After the two-year break, we got a chance to come back to WUG Days 2022. It is the largest Czech free educational conference intended for administrators, developers, and database specialists interested in Microsoft technologies. It took place at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication VUT, on September 13-15. What did we learn? What did we teach others? Let’s get into it.
Y Soft booth at the conference
As a partner of the conference, Y Soft had a booth there to meet with attendees. We also offered everyone a chance to take part in a competition for valuable prizes. Engineers from the AIVA Turing team were present at the booth to explain AIVA in more detail and answer any questions. As Y Soft is known mostly as “that print solution company”, we were happy to show more from our portfolio and prove our innovations go beyond printing.
How difficult is it to work with our robots?
We brought one of our robots to the booth to attract attention and show real examples of what AIVA can do. Our robot was also the key to our competition. The goal of the competition was to create an automated script using the AIVA system and instruct a robot to complete a simple task. The goal was to open a translator application on a smartphone, write an arbitrary word on the keyboard, confirm, then use a “speak up” function to create a voice response. This way, it was immediately apparent if the task was completed correctly. The fastest times of finishing the task were just under 2 minutes, while most participants finished within 3 minutes. In the end, the three fastest competitors received prizes.
It was not just for fun, however. This task also had a soft benefit for us. It was a quick and easy way to test our interface. As we showed AIVA to people who had never seen it before, we could observe if the user interface was intuitive and clear enough. From the reactions of participants, it was quite straightforward to design such a simple scenario, but we also received feedback for improvement that we will act on.
Let’s talk
One of the perks of being a partner of WUG Days is having a reserved slot for a presentation talk. This means an opportunity for one of the engineers to do a public presentation on any technical topic which is at least partially in the Microsoft world. This year’s presentation was done by Vašek from the AIVA Turing team on the topic of Dynamic Training of Deep Learning Models in Production. The presentation focused on the pros and cons of integrating dynamically learned models into production, what limitations and requirements they have and what engineers should be aware of.
One of the key takeaways from the presentation is that dynamic training of deep learning models is, in fact, very little about machine learning! As Vašek mentioned, the actual machine learning is about 10% of the development needed; the rest is about the database, backend, and frontend development which may be difficult due to the displaying of very technical information to the not-that-technical people. That’s the essence of the engineer’s work, after all.
You know what? Watch the presentation yourself.
Until next time
Last but not least, we want to give a shout-out to the organizers for a great event. We were happy to be part of the conference and can’t wait for next year to come back!