in Place, Tech

Tech talk on artificial intelligence

A group of us are planning a tech talk in Wilmington on artificial intelligence. Next month or so. It’s such a compelling and many-sided and zeitgeist-y topic, I’m hoping it becomes, like, a series of talks, or a book group or a metaphysical club 1, so we can keep going.

I’m peripheral to the project, but I introduced two friends who will be the principle speaker-panelists: An IBM colleague who runs the Watson University program, and a UNCW Psych department brain professor buddy, who will speak from different vantage points about cognitive computing, actual cognition, perils and pleasures, philosophical implications, this current moment–with all the big tech companies investing heavily in AI (“Investor rush to artificial intelligence is real deal” Financial Times). That’s the idea at least. Who knows where it will go. We talked about having someone from the clergy :-) Maybe demo some natural language processing after hours. I think it’s going to be an exciting topic to convene.

I’ve hooked these guys up with the hosts, who run the Waverider Design and Wide Open Technologies companies here in Wilmington, respectively, and who have been putting on a great series of tech talks on subjects like entrepreneurship, beacon technologies, others.

We’re hoping to have the event at the fabulous TekMountain, too. They’ve indicated they’re amenable and have an unbeatable venue for conversation, bean bags and bean beds, craft beer, plugged-in smarties. They held an event for the Cucalorus “10 x 10” program, where ten filmmakers spend a week with ten entrepreneurs [that they haven’t met or planned anything with] to create videos, and are really engaging the local community of founders, inventors, learners, and creative types.

Notes:

  1. The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand, one of my favorite books of all time

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  • TekMountain Mentor – brownhen.com

    […] brain guy and Julian Keith, Watson University IBMer Mike Orr, and Tanner Clayton, we convened a tech talk on artificial intelligence at Tekmountain last year that was really well attended, energetic, and thoughtful–and that […]