• Olivier Hecq, Head of SSC IT for Societe Generale European Business Services

“Being part of DevTalks Bucharest is for us an opportunity to exchange our knowledge and experiences with regard to the digital transformation of the banks. SSC IT is not another captive outsourcing center, is a spin-off of the global SG IT and we are contributing to the development of the banking system.

We are excited to present our activities through our keynote and our booth, but also we are looking forward to interact with the visitors, to take the pulse of the participants and why not, to meet our future colleagues ?

Don’t hesitate to visit us because we have a lot of interesting things going on the entire day!”

• Interview with Joe Winchester, Senior Technical Staff Member IBM & speaker of DevTalks Bucharest 2017

Why did you accept to join us at DevTalks Romania?

This will be my first time at DevTalks Romania!  I work for IBM in the UK and recently we acquired EZ Source who are a software vendor in Bucharest specialising in application discovery analysis tools.  I’ve spent about six weeks visiting the local team (having never previously visited Romania) and I am hugely impressed with energy and skills and enthusiasm of everyone I meet – whether they’re in IT or just locals in the shops, cafes, running trails, or enjoying Papanasi.

When I found out about DevTalks I just said to myself “I need to be there” so I submitted a talk that was thankfully accepted and I can’t wait to be there.

What are your expectations for this edition ?  How do you think DevTalks will surprise you in 2017?

I really enjoy just being around other people who are experts in their field and have found interesting ways to apply technology, or have interesting ideas about what we should be doing in the future or signposts for what’s just around the corner.  DevTalks is my perfect conference with short talks and great speakers and chances to interact and network.

I love hearing stories and feeding off the energy of others as well as sharing my stories and enthusiasm for IT and its relevance and applicability for current problem solving.  I hope to be surprised by finding something that just makes me think “Wow – that’s a path forward I did not expect to find someone taking”.  I hope to leave the conference with new friends and contacts to share ideas going forward and in my talk I hope that some of the folks in the audience learn something new that changes the way they think about AI.

What is the topic that you will approach that?

I was thrilled to get my submission accepted for “Turing to Watson”.  Alan Turing is a British mathematician who was pivotal to codebreaking and building the world’s first computer to do that known as “The Enigma Machine”.  Turing was fascinated by artificial intelligence and machines and created a hypothesis which is that if you communicate with a computer and can’t distinguish it from a human then that computer has achieved intelligence.

Watson is IBM’s cognitive learning software that is currently being used in a huge number of applications from helping to identify tumours from radiography pictures more accurately than humans, as well beating humans at games such as TV quiz shows.  My topic will cover AI in terms of what it is – the state of the art in terms of what it currently is capable of – and I’ll round out covering issues the trouble, and inspire me, such as “who trains the machines and how do you trust their answers” and whether relying on AI will make humans dumber or smarter as a species and populus.  Looking forward to sharing my ideas and stories a bunch.