All posts of Ian

SocialTies is coming

Slowly but surely we’re getting there with our social-discovery app for conferences. We aim to have SocialTies in the UK iPhone App Store in the next few weeks. I demoed it to several hundred folk at EuroPython a few weeks back and it was rather well received. Currently the Android BETA is linked from the […]

Dell E6420 with Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwahl) 64 bit

I’ve just treated myself to a quad core (8 virtual core) Dell E6420 with 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, NVIDIA NVS 4200M GPU (with integrated Intel GPU) and the high spec screen. It is rather nice. It comes with Win 7 Pro installed (fine for some libraries I’ll need and maybe some MS Office), I’ve just […]

£5 App #24 write-up

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!) […]

MakerFaire 2011

This weekend Emily and I visited MakerFaire UK 2011 in Newcastle. What fun! You need a MakerFaire to see such a wide (and crazy) collection of electronic and mechanical hackery along with soldering tables that anyone (kids too) can interact with. We went up representing BuildBrighton (our local Hacker Space) and to do some research […]

“A.I. in the real world” 2011 lecture at Sussex Uni

I’ve just given my yearly lecture at Sussex Uni talking about Artificial Intelligence in the real-world. It details some of my exploits over the last 10 years. The presentation is below, I’ve also linked to some of the videos below. A.I. in the Real World – Sussex Uni lecture March 2011 View more presentations from […]

Review for Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook (Packt, 2010)

Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook (Amazon US, UK) is a cookbook for Python’s Natural Language Processing Toolkit. I’d suggest that this book is seen as a companion for O’Reilly’s Natural Language Processing with Python (available for free at nltk.org). The older O’Reilly book gives a lot of explanation for how to use NLTK’s […]

And on with 2011

Earlier this year I switched back to my long-running artificial intelligence and CUDA high performance computing consultancy work through Mor Consulting. Having sold ProCasts earlier in the year and moved entirely away from screencasting (leaving ShowMeDo in Kyran’s capable hands) I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty of low level algorithms and implementations. […]

Packt’s new “Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook”

I’m rather excited to have received a review copy of Packt’s new NLP book “Python Text Processing with NLTK 2.0 Cookbook“, it is based around Python’s Natural Language Processing toolkit. I’ve been using the O’Reilly book for over a year, I’m curious to see what’s different between the two. I’ll post a full review once […]

£5 App #23 – “Things we built this summer”

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 […]