Slash n, Flipkart’s flagship tech conference, is back for its sixth edition, and this year, it is set to be bigger and better than ever. Over 30 tech talks from industry stalwarts, more than 700 delegates and spread out over two whole days — April 4 and 5 — get ready to geek out at slash n 2019.
We’ve put together a list of 10 talks you can look forward to at this year’s conference at the Radisson Blu, Marathahalli, Bengaluru.
Data Sciences: The new fuel for business and how to make it work for you.
Moderated by Mayur Datar, Principal Data Scientist at Flipkart, this slash n 2019 panel discussion aims to explore the possibilities data sciences unlock for businesses, and how businesses can optimize their data to achieve outcomes unique to their key objectives.
Panel speakers:
- Manjeet Dahiya, Senior Data Scientist, Delhivery
- Debdoot Mukherjee, Director – Data Science, Hike messenger
- Subrat Panda, Head – ML, AI, Capillary Technologies
- Rajiv Verma, MD and Senior VP, AppLift
When: April 4, 3:30 PM to 4:15 PM
India’s Digitization Journey – Creating the levers of growth
Sanjay Jain, Chief Innovation Officer, CIIE, IIM-A
Having been the chief product person at Aadhaar and also one of the first to work on the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) for India, Sanjay Jain has played a vital role in India’s road to digitization. At slash n 2019, he will elaborate on the journey so far, and the digital levers that will continue to drive India forward.
When: April 4, 10:15 AM to 11:00 AM
Unified Cluster Federation: A hyperscaled architecture for heterogeneous clusters
Varada Kari and Romit Misra, Flipkart Cloud Platform
In this slash n 2019 talk, Varada and Romit will elaborate on their use of Ceph storage clusters to keep up with Flipkart’s growing business-critical needs. Under this model, Ceph clusters are federated under a common endpoint with programmable Nginx (LUA Jit + Nginx), which allows for seamless growth of storage for IOPS, capacity, and availability.
When: April 4, 11:45 AM to 12:30 PM
Machine Learning and Data Science problems in ride hailing
Dr. Gaurav Aggarwal, Senior Principal Scientist, Ola
An online ride-hailing platform achieves order dispatch over a long time interval (e.g., several hours or a day), by both fulfilling current passenger demand and optimizing the anticipated future gain. It relies on a careful modeling of spatiotemporal passenger demand and taxi mobility patterns, as well as sensing and controlling them in real-time environments. In this talk, Gaurav will delve deeper into the specific challenges ride-hailing apps face from an AI/ML standpoint, and the solutions.
When: April 5, 5:00 PM to 5:45 PM
Polestar – User behavioral analysis at scale
Karan Uppal and Rijo Joseph, Myntra Data Platform
Polestar is Myntra’s self-serve, event-agnostic analytics platform that analyzes events, user journeys, and provides user insights. It leverages Alluxio with its tiered data caching capability, statistical techniques such as HyperLogLog for faster querying and Presto as a distributed query engine. Polestar also captures the events metadata in its catalog called Blueprint. At slash n 2019, Rijo and Karan will take us through how Polestar helps Myntra with behavioral analysis.
When: April 4, 2:45 PM to 3:15 PM
Cross-modal retrieval
Professor Soma Biswas, Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore
Cross-modal retrieval aims to enable a flexible retrieval experience across objects with different modalities (text, images etc.) An example of a cross-modal retrieval task — probably useful in product search — is given a text query, obtaining all semantically similar images from the database (e.g., catalog). In his slash n 2019 talk, Professor Soma Biswas will elaborate on the applications of cross-modal retrieval techniques across use cases.
When: April 4, 4:15 PM to 5:00 PM
Gone in a flash: Learnings & Solutions from Flipkart Flash Sales
Gokulvanan V Velan and Srinidhi VK, Flipkart
Flipkart’s order capture traffic grows every year and during flash sales, this results in surges of traffic (up to a hundred times more than usual). Conventional system interactions are stressed during such surges, and the customer experience takes a hit. In this talk, Gokul and Srinidhi will explore solutions to the Demand-Supply problem and technical solutions such as call graph optimizations, datastore tuning, circumventing around datastore hot-spotting and the need for rate limits.
When: April 5, 2:45 PM to 3:15 PM
Decoding Hyperlocal – Lessons from the front line
Dale Vaz, Head – Engineering & Data Science, Swiggy
Online-To-Offline (O2O) business models have led to the emergence of various spatial crowdsourcing (SC) platforms (e.g., Swiggy) in our daily life. A core issue of SC is to assign real-time tasks to suitable crowd workers. At slash n 2019, Dale will discuss the learnings acquired over the course of pioneering hyperlocal delivery in India.
When: April 5, 10:45 AM to 11:30 PM
Alternate data-based credit underwriting
Rishabhdhwaj Singh and Kaustav Chakravorty, Payments & Affordability – Flipkart
Traditional methods of credit assessment have limited coverage and do not address a large section of India’s population. In this talk, Rishabhdhwaj and Kaustav will elaborate on how Fintech at Flipkart derives insights from alternative data sources to unlock access to credit for its users while ensuring the security of their data.
When: April 4, 12:30 PM to 1:15 PM
Virtuous Cycles: Building feedback loops into your software so you can get more sleep
Aaditya Talwai, Site Reliability Engineer, Confluent Cloud
Operator nirvana is having apps that can heal themselves, without human intervention — but most SRE teams accept a certain amount of toil as an inevitable part of their lives. This is because some procedures are too risky to automate, too costly to get wrong. How does one ensure that a “self-healing” system does not accidentally shoot itself in the foot while in production? Aaditya takes a deep dive into this challenge at slash n 2019.
When: April 5, 12:30 PM to 1:15 PM
Looking for something in particular? Visit the official slash n 2019 website for more details on the agenda, speakers, and more!
Feeling geeky? Visit Flipkart’s official tech blog for an in-depth look at some of the talks from slash n 2018.
Also read: Changing the face of digital India – meet the minds behind Flipkart’s best tech!
