Raining meetups: AI & ML in e-commerce, performance testing at cloud scale, and evolution of technology in ISRO🚀
By: Shreyas Narayanan
Tags: Space, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Newsletter, Data Science

What’s happening at our end? It’s raining meetups, but before that, a recap of last week’s events:

The open house on design and community on 7 July revealed three issues:

Freelance designers and those working as solo designers in companies leads to isolation. A community offers a sense of belonging, a place to bounce ideas and become more creative.

However, existing design communities are fragmented. Design events cater to different people of varying skill levels. Can a single community fulfill every designer’s learning needs and aspirations?

Communities and events should focus on case studies and experience sharing.

Given these insights, tell us what kind of content you’d like to see at Meta Refresh 2017.

This year’s edition is on 30 November. The focus is on sharing case studies and experiences of design decisions. If you haven’t seen the CfP yet, head here: https://metarefresh.talkfunnel.com/2017/. And do share, tweet and post the CfP announcement widely.

Updates on 50p conference in Mumbai:

50p took place in Mumbai on 8 July. We opened the conference with a panel discussion about UPI’s performance in the first year. Here is a quick summary of the panel:

UPI is one of the most secure payment platforms available because transactions cannot be made without the consumer’s consent.

However, awareness about UPI is still low. Banks are unlikely to invest in building awareness about UPI because this is an important aspect of their business model. Will the onus then lie on the government to sensitize the masses about UPI?

UPI is a consumer-to-business tool. What is in it for businesses to use UPI since the B2B use cases aren’t clear.

The governance structure of NPCI is still unclear. Is NPCI a quasi-regulator when it is actually a private company funded by banks?

While UPI is a secure platform, NPCI should conduct security audits with network partners to ensure that their systems are not vulnerable to consumers losing money in the transit.

Now, the raining meetups this week:

1. NewSpace open house on Friday, 14 July:

Prof. S. Chandrashekharan will talk about how technology in ISRO has evolved over the last twenty years. Prof. Chandrashekharan worked at ISRO for twenty years, and is currently serving as faculty at IIM-B.

To attend, RSVP here: https://www.facebook.com/events/101658303796453/

Time: 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM

Venue: HasGeek House

2. The Fifth Elephant meetup in Bangalore on Saturday, 15 July.

@WalmartLabs and The Fifth Elephant are hosting a meetup on trends in machine learning and artificial intelligence in e-commerce and retail. Talks will cover:

Application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in retail using vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

Trends in the e-commerce catalog space, and implications for the industry.

Cracking the last mile code.

Subrat Panda, principal architect at Capillary Technologies, Govind Chandrasekhar, co-founder of Semantics3, and Issac Mathew, senior data scientist and supply chain domain lead @WalmartLabs are the speakers at this meetup.

If you’re a data scientist, analyst, data engineer working on recommendation systems in e-commerce, this is a great opportunity to meet and learn more about how AI and ML are shaping the course of data mining and engineering in e-commerce and retail.

RSVP for the meetup here: https://fifthelephant.in/2017/bangalore-meetup

3. Rootconf meetup on Performance Testing at Cloud Scale on 19 July:

On 19 July, Rootconf and CA Technologiesechnologies are hosting an event on ‘performance testing at cloud scale’. Performance is a critical factor in testing web applications as it directly impacts the end user’s experience. The main aim of performance testing is to measures various parameters such as system throughput, latency with changing number of parallel users accessing your application, with different load profiles and various other performance metrics.

Join us for the meetup on 19th evening. RSVP here: https://rootconf.in/2017/perf-testing-meetup

If you want to speak at this meetup, write to me with details, on shreyaskutty@hasgeek.com.

And finally, Fragments conference tickets are open:

Fragments is evolving as a space for mobile developers working on different platforms to share their work. The first edition of the conference will talk about modern mobile development teams, across Android, iOS and mobile web.

Get your tickets here: https://fragments.in/2017/

The Call for Proposals (CfP) is open, in case you missed submitting a talk in the first round. Last date for submissions is 30 July.

https://fragments.talkfunnel.com/2017/