Keynote Speech

I am a Malaysian who has been a resident of Japan for the past 20 years. Career wise, I am the founder and CEO of LaLoka Labs. My previous company, Xoxzo was acquired in Sept 2021 which I still currently serve as the COO. In the past, I have worked in engineering positions within Yahoo! Japan and business roles within Amazon. The experiences working within these organizations have tremendously influenced me on my ideas and philosophies concerning engineering and business. My Python journey started in 2002 with ver. 1.5.2 when I started working at Yahoo! Japan. The language has led me to the community behind it. My first PyCon APAC was in 2010 in Singapore. Within the Python community, I co-founded PyCon JP and PyCon MY, I help manage PyCon APAC, and I am also involved with the Trademarks Working Group (WG) and the Diversity and Inclusion WG of the Python Software Foundation (PSF). I also ran for a seat on the PSF board, and after failing spectacularly for the second time, wrote an essay on my thoughts on what needs to be done for the PSF. I would like to believe that this directly had an impact on the PSF's decision to start the D&I Workgroup in Dec 2020. The experiences working with the community has tremendously shaped my views on how and why we need to be present and actively participate within the community with ideas, effort and money. It also has shown me how the rest of us are lacking the opportunities that some of us have. Opening those opportunities to more people has and still is a constant personal mission that I have. After all, we are living off the goodwill which the people before us have left us with, and replacing that goodwill is the least we can do. Feel free to connect with me or learn more about myself from Twitter, LinkedIn or even LaLoka Labs's blog.

Iqbal will be speaking about the past, present and his hopes for the future of the community, from a people mover and organizer point of view. There will be nostalgic pictures, thoughts on diversity, inclusion, generational change, burnout and hopefully opportunities to reflect during this talk.

Dustin is a software engineer on Google’s Open Source Security Team, where he works on improving the security of open-source software that Google & the rest of the world relies on. He’s also a director of the Python Software Foundation, where he helps ensure the long-term success of one very big open-source Python project you've probably heard of: Python itself, as well as the community around it. He's also maintainer of the Python Package Index, where he helps ensure the long-term success of hundreds of thousands of tiny Python projects, many of which you've probably never heard of, but play a critical role in the Python ecosystem.

The past year has seen a wave of interest at the intersection of security and open source. The rapid creation of new tools, new standards, and new best practices to build defences against threats (both historic and anticipated) represents real action towards a fundamentally more secure technological ecosystem. But what, exactly, are we protecting? Who are we protecting it from? And what responsibility do we as individuals have to participate?

Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, maintains Python upstream and downstream (RHEL and Fedora). Python core developer since 2010.

How does Python introduce incompatible changes? How are projects dealing with them? Reverting a few changes breaking most projects.

Dr. Cheng-Te Li is now an Associate Professor at Institute of Data Science, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), Tainan, Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree (2013) from Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University. Before joining NCKU, he was an Assistant Research Fellow (2014-2016) at CITI, Academia Sinica. Dr. Li’s research targets at Machine Learning and Data Mining with their applications to Social Networks, and Social Media, Recommender Systems, and Natural Language Processing. His work has been published at premier conferences, including KDD, TheWebConf (WWW), ICDM, CIKM, SIGIR, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP and NAACL. Dr. Li’s academic recognition includes: Y. Z. Hsu Scientific Paper Award (2022), FAOS Young Scholars’ Creativity Award (2021), MOST Future Tech Awards (2021, 2020), TAAI Domestic Track Best Paper Award (2020), K. T. Li Young Researcher Award (2019), MOST Young Scholar Fellowship (2018), and Exploration Research Award of Pan Wen Yuan Doundation (2016).nHe leads Networked Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (NetAI Lab) at NCKU.

Graphs depict how entities connect and interact with one another, and enable fundamental predictive tasks, including node classification (NC) and link prediction (LP). With the blooming and advances of deep learning, novel Graph Representation Learning (GRL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNN) models, which learn the representations of nodes and graphs, are invented and widely applied on social and information networks. How can GRL/GNN be applied for data science? In this talk, I will utilize our recent research outcomes to exhibit what, where, and how graph machine learning can benefit a variety of tasks in data science. First, I will first give a review on both unsupervised and supervised GRL for typical NC and LP tasks. Second, I will show that GRL can be applied to better model and exploit diverse relationships between various types of nodes in the realms of recommender systems and knowledge base. Third, through the applications to fake news detection, air quality forecasting, traffic flow forecasting, customs fraud detection, and stock price prediction, I will further exhibit that GRL and GNN are powerful even when the graphs cannot be observed.

Kushal Das is a public interest technologist, who is currently helping with privacy and security at https://sunet.se. He is a core developer of CPython (the Python programming language), and also part of the [Tor Project](https://www.torproject.org) core team, long time Fedora Project contributor, and co-founded [Linux Users' group of Durgapur](https://dgplug.org). He is a director at the Python Software Foundation. He regularly blogs at https://kushaldas.in .

This talk about the term "failure" and how my life changed over the years as I understood that "failure" is part of life at every level. Starting from learning a new programming language (or actually failing at it in a grand way), to the failure of removing any temporary directory in a long running service. I will also talk about how I failed to understand many social and ethical points of technology and things improved with more failings over the years.