Schedule VIScon 2018

VIScon Symposium Opening

Democratizing AI

Come hear about Machine Learning at Google and how we are working to make this revolution accessible to everyone.

This talk is an introduction to Machine Learning and how we use ML at Google. Find out more about Google's Vision, Translation and Video Intelligence API, as well as the Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

Facebook Ads 101: Feed, ML, Auctions and Scale

This is a high level introduction to how your Facebook feed is built and how ads are inserted into it.
We focus on presenting specific problems in the ads space and how we use machine learning and auctions to solve them.
We also present scalabil...

From Data to Business: Mind the gap

Data is everywhere. Nonetheless, turning data into gold is a difficult task to achieve. Current advancements of Machine Learning, combined with Big Data and Artificial Intelligence technologies, open new doors for businesses. We are experiencing a...

Discovering products faster and simpler

This talk includes the basic introduction about Elasticsearch and how we at Digitec Galaxus leverage its power and enable our customers to discover products using search, navigation and filters on our websites.

Have you ever wondered, how Switzerland´s biggest online shops – Digitec and Galaxus, enable you to discover products effortlessly and how exactly we empower our customers to find information and products in the ocean of more than 4 million products, 9000 journalistic articles and a huge community content. In this talk we´ll touch on information-theory concepts and take a sneak peek on how exactly our search algorithm works.

Going fast and slow: How agile engineering and DevOps are key to accelerating innovation and change in IT at UBS.

In an increasingly competitive world it's important that UBS has the capability to move fast and innovate, however like most large banks, UBS carries IT platforms that go back decades. In some ways this is a competitive advantage as these contain ...

How to become a Program Manager at Microsoft after ETH

From ETH to Program Manager at Microsoft

Becoming a Program Manager directly out of ETH at one of the world’s tech giants, Microsoft, can be intriguing yet intimidating. After one year I can happily say, I enjoyed every step along the way and I’m here to show you how you can do the same. I will be sharing my journey including which parts of my studies (sometimes surprisingly) helped me better succeed in my role today. If you’re interested in becoming a program manager and would like to know which parts of ETH can help you come and join me

A speed of light Internet

Today’s Internet is often tens of times slower than the fundamental speed limit, i.e., the speed of light in vacuum. My research addresses the grand challenge of building a speed of light Internet, and I will describe our exploration of free-space...

SCION and why it matters

The Internet has not been designed for high availability in the face of malicious actions by adversaries. Patches improving security and availability are constrained by the current Internet architecture, business, and legal aspects.
To address t...

Processing Data Where It Makes Sense: Enabling In-Memory Computation

Today’s computing systems are overwhelmingly designed to move data to
computation. This design choice causes inherent performance and energy
bottlenecks:
(1) data access from memory is already a key bottleneck as applications become more data-intensive,
(2) energy consumption is a key constraint in especially mobile and server systems,
(3) data movement is very expensive in terms of bandwidth, energy and latency, much more so than computation. These trends are especially severely-felt in the data-intensive server and energy-constrained mobile systems of today.

At the same time, conventional memory technology is facing many scaling challenges not only in terms of energy, and performance, but also reliability. For instance, the DRAM technology suffers from the RowHammer problem, as we discovered and rigorously analyzed. RowHammer is the phenomenon that repeatedly accessing a row in a modern DRAM chip predictably causes errors in physically-adjacent rows. It is a prime (and very likely the first) example of how a circuit-level failure mechanism in DRAM can cause a practical and widespread system security vulnerability.

As a result of such serious technology scaling ch...

Monetising your App

After this session attendees will be able to use the contents learnt to begin the process of monetizing their own assets. It will focus on concepts of making money from an app or website through advertisements. We will also walk through a common i...

Design Thinking

From the problem to the validated, digital prototype in under two hours! Learn how to create multidisciplinary product ideas and validate ideas!
Be inspired and get to know the interplay of different tools such as Design Thinking, UX and agile ap...

Create your own Augmented Reality Game

Learn how to build an Augmented Reality app for your Android smartphone with Unity.

In this two hour hands-on workshop you will learn the essentials of Unity, the popular cross-platform game engine with AR support. After a brief introduction to the topic you will create an interactive AR experience and finally run it on your own smartphone. Apart from a basic understanding of programming no prior knowledge is required. Please bring an Android Phone with you if possible.

1001 Anecdotes – Short stories from the first years of our company

What started as a fun project between (or sometimes during) lectures at ETH quickly became one of the leading app companies in Switzerland, creating apps like SBB Mobile or MeteoSwiss. With a few short stories we will share insights into challenge...

Service Mesh: How to Tame your Microservices

Ever since Netflix & Co. have popularized the microservice architectural style some years ago by turning their monolithic backend applications into independent, scalable and resilient services, many companies have tried (and often failed) to repli...

GetYourGuide - The Key to Success

Tobias will share the founding story of GetYourGuide and provide his insights on the keys to build a company with more than 400 employees.

Why did GYG move its headquarters to Berlin? What are the technical challenges of a growing company? What...

Web of Things for Semantic Building Automation

Company: Siemens Schweiz AG
Speaker: Dr. Matthias Kovatsch, Ganesh Ramanathan

Matthias is a Senior Research Scientist at Siemens Corporate Technology in Munich, Germany and ETH alumni with a focus on Web technology for networked embedded syste...

Semantic Web of Things in Building Automation
Building Automation systems present a particularly difficult problem when it comes to device interoperability. Devices such as sensors, actuators, and controllers interoperate only when they strictly adhere to one and the same of many standards. Yet even then, they usually do not provide the desired semantic interoperability, where devices would not only exchange messages, but also become aware of the context and meaning of data and commands to ensure correct operation and lower engineering and maintenance costs. In fact, this problem is more widely visible with the growing adaption of the Internet of Things, where more and more devices are becoming “connected.”

One of the promising approaches in solving the problem of both technical and semantic interoperability is by adopting concepts and technology that made the Web successful. This initiative is known as the Web of Things (WoT), which has its roots at the Institute of Pervasive Computing at ETH Zurich and has now become a global standardization effort within the W3C.

We applied Web of Things in the domain of Building Automation and in this talk we will introduce you the pr...

Migrating Frontend Code from A Monolith to Microservices

As the business requirements for Yelp for Business Owner Application change constantly, our old frontend stack built on top of Google Closure and jQuery is no longer the best choice. Besides, a large part of the application code still lives in a m...

As the business requirements for Yelp for Business Owner Application change constantly, our old frontend stack built on top of Google Closure and jQuery is no longer the best choice. Besides, a large part of the application code still lives in a monolith repository which has a large overhead with regard to testing and development.

As one of the feature teams, we want to migrate our frontend code to a frontend service built on top of the React ecosystem to ease future development and deployment.

But a big bang rewrite is not a option because new feature development should not be halted by this migration. How should we build the bridge between the old tech stack and the new tech stack? How should we combine new feature development and migration? How can we guarantee the functionality won’t be changed and no bugs get introduced by the migration?

Distributed QoS Performance Monitoring and a network outage

Massive bandwidth usage increase generated by Swisscom TV drove the need for an improved performance and QoS monitoring system for our aggregation networks. The requirement to collect short-term peak bandwidth rates led us to build our own distrib...

Insights from Crypto Valley: Briding your business in blockchain

In our daily work with innovators, entrepreneurs and decision-makers, some questions come up more often than others. Why blockchain? What problem does blockchain solve? What impact does blockchain have on our markets and our actions?
Blockchain a...

Merging Worlds

Driven by AR, AI and IoT the physical and virtual world are merging. The increased pace of innovation blurs the line between academia and industry, and emerging interdisciplinary job profiles bridge the technology, design and business world. Oppor...

VIScon Symposium Closing Ceremony