The Linux Foundation Member Summit 2020

Human Trust has always been a crucial factor in the development and adoption of new technologies throughout our history. The advancement of Internet and now, Machine Intelligence, is pushing this question to the forefront of both technology policy and technical development. You have certainly heard about debates about privacy, social media manipulation, surveillance, user location tracking, ... just to name a few examples. Wenjing is a seasoned technologist whose work addresses the challenges we face to develop future technologies that can have deep rooted Human Trust. In this talk, Wenjing will share the technology landscape and open source projects as essential building blocks for Trust in Future Computing.

One of our Zambian sponsors wanted to shift to an open-source policy. Due to the scarcity of local talent, they needed to fly in consultants from Europe, for a daily rate that is equivalent to 3 local monthly salaries. After the pilot, the project was killed as it was less expensive to use proprietary software.

This talk explains how Living Open Source Foundation is educating Africans in Open Source technology with the help of Linux Foundation. This is a challenging mission, as the foundation of IT education is weak in many countries. Nevertheless, participants to the large scale events organised is huge, with more than 500 participants in Malawi.

This talk is a happy story that explains how Open Source can change local economies. At the same time this talk is calling for potential sponsors, because a lot is needed to make a sustainable change. The talk will give an overview of current projects.

Deep learning and machine learning more broadly depend on large quantities of data to develop accurate predictive models. In areas such as medical research, sharing data among institutions can lead to even greater value. However, data often includes personally identifiable information that we may not want to (or even be legally allowed to) share with others. Traditional anonymization techniques only help to some degree.

In this talk, Red Hat's Gordon Haff will share with you the active research activity taking place in academia and elsewhere into techniques such as multi-party computation and homomorphic encryption. The goal of this research is to enable broad information sharing leading to better models while preserving the anonymity of individual data points.

When researching new technologies one often has to deal with new hardware and new software that is required to operate the new hardware. How does one actually do this and what are the issues that one has with vendors that may want to keep the software proprietary. This is in particular an issue if one operates a open source dominated software ecosystem in a company.

The operation of an R&D infrastructure necessarily also involves tool for prototyping and testing and the open source community provides a unique set of tools and techniques to enable such endeavors in a rapid fashion that is not commonly possible with traditional tools that are heavy in support needs and in the learning curve to get these tools deployed. The open source community relies frequently on individual contributors in large communities. Such open source ecosystem must provide tools and methods to enable new developers to contribute to these projects with minimal effort.