Perspectives on Venturing into AI

**Regular Cork AI attendees, please take note of the change of venue and that this month's meetup takes place on a Wednesday!!

Bank of Ireland Workbench Patrick Street Cork
Wednesday 25th April 6pm**

This month Cork AI brings you two fantastic speakers each with their own perspectives on venturing into the world of AI.
The evening will be kicked off with a talk from Sarah Kate Sweeney, a secondary school student who has received numerous awards for her various AI projects.
This will lead us to a presentation by Richard Rodger, founder and CEO of voxgig.com and previous co-founder and COO of nearForm.com. Richard will describe his experience of using the Vespa open-source search engine in a machine-learning context as part of the core technology at voxgig.

The evening will include refreshments in the form of pizza and beer!

Sarah Kate Sweeney:
Sarah Kate Sweeney is a 16 year old student at Scoil Mhuire Gan Smal in Blarney. She is an aspiring musician and AI enthusiast and has been programming her own applications since the age of 9. She has participated in numerous science fairs and won 1st prize in the Math/Chem/Phys category of BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition 2016, and Overall Award in Scifest @CIT 2015 to name just a few. Sarah will describe her experience of AI, as somebody armed with nothing but a Macbook, Junior Cert Maths, a few years in Coderdojo and a Dad in the tech industry. She will explain machine learning from first principles in a manner accessible to everyone, and how she has applied it in numerous projects.

Richard Rodger:
Richard Rodger is the author of 'The Tao of Microservices', the host of the
Dublin Microservices Meetup, and the maintainer of the open source senecajs.org microservice framework. His first book 'Mobile Application Development in the Cloud' is one of the first major works on the intersection of Node.js, Cloud, and Mobile.
Richard is curator of the voxgig newsletter for tech conference speakers and founder and CEO of voxgig.com, a professional network and tool suite for speakers and event organizers.
Richard was previously a co-founder and COO of nearForm.com, the world's largest specialist Node.js consultancy.

Richard's talk is entitled 'Introducing the Vespa search-engine: The open-source search-engine that powers Yahoo machine-learning based low-latency search':
Abstract:
Machine-learning models are hard to develop, but even after you've built them, you're still not done. Now you have to put your tensors in those models to work. That means executing high volumes of multi-dimensional vector operators, at speed.
The Vespa search-engine was open-sourced by Yahoo in late 2017. The codebase is the result of 15 years of effort. Vespa is not only a fantastic search-engine out-of-the-box, easily rivaling Elastic Search, but it also provides a low-latency, multi-pass tensor execution engine.
This means you can easily deliver machine-learning based functionality (such as recommendations) to your users without having to build your own software architecture. Vespa takes your models and applies them to your live data, generating useful results in milliseconds.
We've adopted Vespa as the core technology for our startup, and this talk is about our experiences so far (spoiler: it's been awesome!).