Dev Day Houston 2017 Recap
Mark III Systems and our digital development unit, BlueChasm, hosted our second Dev Day Houston at the Karbach Brewery in Houston, Texas! In case you missed this years Dev Day; Dev Day is “a meetup and expo for ALL Houston tech professionals that build, run, and support amazing software for enterprises, organizations, service providers, research institutions, and everything in between.”
Here is an in-depth recap of some of the expo tables we had at Dev Day:
IBM Watson
At the IBM Watson table, the BlueChasm team built an API-driven cognitive call center platform using speech-to-text and Server-side Swift. Having utilized Swift for a long time for iOS development, the BlueChasm team recently turned to Swift to roll out many services that combine to power the platform, due to a number of reasons, including scalability, performance, and some of the nice debugging tools that are available with Swift. Watch the video below to see a demo of Cognitive Call Center.
BlueChasm
BlueChasm (Mark III's digital development arm) had a table that featured a couple different cognitive demo platforms also built around IBM Watson, TensorFlow, and IBM Cloud Object Storage.
BlueChasm showed a live demonstration of our trained Vision AI model called VideoRecon and showed how you can start using AI Vision to solve business challenges! For those not aware, VideoRecon is a video analytics platform that our team put together that uses IBM Watson, Bluemix, and IBM Cloud Object Storage, in combination with some of our own algorithms, to enable a user to leverage Watson to auto-tag a video with what Watson "sees" in the video. These tags will allow the video to be searched, filtered, and analyzed (after tagging), all without any form of manual tagging or labeling that's required with most video/audio storage software platforms today. To see the full demo visit VideoRecon.io and click “Demo” or click the image below.
BlueChasm also demonstrated its medicine recognition AI demo, in which a simple box was converted into an edge computing device with a simple camera trained to identify pills and medication simply by "looking" at the pill. Nearly 100,000 Americans die every year from taking improper medication, so AI technologies like this hold a lot of promise not only for industry, but also for contributing to help solve challenges faced by humanity.
BlueChasm DevOps
At the BlueChasm DevOps table, we showed chatbot integrations for managing and monitoring enterprise systems hardware over Slack; as well as, support for performing various management tasks using voice commands through Amazon Alexa.
TensorFlow
At our TensorFlow table, we demoed how its toolset is enabling a whole new generation of AI and deep learning apps and use cases. Examples at the booth include fast, accurate image recognition to solve business challenges and significantly more accurate predictive business models (vs traditional analytics techniques).
Docker
Did you know Docker is for more than just Microservices? We all know Docker provides the foundation for changing the way you develop and run applications, but it can also make existing legacy apps more secure, efficient, and portable to hybrid cloud infrastructures. At Dev Day the Docker team discussed how to migrate existing Windows and Linux applications into Docker containers without having to modify source code. Mark III is both a Docker DVAR and Docker Consulting Partner and has Docker Enterprise Edition (Docker Datacenter) running in our Houston lab, which includes key enterprise-centric components like Docker Universal Control Plane (UCP) and Docker Trusted Registry (DTR).
Chef
Ship better software, faster! We were pleased to have Chef join our second Dev Day. At their table, they discussed how you can use Chef Automate (Chef's enterprise platform) to enable collaboration and continuous automation across your infrastructure, applications and compliance for all your apps and infrastructure.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA demonstrated a simple but powerful image recognition program to illustrate how Deep Learning works and how using the right tools can simplify development efforts. NVIDIA and its leading GPU and acceleration technologies represent the heart of the current surge in the industry in AI and deep learning related innovation... most of BlueChasm's platforms and apps are built on top of stacks that incorporate NVIDIA technology.
Azure Stack
We did a live demo of Azure Stack Development Kit running remotely in the Mark III lab. Azure Stack is the soon to be released on-premise version of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform (PaaS/IaaS) targeted for release in 2H2017. If your organization has constraints on using public cloud (security/legal/regulatory/comfort/network/etc) but you still want the same agility, speed, and development tooling, then Azure Stack is perfect for you.
Til the next Dev Day
Thank you to everyone who attended Dev Day and for everyone who helped make the meetup a huge success! We had such a great time at Dev Day Houston 2017 we can’t wait an entire year so follow us on Twitter or Facebook to hear about Dev Day Houston 2018 in the Spring!
If any of these technologies and/or projects/products interest you, please feel free to reach out to us directly at Mark III to start a conversation!
