Hello Everyone

Given the recent developments with the pandemic, we have made a decision to change this to an ONLINE ONLY event using Zoom Webinar as a platform. We have now extended the capacity for up to 500 people will be able to join on the event. EVERYONE who wants to access this event needs to sign up via link >

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_y80y-pmIRhyHssEAT52MzA

We are pleased to let you know that Philip Lew is still available and will join the community from San Francisco, USA with his new talk, see below. In addition, we have been very lucky to secure two further speakers, James Farrier, Co-Founder & CTO of Appsurify joining us from Auckland, New Zealand and Ian Sharp, Head of Responsible AI Enablement at Slalom, based in London, United Kingdom

Talk 1: Don’t Become Irrelevant: Testing in the Age of AI

“Work smarter not harder”, is not enough in today’s fast-moving world. Not only is technology moving fast, but it’s also accelerating. With AI supported by big data, quantum computing, and 5G, its progress will accelerate but how can it be applied to software testing? In this talk, Phil discusses where AI has applications in testing, what AI can do today and possibly tomorrow. Most importantly, he’ll discuss where AI works well and where it doesn’t.

About Philip Lew

Philip Lew is the CEO at XBOSoft. As a Corporate Executive, Development Manager, Product Manager, and Software Engineer, Philip has managed teams to tackle broken processes, develop solutions to difficult problems, and coached others be leaders, managers, and experts.

Talk 2: Curing your Test Automation with AI
In a world where budgets are being cut but IT services are more essential than ever companies are relying on test automation more than ever before. But the challenges of the past still prevent automation from being fast and reliable. In fact, the prognosis for most test automation projects is failure. But some companies do succeed, in this presentation, we will go through what Google and Facebook do to run automated testing at scale using AI and best practices.

About James Farrier
James Farrier is Co-Founder & CTO of Appsurify, where he builds products to make software testing smarter, faster, and cheaper. James has been in QA testing for more than 15 years as a test lead and test manager in the financial services industry with a focus on test automation.

Talk 3: Frameworks, APIs and Testing in the Age of AI
There has been rapid progress in AI and machine learning over the past few years. Today, you can grab one of a handful of frameworks, follow some online tutorials, and have a working machine learning model in a matter of hours. First, there is no standard for model serving APIs, so you are likely stuck with whatever your framework gives you. This might be protocol buffers or custom JSON. Your business application will generally need a bespoke client just to talk to your deployed model. And it's even worse if you are using multiple frameworks. If you want to create ensembles of models from multiple frameworks, you'll have to write custom code to combine them. Second, building your model server can be incredibly complicated. Deployment gets much less attention than training, so out-of-the-box solutions are few and far between. Try building a GPU version of TensorFlow-serving, for example. You better be prepared to bang your head against it for a few days.

About Ian Sharp
Ian Sharp is Head of Responsible AI Enablement at Slalom Ltd, a modern Management Consultancy. Prior to this, he was Head of Ai Innovation and Design for Oracle’s Key Accounts across EMEA and JPAC. He has also worked in Microsoft’s Data Cloud Solutions Comms and Media POD, and was Lead Data Scientist for Oracle UK, Ireland and Israel.

Agenda
6:25PM Open, Introduction & Welcome
6:30PM Talk 1: Philip Lew
7:00PM Talk 2: James Farrier
7:30PM Talk 3: Ian Sharp
8:00pm Q&A, Future Meet-ups and Close

Regards
Andrew