Keynote Speech

Originally from Hong Kong, Yenny is an engineering leader at Rasa. She and her team are working on the standard open-source infrastructure for building Conversational AI. She writes and speaks about Conversational AI, engineering management, and Python best practices. She cares about building inclusive teams with a “people first” approach. She enjoys the thrill of public speaking and meeting like-minded people along the way. You can find her on Twitter and at conferences on leadership and Python. She is also an angel investor backing founders from underrepresented backgrounds.

AI assistants are the new faces of tech. We can now control our lights, play music, make an account transfer, and buy insurance from a chat or voice interface. Conversational AI opens up tech further to serve the people who were once left behind. Building AI assistants from scratch is very challenging. But now, we have much better tooling and infrastructure that make use of cutting-edge NLP research. In this talk, we will explore the current state of the technology: the level of experience we can provide for the end-user, the ease of building AI assistants from the dev perspective, and the maturity across different languages. We’ll also pull up our sleeves and develop an AI assistant together!

Marc-Andre is the CEO and founder of eGenix.com, a Python-focused project and consulting company based in Germany. He has a degree in mathematics from the University of Düsseldorf. His work with and for Python started in 1994. He is a Python Core Developer, designed and implemented the Unicode support in Python, and author of several open-source Python extensions and projects. Marc-Andre is the current EuroPython Society (EPS) Chair, a Python Software Foundation (PSF) founding Fellow and co-founded a local Python meeting in Düsseldorf (PyDDF). He served on the board of the PSF and EPS for many terms and loves to contribute to the growth of Python wherever he can. More information is available on https://malemburg.com/

Python has become a very important part of life for many of us - as the basis for making a living, as a way to enjoy programming, or as a project which brings together people. I've had the opportunity to work in all these fields in the last two decades and have learned a lot. In this keynote, I'd like to take you on a tour and share some of the insights I have gained.

Dr. Tze-Jen Wei is currently an associate professor at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University’s School of AI, chief mathematician at iiNumbers, Inc., Google Developer Expert (GDE) in machine learning, Educate Cloud Ambassador at AWS, Hualien.Py organizer, Google Developer Groups Hualien initiator. Holding a master degree in mathematics, Dr. Wei had lectured in the Department of Applied Mathematics at Tung-Hwa University. Moreover, he also tutored Taiwan’s representatives in the Internal Mathematical Olympiad. Dr. Wei is an enthusiast in solving mysteries and challenging problems. He has been coding and playing math for more than 35 years. He also learns Chinese chess and magic. Moreover, he believes the perfect activity during leisure time is to read a book while drinking a cup of tea.

First you learn to code, then you code to learn. Ten years ago, before the era of PyCon Taiwan. It was rare to teach Python in the programming courses. At that time, people who coded in Python were almost self-taught. PyCon and many Python communities were established for growing the community of Python programmers as well as for meeting and exchanging experiences with Python enthusiasts around the world. Ten years later now, deep learning is becoming popular and Python is also the major programming language while PyTorch, TensorFlow, Numpy, SciPy, Scikit-* are becoming basic vocabularies. Do we still need a place to promote Python and exchange our thoughts when so many people know how to code in Python? Except for promoting Python, advancing and sharing the knowledge in Python skills, my original intention on promoting Python to communities was to make Python as a basic skill and tool for everyone to do exploration, learning, and creating ideas. In this talk, I will share some of my thoughts and experiences involving Python not only at work but also in my everyday life.