Taking place on 8th and 9th September this year’s TechExeter & Digital Exeter event may have been delivered in virtual form, but it certainly didn’t disappoint. The team as always delivered a slick and engaging event that was full of knowledgeable and experienced speakers, we were proud to have the opportunity to sponsor the event again this year and see two of the Software Solved team take to the ‘virtual’ stage to deliver a talk on the first day.
With a theme focused on ‘vision’ the 2-day event saw speaker topics including Artificial Intelligence, Software and Web development, Computer Vision, UK, Design, Digital Marketing, SEO and more.
Software Solved team members Tom Rooks and Aneeq Ur Rehman delivered a talk on ‘Deep Learning for object detection – A vision of the future’. The aim of the talk was to provide attendees with an understanding of the topic but also a practical understanding of how to quickly build and deploy custom object detectors with a few lines of code and some helpful resources.
Tom Rooks said, ‘It was great to be involved in this year’s TechExeter, being able to deliver a talk alongside so many esteemed and knowledgeable speakers across the two days was a great opportunity’.
As not just a speaker but an attendee as well we asked Tom Rooks for his Top 3 talks of the day…
- Nicola Whiting – Following your Vision, Beating Imposter Syndrome and Living your Dream Life
Tom said ‘Nicola closed the event last year, so I was looking forward to seeing her deliver a keynote this year. She provided great insight during her talk, championing diversity throughout and also sharing practical tips from her own experience on how to succeed and not let the modern worlds take of comparing ourselves to others distract from that success.’
- Antonia Forster – Touchless Technology – Innovating in a Post-Pandemic World
Tom said ‘Antonia was really inspiring, self-taught in the realms of AR she will soon be heading up the XR department for Unity. She shared insight into the company’s development of non-touch tech where the screen will track where a user’s hand is and associated haptics. This technology has been in development for a while bit the pandemic is likely going to be the catalyst to its adoption.’
- Tariq Rashid – Safe, Responsible and Ethical AI
Tom said ‘Tariq shared insights and examples about the negative bias that needs to be considered within machine learning to make sure it is effective and fair. The algorithm used to predict A Level results recently was an example of how potential negative bias can impact outcomes and it was felt likely in this instance that testing undertaken to identify the bias was not rigorous enough.’
These are just small elements of a few of the speaker’s topics from the first day but provide a taste for the wide variety of knowledge and expertise that is shared during this event each year.
To find out more about the full line up of speakers and topics head over to the TechExeter website.