The 2023 Vancouver Korean IT Conference, co-hosted by the Consulate General in Vancouver and the Korean IT community KDD, was held with more than 250 attendees at UBC Robson Square in downtown on July 15th, following last year's May event.
The conference revolved around the theme of 'Dive to the Future.' The first part featured an IT trend forecast and a roundtable discussion with hiring managers. This was followed by sessions where industry recruiters provided practical help to job seekers navigating the IT job market.
Participants also had the opportunity to engage in sit-down meetings with IT company hiring managers, allowing them to gain insights into strategies for overcoming the employment recession. Networking sessions and mentoring opportunities were available for job seekers and students, with mentors from various fields, including major tech companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, as well as game companies and financial startups, sharing their job know-how.
During the conference, Professor Jeeho Ryoo, Faculty of Computer Systems Technology at the British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT), delivered a lecture on "Advancements in Computer Architecture Research for Performance and Energy Efficiency." Additionally, Associate Professor Dongwook Yoon from the University of British Columbia (UBC) presented a lecture on "AI's Impact on Selfhood and Relationships."
Professor Jeeho Ryoo emphasized the increasing demand for computing systems capable of handling complex workloads while conserving energy. He highlighted the surge in research on specialized hardware accelerators, advanced memory architectures, and new approaches to parallelism to enhance performance and energy efficiency. He also mentioned the development of energy-aware scheduling algorithms that optimize resource allocation and reduce energy consumption while meeting performance requirements. These advancements hold promise for the future of computing technology and offer exciting job opportunities for engineers. Notably, major companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are heavily investing in energy-efficient computing systems, while startups are focusing on specialized hardware and software for efficient computing.
Associate Professor Dongwook Yoon's lecture delved into the impact of AI on selfhood and relationships. He discussed how AI agents can learn from data and imitate human appearance, thoughts, and skills, and emphasized the need to consider individuality, such as selfhood, values, and relationships, in the AI discourse. His talk drew from recent findings in design fiction studies, which explored people's perception of AI's impact on selfhood and relationships through speculative scenarios involving near-future technologies. These findings highlighted potential tensions related to human-like nonhuman beings, such as the uncanny valley, distrust, and impression management. They also had implications for the ongoing discourse on AI's societal impact, touching on areas such as ethics, justice, and sustainability.
Meanwhile, job seekers who attended the conference expressed concerns about the high threshold set by companies for hiring. It was reported that Vancouver's top tech companies, including Amazon and Apple, have frozen hiring and are laying off existing staff.
