While we are making the final arrangements before this year’s IT Arena big day, you might want to learn what’s on the agenda and what presentations are worth spending your time on. Don’t forget that the IT Arena platform enables participants to ask questions to speakers instantly. So don’t miss some of the big industry names who will be sharing with you their invaluable wealth of experience. Here are 5 top IT Arena 2020 talks selected by our CEO Stepan Veselovskyi you’ll undoubtedly benefit from.

Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, UX Director at Google

Creating consumer-grade developer experiences

Elizabeth Churchill, currently Director of User Experience at Google, is a distinguished scientist with a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and honorary doctorates from the University of Sussex and the University of Stockholm. She authored more than 100 scholarly publications in theoretical and applied psychology, cognitive science, human-computer interaction, mobile and ubiquitous computing, computer-mediated communication, and social media.

Dr. Churchill also worked in industry as an individual contributor, in management and consultancy capacity. Her past affiliations include eBay Research Labs. (eRL), Yahoo! Research, PARC, and Fuji Xerox’s research lab in Palo Alto, FXPAL. In addition to building successful multidisciplinary technology innovation teams and advising on corporate strategy, she continues to be active in research. The researcher conducted ethnographic design investigations, designed and managed field-based prototype/system trials, and ran laboratory and field-based experiments. A number of technologies designed by Churchill have been launched as prototypes and/or products. In her IT Arena talk, Dr. Elizabeth Churchill will focus on the ways to provide the best experiences for our customers. 

Godard Abel, Co-founder & CEO at G2

Customer Trust Crisis

Trust is a key to any relationship, including the one between a customer and a business, with customers who trust a company more willing to spend more money and recommend the service or product to others. In these unsettling times, the issue of customer trust is a particularly acute issue for the software industry, with stakeholders attempting to minimize business expenditure. How can we win back customer trust? Godard Abel, the co-founder & CEO of G2 Crowd, the world’s largest tech marketplace where businesses can get unbiased and authentic peer review about software they are using or intend to buy, will help you find a solution at IT Arena.

Godard Abel is a serial entrepreneur and a prior founder/CEO of BigMachines (now Oracle) and CEO of SteelBrick (now Salesforce), which led to a combined $700M in acquisitions. Last year, Abel led a $10 million seed round investment in ThreeKit, a 3D product configuration and visualization platform, where he took the role of executive chairman. 

Dr. Richard Stallman, Founder of Free Software Foundation

Computing, freedom and privacy 

Richard Stallman has never been afraid to voice his opinions that frequently spark outrage and wonder in some. An ardent advocate of the free software movement, he developed the GNU operating system, which has been used on millions of computers, and authored Copyleft – a general method for making a program free to be modified. According to Copyleft tenets, anyone who redistributes the software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to further copy and modify it. 

The latest news about Stallman exudes an aura of notoriety and questions left to interpretation – his comments on Epstein’s scandal and his recent comparison of the global pandemic TV coverage to the reports of the September 11 terrorist attack, which, according to Stallman, are psychologically traumatizing and brainwashing. In his IT Arena talk, Dr. Stallman will share his views on such an important issue as the freedom of technology use and its impact on our privacy.

Siddha Ganju, Architect, Self-Driving Vehicles at NVIDIA

Deep learning for mobile 

September has been rife with breaking news for some of our speakers’ companies. NVIDIA has recently announced the acquisition of Arm Limited in a transaction valued at $40 billion, which entails the Arm’s R&D expansion by establishing a world-class AI research and education center. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s in his letter to the company’s employees, outlined they are planning to build an AI supercomputer that can write software no human can. 

At IT Arena, you have an opportunity to learn AI methods from Nvidia’s Architect, who works on the Self-Driving initiative. Siddha Ganju’s experience includes leading NASA’s Long-Period Comets team. She also co-authored a step-on Practical Deep Learning for Cloud, Mobile & Edge. In her talk, Siddha will share the secrets on the use of convolutional neural networks and deep learning for smartphones and web browsers, which are scarce in memory and power.

Ken Sandy, Industry Fellow and Lecturer at UC Berkeley

10 steps to lead through influence

The demand for product management practitioners is growing exponentially, with digital enterprises springing up across all industries. What are the skills and expertise crucial for launching all high-flying products? Ken Sandy, who distilled over 20 years of product management experience, including creating and leading successful PM teams, attempts to answer the question in his recently published book, The Influential Product Manager: How to Lead and Launch Successful Technology Products. At IT Arena, he will elaborate on interpersonal skills and the importance of leading through influence.

Ken Sandy is an industry fellow and lecturer at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously he acted as Vice President of Product at the online learning companies MasterClass and Lynda.com. ​The expert shares his experience in the role of an executive consultant, mentor, and advisor for startup and scale-up companies in the US, Canada, and Europe, and regularly speaks at most influential product management conferences. In his early career, Ken was a consultant at a leading management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

See the full lineup and select your favorite talks here.