I’m chuffed to have delivered the second version of my “A.I. in the real world” lecture (I gave it last May too) to 2nd year undergraduates at Sussex University this afternoon.
The slides are below, I cover:
A.I. that I’ve seen and have been involved with in the last 10 years
Some project ideas for undergraduates
How to start a new tech business/project in A.I.
In the talk I also showed or talked about:
A YouTube video of the DARPA Grand Challenge (down below)
The Internet Movie Firearms Database when talking about searching for “movie on a beach with bangalores” which resolves to Saving Private Ryan…if someone writes this search engine
Here’s the YouTube video showing the Grand Challenge entries:
Update – the blog for the A.I. Cookbook is now active, more A.I. and robot updates will occur there.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
Last night we ran our 22nd £5 App event, videos for each speaker are listed below. The lovely Thayer Prime of Data.Gov.Uk provided us with 3 copies of Programming the Semantic Web to give away, this was particularly well timed given the semantic nature of our two main talks. Thanks Thayer!
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I was hoping to do a short demo of speech and facial recognition technologies I’m working with but due to feeling a bit under the weather I might leave that until a future £5 App.
As usual please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like:
The aim of the site is to build a large repository of common-sense knowledge, exactly the kind of knowledge that humans take for granted and never write down as statements for a computer to understand. Currently it tracks over 1,026,553 statements.
Using the link you can vote on the concept. Vote up if the concept is solid (i.e. something a human would say is ‘right’) or down if it is wrong, silly or erroneous. The site supports OpenID which makes starting a touch easier.
My goal with this bot is to remind people every day to vote on the concepts and to add new knowledge. If a concept has many votes then we can have faith that it is ‘common-sense knowledge’. If a concept is voted down enough then we can have faith that it is ‘unhelpful or wrong’.
You’ll find a searchable list of Concepts and some random examples on the English homepage. For good examples see all the information that ConceptNet knows about humans, chess and girls.
Details:
I’ve written the bot in Python using PyYAML, Python-tinyurl and Python-twitter. It runs every day via a cron job. It works by guessing a random id for a raw_assertion and checking to see if a concept lives at the URL. See this XML example for id 143313, I extract the .yaml version via PyYAML but the .xml version renders nicely in your browser if you want a peek.
ConceptNet’s web API is well documented. ConceptNet itself is written in Python using Django but I’m not using the downloaded version here, just the web API.
My first Twitter bot – @BrightonJobDoom:
Just in case you live here in Brighton you might want to track @BrightonJobDoom to see how healthy (or…not) the job market is in the UK during this rather wobbly recession I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 5k coding competition.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
It was fab! John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – itseemsthatmanyothersdidtoo. I particularly like:
“I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and is more rewarding for all as a result. Here with @ribot & @lastminute teams” – ribotminimus
The event was organised through Philip and Declan of PlayGroup, they use Hector’s House for arts and science gigs (thanks BuildBrighton for the connection!). Cheers chaps, it was exactly the space we needed!
“Seb’s Slightly Failed Music Career”
Seb spoke on the highs and lows of forming a band, showed previously-unseen footage and generally gave the lowdown on how it all works. Rick-rolling was included. Seb has his own write-up.
Sadly Seb’s hard-drive died after the talk taking all his transcoded footage but on the flip-side Seb inspired Simon to share footage from his old cover band.
Paul Silver took a video of the ThereThing in action:
Sadly the ThereThing is slightly out of shot during the video of the talk but you can hear Toby and see the screen just fine (and the ThereThing link shows it in detail).
“Jim – Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar-mounted iPhone ableton live interface”
Jim Purbrick showed Mrmr, the LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone Ableton live interface. Jim’s also the head of Second Life (UK) and is known for building robots.
After the talks finished Jim Purbrick and Max went on to play live n’loud as 100 Robots.
2010 and beyond…
If you want to keep in touch with future £5 App events then join the £5 App Google Group – it is very low volume and is mostly there just for the announces.
We’ll probably run some more competitions next year, the 5k competition went very well and John wants to do more around that idea and I want to play with some open-source A.I. kits. Details to follow.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
John and I are very pleased to announce our upcoming music-themed £5 App Christmas Special on Wednesday 2nd December, 8-11pm at Hector’s House in collaboration with the lovely Playgroup guys. Please do the usual – sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to brew for you all. If you don’t know what this is then see last year’s Xmas Special write-up and details of all the previous events (with videos).
We want 40-60 of you along this year so please spread the word – Tweets and blog posts would be hugely appreciated!
Outline:
Seb Lee-Delisle – “My life as a wannabe rock star at the birth of the internet music boom” – full description below
Toby Cole – “Zero to Theremin in 20 days” – How BuildBrighton built a feature rich, ultrasonic, laser etched MIDI controller in under three weeks”
Tom Hume – “You’re all an orchestra, get over it” – Bluetooth devices will interact with the audience to create changing ambient music, created by Future Platforms for a Music Hack Day
Jim Purbrick – “A short talk on the Mrmr/LiveAPI guitar mounted iPhone ableton live interface by the head of Second Life Europe and later a demo with 100Robots”
lastminute.com labs – Bottle-Rock-It, a music game for n iPhones where (with any luck) n > 3 (Richard, Russ, Sam, Mathias)
100Robots – Jim and Max Williams play live and loud for us
Seb has the main talk, his full blurb is:
“Before Seb Lee-Delisle was peddling his digital creations, he had an entirely different life. He spent most of his 20s setting up Solar Records and promoting his band Stargirl (later Laine). Investing over £50,000 of their own money, they released their own CDs, made it onto the radio and TV, played in front of 30,000 people, recorded at George Martin’s Air Studios and had full page spreads in the nationals.
They were at the forefront internet music boom of the late 90s. The future was looking rosy for this group of dynamic 20-somethings. So come and find out what it was like, how the hell they got the £50K, and why their plans didn’t quite reach fruition…”
Beer – several of us who are doing well this year will put up some bar-money (Alan of SensibleDevelopment, Paul Silver of Brighton Farm and my ProCasts so far, several more to come, get in contact if you want to share the love).
Food – maybe nibbles.
Next, please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to provide and tweet/post about the event to help us spread the word. Cheers!
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
The 19th £5 App will feature a new fab speaker talking about his career as inventor, followed by Seb and Raul. This will be our last £5 App for probably 2 months (due to conferences and John’s wedding), we’ll probably return in November.
Hope to see you there!
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
The 19th £5 App will feature a new fab speaker talking about his career as inventor, followed by Seb and Raul. This will be our last £5 App for probably 2 months (due to conferences and John’s wedding), we’ll probably return in November.
Tony Ellis will be speaking about moving from being an employee to an inventor, successfully licensing 45 electronic inventions. Tony spoke at an earlier RobotBrighton on his robots and toys, now he’ll give the story about how he jumped from a career in electronics to running his own company, figuring everything out on his journey to licensing 45 toys and games to large distributors like Mattel and Radica.
Next Seb – Flash Guru and previous 5K App winner – will be talking about a new project called IWillPayYourParkingTicket he is working on with Jamie Matthews.
Finally Raul will give a talk titled “Language and design: we write too much, we design too predictably”.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
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.
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.
Ian applies Artificial Intelligence for companies (Mor Consulting), programs Python,
produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.
I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 
