IT NonStop: IT Travel Trends

• "Using Machine Learning to Improve User Experience with Large-Scale Systems" by Alex Popov, Site Engineering Lead, Skyscanner

• "Data driven fuel management at Ryanair" by Marcin Pilarczyk, Data scientist, Ryanair

Ryanair is the biggest European airlines with more than 2200 flights daily, a fleet of 400 Boeing 737 NG and around 120 million passengers in 2016. By 2024 we estimate to have around 200 million passengers. There are multiple ways the company is supported by machine learning. The presentation is focused on aspects of fuel management, i.e. how to fly cheaper and therefore offer cheaper tickets.
Safety first, but there are multiple areas where flight operation decisions can be supported using advanced analytics:
• Fuel usage forecasting - analytical methods based on the planned network and long term forecasts based on the number of available aircrafts.
• Planning support - identification of routes where excess fuel is carried on a regular basis.
• Route outlier detection - supporting flight operations in daily decisions, for instance by analyzing the best slot times.
• Line of flight aircraft assignment - linear integer programming, old school technique supporting decision making.
• Aircraft weights - regression models, a proper weight classification reduces ATC costs.
Multiple data sources are used to provide insights: transactional data, quick access recorder data, radar data, weather reports, pilot reports, and multiple static sources. The data is processed with Spark on an onsite Cloudera cluster, Microsoft SSIS and R and presented mainly with Tableau.

• "A/B testing of geo data in Booking.com" by Elena Nikolaeva, Software Developer, Booking.com

The A/B testing approach sees widespread use around the world. But how do you test data? And how do you test specifically location-related data? I'm going to tell you how we do it in the Geo team in Booking.com, the largest accommodation booking site. How do we decide what data we need, how do we decide how much to collect, how do we test the data, and what do we do next.

• "Blockchain in the travel industry. How Azure Blockchain as a Service can help" by Igor  Leontiev, Lead Architect, VISEO group worldwide

The travel business is complex and fragmented. There is no trust between participants.Also there are a lot of different bookings systems.These disparate systems have created discrepancies in the closing entries of travel companies, resulting in an expensive and time-consuming reconciliation process. In this talk, i'll show how the use of Azure and Blockchain and sure we will talk about WebJet Business/technical case.

• "The "Build or buy" problem for large projects and companies", Alexander Chichenin / Solutions Architect, DataArt, Russia

When a project becomes large we need to handle it as a group of small projects. Large companies are quite similar in that sense. Sometimes we build our own software and sometimes we adopt existing solutions. In many cases we have a combination of both.

It's a well-known fact that the efficiency of development in large projects and companies is decreasing over time, but why exactly? Let's try and improve this using the following plan:

First, let's define the types of "large" projects and companies and outline the main differences between them.
Secondly, let's answer the following questions:

How can we build multiple small but related projects together?
What are the common pros and cons of in-house development and how do we decide if we should buy a product or build our own?
How much resources should we spend on "R&D"?
Which developer qualifications and traits are more suitable for "R&D"?

Finally, let's choose the building blocks suitable for tooling development and various types of projects.

• "5 main travel technology trends to (re)shape the industry in 2018" by Tatiana Kharlamova, Marketing Analyst, DataArt

The development of the Travel industry is based on emerging new technologies like AI, machine learning, chatbots, voice-activated components, blockchain etc. As the industry matures in terms of technology, more and more firms will rise or fall by their ability to maintain a technological lead over their competitors. Travel firms will live or die by their tech. This talk will answer the following questions: How technologies could impact hospitality and travel? How companies could make their business grow by fueling it with advanced technologies? And the last but not the least: How travelers could benefit from all of this changes?

• "Account Management across industries (including Travel)" by Julia Falaleeva, Senior Account Director, DataArt

Strategic account management is a process at the organizational level that goes beyond sales to embrace building strategic, mutually beneficial relationships between DataArt and its key clients. AM builds trust by focusing on value and enabling alignment on aspects important for the client's business. Working across practices in DataArt, I would like to share my experience in identifying those aspects depending on the client's industry as well as talk about some approaches to building value propositions tailored to the client's needs.

• "Full Cycle of Telegram Bot Development process in Node.js" by Alexander Trishchenko, Senior JavaScript Developer, DataArt

Bots are very popular these days. During IT NonStopI'm going to give a technical overview of bots using an example based on telegram and node.js. The bot's mechanics are pretty simple and during the presentation you will understand how it can be made easy with JavaScript. I will explain the whole bot delivery process, starting from prototyping and development, up to scaling and analytics.

What are bots and why are they so popular these days? Reasons for businesses to have bots.
Bot infrastructure. What's common and different between bots and web applications?
Back-End architecture design for scalable and flexible bots.
Long polling vs. webhooks.
Libraries and framework which can help a lot.
Manual and automated testing processes.
Bot hosting and deployment processes. Continuous integration and safe delivery.
Tracking and analytics.

• "Integrating with Channel Managers: Survival Guide" by Valentina Zotova, Project Manager, DataArt

Most travel projects, one or another, are integrated with third party system. A channel manager system is a service provider that links the property management system (PMS) you use to manage your rooms and prices with online platforms. This talk explains why you may need such integration and what makes sense to take it into account.

• "Virtual Presence" by Alexandr Khmil, Project Manager, 3D Expert DataArt

Want to see a hotel's premises before going there but are tired of fake fancy photos? How about customizing your room? You are a speaker at a conference and want to feel the stage and setup the lighting specifically for you? Now it is possible without going anywhere with the help of modern 3D engines. Photorealistic interactive graphics are here today!