Category: event

Practical Machine Learning for iOS

This post serves as a collection of follow-up resources for my AppBuilders 2020 talk, Practical Machine Learning for iOS. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me (via Twitter is preferred). 

If you want a full transcript, the script for this talk is available here as a PDF.

Here’s some useful links, roughly in the order they might interest you related to the talk:

  • CreateML — Apple’s easy to use tool for creating machine learning models based on tasks
  • CoreML — Apple’s framework for using machine learning models that are in the CoreML mlmodel format

Building a Sound Classifier:

Building a Caption Generator:

Some additional links that might be of interest:

And finally, we have a GitHub repository with the code that was shown in the talk, as well as the code repository for our book, Practical AI with Swift, that has a whole lot of great activities for you to use (even if you don’t have the book) across sound, vision, text, and more.

SA Conference 2020 NYC

Ben_Hider_BH305631

We’ve just finished speaking at the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2020 in New York City. It was, as always, a fabulous event, and we had a great time! In a few weeks we’ll be speaking at O’Reilly’s Strata conference in San Jose, as well!

At Software Architecture in NYC we spoke about entity component systems, in a talk entitled “Entity component systems and you: they’re not just for game developers“.

Below are some of our favourite links relating to ECS. We hope you find them useful!

You can also find a slightly earlier version of the talk (from last year’s conference) on YouTube:

Software Architecture NYC was fabulous, and we can’t wait for the next one! We really enjoyed seeing our friend r0ml give an amazing talk (as usual), and signing copies of our Unity Game Development Cookbook!

Catch us next at the O’Reilly Strata Conference in San Jose!

/dev/world/2019 Early Bird âš ď¸Ź

Get your /dev/world/2019 tickets soon! Don’t miss out!/dev/world/2019 is fast approaching, and discounted Early Bird tickets are available until 9 August 2019.

A ticket gets you access to three days of workshops, sessions, and networking — it’s a great deal! /dev/world/2019 runs in Melbourne at RMIT, and features speakers from companies like Google, Canva, Mercari, Etsy, CBA and beyond, covering topics from the latest SwiftUI, to Flutter, to Rich Notifications, to hand puppets with Augmented Reality (AR).

Join us at /dev/world! For more information and tickets, visit https://devworld.com.com.au

The first announced Featured Presentation at /dev/world/2019 will be from Simon Joslin and Matthew Clark, from The Voxel Agents, developers of The Gardens Between, the Apple Design Award-winning adventure puzzle game. They’ll be talking about good design, and how it can’t just be rushed.

Get your tickets at https://devworld.com.au ❤️

Science Fictional User Interfaces

This week at the Strata Data Conference, in London, Mars and I gave a talk on Science Fictional User Interfaces. It was a very enjoyable talk to prepare, and we were really thrilled to be given a slot at such a technical data-focused conference as Strata, to effectively rant about how great science-fiction is, and how everyone should watch, read, and play more sci-fi.

This post serves to provide some links to resources that we mentioned in the presentation, or that we think you’d find useful if you enjoyed the presentation. We’ll also post a video of the talk here, once it is available (usually a few weeks!)

If you’re interested in reading more about this topic, there’s two amazing books that cover similar ground:

There’s also a range of books that take a different angle on a similar topic:

  • Designing Agentive Technology (Christopher Noessel) — available from O’Reilly’s Learning Platform, Rosenfeld Media, and Amazon
  • Speculative Everything (Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby) — available from The MIT Press and Amazon
  • Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies (Dave Addey) — available from Amazon
  • Extrapolation Factory Operator’s Manual (Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken) — available from Amazon

And there’s some interesting papers and academic articles we think you might be interested in, if you enjoyed our talk:

  • Hopes and fears for intelligent machines in fiction and reality (Stephen Cave and Kanta Dihal) — available from Nature Machine Intelligence
  • Long-Term Trends in the Public Perception of Artificial Intelligence (Ethan Fast and Eric Horvitz) — available from arXiv
  • “Scary Robots”: Examining Public Responses to AI (Stephen Cave, Kate Coughland, and Kanta Dihal) — available from AIES Conference

Software Architecture NYC 2019

The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2019 (SACon) just wrapped up in New York City, and I was privileged enough to attend as a speaker with my friend and colleague, Tim, and partner and colleague, Mars. Together, we presented a session called Entity-Component-Systems and you: they’re not just for games anymore, and Tim and I did a book signing for our recent title Learning Swift (3rd edition), as well as a Meet the Experts session.I was initially quite sceptical of the SACon, because the idea of an event based on ‘software architecture’ conjured up images of very dry sessions on traditional, serious enterprise architecture, presented by uninspired, uninspiring people. As it turns out software architects, and those who attend software architecture conferences, are incredibly passionate, interesting people, who are the very opposite of the straight-laced faceless people I imagined.

SACon was a melting-pot of interesting ideas, framed around the discussion of software architecture as a profession. O’Reilly’s conferences are always polished, well, run and all that good stuff (disclaimer: as might be obvious, O’Reilly is my publisher), but the attendees and speakers are what makes any conference shine. This conference definitely shone.

All the sessions that I attended were excellent, but the highlights of the conference for me were definitely the following talks:

The ‘hallway track’ was also exceptional, and we had some fantastic conversations with attendees on topics ranging from the rise of the Rust programming language to the use of ECS in non-video games to the merits of the Swift programming language to designing video game engines, and beyond.

Tim and I really enjoyed our book signing, and found ourselves face-to-face with one of the biggest queues we’ve ever had for a book signing, and had some excellent conversations with developers, architects, and team leads who were excited to learn Swift from our book, or share it with their teams back home.

Our ECS talk went well! We had a packed room (which was also one of the most palatial conference halls we’ve ever spoken in!) and got 5-star reviews with great feedback.

If you’re interested, you’ll find the slides from our talk on ECS are available via the conference website. You can also find a video embedded below, or on YouTube, or O’Reilly’s Learning Platform. (if you have an O’Reilly Learning Platform subscription, we strongly recommend watching it there!)

There’s some follow-up resource we want to share with attendees of our talk. We hope you find them useful!

I’m excited to return to a future SACon! The good news is there’s lots of them to choose from! San Jose is coming, as is Berlin!