Of all the new technologies impacting developers today, machine learning has been probably the most immediately impactful. Already it is changing the way we use data to do things like predict how customers will behave or when machines may need repair. It is not an exaggeration to say that developers who understand how to leverage machine learning will become indispensable to companies in the near future.

In this free event, Paige Bailey of Microsoft and Nick Walsh of Datmo will explain the basics of machine learning and artificial intelligence - what it is and why we should care - and even walk through how to build an application based upon machine learning.

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

It feels like everyone is talking about AI these days – and what’s worse, everyone seems to have a different term for it! “Deep Learning”, “Machine Learning”, “Artificial Intelligence”: what do they all mean, really? Are the concerns about ethical algorithms and automation of jobs grounded in fact, or are they overhyped? And what language will SkyNet be implemented in? (My money’s on JavaScript.)

In this session we’ll answer those questions – and walk through what machine learning really is: how to build a model by ingesting data, training on it, testing, and then deploying to production. We’ll also discuss which tools are primarily used by data scientists; how much math is really required to run predictive models; and some strategies you can use today to incorporate artificial intelligence into your applications.

Creating an Art-making Twitter Bot with Machine Learning

Twitter Bots are a great interface for ingesting data and doing awesome things programmatically. In this workshop, we’ll go through how to use Python and tweepy to parse tweets targeted at our bot account. Our bot will grab the images from the tweets, and use a neural network to apply a style transfer effect that will automatically respond to the sender.

Participants can expect to leave the workshop with an understanding of how Twitter bots are architected, and boilerplate code which they can use going forward to modify for their own use cases.