Keynotes
Keynote on Wednesday (June 10th)
David Bryant, Fellow in Emerging Technologies, Mozilla
WebAssembly Outside the Browser:
A New Foundation for Pervasive Computing
WebAssembly is changing the web, but we believe WebAssembly can play an even bigger role in the software ecosystem as it continues to expand beyond browsers. We see a future in which WebAssembly brings all the advantages it has amply demonstrated inside the browser — securely containerized, exceptionally efficient, and broadly multi-platform — outside the browser across the widest possible range of devices, operating systems, and programming languages. Beyond the clear benefits as a computing platform, WebAssembly offers the possibility we can address a fundamental need and challenge in today’s world of software development where nearly every application and service depends upon shared components from global repositories that developers, and therefore all our users, cannot be sure they can safely trust. In 2020 we will see that new platform realized and look forward to working with developers and partners in putting it to use.
As a Fellow in our Emerging Technologies organization, David is responsible for providing technical expertise and representation for engineering broadly in all aspects of company decision making. In the past he has held a variety of roles leading product engineering, marketing, sales enablement and technology licensing businesses at Bell Laboratories, Sun Microsytems and Nokia. He was at Bell Labs during the formative years of Unix, working on signal processing and computer graphics components for running the long distance network and, after divestiture, exploring new business opportunities for AT&T. At Sun he managed product teams responsible for key components of Solaris and Sun’s enterprise Internet software stack, including as part of the Sun/Netscape alliance, as well as for the Java platform in embedded and desktop systems. In the CTO unit at Nokia, David’s team prototyped emerging hardware and software technologies to accelerate delivery of differentiated mobile computing products. Throughout his career he has been motivated by building Internet and computing technology solutions for real-world problems that matter to people. David grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and holds Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee.
Keynote on Thursday (June 11th)
Prof. Dr. Olaf Zimmermann, University of Applied Sciences of Eastern Switzerland (HSR OST)
Dimensions of Successful Web API Design and Evolution: Context, Contracts, Components
If data is the oil of the information age, the Web and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are its pipelines. What does it take to craft Web APIs of quality and style that feed single-page application frontends rapidly and integrate legacy application backends sustainably?
- Context matters. One size does not fit all; blind faith in a single paradigm, principle, or pattern is bound to fail. Functional and non-functional requirements must drive the design instead. A responsible Web engineer has a rich toolbox to choose from, which includes agile practices and domain-driven design.
- Contracts rule. A unified interface as provided by HTTP promotes interoperability, but does not cover all concerns that consumers and providers have to agree on in practice. The success of OpenAPI Specification and the emergence of platform-independent contract languages make the need for contract modeling and management evident.
- Components contain cost and risk. The list of candidate frameworks, libraries, and other assets continues to grow day by day, both on the application and on the infrastructure level. Microservices and microfrontends promise to promote modularity and loose coupling; API gateways, container technologies, cluster managers, discovery services and service meshes claim to increase flexibility and reliability. Patterns can bring order to chaos by structuring this design space and sharing component-level design wisdom.
This presentation motivates these the three dimensions of Web API design and evolution (context, contracts, and components) in real-world projects, presents recent results from the community and identifies open problems. It debunks some myth about API and service design along the way.
Keynote on Friday (June 12th)
Jaakko Lempinen, Head of AI, YLE
Yle - Towards an AI-enhanced Personal Media Experience
I’ll talk about how AI will shape the future of media experience and how Yle is shaping it’s operations around this change. I’ll give few examples of how ideas are scaled into products across the whole organisation. I’ll also talk about how the culture changes within organisations as they start to benefit more from progressive data solutions – what are the future skills that every organisation should have and how to get started with the change.
