Stop the ducks and f**ks - using AI to filter mobile app content

Jim Bob Bennett (@jimbobbennett) - Senior Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and author of Xamarin In Action - will be talking about AI, and teaching it (and us) how to filter out the bad things. Here's what he has to say about the talk:

----------------------------------------

"A large number of mobile apps rely on user input - whether they are photo sharing tools, social media apps or chat apps. Whilst these kind of apps are great and have helped created large communities of like-minded people, they also suffer from the inevitable inappropriate content. This talk looks at using AI to reduce the risk of users being exposed to inappropriate images and text.

AI is one of the new tools that promises to improve our apps. Using advanced AI we can detect faces, classify images and understand user-created content. These are all useful features for reducing inappropriate content in modern mobile apps, especially social media apps.

In this session we will look at cloud-based AI services and how they can be used in a mobile app built with Xamarin (although the concepts apply for native, React Native and PhoneGap apps as well). We’ll see how to do facial detection in photos taken with the camera, then classify those images to filter out the dreaded ‘duck face’. To do this filtering we will create an image classifier using online AI tools and see how the model we create can be used either via a remote API call, or run on-device using CoreML or TensorFlow. Finally we’ll look at using content moderation to block profanity in text input.

By the end of this session you will be well placed to get started using AI to enhance your mobile apps. Note - this session will contain a small amount of strong language used to demo content filtering."

----------------------------------------

The formal start will be around 7pm, at which point pizza will be supplied, but I'll be there from about 6 if you want to show up early. While I try to arrange things like sponsorship I'll pay for the pizza myself, but if anyone wanted to donate towards it, I'll set-up a tip bucket closer to the time.

I think the only thing that remains is to remind you that we have a Slack channel which acts as a virtual water cooler, allowing you to chat with me, and all the other members. If you've not already, you can join using this link:

http://bit.ly/worcsourceslack

If you have any questions or ideas, hit me up on the slack channel.