Report: Data a znalosti & WIKT Conference

The Data a znalosti & WIKT 2018 conference is rather small regional event for young researchers and PhD students. Its focus is on data, analytics, machine learning, and other related topics. The program of the conference is mostly academia-oriented and presented topics rather theoretic. Red Hat was a sponsor of the conference, which took place in Brno on October 11 and 12.

Vaclav Pavlin and Frido Pokorny, with the Artificial Intelligence Centre of Excellence within the office of the CTO attended the conference. Frido presented “Selinon – Dynamic Distributed Task Flows” and a poster titled “Project Thoth – A Recommendation Engine for Machine Learning Applications.”

Red Hat had a booth at the conference as well,  where we presented Red Hat academic program and some of the things we do with Open Data Hub on Mass Open Cloud and Log Anomaly Detector and how we use it internally. Both ideas generated a lot of interest and conversations were very interesting. Vaclav was driving these conversations, as his area of expertise is infrastructure that can be used for complex computing.

One specific highlight was an interest in the possibility to run Python code in your browser without the need to have strong computing power locally (Jupyter Notebooks). Giving local researchers an environment where they can run their tests on powerful hardware without the need to do a lot of paperwork requesting computational capacity first is a great opportunity for Red Hat that we can explore in the future.

All in all, this was a great opportunity to establish the first contact with some research groups we have never had strong contact with. Fostering these connections can prove very useful if the role of data grows stronger at Red Hat.