NE:Tech - February 2020

February brings NE:Tech to us the day before Valentine's day, the day for celebrating love, and if you have a love for tech then NE:Tech is the place to be.

Please welcome your speakers:

Stephen Powers, Software Engineer @ SAGE

• Limitations of Sentiment Analysis
• Basic experience required
• Tags: Natural Language Processing

Sentiment Analysis has become an increasingly popular tool for businesses, public bodies and researchers in aiding decision making by mining data for useful information. With a rush of natural language processing service providers entering the market, we must ask ourselves ‘how accurate can sentiment analysis really be?’.

This talk sets out to explore this very question by looking at data containing political opinions, which exposes one of sentiment analysis’s greatest weaknesses – sarcasm. We will discuss briefly the methodology of building a simple API to collect tweets, the algorithm used in this study to analyse sentiment and the key findings.

A little about Stephen:
Previously worked in the public and political sector with a strong interest in driving the digital economy, particularly here in the North East. Went back to University to complete a master’s in computer science completing a thesis focused on Sentiment Analysis of data containing political opinion. Since finishing University in July 2019, has worked at SAGE as a developer.

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Colin Eberhardt, Chief Geek @ Scott Logic

• Build Your Own WebAssembly Compiler
• Intermediate experience required
• Tags: Development / Writing Code

For more than 20 years JavaScript has been the only 'native' language of the web. That's all changed with the release of WebAssembly. In the coming years, you'll see people writing web apps in Rust, C#, C++ and all manner of other languages. But just what is WebAssembly? And what’s all the fuss about?

WebAssembly is a low-level compilation target, which means that it is unlikely you’ll use it directly. However, as developers and hackers, we love to know how technology works!

In this talk, we will look at some of the internals of WebAssembly, explore how it works ‘under the hood’, and look at how you can create your own (simple) compiler that targets this runtime.

A little about Colin:
I’m the Technology Director at Scott Logic, a UK-based software consultancy where we create complex application for our financial services clients. I’m an avid technology enthusiast, spending my evenings contributing to open source projects, writing blog posts and learning as much as I can. You can find me online @ColinEberhardt.

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NE:Tech is hosted by The CTRL Pad in The Gate in the centre of Newcastle which offers a gaming lounge packed with everything from retro to bang up to date games and setups. NE:Tech talks are about ANY tech-related subject and are, of course, accompanied by free drinks and pizza.

After the talks have taken place we'll have full use of the place to ourselves where you can enjoy over 200 games going back over 30 years across consoles including Sony PS4, PS3, PS2, PS1, Nintendo Switch, Wii U, Wii, GameCube, N64, Snes, Xbox and Sega Dreamcast plus HD low lag monitors and HDTVs.

Thanks to our sponsor
Scott Logic

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NE:Tech events are intended for education, networking, and community. To ensure it is a welcoming, friendly environment all attendees, speakers and volunteers at any NE:Tech event are required to conform to the following Code of Conduct: https://ne.technology/code-of-conduct.html. We will enforce this code throughout our events.