Finally I attended the first edition of #SwitchConference2019. Held at Jin Fei Conference Centre, Jin Fei Smart City, the conference was organised by African Leadership University students and some awesome people in Mauritius..
The vision of the conference is to bring together women in STEM, tech enthusiasts, policy makers, entrepreneurs, and students to engage in a series of talks, workshops and brainstorming sessions. This way, we can spur learning, foster inspiration and provoke action towards overcoming challenges facing the African continent through realizing opportunities for women in tech.
The main highlights for me attending the conference was on:
Robotic Process Automation – Opportunities in Technology by Lenore Kerrigan, Country Director for UiPath, South Africa. By 2021, everyone will have a Digital Assistant – A bot for Home, A bot for Work. Many years before, there was prediction that PC would be accessible to everyone. One had predicted that smartphones would become accessible to everyone. I agree with Lenore’s statement about AI-Powered bot being at the reach of everybody, helping make life better.
Robotic Process Automation is the technology that allows anyone today to configure computer software, or a “robot” to emulate and integrate the actions of a human interacting within digital systems to execute a business process. Only substantially better: an RPA software robot never sleeps, makes zero mistakes and costs a lot less than an employee.
That’s true: I have been developing few ChatBots and this has changed my life – no longer required to connect Live to reply to chat messages. Feed the bot intelligently, and the bot will ‘serve’ in its best ability. I have for eg. also used bots to “scrape data’ from the web.
Just before lunch time, attended the interesting presentation on Professional Certification..
Another presentation which marked my day was on Amazon Web Services – A Leading Cloud Platform by Soodeshna Bappoo, Software Developer at Maureva. GOt the opportunity to explore for the first time the Console of AWS – more than 165 services proposed.
Another session which I had wanted to attend was on : Discover the world of Internet of Things by Chervine Bhiwoo
Today, on the second day, was happy with the Short Networking Break – games to kickly get introduced to attendees at the conference. The session which I attended was on: Build your own conversational Avatar with Amazon Web Service by Nitasha Guruvadoo. She explained design of a Host on Amazon Summerian and Amazon Lex. Was really cool to see how chatbots could be in the form of avatar.
More photos to be uploaded soon on this blog post…