Nerd Nite Hong Kong: Edition #9
Event: Nerd Nite Hong Kong: Edition #9
Date: 29th January 2017
Time: 8:00 p.m.
Location: Mezcalito; 27/F, 18 On Lan St, Central.
Entry Fee: Free! Thanks to the support provided by the venue! You just got to buy your own drinks!
Speaker 1: Dr. Julian Tanner
Topic: DNA Nanotech Will Change Your Life
Quick Nerdisms: As well as being life’s genetic material, DNA is an incredible lego for building at the nanoscale. DNA nanotechnology will transform medicine, electronics, computing and might even create a new biology in our lifetimes. This revolution is just emerging and we’ll look at where it might go.
Nerd Cred: Julian is an Associate Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at HKU who researches DNA nanotechnology and chemical biology. His team has developed new technologies for malaria diagnosis and is building devices out of nucleic acids at the nanoscale.
Speaker 2: Mr. Sébastien Bourdeauducq
Topic: A Talk About Nothing
Quick Nerdisms: Vacuum is a required ingredient for many interesting projects, such as making great 3D printers with electron beam melting, analyzing unknown chemicals with mass spectrometry, and building your own early-20th-century vacuum tubes for radios. But when considering the creation of a vacuum, many people are taken aback and deterred by the cost and complexity. This presentation will tell our stories of building low-cost vacuum systems in Hong Kong, and demystify their construction. While
vacuum technology is certainly not trivial, it is perfectly accessible to someone with a bit of dedication, the right information, and less money than what the Hong Kong real estate system milks from you over a few months.
vacuum technology is certainly not trivial, it is perfectly accessible to someone with a bit of dedication, the right information, and less money than what the Hong Kong real estate system milks from you over a few months.
Nerd Cred: Sébastien is the founder of M-Labs, a company in Hong Kong that designs electronics and software tools for research in quantum physics. In its office, he hosts a semi-weekly “Experimental Physics for Morons” workshop, where people hack around with vacuum systems, electronics, lasers, and other devices. It is open to everyone with the right mindset.
Speaker 3: Dr. John Stonham
Topic: Artificial Intelligence! You must be Joking!
Quick Nerdisms: The history of AI is as long as that of computing with many significant developments having taken place as long ago as the 1950’s.
Whilst conventional computing has enjoyed continuously successful exponential development over the past 70 years, AI has encountered many major setbacks over the same period but it is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest world-wide.
The challenges however remain immense but I believe it is achievable. Natural Intelligence, based on biology, is essentially the processing of electrical signals mainly, but not exclusively in the brain. Natural Intelligence clearly exists, but some would argue that its system complexity compares with that of the Universe. How do we replicate this intelligence in artificial systems and why should we want to do so?
Whilst conventional computing has enjoyed continuously successful exponential development over the past 70 years, AI has encountered many major setbacks over the same period but it is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest world-wide.
The challenges however remain immense but I believe it is achievable. Natural Intelligence, based on biology, is essentially the processing of electrical signals mainly, but not exclusively in the brain. Natural Intelligence clearly exists, but some would argue that its system complexity compares with that of the Universe. How do we replicate this intelligence in artificial systems and why should we want to do so?
Nerd Cred: Dr. John Stonham is a Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Brunel University London and has been working on Neural Networks and Artificial Intelligence all his academic life, which is now a very long time. He has supervised more than 100 PhD projects and notably some of the pioneering neural network hardware developed at Brunel University in the 1980s which is currently on exhibition in the London Science Museum.