Facebook Developer Circles is a global network of local communities created by developers, for developers. Last year we launched a Facebook Developer Circle in Colombo. If you haven’t joined it yet, join : https://www.facebook.com/groups/DevCColombo.

The December meet up of Developer Circle Colombo will be held on 20th December from 5 PM to 7 PM at WSo2. This meet up will have  two tech talks on cutting edge technology by two Sri Lankans who are working at top tech companies in the world.

The first talk of the day will be on "The impact of 5G, AI, and Blockchain on the way we live" by Jeewika Ranaweera.  There is a major shift in technologies and market dynamics as we transition to an ecosystem with 5G, AI and Blockchain. We are starting to see the impact of IoT, the connected cars, smart cities, and many other industries that may look like a page from a science fiction book. This talk will address how 5G changes the industries and the world, how AI changes the human interaction with machines, and how Blockchain will change the way people and machine interact and transact. The talk will conclude with how this combination will impact our world, our future generation, and humanity.

Jeewika Ranaweera is a principal hardware engineer at Oracle. She received her Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering from ISPJAE in Havana, Cuba; and her Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. She is a member of the Oracle Semiconductor Engineering team that focuses on high-speed microprocessors. She is an IEEE Senior Member, an ABET program evaluator for IEEE, and a Sustainability Champion at Oracle. Jeewika authored an eBook about her engineering journey for IEEE Women in Engineering to inspire others to follow STEM careers and illustrated the 1st children’s book published by IEEE.  She also volunteers as a Technologist at the Oracle Education Foundation. Through ABET, she helps guide the content, quality and delivery of ECE degree programs around the world. She has authored and co-authored many papers published in technical journals, or presented at international conferences. Jeewika holds four U.S. Patents. 

The second talk of the day will be by our own developer circle core member, Praneeth Peiris on "Machine Learning with AWS".  Machine Learning is one of the widely growing topics used in various domains including data analytics, predictions and recommendations, even in music and art. In the Display domain of trivago, ML is used on the elements which are visible to the user, such as descriptions, reviews, tags and images, and the pipelines are implemented on AWS (Amazon Web Services). This talk will explain how trivago implemented the the ML algorithms on AWS to process terabytes of data.

Praneeth Peiris is a Software Engineer in the Visual Content team in trivago: one of the largest search engines for hotels. He is a BSc. Computer Science graduate from UCSC: University of Colombo School of Computing, and Umeå University, Sweden. He was a contributor and a volunteer for many organizations when he was in Sri Lanka, including our own Facebook Developer Group - Colombo.