Sunny Tech 2022 (EN)

Before talking about my favourite discoveries of Sunny Tech, I would like to thank all the volunteers who made this event possible after several years of absence due to Covid. You don’t realize it as a participant, but a titanic organization is necessary to set up a conference of this quality!

I would also like to highlight all the actions for the environment that were implemented, such as:

I will now present to you my favourites of this conference! If you ever want to have more information than my summary, all the talks have been filmed and will be published soon. I will update the article once all the presentations are online with the link to find them.

This alarming but important subject was presented by Audrey Neveu and Agnès Crepet. This presentation is divided into two main areas. On the one hand, the resources necessary for our entire digital life and on the other hand, the ethical questions that arise with new technologies. The duo is exciting, and their areas of expertise complement each other perfectly. I will not dwell on these problems that are well known, but on the solutions proposed by the speakers in order to stay on a positive note!

To begin with, regarding our privacy and interactions on Internet, companies should focus on 4 pillars:

The right to a clean design means that the solution does not use dark patterns (see definition below) to deceive users.

Concerning the ecological impact of all our devices, several solutions are also possible:

To sum up, there are many things to improve, but solutions exist and we are the first actors to be able to change things.

Thanks again to the two speakers for raising awareness on this important subject!

Mathis Hammel presented us his home-made solution to detect deep fakes. The site thispersondoesnotexist generates fake faces for free.

Ill-intentioned individuals use these services to create fake profiles en masse on social networks. To remedy this, Mathis created a solution to detect them from scratch.

The speaker started his reflection with a simple but effective solution. Before explaining it, we need to go back to the methods used to realize this AI.

The artificial intelligence technique used to generate the images is a GAN (Generative adversarial network ). This type of model is based on three parts:

The goal of the generator is to produce the most realistic image possible to deceive the discriminator and the goal of the discriminator is to detect as well as possible the false images generated. After many training cycles, the two modules will improve and become more and more efficient.

The first trick to detect false images generated by this model comes from the image bank used. Indeed, the faces coming from this group of photos have a particularity: the eyes are always placed in the same place. Therefore, the AI will try to create images as close as possible to the real ones and will therefore also place the eyes in the same place. The most naive solution is to look at the position of the eyes on the image and if it matches the known position, the image is false. But this solution is not very robust to changes in the pictures, so the presenter developed a more advanced method.

To do this, it has set up a service that retrieves and stores images from the site thispersondoesnotexist. It has made several optimizations in order not to store the raw images on the server, as this would take up too much disk space. Then, when you want to detect a fake face, the tool will compare with its database and according to a score, send back yes or no. If you want to test, Mathis hosts a website allowing to detect fake images directly from the browser. Moreover, this website displays interesting information such as look-alikes, when the fake image was generated, or the eyes technique explained before.

Noël Macé and Pierre Tibulle presented us an interesting subject with a very original presentation! Indeed, while Noël explained the origins of browsers and their evolution through time, Pierre drew the slides in real time on the stage.

I really admire the people who manage to go out of the frame to present their subject, a big bravo to them!

By the way, Pierre has posted on his twitter feed several summaries of talks he participated in (like the one about deep fakes).

We had the privilege to receive two unicorns on stage to explain us the job of DevRel (Developer Relations).

I really enjoyed this talk because the term DevRel was obscure to me. I imagined a person who goes from conference to conference to sell their company. But after this humorous presentation, you realize that this is only the tip of the iceberg. This illustration by @manekinekko shows the submerged part of the iceberg.

Among all these missions, there are several that I would never have imagined:

The list is long and that’s why summarizing this job in a few lines is complicated.

There are also several points that are important in the vision of a DevRel:

I urge you to watch the replay of this moment to learn more! The slides are available here.

This offbeat talk presented by Yann Bertrand explains a multitude of techniques to avoid finishing last in Mario Kart! I think it’s great that this fan of video games and e-sports competitions can come and talk about his passion in a conference like Sunny Tech.

For Mario Kart Deluxe 8 players, here are the main techniques I didn’t know:

Afterwards, Yann showed us several advanced methods, but to be honest, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reproduce them…​

The weekend after the conference was an opportunity to test out all of his techniques and to my surprise, I really improved! Considering my initial level, I had a lot of room for improvement…​ If you’re a Mario Kart player on Nintendo Switch, I highly recommend watching this talk a few times!

Laurie Coquillat imagined and created a board game to explain Agile methods in a playful way.

In this workshop, you had to organize your group vacation with unforeseen events and constraints in the best possible way. This parallel with an IT project allows participants to discover the world of agility in an original way.

There are several points to take into account during our adventure such as the mode of transport used, the activities, the meals or the chosen accommodation. During the game, you may come across some unexpected situations that you have to deal with as a group.

Laurie was present throughout the game to guide and help us. At the end of the game, she highlighted the parallels with our IT projects to explain the different Agile frameworks and their use cases.

I highly recommend that you attend if you are going to a conference where Laurie is presenting this workshop. Even if you work with the Agile mindset on a daily basis, this workshop allows you to rediscover the basics and the interest of these methods in a fun way!