Endava’s experience in building games and game services for the past 15 years made them fully understand that game production pipelines are about efficiency as much as creativity. Therefore, their researchers think unlocking the capabilities of machine learning (ML) will elevate games production teams to new heights.

To showcase their advanced research and development (R&D) capabilities, Endava initiated a project that implements machine learning in the context of creating assets for game productions — let find out how this is useful for all of us!

Endava helps game companies create better games, covering the full game development lifecycle, including concept, art, development, automated testing and DevOps. They also help their clients innovate and improve their own tools and pipeline & and they have established a real mission of implementing the most innovative solutions in their work.

Professional tools like Unity’s ArtEngine already make use of ML in interesting ways to improve texture work, so the creative team wanted to take it a step further. We can now look together at mesh creation and alteration and find out how this can either be used as creative input for artists or directly facilitate the creation of 3D assets. To investigate this, Endava formed a team of data scientists, ML ops, 3D artists and UI developers who worked together for about two months and started researching scientific papers that use neural networks to simultaneously generate texture and augment meshes.

After selecting StyleGAN, StyleCLIP and Text2Mesh as the most promising candidates, the team built a working implementation of an AI-aided asset creation journey. Based on voice-guided user input, the solution transforms existing mesh data into new creations. Endava’s specialists set out to evaluate where this approach is promising and where it hits limitations in its current form. They also improved the usability and applicability of this solution and evaluated how 3D artists would be able to work with this solution.

Text2Mesh is a method that takes as an input a 3D mesh with a carefully constructed topology and augments its geometry and texture, striving to match the textual description provided by the user. The mesh evolution respects the semantic meaning of each part of the object and it is determined by a set of parameters that model the accuracy of the details, the magnitude of the deformation or the number of iterations, among others. In the example below, it grew laces in the proper position and produced spiked soles for hiking boots:

The ability of Text2Mesh to develop a meaningful geometry and texture in 3D makes it a powerful tool in the hands of the experienced data scientists, while it also enables the creation of tools that can save many hours of work for visual artists.

PROVIDING CREATIVE INSPIRATION FOR THE ARTIST

We wanted to explore if 3D artists see value in using a neural network that specifically adds details to a basic 3D shape or its texture as an inspiration for creating interesting assets. How much influence would an artist want, and how would they want to interact?

Inspiration is often led by finding value in the unexpected. First and foremost, the solution is useful to create unexpected results. Based on the directional input given by a user, the solution adds features to the shape and texture of a mesh, which leads to interesting and inspirational outcomes. Have you ever wondered what a broccoli horse looks like? Or maybe a cookie dough alien? We neither, but now we know for sure! Let’s have a look at some examples:

Endava’s team think the solution could likely be used with some additional development. The artists really valued not having to start with a blank page, and even the weirdest AI creation, like this cookie dough alien shape augmentation, can spark creativity. Their UI interface and some post-processing helped immensely to improve the accessibility of this tool for the 3D artists.

For example, one of their artists used this boot that was augmented with certain patterns and shapes and turned it into a proper asset. Which leads to the next segment:

ACCELERATING VARIED ASSET PRODUCTION

Building on the former approach, we wanted to find out how usable the created assets are out of the box as a starting point for high-quality game assets. What auto-processing could we add to facilitate pipeline integration and actually make the artist more productive, specifically when variations or skins of an asset are needed?

To make the assets more useful for production purposes, the team built in algorithms to generate more useful results. This mostly meant ensuring that the topology of the mesh is fit for purpose, that the resulting UV map can be used in later stages of production and that the mesh transformation can be adjusted by the user. Also, they implemented a prototypical UI to make it easier for artists to run their own augmentations through the browser.

For certain assets, the approach could already help make artists more efficient and give them a basis to work with. However, the method should allow for more specific direction and better control of the way it augments the models thematically.

Moreover, there are clear limitations to the quality of the mesh output of the implementation. While there is a clear benefit to keeping the original mesh complexity because mapping and even animating the input object could be kept consistent, this is also why the augmentation of the mesh hits clear limits.

To avoid this, the team automatically recognized when spikes in the mesh were appearing and avoid spending computational resources, coming to the conclusion that it might be beneficial to investigate a core method that is able to add complexity to the mesh where the objects are more strongly altered.

CREATING INDIVIDUAL 3D OBJECTS FOR IN-GAME CRAFTING MECHANICS

Could we even come close to using generated assets as part of a crafting or breeding mechanic to create individualized skins or even mesh variations for unique player items? Would a direct integration without manual editing be feasible?

In the near to mid-term future, we see this solution not only working as a tool for asset creation or alteration but also as a feature that can be directly integrated in a game — the team says, confidently. Think crafting or breeding mechanics where the player can combine the characteristics of two individual assets into a brand-new form.

We think that in its current state, the selected method has only very limited use — and only if the game can accept the weird-looking results as part of its identity. However, we believe there is great potential to develop a custom solution specifically for these kinds of games where the uniqueness of an asset or item could have huge value for the game economy.

THE VALUE OF COLLABORATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH

Applying machine learning in the context of game production has a bright future, and Endava’s researchers are certain that the value it can create today is to be found in all stages of the software development lifecycle. If used to its full potential, it can create value especially where classic automation fails.

While this was an exciting experiment for Endava’s team — more than anything else — they see it as a way of showcasing how they can help clients with their research and setting up interdisciplinary teams with great expertise in a wide range of capabilities, stretching beyond core game development services.

ENDAVA’S INSPIRED TEAM IS COMING TO CODIAX

Endava is one of Codiax’s main partners, constantly contributing to creating bridges between people and technology and approaching the most innovative solutions in the field.

If you were as fascinated by this experiment as we were, you certainly won’t want to miss the applied workshop that the Endava team is conducting within the Codiax 2022 event.

Alexandru Baila & Eugeniu Spinu will take you on a technical ride on the Latest Issue from the Transformers Trilogy: GPT-3, so you’ll get the perfect opportunity to explore some of the amazing functionalities and have fun while you learn highly applicable tips & tricks.

Just clear your agenda on November 10, from 11.15 to 13.15 and secure your place at their workshop!

***

This blog article has been co-authored with Thomas Bedenk and Kai Wegner. The team will also like to thank Oscar Michel for kindly helping understand some of the more subtle aspects of the method and navigate through the technical intricacies of the code.

Endava conducted an experiment on how AI can ease the work in 3D asset creation for games, and now… was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Superbet is the largest sports betting operator in Romania, with offices in the UK, Poland, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Cyprus, and Malta, awarded 3 years in a row with the The Best Sports Betting Operator in Central and Eastern Europe Trophy.

In 2016 they stepped up the game and launched their online business. The reason? Offering the best in class adrenaline-packed entertainment to the customers. To stay on top of the game, their plans are big — expanding the business in Central and Eastern Europe and increasing their market share.

The Superbet Group is led by an executive team with extensive experience in the field of international gambling. The vision of senior management, combined with the experience gained from coordinating other successful businesses, quickly evolved to what currently is the company with the most pronounced rise in the field of Betting & Gaming in Central and Eastern Europe.

Their vision was recognized by the World’s largest private equity fund, Blackstone Group, and received a strategic investment of 175 million euros!

More insights on their transition and plans are revealed by Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence in the statements below

As the past year has put many companies in the situation of transitioning their business online, Superbet transitioned from a traditional betting company with physical locations to a technology company. “For us, it’s been a process since the start of the Online vertical in 2016 and then the launch of the proprietary Superbet app in 2018. What happened during the Covid period, was an acceleration of an existing trend, with some of our Retail-only customers moving to the Online landscape. At Superbet, we consider the Retail business to be highly important to our strategy focused on Omnichannel, on enabling customers to have the same experience anywhere. If it’s our betting terminals, our app, our slot machines in shops, or our online website, we strive towards a unified experience.” said Andrei Popa, Director of Business Intelligence at Superbet.

In 2021, technology definitely plays an essential role in all companies and Superbet is working on interesting projects to keep up their business worldwide. One of their main goals this year is the launch of their in-house platform in Croatia. Andrei Popa stated about the project that “We are proud of developing a state-of-the-art real-time platform that will enable us to personalize the experience of each customer to the extent of transforming betting into entertainment. Add to that some of the unique features that we launched last year like SuperSocial (social feed of users, share/like/follow/comments bets and profiles) or our stack of free to play (SuperSpin, SuperGame). From a data perspective, we are focusing this year on creating data-for-everyone infrastructure that will enable any data enthusiast to get access, use and play with data in a heartbeat. For Superbet users that rely heavily on reporting and analysis (note. Superbet is using Tableau), we are building a CRM tool focused inwards. Based on the activity of our employees (traffic to reports, usage, click to action, etc) we plan to segment them for personalized newsletters, interviews, alerts. Even create a rating system that will link the effort invested into report and analysis creation to the usage and business implementation. All to become a leading data company in Europe”.

Nevertheless, he also appreciates that the deep tech ecosystem in Romania is vast, having more than 200,000 tech specialists in employment with 1 in 4 being a woman, one of the highest ratios in the EU of women being part of tech. “RO Tech ecosystem is a mix of various companies and people that operate at different levels but with the same goal in mind, technology. There are the big international firms that created technology hubs in Bucharest or Cluj, the well-established Romanian companies that are going through reshaping their technology stack, and the startup scene which is sprinkled with a lot of opportunities but some successful unicorns as well.” he says.

Superbet is planning to become the next Romanian Unicorn in the next 5 years, being in a mission to excite the world and they plan to do that with investments in technology and especially in their people. Their strategy and how they see technology playing a role in this development is that they are “looking to unify the experience of customers between Retail and Online, to continue providing new products and features that will differentiate us versus competitors, to enhance the SuperSocial platform that allows customers to interact, to have the fastest platform in the market and mainly to add data at the core of our business.” as Andrei Popa mentioned.

Find out more on May 13–14, 2021 during Codiax. Tickets on www.codiax.co/tickets.

On a mission to become the next Romanian Unicorn — an interview with Andrei Popa, Director of… was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Technology is everywhere. We are living the days when scientific discoveries and meaningful engineering innovation happen faster than we could ever imagine. Deep tech companies around the world bring their technical expertise, business knowledge & intelligence and other resources to the table, solving most of our problems. Media is even talking about Moon travelling and scientists are researching ways to live on Mars.

All of these sound super interesting, and of course you’ll get to know more if you purchase your ticket to Codiax now!

Since we have your full attention, it’s time to present you some of our speakers, starting with Dr. Laura Kerber!

Currently planning a Moon mission to explore extraterrestrial cave environments

Laura Kerber is a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory with interests in physical volcanology, aeolian geomorphology, wind over complex surfaces, the ancient Martian climate, the role of sulfur in planetary atmospheres, and extraterrestrial cave environments. Laura holds two Master Degrees in Geology and Engineering (Fluid Mechanics), and a PhD in Geology from Brown University. She enjoys combining remote sensing, field work and modeling, and working on the interface between the surface geology and the atmosphere. She is the Deputy Project Scientist of Mars Odyssey and the Principal Investigator of a Discovery mission concept called Moon Diver, which aims to send an extreme terrain rover to explore deep caverns on the Moon in order to understand the Solar System’s largest volcanic eruptions. How cool is that, right?

Shortlisted in Forbes 30 under 30 at 28; earning $800,000 from investors

Talking about talent, expertise and professionalism, here is another speaker we would love to introduce to you: Tony Beltramelli — co-founder and CEO of Uizard, our first speaker of this edition shortlisted in Forbes 30 under 30! Tony works at the intersection of machine learning, design and software engineering. His research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Neural Networks.

Uizard is a startup developing AI-powered tools to transform the way people design software. Tony’s research work on applications of deep learning has been recognized globally and featured in international media such as WIRED, Forbes, The Huffington Post, TechCrunch and The Next Web.

If you didn’t find your way to a Codiax ticket yet, here it is https://codiax.co/tickets/.

How deep tech impacts extraterrestrial research was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Truth is, and we’re just going to say it out loud, this period brought almost nothing “great” upon us. We’re still restricted, we still don’t know what to expect from tomorrow, and we’re still in a latent state. But somehow, this period also brought us — deep tech enthusiasts — together, exploring all the possibilities to make the world a better place, trying to find solutions and striving to make the changes we would want to see out there.

We could easily say that 2021 is the year of deep tech, so far. Deep tech companies around Europe (combined) value more than 700 billion euros. Deep tech, including Artificial Intelligence, blockchain, robotics and quantum technology, now accounts for a quarter of all venture capital investments in Europe. Moreover, a deep tech startup (BioNTech) created the first mRNA-based vaccine used to combat COVID-19.

Our team knows best that the future of deep tech is evolving day by day, and every passionate should get updated with the latest news. Innovation doesn’t wait, right?

Not only have we prepared for you an entire day of conferences on the hottest topics at this time, but you can also enjoy a day full of online innovative workshops, run by the most skillful experts in their area.

Our speakers come from various domains, bringing on our stage their vast experience in Artificial Intelligence, Augmented & Virtual Reality, Frontier Hardware, Internet of Things and Blockchain. From CEOs to creators, from Google to Forbes & MIT, Harvard University, Amazon or Bloomberg, you’ll have the possibility to engage with their amazing stories & content and to connect with them in one place: at Codiax.

Emeli Dral (Co-founder and CTO at Evidently AI, co-founder Data Mining in Action — the largest open data science course in Russia); Lobna Karoui (Executive AI Business Leader at Fortune 500, President of AI Exponential Thinker, Forbes & MIT Contributor), Matthias Feys (CTO at M6, technical advisor for startups and colleges/universities), Roelof Pieters (CTO and co-founder at Overstory, ex founder at Sunshine Lab, CEO & founder at creative.ai, founder at Graph Technologies), Gema Parreno (lead data scientist passionate about ML and videogames) and János Puskás (Senior Software Engineer at Accenture Industry X with over 15 years experience in the IT industry) are just a few names you’ll want to applaud in real life after seeing them “on Codiax stage”.

The greatest part? We are fully virtual so you don’t have to stress out about getting home at a certain hour.

Grab your ticket now and see you online on 13–14 of May!

2021 — the start of the Deep Tech Era was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Codiax #3 has ended and we are excited to say that it was a really successful edition and the displayed information highlighted some of deep tech’s best features and connected more dots in this industry.

The second day of Codiax found us in search of coffee and knowledge and had an interesting offset with Jair Ribeiro presenting his approach on how to define a successful AI strategy for your business. Given that many companies are starting their AI adoption journey, an efficient plan must be defined in order to do this precisely, and Jair pointed out the steps that need to be taken and reminded us that we must understand all the data we have.

“AI — like any other powerful technologic tools, must be developed under a clear light of ethics and principles.”

Also on AI, Jagannadan Varadarajan, the head of Data Science at Grab, made a demonstration of how their company is significantly improving life in South-East Asia and highlighted the immense power of data and how we can use it to enrich our services.

Joanna Bryson showed another facet of technology and reminded all of us that at the end of the day only humans can be accountable and we can’t build machines in order to be accountable. According to her theories: Intelligence is a form of computation; AI extends & reuses ours; ML uploads ours.

Linked data technologies are at the core of the semantic information infrastructures and Mariana Damova from Mozajka enlightened us with more insight information on this topic. Following, a data scientist with a strong background at Philip Morris International — Maciej Marek went through the stages of starting, building and shipping data science products developed inside PMI.

Olga Afanasjeva helped us better understand the Universe through the lens of her company GoodAI, with specific examples of how they are working towards a common good with AI: We see AI as a tool to augment our own abilities.

Shifting over to robotics, we had Jade Le Maitre on stage that revealed some of the ways in which we can now improve services with the help of robotics. Her company, Hease Robotics, builds robust and autonomous mobile robots, equipped with attracting means of interacting with humans.

After a well-deserved lunch break that helped all that new information sink in, we had Alexey Borisenko from Cisco talking on how to create IoT solutions using LoRaWAN Network Server, followed by a not so techy aspect: a power outage. The good thing is Codiax has its superheroes prepared for anything, and thus Cindy Spelt delighted us with her presentation without any technological help, showcasing the facing recognition challenges and also how to overcome them.

Our agenda continued with Sean Holden that was determined to prove theorems, using machine learning, and had an interesting and quite funny approach on this and then with Jakub Bartoszek from Samsung Electronics who believes that an overly connected future is coming and we have to adjust accordingly.

Jakub Langr from the University of Oxford presented a topic he is highly acquainted with: general adversarial networks. He stated that, although generative modelling has been largely unsolved, we are moving closer to using unsupervised learning as a working paradigm.

The new kid on the blockchain - Anisha Malde made it clear why this topic should be on our radars and Szabi Szekely from NeuralCam came with a different approach on photography and referred to some methods in which we can enhance the capabilities of our mobile devices.

In charge of the last talk of Codiax 2019 was Cameron Cooke, from Airbus, who took us behind the scenes of this company and discovered how they apply AI.

Fun Facts of Codiax 2019:

• Thispersondoesnotexist.com 👉 taken from Jakub Langr

• Honey badgers could be actually smarter than people if they had fingers (according to Olga Afanasjeva)
• Airbus’s revenue is twice as big as Romania’s government (according to Cameron Cooke 🙀)
• You don’t need technology in order to keep a technology conference going. (Thank you, Cindy Spelt for rocking the stage on a power cut)

We want to thank everyone who made Codiax 2019 possible — organizers, volunteers, speakers, partners, attendees. It’s contexts like these that help us lay the basis of tomorrow.

And a big thank you to all our partners:

Betfair, Medicover, Telenav, Metro Systems, Macadamian, Halcyon Mobile, Yonder, Cognizant Softvision, Accesa, 3SS, Spyhce, WolfPack Digital.

Codiax 2019 — A Glimpse into the Future was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Deep Tech has a profound enabling power and today we tried to take advantage as much as we could of this. The new and world-changing technologies are Codiax’s favourite ones, so its agenda for today was built around them. From leveraging technics in machines learning to discovering all of blockchain’s capabilities or even using data at its full capacity, the day was prepared for all our deep tech aficionados to take the best out their favourite topics.

Research-driven technical challenges awaited our participants. All our mentors had prepared intense exercises to widen perspectives and understandings of their expertise. The first ones that startled the audience’s thirst for knowledge were Victor Lupaescu from Cognizant Softvision and Liviu Eșanu from Metro Systems.

Victor Lupaescu went through all stages of data, engaging his mentees in exercises finalized in concrete answers, and oftentimes different from what the participants had thought to be right. “Your viewers should take something away from the time they spend with your visualization”, was one of the facts pointed out by Victor.

Battle bots using machine learning was an intense workshop, lead by Liviu Eșanu. Determining known and unknown bots to categorizing them and then employing a wide range of detection techniques, the participants were truly engaged in their first and final battle of the day.

After a well-deserved coffee break, we returned back to fuelling our neurons, and split between the next two workshops: Leveraging Machine Learning for a personalized and safe gambling experience and The usability, security and privacy limits of blockchain technology.

Anca Lazar and Sorin Circo from Betfair Romania Development pointed out why a safe gambling experience is important and how you can use machine learning to create one. Their system is built such that it identifies behaviours and can take measures upon them.

Even if blockchain is a hot topic, it’s still hard to find analysis of the privacy and information security aspects of the technology. Joris van Rooij from Jibe Company has a strong background in this industry and provided his participants with valuable insights.

One area where deep tech is certainly making a positive difference is healthcare. There are still many processes that need to be optimized in order to have quality healthcare services, but we’re making efficient steps to this. Florin Baroga and Matei Birle from Macadamian addressed a part of these problems with a workshop focused on voice assistants in the operating room.

At the same time, our Panoramic Room was focusing on taking the first steps with Tensorflow 2.0. The attendees were delighted to learn how to build and train models using Colab, alongside a reputed expert — Christian Merkwirth.

We want to thank everyone for today and we hope the hands-on sessions met your expectations. We’ll see you all tomorrow for another deep tech round!

The First Day of Codiax 2019 — Enabling Knowledge was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Betfair is one of the companies that truly encourage innovation and works hard to achieve it, as they embrace a wide range of programming languages and are distinctly present in the tech community.

Betfair Romania Development is one of our Gold partners for Codiax 2019.

Coming up next, you can get insights on how Betfair looks for value and supports it by putting people first from Paula Tibre, the General Manager of the Paddy Power Betfair Cluj Office and member of the Flutter Entertainment technology leadership team.

“Together with the leadership team in Cluj, with a focus on values, strategic thinking and people enabled Betfair Romania Development to grow to more than 900 employees, which makes it the biggest technology centre in the Flutter Group, recognized for its excellence in various technology, operational and commercial areas.”

Betfair is widely known for its community-driven initiatives; supporting Codiax and Techsylvania being among the projects to benefit from your continuous support. Why us?

Communities create a sense of belonging, of being part of something bigger than us and being connected to others like-minded. That sense of belonging, growth and being understood inspires us, gives us strength and motivation to believe in a bigger future.

Betfair Romania is such a community, of passionate professionals thinking about the customers, their experience when using our products and the culture where we can enjoy every day when we come to work. It is because of their hard work, boldness and innovative spirits, that we have managed to always reinvent our industry, think, get answers and quickly adapt to the latest technologies and ways of working.

Similarly, the same passionate professionals think of giving back to the people which need it the most, to the town which has been the place where we studied and found a home and maybe the future of our children. And this is not a one-off initiative — it’s leadership because they are true leaders. We call them our CSR Heroes. It was because of their strong belief in doing more and doing better so that NGOs like Beard Brothers, Tasuleasa Social, Life Education for all, initiatives like O masă caldă, Charity Treat Sale, Scripor Alphabet, Shoe Box, organizations like The Box — Barbell Club, Cluj Crusaders and more (way more) got the much-needed support to deliver their projects that shape the world we want to live in.

Codiax and Techsylvania have put Cluj Napoca on the map of the IT Conferences and create such a community contributing to the future of the city, IT industry and people from Cluj. From this point of view, supporting Codiax and Techsylvania is, in fact, our way of supporting visionary ideas from our technology pioneers and of those from all around the world. The more diverse the professional backgrounds, stories, experiences — the better. Having global technology leaders in the spotlight during two events that put our community on the international tech map truly gets us inspired.

The company is also a keen supporter of deep tech startups, one of them being Alpha Hub. What can you tell us about your program?

We were talking about communities. Alpha Hub is a hands-down example of how we leverage the power of people in developing innovative solutions that bring value to the customer experience. Launched in 2018 with a focus on responsible gambling technologies development, Alpha Hub upscaled into an ecosystem of startup, academic and corporate components.

Our goal was to create this virtual collaborative space and to get the startups community closer to our corporate environment, by enabling an easy way for their technologies to complete our products and internal innovation efforts. We’ve made a commitment to explore these new ideas, new companies, new people as we thrive amid change.

How does Betfair embrace innovation?

We are a big company, not only in Romania but all over the world with 8000employees across 16 offices. Sometimes big companies tend to become slow, repetitive and less original. In this company, however, there is never a dull moment — everything moves fast, evolves and surprises even the ones that have been here for a long time.

That is because are widely known to do things differently and to never stop creating new and exciting ways for our customers to bet on what they love.

In Paddy Power Betfair, innovation is an outcome of culture. We have recently developed a new culture plan that stands for innovation in its early stages. It revolves around curiosity. It will be our challenge to drive curiosity in people and to fuse the mindset into day-to-day activities. A lot of shared experiences, ideas and good practices come as a result of a common ambition in offering our employees, not regular jobs, but journeys of self-growth, by encouraging them to learn, collaborate and test their ideas.

On the other hand, in order to build brands that our customers love, is crucial for us to ensure a culture pillar focused exactly on listening to our customer and constantly harness their feedback. This is how innovation takes shape — by tackling each matter from every point of view, think bold solutions and experiment in order to achieve outcomes and key-results carefully defined at the beginning of each process. All these, together with a diverse and inclusive environment is what makes for the growth mindset of our people. We value everyone’s input, experience and background, which creates a stronger, better organization for all of us, implicitly innovative.

Tech for the People — An Interview with Betfair on Leveraging the Power of the Community was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

More and more healthcare startups are making great use of technology to disrupt today’s medical practices. Exoskeletons, 3D bioprinting, brain implants, all the most exciting breakthroughs that promise to change our lives for the better. But there’s also the current and near-future challenges that could use technology; we find various applications of deep technologies — big data, computer vision and others — that can have a profound impact on what we know, how we ensure knowledge transfer, and how we apply that into preventive care and treatment.

A medical company that integrates technology at the core of its activity is definitely a visionary company. One such company is Medicover, also one of our Gold partners for Codiax 2019.

In the following lines, you will find out more about the possible implications of technology in the Healthcare sector from Delia Iliasa, Commercial Director & National Director Medical Centers at Medicover.

It’s quite uncommon for a medical company to embrace technology the way Medicover does. Can you tell us more about the tech work behind your platform? How do your patients respond to this tech-first approach?

It is starting to be crowded in this area too, as most of the Healthcare operators are starting to look at digitalization and technology. Traditionally, the idea of technology in healthcare was applied to the latest trends in medical equipment, but in recent years we are talking more and more about Patient Journey and Experience. This is actually a trendy name for the digitalization of flows, mainly non-medical, but not necessarily. In Romania, I believe we are setting a trend, but we are not alone. This is, of course, in the main interest and benefit of all the users of private healthcare and, since we are barely at the start of this, it will be interesting to watch in the next years.

Your app is trying to change the way people access medical services. How does that influence the doctor-patient relationship and the healing process, in general?

We are always mindful of the way things have happened until now, but we also explore and try to understand what people do today, how do they act naturally. The simple reason that things have happened in a way in the past does not mean we need to continue doing it. Imagine that in the ’90s the trend was to speak on the phone, today it is mainly texting, so evolution is taking place. We need to adapt, having in mind and respecting the prerequisites for a truly valuable medical act. So, want it or not, evolution touches all aspects of our lives, healthcare included.

The local tech community is growing at a fast pace; what are you hoping to see in the near future? How are you getting ready for that?

If the question is what are we hoping to see related to healthcare, then it must be telemedicine. True and by-the-law telemedicine, enabling us to deliver the right type of services to the right patient in less time and bringing more value. The tech world is today able to bring that, the question is when will this be acceptable in Romania too.

When Deep Tech Meets Healthcare — An Interview with Medicover was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The thing with deep tech is that it has a continual potential of creating new industries and shake up the old ones. AI, robotics, 3D printing, cryptocurrencies — all these technologies and trends have shaken up the way we handle our daily lives and the way we view them. By focusing on the right resources and technics, we can connect the dots in this industry and optimize our lives at another level.

But impactful technologies emerge only when the right minds meet. That being said, let’s give a warm welcome to our new guest speakers at Codiax 2019:

Jade Le Maitre grew up in the little French town of Châteaufort on the outskirts of Paris, just a few miles from the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre and one of France’s many state-run research labs. Her childhood was spent lost in Jules Verne books like Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea in which the hero was always an engineer. Even then Le Maitre knew she wanted to become an engineer too.

Today Le Maitre, 30, is CTO and co-founder of Hease Robotics, a Lyon-based startup that develops autonomous customer service robots for shops, airports, museums, and offices. The entrepreneur has raised $2.3 million since starting the business in 2016, and her droids have been deployed by the likes of Total oil and gas, construction group Vinci, supermarket chain Leclerc and France’s state-own rail service SNCF.

Jade is also an expert advisor to the European Commission, she regularly appears on French TV and has helped lead pinnacle robotics events like the Innorobo summit. The entrepreneur is also co-founder of the Lyon-Is-AI movement where she champions the French AI ecosystem and co-founder of the Social Robots Community. And she is a mentor for the Lyon French Tech IOT Manufacturing network and sits on boards for three startups.

If you want to dive more into Jade’s story, you can give the following article a look.

Olga Afanasjeva is the COO of GoodAI, a general artificial intelligence R&D company based in Prague, Czech Republic. She has been working at the company since its early days. With a background in social sciences and art, she is pursuing her passion for discovery and for pushing the limits of “possible.” At GoodAI she has led the General AI Challenge, organized the 2018 Human-Level AI Conference, and facilitated workshops around the globe on AI safety and security.

“The first general AI system will be disruptive and transformative. First-mover advantage will be decisive in determining the winner of the race due to the expected exponential growth in capabilities of the system and subsequent difficulty of other parties to catch up.“

Read more 👉 Race Avoidance in the Development of Artificial General Intelligence

Jakub Langr graduated from the University of Oxford where he also taught at OU Computing Services. He has worked in data science since 2013, most recently as a Data Science Tech Lead at Filtered.com and as an R&D Data Scientist at Mudano. Jakub is a co-author of GANs in Action by Manning Publications. Jakub also designed and teaches Data Science courses at the University of Birmingham, numerous private companies and is a guest lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Maciej Marek is an Enterprise Data Scientist, CI/CD best practices evangelist, and trainer at Philip Morris International. He is passionate about Big Data building blocks, Spark lover and Machine Learning enthusiast. His primary interest is to answer the question: how can we create entire data products with AI core inside from data collection to web application?

They say a major part of succeeding is showing up. What do you say? Will you be there to witness the next breakthroughs in deep tech?

We can give you a hint: tickets at Early Bird price are still available, until the 8th of October 👉 https://codiax.co/tickets/

When the right minds meet, technology goes one step further was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How time passes by when you’re always on the look for the next deep tech breakthrough!

Yes, we’ve reached the third edition of approaching edgy topics in this industry, of putting Transylvania on the map of the deep tech ecosystem, and of improving our professional overview by learning from the best.

Sneak peek at our new edition

Codiax #3 will concentrate on gathering data to fuel the next breakthrough ideas in innovation. We believe in striving as a community by always learning from the best and creating the best concepts after connecting the dots together.

Our gathering will take place once again in the heart of Transylvania — Cluj-Napoca, following its tech-pulse. Save the date for 21–22 November!

Meet our first speaker

Jair Ribeiro, Senior AI Business Strategist, Volvo Group, has several years of experience in leading teams and projects in companies like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and IBM.

He is currently leading, inspiring and helping the Volvo Group to innovate through the power of Artificial Intelligence. Jair is also engaged in communicating in a very inspiring and practical way the vision, the strategy, and the objectives of the Volvo AI Center of Excellence, having a deep understanding and experience in several AI fields, especially Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Data Science, Image Recognition, and Natural Language Processing.

Tickets

We know senior software engineers, data scientists, CTOs, VPs of Engineering, founders and software architects like to be one step ahead, so we have an offer designed for them:

🎫Conference Early Bird — € 79

🎫Conference & Workshops Early Bird — € 109

This year’s focus

Innovation is systemized; keeping a continuous overview of the advancement of technology enhances our understanding of the world we live in and how to make it better. The 3rd edition of Codiax will be at the convergence of:

• Artificial Intelligence
• VR & AR
• Frontier Hardware
• Internet of Things
• Blockchain

Throwback

Reminiscing last year, there are a lot of moments and keynotes that improved our way of viewing certain angles of this industry. Let’s take a look back together at how our 2nd edition of Codiax unfolded:

Are you ready for tomorrow?

Join us by booking your seat for Codiax 2019 — Early Bird discounts included!

Deep Tech. Fueling innovation at Codiax 2019 was originally published in Codiax on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.