We had our 24th £5 App event a few weeks back (follow @fivepoundapp for announces). The event was titled “Spring” so we could see what people had been building recently.
First up was Jayanth (@jaykannan) from Sussex University with DorkSynth – a Kinect powered theramin-like synth tool. The video (sorry for the 90 degree twist!) shows it in action:
Jay also has a video for his second Kinect project (for Microsoft) – a Kinect-powered quiz tool:
Next up was Erik Erskine who spoke about the Brighton Marathon iPhone app. They were commissioned to write the app to help well-wishers keep up to date with news (powered by RFID tags) on the progress of the runners:
After this Prem (@premasagar) of Dharmafly spoke on a webapp that helps organisations visualise the change that takes place in skill levels and connectedness during educational programmes:
Finally Chriss Ross (@darkrock) spoke on Tap to Chat, an iPhone Facebook chat app that has become something of a financial success from humble week-long-hack beginnings:
Thanks as always to Jon at The Skiff for hosting us (go sign-up if you need a lovely co-working space).
Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Last Tuesday we had our 23rd £5 App event, given that it is only our second event this year we chose to let people “show and tell” about the things they built this summer. We had 9 speakers, I bought the beer, John baked the cakes.
Shardcore and the Englightenment Machine
Shardcore‘s Enlightenment Machine was installed at the WhiteNight festival a week back, here he explains what’s going on:
My Social Microprinter is a CBM 231 receipt printer + Arduino + WiShield + remote server, it prints tweets and useful info using a regular shop’s receipt printer via serial:
Emily is working on an iPhone app with me that we’ve named SocialTies, it helps you find your friends and ‘similar people’ when you’re at an event or conference. It was inspired by the fruitless hours I’ve spent at events wondering if I’ll ever find anyone I know…
Kyran and I have been working on some social graph visualisations, Kyran’s interface lets you see where you sit in an event’s social network whilst reading real-time updates from attendees:
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on future events or would like to speak please join our £5 App Google Group.
Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Next Tuesday at 8pm at The Skiff we’re holding our 23rd £5 App event. This is our second this year, we’ve been a bit slow. To make up for being slow we’ve given it the title “Things we built this summer“, here’s our fine speaker list:
Ian (me) on hacking a receipt printer with an Arduino
The evening will run for about 2 1/2 hours, we’ll provide free beer and cake as usual. My Mor Consulting is sponsoring the beer, John‘s fine cooking skills are providing the cake.
Because we’re buying beer and baking cake we need to know if you’re attending! Please sign-up on Lanyrd or Upcoming (and unAttend if you subsequently can’t attend).
I’d be especially happy if you use Lanyrd (you just need to tweet ‘@lanyrd attending #fivepoundapp’ for that to happen automatically) as I’ll be collecting that data for Emily‘s Social Ties talk.
As usual we’ll drift to the pub after the event. If you want to meet a bright selection of get-off-of-bottom-and-do-interesting-things people then you should attend next Tuesday.
Whitenight Festival
If you’re attending the Whitenight festival this Saturday (you really should if you’re in town) then do check out Shardcore’s Enlightenment Machine and Cats and BuildBrighton’s Light Brigade build-flashing-social-lights hack event.
Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a 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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a 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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a 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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a 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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a 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 Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Ian applies Data Science as an AI/Data Scientist for companies in Mor Consulting, founded the image and text annotation API Annotate.io, co-authored SocialTies, programs Python, authored The Screencasting Handbook, lives in London and is a consumer of fine coffees.
I wrote this bot for our £5 App’s 
