29 April, 2016

Great Indian Developer Conference, Bangalore

Before the dawn of 29th April 2016, over 2000 enthusiast woke up early and in a busy city like Bangalore, fighting with the traffic made it to IISc from across the city on time. They gathered to attend the Great Indian Developer Conference -a summit that provided them an opportunity to meet like-minded people, brainstorm about the best practices of playing with data and discuss about upcoming trends, new products and cutting edge technology in the industry. The conference is divided into 4 tracks across 4 days. Day 1 was about .NET/Cloud, Day 2 was about Web/Mobile Development, Day 3 was about Java/Dynamic Language and Day 4 was about Data And Analytics.

Honouring the job and work schedule, I had to choose one track among the above tracks. In the advent of 21st century, with Internet connecting all different parts of the world and creating humongous data every millisecond, which can be either structured, semi-structured or unstructured, I have been always interested to learn more about how the data is collected, stored and retrieved. Having performed research for a year in the field of Information Retrieval, having papers published in 3 esteemed international conferences and realising the 3Vs- volume, velocity and volatility of data, I chose to be a delegate on Day4 - for Data and Analytics track.



We arrived at the location venue before the registration had started. The conference began on time, was well organised and had a sorted registration to make the process easier. They provided all delegates with a guide which provided exclusive information that would be useful through the day - like agenda and speaker and session details. After having breakfast and networking with other delegates, we headed towards the following keynote sessions.

Session 1: Data- Whose Responsibility is it Anyway? -Amod Malviya.
Amod talked about the importance of data and why should they be treated with due respect, what are some major challenges that a firm faces to manage data - how to capture it, what to capture and how to incorporate data as one of the main part in SDLC. Data is a raw state and processed data is called information. This distinction is generally not clear, which is one of the root cause of challenges. Other challenges are that data is looked upon retrospectively and quality of data is often broken and the developer has to scratch his head through the logs messages to understand data. In the end, he talked about a possible approach to overcome with these challenges.
"Data is the only true intellectual property an organization has!" - Amod

Session 2: The Seif Project - Doug Crockford
Sief project is a safe and effective relationship management module, which has its development spread across 5 major steps - i.e. Node, Protocol, Resource Manager, Apps and Helper Apps. Doug is one of the main propagators in the early era of Javascript. He talked about how the security in the web grew from passing a password in URL [1st time in Dec 1994 in RFC 1738 - Url: //server:password@host:port] to a very secure method having complex cryptographically secured ways of passing password.
"A good software takes time to develop - the less you estimate, the more it takes!" - Doug

Session 3: Modern Data Technologies - Aditee Rele
In this session, Aditee walked us through how the technology has transformed from the early Analog times to the recent digital times.  She talked about the frequency with which data is generated, different sources of data generation and a bird-sight view of how the buzz words to a layman like Bigdata, Cloud, Machine Learning, Hadoop, etc has the power to manage a large scale of data. She talked about how the database warehouse building, designing architecture and deploying has become easier from 3 years to 3 months to 30 minutes.
"The data processing is growing from Reactive > Realtime > Predictive > Transformative" - Aditee

Session 4: Artificial Intelligence for Efficient Financial Market - Sivasankari Ramamurthy
Being a full time technology associate at Morgan Stanley, probably this was the topic I was eagerly looking foward to - how can AI make the financial markets efficient. Since the operation of every financial firm is divided into 3 major office - front, middle and back. Hence, it makes sense to see how AI fits into each of these and make lives easier.
-Front office: Advisory services, trade analytics and portfolio modelling.
-Middle  office: Risk Management, Corporate Actions, Post Trade Analysis, Portfolio Accounitng and Trade Execution
-Back office:Complaince and Due Diligence,  Regulatory reporting and Clearing and Settlement of Trade.

Session 5: Broadbridge - Naren Ramakrishnan
Naren talked about Broadbridge, which is a technology services company focused on global capital markets. It is the market leader  enabling secure and accurate processing of information for communications and securities transactions among issuers, investors and financial intermediaries.

After the keynote session, there were a series of 5 simultaneous tracks - amongst which, a delegate can choose the session which interests him the most. More details about them are available here. It was a day filled with energy, enthusiasm and keenness to learn, to know the cutting edge technologies and interacting with the experts from industry. About 29 companies had their booths setup, where they explained about what do they work upon, how one can relate to it and about the career opportunities with them.

Lastly, I would like to conclude with some acknowledgement. Thank You Morgan Stanley for providing us an opportunity to attend this conference, Thank you Salt March for organising GIDS conference and of-course, the sponsors for making this event more successful.

I know this blog has gone a bit longer than expected, but thanks for reading through it. Please provide your feedback or any questions you have in the comment box below. :)


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