BSc Computer Science student, Jheng-Hao Lin, travelled to Berlin for a week to participate in a conference and a Hackathon. He received £500 of funding to support his experience.

Thanks to Santander’s Go International Bursary, I had the chance to travel to Berlin and attend two interesting tech events: ‘Berlin Buzzwords Conference’ and ‘Talk to me, Berlin’.

‘Berlin Buzzwords’ was a conference on storing, processing and searching large amounts of digital data. The attendants were either data scientists, data engineers or researchers who were experts in the domain. As a novice in the data science area, I worked as a volunteer to assist the event and tried to absorb some knowledge.

For the last three days, I attended a hackathon named ‘Talk to me, Berlin’. It was sponsored by the Amazon Alexa team, Google and other companies related voice interface technologies.

The event included a team building session, where I joined the team Speechless. Our team goal was to help people learning a new language by conversing with a VUI, such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa.

We finalised our concept on the second day; Google Home was chosen to be our main target VUI device rather than Amazon Alexa. Our demo was to present a funny, flirty conversation in German between one of our teammates and the Google Assistant.

Our team’s pitch had a really positive response from the audience and judges, which eventually led us to our prizes! Our team won the Google Home prizes, and each of us got a free Google Home!

I had a great week in Berlin. Thanks to the sponsorship from Santander, I was able to fly to this beautiful city and meet so much interesting people during these few days. These experience definitely contributes to my resume and portfolio.

The funding for this opportunity was provided by Santander Universities.