XConf India
November 22, Bangalore
For over a decade, Thoughtworks’ XConf has been our flagship event—created by technologists for those passionate about technology and its impact on the world. Our goal is to provide a space where professionals can connect, share experiences, and explore their love for tech in a relaxed, engaging atmosphere.
This year, we're heading back to Bangalore! Join us for XConf 2024 on November 22—a one-day, three-track tech event designed for technologists, by technologists.
Venue: Marriott Hotel | Whitefield
Address: Plot No 75, 8th Rd, EPIP Zone, Whitefield, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560066
What is XConf?
Thoughtworkers and guest presenters share how technologists and business leaders foster growth, collaboration and innovation to make an impact on clients, society and the tech industry.
Agenda
8.00am
9:00am
Vanya Seth and Bharani Subramaniam (Heads of Tech, Thoughtworks, India & Middle East)
In this talk, Vanya Seth and Bharani Subramaniam, will cover key highlights of technology trends that have disrupted the IT industry in the past six months. The pace of technological change can be dizzying, and it’s not always easy to spot these changes in time. In this keynote talk, we’ll share the top eight trends that we believe are significant and you may have missed.
9.50am
Kiran Jagannath (India FSI leader) and Satinder Pal Singh (India SA leader)
Join leaders from Amazon Web Services (AWS) as they share insights into innovative solutions crafted for their clients, tackling complex challenges across industries. Discover key success stories that highlight the power of cloud technology and gain valuable perspectives on emerging trends shaping the future of business and technology
10.20am
Annapurni Subramaniam (Director of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics)
Astronomy has always been at the forefront of technological and scientific advancements, inspiring breakthroughs that extend far beyond the study of the cosmos. In this keynote, Annapurni Subramaniam will explore the fascinating interplay between astronomy and technology, showcasing how the pursuit of understanding our universe has driven cutting-edge innovations in software, hardware, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. Through real-world examples, the talk will uncover how astronomy's unique challenges have catalyzed transformative technologies, paving the way for a brighter, more interconnected future.
11.00am
Take a break and reenergize. Meet some of the finest and most enthusiatic technologists from across banglore. Join one of our limited seats workshops and engage with the future of technology.
Win goodies at XConf booths and participate in exciting activites.
11:30am
Specialist talks in parallel sessions after keynotes
This year, specialist talks will cover three major areas: AI/ML, Data, and Emerging Tech. Register your interest for the talks as you walk in. Seats are limited and will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
You can find the detailed schedule for each track in the section below.
1.30pm
Complete the event feedback form and get a chance to enter our lucky draw! Don’t miss the opportunity to win some amazing goodies—your feedback matters, and so does your luck!
1.35pm
2:00-4:00pm
At XConf, you don’t just listen—you engage. This year, we’re offering two exclusive, invite-only hands-on workshops running in parallel. These sessions are designed to deepen your technical skills through practical, immersive learning experiences.
Specialist talks - Parallel sessions
11.30 - 12:10pm
Transforming data products and analytics platforms into business success
Ram Suri and Neeraj Bholani
In this talk, we will talk about how we transformed raw data into powerful business analytics & insights by building different Data Products. We will dive into the strategic integration of diverse data sources and data products, enabling decision-makers to track OKRs, optimize operations, and drive strategic success. Attendees will gain insights into the data-as-a-product approach, analytics platform best practices, and real-world examples demonstrating data-driven success.
12.10 - 12.50pm
Accelerating drug discovery: A generative AI-powered preclinical knowledge engine
Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni
The journey of discovering new drugs is heavily reliant on preclinical testing. Researchers struggle to efficiently locate the right insights from the vast trove of past studies. In the PRINCE project, Bayer and Thoughtworks collaborate to streamline how researchers access and analyze this data. In this talk, we'll explore how we built the AI Research Assistant – discussing AI techniques, customization strategies and path to production, along with Agentic capabilities. You'll learn about its impact on researcher efficiency. This session will equip attendees with the knowledge to build their own AI-powered knowledge engines, revolutionizing preclinical research and experimental design.
12.50 - 1.30pm
Aalap: AI assistant for legal & paralegal functions in India
Prathamesh Kalamkar
The talk will cover, the need for finetuning. When should you not fine-tune an LLM and when you should? The talk will cover in more details about how to finetune and pitfalls to avoid. In this talk we will go through the lifecycle of domain-specific LLM finetuning using Aalap as an example. Aalalp is a fine-tuned Mistral 7B model on instructions data related to specific Indian legal tasks. The performance of Aalap is better than GPT-3.5-turbo in 31% of our test data and obtains an equivalent score in 34% of the test data as evaluated by GPT4. Training Aalap mainly focuses on teaching legal reasoning rather than legal recall.
11.30 - 12:10pm
From chaos to clarity: Scaling observability with OSS
Krishnaswamy Subramanian and Shakir Shakiel
In today's era of complex, distributed systems, achieving effective observability is crucial. This talk will explore our experiences in managing a large-scale observability platform that processes terabytes of observability data. We will share our insights into the challenges we faced, common pitfalls, antipatterns to avoid and best practices to guide you from chaos to clarity in your observability journey.
12.10 - 12.50pm
Navigating the distributed database landscape: challenges and opportunities
Tejas Baldev, Isaac Wong and Bharani Subramaniam
Distributed systems present unique challenges, from data consistency to scalability and beyond. In this panel discussion, industry experts will delve into the common pitfalls of distributed systems and explore innovative solutions that are helping businesses tackle these complexities.
12.50 - 1.30pm
DevEx on steroids: 5 techniques to scale developer experience
Pramida Tumma
Struggling to maintain stellar DevEx as your team scales? This talk unveils 5 proven techniques to empower developers at scale, helping you boost productivity, streamline workflows, and build a thriving development environment. We will also showcase Backstage, open-source IDP that has helped us in this scaling journey.
11.30 - 12:10pm
Continuous compliance, agile practices for software compliance process
Vignesh Radhakrishnan & Vivek Poovalingam
In automotive software, a Functional Safety (FuSa) audit verifies compliance with ISO 26262’s ASIL requirements. Typically, audits occur independently, using manual, non-integrated tools, often creating end-of-cycle burdens. Continuous compliance, however, enables ongoing FuSa assessments, ensuring regulatory adherence, streamlining audits, and keeping teams updated on requirements throughout development, reducing mean-time-to-recovery when non-compliance arises.
12.10 - 12.50pm
XR's evolution towards tomorrow
Rathlavath Sindhu and Neelarghya Mandal
This talk will cover the landscape shift in XR from an adaption and development point of view showcasing some of the key factors that are affecting its growth. We also cover what developers should look forward to the development in XR for the near future.
12.50 - 1.30pm
Embedded excellence: lessons learnt while making embedded systems reliable
Parth Purvesh and Ranjan Sharma
With the ever-increasing presence of robots all around us in all the devices we rely on daily, the reliability and performance of embedded systems are of paramount importance. This talk revolves around our learnings and key takeaways from delivering quality-focused and reliable embedded software, that we believe every team developing embedded systems can learn from and implement.
Featured XConf 2023 talks
XConf India: Bharani Subramaniam and Vanya Seth, Heads of Technology
XConf Europe: Dr. Rebecca Parsons, Thoughtworks CTO Emerita
XConf Singapore: Panel discussion with May Xu, Sowmya Ganapathi Krishnan, Aditi Agarwal and Nouman Memon