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Author: Sufi Mohamed, Luca Solimine
Zürich-West - This event brought members of TecHUB, clients, and friends together. Through talks, conversations and collaborative exchanges, attendees enriched their network and planned their next partnerships in their future endeavors.
The event included not only finger-food, but also conversations and presentations from five esteemed intellectuals: Ana Klimovic, Professor at ETH; Olga Miler, Finance and Entrepreneurship Guru; Marco Kündig and Felix Grüner from Copebit AG, and Thomas Riedel from the Swiss Digital Network.
Below, we will provide a brief summary of their presentations.
Olga Miler emphasized the significance of financial education and financial resilience. Financial resilience pertains to the ability of individuals, businesses, or economies to endure and rebound from financial shocks, such as job loss, economic downturns, or unforeseen expenses. It involves having adequate savings, diversified sources of income, and effective strategies to manage financial risks. In our fast-paced world, we encounter numerous challenges that expose us to continuous and often unforeseen risks. Mrs. Miler underscored the importance of financial resilience and explained why neglecting this aspect could jeopardize our lives.
Prof. Dr. Ana Klimovic, professor at ETH and a member of the Institute for Computing Platforms, described the importance of optimizing cloud computing systems, particularly for large-scale machine learning (ML) applications. Her research focuses on improving CPU and GPU utilization in these systems, especially when handling the bottlenecks caused by data preprocessing. Klimovic has highlighted that inefficiencies in CPU data pipelines can slow down ML tasks and lead to underutilization of costly hardware accelerators like GPUs, driving her to explore ways to reduce CPU overload and improve system throughput. TecHUB members became much more aware of the bottlenecks that may even result from using ChatGPT.
Marco Kündig and Felix Grüner shared a real-life case study demonstrating how they used Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to extend an existing large-language-model (LLM) by integrating customer-specific data without the need to retrain the AI model; thereby saving significant time and costs while benefiting from the additional possibility to update customer data without retraining the model. In their showcase, they explained the solution's architecture and its ability to index hundreds of thousands of pages of financial rating companies' data to retrieve data using AI-based prompts later, similar to how people currently use ChatGPT.
Thomas Riedel, from the Swiss Digital Network, emphasized how continuous verification leverages test data and analytics to enhance DevOps practices. By embedding automated checks into every phase of software delivery, teams can identify issues early, maintain high operational efficiency, and support high-velocity deployments without compromising on quality or compliance. Continuous verification (CV) refers to the process of continuously validating and testing software systems throughout their development and operational lifecycle to ensure quality and reliability. It integrates real-time automated testing, monitoring, and validation into DevOps pipelines, ensuring that software is always compliant with performance, security, and functionality standards, even as it is rapidly developed and deployed.
Conference members were thoroughly enthused, raised questions and shared laughter throughout their conversations with one another. Sufi Mohamed took photos, of course together with Luca Solimine! TecHUB members found it not only intriguing, but were excited already for the coming conference.
More on that soon!
