In the recent issue of Technology Radar, the rise of platforms as a new trend comes to the focus. Platform becomes a heated topic for the entire technology and commercial communities, from ordinary developers to big leading technology companies. Then what is the definition of a platform? Why platforms emerge and rise in these days? What kinds of platform are there? What do platforms mean to every single technical person and technology company? You will find all the answers at this summit. 

As we see a series of so-called “intelligence-as-a-service” platforms sprung up and open sources for differentiated tools such as Kubernetes and Mesos and SaaS platform based solutions emerge and evolve, artificial intelligence is no more a luxury. How can we combine artificial intelligence with business cognitive abilities in the new technology landscape?

As a new form of human-machine interaction, Conversational UI enjoy rapid development in recent years. Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Home and similar tools and applications are used and come to the attention by more and more people. Conversational UI is not limited to voice interaction. ThoughtWorks will share the development status and trends of this technology along with the opportunities and challenges confront company management and developers.

It has been nearly 30 years since birth of Python. In the past 30 years, Python was extremely popular among operation and maintenance engineers and data scientists. However, hardly any company regard it as a preferred language for production environment. The situation changed a lot in recent years. With rapid development of cloud computing, big data and artificial technology, Python and its development eco-environment draw more and more attention and there are more Python related technologies in Technology Radar. Why does Python become the “selected language” and what changes will this trend bring to enterprise IT?  

For many years, product companies focus on user experience design and regard it as a key differentiator. Facing the rise of developer-oriented tools and products and a shortage of engineering talents, these companies have to put more efforts on developer experience. More and more organizations start to assess cloud products based on engineering friction reduced, treat API as an important product and focus on improvement of team efficiency through engineering productivity. In ThoughtWorks, we are committed to seek highly efficient engineering practices and east-to-use tools and platforms for developers. We are excited to see these ideas are adopted by the industry. 

Confronting the challenges of Internet economy, traditional enterprises out of IT sector have to find a feasible digital strategy for themselves. They do not need to be on a par with Internet enterprises in adoption of high technologies; instead, they should make the best use of their core assets accumulating over the years to build up digital services platforms and establish an industry-wide digital eco-system. In the course of digitalization, a powerful digital platform is extremely important for a company to improve IT efficiency, construct industry eco-system and promote business innovation. This time we will look into the best way for traditional enterprises to develop and implement digital platform strategies.

As we step into an intelligent era, our understanding of mobile applications is changing fast with the updating of message platforms represented by WeChat, Facebook and Slack as well as AR technology represented by NLP, NLU, automatic speech recognition, image recognition and deep learning. Mobile applications products begin to take on a brand new form (conversational app) and accordingly change the way enterprises connect with mobile users. Such a new product form also changes development mode of mobile applications. This time we will introduce the history, architecture and future of conversational applications and how could we better develop a conversational application.

This topic will mainly focus on enterprise transformation case studies of 3 different industries——Airways, Manufacturing and Automobile: about how to build an intellectual innovative platform that responses rapidly to market demand under the impact of technology and capital in an Internet world.

The risks of AR technologies are no more a new topic. When we look into public discussions of ethical problems and risks brought by AR technologies, we may find that humankind is often regarded as potential victims. Most narrations are constructed in the form of “machines vs. humankind”. There are rarely systemic discussions on how intelligent technologies are dominated by current social power structure which in turns strengthens the existing structure, which results in aggravated oppression on vulnerable and marginal populations.  In this post, we will analyze ethical risks of artificial intelligence from the perspective of social power and propose research methods and corresponding suggestions.

We will uncover secrets behind conversational UI from Kempelen Machine to Siri, from analog signal processing to high-performance computing, from regular matching to semantic search, from voice to text and from ideas to design. 

AR (Augmented Reality) is a technology not far from us. We have started to experience the charm of this technology from AR games to AR red packets. It also starts to show its power in business application. A speech concerning Unity based AR business application will be delivered in the aspects of team building, iterative process, devices, development tools, techniques as well as key points and optimization of each link. 

As blockchain technology comes to the forefront and develops rapidly, many enterprises switch their attention to this disruptive technology. However, as a brand new field with wildly growing ecosystem, it is a tough target which many ambitious appliers cannot control. In this part, we will share what factors will be considered in blockchain practice in enterprise applications, how to select an appropriate blockchain technology, conduct architectural design of decentralized applications and optimize deployment of blockchain nodes to boost those ambitious blockchain appliers. 

Safety is always an important part which cannot be ignored in the course of application development. With development of various concepts and technologies, e.g. agile and lean development, micro-service, Cloud Native, DevOps, DevSecurity starts to take shape. It integrates cultural concepts, best practices and tools, which enables organizations to develop and improve products quickly and to deliver safer applications and services. We will introduce development history of DevSecurity in this part.