London based recording artist Imogen Heap blurs the boundaries between pure art form and creative entrepreneurship. Writing and producing 4 solo albums, one as Frou Frou (with Guy Sigsworth), and collaborating with Jeff Beck, Mika and Josh Groban amongst others, Heap has penned tracks for movies,...

As developers who want to lend our skills to support organizations fighting for social justice, how do we build effective, impactful collaborations with organizations and make the resulting open source projects sustainable? Over two years and 1,062 commits, we'll follow the evolution of an open s...

Telenovelas are beloved for their over the top drama and intricate plot twists. In this talk, we'll review popular telenovelas to synthesize a typical telenovela arc and use it to train a deep learning model. What would a telenovela script look like as imagined by a neural network? To answer this...

Instead of just teaching Deaf people how to get along with the rest of the world and understand them, why don't we make an effort to understand them and their language via technology?! In this talk we will learn how to use machine learning to interpret sign language.

What does it mean to prove something? Propositional logic requires we reveal propositions and then prove them true, but what if it were possible to create proofs which reveal nothing but their own validity? This is the core idea behind the emergent field of zero knowledge proofs: a decades old so...

In late 2017, Slack's largest customers were plagued with relentless performance-related outages. Our monolithic, spaghetti codebase was increasingly difficult to reason about; small, innocuous changes might accidentally cause a cascade of regressions. A few concerned engineers teamed up to build...

Shoprunner aggregates millions of products from 140 retailers which represent thousands of brands. In order to make these products findable and searchable by users it is important for Shoprunner to be able to standardize the attributes (style, color, pattern etc) of these millions of products. Ev...

Black Box AI technologies like Deep Learning have seen great success in domains like ad delivery, speech recognition, and image classification; and have even defeated the world's best human players in Go, Starcraft, and DOTA. As a result, adoption of these technologies has skyrocketed. But as emp...

Unison is an open source functional programming language with special support for building distributed, elastic systems. It began as an experiment: rethink all aspects of the programming experience, including the core language, runtime, tooling, as well as code versioning and publishing, and then...

Secrets are a key pillar of Kubernetes, but anyone with access to etcd can all the plaintext values! Attendees will learn techniques for securing Kubernetes secrets including encryption, KMS plugins, and tools like HashiCorp Vault, and the tradeoffs of each approach to better secure their clusters.

Gaming is a rapidly growing industry. Players generate extremely rich datasets that record each and every in-game action, social interaction, ad view or purchase. Because of the constant and continued relationship between player and game, player behavioral data constitutes a unique source of info...

If you're like the 2016 version of me, then you think you have a decent handle on web accessibility. You put alt attributes on all your images (though you don't give much thought to the actual text) and you make sure your sites can be used with a keyboard (except for overlays sometimes). Then the...

Most of us don't question the assumptions we make about color and how we implement it in the technology we build, beyond perhaps a quick contrast check. This inattention to color is a grave mistake, as the history of color in computing is vibrant, and its impact on our lives can be significant! I...

This talk will explain the ideas around training models on different nodes. I'll describe a specific instance of a federated learning algorithm (called federated averaging), and I'll explain the ways in which the real world full of malicious actors and distributed systems complicates the naive pi...

AI offers so many exciting possibilities for campuses, corporations, and communities. However, as we look to the future, we must keep in mind that technology has fundamental limits and AI is not a magic bullet that solves all social problems. In this talk, author and professor Meredith Broussard ...

In the US alone, approximately 3% of the population (10 million) are either deaf or have moderate to profound hearing loss. This is 3 times as many people than those in wheelchairs yet reasonable disability accommodations for the deaf or hearing impaired only require an ASL (American Sign Languag...

Angklung is a traditional musical instrument from Indonesia. This instrument has a lot of variety in how it is performed; a common format is the orchestral format in which 15-30 players gather to form a team. Playing angklung in this way is fun but also presents some challenges that are hard to s...

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, both launched in 1977, each had a primary objective to explore Jupiter and Saturn. This goal was achieved by 1981. Yet Voyager, NASA's longest running mission, has continued to this day. Both Voyager probes are still operating, and returning scientific da...

NYC Mesh is a community-run mesh network that helps over three-hundred homes connect to high-speed Internet; making it one of the largest mesh networks in the world. We work with anyone interested in reclaiming ownership over their Internet, but specifically engage with underserved populations in...

The process of legal reasoning is heavily reliant on information stored in text, but while legal texts are generally easily accessible, their interpretation often isn't straight forward, making the understanding of the law effectively inaccessible to the general public.

At LinkedIn, we run several thousands of stream processing applications which, coupled with our scale, has exposed us to some unique challenges. We will talk about the 3 kinds of applications that have made the most impact on our stream processing platform. Machine Learning applications are driv...

The Wireless Telegraph was invited in the 1890s and quickly spread to be the dominant method of peer-to-peer communication throughout the 19th century. As a method of communication, the Telegraph allowed for a secure, Intercontinental, high-throughput and extensible message transmission. Toward t...

What if you could find complex bugs in systems without ever having looked at any of the code, without running the code, without cloning the code, or even knowing what language the code is written in or where its git repo lives? What if you could validate the correctness of an architectural propos...

I'm an introvert. This can be a bit unfortunate, when you are a person that enjoys spending a lot of free time creating fashion things bedazzled with LEDs... only to rarely wear them out in public. In an effort to actually share my weird and wonderful creations with others, I decided to create a ...

Sol LeWitt was a prolific American artist credited with founding Conceptual Art and Minimalism. This talk is inspired by his series of participatory, conceptual art called, "Wall Drawings". The Wall Drawings are large-scale installations that grow from a set of simple written instructions by Sol ...

Designing complex, dynamic systems that can produce interesting and aesthetically pleasing art is a very hard problem to solve, even when you're just talking about something as focused as a Twitter bot. What happens when you try to make procgen art that doesn't just exist on the Internet, but act...

JavaScript is an imperfect programming language. It’s weakly-typed, scoping rules and type coercion can make difficult-to-diagnose bugs, and cross-browser compatibility sometimes feels like a pipe dream. But does it matter? In this talk, I’ll argue that judging the merits of JavaScript solely as ...

Who wants to spend time dreaming about the ability to leap tall buildings with a single bound, when we can recast stories we live day to day as powers of our own... and improve our own lives in a practical way? When observability is folded into the development process itself, it represents the po...

Color is a fascinating subject. It is both incredibly subjective (ie. what makes a painting beautiful) and perfectly scientific (ie. wavelengths of light) at the same time. This talk will be a deep dive into the history and science of color and the fascinating world of human perception and the sc...

Time is intrinsic to information and yet it is usually an afterthought in database designs. We present Crux, a general purpose open source document database with bitemporal graph queries. This talk will explore the journey of how Crux was conceived from JUXT's consulting experiences of building g...

The New York Times Crossword is serious business. Operated like a startup within the company, the NYT Games Team works tirelessly to keep our 500,000+ subscribers happily solving while driving significant revenue to support great journalism. With serious solvers comes the need for serious technol...

Bias in machine learning is a Problem. This is common knowledge for many of us now, and yet our algorithms continue to operate unfairly in the real world, perpetuating structural inequality along lines of class and color. After all, "better training data" is not so easy to get our hands on, right?

The early beginnings of computer graphics in the 1960s saw the birth of a number programming languages that were created specifically for making animations and graphics. Almost all of them are now obsolete and mostly forgotten. However, back then, many of these languages cutting-edge and made pos...

Everyone should learn programming, right? Yes! But how... Should we allow children to explore and learn about syntax on their own, or should we drill programming like we rote memorize the table of multiplication or German grammatical cases? Felienne's talk outlines this history of programming edu...