TechNight

Tech Night LDN is a mini-conference embracing diversity by raising the visibility of accomplished women and underrepresented groups in tech and focussing on their achievements and knowledge.

The evening will feature workshops, talks, panels and networking for people of all genders who are curious about technology. Expect an evening of inspiration and motivation!

The event is open to all university students and graduates less than two years out of university of any technical skill level (including complete beginners) and best of all... it's absolutely free!

Opening talk by Emily Brooke, CEO and Founder of Blaze (https://blaze.cc/)

Then the event will split into three streams:

-Workshop by Morgan Stanley:

You will get to work in teams on AI for an automated player in a game of Ultimate Tic Tac Toe. Everyone will get to learn about Game theory and basic AI algorithms, and at the end each team’s player will play automatically against all others to see which algorithm is strongest.

For this workshop we’ll provide an initial implementation of a player to each team, with very basic decision logic – so that everyone starts from the same point. The players will be coded in JavaScript and run with Nodejs.

-Panel on Perspectives in Tech

Gain insight on multiple aspects of the tech industry from our panel members, who have a wide range of backgrounds, including:

-Zahra is a full-stack iOS developer at Bloomberg. She recently graduated from UCL with a Computing BSc, where she was the former Director of Events at UCLU TechSoc and led organisation of events such as the last Tech Night LDN. She's also a student hackathon veteran, having worked her way up from attendee to organiser to judge, and was a member of the first cohort of Clarifai Champions.

-Umesh is the Co-Founder of Pace Ventures, an innovation consultancy that works with governments, corporates and charities on their innovation capability. Through workshops, hackathons, accelerators and consulting projects, Pace Ventures helps broker relationships with startups and SME's. Alongside Pace Ventures, he runs UniHack, a nationwide hackathon programme. UniHack brings together students, corporates, the third sector, and the local community to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges.

-Jennifer has studied Electronic and Telecoms Engineering (MEng) at the University of Sheffield. Having graduated in 2015 she joined Vodafone Group’s Technology programme and is now on her 3rd placement working in the Systems Architecture team. Jennifer has worked on a range of interesting projects from collaborating with suppliers for a catalyst project in order to deliver more personalised customer experience to learning about open API’s and how we can use this to deliver a better service to our customers.

-Tech Talk with Zehan Wang and Suranga Chandratillake:

Zehan Wang was previously the co-founder and CTO of Magic Pony Technology, which was acquired in 2016 by Twitter for up to $150M (https://techcrunch.com/…/twitter-is-buying-magic-pony-tech…/). Currently, Zehan is an engineering manager at Twitter where he leads a team of researchers and engineers developing features and technologies which provide new and better visual experiences for Twitter users. Prior to that, Zehan did a PhD at Imperial College London on medical image analysis using computer vision and machine learning.

Suranga joined Balderton as a General Partner in 2014. He was previously an entrepreneur and engineer. Suranga founded blinkx, the intelligent search engine for video and audio content in Cambridge in 2004. He then led the company for eight years as CEO through its journey of moving to San Francisco, building a profitable business and going public in London where it achieved a peak market capitalisation in excess of $1Bn. Before founding blinkx, Suranga was an early employee at Autonomy Corporation - joining as an engineer in the Cambridge R&D team and ultimately serving as the company's US CTO in San Francisco.

Closing Speaker - TBA!