High Performance Ruby & A.I. Newbies

This month we have a diverse range of talks. First, buckle up your seatbelts as we show how fast Ruby can go! Then we dial back the throttle to take you through a gentle introduction to one of A.I.'s resurgent hot topics - Neural Networks.

High Performance Ruby by Roger Martin, Lee Farrell and Attila Horváth - The Fusioneer (http://fusioneer.com/) team show us a Real world example of Ruby Performance in a time-critical system – not your usual caching type solution! While Ruby is known for its speed of development and elegant code, it is not known for its run time performance. Here we can show an example of how we can achieve competitor-beating performance in a live betting system using MRI Ruby.

How Neural Nets Work! by (https://twitter.com/Ann3Sophie)Qamir Hussain (https://twitter.com/qhussain) - Neural Networks have been around for a long time. But when Google managed to get them searching for cats (https://www.wired.com/2012/06/google-x-neural-network/) a few years ago it was clear this branch of A.I. had really hit the big time. This fad hasn't faded, making it worth your while to find out what it's all about. In this talk, Qamir will give a hands on demo of how Neural Networks work. So bring your real intelligence to learn all about neural net learning, training and memory recall. You've just about enough time to absorb this before the singularity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity)!

If you want to take part with a talk of your own in future, even a short one, please submit it here (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSewR0q9zrIrGUh8GTzPQj1iiUF1U1AOq4P07hWxvtYbG6esqg/viewform?c=0&w=1).

Note: Doors to Zendesk open at 6:30pm. Talks at 7pm.

Thanks to Zendesk (https://www.zendesk.com) for hosting us and sponsoring the pizza!

And also thanks to JetBrains (http://www.jetbrains.com/) for the RubyMine IDE licence prizes.

Minimum age limit to attend is 18 years.