Name: Great North DevFest
Start: 2021-11-13T11:30:00-05:00
End: 2021-11-13T16:45:00-05:00

Chander Dhall

Cazton

Chander Dhall, CEO - Cazton, Inc (Cazton.com) is an awarded Microsoft MVP and world-renowned technology leader in architecting and implementing solutions. He's not only rescued software development teams, but also implemented successful projects under tight deadlines and difficult business constraints. His company has a proven track record of not just saving the client millions of dollars, but also providing an expedited delivery time. Chander's team of experts are internationally-acclaimed speakers in top technical conferences in the world.As a Microsoft Azure Advisor, ASP.NET Insider, Web API Advisor, DocumentDB Advisor, and an MVP for Visual Studio and Development Technologies, Chander has insight into new releases on technologies used by millions of developers. His critical advice, impeccable vision, futuristic strategy backed with creating and establishing best practices in the industry are some of the reasons for his unparalleled success.At the same time, he's a voracious and highly-respected speaker. Chander is known to elucidate critical and complex concepts while making them easy to understand. He's one man who can talk to anyone from a junior developer, a senior architect all the way to an executive and knows how to speak their language. He has utilized his amazing business sense having started a company with zero funding and turned it into a multi-million-dollar company in less than two years.

Serg Masís

Syngenta

Serg Masís has been at the confluence of the internet, application development, and analytics for the last two decades. Currently, he's a Climate and Agronomic Data Scientist at Syngenta, a leading agribusiness company with a mission to improve global food security. Before that role, he co-founded a search engine startup, incubated by Harvard Innovation Labs, that combined the power of cloud computing and machine learning with principles in decision-making science to expose users to new places and events efficiently. Whether it pertains to leisure activities, plant diseases, or customer lifetime value, Serg is passionate about providing the often-missing link between data and decision-making — and machine learning interpretation helps bridge this gap more robustly. His book titled "Interpretable Machine Learning with Python" was released in April 2021 by UK-based publisher Packt (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08PDFXXRL/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i0)

Amir Feizpour

Aggregate Intellect

Amir Feizpour is the co-founder of Aggregate Intellect (https://ai.science/), a Smart Knowledge Management platform for R&D teams in emerging technologies like AI. Amir has built and grown a global community of AI practitioners and researchers gathered around topics in AI research, engineering, and product development. Prior to this, Amir was an NLP Product Lead at the Royal Bank of Canada and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford conducting research on experimental quantum computing. Amir holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Toronto.

Chris Stocks

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Chris is a Manager in the Algorithmic Fairness and Data Science practices at SolasAI, where he helps clients build fair, highly predictive models using advanced machine learning and explainable AI techniques. Prior to his work with SolasAI and BLDS LLC, Chris analyzed disparities in credit outcomes at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to support fair lending actions that resulted in millions of dollars in restitution to consumers. Chris also serves on the board of the Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning, where he chairs the Technical Best Practices committee. [FBPML] While in graduate school, Chris worked on fair lending projects part time at both BLDS, LLC and Hudson Cook, LLP, a Consumer Financial Services Law Firm. He’s been involved in many projects involving discrimination measurement, algorithmic bias, disparity mitigation, and explainable AI in fields like credit, healthcare, and insurance. Chris has had meaningful experience working on issues around fairness across government, at a law firm, and in consulting. He brings a blend of compliance experience from many fields and perspectives, alongside quantitative abilities that allow him to cross between worlds to be a highly effective data scientist. Chris hopes to use his experience on both the regulatory and industry side of fair AI in fields like credit, healthcare, and marketing to help bridge the gap between academic ideals of fairness and how algorithms can be made more equitable in practice. Chris has an MS in Business Analytics. Publications ● Dietrich, Jason and Schneider, Karl and Stocks, Chris, Small Business Lending and the Great Recession (January 16, 2020). Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Office of Research Reports Series No. 20-1, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3526262 Recent Speaking Engagements ● CFPB, October 9, 2020. Selected to participate in the agency’s Tech Sprint on Adverse Action Notices; presented on explainability techniques and best practices related to fair adverse action notices for machine learning algorithms. www.solas.ai | info@solas.ai | 1608 Walnut St. (Suite 1108), Philadelphia, PA 19103

Daniel Vale

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Daniel currently works as legal counsel for AI & data science at the H&M Group: where his principal focus is on developing and maturing the company’s MLOps (business, governance, and regulatory) capacities, while maintaining the commercial advantage of such technologies. Daniel is also completing his Ph.D. in law, finance & AI at Leiden University. His research focus is on algorithmic (AI) high frequency trading & EU financial law. Daniel’s education is in behavioral science, statistics, and law: B.A., LL.B. (J.D.) & LL.M. Having worked at corporate law firms as an attorney and later as a consultant for commercial enterprises, Daniel has practical legal and commercial experience in the field. He proposes that responsible ML is centered around two essential themes - (a) a constant appreciation of context, and (b) prudent MLOps & project management.

Nicholas Schmidt

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Nicholas started working in the field of responsible AI through his twenty years of experience working at the intersection of statistics, law, and regulation. He is currently the CEO of SolasAI and the AI practice leader at BLDS, LLC. Before that, Nicholas studied at the University of Chicago. In his work at SolasAI, he leads a team of data scientists and engineers building software that assesses whether there is evidence of bias or discrimination in an algorithm, and then provides alternative models that are both fairer and highly predictive. Nicholas believes that algorithms can be used as a force for good, but that responsible governance is necessary for that to happen.

Violeta Misheva

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Violeta has been interested in understanding the causes of social inequalities and to what extent bad experiences early in life propagate to negative outcomes later. When she realized ML can result in widening already existing social gaps, she became an advocate for the responsible development and deployment of ML. Violeta currently works as a data scientist at ABN Amro. Before that, she worked in consultancy and obtained her PhD in applied econometrics. Violeta likes sharing her knowledge with others by the form of workshops on data science and online courses. Violeta proposes that developers of ML solutions alone cannot ensure their safety but, rather, that the additional efforts of multidisciplinary experts as well as proper regulation is also needed.

Dewan Ahmed

Red Hat

👋🏽 Hello! I’m Dewan - a Senior Developer Advocate at Red Hat focusing on cloud-native projects. Before starting at Red Hat, I have worked at IBM for six years as a developer, QA lead, consultant and developer advocate. And even before that, I was a renewable energy engineer designing solar homes for off-grid parts of Bangladesh.I believe in the power of community and actively work with the local and virtual communities (OpenShift, K8s, CNCF to name a few).Besides work, I offer career coaching to students, newgrads and professionals who are trying to transition to the software industry. When I’m not working, I spend quality time with my family and play 🎱.

Faisal Abid (GDE)

Eirene

Faisal is a Google Developer Expert, Entrepreneur, and Engineer. He is a programming language enthusiast and loves solving software engineering challenges across the stack

At any point during the day, you can find Faisal writing mobile apps in Flutter, building backends in Dart, Node.js or Rust, creating models with Tensorflow or deploying services with Kubernetes.

Faisal Abid is the CTO and Co-Founder at Eirene. Additionally, Faisal Abid has had 6 past jobs including Chief Technology Officer at Zoom.ai.

Nav Singh

Manulife

Android developer at Manulife Google Developer Expert for Android, Mobile Software Engineer at Manulife, Organizer at GDG-Montreal, Mentor for Android-Kotlin Nano-degree at Udacity, and write articles about Android and Kotlin. Apart from his day-to-day job, He spends his time learning new technologies/frameworks. During his free, he loves to watch Netflix, or you can find him at Gym.

Boris-Wilfried Nyasse

Stack Labs Canada

Dart/Flutter GDE & Cloud Consultant, I am above all passionate about languages, infrastructure, and automation. As a developer, I enjoy my journey to ensure that the engineering trains run on time by creating an ideal environment for passionate people. My goal is to inspire others to continuously improve and raise their standards at all levels of the team. I am lucky to be the former founder and organizer of the Flutter Toulouse Meetup in France. Former speaker to some DevFest event at Toulouse, London & Montreal, I am currently working as the North America Director of Stack Labs & his VP of Engineering: a Google Cloud Premier Partner consulting firm company specialized in architecture and development of cloud solutions. I enjoy my journey to work with customer Technical leads, client executives, and partners to manage and deliver successful migrations to Google Cloud solutions and now their journey to Dart & Flutter. It is always a fun moment for me to share my passion for Dart & Flutter.

Joel Humberto Gómez Paredes

IBM

Frontend Developer en Platzi, GDE en Web Technologies y Google Maps Platform, amante de JS, los tacos y maestro Pokémon

Márton Kodok (GDE)

REEA.net

Márton is a Google Developer Expert (GDE) On Cloud, top user on Stackoverflow with 192k reputation, software developer, international speaker & passionate about mountain hiking. Active contributor for open-source solutions like Beanstalkd console, and Riak admin interface. Expert in Cloud Technologies, Scalability, HA, Serverless, Cloud Run, Vertex AI, database systems like BigQuery, Redis, MySQL, Elasticsearch. Mentor and consultant for startups.

Guillaume Blaquiere

Accenture AI

Guillaume is a Google Developer Expert on Cloud Platform since 2019 and works at Veolia as Lead Cloud Architect.

Java developer for more than 15 years, and despite positions of responsibilities, he has always kept his wish to create, develop, discover and test new solutions, especially in the Cloud, the machine learning or Python and Go language.

Innovation addict and Google Cloud 3x certified, writer and speaker on his free time, he's fascinated by the serverless solution and all the "usual" problem that it solves.

More generally, he likes helping people stucks on Google Cloud; you can find him on Stack Overflow (guillaume-blaquiere), Medium (@guillaume.blaquiere) and Twitter (@gblaquiere)

Frank Abbruzzese

Over 34 years in the Technology & Innovation Sector. Enjoy developing long-term relationships for companies and organizations of all sizes. Provide strategic planning for their Innovation and Technology investment, disaster data recovery plans, web development, web marketing, custom software and Cyber Security.

Know as "The Connector" bringing professionals together to create opportunities for each other.

Specialties: Team of technical expertise in all facets of IT hardware, 24x7 support, web development, digital marketing, custom software development, data security/data disaster recovery.

Joe Birch

Buffer

Joe Birch is an Android Engineer and Google Developer Expert for Android and Actions on Google based in Brighton, UK working on the Android team at Buffer. He is passionate about creating meaningful products, diving into new technologies and sharing his experiences with the community along the way. Outside of work Joe is building Compose Academy and also loves to dabble in electronics projects in his spare time.

Karan Balkar

LTI

Karan Balkar is a mobile application developer primarily working on Android since the past 5 years. He has also worked on Augmented reality / Virtual reality based mobile applications and is passionate about exploring new innovative technologies.

Procheta Nag

BGC Engineering Inc.

Procheta is working full time as a UI/UX Designer at BGC Engineering Inc, Canada. She has a Masters’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Simon Fraser University and Bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering. She made several research publications on renowned conferences like IEEE, ACM.She is engaged with the tech community from her undergraduate study life on a mission to help learners. She is a Mentor of Exchange with Google Developer, Organizer of Google Developer Group and Women Techmakers Ambassador. She enjoys sharing her learnings and experiences about UX and Career.

Vasudev Maduri

Accenture AI

Vasudev is a Sr. Machine Learning Engineer working at Accenture AI. His past works are related to Google Cloud, Deep Learning, and Cloud Computing.His research areas include predictive analytics, video analytics, and his research work has been published in more than 10 journals and recently filed a patent. He is also 6x certified on Google Cloud PlatformHe is an active open source contributor, had been a mentor at GSoC'21, and delivered 20+ technical talks in the past.

Shubhra Sarker

Electronics Arts

Shubhra Sarker is a master’s graduate from Simon Fraser University currently working as a Software Engineer at Electronic Arts. He completed his bachelor’s degree with the major of Computer Science and Engineering from Khulna University, Bangladesh.He completed his MSc in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with an emphasis on Augmented Reality and Game Programming. He has expertise in AR/VR development, gameplay programming, and computer vision.

Mike Hoff

ATB Financial

Mike has been in IT for over 30 years - yes, he's older than he looks! - including roles as Programmer, DBA, Sys Admin, BA, PMP, and various leadership positions. He's experienced the highs and lows of IT in retail, healthcare, government, consulting, a dot com, and a brief stint as IT Manager at Winsport Canada. Mike does occasional public speaking engagements on Job Hunting and Risk Management, and is famous for telling anyone who will listen that our role is to be "the midwives for The Cloud."

Madona Wambua

WGU

Madona Syombua is an Author, GDE Android, and Senior Android Engineer at WGU, She is also a Women Who Code Mobile Lead, Women Techmakers Ambassador, and a developer who enjoys sharing her Android knowledge and teaching others how to make Android applications.

Elad Shechter

Yad2

Elad Shechter is a Web Developer specializing in CSS & HTML design and architecture.Besides this, he is a Writer of various globally known CSS articles and a CSS speaker.

Kamal Shree

Kamal is a Google Developer Expert in Flutter & Dart with 11 years of experience in Web Technologies, Android and Flutter. She has worked for multinational firms in India, the Netherlands and USA. She is an active Youtuber (WhatsUpCoders) and an International Speaker.

AJ Khan

AJ Khan is a Cyberpreneur and has multiple startups focused on Cyber. These include CyberStrategiz Inc., CyTaara Inc. CloudGRC Inc., Cyber Innovation Leadership Solutions (CILS) and Vehiqilla Inc. He also has a resource focused on Cyberpreneurship called CyberXLTR.AJ has over 20 years of experience in Governance, Risk & Compliance, and 13 years of experience in Cybersecurity Innovation and Emerging Technologies. AJ is also an MBA in Innovation & Entrepreneurship.AJ is also a noted author. His first book, “The Global Age of Entrepreneurship”, was focused on Innovation and entrepreneurship. His new book, “Automotive Cyber Governance” focused on challenges and opportunities in automotive cybersecurity is scheduled to be published by the end of 2021.

Anik Jha

Rocket Mortgage

Anik is a Machine learning engineer at Rocket Mortgage. He has previously worked in domains of visual question answering, motion planning in self driving cars, fraud modeling, smart resource allocation and ADCS units for nano satellites. He has completed his Masters in Electrical engineering with a focus on Machine Learning and Computer vision.

Abhishek Verma

Rocket Innovation Studio

Abhishek is a Product Owner at Rocket Innovation Studio. He has a diverse background in financial services and has a passion for agile adoption and cybersecurity. In earlier stints he has helped with AI ML solutions development as well as marketing of those solutions.His passion is continuous learning and earning certifications in cloud technologies and agile. He also loves to advise newcomers to technology with career progression assistance. In his past time he loves to train himself to be a prepper.

Marco Diazgranados

BGC Engineering Inc.

Marco is a software tech lead at BGC with over 17 years of experience utilizing technology to solve complex problems working as an in-house developer and consultant in a variety of sectors including telecom, banking, motor vehicles, and electronics. Marco is leading one of the teams responsible for all the work related the map interactions in BGC’s Cambio web application. Marco is a passionate technology geek. He loves spending time with his family and watching movies, series, sports, and videos on YouTube.

Eldon Wong

BGC Engineering Inc.

Eldon Wong is a Software Development Manager at BGC and leads the development teams responsible for BGC’s web and mobile applications.

Joseph Walls

BGC Engineering Inc.

Joseph Walls is a senior UI/UX Designer who leads the design team at BGC.

Ali El-Sharif

St Clair College

Ali El-Sharif works as a professor at St. Clair College in Windsor, where he teaches Data Analytics and Cybersecurity.

Ali is currently co-authoring a book with Serg Masís and Nick Schmidt. The book title is “Building Responsible AI with Python - Identify, explain, and mitigate bias with hands-on code examples.”

Ali enjoys volunteering for GDG Windsor and encourages everyone to stay connected with this amazing community of developers.

Muskan Sandhu

Bell Canada

Muskan Sandhu, Solution Architect for Front end technology, has a post-graduate degree in Big data science from NIT Rourkela and a master's degree in computer science from Arizona University. She has started her career as a Front End developer 5 years before and focus on web deployment front-end framework. She is very passionate about technology and in her free time she likes to study IT-related articles.

Dipak Makhija

Rocket Innovation Studio

I have been in IT for over 21 years. I am TOGAF certified Enterprise Architect, AWS Certified Solution Architect, Microsoft/Sun/Oracle Certified. I have played different roles like Cloud Architect, Integration Architect, Business Process Automation Architect & RPA Strategist. And working with technologies like .NET, Java, AWS, Camunda, Microservices, RPA, Mulesoft, Salesforce.

Kiley Carson

University of Calgary

Kiley is a versatile Computer Science Major with expertise in planning and executing technical and non-technical events and cultivating collaborative and supportive environments for learning and teamwork throughout many positions. In her spare time, she enjoys upskilling, walking her dog, and spending time with her family.

Susan Taylor

St. Clair College, Genesis Entrepreneurship Centre

Susan has been a long-time entrepreneur, mentor, teacher, and advocate of women in STEM. She currently manages the Genesis Entrepreneurship Centre at St. Clair College under the Department of Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. She is passionate about helping others reach their full potential and is actively involved in several local charities and non-profit organizations. She believes in the importance of establishing a strong network and the powerful impact they can have.

Bobbi Bidochka

TAndemLaunch

Bobbi is always seeking aspiring tech entrepreneurs to build companies with and she helps portfolio companies raise venture capital funding. Bobbi is the resident Equity, Diversity and Inclusion advocate, she started the Young Women’s Tech Leadership Program and the Social Entrepreneurship Program at TandemLaunch. Bobbi is the co-founder of WIN4Science, set to encourage women to remain in science and academia, and she participates as a mentor to startups, charitable board member and in various advisory roles.

Mohit Sarveiya

Mohit is a Google Developer Expert for Kotlin and Android. He was an early adopter of Kotlin! Over the years, he has talked in various communities around the globe and has helped many companies adopt Kotlin and Coroutines.

Great North DevFest

GDG Windsor Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 11:30 AM (EST)

454 RSVP'ed

About this event

What is the Great North DevFest?

Prizes

What Canadian Google Developers Groups and Google Developer Student Clubs are contributing to this?

Lastly,

** PLEASE NOTE: ALL TIMES ARE IN EST **

Speakers

Chander Dhall

Serg Masís

Amir Feizpour

Chris Stocks

Daniel Vale

Nicholas Schmidt

Violeta Misheva

Dewan Ahmed

Faisal Abid (GDE)

Nav Singh

Boris-Wilfried Nyasse

Vivek Yadav

Joel Humberto Gómez Paredes

Márton Kodok (GDE)

Guillaume Blaquiere

Frank Abbruzzese

Joe Birch

Karan Balkar

Procheta Nag

Vasudev Maduri

Shubhra Sarker

Mike Hoff

Madona Wambua

Elad Shechter

Kamal Shree

AJ Khan

Anik Jha

Abhishek Verma

Marco Diazgranados

Eldon Wong

Joseph Walls

Ali El-Sharif

Muskan Sandhu

Dipak Makhija

Kiley Carson

Susan Taylor

Bobbi Bidochka

Mohit Sarveiya

Chander Dhall

Cazton

Serg Masís

Syngenta

Amir Feizpour

Aggregate Intellect

Chris Stocks

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Daniel Vale

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Nicholas Schmidt

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Violeta Misheva

The Foundation for Best Practices in Machine Learning

Dewan Ahmed

Red Hat

Faisal Abid (GDE)

Eirene

Nav Singh

Manulife

Boris-Wilfried Nyasse

Stack Labs Canada

Joel Humberto Gómez Paredes

IBM

Márton Kodok (GDE)

REEA.net

Guillaume Blaquiere

Accenture AI

Frank Abbruzzese

Joe Birch

Buffer

Karan Balkar

GDG Windsor
Sat, Nov 13, 2021, 11:30 AM (EST)

PLEASE NOTE: ALL TIMES ARE IN EST