The GeneXus Meeting, already consolidated as a technological reference in the region, was attended by more than 35,000 people from 25 countries who watched it via streaming, leaving a balance of 180 conferences related to innovation, Artificial Intelligence, IoT and blockchain, showing the tangibility of a world that in the recent past was endorsed by science fiction authors.
Three days of 180 talks by 170 speakers, with participants from 25 countries and no less than 4,500 in-person participants is just a summary of what happened at the GeneXus GX27 meeting at the Radisson Hotel in Montevideo this week.
Artificial intelligence, robots, bitcoins and blockchain, integration and the bet on the world of startups with Thales Lab were the strong point of this new Shape your Future meeting, which encouraged its users to the mission of taking the future in their hands to model it in their own way.
The event, which ended as usual GeneXus between awards, music and networking, had Diego Forlán as a speaker in one of its closing talks, who together with Santiago Alfaro -his personal trainer- explained the work path chosen to be the best while remaining happy. This is the message that the company chose for its community, to work to go beyond the expected, and undoubtedly the football player who, with the highest training average managed to be number one in FIFA, is an encouraging example.
The risks taken by Roberto Musso, musician and composer of the Grammy-nominated Cuarteto de Nos, when he recounted the steps that led him to leave his work as an engineer for music, do not seem so far removed from the challenges Nicolás Jodal encouraged his community to take, inviting them to focus on "maturing" technologies. For Musso, the world that "brought me to engineering school is not alien to the world of letters and music. His lecture on Tuesday was another of the euphoric moments of the event, in which he told his story making an analogy between both industries, highlighting the importance of creativity, experimentation and authenticity.
Paradigmatic shifts
For Jodal, what we have seen in the last ten years has been more than the evolution of different types of technologies, a paradigm shift, probably the most important after the third industrial revolution. "The topic at the moment is Artificial Intelligence, every day we see headlines in the newspapers about this topic and this is what we know how to do", explained Jodal who then recalled that artificial intelligence has been the basis of GeneXus code generation but that in the past they did not admit it because "it had bad press".
Among the technologies that are proving to be potentially powerful given their accelerated development and potential use, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things and Blockchain development system stand out. These were the topics that were the focus of these three days of networking, where coexist from the most naive users to the most successful companies that have taken advantage of its platform to grow in various market niches. But the advanced technological topics were also accompanied by different exhibitions related to change management and the new skills needed, among which the one by Adizes, on the future of business management, stood out.
Cristina Zubillaga (General Director of the Department of Sustainable and Smart Development of the government of the city of Montevideo) explored the real and digital world, the 17 development goals for 2030 of the United Nations, and the challenge of transforming cities to make them more sustainable by relying on technology. A point for which we have many conditions, as noted in his lecture on innovation in Latin America, the IDB representative, Susana Robles.
Artificial Intelligence, IOT, Autonomous Vehicles and Fiction Becoming Real
Although the fear of being attacked by autonomous machines is far from disappearing, the bet is growing at an accelerated pace. According to what Jodal explained in the opening talk, two reasons that have made it possible to think about Artificial Intelligence in a closer way, the first is the increase in computational power and the second is the evolution of Deep Learning systems. In this same path we find the IOT or internet of things with the wireless and sensor industries in full expansion, which is a field with an advanced level of development but potentially much more exploitable (it is estimated that in 2020 there will be millions of connected objects).
Another of the topics that was present in the conferences was Autonomous Vehicles. "In the past I would never have imagined that I would be able to program a phone or a watch, but now I think I will be able to program a vehicle," said Nicolás Jodal, showing one of the prototypes that the company is working on together with the National Innovation Agency (ANII).
In this sense, there was also a tour of the 20 years of machine learning by the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Industry, Energy and Mining of Uruguay, Guillermo Moncecchi, as well as Uruguayans living in other countries came to the event to tell what they are doing in robotics and teleoperation (Fernando Bracco) or how to manage complexity and mental models (Daniel Fernandez Koprich).
"Learning by doing
Digital currencies such as the famous bitcoins were not left out of the GX27 where several of the talks were dedicated to the development structure of these systems.
The blockchain or block development system, is shown as a field of development in full swing. But it is no longer of interest only if this is the currency of the future or not, but also that the good management of this type of development could bring with it the solution to problems that have not yet found the right solution, such as inter-company work.
Many of the experts who gave talks agree that the leap is not only technological, it is about overcoming cultural and regulatory boundaries to move forward as technology is giving unexpected results. While we are thinking about its uses, testing, consulting with users, Jodal called for collecting data, "as much data as possible, without a specific purpose. First, let's have the data, then we'll learn what it's for, we'll make use of it. And how do we learn? By doing. Learning by doing is the method of learning and construction that is aimed at, and it is the system that they have currently put into practice for the program to support Thales Startups, as explained Fernando Brum of ANII.
GeneXus also talked about its training and courses plan together with Plan Ceibal, called "Jóvenes a Programar".
Machines in Paradise
One of the most controversial participations of the meeting was that of the Dominican José Elías, one of the experts in Artificial Intelligence, author of several books on the subject, such as the one that titles this paragraph.
Elias, is a great optimist about the use that humans will make of the new IT and to a full room he told the possibilities that neural networks were opening, where it is not too crazy to think of bodies merged with machines, robot surgeons or interstellar travel.
If tomorrow our mind could be translated into bits and these allowed us to be in several places at the same time, where would you want to go? This is one of the questions that was left ringing among the participants of the event.
Future-proof algorithms hoarding knowledge
The world of innovation has not been about having an idea never thought of before, but about learning to do things in a different way, with more collaborative forms of production. The GeneXus community has the habit of working in this way, on the client's side, solving problems with increasingly friendly solutions.
"Thirty-three years ago we got together with the sole purpose of solving the problem of corporate databases. Today, what we did in the past is a trend", said Breogán Gonda, who gave an emotional and masterful final talk at the end of the GX27. In it, he called the GeneXus Community to do a little more, "what if we all realize the synergy and capitalize it in planetary successes" and continued talking about the essential relationship between Artificial Intelligence and GeneXus, while he made an accurate analysis of serial processes, from the era of Ford to the era of Robots and mentioned the possibilities of Robots for medicine.
The reason why AI is now being successful is because it is data-driven, said Gonda, adding: "Being database experts it was easier for us to realize that all that data was useful for reality, and that's how GeneXus was born, capturing knowledge from data". He ended his conference with the innovations that GeneXus presents today in its DSL (Domain Specific Languages), such as the Knowledge Specific Language, and those presented in the GX27 Stencils Visual Models and the Chatbots Generator.
"This is just the beginning, we will continue to work every day with joy, enthusiasm and generosity," concluded the GeneXus Chairman of the Board, to a wave of applause.
All the conferences are available online at the GeneXus Meeting website.
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