Programme details

Amitrajit Sarkar

Senior Lecturer, Ara Institute of Canterbury

Amitrajit is a senior member of faculty at Ara Institute of Canterbury and an affiliated research associate at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He has published widely in Software engineering and Management Information Systems. His main research interests include IT Governance and IS resilience, which is an aspect of organisational resilience. He has won multiple best paper awards for his research publications.

Test Driven Development will make your database deployments hassle free

Wednesday 3:50pm - 4:10pm, (CITRENZ 1 Room)

Test-Driven Development (TDD) has a proven track record in application development, but is less ingrained in database development work, despite data quality is increasingly critical in a data-driven economy.

This mindset has changed with the arrival of test frameworks that use the SQL language, and that are available as plug-ins for development environments. In this workshop, we will discuss in detail a Unit Testing framework for databases called tSQLt that is available as a plug-in for SQL Server Management Studio.

This free open-source library has gained a lot of attention lately; even more so since industry leader Redgate have put their weight behind it by making tSQLt the backbone of their product SQL Test.

Ethical principles in multi-modal application development: a BARJ case study

Friday 2:15pm - 2:45pm, (Wellington 1 Room)

Bosch, Ara Institute of Canterbury, Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, and Jade Software (BARJ) are collaborating on investigating enhancing the user interfaces of products manufactured by Bosch. The plan is to answer four questions:
1. “Can we speed up the setting-up process by telling the appliance what we need and want?”
2. “How can we easily configure the user settings instead of reading manuals and complicated menus?”
3. “How can we find relevant functions quickly?”
4. “How can we interact with the UI manually and via voice command?”
What is being developed is a multi-modal UI concept allowing a user to interact with the device using traditional methods (touch, hardware buttons, etc), and voice commands. The voice commands (Speech-to-text, NLU) are processed on-device or in the cloud (currently Google’s Dialogflow).
This investigation is not only there to ease navigation through the device’s menus and altering settings, but also to provide an alternative form of interacting with the device. This could be beneficial to users that are unable to interact with it traditionally and will enhance the accessibility of future devices produced by Bosch. Moreover, we will look into another interesting area – Ethical considerations when implementing AI in the organization. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving domain with a number of innovative use cases for organizations across a variety of disciplines. Despite the advancement of AI, there are currently no specific ethical regulations around the technology—though some governments are working to establish them. Many organizations are already beginning to implement standards and best practices around the use of AI to help ensure that the data-driven systems they implement are more trustworthy and will remain viable once regulations are introduced. We will share our learning around this contemporary concept using this project as a use case.

Ethical principles in multi-modal application development: a BARJ case study

Thursday 2:35pm - 3:10pm, (Christchurch 1 Room)

Bosch, Ara Institute of Canterbury, Regensburg University of Applied Sciences, and Jade Software (BARJ) are collaborating on investigating enhancing the user interfaces of products manufactured by Bosch. The plan is to answer four questions:
1. “Can we speed up the setting-up process by telling the appliance what we need and want?”
2. “How can we easily configure the user settings instead of reading manuals and complicated menus?”
3. “How can we find relevant functions quickly?”
4. “How can we interact with the UI manually and via voice command?”
What is being developed is a multi-modal UI concept allowing a user to interact with the device using traditional methods (touch, hardware buttons, etc), and voice commands. The voice commands (Speech-to-text, NLU) are processed on-device or in the cloud (currently Google’s Dialogflow).
This investigation is not only there to ease navigation through the device’s menus and altering settings, but also to provide an alternative form of interacting with the device. This could be beneficial to users that are unable to interact with it traditionally and will enhance the accessibility of future devices produced by Bosch. Moreover, we will look into another interesting area – Ethical considerations when implementing AI in the organization. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly evolving domain with a number of innovative use cases for organizations across a variety of disciplines. Despite the advancement of AI, there are currently no specific ethical regulations around the technology—though some governments are working to establish them. Many organizations are already beginning to implement standards and best practices around the use of AI to help ensure that the data-driven systems they implement are more trustworthy and will remain viable once regulations are introduced. We will share our learning around this contemporary concept using this project as a use case.