Entrepreneurial Geekiness

Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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Science Companies around Brighton?

ArtificialIntelligence, Entrepreneur, Life, projectbrightonblogs June 4, 2008

I’m asking you for some feedback – which science-based companies do you know of around the Brighton/London area?  Can you leave me a comment if you know one that I don’t already know?

Why am I asking?  I’m an A.I. researcher by trade, I’ve used Python, C++, Java and Matlab to solve ‘interesting problems’ over the last 8 years for a number of clients.  Most of them have been somewhere between Brighton and London.

I’m looking for new A.I. research work and I’m wondering which other companies exist that I could approach.  Possibly you’re an A.I. bod / geek / post-grad researcher in the area who’d like to know which companies might offer jobs or consultancy work.

So far I can think of:

  • PANalytical at SInC (one of my current employers for interesting A.I. work)
  • Proneta at SInC (very small company, John Hother sometimes has A.I. related questions)
  • Observatory Sciences in Hove (seen via their job ad)
  • Infonic in Guildford (formerly Corpora, they acquired my old employer Algorithmix years back)
  • DataSlide via SInC (current employer, tiny + very smart ‘storage solutions’ company)
  • Ambiental at SInC (past employer, nice flood-risk simulations and modelling)
  • Elektro Magnetix at SInC
  • NeuroRobotics at SInC
  • MindLab at SInC (new company, looks cool if works as claimed)

There’s the rather obvious bias towards the Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC) in the list above. I’ve been involved with companies that are here so I know an awful lot of faces.  I’m sure there are related companies out and about in the local area – any suggestions?

I’ve also spotted one related company:

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TurboGears caching decorator released (thanks John!)

Python, ShowMeDo June 3, 2008

John has just published his TurboGears Caching Decorator.  We’ve been using it on ShowMeDo for the last 6 weeks – our cpu usage dropped from 60%+ on our shared box down to <30%.

Currently we cache the main pages for 1 hour, these ought to be extended to ‘forever’ since I have a good cache-expire key for these pages.  If I fixed this then I’d imagine our cpu usage would drop even further.

Getting it installed and running with the ‘cache using files’ version took about an hour.  Developing some custom keys (one for each type of page) took another few hours, we’ve had no bugs and we’re darn impressed.

John developed this decorator for his Chrss and our ShowMeDo – we’re in debt to John for digging us out of our performance woes.  Much obliged!

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Python Demos in Brighton @ £5 App Demo Camp

Life, projectbrightonblogs, Python, sussexdigital, £5 App Meet May 31, 2008

On the evening of Tuesday July 8th (upcoming) we’re having a Demo Camp in Brighton as the new format for our regular £5 App hack/story evenings.  Everyone is welcome, we normally have 20-40 people, London Python folk are especially welcome.

The current 6 talks (2 for Python – woot!) are:

Do you have something to demo?  Get in contact (ian AT ianozsvald.com), maybe we can fit you into this event or maybe the next one.  The next event may well have more of a start-up focus (if you’re running a start-up and you’d like a demo spot please do get in touch!).

The location is a bus-ride along Western Road, it’ll take about 20 minutes from Brighton station (see the upcoming page for maps).  The evening is free, it’ll be bring-your-own-beer (and I’ll aim to bring some spare beer and a hat-for-cash for those who forget).

Ribot was kind enough to video the last event, take a look to get an idea of what to expect (at this event we were trying to figure out the format for 2008’s talks).

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Looking for A.I./Python Consultancy Work

projectbrightonblogs, Python May 31, 2008

I’m now on the look-out for some interesting A.I. or Python related work in the South-East.  An interesting challenge involving Python around Brighton/London could be quite cool.  My skills and experience are listed on my MorConsulting work site.

I have some more time on my hands as I’m winding-back my involvement in ShowMeDo (the video-tutorial site with a Python focus that I co-founded in 2005) as Kyran will shortly be taking the reigns full-time.

I could have two weeks a month to bring to bear on a new problem, preferably something hard that needs some A.I. and thinking.

Does the Python community have a ‘skills available’ site for the UK?  I couldn’t see anything so I figured that this public post might be the best way to get the word out.

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Inuda’s new HowSociable.com

Life, projectbrightonblogs May 30, 2008

At likemind beer last night Jon told me about his new HowSociable.com app, a demonstrator for the kind of projects that Inuda like doing.

I plugged in ShowMeDo (howsociable.com/showmedo) and discovered that several users have been twittering, some photos of an old presentation are in flickr and that some of our videos are in YouTube.

By itself this service is pretty limited – now I’ve seen what’s out there there’s nothing else I can do.  I hope that Jon extends this, it’d be useful to e.g. receive monthly updates on how the numbers have changed from the previous month.  Having a passive update of our popularity delivered to my inbox would surely be a useful service.

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