 years at least. He is most passionate about building sustainable teams and working on projects which span between countries. In the context of the Bulgarian IT market he works for investing in young professionals and helping Bulgarian specialists return back to their home country. For the company is a founder of the first internship program with high-school students from technical schools and is about to launch an internal academy in OOP.
With his strong management and leading example Ivan Georgiev has set the foundations of Kaufland Service, defined its corporate strategy and managed operations. He has made it into a recognizable company which can only be trusted and respected.
Dave Morris
Delivery Director and Head of Engineering REWE Digital
Dave Morris
Dave Morris is the Delivery Director and Head of Engineering for REWE Digital, a provider of online strategy and execution for the REWE Group – a $60B German retail and tourism group that includes the REWE supermarket chain which has more than 15,000 stores and 360,000 employees worldwide.
Under Dave’s leadership, REWE Digital is responsible for the digitalization of the food retail sector in Germany; ensuring that REWE customers are given the opportunity to order food online which is then delivered, fresh and cooled, to their doorsteps at their desired time.
Before joining REWE Digital, Dave was IT Engineering Director for Travis Perkins – the UK’s largest builder’s supply retailer where he led multiple digital transformation projects. Dave also led a 250+ person team in a multi-million dollar e:commerce platform rollout as Delivery Director at Tesco.
Dimitar Kostov
R&D Director VMware
Dimitar Kostov
Dimitar started his career in the IT industry over 25 years ago, while studying at the Sofia University.
Today Dimitar is a R&D Director at VMware, engaged in starting new products, building product organizations and taking part in the strategic planning of product families.
His Cloud Foundation team is delivering the easiest way to deploy and operate Kubernetes-based application runtime infrastructures. In his free time, Dimitar is an IoT evangelist.
Prior to VMware, he co-founded, led and held leadership positions in a number of high-tech companies, such as Methodia, SAP, Sciant.
Dimitar is a strong believer in that advanced technologies will continue to make the world a better place.
Dr. Pavlin Dobrev
Bosch Software Innovations
Dr. Pavlin Dobrev
Dr. Pavlin Dobrev is a Research and Development Manager at Bosch Software Innovations. The company owned by Bosch is focused on developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT). He is charge for the Quality Management of the Bosch IoT Suite, the entire support of ISO 9001, ISO 20000 and ISO 27001 at Bosch Software Innovations, as well as various research and customer projects.
Dr. Dobrev has more than two decades of experience with IoT including latest Java technologies, as well as in OSGi and embedded systems. He is an active participant in the OSGi Alliance, Java Community Process and other technical standards groups. He is a member of the Eclipse Foundation and participates in the development of the Eclipse IDE as a committer in the Equinox project.
Pavlin Dobrev has a PhD in Computer Systems in the area of Knowledge Management from the Institute for Parallel Processing, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and holds an MsC in Computer Science from the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University. He has written many scientific and technical publications and participated as speaker in prestigious international conferences.
Prototyping platforms for any IoT use case
Internet of Things is becoming the heart of more and more projects. Each IoT project starts with a PoC prototype. This workshop will walk you through what a prototyping platform is and how it impacts the development of a project. Using the Bosch XDK, we will go through what such a board offers as sensors, connectivity, functionality and extensions and interesting examples from the real world. Bosch and Zuhlke developed the platform to encourage community development and open source coding thus we will see some live coding on the stop.
Internet of Connected Everything
Connectivity is transforming all kind of domains – not just smart homes but also industry, buildings, agriculture and mobility. IoT has finally reached the corporate sector and is now being increasingly commercialized. As predicted Bosch alone already has more than 50 million of connected devices! . In 2025 all our products either possess intelligence themselves, or AI will have played a key role in their creation. In their keynote address, Dr. Pavlin Dobrev and Kai Hackbarth traces Bosch’s evolution to an IoT company. We will dive into the reference architecture for IoT domains like connected building, retail, smart architecture. For Bosch, Things are the most essential part in IoT. We design them to the requirements of IoT: Aware, Autonomous and Actionable.
Key findings:
- Bosch transformation from a traditional manufacturer to an IoT and high-tech company: Challenge accepted
- Innovation is part of our DNA
- Bosch embraces sustainability: climate neutrality worldwide by 2020 and new solutions for better air in cities
- Nobody can do IoT alone: IoT platforms, software, and developers
- The impact of open source and agile organization
Stoyan Rakadjiyski
Manager applications development and services for Bulgaria DXC Technology
Stoyan Rakadjiyski
Stoyan Rakadjiyski is manager applications development and services for Bulgaria in DXC Technology. He holds a Master of Science degree in computer science from Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” and started his career in IT 24 years ago.
His team in DXC runs projects on latest technologies in Java, .Net and C++ for DXC customers, which are global leaders in their business domains such as Banking, Insurance, Transport, Health cate, Engineering software and others. The team is focused on getting deep knowledge in how the customers work and to deliver them innovation through adoption of next generation IT solutions.
AI&Smart Tech Speakers
Martin Tsarev
Zühlke Engineering
Martin Tsarev
Martin is a graduate in Computer Science from the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. He has been working in Germany as an embedded software engineer and has been developing mainly safety-critical low-level software in C/C++ and IoT systems. Martin is currently leading enterprise software projects at Zuhlke Engineering Bulgaria.
Prototyping platforms for any IoT use case
Internet of Things is becoming the heart of more and more projects. Each IoT project starts with a PoC prototype. This workshop will walk you through what a prototyping platform is and how it impacts the development of a project. Using the Bosch XDK, we will go through what such a board offers as sensors, connectivity, functionality and extensions and interesting examples from the real world. Bosch and Zuhlke developed the platform to encourage community development and open source coding thus we will see some live coding on the stop.
Mark Stephen Meadows
Botanic Technologies, Inc
Mark Stephen Meadows
Meadows is an American author, inventor, artist and entrepreneur. With 18 years in AI, 22 in VR, and 7 years in blockchain he has designed and developed AI applications at some of the world’s top research labs (Xerox-PARC, SRI, Waag, and others). He has worked as a government-level consultant in both hemispheres, is the author of a half-dozen patents, and has written four books that examine technology and their social consequences. As founder / CEO of Botanic.io and co-founder / Trustee of SeedToken.io, he leads the vision of the companies by inventing new methods of computer-human interaction, designing the hearts and minds of highly social software robots.
Neil Stevenson
Hazelcast
Neil Stevenson
Neil Stevenson is a Solution Architect for Hazelcast®, the Industry’s leading open source In-Memory Computing Platform.
In more than 25 years of work in IT, Neil has designed, developed and debugged a number of software systems for companies large and small.
Wrong First Time
How does continuous improvement fit with continuous delivery ? In this talk we’ll try to understand how a ML model can be updated in a live system. Simplistically this is just a case of deploy the next version of a model. The catch here is to deploy to a live system. We don’t want any gaps in our processing. We’re connected to the real world after all! So here we’ll look at an environment for running ML models that allows us to deploy new versions,yet keep the old versions running til we are happy the new version is confirmed as better. This is the real world, so a real problem.
Paul King
OCI
Paul King
Dr Paul King has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 30 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy, GPars and Gradle. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning’s best-seller: Groovy in Action, 2nd Edition.
Groovy and Data Science
Groovy is a powerful multi-paradigm programming language for the JVM that offers a wealth of features that make it ideal for many data science and big data scenarios.
Groovy has a dynamic nature like Python, which means that it is very powerful, easy to learn, and productive. The language gets out of the way and lets data scientists write their algorithms naturally.
It has a static nature like Java and Kotlin, which makes it fast when needed. Its close alignment with Java means that you can often just cut-and-paste the Java examples from various big data solutions and they’ll work just fine in Groovy.
And it has first-class functional support, meaning that it offers features and allows solutions similar to Scala. Functional and stream processing with immutable data structures can offer many advantages when working in parallel processing or clustered environments.
These slides review the key benefits of using Groovy to develop data science solutions, including integration with various JDK libraries commonly used in data science solutions including libraries for data manipulation, machine learning, plotting and various big data solutions for scaling up these algorithms.
Math/Data Science libraries covered include:
Weka, Smile, Apache Commons Math, beakerx notebooks, Deep Learning4J.
Libraries for scaling/concurrency include:
Apache Spark, Apache Ignite, Apache MXNet, GPars, Apache Beam.
An introduction to Property-based testing
Property-based testing is an approach to testing that involves checking that a system meets certain expected properties. The approach is frequently promoted as a desired technique when adopting a functional style of programming. It typically involves guiding the generation of large data sets using a generator framework which can be much less work than coding large test suites by hand. This talk looks at the concepts behind this approach and some of the available libraries. The examples are mostly in Groovy but should be easily ported to other JVM languages. The concepts are applicable across all languages.
Groovy and Data Science
Groovy is a powerful multi-paradigm programming language for the JVM that offers a wealth of features that make it ideal for many data science and big data scenarios.
Groovy has a dynamic nature like Python, which means that it is very powerful, easy to learn, and productive. The language gets out of the way and lets data scientists write their algorithms naturally.
It has a static nature like Java and Kotlin, which makes it fast when needed. Its close alignment with Java means that you can often just cut-and-paste the Java examples from various big data solutions and they’ll work just fine in Groovy.
And it has first-class functional support, meaning that it offers features and allows solutions similar to Scala. Functional and stream processing with immutable data structures can offer many advantages when working in parallel processing or clustered environments.
These slides review the key benefits of using Groovy to develop data science solutions, including integration with various JDK libraries commonly used in data science solutions including libraries for data manipulation, machine learning, plotting and various big data solutions for scaling up these algorithms.
Math/Data Science libraries covered include:
Weka, Smile, Apache Commons Math, beakerx notebooks, Deep Learning4J.
Libraries for scaling/concurrency include:
Apache Spark, Apache Ignite, Apache MXNet, GPars, Apache Beam.
Tamaghna Basu
neoEYED Inc.
Tamaghna Basu
Tamaghna Basu, CTO of neoEYED Inc. is on the mission to www.killthepassword.com to build a safer world with stronger, yet very convenient authentication mechanism for companies and end-users. He is a hacker, speaker, trainer and a developer too. He has more than 15 years of experience in cyber-security domain and worked in large enterprises like PwC, Paypal, Walmart etc. to help them secure their products. His main areas of research include application security and network pen‐testing, incident handling and cyber forensics. Being a software developer earlier, he worked in python, java, .net, ruby etc. and various domains like finance, insurance, gaming etc. He is a frequent speaker/trainer in various conferences like NULLCON, C0C0N, OWASP, ISACA etc. and member of NULL, DSCI and other communities. He also contributed to security magazines like Clubhack and ISACA journal. He has accomplished various other certifications like Cyber Crime Investigation, Diploma in Cyber Law, OSCP, GCIH etc.
Preventing Identity Thefts and Impersonation Frauds using AI and Behavioral Biometrics
- Developing a risk framework with cognitive security;
- The technological expertise available to detect these anomalies and patterns.
Igor Kaufman
DataArt
Igor Kaufman
Fabien Vauchelles
CTO Zelros
Fabien Vauchelles
CTO and Co-Founder Zelros
Machine Learning for the Busy Developer
Random Forest, Cross Validation, Clustering, … a whole new vocabulary for a developer, who is already busy!
When you have a closer look, Machine Learning is very simple: you prepare the data, you assemble the datasets, and you model the algorithms. It’s mostly experimentation.
Come and discover how a machine predicts the future!
Through examples and live-coding, we will see:
– how to build our datasets?
– how to choose the right algorithm?
– how to evaluate the performance of a predictive model?
Now, Machine Learning will be your best friend!
How to organise a Datascience competition?
For the last 4 years, we organized the Data Science Olympics. This competition happens every year, on multiple locations and lasts only 2 hours! Last year, we gathered 1000 datascientists in Berlin and Paris.
If you are asking yourself theses questions:
– Why should you come to a Data Science competition?
– How can I win this kind of competition?
– How can I organise a machine learning challenge?
This talk is for you!
We will share with you our experience on the past 4 year about the challenges, the solutions and you will discover some easy tricks!
Radoslav Markov
Bastun Media LLC
Radoslav Markov
Radoslav Markov is well known across digital media community. He is first internetist in Bulgaria (since 1987). Also he is a pioneer of digital cinema, digital restauration and scientific technologies with application in media, especially audiovisual restauration. He is frequent speaker at biggest conference for TV and cinema technology IBC Amsterdam (https://show.ibc.org/speakers19/radoslav-markov), but also at ARRI Archival workshop,No Time to Wait, Photonex and many other international grade events.
Jazz Singer (1929) in holographic and immersive sound – Why not (or why yes)?
This presentation have two parts. First is possibilities of current scientific achievement with application of computer vision algorithms and ML for restoration of image of the old movies – from digitization to multidimentialisation (holographic) and from mono to immersive sound. Second part is: did we have right to this – legal, ethical, aesthetic, rights and financial problems of doing such perfect improvement of the old audiovisual heritage.
Stefan Shishkov
DXC Technology
Stefan Shishkov
Simon Stone
IBM
Simon Stone
Simon Stone is currently the lead engineer for the IBM Blockchain Platform developer experience team based in Hursley, UK. His main focus is on building APIs, SDKs, and developer tools that blockchain developers can use to build smart contracts and applications on their journey to disrupting industries and enhancing the way businesses work together. He is a regular contributor to open source software under the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project, and a maintainer for Hyperledger Fabric.
Building smart contracts and applications with Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain technology where developers can build smart contracts, and applications that interact with deployed smart contracts. Smart contracts and applications can be developed in a range of programming languages, including Go, Java, and JavaScript, allowing developers to easily get started with this technology by taking advantage of their existing skills.
In this talk, you will learn the basics of smart contract development. You will learn how to build your first smart contract, how to write a transaction function, and how to interact with the ledger using the available APIs.
You will also learn the basics of application development. You will learn how to build your first application by using a connection profile and a wallet/identity to connect to a gateway peer, and how to submit a transaction to a smart contract.
Developers already familiar with Hyperledger Fabric will be able to learn about the significant enhancements that we’ve been delivering to the smart contract and application programming model since Hyperledger Fabric v1.4, including an update on our current plans.
Thomas Metcalfe
Chattermill
Thomas Metcalfe
Physics master’s graduate, machine learning engineer and total word nerd.
Transformers: how machines have learned context
Keywords have been timelessly important in natural language processing. However, over the past 10 years we have made vast improvements in the field by leveraging not just the words, but the context in which they are found. Subsequently, there has been a significant shift in the way machines understand the underlying meaning in language. This talk will cover the history of approaches to context encoding, with a particular highlight on the most recent innovation: the transformer. We showcase how this state-of-the-art technique allows us at Chattermill to gain insight from customer feedback and uncover what decisions will drive the greatest impact.
Keynote Speakers from 2018
Mark Stephen Meadows
Botanic Technologies, Inc
Mark Stephen Meadows
Meadows is an American author, inventor, artist and entrepreneur. With 18 years in AI, 22 in VR, and 7 years in blockchain he has designed and developed AI applications at some of the world’s top research labs (Xerox-PARC, SRI, Waag, and others). He has worked as a government-level consultant in both hemispheres, is the author of a half-dozen patents, and has written four books that examine technology and their social consequences. As founder / CEO of Botanic.io and co-founder / Trustee of SeedToken.io, he leads the vision of the companies by inventing new methods of computer-human interaction, designing the hearts and minds of highly social software robots.
Reza Rahman
Microsoft
Reza Rahman
Reza Rahman is a long time consultant now working at Microsoft. He has been an official Java technologist at Oracle. He is the author of the popular book EJB 3 in Action. Reza has long been a frequent speaker at Java User Groups and conferences worldwide including JavaOne and Devoxx. He has been the lead for the Java EE track at JavaOne as well as a JavaOne Rock Star Speaker award recipient. Reza is an avid contributor to industry journals like JavaLobby/DZone and TheServerSide. He has been a member of the Java EE, EJB and JMS expert groups over the years. Reza implemented the EJB container for the Resin open source Java EE application server. He helps lead the Philadelphia Java User Group.
Reza has over a decade of experience with technology leadership, enterprise architecture, application development and consulting. He has been working with Java EE technology since its inception, developing on almost every major application platform ranging from Tomcat to JBoss, GlassFish, WebSphere and WebLogic. Reza has developed enterprise systems for well-known companies like eBay, Motorola, Comcast, Nokia, Prudential, Guardian Life, USAA, Independence Blue Cross, Anthem, CapitalOne and AAA using Java EE and Spring.
Sudan Jackson
REWE Digital
Sudan Jackson
Sudan Jackson has been working in REWE Digital’s technology division since 2016, where he is responsible for cultural and organisational development. The focus is on actively designing collaborative environments to enable modern, innovative, creative, and customer-focused solutions. And although “Manager” is part of his current title, it only says a little about what he actually does. Sudan is a person who is inspired every day to improve people’s (working) lives. He is a certified coach and trainer, and a welcome speaker at conferences.
Sudan has over 20 years of experience as a personnel developer, project manager, IT consultant and business coach with internationally operating and leading companies where he was responsible for major projects in change management, leadership development, and in the organizational/transformational context.
He has also designed and implemented successful leadership, empowerment and talent management programs. He is very interested (and enjoys it a lot) in discovering new ways to modernize these topics. Working with people and helping others to do great things with his help that are not yet imaginable… This is a task with which he strongly identifies.
Atanas Kiriakov
Ontotext
Atanas Kiriakov
Atanas Kiryakov (LinkedIn) is the founder and CEO of Ontotext – Semantic Web pioneer and vendor of semantic technology. Atanas is member of the board of the Linked Data Benchmarking Council – standardization body, who’s members include all major graph database vendors.
Atanas is an expert in semantic graph databases, reasoning, knowledge graph design, text mining, semantic tagging, linking and search. Author of signature academic publications with more than 2500 citations. Until 2010 Atanas was product manager of GraphDB (formerly OWLIM) – a leading RDF graph database serving mission critical projects in organizations like BBC, Financial Times, Nikkei, S&P, Springer Nature, John Wiley, Elsevier, UK Parliament, Kadaster.NL, The National Gallery of US and top-5 US Banks.
As CEO of Ontotext, Atanas supervised multiple high profile semantic technology projects across different sectors: media and publishing, market and investment information, cultural heritage and government.
Surain Adyanthaya
PROS
Surain Adyanthaya
Responsible for PROS Travel product strategies, Surain Adyanthaya collaborates with clients to develop and shape airline solutions that address their key industry needs. Surain has held various roles at PROS including head of R&D. With PROS since 1993, Surain works closely with product development in his current leadership role of product innovation and strategy.
Ahmed Shabana
Parkpine Capital
Ahmed Shabana
Egyptian American entrepreneur-turned investor Ahmed Shabana is the current managing partner of the $150 million fund one Parkpine Capital, the U.S.-based venture capital firm he formed with partner Billy Zane most known in Hollywood for the movies Titanic and The Phantom. Launched in 2016, Parkpine has offices in Los Angeles and Menlo Park.
Ahmed is recognized as a high impact entrepreneur by the Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times by founding the Middle East’s first & Africa’s first eCommerce portal and online pharmacy, Agzakhana.com, generating millions in sales turnover while overcoming the economic and commercialization obstacles of the region. Moreover, Ahmed was able to raise capital from Vodafone Ventures and help fundraise for a number of Healthcare, BigData, and SaaS startups of over $800M in combined valuation.
Ahmed holds an MBA from the the University of Southern California, where he was inspired to form Parkpine as a way to improve access to funding and resources for tech entrepreneurs on a global scale. He funded the Global Ventures Summit to connect influencers of the highest growth startup ecosystems in the world. The Summit enables innovative startups to access venture capital professionals, funded technology startup founders, and policy makers in the freshest tech scenes on the planet.
Parkpine’s fund will target post-revenue investments in early-stage technology ventures in growing markets around the world. The fund has a broad mandate invests in tech companies with business models that can be replicated in different markets.
Delyan Lilov
Musala Soft JSC
Delyan Lilov
Delyan Lilov is founder and CEO of Musala Soft JSC, leading software services company specialized in some of the most challenging industries worldwide like Cloud Integration, API Management, Augmented Intelligence, BigData, Digital Engagement and IoT.
As a CEO of Musala Soft for more than 18 years, Delyan Lilov is responsible for defining the corporate strategy, managing operations and participating in key clients` management. His experience, professionalism and business views lead Musala Soft as a reliable, prestigious and long-term partner for innovative and trendsetting enterprises such as: IBM, Tsystems, VMWare, Experian, SAP, Atos, Cellent, Milestone, UGT, Deutsche Telekom, Telenor, A1, Vivacom, OTP Group, KBC, DZI, Commerzbank, Generali, Bulgarian Guarantee Fund, Visa, Telus Health, Telus International, ESG, Phillip Morris, Edoardo Miroglio, etc.
Committed to lifelong learning, knowledge sharing and a high degree of personal involvement, Musala Soft successfully develops its people and enlarges its offices in Macedonia and Bulgaria. The company is a proud winner of multiple national and international honors and recognitions in Talent Development, Science and Innovation, Quality of Software Solutions, Leadership and Corporate Social Responsibility.
AI&Smart Tech Speakers 2018
Mark Stephen Meadows
Botanic Technologies, Inc
Mark Stephen Meadows
Meadows is an American author, inventor, artist and entrepreneur. With 18 years in AI, 22 in VR, and 7 years in blockchain he has designed and developed AI applications at some of the world’s top research labs (Xerox-PARC, SRI, Waag, and others). He has worked as a government-level consultant in both hemispheres, is the author of a half-dozen patents, and has written four books that examine technology and their social consequences. As founder / CEO of Botanic.io and co-founder / Trustee of SeedToken.io, he leads the vision of the companies by inventing new methods of computer-human interaction, designing the hearts and minds of highly social software robots.
Thomas Metcalfe
Chattermill
Thomas Metcalfe
Physics master’s graduate, machine learning engineer and total word nerd.
Transformers: how machines have learned context
Keywords have been timelessly important in natural language processing. However, over the past 10 years we have made vast improvements in the field by leveraging not just the words, but the context in which they are found. Subsequently, there has been a significant shift in the way machines understand the underlying meaning in language. This talk will cover the history of approaches to context encoding, with a particular highlight on the most recent innovation: the transformer. We showcase how this state-of-the-art technique allows us at Chattermill to gain insight from customer feedback and uncover what decisions will drive the greatest impact.
Eugene Ciurana
Meltwater Group
Eugene Ciurana
Eugene Ciurana is the director of knowledge representation science and technology at Meltwater, where his team is building the most advanced competitive intelligence system in the world by contextualizing 1.2 trillion documents and 12 million unique entities from 10 million data sources worldwide. His previous work as an AI technology principal led to successful exits, products, and services at Cosmify, Yahoo, Summly, and Badoo. Eugene’s career evolved from high availability and scalability systems to deep learning, exploratory analysis of unstructurеd data, and applied ML over the last 7 years. He has served in direct tech advisory roles at MuleSoft (acquired by Salesforce for $6.5B), Horizons Ventures, TA Venture, JP Morgan Chase, Cloudera, Kearny Jackson, Rubikloud, and Box. Eugene can be reached at https://ciurana.eu or in the Freenode and OFTC networks under /nick pr3d4t0r.
Stefan Enev
Ontotext
Stefan Enev
Stefan has key roles in product development, development infrastructure, and projects with some of Ontotext’s biggest clients. He was the guiding force behind the creation of the Dynamic Semantic Publishing platform and two of its core components, the Concept Extraction Service, and the Recommendations engine.
In his present role, Stefan manages the Semantic Analytics Solutions squad. His mission is to make sure the team builds exciting, easy to use and run, and semantically powered software. The focus is on creating technologies which empower publishers to generate more relevant, interconnected content and personalized semantic recommendations, which helps them increase user engagement.
Goran Kolevski
Goran Kolevski
Software Engineer with professional experience across various technologies and verticals, designing software architecture and developing large scale enterprise systems. Specializing and holding masters degree for search systems and machine learning.
You Know, For Search: Deep Dive into ElasticSearch
ElasticSearch is one of the most popular datastores nowadays. Starting just as a distributed version of Lucene it has became a favourite full-text search, data analytics, anomaly detection tool, log aggregation framework etc. But how all this magic happens? In this talk we will dive deep into ElasticSearch and see some of its internals.
Aleksandar Kostadinov
Musala Soft
Aleksandar Kostadinov
Alexander Kostadinov currently holds a Senior Software Engineer position at Musala Soft’s team developing the smarthome platform for Deutsche Telekom – Qivicon. Being part of the team that is responsible for integrating new devices into the platform, through the last years he gained significant experience in working with numerous and various smart devices coming from renowned manufacturers. As an IoT enthusiast, he enjoys spending his spare time playing with connected devices and applying smart solutions to his own home.
Alexander graduated his bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Faculty of German Engineering Education and Business Management at the Technical University of Sofia. In 2017, Alexander held a session considering the ways to overcome the diversity of smart devices during the Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation (ISTA) conference in Sofia. In both 2016 and 2017, he also held lectures considering writing high-quality code during Musala Soft’s MUFFIN conference. Being a strong defender of quality code, he also held several public MUFFIN seminars on the topic.
Nikolay Milovanov
ThingsLog
Nikolay Milovanov
Nikolay is a network freak and lazy software nerd ☺ Over the time he switched from networking and system engineering to software. How that has happened he does not really know. Topics like DevOps, SDN and cloud are a natural match for his interests.
Nikolay has a PhD from NBU in “IPv4 to IPv6 network transformation” and a specialization in Architectures for Software systems from Carnegie Mellon University. Currently Nikolay is getting a sabbatical from his full time assistant professor position @ NBU.
So he got enough free time to put together a hardware startup for consumption monitoring of water, gas and electricity – ThingsLog.
Alex Bunardzic
Alex Bunardzic
Alex has 27 years of full time experience in software development. Starting with Lisp programming at the University, and then moving into the world of business computing, Alex has worked with a wide variety of technologies. From imperative, object oriented programming, to functional/declarative programming. Alex’s expertise spans developing software solutions for healthcare, financial and e-commerce industry sectors. While still at the University, Alex read a seminal book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” by Douglas Hofstadter and become fascinated by the Artificial Intelligence research. Soon after that came the strong interest in the neural networks research. After spending some time building solutions utilizing the web 2.0 technologies (REST and HATEOAS), Alex got involved in the nascent web 3.0 initiatives (the so-called ‘semantic web’). The web standards fostered by the W3C ‘web app manifest’ ushered the new era of Progressive Web Apps (PWA). In addition to this vast improvement in the web technology, web 3.0 also enables the emergence of Conversational User Interface (CUI). Alex has done extensive work in formulating and implementing conversational interface on the web. He had delivered a talk on that topic at the first European Chatbot conference, held in Vienna, Austria in October 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzNT1NPlVJU&t=120s). Alex is a frequent contributor to the “Free Code Camp” publication (https://medium.freecodecamp.com), as well as to the “Chatbots Magazine” (https://chatbotsmagazine.com) and the “Bots for Business” magazine (https://medium.com/bots-for-business). Alex also keeps many of his writings on his Medium page (https://medium.com/alex-bunardzic).
Adam Paszke
Adam Paszke
Author of PyTorch. Programming languages, Algorithmics, FP, PP, Math. CS & Mathematics student at MIMUW.
Zaid Alyafeai
Zaid Alyafeai
Master student at KFUPM in Saudi Arabia studying specialized in deep learning and its applications in computer vision.
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Latest news
24 Nov
Discussion Panel @ GTS Revealed
The main set of topics of Discussion Panels is revealed. The focus of 2019 Discussion…
24 Nov
List of Sessions & Master Classes is available
The preliminary list of topics and master classes for all the events that are part…
21 Nov
Startup World Cup 2020 – Sofia – Hosted by Global Tech Summit
Startup World Cup, a global startup pitch competition with a $1,000,000 grand investment prize, is…
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