For its 2016 edition, La Digital Tech Conference invited 25 speakers to discuss video and artificial intelligence topics, with the support of our 28 partners. Like the city’s popular Trans Musicales festival, this edition attracted even more visitors than the previous one, with over 600 participants [612, to be exact] filling almost all of the 642 seats of the Rennes opera house. So, we were practically sold out!
And there was a good reason for this popularity, because this event featured the world’s 1st live presentation of “Speech to Text” translation from English to French. At one of the conferences, our visitors learned that our 2 hosts, Xavier Debontride and Marine Baousson, had 3,900 and 3,183 Twitter followers, respectively (creating a bit of Twitter envy on Marine’s part). However, Xavier had quite a way to go if he hoped to catch up to one of our key guests, Erwann Gaucher of France Bleu, who has no fewer than 87,100 Twitter fans!
10% of Web Users in the USA
On a more serious note though, Shirine Benhanda warned us that, statistically, the person seated next to is likely to develop cancer at some point in his or her life. Fortunately, however, this diagnosis doesn’t have to be nearly as frightening as it used to be, thanks to optimized genetic sequencing that now costs only $1,000 and takes just 24 hours. This followed the impressive performance of John R. Smith, who travelled 5,600 km to join us in Rennes. He explained that at IBM, he was working on artificial intelligence capable of recognizing 3,000 objects as well as hundreds of different places, in order to create a film trailer in under 24 hours!
We also counted 41 live videos of the event on Twitter and 149 viewers for the Olga Pankova interview on Périscope, 250 for John R. Smith, and 291 for Jérôme Vérité. Some of those people might also have tuned in to the TVR video feed, which recorded 3,573 connections to watch this exciting day. And finally, 1,366 people checked out the ladigital.tech website on the big day, 45% of whom were in Paris and 10% in the USA. In the Twittersphere, 1,117 users tweeted 10,635 times under the hashtag #digitaltc (25% of whom were outside France).
Thank you so much!