April 2025: Baby's first eGPU crunches Open Data & Adventures in Remote Sensing

Join us for our upcoming meetup on Thursday, 10th of April, 2025, at 7pm at the Waterford Treasures Museum (X91 K10E). Enjoy an evening of engaging talks, networking opportunities, food, drinks, and exciting spot prizes as we delve into innovative ideas shaping the technology landscape.

Speaker 1: Conor O'Neill – ServisBOT

Conor has spent decades shouting at computers and failing to compile Open Source tools. But along the way he has built some useful and interesting projects and products in companies like S3, Integral Design, EMC, FeedHenry, NearForm and now ServisBOT. Some of the things he's most proud of include the NodeConf EU badges, his range of terrible RSS converters and building Web2Ireland back in the day. When he's not talking about AI, Open Source or IOT, you can usually find him ankle deep in mud, running slowly on Irish trails and mountains.

Tech Talk: Baby's first eGPU crunches Open Data

Since 2022, Conor has run a simple web-scraper to provide daily updates from the Irish EPA web-site to some environmentalists. It now has a SQLite DB listing over 300,000 scanned PDFs. He also recently dipped his toe into the world of local LLMs and now runs various stock and fine-tuned models on a cheap secondhand eGPU hanging off his laptop. Recently he asked the question - what could that do for 300k PDFs?

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Speaker 2: Dr Cormac Purcell - Chief Scientist | Astrophysicist

Dr Cormac Purcell is an entrepreneurial scientist operating at the intersection of industry and academia to build intelligent tools. He is currently building a new venture, working on marine decarbonisation in partnership with the European Space Agency. Until recently, Cormac was the Chief Scientist at Trillium Technologies, where he led work on flood-mapping from orbit for the Australian government. He helped drive the Frontier Development Lab (FDL) AI research accelerator with ESA and NASA, and still enjoys supervising PhD students at the Universities of NSW and Sydney, who investigate AI weather modelling and neuromorphic processing. Cormac previously developed AI tools for detecting sharks from drones, and spent eighteen years as a professional astronomer investigating star-formation and cosmic magnetism

Tech Talk: Adventures in Remote Sensing

Remote sensing data is essential for our daily lives - you use it on your phone every day for weather forecasts and map-reading. But our capabilities are now being super-charged by the commercial space race and emerging AI technology. In this talk Cormac will give a high level view of AI-enhanced remote sensing from personal experience and peer into the future at what is coming over the horizon