The TechDays Online schedule is here! Don't miss out!

By Andrew Spooner, Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

London Tech Week is right around the corner, which means it's time for TechDays Online! We'll be bringing you a mix of deep technical content and thoughtful future vision keynotes from the Microsoft Reactor, all streamed online so you can enjoy it wherever you happen to be.

It all kicks off on Tuesday June 12th, running until Thursday 14th. That's 4 technical tracks across 3 days!

You can see a detailed schedule below, but first make sure you are signed up on our registration page so you can receive timely reminders for the content that matters most to you. We'll make sure you don't miss out when we go live!

 

Tuesday June 12th - Mixed Reality

 

10:00 - Welcome to TechDays Online

 

10:15 - A Lap Around Mixed Reality for Developers

What's Mixed Reality? How do you get started developing for it? What does it look like to build your first app? We'll take a look in this discussion based session.

Speakers:

  • Mike Taulty
  • Pete Daukintis

 

11:15 - The Mixed Reality Toolkit for Developers

If you're going to be building for Mixed Reality then you'll want to know the Mixed Reality Toolkit and Simon Jackson (MVP) is one of the very best people to get the details from. We'll take a tour around the Toolkit with Simon.

Speakers:

  • Simon Jackson
  • Mike Taulty
  • Pete Daukintis

 

12:15 - UK Developers Building on Mixed Reality

What are UK developers doing with Mixed Reality? Yali chats to a number of partners about what they've been building and how they've found working in Mixed Reality.

Speakers:  

  • Yali Naguleashwaran
  • Harry Gwinnell Infrastructure Program Manager fom Visr
  • Rob Minson: CTO of Fracture Reality
  • Sol Rogers: CEO of Rewind

 

13:15 - The Lunchtime Show

 

Tuesday June 12th - Containers and Microservices

 

13:30 - Why Microservices?

Why should you be working towards a Microservices architecture and when it makes sense. In this session we will explore the doubts of someone that it is just entering this word and Why should you be breaking the monolith.

Speaker:

  • Dany Brown, PepperHQ

 

14:15 - Containerise Your App

In this session we will be looking on the strategies that you have to create a container with base in your application. How you can containerize anything.

Speakers:

  • Ben Hall, Katacoda
  • Ben Coleman, Microsoft

 

15:00 - Containers Orchestration

How can you deploy containers and orchestrate? Why use Kubernetes and what it does represent for the Microservices. What are the other options for container orchestration and do you really need it.

Speaker:

  • Charlotte Godley, Dot Mesh

 

15:45 - CI and CD with Containers

How can you setup a development environment for this new microservices work ow can you do CI and CD in this environment. What are the challenges for CI and CD. 

Speaker:

  • Beth Anderson, BBC

 

16:30 - Events and microservices 

Networking it is a important part of the microservices work and how you route the traffic and how you ingest this traffic it is an important part of that to. In this panel we are going to discuss the different strategies to do that and how can you optimize that.

Speaker:

  • Gabriel Nepomuceno

 

Wednesday June 13th - Data & AI

 

10:00 - Welcome to TechDays Online with Christina Warren

 

10:15 - Devops Meets Data Science

If AI is to be useful it must be relied on in whatever business process it is used in, and if that's the case then it needs to made highly available like other software supporting that process.  This means models need to be subjected to the same kind of continuous integration as application development. The problem is that data scientists aren't good at this and frankly aren't interested, nor should they be.  So join MVP Ben Hall to unlock this technical conundrum.

Speaker:

  • Ben Hall, MVP

 

11:15 - Multi-Models in AI

As humans we often make decisions in groups. Sometimes the person whose the most confident is trusted with the decision, at other times a decision might be put to the vote. Perhaps the same approach might be used to improve AI where several models could inform a decision. In this session Terry McCann one of our new MVPs will share how he's done exactly that.

Speaker:

  • Terry McCann, MVP

 

12:15 - AI & Mapping at Ordnance Survey

Ordnance Survey have the largest repository of mapping in the UK and it's the third largest in the world.  However you might have wondered what they do with all that information and how do they turn satellite and aerial photographs into maps that we can all rely on.  In this session we'll be joined by the OS data science team to understand how they have used deep learning at scale to get a deeper insight from that imagery.

Speakers:

  • Luke Vincent, CSA (working with Ordnance Survey)
  • Isabel Sargant, Ordnance Survey
  • Olivia Wilson, Ordnance Survey

 

13:15 - The Lunchtime Show

 

13:30 - Keynote on AI

How Microsoft has changed to be an AI company and the lessons learnt from that.

 

14:15 - Cosmos DB and how to use it

CosmosDB is basically a planet scale json document database.  However there are a multitude of ways of using it - it can simply emulate MongoDb or Cassandra with out needing to spin up VMs it also supports graph with the Apache Tinkerpop/Gremlin programming API.  Alex Whittles will open the box and show us what's possible and how best to use it.

Speaker:

  • Allan Mitchell, MVP at Elastacloud

 

15:45 - Cherry BOT

One of the thing traits of intelligence is conversation, so this is a key are of artificial intelligence.  In this session we'll see how Greenwood Campbell built CherryBot a conversation  engine to support a football club and  connect the team with the fans

Speaker:

  • Dan Meinect, Greenwood Campbell

 

16:15 - Panel Discussion

Many of us are familiar with Alexa, Siri and Cortana, and but ladies are not just the voice of AI. In this panel we'll meet some of the top data scientists in the UK who happen to be ladies as well to explore what interest and motivates them so we can all benefit from their expertise.

Speakers:

  • Kate Rosenschine
  • Galiya Warrier, CSA
  • Claudia Vitolo, R Ladies
  • Ana Balcia, Py Ladies

 

Thursday June 14th - Quantum Computing

 

10:00 - Welcome to TechDays Online with Christina Warren

 

10:15 - Quantum Computing Keynote

Speaker:

  • Julie Love

 

11:15 - Quantum & Q# Fundamentals

Crash course in the basics of quantum mechanics and Q# - no experience required!

Speakers:

  • Anita Ramanan, Software Development Engineer, Microsoft
  • Frances Tibble, Software Engineer, Microsoft

 

12:15 - Getting Your Hands Dirty: Teleportation in Q#

Learn what we have in our quantum toolkit and use the components to implement quantum teleportation in Q#!

Speaker:

  • Frances Tibble

 

12:30 - Building Quantum Computers

All this theory is nice, but how do we actually go about building a physical quantum computer? Tune in to this session to find out!

Speaker:

  • Anita Ramanan

 

13:00 - Quantum Computing: What's the Big Deal?

Why would you want to build a quantum computer in the first place? What problems could a quantum computer solve? What's in it for me? These questions will be the focus of this session, examining the potential benefits (with examples) from both the scientific and software development perspectives. 

Speakers:

  • Anita Ramanan
  • Frances Tibble

 

13:30 - Q&A

In this session we will answer questions from previous sessions and take live questions from the audience.

Speakers:

  • Anita Ramanan
  • Frances Tibble
  • Christina Warren

 

14:00 - Wrap Up Show

 

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Whilst each of the tracks is going on, there will be a chance to ask questions of our experts and each session will have a knowledge-check competition where you can win great and unique prizes.

Pre-register for the tracks that interest you most and we will send you digital calendar invites and reminder emails near the time of broadcast.

See you on Tuesday!