Swiss Data Community Meetup: Data & AI in Practice

The Swiss Data Community is back! Join us for an insightful evening as we delve into inspiring stories about practical applications of Data & AI. This evening we have the pleasure of hosting the meetup at the offices of the Swiss Marketplace Group.

Multiple speakers will share their experiences of implementing Data & AI and the hurdles they faced.

Talk 1: Migrating Truecaller's 40 Billion Daily Data Points to the Cloud by Krzysztof Zarzycki

To accommodate user growth, Truecaller, a global leader in call management, recently migrated the data of over 380 million active users and 40 billion generated data points daily to Google Cloud. This presentation will cover the tech choices made, combining native cloud services with hybrid open-source technologies to optimize costs and scalability. Additionally, you will gain a quick glimpse into the transition from a centralised team to a decentralised one, leveraging multi-tenant Airflow, Kafka, BigQuery, and Spark to build a scalable self-service analytics platform in the cloud.

Talk 2: Introducing image-based search to Ricardo.ch by César Fuentes and Tim Nonner

Ricardo.ch is the most popular second-hand online marketplace in Switzerland and part of SMG's portfolio. Its huge and diverse inventory makes it challenging for users to find the right items using conventional keyword searches. Therefore, Ricardo is currently introducing image-based search to its apps as a next step on its AI journey. This talk will illustrate the evolution of the backend that powers this feature, starting from the ideation phase, through the due diligence of the image processing technology used, to the integration into the Ricardo search stack.

Talk 3: “AI for Developer Efficiency” by Clive Adams

This talk will explore how generative AI (genAI) tools can enhance efficiency throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC). It will provide a high-level overview of how each SDLC step can be optimized using genAI, breaking down the process step-by-step and illustrating each with examples. Additionally, the talk will address how to measure efficiency improvements both quantitatively and qualitatively. It will also acknowledge potential bottlenecks and process issues that may arise from integrating these new tools, emphasizing that their introduction is not without challenges.