Devoxx Ukraine 2023 – Building full-stack AI Chatbots (Ciklum, 2023)
Info
- Project type Public Speaking, Tech Presentation
- Date 22nd of Sept 2023
- My Role Speaker
- Topics AI, Java, Chatbots, NLP, NLU, Machine Learning
- Keywords Conversational AI, Natural Language Processing and Understanding, Telegram Bots, Spring AI
- Skills developed Presentation, Speaking
- Event URL Devoxx.com.ua
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Event recording (Youtube)
Description
This was my first time speaking and conducting a live coding session at an international software conference, and Devoxx is among the largest in the domain. I presented in front of an international audience comprising AI professionals — developers, DevOps engineers, data scientists, and AI salespeople.
Preparing for such events is demanding, making it a genuinely challenging experience. I've learned that writing the code and setting up the environment isn't the most complicated part. The real challenge lies in handling exceptions and unexpected scenarios during the demo.
I'd like to express my gratitude for the endorsement provided by my colleague, Olena Midzhak, and thank everyone for their valuable feedback.
This session draws from the experience I acquired on one of the production projects at Flatirons, as well as the knowledge I gained while preparing for my AI Developer certification from GTC in 2022. As I was preparing for the certification exam, I also worked on publishing a series of articles. These not only facilitated my understanding of the fundamentals but also helped organize my thoughts.
My purpose in this session was to explain and demonstrate how one can build a conversational chatbot by only writing code (no subscription, no low-code platform needed) and how to fallback to a 3rd party solutions (a bridge created through Spring AI to OpenAI in our case).
This event posed several new challenges for me:
- Presenting to a global audience and to unknown attendees
- Engaging a diverse group with varying levels of expertise and skill sets
- Representing a strong brand like Ciklum in public
- Being broadcasted and recorded without the option for retakes
It was an experience for which I prepared myself intensively and worked hard to overcome my own limits. I also learned a lot of new things and gathered valuable feedback.
I'm especially grateful to Ciklum's branding team for the invitation and opportunity. Thank you!
References
- Github repo
- Presentation slides
- Video recording (Devoxx's YouTube channel)
- My articles related to this topic
Tech stack
- Java, openjdk-19, maven 3.8.1
- Spring and the new Spring AI
- Stanford CoreNLP, Natural Language Processing Java lib
- Lingua, Language detector Java lib
- Jsoup, a powerful HTML parser for Java
- Telegram Bots API doc
- Telegram Bot, Java lib
- Docker
- Env setup commands
- Solr, powerful NoSQL DB & search engine
- MariaDb, a powerful open-source RDBMS
- Metabase, an amazing Java open-source tool for analytics