There's plenty to get your teeth into
Check Out Our agenda
PLAN YOUR DAY, YOUR Way
Thursday, September 28th, 2023
08:30 - 09:00
registration
Tea, coffee and breakfast rolls
09:00 - 09:25
Welcome
Karen Meechan, CEO, ScotlandIS
09:25 - 10:25
How do you think while you're writing code, or performing other tasks involving code? Do you think the same way when writing a new feature as you do when you're investigating a bug? Over the past couple of years, I have noticed some interesting patterns around how I think when I’m coding, and different "modes" that I work in. For example, my thought processes for developing a new feature and for diagnosing a bug are significantly different. At Scotsoft I will be exploring these different modes, and what goes wrong when I end up mixing them. It's unlikely that you will think in exactly the same way, but I’ll be encouraging you to consider how you work best, and how that affects both individual and team practices.
11:00 - 11:45
Cyber risk is not just a security issue, it's a business issue, yet organizations continue to treat it as a siloed risk. Those that fail to implement good governance on cybersecurity, using appropriate tools and metrics, will be less resilient and less sustainable. This, in turn, has an impact on the other organizations they rely on, and ultimately on the stability of companies, communities, and governments. Alignment of security leaders and top business stakeholders maximizes resources and sets expectations for how an effective security posture can enable business growth by building trust and defending against costly cyberattacks.
11:00 - 11:45
Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform healthcare, and medical imaging in particular. Imaging tests such as x-rays and scans provide a window into the body, but only a tiny proportion of the information available is currently used in clinical practice. AI and ML have the potential to dramatically improve the speed and accuracy of image analysis, and also reveal new types of disease. However, in order to realise the potential of artificial intelligence to improve patient care issues such as bias, accuracy, privacy and transparency must be considered at a local, national and global level.
11:00 - 11:45
Join Adam Pettman, Head of Engineering at 2i, as he shares the transformative journey of how career changers propelled 2i's success while positively impacting Scotland. Discover the innovative strategies employed to welcome diverse perspectives, skills, and fresh outlooks. Through inspiring stories, witness the remarkable contributions of career changers and their pivotal role in driving innovation and growth. Explore the broader benefits for Scotland, fostering inclusivity and advancement in the tech community. Be empowered to unlock the untapped potential of career changers and contribute to Scotland's flourishing landscape of innovation and diversity.
11:00 - 11:45
The talk will focus on all the services and components required to be integrated to build the solution, from the cloud ML services, ML models, backend microservice architecture and front end design. It will cover the description of the solution with detailed diagrams, deep dive into each major component and hopefully a short demo of the application.
11:00 - 11:45
How do you shift left security so you can find security issues quickly and not slow down your delivery pipeline? Callum will show you how using the carrot and not a baseball bat can incentivise your developers and engineers to react to security issues and fix them before they've even become a problem.
11:00 - 11:45
Have you ever wondered what’s the difference between monoliths, monorepos and Micro-Frontends? When facing issues with scale, large companies turn to Micro-Frontends as a solution to decouple the monolith and hopefully improve their velocity and increase team autonomy; however, Micro-Frontends are at the far end of the decoupled and distributed frontend spectrum, and many alternatives should be considered first before committing to a fully distributed architecture. This talk is a journey through the evolution of frontend applications at scale, starting from the Monolith, evolving to modular monoliths, integrated applications, monorepos and finally arriving at Micro-Frontends. We will explore each approach’s pros and cons and choose the best tool to help you scale your applications.
11:55 - 12:40
The delicate balance of forging a vibrant new future through technology whilst doing it safely and securely creates friction in every business, and nowhere is this felt more than in the technology department...or is it the IT department? IT is forever tasked with forging ahead with improvements in business capability and efficiency. Cyber has the unenviable task of ensuring that organisations don't fall foul to a cyber-attack or data breach. Tensions can run high, and in the heat of the moment, we can easily forget we are on the same side and fighting towards the same goal. The Solution? Join us in our friendly debate with battle-hardened IT Infrastructure and Offensive Cyber Security professionals who have, against all the odds, learned to understand one another, forged an incredible bond, and created something truly special that we can all learn from and use.
11:55 - 12:40
Mathematics matters both more and less than you think. Yes, you can ignore mathematics and be a highly paid-professional programmer. On the other hand, I will explain that Mathematics is the tool used to solve specialised problems and more surprisingly that programming is doing mathematics. If you get hungry, don't worry, the proof is the pudding.
11:55 - 12:40
While IoT presents many novel threats and vulnerabilities, many are best considered as network-centric issues, and this perspective also offers the best prospect of defence. Attacks against public-facing interfaces, particularly on routers and gateways, are potentially hyper-scaling events with devastating consequences. In this talk we explain some experimental approaches we are taking to mitigate and prevent such attacks through hardware-based approaches to memory safety.
11:55 - 12:40
Distribute.IT was a leading Australian web services provider, boasting almost a 10% market share of domain names in Australia, and tens of thousands of web hosting clients. Over a 9-year period the founders built their start up to an enviable market position with operations in Australia and Indonesia. Within a 30-minute period, a malicious hack on the company's data centres started a waterfall effect that ultimately wiped the company out in under 2 weeks. Alex Woerndle, one of the founders, has lived and breathed a major cyber security incident, and come out the other side with invaluable experience for everyone to learn from. In the time since this event, he has worked with dozens of companies – large and small – to improve resilience, prepare for, and respond to, cyber-attacks. In this presentation – focussed on people and process, not technology - Alex will share his insights of the effects of the Distribute.IT incident, along with some other major incident responses he has supported in recent years.
11:55 - 12:40
Are you intrigued by the capabilities of ChatGPT but uncertain how to navigate it while using it safely? Look no further! In his upcoming talk, Jordan will share: firsthand experiences and practical tips on leveraging ChatGPT at home and at work; the essential guidelines for a seamless, impactful, and safe use of ChatGPT; a live demo of the future of integrated ChatGPT with other AI technologies, followed by an open Q&A. Don’t miss this opportunity to demystify the complexities around ChatGPT. Gain the knowledge you need to make informed decisions and drive innovation.
11:55 - 12:40
This presentation promises an engaging and interactive exploration of the AI landscape, delving into the significant and unprecedented progress achieved in Supervised Machine Learning and Generative AI. During this talk, Eyad will introduce you to these dynamic fields, showcasing their profound impacts through real-world scenarios. You will gain insights into how AI is reshaping various sectors, including Oil and Gas, Public Health, and Security, as well as redefining our work processes. The talk will investigate critical data challenges, including issues like data bias, data authenticity, and data accessibility, shedding light on these factors that are viewed as obstacles to fully harnessing AI's potential. Several AI-driven successful projects in Scotland will be showcased, demonstrating how AI has revolutionized processes and driven innovation and offered faster and more efficient practices. Eyad will finally share essential insights and suggestions on how to harness the power of AI and data-driven applications, be prepared to adapt and seize the opportunities that lie ahead, and the urgent need to reimagining the way we learn, teach, and approach our endeavours in this dynamic era of technological transformation.
12:50 - 13:50
14:00 - 15:00
Inspiring tomorrow's leaders, David will walkthrough his entry into tech at the age of 10, underscoring the global cyber talent crisis. Drawing from the Tesla hack story, he’ll demonstrate critical vulnerabilities in cyber-physical systems and our evolving smart infrastructure. David will provide an overview of our changing attack surfaces and wrap up with a look ahead at imminent cybersecurity challenges, enriched by perspectives from Fortune 500 CISOs.
15:10 - 15:55
This talk aims to introduce property-based testing, why you may want to use it, and how you can make use of it in the real world. Typical unit tests for a function will use a specific example input and assert a specific output is produced. With this approach, how can you be certain your code works across a wide range of inputs? Maybe it only works for that example? In this talk, I will introduce property-based testing as a method to test general statements rather than relying on specific examples.
15:10 - 15:55
The talk will focus on current trends in gaming, and how they will (or will not) help drive and define the 'Metaverse'. It will also look at issues around centralisation/decentralisation in these contexts, leading into web3....
15:10 - 15:55
What can we do as individuals to better protect ourselves online and how can this be communicated across organisations? Kurtis will also discuss experiences he’s come across as a virtual CISO and practical advice on avoiding the same pitfalls.
15:10 - 15:55
Security is often an after thought, we use Penetration tests and code scanning, but what about our designs? Have we thought about the faults in business logic and any possible attack paths that we might accidentally be building in? All putting our organisation at risk? Let’s find them early. This session will help you understand the theory and best practices behind Threat Modelling and see how they can save your organisation time and money.
15:10 - 15:55
There are a huge amount of access needs that users can have, as a result it can be daunting to build accessible software. I want to highlight ten pragmatic tips that you can start following today to make your software more accessible. Along the way, I hope to also inform you on why you should make your software accessible and spark your curiosity to look deeper into this vast, important, and relatively ignored topic.
15:10 - 15:55
Cyber-attacks are at or near to the top of the risk list in most organisations today, but what is not consistent, is the level of preparation and true readiness for cyber-incident recovery. Typically we are seeing something of a schism between the approach of the IT/Cyber teams and the Business Continuity operational response. Ron Miller will describe the importance of governance, underpinning the IT Service Continuity based on business requirements, the supporting cyber security framework and integrated Incident Response.
16:05 - 16:35
16:45 - 17:30
We are at a defining moment in the fight against climate change, where drastic action is required to find solutions. The adoption of emerging technology, while understanding how to apply these technologies, is challenging. As part of this “Anything is Possible” track, Vicky Byrom, Chief Data and Analytics Officer and product owner of Oxygen at Zumo, discusses pioneering work at the intersection of blockchain, sustainability, and data. She shares her learnings and journey in building and launching the world’s first comprehensive product to account for the carbon footprint of digital assets and prove it.
16:45 - 17:30
What steps can organisations take to reduce the Cyber risk with their third Parties and key suppliers? This talk will look at the steps every organisation should take in order to ensure the risk presented by these 3rd Parties is managed in an appropriate way thereby bringing it within appetite. We will discuss everything from identification of 3rd Parties to how to manage issues with them.
16:45 - 17:30
16:45 - 17:30
Chris' talk will cover the background of Digital Twins and demonstrate the way state of the art game technology is being used to build innovative solutions that fundamentally change how companies work. It will show how Digital Twin technology is being developed to transform the management of FMCG in Retail and revolutionise store planning and management.
16:45 - 17:30
As a business grows, services are rapidly connected to drive value for customers. Distributed software stacks scales to meet demand and potentially become coupled and hidden from other parts of a company. In this talk, James will explore how to unlock and share the value of existing services towards an API-based architecture. He will explore API design and guidelines to unlock API First software development and avoid gotchas, but how do we migrate our existing services to work in this way? Using an evolutionary based architecture approach and techniques from DDD, we will discuss refactoring existing services and the opportunity to migrate towards service oriented architectures, microservices based architecture or FaaS approaches.
16:45 - 17:30
Growing a tech business from startup to scaleup is tough. This talk is for entrepreneurs and early-stage investors trying to avoid the sales & marketing pitfalls and wormholes that limit growth. Frank will share his experiences and the tools, techniques and resources that are applicable to any growing tech business to accelerate your growth.
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