I just watched a very important talk from last year’s Beyond Tellerand conference in Berlin. Sacha Judd (@szechuan) delivered her How the tech sector could move in One Direction at this conference and Webstock in New Zealand a few days ago. It is a great example of how a talk can be insightful, exciting and challenge your biases at the same time.

You can watch the video, read the transcript and get the slides.

I’ve had this talk on my “to watch” list for a long time and the reason is simple: I couldn’t give a toss about One Direction. I was – like many others – of the impression that boy bands like them are the spawn of commercial satan (well, Simon Cowell, to a large degree) and everything that is wrong with music as an industry and media spectacle.

And that’s the great thing about this talk: it challenged my biases and it showed me that by dismissing something not for me I also discard a lot of opportunity.

This isn’t a talk about One Direction. It is a talk about how excitement for a certain topic gets people to be creative, communicate and do things together. That their tastes and hysteria aren’t ours and can be off-putting isn’t important. What is important is that people are driven to create. And it is important to analyse the results and find ways to nurture this excitement. It is important to possibly channel it into ways how these fans can turn the skills they learned into a professional career.

This is an extension to something various people (including me) kept talking about for quite a while. It is not about technical excellence. It is about the drive to create and learn. Our market changes constantly. This is not our parent’s 50ies generation where you get a job for life and you die soon after retirement, having honed and used one skill for your whole lifetime. We need to roll with the punches and changes in our markets. We need to prepare to be more human as the more technical we are, the easier we are to be replaced my machines.

When Mark Surman of Mozilla compared the early days of the web to his past in the punk subculture creating fanzines by hand it resonated with me. As this is what I did, too.

When someone talks about fanpages on tumblr about One Direction, it didn’t speak to me at all. And that’s a mistake. The web has moved from a technical subculture flourishing under an overly inflated money gamble (ecommerce, VC culture) to being a given. Young people don’t find the web. They are always connected and happy to try and discard new technology like they would fashion items.

But young people care about things, too. And they find ways to tinker with them. When a fan of One Direction gets taught by friends how to change CSS to make their Tumblr look different or use browser extensions to add functionality to the products they use to create content we have a magical opportunity.

Our job as people in the know is to ensure that the companies running creation tools don’t leave these users in the lurch when the VC overlords tell them to pivot. Our job is to make sure that they can become more than products to sell on to advertisers. Our job is to keep an open mind and see how people use the media we helped create. Our job is to go there and show opportunities, not to only advertise on hackernews. Our job is to harvest these creative movements to turn them into to the next generation of carers of the web.

I want to thank Sacha for this talk. There is a lot of great information in there and I don’t want to give it all away. Just watch it.

Yesterday I gave the closing keynote of the Tweakers Developer Summit in Utrecht, The Netherlands. The conference topic was “Webdevelopment – Coding the Universe” and the organisers asked me to give a talk about Machine Learning and what it means for developers in the nearer future. So I took out my crystal ball 🔮 and whipped up the following talk:

Here are the resources covered in the talk:

• GOAT raising $25M for marketplace for collectible sneakers – this was an example of how we as developers failing at influencing what our market is doing. We’re still at a stage where plain consumerism wins the big investments and technology is used to cater to the needs of a very small, very affluent group
• The Robot Takeover – an interactive site telling you how safe your job is from being taken over by a robot. Based on this research in PDF format
• Movie written by AI
• Daddy’s Car – a song written by AI after analysing lots of Beatles songs
• AI software learns to write AI software – Google Brain coding itself
• Beer brewed by AI
• Chinese factory replacing 90% of humans with robots – 250% more productivity, defects 90% down
• The Power of Big Data and Psychographics – an incredibly scary presentation of Cambridge Analytica at Concordia summit showing how applying the OCEAN psychology test to Facebook quizzes allowed them to influence voters in the Brexit and Trump votes
• Meitu’s App Permissions – an app to make sparkly selfies has full access to your phone now
• Google Photos and its impressive use of Machine Learning to tag and find your own photos
• Pinterest Lens – a Shazam for everyday objects
• AIPoly – an app to detect objects and tell blind users what they are using a Neural Network on the device instead of having to be online and suffering the latency that comes with that. Demo video here
• Google’s DeepMind’s lip reading success – AI can read lips four times better than humans. You can also read the scientific paper on it
• Microsoft Office using Cognitive Services – PowerPoint now creates text alternatives for images
• Learning tools in Microsoft OneNote and a video on how that helps educators
• Live translation of phone calls using Cognitive Services and Skype
• Google Allo using machine learning to create recommended answers to posted images
• Pixel recursive super resolution is a method to create facial images from 8×8 pixel input using machine learning. In essence it is making the zoom and enhance movie trope reality.
• Google open sourced their DeepMind Lab to train AI. The code is on GitHub and the “paper available on Arxiv
• Facebook explained and released their image segmentation algo showing you how to detect shapes in images and classify them
• ImageNet is a database of described images
• Open images dataset is Google’s alternative to ImageNet, a lot of metadata for image URLs described with humain aid
• CaptionBot is a demo by microsoft using Cognitive Services to describe images.
• Microsoft Cognitive Services is a suite of APIs using Machine Learning to understand images, sounds, text and enhance your projects to have a more human output and allow for human input
• Custom Recognition Service is a service by Microsoft to filter content by giving it context, thus improving the outcome of OCR or speech to text conversions
• Video Breakdown is a service to detect speakers, sentiments and create a transcript of videos
• My visit to the medical holodeck is my report about visiting Weill Cornell hospital in New York where they use VR for visualisation of diseases and HoloLens to design medication
• Sophia Roshal’s HoloLens demo shows the intern’s project at Weill Cornell using HoloLens to visualise cancer medication and tumor data
• Anamaria Cotîrlea is a Google employee whose research as an intern saves the company 1.5 petabytes of data each day by switching the Android store from gzip to brotli compression.
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk trained AI for years showing that a lot of the computer magic we see today is the result of human endeavours
• The next blue collar job is coding explains how a lot of soon-out-of-job workers re-educate themselves working in IT as it is the only really growing market

Yes, this was a lot – maybe too much – for one talk, but the feedback I got was all very positive, so I am hoping for the video to come out soon.

Last month I was very lucky to be invited to give the opening keynote of a brand new conference that can utterly go places: ScriptConf in Linz, Austria.

What I liked most about the event was an utter lack of drama. The organisation for us presenters was just enough to be relaxed and allowing us to concentrate on our jobs rather than juggling ticket bookings. The diversity of people and subjects on stage was admirable. The catering and the location did the job and there was not much waste left over.

I said it before that a great conference stands and falls with the passion of the organisers. And the people behind ScriptConf were endearingly scared and amazed by their own success. There were no outrageous demands, no problems that came up in the last moment, and above all there was a refreshing feeling of excitement and a massive drive to prove themselves as a new conference in a country where JavaScript conferences aren’t a dime a dozen.

ScriptConf grew out of 5 different meetups in Austria. It had about 500 extremely well behaved and excited attendees. The line-up of the conference was diverse in terms of topics and people and it was a great “value for money” show.

As a presenter you got spoiled. The hotel was 5 minutes walk away from the event and 15 minutes from the main train station. We had a dinner the day before and a tour of a local ars electronica center before the event. It is important to point out that the schedule was slightly different: the event started at noon and ended at “whenever” (we went for “Leberkäse” at 3am, I seem to recall). Talks were 40 minutes and there were short breaks in between each two talks. As the opening keynote presenter I loved this. It is tough to give a rousing talk at 8am whilst people file slowly into the building and you’ve still got wet hair from the shower. You also have a massive lull in the afternoon when you get tired. It is a totally different thing to start well-rested at noon with an audience who had enough time to arrive and settle in.

Presenters were from all around the world, from companies like Slack, NPM, Ghost, Google and serverless.

The presentations:

Here’s a quick roundup of who spoke on what:

• I was the opening keynote, talking about how JavaScript is not a single thing but a full development environment now and what that means for the community. I pointed out the importance of understanding different ways to use JavaScript and how they yield different “best practices”. I also did a call to arms to stop senseless arguing and following principles like “build more in shorter time” and “move fast and break things” as they don’t help us as a market. I pointed out how my employer works with its engineers as an example how you can innovate but also have a social life. It was also an invitation to take part in open source and bring more human, understanding communication to our pull requests.
• Raquel Vélez of NPM told the history of NPM and explained in detail how they built the web site and the NPM search
• Nik Graf of Serverless covered the serverless architecture of AWS Lambda
• Hannah Wolfe of Ghost showed how they moved their kickstarter-funded NodeJS based open blogging system from nothing to a ten people company and their 1.0 release explaining the decisions and mistakes they did. She also announced their open journalism fund “Ghost for journalism”
• Felix Rieseberg of Slack is an ex-Microsoft engineer and his talk was stunning. His slides about building Apps with Electron are here and the demo code is on GitHub. His presentation was a live demo of using Electron to built a clone of Visual Studio Code by embedding Monaco into an Electron Web View. He coded it all live using Visual Studio Code and doing a great job explaining the benefits of the console in the editor and the debugging capabilities. I don’t like live code, but this was enjoyable and easy to follow. He also did an amazing job explaining that Electron is not there to embed a web site into a app frame, but to allow you to access native functionality from JavaScript. He also had lots of great insight into how Slack was built using Electron. A great video to look forward to.
• Franziska Hinkelmann of the Google V8 team gave a very detailed talk about Performance Debugging of V8, explaining what the errors shown in the Chrome Profiler mean. It was an incredibly deep-tech talk but insightful. Franziska made sure to point out that optimising your code for the performance tricks of one JavaScript engine is not a good idea and gave ChakraCore several shout-outs.
• Mathieu Henri from Microsoft Oslo and JS1K fame rounded up the conference with a mind-bending live code presentation creating animations and sound with JavaScript and Canvas. He clearly got the most applause. His live coding session was a call to arms to play with technology and not care about the code quality too much but dare to be artsy. He also very much pointed out that in his day job writing TypeScript for Microsoft, this is not his mode of operation. He blogged about his session and released the code here.

This was an exemplary conference, showing how it should be done and reminded me very much of the great old conferences like Fronteers, @media and the first JSConf. The organisers are humble, very much engaged and will do more great work given the chance. I am looking forward to re-live the event watching the videos and can safely recommend each of the presenters for any other conference. There was a great flow and lots of helping each other out on stage and behind the scenes. It was a blast.

I just spent a few days in New York setting up a workshop to help minority students to get into development (soon more on that). I was lucky to be in Microsoft’s Reactor when Alex Sigaras, a research associate in computational biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine gave a talk about how HoloLens transforms healthcare research for the HoloLens Developer Group in New York.

@AlexSigaras is about to start his presentation on how #Hololens transform healthcare at the #Devs meet-up NYC https://t.co/eD8MLdmzrQ pic.twitter.com/FiypETVDt0

— Andrea Sboner (@asbonerw) 11 January 2017

I took the opportunity to talk to Alex for Decoded Chats about that. We also covered other topics such as sharing of information in healthcare. And how HoloLens despite being a high-end and rare device allows for collaboration of experts in all feld and not only developers.

If you prefer to have an audio version, you can download it here (MP3, 19MB)

Here are the questions we covered:

1. You just gave a talk at a HoloLens meetup about medical research. Who are you and what do you do with HoloLens?
2. What are the benefits of using the HoloLens as a visualisation tool in computational medicine compared to VR environments?
3. Is there a collbaboration benefit in augmented reality and mixed reality rather than virtual reality? Does it scale better in bigger groups?
4. Genomics is known to have to deal with huge amounts of data. Isn’t that an issue on a device that is self-contained like the HoloLens?
5. Most of the HoloLens demos you see are single person use. Your use case is pushing the collaborative part of the device. How does that work out?
6. What is the development stack you use? Did you find it hard to port to the device and to re-use code of other, VR, solutions you already had?
7. Do you also have some success stories where using HoloLens helped find a data correlation faster than any of the other ways you used before?
8. Is there any way for the audience here to collaborate in your research and help you further breaking down silos in medical research?

You can see the HoloLens work Alex and his team are working on in this tweet.

Our latest work on HoloLens with RoshalSophia ElementoLab engIPM. Source code coming soon on github. pic.twitter.com/tTtO8vWCPI

— Alex Sigaras (@AlexSigaras) 29 September 2016

The slides of his talk are on SlideShare and have a lot more information on the topic.

In addition to visiting Alex at work, I also got a special treat to have a demo of their other VR work, including The Cave, a room with 5 walls that are rear-projected screens allowing you to get detailed 3D views of MRI scans.

Here’s a very raw an unedited video of Vanessa Borcherding (@neezbeez) showing their research in VR and the insights it can give you.

Warning: unless you are also wearing 3D glasses, this video flickers a lot:

I left the hospital and research facility and had to take a long walk in Central Park. It is not every day you see things that you always considered science fiction and a faraway dream happen right now. I’m looking forward to working more with these people, even if I felt utterly lost and the dummy in the room. It is great to see that technology that on first glance looks great for gaming and entertainment can help experts of all walks of life to do important work to make people live longer.

I work remotely and with a team eight hours away from me. Many will be in the same boat, and often the problem with this is that your meetings are late at night your time, but early for the others. Furthermore, the other team meets in a room early in the morning. This either means that they are fresh and bushy tailed or annoyed after having been stuck in traffic. Many different moods and agendas at play here. To avoid this being a frustrating experience, here are seven tips any team in the same situation should follow to ensure that everyone involved gets the most out of the conference call:

• Be on time and stick to the duration – keep it professional – of course things go wrong, but there is no joy in being in a hotel room at 11pm listening to 6 people tell each other that others are still coming as they are “getting a quick coffee first”. It’s rude to waste people’s time. The meeting time should be information and chats that apply to all, regardless of location and time. You can of course add a social part before or after the meeting for the locals.
• Have a meeting agenda and stick to it – that way people who have a hard time being part of the meeting due to time difference can decline to come to the meeting and this may make it shorter
• Have the agenda editable to everyone available during the meeting – this way people can edit and note down things that have been said. This is beneficial as it acts as a script for those who couldn’t attend and it also means that you can ensure people remotely on the call are on the ball and not watching TV
• Introduce yourself when you speak and go close to the mic – for people dialing in, this is a feature of the conference call software, but when 10 people in a room speak, remote employees who dialed in have no no idea what’s going on.
• Avoid unnecessary sounds – as someone dialing in, mute your microphone. Nobody needs your coughing, coffee sipping, or – at worst – typing sounds – on the conference call. As someone in the room, don’t have conversations with others next to the microphone. Give the current presenters the stage they deserve.
• Have a chat window open – this allows people to post extra info or give updates when something goes wrong. It is frustrating to speak when nobody hears you and you can’t even tell them that it doesn’t work. A text chat next to the conf call hardly ever fails to work and is a good feedback mechanism
• Distribute presenter materials before the call – often presenting a slide deck or web product over Skype or others fails for various reasons or people dialing in are on a very bad connection. If they have the slide deck locally, they can watch it without blurs and delays

Using these tricks you end up with a call that results in a documented agenda you can send to those who couldn’t attend. You can also have an archive of all your conf calls for reference later on. Of course, you could just record the sessions, but it is much more annoying to listen to a recording and it may be tough to even download them for remote attendees on bad connections. By separating the social part of the meeting from the official one you still have the joy of meeting in the mornings without annoying the people who can’t be part of it.

Photo Credit: quinn.anya Flickr cc