PANTALKS

Rik Willard is a digital media pioneer and thought leader focused on the emerging "Internet of Value", where the convergence of payments, security and the Internet of Things will greatly influence critical aspects of global business and personal value in the near- and long-term. Just as money drives business today, new forms of value will begin to take shape based on the digital currency movement and significantly alter our definitions of value to better suit our interconnected world.

In cooperation with the Embassy of the United States (Bern, Switzerland).

As a professor in computer science and engineering, Rohini is specialized in the areas of artificial intelligence, multimedia information retrieval, computational linguistics. She gave valuable insights into multilingual text mining.

With the exponential rise in the use of social media throughout the world, there is a compelling need for efficient and flexible approaches to multilingual natural processing technology. Traditional approaches involving multiphase syntactic and syntactic processing do not scale up for this new environment that reflects phenomena such as ad-hoc transliteration schemes and code-switching. Her pantalk presented various techniques for mining multilingual social media, or “ worldspeak ” as we refer to it.

Rohini Srihari's Bio: https://cedar.buffalo.edu/~rohini/

«Crypto Economics» is a semi-technical introduction into blockchain technology with a focus on the potential of the blockchain to change the way we organise our lives. Simon talked about the current financial system - its strengths and weaknesses and will compare it to blockchain based solutions. This talk explained how distributed consensus is reached in a trust-less system and how proof of work mining works. He went further into the concept of smart contracts and how “smart” or not they are. Simon ignited our enthusiasm about the new way of thinking how we can build our future together in an open and decentralised way.

Simon Emanuel Schmid is Head of UX/Front-end at Melonport and aims to make the blockchain easily understandable and usable.

TEND is a blockchain company that tokenizes real luxury assets onto the Ethereum blockchain. By tokenizing the world’s most precious and beautiful objects and making them available to a much broader audience, TEND’s vision is to create a positive impact on society and to enrich people’s life. TEND is located in Zug, Switzerland, the Swiss Crypto Valley, and was founded by Marco Abele.

Marco is the Former Chief Digital Officer of Private, Retail & Corporate Banking at Credit Suisse with an 18 years banking track record including at Deutsche Bank. He was voted top 100 bankers and top 100 Digital Shapers of Switzerland.

During his talk, Marco explained how the tokenisation of assets on the blockchain will change the future and introduce TEND, the trailblazing blockchain app. He also shared some insights on the ongoing token sale which is in accordance with Swiss law, how it differs from other ICOs and the learnings from TEND so far.

Have you ever wanted to blame watching Transformers 3 for making you sick or shout at your mother for being the reason you ate 5 packs of Pringles in an hour?

Chris showed us how to use all the data in our life to help make informed decisions and deal with information overload. He also detailed how he used his own research to optimise his Tinder matches and highlighted some recent research on the `millennial` generation, why we can blame our parents for our shortcomings and how we can do some things to fix it ourselves!

Christoph Meier was talking about the framework with the special name Cynefin. Christoph heard Dave Snowden speaking about complexity and the Cynefin framework a few years ago and didn’t understand one word. So he invested some time to really understand what is meant. He shared and discussed his findings and tried to find out if this model is relevant in the real world.

This talk was about Elixir, a dynamic, functional language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications. Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.

The talk was held by Mateusz Sojka, a software engineer working at Swisscom and co-founder of a podcast hosting service called Podigee. Since he got interested in Elixir he hasn't looked back. During his talk, Mateusz listed and explained the main features of Elixir, the Erlang VM and OTP. He presented Phoenix, the web framework, and Nerves, a platform for embedded programming.

It's hard to imagine front-end development without JavaScript modules nowadays. AMD, CommonJS and ECMAScript modules are helping us in structuring our projects and libraries. In this talk Gion Kunz, a Frontend developer, reviewed the history of JavaScript modules and introduced one of the most powerful tools when dealing with modules. Moreover, a look was taken at the awesome SystemJS ecosystem and how it can be leveraged to build fantastic, future prove applications.

At our last speaker Gio Jacuzzi described how engineers use ambisonics, a full-sphere surround sound technique that can contain sound sources above and below the listener, to create a 3D audio experience. He went on to explain that audio engineers have created microphones called “binaural stereo microphones” that can replicate humans' three natural audio perception properties. To emulate our natural listening experiences, engineers place these microphones in artificial heads and ears to make recordings. This why we can experience a 3D audio sensation while listening to a recording made with binaural microphones over headphones.

After the talk Gio answered questions from the audience and the lively discussion continued over an apéro.

In this talk Florian Kammermann from Swiss Post IT, demonstrated why vert.x is the perfect fit for microservices. He explained that vert.x is event driven, non-blocking and that the communication is done over a (distributed) eventbus. Attendees appreciated the concrete examples Florian provided, and the opportunity to learn the basic functions of vert.x.

In this Pantalk, Alex Weidauer, co-founder of LastMile, a Berlin-based AI startup, told us why despite the hype, bots haven’t offered a superior interface to apps-yet.

Alex illustrated what bots are missing based on his experience building databot.ai, and discussed the technology required to build better bots.

Thanks to Alex, Pantendees will be able to find the best built bots, or even build their own better.