On the 5th of October, I have attended an Artificial Intelligence Conference named DeepCon ’18 which is held for the first time in Ankara this year. The conference was organized by the cooperation of Havelsan, Information and Communication Technologies Authority and Deep Learning Turkey.

Deep Learning Turkey is the biggest Artificial Intelligence community in Turkey. This community aims to bring together the experts of not only Deep Learning, but also Artificial Intelligence in general, in order to create a network where people can support each other. They have several on-going projects through the members of the group and a lot of different channels to share news and resources related to the field of Deep Learning. Also, they have two different blogs on Medium where they share articles about Artificial Intelligence in Turkish and English. I am also a writer in these two blogs. If you want to have more information about this community, you can check their website from here.

Getting back to the conference, because of special reasons, I only had the chance to attend to the first day of the DeepCon ’18. The conference took place in Information and Communication Technologies Authority building which is really close to my university.

There had been several talks about different areas of Artificial Intelligence throughout the day. Below, you can find highlights from some of the talks:

14:15 – Reflections of Artificial Intelligence in Law

In this talk, the decision mechanisms that should be determined by the law are questioned. For example, let us assume that you made a robot that helps the workers in a factory to do their job in a much more easier way. Then, someday, a worker in this factory is killed by a robot. Who should take the responsibility of such an incident? The robot? The producer of the robot? Or the programmer of the robot? By the end of the talk, it is stated that the law system is far behind of the results that we argue related to AI these days. This should be improved in the near future.

14:45 – Artificial Intelligence in Autonomous Vehicle Design

With the help of this talk, we had the opportunity to learn more about the technologies that had been used for the autonomous vehicle design, and the categories through which these vehicles are classified. The speaker mentioned that there are five different levels related to autonomous vehicles from L1 to L5. L1 stands for the driver-assistance. In this level, most of the work is still done by the driver. Whereas in the case of L5, the vehicle is fully-autonomous, and the performance is expected to be as better as a human driver. Robo-Taxi can be given as an example to an L5 autonomous vehicle. He finished the talk by mentioning the autonomous driving challenges.

15:15 – What Should be the Strategy of Turkey for Artificial Intelligence?

In this talk, the speaker started with the meaning of the robot being slave, and continued his talk by mentioning the importance of AI for the strategies of the countries worldwide. Then, he stated that we should give more emphasis on PhD’s in the areas such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning. In addition, he gave some statistics about the papers in these specific areas and told that these numbers should be ten times the current level. He concluded by presenting arguments on AI ethics. For instance, what should the AI system of a personal assistant do, if it determines violence against women? Questions like these should be answered as soon as possible.

16:00 – Cyber Security and Deep Learning Applications

This talk started by giving examples of Machine Learning in Cybersecurity from spam email detection to adversarial networks. Through the talk, speaker mentioned some of the recent works in the cyber security area such as detecting previously unknown micro-architectural attacks like cache based side-channel attacks, e.g. Meltdown, Spectre and Rowhammer.

At the break, I also had the chance to visit the stands. Before the conference, I was at the Data Communications and Networking class where we have talked a lot about the 5G technology. At the venue of the event, I had the opportunity to learn more about this technology that we have talked about during the class.

5G Technology

Previous generations of mobile networks addressed consumers predominantly for voice and SMS in 2G, web-browsing in 3G and higher-speed data and video streaming in 4G. The transition from 4G to 5G will serve both consumers and multiple industries. With global mobile data traffic expected to grow eight times by the end of 2023, there is a need for a more efficient technology, higher data rates and spectrum utilization. New applications such as 4K/8K video streaming, virtual and augmented reality and emerging industrial use cases will also require higher bandwidth, greater capacity, security, and lower latency. Equipped with these capabilities, 5G will bring new opportunities for people, society and businesses.

Conclusion

To conclude, this conference had been a great experience to me as I had the opportunity to learn more about the daily applications of Artificial Intelligence, as well as the problems that emerge due to the growth of this area. If you want to have more information, you can also check the website of the conference from here.

– Coding Woman

References

5G – Ericsson. (2016, March 15). Retrieved from https://www.ericsson.com/en/5g