Summer is over, which means one thing – the official tech events season is on! One of the most renowned local tech conferences with a tradition of bringing together the tech ecosystem – The ISTA Conference – is celebrating its 13th event this October. Among the surprises, this year’s edition is featuring some very insightful keynote speakers, it’s held on two different tracks and it is also going to be taking place in a hybrid format.
The program is announced and the tickets are on sale, which means that we can explore the upcoming edition of the ISTA Conference. It will take place on October 12th in Sofia Tech Park, gathering professionals from the IT sector from all over the country.
International expertise, local insights
From the future of knowledge and the role of AI and cloud cost optimization, to QA in a public blockchain, the evolution of an SRE team and multimodality & data fusion in deep learning, the event opens quality lines of dialogue for technical experts. The conference is organized on two separate tracks, so every attendee can choose their areas of interest, for a more tailored experience.
This edition has gathered professionals from different geographies, with distinct grasps on tech development and whose combined expertise can help create a more homogeneous playing ground for tech companies and professionals interested in growth and the latest tech capabilities.
This year’s edition will be opened by Radu Georgescu, Chairman of the SeedBlink Advisory Board, who is also featured as a keynote speaker. SeedBlink is on a mission to simplify and grow equity ownership in Europe, and easing the way for tech companies to get funded and to access, manage and trade equity is a golden opportunity for pre-seed start-ups.
Donna Sarkar, Technology Director at Microsoft, will also be a part of the conference, in an ISTA premiere. Her leadership of Microsoft’s Accessible Technology and Inclusive Artificial Intelligence program is currently focused on creating AI products to be used by thousands of people around the world regardless of abilities is one of the most practical and immediately integrative uses of AI. Designing inclusive tech products that leverage the capabilities of new AI models is a global priority for Microsoft, and implementing local strategies to make that happen comes with its valuable insights for the local tech community.
This year’s speaker panel also features Jason Beres, SVP Developer Tools at Infragistics. He is also a published author with several software development books covering a wide range of topics, from SQL Server, C#, Visual Basic, Rich Client to Web Development. This kind of holistic overview over the industry is the result of practical experience, and the kind of premise for a healthy dialogue on how to bring the industry further through community-infused best practices.
Among the panelists, we mention Momchil Kyurkchiev – co-founder of Leanplum (a CleverTam company); Victor Boten – Chief Technology Officer, director and co-founder of Iris AI; Victoria Victorova – co-founder and CEO of MindFit Bulgaria and Antonia Atanasova – Front-End Team Lead at Devexperts.
Bringing the tech community together
The ISTA Conference has been on the Bulgarian market since 2011 – it’s a long enough time to have witnessed the growth and development of the tech industry from one edition to the next. Traditionally, there you can expect an event with 500 to 800 participants, whose interests vary from everything tech to software engineering, testing or automation. As far as speakers go, Uncle Bob, Anil Khatri, Martin Hund and Julio De Elma are just a few of the established names who have joined previous editions.
‘ISTA’s mission and goal is both to unite the IT community in Bulgaria and the region, and to focus on the latest trends in the field of technology and innovation. Therefore, this year in the program we focus on artificial intelligence topics, including how AI will change the knowledge industry and what is the application of this technology in automation and software testing. Of course, every technology professional will be able to find something for themselves in the program and exchange knowledge and ideas with their industry peers in our exhibitor area during the event,’ says Hari Grigorov, senior program manager at VMware and part of the ISTA organizing team.
The conference is organized by five leading technology companies in Bulgaria – Experian, Infragistics, Musala Soft, SAP and VMware, who partnered up with community supporters like XactWay, Superhosting.bg, AIBEST, BASSCOM and bait, as well as media partners – dev.bg.
