7 July 2009 - 15:17£5 App Tues July 14th @ Skiff – Kite power with AI, short geo-urls and safety training

Next week’s £5 App night is shaping up nicely, we’re mixing A.I., clean energy production, geo-urls and a safety-training start-up in 3 talks by new speakers.  I’ve cribbed the following from the 18th event description, sign-up on Upcoming to give us an idea of numbers please:

Allister Furey will be talking about applying ‘bio-inspired’ AI techniques to the next generation of wind energy technology which uses tethered wings (that’s kites to you and me) to drive electrical generators. He’ll show some:

… examples of where these techniques; genetic algorithms and neural networks, have been used in other applications, sometimes in combination with physics simulation. Hopefully demystifying some of these techniques and show how they can be relatively simple to implement, including how to program a genetic algorithm in one line of code and how to let a physics model build itself.

Next up there’ll be Jamie Matthews on hereit.is:

a simple web app which lets you create and share short urls for geographical locations. As well as explaining what it is and how it works, he’ll be taking you on a whistle-stop tour of MVC architectures, REST APIs, CSS3 magic, the Google Maps API, and anything else he can squeeze into twenty minutes.

Finally David Hawes will discuss how a knee operation in July 2008 and hence an unexpected chunk of “down time” allowed him to finish a decent version of www.safetytrainingnetwork.co.uk, through the haze of various painkillers, in time for a launch at the Focus on First Aid conference:

The launch was well received and so he decided to quit his safe job at Avanade, in the depths of the recession, to pursue his own ideas full-time. Eight months later he released the first subscriptions for www.trainingcoursebooker.com enabling small Safety Training Providers to manage their businesses and sell courses. David will talk about what he has learnt and why he is glad he has done it after working at large companies for the last 5 years.

You might also want to see videos from last month’s event which include Darren Fell on Crunch, ChatBadge, Taykt and a human memory hack.

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Ian applies Artificial Intelligence as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher for companies (Mor Consulting), co-founded the StrongSteam A.I. datamining toolkit, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.