JHB - Spooky AI, Bits to Bites - Agriculture & AI, An Image is Worth 1000px

Welcome to our Spooktober Meetup. We like this time of year, and will be hosting an extra special event in October!

🗓Agenda
‣ Welcome and News in AI
‣ Spooky AI by Rishal Hurbans
‣ Bits to Bites - Agriculture and AI by Bradley van Aardt
‣ An Image is Worth 1000px by Pierre Roux

🎃Spooky AI by Rishal Hurbans
Let's imagine a possible spooky future, and what could make it happen.

🎤About Rishal (https://rhurbans.com/)
Rishal probably does too much. Solutions architect at Entelect, busy authoring Grokking AI Algorithms for Manning, Founder of Prolific Idea, and Innovator at Intel. He likes technology, design, people, and philosophy.

🌱Bits to Bites by Bradley van Aardt
We'll be looking at some of the new ideas being tried out in agriculture and food distribution, from vertical farming to cloud kitchens, and how these might change the way we live. There will be an emphasis on the application of technology such as machine learning and robotics.

🎤About Bradley (https://twitter.com/theminidriver)
Bradley is a software engineer, working professionally for the past 14 years, though he's been coding since he was 8 years old when he first got a dodgy Sinclair ZX81. He's interested in the application of software to the physical world.

🖼An Image is Worth 1000px by Pierre Roux
"Photoshop" apps allow us to add filters to pictures: effects like blur, sharpen, edge detection, color segmentation, etc. are all options in these apps, but how does your computer understand how to do this?
I will explain this by teaching how to do this by hand, and thus how your computer derives meaning from a grid of numbers (called pixels), how it detects simple features in the image, and then manipulates pixels according to what the user demands. But we won't stop there, as this technique can be used on much more than only images.

🎤About Pierre (https://twitter.com/Blaarkies)
Pierre is an inquisitive learner with a hunger for knowledge, who embraces picking up new skills and mastering them one day. He is a software engineer who started his career in 2015 and grew fond of JavaScript, using it in order to make interactive presentations on a personal website for use in his talks about data compression and other interesting topics. Aside from this, he has become well adept at developing software for C#, Java, Android and Angular platforms and frameworks, where he enthusiastically follows best practices when possible. He spends his free time trying out new outdoor adventures, traveling the world and developing his personal game; built around his interest of video games and their underlying mechanics, space flight and orbital mechanics, electronic circuitry and home automation.

ℹ️Info
We've expanded the topic range of the meetup to include anything "future tech" such as IoT, VR/AR, Game development, Cloud, etc. We're also trying to include a lightning talk at each event exclusively for new presenters to help encourage more people to share their work and gain experience speaking and interacting with the community. So get in touch to speak 💯