Tech Talks

Machine Learning and AI have been mostly used to “program the impossible.” That is, these technologies are most successful to address computation problems such as Computer Vision or Natural Language Processing for which traditional programming techniques are not appropriate. This talk argues that AI technologies can also be attractive for more traditional software engineering tasks. There are several recent systems, hardware, and security trends that support this prediction.

Donald Kossmann is the director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Redmond, which researches in all core areas of computer science, works closely with business groups throughout the company and collaborates openly with universities and the scientific communities, to cover the whole spectrum from fundamental, basic research to technology transfer as part of high-risk and high-potential projects.

The concept of treating data as a back office after thought is endangering companies now more than ever. In fact, data has become the critical resource of the 21st century and requires a re-thinking of its position in the software stack. This TechTalk will introduce a new approach to data that is frugal as well as optimized for the needs of today’s industry - be it for small microservices or large-scale analytics - without breaking the paradigm of a single data set. The document model and cloud-based “Data as a Service” approach of MongoDB Atlas is a representation of this very new thinking. A client example will visualize how it can be leveraged as a multi-cloud data as a service platform.

Customers want longer opening hours, faster checkout, cheaper prices and better selection. One answer to provide all of this are autonomous stores - just grab and go. Valora, the company behind iconic brands such as k kiosk and Brezelkönig, is bringing these concepts to Switzerland. In his techtalk, Michael will give an overview of the different computer vision tasks that need to be performed to get rid of the checkout once and for all and how they play together to provide a seamless experience to the customer. Michael is Head of Digital at Valora and responsible that the company is leading the way in customer experience and convenience. He is an alum of ETH Zurich, a HackZurich veteran and recently made the jump from his own start-up to the corporate world.

Modern software development within the federal administration. Every day thousands of trucks travel through Switzerland. Right now almost every single one of them has to stop at the border even if it's just for paying a fee. We are about to change that, by building a system to collect said fee automatically. In order to keep up with the trucks speed whilst still complying to governmental guidelines we turned to a set of modern technologies. We are going to talk about some of the challenges we had to face, the technologies and patterns we used to solve them as well as how the federal administration can use technology to keep things moving. Microservices and event driven architecture are going to be our main focus.

Soon more information will be available here: www.bit.admin.ch/hackzurich

The goal of project Ascento was to build a compact and agile robot designed for indoor environments. The combination of wheels and legs allows it to move quickly on flat terrain by leaning into curves, adjusting its height while driving and adapting its legs to uneven terrain. By quickly extracting its legs, the robot is even able to jump onto a step of a stair or to overcome obstacles. Its small form factor renders it fit for tight indoor spaces and shows potential for highly agile indoor mobility tasks. Currently, the team is developing the next iteration of the robot, aiming to fulfil a real world application. Do you have a demand for such a system? The team is eager to deepen their industry partnerships within the next couple of months to focus on a use case.