Newsletter

It’s a tad late, but here’s wishing you a great 2024
It was great to see so many of you again through 2023. Here are a few flashbacks for those who made it, and those who did not.

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2023 in review at Hasgeek
Empowering community, fostering innovation

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India’s first GenAI hackathon - powering the GenAI Community

Hasgeek worked with community initiators Nirant Kasliwal (Qdrant) and Soumyadeep Mukherjee (Dashtoon) to organize early events and manage community funds.

Hasgeek also provided frameworks for content management, enabling diversity, and a code of conduct that helps facilitate community self-management.

11 sessions | 24 Speakers | 4 Women-led sessions | 1,000+ Members

Follow GenAI’s activities here
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The Fifth Elephant (Monsoon + Winter editions)

2023 had two quarterly Fifthel conferences - monsoon edition in August followed by Winter edition in December. The Winter Edition - held on 8 December 2023 - was curated by two members of The Fifth Elephant community - Bharat Shetty (now Consulting Editor at The Fifth Elephant) and Ashwin Kumar (MTS at AMD).

Some highlights of the more recent Winter Edition session were:

• Priyanka Nahata explained how GenAI has revolutionized online shopping at Flipkart.
• Anuj Gupta of Gradient Advisors touched the vexing topic of how to examine ROI in AI, sparking a lively discussion.
• Kalyan Sivasailam and Bargava Subramanian from 5C Network showed how they are leveraging AI and LLMs in producing more efficient radiology reports - a live example of AI in health-tech.
  
  In addition, The Papers Discussion group - supported by The Fifth Elephant - was initiated by Bharat. The group has organized three engaged discussions of important research papers in NLP, Computer Vision, Deep Learning and GenAI at a monthly cadence.

25+ sessions | 50+ Speakers | 10+ Women-led sessions | 300+ Members
Join the conversation at The Fifth Elephant on WhatsApp and Telegram

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Women in AI group

The Women in AI group, which was formed as part of the GenAI mixer organized by Shubhi Saxena in May 2023, is now an active group on WhatsApp, and has conducted two meetups so far.

Key contributions to the group have been made by Saraswati Chandra, founder at Cranberry.fit, who hosted the November meetup, and Divya Dixit (reviewer of Fifthel Winter edition of talks) and Rachana Maheswari (speaker on AI and risks) in furthering the community. The group participants also include Rumanu Bharadwaj, Sharmili Srinivasan, and Priyanka Nahata (speakers at The Fifth Elephant) and Mahathi Bhagavatula (from The Papers Discussion group).

5 sessions | 8 Speakers | All Women-led sessions | 200+ Members
Follow activities of Women in AI here

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GeekUp with Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal Foundation, in Bangalore

The Fifth Elephant hosted Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal Foundation and renowned AI scholar in Bangalore on 3rd October, 2023. Meredith met with Public Interest Technologists, prominent members of the startup and VC communities in Bangalore, and interacted with the community over two discussions. The Bangalore International Centre (BIC) partnered with Hasgeek in this initiative.

Meredith and the visiting Signal team shared approaches that Signal has adopted in pushing back against the conjoined threats of mass surveillance and enhanced social control of the AI hype wave.

Meredith Whittaker was also joined by Amba Kak, Executive Director of the AI Now Institute, and Udbhav Tiwari, Head of Global Product Policy at Mozilla, in presenting perspectives on the policy landscape around AI. The panel particularly focused on the threats posed to privacy, and the ways that the dominant narratives are getting AI wrong.

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The Rootconf comeback

Rootconf had two quarterly conferences in 2023 - with a focus on Cloud Costs Optimization in July, followed by Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in November 2023.
Sarika Atri (ex-Flipkart, ex-Hotstar, co-founder at xMplify.tech) was reviewer at July conference and co-editor of the SRE edition in November. Sarika is the first woman editor at Rootconf, the community’s landmark achievement to date. Rootconf also saw the comeback of community members Safeer CM (Flipkart), Saurabh Hirani (Last9), Raghdip Panesar (Google) and Anand Chitipothu (formerlym FOSS United Foundation) in curating content for the community.

Rootconf proudly powered member Pramod Biligiri’s idea of doing monthly talks on software project management, along with co-curator Mayankk Banerjee. The group has hosted three talks with speakers like Ranjan Sakalley (Executive Vice President at Pine Labs), Gaurav Lochan (Head of Engineering at PhonePe) and Deepti Aggrawal (Director of Engineering at Flipkart).

40+ sessions | 40 Speakers |10 Women led sessions | 300+ Members
Join the conversation at Rootconf on Telegram

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New in 2024: Additional member benefits at Hasgeek

We’ve got a lot of new activities and content planned for The Fifth Elephant and Rootconf members in the coming months. This includes exclusive access to in-person events, conferences and several new online/offline/hybrid engagements like podcasts, round tables, meetups and mixers.

We will also power communities and community events in other cities across India - Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and more in 2024 . If you want to speak, partner or curate, join the community channels. There is a place for everyone!

Sign up for a Membership now for special access and added benefits
Become a Rootconf member | Sign up for The Fifth Elephant membership

Some exclusive Members-only benefits (not available to non-member participants):

• Virtual access to monthly Meet-ups; and GeekUp events
• Free virtual + in-person access to Rootconf/The Fifth Elephant conferences. Exclusive access to Speakers’ Lounge
• Priority virtual + in-person access to Podcasts, Roundtables and Virtual Meet-ups
• Members-only participation in rehearsals for Meet-ups and Conferences
• Access to video content archive - from past Meet-ups, Talks, Conferences and Workshops