Subjective eye of PMR: PLNOG 23 in Kraków

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At the 23rd PLNOG conference there was a place for meetings and talks. There were also interesting lectures and accompanying discussions.

From organisational and logistic point of view

The 23rd edition of the PLNOG conference, which took place on 23-24 September in Cracow, at the Metropolo Hotel, is behind us. The PMR team had the opportunity to participate in this event.

PLNOG is primarily an opportunity to interact with several hundred other people participating in the event. We had the opportunity to talk live with our customers, but also to establish new contacts and discuss with exhibitors who presented their solutions in a dedicated zone.

Looking at the logistical background from the participant’s side, the conference was organized at a good level. Apart from occasional and minor clashes with the sound system and projectors, there is rather nothing to be attached to.

Until a certain point, the lectures were single-track, then the sessions began to run parallel in several rooms. Among others, for those who have not yet mastered the skills of bilocation, the organizer took care of videofilming of the speeches.

A small curiosity is that diehard 5G fans could proudly wear microwave protection caps at the conference, or arm themselves with an appropriate talisman, or possibly an elixir. It is difficult to say whether these accessories were effective due to the high concentration of 5G during the conference.

From substantive point of view – day one

The conference started with a cosmically thick pipe – which is a good thing, but the latest discoveries related to the black hole certainly did not go unnoticed. Dr Wielgus’ speech, balancing on the border of broadly understood telecommunication, data analysis and science fiction themes, certainly aroused the listeners and gave them a positive attitude towards the rest of the day.

Then Andrzej Szulc took the floor and told about his experiences from the expedition to Denali. He moved the participants to the snow-covered Alaska, suggesting that man does not live by work alone and sometimes it is worth to break away from his desk.

The problem of knowledge transfer from analog to digital solutions was taken up by Marcin Marciniak in his speech “What a computer scientist can learn from the railways”. On the example of the Szczekociny disaster, he pointed out the mechanisms and phenomena that contributed to this historic event, and how such knowledge can be used to implement new technologies in business. Conclusion after the presentation – think, predict mistakes and give time for training.

From substantive point of view – day two

The second day of the programme was marked by a debate on 5G. The topic was hot, it was very ograny, but the participants stood up to the task. It is not even about a solid portion of knowledge and content, but a slightly different perspective and the right distance to the subject. The panel (in two parts) met our expectations.

In the morning Michał Małyszko from Equinix talked about the possibilities of the new PLIX. From the post-lunch presentations to the PMR team, it was possible to participate in speeches, which in their subject matter were more related to data analysis and extensive machine learning.

In the first one, Tomasz Janaszka and Jakub Salamon briefly presented the application of machine learning in the process of routing management in Orange. A little bit about the infrastructure, a little bit about algorithms. For analytical freaks – a real treat.

The next presentation by Jarosław Zieliński was a short introduction to Amazon Web Service and the basic capabilities of this tool – on the example of time series prediction. In contrast to the previous presentation, this lecture enjoyed rather moderate popularity, judging by the number of listeners in the room. It’s a pity, considering the wide possibilities of the service and the rapidly developing data science traffic, using the computing power suspended in the cloud.

During the last session, just before the closing ceremony, Dr. Andrzej Bęben talked about data processing techniques at the edge of the network, pointing to the important problem of the distance between the cloud and the end user. Bow here to the program council, which did not limit the lectures from the world of science to only great and media discoveries, such as black hole image processing.