We continue the sharing session with the speakers coming at DevTalks Cluj-Napoca! This time, Martin Woolley, Technical Program Manager @ Bluetooth SIG, Paul Ardeleanu, Mobile Software Consultant at Lupo, and Marcel Cremene, Senior Java Developer/Tech Lead at 8×8 Global Cloud Communications, are in the spotlight telling us more about their participation at DevTalks in 2017. 

• Why did you accept to join us again in 2017 at DevTalks Romania?

Martin: DevTalks Cluj-Napoca in 2016 was an excellent event! It was evident from the conversations I had, that there is a lot of interesting work, in areas such as IoT going on in Romania. This is exactly the type of audience I want to connect with.

Paul: DevTalks is one of those conferences that is a must for me every year – great topics, remarkable community and exceptional logistics.  And, as a previous speaker, it’s a great opportunity to contribute to the Romanian IT ecosystem.

Marcel: I think it is important to disseminate ideas. I consider that I have an interesting presentation subject related to a hot topic like machine learning. I enjoy interacting with others and exchange ideas because this stimulates and motivates me.

• What are your expectations for this edition? How do you think DevTalks will surprise you in 2017?

Martin: I hope that one year later, awareness of and interest in topics like IoT and Smart Buildings has increased dramatically, as developers from all sorts of backgrounds, recognise the immense opportunity that they have to participate in and profit from these exciting new topics.

Paul: I hope VR and/or AR will make an appearance and some players in the fields will showcase consumer solutions.

Marcel: I hope that my presentation will be interesting for the audience. But I think the most important gain comes from the feedback and discussions. Critics are usually very useful. From the conference in general I expect to facilitate interactions, to create a good context for exchanging ideas, and a nice ambiance. I want to know other people having similar interest. I am curious about the other presentations.

• What is the topic that you will approach about?

Martin: I will be talking about Bluetooth 5, the latest version of this utterly pervasive, low power wireless communications technology, its improved capabilities and what kinds of things mobile and web developers can do with it.

Paul: I’ll be talking about what makes a good developer great. The last of my slides says: “Be a human first. Then become a developer”.

Marcel: My topic concerns automatic document classification. This is related to natural language processing and also to AI classification systems in the context of Big Data and Cloud Computing. In particular we (8×8 Inc.) are interested in call transcriptions – our company develops services for call centers. The problem is to find relevant topics in a large volume of transcriptions. Natural language understanding remains a very difficult problem, especially when we consider sentence level semantics. I investigated several existing approaches and I decided to propose a new solution that combines different methods.

Can’t wait to meet you on May 17!