I recently went to Gurgaon with Shubham Chinda to attend the  Google Developer Group DevFest 2019 organized by the amazing people of GDG Mumbai.

The conference was held at the Westin,Gurgaon. Kudos to the organizers for selecting such an awesome venue.

This was a 1-day event with 8 simultaneously running tracks: AI/ML , Mobile , Web , Cloud , Design , AR/VR , Pro , and Grow your Career .

Floor Plan

Here’s a short TL;DR on each of the talks that I was able to attend. Since all 8 tracks were running simultaneously, I was only able attend the talks from AI/ML and ‘Grow your career’ path .

Note: I will also be adding the link to the videos of all the talks as soon as they are uploaded.

What Are GDG DevFests?

GDG DevFests are large, community-run developer events happening around the world focused on community building and learning about Google’s technologies. GDG DevFests happen in most of the major cities around the globe.

The events cover multiple products of Google, such as Android, Firebase, Google Cloud Platform, Google Assistant, Flutter, machine learning with TensorFlow, and Mobile Web.

The main objective of this event is to provide developers and designers with a platform to celebrate and share their work.

It’s also a great place for startups to look for right people and for Open Source authors to show-off their latest creations.

Beginning

I entered the event venue it was filled with tons of developer talking about their work and achievements. I felt really great as it was the perfect opportunity for me to do networking but first I had to go to the registration table to register my presence.

They asked me to show my Qr Code for getting a recyclable band and a cap that said “I am also a developer”

After showing my Qr Code I got:

I thought it was really funny.

The place was really packed and full of great people

I decided to take the AI/ML track because I was already developing applications and content in Web and Augmented Reality so I thought this might a good time to get a simple idea about AI/ML.

Starting The Track

The first talk was given by Pankaj Kanwar who was working with Google for the past 8 years. He was currently working with Google Brain Engineering Team.

The talk that he gave was really great and he displayed us that how easy Tensorflow was and anyone with some skills in Python can easily create their own models. He also introduced the concept of Google Cloud Program about which I had no idea.

The second talk was about Reinforcement Learning – Applications and Challenges in Robotics

In this talk they explained how a simple robot is programmed to pick up objects using Reinforcement Learning . It was really informative and really like the session.

Third Talk Cognitive biases in AI: Detection and mitigation

This talk was about XAI(Explainable Artificial Intelligence)

Explainable AI (XAI) refers to methods and techniques in the application of artificial intelligence technology (AI) such that the results of the solution can be understood by human experts. It contrasts with the concept of the “black box” in machine learning where even their designers cannot explain why the AI arrived at a specific decision. XAI is an implemention of the social right to explanation. Some claim that transparency rarely comes for free and that there are often trade-offs between the accuracy and the explanaibility of a solution .

The technical challenge of explaining AI decisions is sometimes known as the interpretability problem was discussed in this session. It was really good as expected.

After this I did networking and attended the session of Open-Source I knew everything about Open-Source so I didn’t gain anything from that session

Closing Keynote

Everyone gathered in a big hall and appreciated the efforts of the speakers , organizers and volunteers who gave their best in making the event successful.

We were given lots of stickers and a T-shirt of Google DevFest 2019

Lastly, I would like to say that the experience was really great.