Beer Garage Tech Education Series
A Collection of Technology Deep Dives for AB InBev's Tech Teams and SMEs
At the Beer Garage, we needed to always be surfing the technology wave - this is key to making informed decisions about the emerging technology products that we bring inside AB InBev. To ensure the Innovation team has a basic understanding of emerging technologies, I created the BG Tech Education Session series. As Global Manager for Innovation, I had a duty to maintain high the level of expertise in Technology. This fits well with my curiosity and desire to understand complexity and technologies in particular. I have always believed that education and knowledge are key tools for successful developments, I tried to develop this by taking concrete actions and organizing a series of Technology Education Sessions opened to increasingly larger audiences in the company.
In these, we learned about a variety of technologies, including Robotics & Machine Learning, 3D Printing, Blockchain and Cryptocurrency, Software Development, IoT and Industry 4.0, the Digital Economy, the Internet and more. I experimented various formats: from workshops, to guided group discussions, to the classic lecture followed by Q&A, and also mini competitions and deep dives. The nature of the speakers also changed from session to session: we had internal BG speakers, I hosted a couple, to HBSIS (Development Center in AB InBev Brazil) experts, to Academic professors, technology pioneers and corporate executives. In time, we grew the audience of those sessions from being exclusive to the Beer Garage teams, to being open to different parts of Technology and relevant Functional areas.
The average satisfaction of all sessions that were in the series was 8.8/10. With the BG Tech Education Session Series, I have carved AB InBev's education niche to be focused on cutting edge, relatively emerging technologies from which we all learned a lot and can become better innovators.
You may catch a glimpse of each session below.
Blockchain & Cryptocurrency
I led a total of 3 sessions on Blockchain and/or Cryptocurrency in the Tech Series. All the content in those was researched, created, curated and presented by me. The very first one, hugely based on a research paper I wrote on my own time on blockchain basics, was a lecture to my peers in the Technology Innovation team, the Beer Garage. The second session was a keynote for the Global Procurement Organization, with an attendance of around 200 employees, titled Th Blockchain Alternative, and focusing on the role that a technology like Bitcoin can have in creating an alternative economy to that based on Federal Reserve Banking. The third session was a technical, conceptual training to the Global Fintech team on the mechanisms of Proof of Work blockchains.
3D Printing & Additive Manufacturing - Carbon
Another session focused on 3D Printing technologies, with a particular focus on Silicon Valley startup Carbon's technology. This was a shared keynote with a dynamic Q&A session. The audience contained Technology, Manufacturing, Logistics and Innovation teams. The content was created and presented by Jason Lopes and Keshav Swarup from Carbon.
The Internet
One session was dedicated to a less recent technology, but perhaps the most innovative of the second half of the 20th century - the Internet. For this session, I took care of the research, creation of material and keynote presentation. The keynote was immediately followed by an activity involving the audience, which was made of all the participants in the 2020 Beer Garage Tech Incubator program about 50 people).
Robotics & Machine Learning, by Covariant-UC Berkeley
On the topic of Robotics & ML, I brought in genius founder of Covariant and Professor at UC Berkeley Pieter Abbeel and his Robotics Engineer, Gabriel Nakajima. This was a keynote presentation followed by a Q&A where employees from the IT, Development, Innovation, Manufacturing and Logistics teams attended.
Software Development Basics Session
This was a very exclusive session only including the Beer Garage team, or Global Tech Innovation team. The session required pre work, some reading and watching a lecture, to ramp up basics of computer science. On the day of the session, I presented a material re-cap, and the workshop was built and led by one of our in-house AB InBev developers from Brazil, Alexandre Mendonça Alvaro. We led the audience to code live on their devices, on the Thunkable platform, a ''To-Do List" application that could be actively used on a daily basis.
Machine Vision, IoT & Industry 4.0 - Presented by Cognex
Cognex Directors and Executives Andreas Savvides, Richard Gibbs and Jason Styron came to co-present on the topic of Machine VIsion, Industry 4.0 and IoT. This presentation and Q&A session took place in front of an audience of IT, Manufacturing, Innovation and Logistics teams.