The Fifth Elephant 2024 Annual Conference (12th &13th July)

About the 2024 Conference

The Fifth Elephant 2024 Annual Conference was held on 12th (workshops) and 13th July (main conference), 2024. The main conference was held at the Bangalore International Centre, Domlur. It was a hybrid event - allowing participants to attend either in-person or via the livestream.

The conference (first held in 2012) continued as a unique community-led forum for developers and engineers to get together, share experiences and explore fresh ideas. All the conference topics, sessions and speakers were curated, peer-reviewed and supported by a group of community editors.

In addition to speaker sessions, we had interactive sessions, including - Workshops, Roundtables and Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions.

Some key conference takeaways

1. Data engineering infrastructure and capabilities advancing - There is a technical deepening of the data engineering and infrastructure landscape at the high end. There are now advanced expectations from data platforms, and increased capability among practitioners to meet them.
2. Build or buy conversation continues to evolve - Companies are using off the shelf building blocks and then writing their internal software to work with them. However, the decision of what to build vs buy is getting harder as more targeted products are built.
3. Made in India commercial data products arriving - As a consequence of increased capabilities in India, we saw commercial data products being built out of here. Multiple providers presented their offerings in our space.
4. More reasonable expectations of value - on the economic side, we see more a tempering of expectations about what value a data platform alone can bring. There were more pragmatic conversations that didn’t overlook the trade-offs and contexts in which these solutions or products were built.

📋 2024 Annual Conference Report coming soon here

Participant testimonials 🗒️

Here’s what our participants had to say about the 2024 conference...

“The Fifth Elephant is hands down the best tech community I’ve been a part of. Absolutely loved the conversations at their annual conference today! Huge thanks to all the volunteers & amazing folks @hasgeek” - Mitun Arunan on X.com

“Amazing conversations on community licenses of AI models at @fifthel with @nutanc @thej . The community is so lively.” - Srinivas Kodali, Data, Information Security and Society on X.com

“This was my first time @fifthel and what stood out for me was the people. Absolutely thankful for the folks I’ve learnt from, who so generously invested their time and encouraged me along the way. Loved the interesting questions from the audience! Huge shoutout to @hasgeek folks for a tasteful, well-organised conf.” - Aditi Ahuja, Speaker and SWE-2 Couchbase on X.com

“Had a blast @fifthel. Such a great conference. Such a great day. Y’all have it so good here.” - Siddharth Sharma, technologist, writer, former CTO Shaadi.com on X.com

“🌟 Thrilled to have spoken at #TheFifthElephant 2024 Annual Conference by Hasgeek. A heartfelt thank you to the incredible organizers and insightful reviewers for making this event a phenomenal success. Your dedication and hard work made it all possible. 🙌...” - Siddhant Agarwal, Speaker and Developer Communities Lead - APAC at Neo4J on LinkedIN

At the conference

DAY 1> (Friday, 12th July 2024): Workshops at Underline Center, Domlur, Bangalore - (in-person) and online. Workshop details here.

DAY 2> (Saturday, 13th July 2024): Main conference at the Bangalore International Centre (BIC), Domlur, Bangalore - (in-person) and online.

Want to know more? 👀
📅 View the complete conference schedule here
📋 View the 2024 conference submissions here
🧔 See the full crew

The 2024 Conference Themes

The main 2024 conference (held on Saturday, 13th July 2024) was centered around two tracks:

TRACK A - Data Engineering and Infrastructure 🏗️

Track A editors were...
1. Pramod Biligiri is the Founder of Bitken Technologies
2. Sandeep Joshi is a Data science/Engineering veteran at Kognitos
3. Shashwat Agarwal is the ex-VP of Engineering at Udaan
4. Sunil Sayyaparaju is the VP of Engineering at Aerospike

TRACK B - GenAI and LLMs in Business 🤝

Track B editors were...
5. Abhishek Harshvardhan Mishra is an independent consultant/hacker
6. Vikram Srinivasan is the founder of Needl.ai
7. Harshad Saykhedkar is the Co-Founder & Chief AI Officer of AbleCredit.com
8. Bharat Shetty B is an AI/ML Consultant and consulting editor at The Fifth Elephant

WORKSHOPS - On 12th July, 2024

The conference also featured several workshops, which were held a day before the main event at the Underline Center, Domlur.

Details on the online and in-person workshops are in this update.

About the audience 🧑

1. AI/ML/Data Science/Ops engineers especially from domains such as health care, e-commerce, automobile, agri-tech and industrial verticals
2. Data scientists looking for deeper understanding of model deployment/governance.
3. Architects involved in building ML workflows that scale.
4. Tech founders and CTOs creating products and platforms that leverage data, ML and LLMs.
5. Product managers, involved in the process of building AI/ML products.
6. Directors, VPs and senior tech leadership involved in building AI/ML teams.

Conference sponsors

Gold Sponsor - Atlassian
Silver Sponsor - Google
Workshop sponsor - Datastax
Lanyard Sponsor - Uber
Community Partner - FOSS United Foundation
Beverage Partner - BONOMI

About The Fifth Elephant 🐘

The Fifth Elephant is a community of practitioners, who share feedback on data, AI and ML practices in the industry. If you like the work that The Fifth Elephant does and want to support its activities - review of Papers, Books, building the innovation ecosystem in India through hackathons and conferences - contribute by picking up a membership.

Contact 📞

💬 Post a comment with your questions here, or join The Fifth Elephant Telegram group and the WhatsApp group.

Follow @fifthel on Twitter.
📞 For any inquiries, call The Fifth Elephant at +91-7676332020.