As its name implies, FOSSASIA is a Free and Open Source Software  event taking place every year in Asia, more specifically in Singapore. I first discovered it last year, and published a virtual FOSSASIA 2018 schedule last year to give an idea about the subjects discussed at the event.

It turns out FOSSASIA 2019 is coming really soon, as in tomorrow, so I’m a bit late, but I’ll still had a look at the schedule and made my own for the 4-day event. 

Thursday – March 14, 2019

• 10:05 – 10:25 – For Your Eyes Only: Betrusted & the Case for Trusted I/O by Bunnie Huang, CTO Chibitronics

Security vulnerabilities are almost a fact of life. This is why system vendors are increasingly relying on physically separate chips to handle sensitive data. Unfortunately, private keys are not the same as your private matters. Exploits on your local device still have the potential to grant bad actors access to your screen and keyboard. This talk introduces the Betrusted device as a possible remedy. Betrusted is a physically separate, trustable display and keyboard directly connected to a secure enclave. This talk concludes with a brief exploration of some of Betrusted’s goals and design features.

• 11:00 – 11:15 – The Open Source Industrial AI Capabilities with IBM by Rahul Akolkar, Worldwide Technical Sales Leader, Data Science and AI IBM

Technological advances in the last decade have led to a resurgence of interest in AI for solving critical business problems and enabling new & transformative business models. Along have come common fallacies in the implementations of AI systems leading to mounting technical debt and infrequent, unsustainable deployments. IBM has brought together a set of industrial AI capabilities and tools that provide a robust open AI platform for the enterprise, built to consistently leverage a wide choice of open source libraries and data science runtime environments.

• 11:15 – 11:30 – Open Source Hardware and Education  by Mitch Altman, CEO Open Hardware Creator

No abstract

• 11:40 – 12:25 – Business, Government, Science – What Opportunities Does “Open” Bring to Society? by panel including Mario Behling, CEO OpnTec, Bunnie Huang, CTO Chibitronics, Hong Phuc, Founder FOSSASIA, Shanker V Selvadurai Vice President & CTO of Cloud and Cognitive Software IBM, Dr. Graham Williams, Director of Data Science Director of Data Science, Microsoft and Carsten Haitzler, Technical Director Arm Holdings

At FOSSASIA developers work across time zones, countries, and continents and anyone can join development. Imagine how difficult it would be to develop our products if we had to get everyone to sign NDAs and Copyright agreements. This would cause a huge overhead, but there are different models and possibilities to how what extend openness can prevail and in this panel we would like to get insights into how open development, open communication, open tools and technologies, open knowledge and open collaboration has benefited organizations and work of our panelists.

In the second part of the panel we would like to talk about the future. What are plans of panelists for the future in their organization in regards to opening up and creating new opportunities? And in the bigger picture how will society change and open up and what opportunities and challenges lie in opening up areas of society? Panelists will answer these questions from their specific point of view as managers of a large tech corporation, successful Open Hardware makers, representatives of a community driven Open Tech company, or a manager in a computer processor company.

• 14:00 – 14:25 – Microsoft’s Commitment to Openness and Collaboration by Sindhu Chengad, OSS Lead Microsoft

Microsoft’s commitment to openness and collaboration is ingrained in our day-to-day approach to doing business alongside open source industry partners as well as communities around the world. Microsoft not only releases key innovations as open source for others to use and build upon, it also contributes code and thought leadership to open source communities.

• 14:30 – 14:55 – What would you build next with Blockchain? by Ong Khai Wei, Cloud Solution Specialist IBM

Blockchain can do for business what the internet did for communication. Powering that transformation is Hyperledger, hosted by The Linux Foundation. Innovators in finance, banking, healthcare, IoT, supply chain, manufacturing and technology are creating open, standardized and enterprise-grade distributed ledger blockchain frameworks and code bases to produce tangible business results. In this session, we will discuss IBM’s Blockchain strategy, from its ongoing contributions to the Linux Foundation Hyperledger project to how it is helping clients build, grow and accelerate Blockchain networks.

• 14:55 – 15:20 – Flowchain/IPFS – Distributed Storage using Blockchain Technology by Jollen Chen, Founder & CEO Flowchain Foundation

Flowchain aims to implement a blockchain that can provide a distributed ledger technology for the IoT and AI. And Flowchain already proposed the virtual blocks technology that can ensure chunked data (data streams) transactions in a near-instant manner. Furthermore, the virtual block technology can integrate with IPFS, an emerging distributed storage blockchain and can work as an off-chain mechanism to transfer your digital assets from one trusted party to another. In this presentation, Jollen will show the implementation of a distributed storage using Flowchain and IPFS open source technologies.

• 15:40 – 16:05 –  Serverless with Knative by Mete Atamel, Developer Advocate Google

When you build a serverless app, you either tie yourself to a cloud provider, or you end up building your own serverless stack. Knative provides a better choice. Knative extends Kubernetes to provide a set of middleware components (build, serving, events) for modern, source-centric, and container-based apps that can run anywhere. In this talk, we’ll see how we can use Knative primitives to build a serverless app that utilizes the Machine Learning magic of the cloud.

• 16:05 – 16:30 –  Open Source Quantum Computing by Matthew Treinish, Senior Software Engineer IBM Research

Quantum computers are not just science fiction anymore, with many companies building increasingly more powerful quantum computers. While, concepts in quantum computing have been around for over 30 years, but it hasn’t been generally accessible until recently. Despite this quantum computing is still very much in its infancy and there are physical limitations preventing them from being generally usable. But the machines that are available today are useful for experimentation and showcasing certain applications where they will be useful.

This talk will provide an introduction to the basics of quantum information theory, look at some of the quantum computers out there, explore the open source tooling available for quantum computing, and show how you can use that to write your own quantum programs and run them on simulators and actual quantum computers.

• 17:10 – 18:00 –  The Future Is FOSS!/? – Panel

The theme of the FOSSASIA Summit 2019 is “The Future is FOSS”. FOSS – Free and Open Source Software stands more and more for Free and Open Source Solutions. At FOSSASIA we are not only developing software, but also hardware, content and complete solutions following a model of free and open development. But, is the Future indeed FOSS? Is FOSS mainstream already in many areas and does it mean it will be also mainstream in other areas? Is it possible that trends also go in another direction where developers follow a more closed source approach in some areas again? What opportunities do really exist in other areas like hardware? In this panel we hope to get ideas for answers from our panelists.

Friday – March 15, 2019

• 09:00 – 10:55 –  Using Kubernetes and Knative to Deploy & Secure Containerized Applications by Sai Vennam, Lead Developer Advocate Cloud IBM

Get hands-on with Kubernetes and learn to effectively manage networking, security, user access, maintenance, performance and scale. This workshop is perfect for developers who are already using Kubernetes and those that want to learn from the pros. Join this workshop led by Kubernetes experts to create and deploy your own cloud-native microservices application to IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service.In addition, we will discuss how Knative provides developers with the building blocks for serverless platforms to run on Kubernetes.

• 11:00 – 11:35 – Customize Debian for Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone by Nguyn Hng Quân, CTO AgriConnect

Guide on customising Debian image to use in your project with Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone.

• 11:40 – 12:05 –  BuildStream – The all purpose build and integration tool by Tristan Van Berkom, Lead Software Engineer CodethinkThis talk will begin with a brief introduction to the problems which revolve around the software build space from the perspective of the developer and the perspective of the system integrator. Then we will present the solutions we’ve come up with in the BuildStream project; which is now used to build the base Flatpak runtimes and GNOME releases. As this will be a brief session, we will try to discuss the build space in the abstract and hope to raise awareness through the Q&A session.
• 12:10 – 12:35 – VLC 4.0 by François Cartegnie, Developer VideoLAN

After 3.0 release, an overview of current achievements and ongoing work at VideoLAN on the most popular multimedia player.

• 13:30 – 13:55 –  Improving the FreeBSD security advisory process by Philip Paeps, Developer FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Project is an old and well-established open source community. With volunteer developers around the world, handling security advisories in a timely manner while respecting third-party embargoes poses unique challenges. This presentation introduces the FreeBSD security officer team and the processes in place for handling security advisories affecting the FreeBSD open source operating system itself and the third-party components the project distributes.

• 14:00 – 14:25 –  Will AI Replace Developers? by Kitman Cheung, Chief Technology Officer, IBM Data & AI , Asia Pacific IBM

No abstract

• 14:30 – 14:55 –  Sustaining FOSS Projects By Democratizing The Sponsorship Process by Duane O’Brien, Head of Open Source Indeed.com

Within a given company, there are typically only a few people involved in deciding which FOSS projects and initiatives to support financially. This year we decided to change all that and democratize the decision making process. We set up an internal FOSS Sustainability Fund, and invited everyone to participate in the process. This talk will examine how we got executive buy in for the fund, how the fund was set up, how we encouraged participation, and what the impact has been so far.

• 15:00 – 15:25 – Creating Ubuntu and Debian container base images, the old and simple way by Hamish Coleman, Member Dim Sum Labs

Containers are everywhere, but do you know how to create the rootfilesystems that they use?  There are simple tools available to create your own custom Ubuntu or Debian root filesystem.  By using these tools to build environments matching your needs, you will end up with a better understanding of how containers are built – and how to debug them – as well as gain access to more options that can speed up your own builds and testing.

In this presentation, I will show the debootstrap and multistrap tools and provide worked examples on how to avoid their gotchas and end up with a bootable root filesystem.

• 15:40 – 16:05 –  Kubernetes The Hard Way by Masayuki Igawa, Senior Software Engineer SUSE

“Kubernetes” is one of the most popular and famous container orchestration open source software. And now, there are so many Kubernetes environments and deployment tools such as SUSE CaaS Platform, minikube, kubeadm, Rancher, GKE/AKS/EKS, etc. So, we can use or build a Kubernetes cluster with them very easily. However, it also prevents opportunities to understand Kubernetes technologies themselves from users. Therefore, if a Kubernetes cluster gets something wrong, it would be tough challenge to resolve it without such knowledge. With the situation, here is a very good exercise document – “Kubernetes The Hard Way” which is a tutorial for setting up Kubernetes the hard way on Google Cloud Platform(GCP). People can learn internal architecture of Kubernetes from that.

In this session, attendees will get an opportunity to know how to set up a Kubernetes cluster on not only GCP but also an OpenStack cloud or something based on the tutorial, and, will get to know its technology deeply.”Kubernetes The Hard Way” has 14 chapters right now. And it’s written for the GCP basically. However, it works on the other clouds  with some modifications.

16:05 – 16:30 –  Firebase ML Kit: From 0 to 1 in Machine Learning by Harshit Dwivedi, Android Developer CodingBlocks

The Firebase ML Kit APIs offer features like face detection, text recognition, object detection, etc. Your apps can also label a provided image for special characteristics and identify popular landmarks in a picture.

In this talk, I will outline the usage of all the 5 APIs available in Firebase ML Kit and I’ll be doing so by using a sample app that utilizes these APIs.

I will be walking you through the working of each api and you will leave the talk having sufficient knowledge of the APIs to go ahead and implement them in your own apps.

• 16:35 – 17:20 – Machine Learning for CI by Andrea Frittoli, Open Source Developer Advocate IBM

As more applications move to a DevOps model with CI/CD pipelines, the testing required for this development model to work inevitably generates lots of data. There are valuable insights hidden in this data that ML can help extract with minimal human intervention. Using open source tools like TensorFlow and Pandas we trained ML algorithms with real-life data from the OpenStack community’s CI system. We built a Kubernetes application that sets up a prediction pipeline to automate the analysis of CI jobs in near real time. It uses the trained model to classify new inputs and predict insights like test results or hosting cloud provider. In this talk, we present our experience training different ML models with the large dataset from OpenStack’s CI and how this can be leveraged for automated failure identification and analysis. We also discuss how these techniques can be used with any CI system.

• 17:55 – 18:20 –  Automated emergency paramedical response system by  Mashrin Srivastava, Deep Learning Engineer Intel, and Saumya Suvarna, Software Enginner Cisco Systems

Automated Emergency Paramedical Response System leverages various open source technologies to provide medical supplies using aerial distribution by drones. It is a multifunctional end to end semi-autonomous system which operates differently in urban and rural areas based on their individual requirements. In semi-urban and rural areas, there is a need to provide access to specialised doctors and medical supplies as these are unavailable in their community hospitals. AERPS  leverages medical image processing and deep learning using OpenCV and TensorFlow to accurately predict the presence of disease like ischemic strokes and based on the diagnosis, allows the community hospital to order for medical supplies. The medical supplies are delivered using a drone enhanced with edge AI to run intelligent algorithms enabling it to ensure that the medicines are only delivered to authorised people and providing accurate obstacle avoidance thus making delivery in hard to reach places easier. In congested urban areas, an interactive chatbot with the ability to predict ailments based on patient symptoms informs the medical personnel who approves the delivery of medicines thus providing quick delivery of medical supplies where traffic is a major roadblock in providing medical assistance. Confidentiality of patient records has been achieved by using decentralised blockchain-based distributed computing to ensure security for the users without involving third-party institutions.

• 18:30 – 18:55 –  Flatpak a sandboxing technology by Parag Nemade, Senior Software Engineer Red Hat

Flatpaks is a new world for application developers. It is a way to publish applications on different Linux distributions. This is useful to third parties to distribute their application on multiple distributions. This will be an introductory presentation where following topics will be covered

1. Introduction to Flatpaks
2. Flatpak concept (underlying technology)
3. Features of Flatpaks
4. Using Flatpak commands
5. Build application using Flatpak
6. Flathub

We will see what Flatpak is, how to use its commands on Fedora Linux, then build the simple application as a Flatpak. We then look at how to use Flathub on Fedora. Flathub is a central repository where flatpaks are stored.

• 19:00 – 20:55 –  Introduction to SQLite by Team ComputingSG BuildingBloCS

Participants will learn about relational databases through SQLite, a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine which is the most widely deployed database in the world. Both single and multi-table (with normalization) scenarios will be covered. Participants will connect to SQLite using the Python sqlite3 standard library module to perform common operations.

Saturday – March 16, 2019

• 10:00 – 11:55 – Machine Learning with Python by Team ComputingSG BuildingBloCS

Participants will learn about basic machine learning algorithms such as linear regression and build a single layer perceptron to improve the performance of the linear regression model.

• 13:00 – 13:45 –  Embedded Programming for everyone using MicroPython and CircuitPython by Ayan Pahwa, Embedded Software Engineer Mentor-A Siemens Business

Embedded system or firmware programming can be very intimidating for beginners and often they tend to drop it very soon, thanks to connecting wires across a breadboard and writing bits and bytes to processor registers using bit shifting and logical operations.

Enter MicroPython and CircuitPython which let’s you program microcontrollers using everyone’s favourite Python programming language, no toolchain, cross compiler, assembler required. The code lives on your board itself and every lower level detail is abstracted. And if you think you can just blink LEDs with it, you just imagined tip of the iceberg. You can actually track the current location of International Space station and turn on an alarm when it is passing above you 😉 . Quite Interesting hah, There is so much we can do with it and it’s not scary.

Talk includes Introduction and some example project showcase and can also include basic hands-on experience.

• 13:50 – 14:35 – Exploring ARM development boards by Carsten Haitzler, Technical Director Arm Holdings

There are a host of ARM based development boards, possibly the most famous of them being the Raspberry Pi series. There are also many others that very few people may know about. Some boards are more or less costly than others and offer different levels of performance, connectivity and levels of software support.

Have you considered getting such a dev board? Have specific use cases for them? Perhaps considered developing one of your own and want to see what else is out there?

This presentation will go over some boards, demo some of them, show how to use or install them, what is and is not well supported and how.

• 14:40 – 15:25 – Building products with ESP32 by Anuj Deshpande, Embedded Systems Engineer Espressif Systems

ESP32 is the bigger brother to the awesome-ly popular ESP8266. It comes with more RAM, BT and BLE, and more.

This workshop is about all the things we need to incorporate in our “production firmware” for an ESP32 based product.

We will start with a “Hello World” application and gradually build up to a full fledged product which will include:

1. Hardware interfacing
2. Network configuration
3. Cloud connectivity
4. OTA updates
5. Creating and managing partitions

• 15:45 – 16:30 – Open Source Firmware by Daniel Maslowski, Software Engineer img.ly

Firmware is found in all computing devices, including PCs, laptops, networking equipment, printers, embedded devices such as IoT and industrial controllers, mobile phones, tablets, and more. The community around open source firmware has grown over the last years, allowing for more exchange in the development and granting freedom to end users. Prominent projects like U-Boot, Tianocore, coreboot and others teach how firmware works and welcome contributions. This talk provides an overview of the current state, an end user report, and a summary of the first Open Source Firmware Conference.

• 16:35 – 17:00 – Raspberry Pi history, tips and use case – its history, how to use it and what is its good use case by Masafumi Ohta, Lead Contributor Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi is now 6 years old, there are several tips and use cases. It was born for kids programming education, though, it is now also used for electric DIY hobbies, industrial use, Edge Computing, IoT and more. Masafumi will talk Raspberry Pi history and latest updates and discuss several its use cases and tips for our business and daily use.

• 17:05 – 17:30 – SUSI Smart Speaker – A completely “Personal” Smart Speaker by Sanskar Jethi, Full Stack Developer FOSSASIA

Until now, all the smart speaker market has been dominated by the proprietary speakers like Google Home, Amazon Alexa, Apple HomePod, etc. To break this Oligopoly we created the SUSI Smart Speaker which provides complete customisability to the users unlike the proprietary competitors available in the market. And no personal assistant is completely personal until you are able to completely customize it. We have tried to solve this issue by developing our smart speaker.

This talk aims to emphasize the lack of Open Source competitors in the Smart Speaker industry and the oligopoly created by the proprietary organizations.

And how we, an active FOSS community have implemented cool features like “region-free” youtube music support, offline functionalities, custom USB media Daemons, open skill languages, etc. Most importantly we do not track your data.

The SUSI Smart Speaker aims to fill this gap between the Open Source world and the Smart Speaker industries.

• 17:35 – 18:00 – Voice assistants on tiny, low-cost micro-controllers by Anuj Deshpande, Embedded Systems Engineer Espressif Systems

Voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant offer excellent SDKs and APIs so that people can incorporate them in their hobby projects and consumer products. There is still a prohibitive cost to doing this, as $5 Raspberry Pis are not exactly available at bulk. Additionally, size is an issue.

A lesser known, but more effective way is using supercharged micro- controllers like the ESP32. The WROVER module for ESP32 comes with half a megabyte of RAM, which is more than enough for fitting voice assistants in tiny places.

In fact, we can do a lot more fun stuff with micro-controllers because of their smaller size and lower power requirements. We can embed them into appliances like light bulbs and fire alarm systems, to give them a truly ubiquitous feel.

• 18:00 – 18:25 – IIoT Edge Gateway Servicing with Eclipse Kura by Isham Mohamed MI, Software Developer Kloudynet Technologies Sdn Bhd, Malaysia

(I)IoT is rapidly growing these days so does the Edge computing. Industries prefer Edge computing mainly since it has the capability of providing security, privacy and low network latency. In this session I am going to showcase a real world Edge gateway with Eclipse Kura on Ubuntu Core.

• 19:00 – 20:55 – Introduction to Python by Team ComputingSG BuildingBloCS

Participants will learn how Python can be used to automate common tasks and program a simple text-based game. We will cover data types, conditionals, loops, data structures and functions.

Sunday – March 17, 2019

• 10:00 – 10:25 – Code Coverage Based Verification (CCBV) by Omprakash Kasaraboina, Director ScaledV Consultancy Pte. Ltd.

Continuous testing is an important aspect of DevOps. It is primarily related to Verification & Validation.

Verification – Are we building the product right? Validation – Are we building the right product?

With Agile principle in place, when we release a Minimum Viable Product to the customers, we get a feedback that helps us with validation. While validation is important and the core emphasis of practices like DoD, Acceptance criteria, System Demo.

What is equally important is to have a scientific way to verify that we are building the product right. Let us evaluate the relevance of code-coverage based verification at system testing. While code coverage is extensively used during unit testing phase, rarely do we use this technique at system testing.

Code Coverage Based Verification (CCBV) will help us accomplish

1. Test suite comprehensiveness
2. Reduction in technical debt

In addition to this, it will also help us with

1. E2E Requirement traceability matrix (RTM)
2. Regression test suite preparation

• 10:30 – 12:25 –  Linux Exam Preparation by G. Matthew Rice, Executive Director Linux Professional Institute

Not ready to take the exams just yet? Linux Professional Institute will be offering an exam preparation session on Sunday, March 17, 2019. Learn more about the importance and understanding the objectives, exam structure, and why obtaining any of your certifications will be professionally beneficial.

• 13:30 – 13:55 – Just an Engineer or an Excellent Engineer by Kogi Oberoi, Engineer Mechanical

This talk will demonstrate the methods to build a Professional Tool Kit and lead a successful career in tech.

• 14:00 – 14:25 – Fedora CoreOS – best host for your containers by Sinny Kumari, Senior Software Engineer Red Hat

Fedora CoreOS is an Operating System which emerged from the best of both Fedora Atomic Host and Container Linux. It provides unique features like immutability, automatic updates and rollback so that you don’t have to worry about the host. It is also optimized to run/manage both standalone and a cluster of containerized applications. Fedora CoreOS community is working towards its first version release with a likely target being Fedora 30 release.

During this talk, you will get to know:

1. What is Fedora CoreOS and its underlying history
2. Features which makes this OS unique and fit for running containers
3. Tools like ignition and rpm-ostree to manage your host
4. Availability in cloud providers
5. Demo (if time permits)
6. How you can get involved

• 14:45 – 15:40 – How does blockchain fit into the FOSS community? – Panel Discussion with Martin Bähr, Founder Beijing LUG

Unlike many other projects that are started in the FOSS community, or where the ideals of the project are very much aligned with the FOSS community, many Blockchain projects appear to be following a different philosophy, and the fact that the Blockchain code is under a Free Software and Open Source licence is more incidental than intentional.

Saturday appears to the most interesting and busy day with several talks overlapping each others so I had to make choices. If you are interested in joining the event you can still purchase tickets online. Price starts at 15 SGD (~$11 US) to access to the exhibition and some special events like workship. To have full access to the event as a individual, the ticket costs 99 SGD (~$73 US) , and they also have tickets for academics, businesses, and investors.

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